A Subaltern's Love-song

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness ofjoy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won.
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father's euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing's the light on your hair.

By roads 'not adopted', by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car-park the dance has begun.
Oh! full Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girls hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us, the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice,

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car-park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

John Betjeman
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

John Betjeman was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984. He was immensely popular and held in great affection. The above is one of his most famous poems. Larkin was a great admirer of his - some of his writings about "Betchers" can be found in "Required Writing", an anthology of some of his prose.

He has since become wildly unfashionable, which is probably why I like him so much. Yes, he can be campy and twee ("mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells"), but I can forgive him that for his supreme craft and power to evoke almost filmic images, as he does here in "Devonshire Street", another deservedly famous poem: -

Devonshire Street

The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen
Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet.
The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene
With Edwardian faience adornments - Devonshire Street.

No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm
Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by.
The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm
Its chimneys steady against a mackerel sky.

No hope. And the iron knob of this palisade
So cold to the touch, is luckier now than he
'Oh merciless, hurrying Londoners! Why was I made
For the long and the painful deathbed coming to me?'

She puts her fingers in his as, loving and silly,
At long-past Kensington dances she used to do
'It's cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly
And then we can catch a nineteen or a twenty-two.'

~~~~~~~~~~

More information on Sir John here: -
http://www.johnbetjeman.com/



[This message has been edited by Clive (edited February 13, 2003).]

Dear Clive

Thanks for posting these.

I have taken the liberty of retitling the thread with the poet's name and dates. I hope this is all right.

I shall be interested to see how our American colleagues react.

Regards

Clive Watkins

Clive:

Hmm, why is camp always seen as a prejorative? I think camp can be wonderfully delightful, particularly in its purest manisfestations (to paraphrase Susan Sontag's landmark essay, "Notes on Camp," something is most purely camp when the intentions are to produce a serious work of High Art and the results are closer to Low Trash). Some things are so bad they are just wonderful, like Mariah Carey in "Glitter," where you would swear she had to have pissed off the cinematographer in some particularly nasty way to have been lit and shot from the most unflattering angles possible and her line readings are so flat as to be positively concave.

My sister took me to see Radio City Music Hall's Christmas Show, which was just an absolute masterpiece of kitsch. Why, she asked me after, did I love this when I was critical of several other Broadway shows which weren't "any better really" than the Christmas show. I told her: Because the Christmas Show doesn't pretend to be anything any more than kitschy entertainment and 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' is pretending to be a Great Musical."

I don't find Betjeman to fall squarely into either category: camp or kitsch. But then again, I have not read much of him. I tried. I took out his Collected Poems from the library on and off all last summer. And I sat myself down and dutifully read. And mostly (and please try not to hate me for saying this) I was bored.

I suppose the assumption is as an American I am supposed to be fascinated with High British Culture--from the foibles of the monarchy to tea and crumpets and the like. Well, alas, I am not. I think that is the problem with Betjeman for most American readers. He is so squarely Briddish that it almost feels like he is writing in another language. I was talking to someone else earlier tonight about Sara Teasdale, and in a way I think he and Teasdale suffer from the same phenomenon: the craft overwhelms the subject. There is a reticence to their work that, while exquisitely crafted, can be too precious or "pretty" to have real staying power--at least for me.

Interesting that I don't feel this way about Larkin--though I suppose in the case of Larkin, he was almost obsessively seeking out taboo subject matters or points of view. But there is always, with Larkin, layers of meaning and feeling. Look at "Church Going" where I think you get two conflicting attitudes (at least!): this is all nonsense, silly nonsense, but why don't I believe in it, am I missing out on something? Or "This Be the Verse" which is caustic and bitter and, well, compassionate in a way you wouldn't ordinarily expect Larkin to be. With the Bejetman poems posted here, I feel like he is bordering on sentimentality, that a very British reticence is keeping him from showing the complexity of the subjects he has chosen. Or, as in the case of the first poem, he isn't kitschy enough. I would rather read Stevie Smith, who can be wicked as well as wickedly funny.

Then again, it took about a year for Larkin to click with me. So, I will take out the Bejetman Collected again in a bit and see if it clicks.

Hope all is well with you.

Tom

Betjeman is in my view a minor poet but remains a definite feature in the poetic landscape of British writing in the last century. As time refines him, the number of poems which occurs to anthologists will dwindle, but that is true of all writers, including the greatest. And reading through any collection, there is no need to feel one has to enjoy more than a few poems, after all.

An aside to Tom… You say: "I suppose the assumption is as an American I am supposed to be fascinated with High British Culture - from the foibles of the monarchy to tea and crumpets and the like." I don’t imagine Clive intended to impose on you (or on any non-British member) in the way this remark implies - any more than, as someone from the UK, I imagine that I am supposed to be "fascinated" with American cultural, social and literary history. We enjoy what the breadth of our sympathies allows us to enjoy.

Anyway, here for the curious are two more samples, the first from the beginning of Betjeman’s career, the second from towards the end. The second poem, "Harvest Hymn", is a parody of a hymn well-known in the UK which begins" We plough the fields and scatter The good seed on the land". I wonder if it is sung in other English-speaking countries.


Death in Leamington

She died in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the ev'ning star
That shone through the plate glass window
From over Leamington Spa.

Beside her the lonely crochet
Lay patiently and unstirred,
But the fingers that would have work'd it
Were dead as the spoken word.

And Nurse came in with the tea-things
Breast high 'mid the stands and chairs-
But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,
And the things were alone with theirs.

She bolted the big round window,
She let the blinds unroll,
She set a match to the mantle,
She covered the fire with coal.

And "Tea! " she said in a tiny voice
"Wake up! It's nearly five."
Oh I Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,
Half dead and half alive!

Do you know that the stucco is peeling?
Do you know that the heart will stop?
From those yellow Italianate arches
Do you hear the plaster drop?

Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,
At the gray, decaying face,
As the calm of a Leamington ev'ning
Drifted into the place.

She moved the table of bottles
Away from the bed to the wall;
And tiptoeing gently over the stairs
Turned down the gas in the hall.

…

Harvest Hymn

We spray the fields and scatter
The poison on the ground
So that no wicked wild flowers
Upon our farm be found.
We like whatever helps us
To line our puree with pence;
The twenty-four-hour broiler-house
And neat electric fence.

All concrete sheds around us
And Jaguars in the yard,
The telly lounge and deep-freeze
Are ours from working hard.

We fire the fields for harvest,
The hedges swell the flame,
The oak trees and the cottages
From which our fathers came.
We give no compensation,
The earth is ours today,
And if we lose on arable,
The bungalows will pay.

All concrete sheds…etc.

Didn't Larkin say (something to the effect that) to start a fight between any two British poets, mention Betjeman?

Here is Larkin reviewing Betjeman in the Guardian archives .

Clive:

Put scare quotes around the word supposed.

Tom

Clive,

I can't seem to locate it, but my favourite poem by JB is a scathing piece about British wifes praying in a church during some war (WWII I think). His technical virtuosity has been rivalled by few poets this century. And that, alas, is one of the main reasons that he's increasingly regarded as a minor poet; part of the general devaluation of technical skills over the last century, the attitude that technical ability implies a lack of message.

Shekhar

Dear Shekhar

The poem you are thinking of is called "In Westminster Abbey" and begins "Let me take this other glove off As the vox humana swells". It was published in a 1940 collection.

In the second verse, the speaker - a woman - prays "Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans, Spare their women for Thy sake, And if that is not too easy We will pardon Thy mistake".

Here is the fifth verse:

Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
I have done no major crime;
Now I’ll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.

Unfortunately, I am afraid I do not have the time to put up all of its seven verses!

You are right: it is a splendid satire.

Clive Watkins

Thanks for posting this, Clive. My introduction to Betjeman was roundabout--I was reading a little book of verses by Wendy Cope, and her fictional character was a Betjeman fan. Needless to say, I didn't get her little joke because I didn't know the poet, so I looked him up and read a couple of his poems. I expected them to be bad--after all, Wendy Cope went to Oxford, so if she thought him bad enough to merit being the favorite poet of her satirical character, well, he must be just awful. Basically I went away feeling terribly confused, because I didn't think his poems were awful, and figured I just must be stupid.

Thank you for giving me the official permission of the Hoity Toity Poets Society to like Betjeman. I think I'll go off in a corner and read him with a more open mind. I like the light-heartedness of that first one (and of your parody). Reminds me ever so faintly of P. G. Wodehouse.

We know Larkin was a great admirer of JB's(and was not a great admirer generally)and, while Larkin's finest poems are a long way better than Betjeman's, I think Bejeman wrote a much larger number of pretty good poems, and that Larkin's "Collected" is, in general, a less rewarding read than Betjeman's.

Betjeman worked for the British Embassy in Dublin at one time and is widely believed to have been a spy (although probably of the cocktail party circuit type) which he probably was, and has written a few excellent poems about Ireland. He was an inveterate snob and fawner on the high and mighty, by all accounts, and his world is not my world, but I still think he was a wonderful poet of place, and London in particular.

Minor he may be, but I think poems (apart from those mentioned above) like "Myfanwy", "Middlesex", "Christmas"
"Slough" and "How To Get On In Society" will be around for a while yet.

Christmas

The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hooker's Green

The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that villagers can say
"The church looks nice" on Christmas Day

Provincial public houses blaze
And Corporation tramcars clang,
on lighted tenements I gaze
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
says "Merry Christmas to you all."

And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,
and oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad
And Christmas-morning bells say "Come!"
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremenduous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true, For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

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 to-day in Bread and Wine.