John Betjeman, 52, is a gentle, witty, rumpled Englishman who has been called "the greatest bad poet now living." It would be in character if he agreed with that estimate, although he can be called "bad" only in the sense that his rhymes sometimes jingle like a song writer's and that his subjects are often deliberately homely. Literary bookmakers predict that Betjeman (rhymes with fetch-a-man) will be England's next poet laureate. By last week, his Collected Poems had caused a rush on British bookstores probably unmatched by any newly published work of poetry since Byron's Childe Harold burst forth in 1812. Betjeman's 279-page volume was selling at the rate of about 1,000 copies a day, a turnover few bestselling novelists achieve.
The cause of his success is not just his billing as "the poet the Princess reads" (Margaret does). It is simply that Britons of all classes think Betjeman one of the pleasantest men alive. He himself says that he cannot understand why people buy his verse ("I don't call it poetry"), and he describes himself as "a passionate observer of the second-rate." Actually, Betjeman observes a great deal more than the second-rate. He has a unique eye for the twilight of changing times, although he is one Englishman who looks neither back in anger nor forward in fear. He is perhaps the sharpest and yet gentlest landscape poet now writing in English, whether he lyrically describes a summer meadow or peers with sane, affectionate exasperation at
Dear old, bloody old England Of telegraph poles and tin.
Kindly Stygian. Betjeman's nostalgia is for the Victorian past; his heart is in its poor remnants, and he frankly calls himself "a case of arrested development." He was raised comfortably in London, great-grandson of a Dutch-descended Englishman who grew rich on inventions such as the tantalus, a contrivance to keep Victorian housemaids out of the port. Betjeman went to Oxford's Magdalen College, where he detested his tutor (Author C. S. Lewis), failed to get a degree because he forgot to take "divvers" (divinity).
Once an assistant editor of Architectural Review, Betjeman has a rare knowledge and love of English places that is even more famed in Britain than his poetry. To keep his island from becoming "a right little, tight little clinic," he is constantly embroiled in some passionate public campaign -to subdue TV aerials, to save ancient towing canals or musty little churches. He writes glowing guidebooks, and he has so cleaned up the despised name of Victorian Gothic architecture that some of his readers are able to look even on London's Stygian train terminals with a kindly eye.
As a lover not of antiquarianism but of genuine gaslit charm and hedge-hid privacy, Poet Betjeman despises planned progress: I have a Vision of the Future, chum,
The workers' flats in fields of soya beans
Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:
And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come
From microphones in communal canteens
"No Right! No Wrong! All's perfect, evermore."