Betjeman: a "whim of iron".(Young Betjeman)(John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love)(Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter)(Book Review)

The obsession of academic critics with differentiating "major" writers from "minor" ones, and summarily dismissing the latter, serves the interest of no one but their fellow-academics and actively harms not only those authors they deem minor, but also that large majority of the public who reads novels and poems purely for pleasure, with no scholarly or careerist motives. Within the academy, "major," at least since the heyday of Eliot and Pound, has tended to mean "difficult"--possibly because difficulty supposes a need for expert interpretation and therefore justifies the existence of professional explicators. Kipling and Trollope, for example, so popular during the Victorian era as to have become an integral part of England's cultural fabric, are not only ignored in modern universities but actively denigrated.

This has also been true of postwar England's bestselling poet, John Betjeman (1906-1984). The euphony of his words, the immediacy of his images, his mastery of traditional meter and rhyme schemes, in short the pure accessibility of his work has guaranteed its exclusion from "serious" studies of twentieth-century poetry. He simply did not fit into the modernist tradition, and his hugely successful career as a television personality and expert on the sort of architecture that had hitherto been considered pure kitsch did not raise his stock in academic circles. The 1993 edition of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for instance, made no mention of Betjeman in all of its 1,383 pages. Neither did the 626 pages of A Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature (2001).

Technically, Betjeman did not advance beyond Tennyson, Praed, or Newbolt. For him, as Philip Larkin wrote (admiringly), "there has been no symbolism, no objective correlative, no T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, no reinvestment in myth of casing of language as gesture, no Seven Types or Some Versions ..." (Larkin allowed, however, that Betjeman did have a White Goddess: "in blazer and shorts.") His subject matter was almost aggressively retrograde; William Plomer smiled at the thought of "a new generation which is used to verse garnished with pylons and bombers and Arms for Spain and anti-Nazism and Hampstead surrealism" being "shocked by a poet who alludes to pink may, laburnum, tinned peas, cigar ends, church bells, gym shoes, deviled whitebait, hockey girls, picnics, racing-stables, and old City diningrooms." And what other poet of his era would seriously have applied a Wordsworthian sense of wonder and joy to an utterly banal activity, as he did in "Seaside Golf"?

 
   it lay content 
 
   Two paces from the pin, 
   A steady putt and then it went 
   Oh, most surely in. 
   The very turf rejoiced to see 
   That quite unprecedented three. 
 
   Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves 
   And thyme and mist in whiffs, 
   In-coming tide, Atlantic waves 
   Slapping the sunny cliffs, 
   Lark song and sea sounds in the air 
   And splendour, splendour everywhere. 

Minor Betjeman might have been, but the poets who were his contemporaries, at least in England, thought him valuable and unique and banished the futile major/minor distinction to the irrelevance it has always deserved. To Edmund Blunden, Betjeman's work was "of the kind which makes the question of major and minor poets seem quite academic, at least while one reads and responds." Even Edmund Wilson, king of critics, opined in the 1950s that "Since Dylan Thomas's death [Betjeman] is, I suppose, the best poet in England--a minor poet, perhaps, but a very, very good one." The fact that "minor" and "best" are not mutually exclusive terms might come as a surprise to academically trained readers.

Bevis Hillier, for one, entertains no doubts as to Betjeman's place in the canon, for he has dedicated more than twenty-five years of his life to writing a biography that is not only definitive but likely to remain so forever: it is hard to imagine anyone ever trying to top this three-volume, 1,530-page whopper. (1) Even those who love the written word, and love Betjeman, might shy away from this doorstop. Betjeman himself suggested to Hillier that the proposed volumes would probably sell very well in old-people's homes, and indeed one does wonder just how many people (as opposed to libraries) will buy this sequence: probably only true fanatics, sadly, so that it is doubtful whether it will win the poet many new readers.

Still, sheer volume of detail can some