John Betjeman
RockyRoger
Shipmate
in Heaven
There have been a few JB related programmes on the BBC recently to mark (I think) 120 years since JB's birth. Stimulated by these, I've been reading a detailed biography and some of his poetry.
I was very intersted why JB and CS Lewis (his tutor at Oxford) didn't get on at all and JB detested Lewis for the rest of his (JB's that is) life. This I can understand. But was Lewis right about JB wasting his talents? I'm trying and failing to like JB as a person, and can't decide whether his poetry, though much loved by most, but so derided by others, is actually awful.
So I'm ambivalent about him, great TV communicator and amous Anglican though he was (and now (hopefully) in Glory).
How do other shipmates rate JB? Was he not really 'real' and always putting on an act? And then there's thewretched teddy bear ....
Help!
I was very intersted why JB and CS Lewis (his tutor at Oxford) didn't get on at all and JB detested Lewis for the rest of his (JB's that is) life. This I can understand. But was Lewis right about JB wasting his talents? I'm trying and failing to like JB as a person, and can't decide whether his poetry, though much loved by most, but so derided by others, is actually awful.
So I'm ambivalent about him, great TV communicator and amous Anglican though he was (and now (hopefully) in Glory).
How do other shipmates rate JB? Was he not really 'real' and always putting on an act? And then there's thewretched teddy bear ....
Help!
Comments
I wouldn't 'deride' him but neither would I laud him.
I admire his work on conservation - saving St Pancras station for instance and enjoyed visiting some of the churches he loved in Cornwall.
Tell it not in Gath, I'm not an enormous Lewis fan either but again I wouldn't 'knock' him.
Both of them hit the nail on the head at times but other times were well wide of the mark. A bit like all of us.
I'd wish neither Betjeman or Lewis any harm. I read both from time to time.
'The firm's Cortina' pins this poem to a particular period, but the satire is still relevant.
What I like about Betjeman - and possibly Lewis didn't - is that he makes poetry out of the mundane, the shallow, the unromantic. Not a high elf in sight.
Betjeman's film about the old Somerset & Dorset Railway's original main line - Burnham to Highbridge and Evercreech Junction - is worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2NZU3S-0iM
It is fair comment, but it's not like Lewis didn't know that - he was as much an expert as Tolkien. Tolkien was, to my eyes, a perfectionist and a world builder. Lewis was a storyteller. And I love them both.
Betjeman's Westminster Abbey is a great poem in its way.
I think too that their backgrounds were so different: Lewis from, by all accounts, a pretty dour Belfast childhood, Betjeman the son of a north London business- and craftsman. We know too that Betjeman, social climber and would-be aesthete, despised "hearties" and may have regarded Lewis as one of that ilk. Lewis, too, had served (and was wounded) in the First World War trenches while the younger Betjeman had not.
To have him later ask for support in a bid for an honors degree--well, I'm not surprised Lewis said no.
Betjeman clearly had talents. To some teachers, the student with gifts who refuses to use them is much more frustrating than the one with little or nothing who nevertheless is trying his/her best.
(To explain, effort was graded Good, Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory. Plus or minus signs could be added at the teacher's discretion).
Some of that is because some poems are about the Harrow region where I grew up.
I have three of the four albums of his poetry set to music. I think they came out in the 60s.
I had a history teacher like that. He graded me an A on internal exams but I did very little prep and homework so I had a “does no work!” remark added.
In the subsequent O level exam, I got grade A. I really was an appallingly lazy student.
I literally don't know which one you mean here.
Aw, the teddy bear has his own Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Ormsby-Gore
What is wrong with being efficient ?
I have no difficulty at all in imagining why Lewis and Betjeman irritated each other so much. I think @Baptist Trainfan has explained that sufficiently for all general purposes. Yes, Lewis was not a 'hearty' but he may have looked like one, and one can certainly understand why a serious young don might have found the young Betjeman's facade of dilettante entitlement insufferable.
Yes, but the satire is snobbish. The message is: "these awful nouveaux riches (unlike you and me) have no taste, can't use language properly and don't understand the importance of old buildings, and yet somehow they're really rich, successful and pleased with themselves - no wonder the country is going to the dogs"...
I guess it depends whether or not you agree with @Enoch that the targets deserve it!
Besides, some of them have been to the sort of schools that give one that sort of facile ability to schmooze and swan about. There is an Old Alleynian who springs to mind.
The message I got from it was people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing carving their destructive way through life.
I don't see why. It's not her fault her father was rude about Slough, is it?
God forbid anyone should be able to understand poetry! Can't be any good!
I was one of these, too, though more for reasons of depression and abuse than for true laziness. But I drove my teachers mad, because I never turned in homework, read novels under my desk while they were lecturing, and pulled off the highest score in California on the PSAT test that year. They came and bodily hauled me out of class, all but swearing, and demanded an explanation. Which of course I could not give...
Today I'd say it was due to a near-photographic memory and very wide reading.
Graduate school was where things came apart (mildly). I'd never learned to study--some of you call it "revision"--and suddenly I needed to. I had a lot of making-up to do.
But yeah, I can see why some of my teachers resented me. It looks very disrespectful when you're reading comic books under the table, and your teacher aims a Spanish declension question at you, intending to catch you out--and you answer it correctly without looking up.
"No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine."
That poem occurred to me as well.
On poetry in general ... as an aside that I hope doesn't become a whopping big tangent, I think poetry is becoming very elitist and incomprehensible again after a period of more demotic and accessible verse.
This time, I'm afraid, it's an elitism of the left, not the right. If you don't believe me read Poetry Review.
Anyhow... yes, Betjeman can be twee but he was a better poet than some up-their-own-backsides literary pundits allow.
I prefer Larkin and Heaney but Betjeman has his moments.
Lewis used to be quite bibulous. I don’t know whether that made him a 'hearty'. He'd regularly have 3 or 4 pints at lunchtime and walk it off during the afternoon.
In the days before people drove everywhere, 3-4 pints at lunchtime was not that unusual.
I went through a phase of disliking Betjeman's poetry intensely but now I appreciate it. Not my favourite poetry by any means but more varied than is often thought.
The albums with musical backing are quite interesting. Very much of their time.
This could be its own thread, but I would love to know which comic books you read back then. I think I did actually have a thread on comics some time back but it’s been a long time.
I recognised it too - and I can't stand it.
I was quite boring--I had a ton of Charlie Brown books!
No, I did realize that. I had an earlier post dealing with Lewis' reaction to him as a student--and indeed, I suspect the flippancy toward--well, everything in general, I suspect-- was noticeable then, too. And would be hard for someone wounded in the Great War to cope with.
I think the bombs are friendly because they'd blow up something ugly.