The popular image of Betjeman is a sort of unfrocked Anglican vicar, bicycling genially from church to church, conceiving whimsical crushes on stout-thighed county gels, and erupting occasionally into volcanic bursts of laughter. As the cliché, coined by a headline writer on the Times, had it, he was ‘By Appointment: Teddy Bear to the Nation’.
He was no teddy bear. Utterly terrified of many things (social humiliation, bad reviews, death); capable of great vanity; shy, yet a compulsive show-off; benighted by religious doubt; frightened, I suspect, of for one moment standing still; implacably opposed to concrete lamp-posts . . . he was a complex character and an uneasy one, with a near-bottomless need to be loved. Kind, humorous and in his way very brave, he managed, at any rate, to supply that need.
Betjeman’s standing as a poet remains a matter for debate. Was he a major minor poet, or a minor major poet? Or was he no good at all? Cromwellian modernists pretty much hated him from the get-go, and a couple took the chance to put the boot in after his death. The music of his poems — Victorian, often with a more or less explicit hint of Hymns Ancient and Modern in the mix — affrighted them; as did the subject matter, the ease of comprehension and, you have to suspect, his vast popularity.
Things seem to have settled down somewhat. It’s now more possible to pay attention to his extreme prosodic artfulness, and the very downbeat but distinct admixture of agony with gaiety that characterises his best stuff. A judgment frequently repeated is that he was a limited poet, but one entirely successful within those limitations: ‘Auden sets himself a big test, and fails; Betjeman a lesser test, and passes it.’
More subtly, he has been described as having had a ‘whim of iron’, and charged with ‘mischievous silliness’. His elegiac strand was more than nostalgia: ‘Dear old, bloody old England/ Of telegraph poles and tin/ Seemingly so indifferent/ And with so little soul to win.’ His celebratory work, likewise, was seldom untroubled by sadness. Describing his themes in an interview, Betjeman said, ‘You’re all alone, you fall in love, you’ve got to die.’
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