CHARMINGLY BOUND in blind-tooled ivory cloth, with gold Baskerville on the spine and a rose top-edge, this collection finally puts to flight the notion that Betjeman is no more than a dealer in a few preciosities such as Anglicanism or ghastly good taste. No doubt the photographs and rubrications of his early books helped to foster this view of his work as ╥amusing╙ yet infantile pastiche: since 1940, however, a succession of more chastely designed volumes has ousted the element of undergraduate hoax, of Osbert Lancaster and Arthur Marshall, and after A Few Late Chrysanthemums we have had to accept that what poets are supposed to do Betjeman does ╤ not perhaps, in ways we think proper or ways sanctified by recent example, but which henceforward must be marked ╤ or remarked ╤ on the map.
Yet it would be wrong to claim that the later poems represent any radical alteration of poetic method. The first poem in the book, published in 1930, might have been written yesterday:
She died in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the ev╒ning star
That shone through the plate glass
window
From over Leamington Spa.
Only mediocrities develop, Wilde said, and if Betjeman could hit the target so unerringly at 25 he had clearly no need to change. What he did was enlarge his range of subjects. Little in the earlier books presages the discoveries of the
forties:
The gas was on in the Institute,
The flare was up in the gym,
A man was running a mineral line,
A lass was singing a hymn.
On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and
shorts
And the cream-coloured walls are
betrophied with sports,
And westering, questioning, settles the
sun
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan
Hunter Dunn.
Rumbling under blackened girders,
Midland bound for Cricklewood,
Puffed its sulphur to where that Land of
Laundries stood.
Rumble under, thunder over, train and
tram alternate go,
Shake the floor and smudge the ledger,
Charrington, Sells Dale and Co.,
Nuts and nuggets in the window...
To love and topography the fifties added a deeper sense of time and mortality and a chantableness towards ordinary people that in no way blunted his feelings about the Age of the Common Man. And now, so far from being the laureate of a few private fads, Betjeman goes further than anyone else towards summarising ╥Dear old, bloody old England. Of telegraph poles and tin╙ simply because no one else has his breadth of poetic reception. Betjeman picks it all up: the decay of surviving nineteenth-century institutions, the decline of the Church, the altered countryside and ways of living, sub-topia and socialism, and all the tiny vivid little manifestations of sadness and snobbery and silliness, and with his simple loving enthusiasm transmutes it to poetry. He is a subtle poet, but not a sophisticated one. Poetry for him is not a moral or sociological gymnastic, but a spontaneous overflow of natural feeling which directs his choice of words and informs them when found:
Cancer has killed him Heart is killing her.
The trees are down. An Odeon flashes fire
Where stood their villa by the murmuring
fir...
Those who 25 years ago tried to dismiss Betjeman as ╥bourgeois taste at its most corrupt╙ now call him a remarkable minor poet it would be a disservice to over-estimate. This seems to me to ignore his particular worth at this time. Almost alone among living poets, Betjeman has knocked down the ╥No Road Through To Action╙ sign; he is in the best sense a committed writer, whose poems spring from what he really feels about real life, and as a result he brings back to poetry a sense of dramatic urgency and a jumble of properties it had all but lost. In the 36 lines of Felixstowe, or The Last Of Her Order, for instance, or Eunice, there is a whole life it took delicacy to perceive and subtlety to express, and its impact has the fullness of a novel. Similarly, the quality in his poetry loosely called nostalgia is really that never-sleeping alertness to note the patina of time on things past which is the hall-mark of the mature writer:
And from Greenford scent of mayfields
Most enticingly was blown
Over market gardens tidy,
Taverns for the bona fide,
Cockney anglers, cockney shooters,
Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters
Long in Kensal Green and Highgate
silent under soot and stone.
For this reason it is my considered opinion that it would do no harm to over-estimate Betjeman╒s poetry for a bit. Some people have been puzzled by Edmund Wilson╒s remark last May that Auden, Thomas, and Betjeman were the best post-Eliot English poets: to me it seems eminently sensible, and my only regret is that he did not add that, of the three, Betjeman is the only one who is still a positive poetic force.
