Poet scorner

John Betjeman liked to travel by railway. Poet-in-Chief, from 1972 till 1984, he starred in many documentaries in which he is seen sitting in a train, bound for a town somewhere in the provinces of England. Filmed in black-and-white, Betjeman is a solitary passenger in the carriage, tranquilly passing through the land, be-hatted and rain-coated, and probably not always thinking in lines of poetry. Sometimes he must have been incommoded by hunger, or by a thought that a bill had not been paid. He is, at any rate, a man going along and seeing England through the lens of literature. Nay, poetry. The films left behind, a heap of reels, show that Betjeman liked television. Or - at least - liked to be in front of the camera. He was doubtless a poet of the twentieth century, alive to its technology, its psychedelic lanterns.

He speaks in the films with a prayer-like narration. It is the sobriety of the voice, its very timbre that bewitches. Its incantatory rhythm and rhyme. A diction suited to the peels of landscape that he rails past, and describes. A poet not just on the page, but one who verbalises, as one might expect, with orotund surety. By temperament not a shrinking violet, he performs for the camera, keen to make poetry a competitor in televisual broadcasts.

To the fore of Betjeman’s sight-seeing were the churches of England. Under his eye, scenes that might otherwise seem anodyne become collages of detail. Sterility becomes fertility. One winter he railed to Worcestershire in the Midlands, the train screeching windily into the town of Pershore. He was in rural England. Blessed with a grasp of history, he knew of the orchards of the county, and of Pershore Abbey, an ecclesiastical gem, the exterior of which has buttresses, grand arches which seem to prop up the outer walls, and from whereabouts he could hear the peals of evening prayer :

On the windy weedy platform with the sprinkled stars above
When sudden the waiting stillness shook with the ancient spells
Of an older world than all our worlds in the sound of the Pershore bells.
They were ringing them down for Evensong in the lighted abbey near,
Sounds which had poured through apple boughs for seven centuries here.

––from the poem “Pershore Station” (1954)

On celluloid, the amiability, the sagacity, and the plummy tone of Sir John Betjeman make him a bard for all seasons. Some of the vistas in the films––the fields of Suffolk, the cathedrals on the sky, the timber-framed houses––drone agreeably with classical music, the cellos and bassoons, perhaps, of the contemporaneous Sir John Barbirolli.

In the 1976 film “Summoned by Bells” there is a poke of mirth when, over a shot of his walking down a street, he self-effacingly narrates :

Betjeman’s a German spy!
Shoot him down and let him die!

A textbook Englishman, Sir John had ancestry from the Netherlands, the name Betjemann docked at the tail to Betjeman, with the aim of making it appear less German. But why textbook? Because his airs were English, his land and language were England. But not only language –– his way of feeling was archetypally English. Be that as it may, generations live and die, the conditions of history change, and the flavours of Englishness change.

In his case, Betjeman, avoider of confusing poetry, intoned in Saxon :

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now.

––the opening of the poem “Slough” (1937)

Heavily industrialised, choked with houses, Slough, to the west of London, was the bête noire of a poet who was fanatical about the aesthetics of towns. He must have been scorned by the planners of housing estates. A nomad of England, a custodian of national heritage, Betjeman travelled to many locations, more tuned to the nation than the writers fixed to one place, understanding the land and its people far better than any city-dwelling liberals.

Galloping by steam to Burnham-on-Sea, starring in “Let’s Imagine” (1963), the poet tells the watcher of his programme that he is not being nostalgic by advising that railways should be preserved :

“.......when we all of us know that road traffic is becoming increasingly hellish on this overcrowded island, and that in ten years from now there’ll be three times as much traffic on English roads as there is today. What will the West Country be like then? How will we get anywhere in summer – except by railway........”

The films, containers containing a bygone England, made for television from the 1950s to 1970s, are unavoidably personal, and in segments autobiographical. Autobiography speaks guardedly from within, biography evaluates critically from without, and each format has its pluses and minuses. Biographers have their own angle, but to encounter perspective from within a life is a richer, closer intimacy. Wordsworth could not pipe his chat into a microphone, but luckily Betjeman did.

As he recalls that he always wanted to be a poet, Sir John is filmed on the sands of Trebetherick on the Cornish coast, whither, as a child, he spent the days of summer, and whither, after writing poems and making films and living out his threescore-and-ten, he was buried at last in 1984. Returned to the soil of England, a poet who liked its churches had passed into sainthood.

Put before a minority, the verse-reading public, the sheaf of poems of 1974, bearing the title “A Nip in the Air,” was the last to be published. The final poem in the volume is thriftily compact, a mutter of a few lines, a poet’s meditation on his life, his work, and the imminence of his bodily end :

I made hay while the sun shone.
My work sold.
Now, if the harvest is over
And the world cold,
Give me the bonus of laughter
As I lose hold.

––the poem “The Last Laugh” (1974)