The Blending of Betjeman

BY PHILIP

LARKIN

pinstalment of Mr. Betjeman's verse auto. - NE of the most striking passages in this first 4°Ri,raPhy* describes how, as a schoolboy in tcsIgngate he fancied that his poems were 'as 'c'd as Campbell now': And so I bound my verse into a book. Pie Best of Betjeman, and handed it 10 one who, I was told, liked poetry—

The American master. Mr. Eliot.

The scene is worthy of a nineteenth-century I1 native painter: `The Infant Betjeman Offers Verses To The Young Eliot.' For, leaving w's'de their respective poetic statures, it was Eliot c,I gave the modernist poetic movement its _homer in the sentence. 'Poets in our civilisation, w a exists at Present. must be difficult.' And it Das Betjeman who, forty years later, was to by- gr4,,ss“the whole light industry of exegesis that had k77'n up round this fatal phrase, and prove, like rciPli.ng and Housman before him, that a direct iisLat'ion with the reading public could be estab- ilil by anyone prepared to be moving and en)urable. 61t is ironic that, up to a point, the poetry of tie11-1an (and also that of his contemporary torlsa Auden) is precisely the kind coMr. Eliot icow- 'Our civilisation,' the passage ntinues, tio'"Prehends great variety and complexity, and retis variety and complexity, playing upon a ned sensibility, must produce various and thplex results.' So it has! Betjeman dots more hoalt genuflect before Victorian lamp-brackets 0.", shudder at words like `serviette': despite the ofto First and Last Loves (now of PaPerbackt), he is an accepter. not a rejecter, En (;111' time, registering 'dear old, bloody old $i gland' with robustness, precision and a eieacious affection that shimmers continually ziw,cen laughter and rage, his sense of the past tatting long perspectives behind every observa- tio,11' And the age has accepted him, in the most tel:111113tguous way possible: it has made him a 'v'sion personality soh°,111 g awareness of the existence of this per- has no doubt gone towards the publica-

co per-

con Summoned by Bells. For Christmas is th,"1"18, and what more tempting to the trade ajtn Mr. Betjeman's autobiography? And pubuta,11Y handling the book (relentless pre- aocnication serialisation has made this almost an elide does little to allay our fears: the Old ot).'e Antique, the regressive ornamentation (the ter Papers are horrible), and solemn-funny chap- kpisYnopses (Inexplicable desires—attempt to outtianin them') make one dread that Betjeman is is g on an act for the gallery. Fortunately this chanot so. Sumnioned by Bells comprises nine k,Pters of the kind of reminiscential verse Mr. -rhl_tetuan has already given us (`Original Sin On sh,s'._ Sussex Coast'), demurely pedestrian, Leica- 493 in detail, recounting by selective episodic $ S,,,mustoNED By BELLS. (John Murray, I6s.)

KIES? AND LAST LOVES. (Arrow Books, 5s.) narrative his life from boyhood to involuntary departure from Oxford, done not in the spirit of farcical or shocking revelation (much of his material is as familiar as his manner), but with an eager pleasure in re-creating incidents and cir- cumstances that still have power to move him. The personality is in abeyance. And indeed what first emerges from a reading of this poem is that Betjeman, though an original, is not an egoist: rather, he is that rare thing, an extrovert sensitive, not interested in himself but in the experiences being himself enables him to savour, including that of being himself. He may write: An only child, deliciously apart, Misunderstood and not like other boys.

Deep, dark and pitiful I saw myself, but his handling of 'personal' situations is oddly detached :

Then what, by God, was this—

This tender, humble, unrequited love For Biddy Walsham? What the worshipping That put me off my supper, fixed my hair Thick with Anzora for the dance tonight? The Talbot-Darracq, with its leather scats And Biddy in beside me!

Here the proper names all stand on much the same emotional footing, and time and again in scenes where interest might be expected to focus on the author's feelings we find it instead shifting to the details:

I scraped my wrist along the unstained oak And slammed the door against my father's weight—

And ran like mad and ran like mad and ran . . . 'I'm free! I'm free!' The open air was warm And heavy with the scent of flowering mint, And beetles waved on bending leagues of grass, And all the baking countryside was kind.

None the less, the connecting theme of the narrative is highly personal, not dissimilar from Samuel Butler's 'I had to steal my own birthright. I stole it and was bitterly punished. But I saved my soul alive.' Only son of a forceful father and semi-invalid mother, Mr. Betjeman was expected to carry on the family business of making luxury -articles of fine wood, glass and silver for sale by Asprey and Mappin and Webb. He refused—implicitly, when young, by incom- petence; explicitly, when older, with defiance. This was a grave defection for an only son, and Mr. Betjeman does not minimise his father's anger ('Bone idle, like my eldest brother Jack, A rotten, low, deceitful little snob') nor his own feelings of remorse ('A sense of guilt increasing with the years') that spread like a discoloration across his whole life. The excuse he gives is single and unvarying: I was a poet. That was why I failed.

The lame self-importance of this attitude must be interpreted by what we know of Betjeman today. Destined to be one of those rare persons who can say, 'Simply the thing I am shall make me live,' he was holding off with an instinctive obstinate wisdom anything that might hinder con-

tact with the factors that were to form his par- ticular nature. And one by one we see them enter —Cornwall and the sea, Oxford and church archi- tecture, London and railway stations; then re- ligion, announced by the strangest of all the bells that summon him throughout . the narrative—it hangs on an elm bough, beaten by a bearded book-reading priest outside a ruined church; then, lastly, Magdalen, where for the first time his sullenly smouldering character bursts into violent flame, and the extraordinary blend of interests that we label Betjemania becomes recog- nisable. Thus although the book ends in osten- sible failure ('Failed in Divinity!'), it is really a triumph. Betjeman has made it. He has become Betjeman.

The value of this poem will no doubt be hotly disputed. On chilly battlements the critical sen- tries are continually aware of the spectre of 90,000 copies of Collected Poems (`Shall I strike at it with my Partisan?'), and the thought that they have sold without a single subsidised summer-school seminar nukes them doubly vigilant. For the moment it is enough to name two of its virtues. First, Betjeman has an astonish- ing command of detail, both visual and circum- stantial. It makes the surface of his flat, Task-like blank verse (resigned to swallowing anything, even 'Don't throw old blades into the w.c.') glitter like John Brett's Stonebreaker, whether in sus- tained felicities: '

The lofty entrance hall, the flights of stairs, The huge expanse of sunny drawing-room, Looking for miles across the chimney-pots To spired St. Pancras and the dome of Paul's, .

or in accumulations of flotsam from its author's remarkable memory: In late September, in the conker time, When Poperinghe and Zillebeke and Mons Boomed with five-nines. large sepia gravures Of French, Smith-Dorrien and Haig were given Gratis with each half-pound of Brooke Bond's

tea. A neighbour's son had just been killed at Ypres; Another had been wounded. Rainbow came On Wednesdays—with the pranks of Tiger Tim, And Bonnie Bluebell and her magic gloves.

This imaginative and precise evocation is part of the poem's purpose, and is accomplished with splendid competence.

Secondly, although it remains a mystery hoi0 Mr. Betjeman can avoid the traps of self- importance, exhibitionism, silliness, sentimen- tality and boredom, he continues to do so. Why should we accept his teddy-bear when we want to stuff Sebastian Flyte's down his throat? How, without embarrassing us, can he write: Poor mother. walking bravely on the lawn.

Her body one huge toothache! Would she die? And if she died could I forgive myself?

How, without alienating us, can he confess his social climbing into 'the leisured set in Canter- bury Quad,' or admit his infatuation with the Firbanky world of Harold Acton (`My dears, 1 want to rush into the fields And slap raw meat with lilies') without attracting to himself some of the impatience that today it rouses in us? No doubt sincerity is the answer, a sincerity as un- selfconscious as it is absolute, but it is helped by his own attitude to himself, scrupulously free of what they no doubt called 'side' at Marlbor- ough and disinfected by his palpably greater interest in things other than himself. It may irritate us that it should be so marketable. But one finishes the book with a considerable respect for this almost moral tactfulness. It will be inter- esting to see if it can be maintained as Mr. Betjeman's memory, like Poe's pendulum, sweeps closer and closer to the present.