Betjeman: Writing the Public Life

Introduction

s 1 Introduction A man’s religion colours his work.1 Mention the name of John Betjeman (1906–1984) in the United States and you will likely elicit little more than a shrug of unfamiliarity , even from a literary scholar. The response in the United Kingdom, however, could hardly be more antipodal. More than twenty years after his death he is still widely remembered: as a poet of suburbia and nostalgic Englishness, as a radio and television personality and the beloved teddy bear to a nation,2 and as a devotee of causes that at one time must have seemed amusingly quaint or even eccentric . Victorian architecture, abandoned churches, gas lamps, and London ’s early suburbs were among the threatened hallmarks of English culture whose preservation he pioneered. The 2006 centenary of his birth, which went unnoticed in the United States, occasioned in the United Kingdom innumerable publications, exhibitions, broadcasts, and retrospective celebrations.3 Even now, hardly a week passes without Betjeman’s name cropping up in British newspapers, usually without recourse to his actual words or ideas, often used as shorthand for a particular and narrow idea of Englishness. Allusions to Betjeman in the popular press typically and unfortunately diminish the complexity of his vision in order to promote a nostalgic, middlebrow fantasy or bourgeois political agenda that has little to do with who this man truly was and what he represented. John Betjeman was in fact a s 2 Betjeman: Writing the Public Life complex of contradictions: a retiring poet who enjoyed being a public figure; a modernist in a traditionalist’s garb who could write glibly of a “Jacobean wireless set” and a “Perpendicular gramophone”4; a lover of steam engines and narrow-gauge branch lines and all things archaic who adroitly used radio and television to advance his causes; a loather of automobiles and traffic congestion who launched and edited a series of motorists’ guidebooks for Shell Petroleum; and a lifelong Anglican and preserver of churches who struggled mightily to believe the faith. It is this aspect of Betjeman and his religion that is the occasion of this book. For this very public figure, faith was no private matter. He openly declared his Christian faith, using poetry, newspapers and magazines , and radio and television broadcasts to address issues ranging from articles of faith to the relationship between religion and culture. He celebrated the social and aesthetic joys of Anglicanism, describing the intersection of architecture and faith, of beauty and the spirit: the physical and spatial splendor of its churches, the joy of its liturgy and worship, and its role in providing a cultural identity for the English people. However, he was no simple propagandist for the Church of England or for Christianity. He demonstrated the social and spiritual failings of Christianity in general as well as his own spiritual failures. He wrote of the perils of a life of faith and described the anxiety of death without the certainty of Christian consolation. And yet, despite such doubts and frustrations, he wrote unapologetically of his commitment to Anglicanism. Through his own journey of faith and doubt, Betjeman was able not only to describe the parabola of his own religious belief but also to illumine the nature of belief for all his readers. Since doubts were so weighty for him, he relied on the traditions of the Church of England to offer spiritual sustenance, and quite naturally its essence infuses his poetry and prose. Because so much of his work is constructed with the stuff of English Christianity, it is my contention that his poetry is specifically “Anglican” in nature and a vital part of a living tradition of Anglican poetry and worship. But what exactly is meant by “Anglican”? It has often been noted that the Church of England, along with the entire Anglican Communion , resists definition, that it can only be described. As Bishop Stephen Neill admits, “There is an Anglican attitude and an Anglican atmosphere that defies analysis.”5 A central paradox concerns the place s Introduction 3 of Anglicanism in time: its doctrine of apostolic succession suggests a quality of timelessness, yet the denomination was clearly born in the historical moment of King Henry VIII’s break with Rome in November 1534. The result of this paradox is that the Church of England is both Catholic and Protestant. Since it is a liturgical church, its prayer book and its common rites, along...