Michael Dirda

A biography of poet John Betjeman, for better and verse.

(Kurt Hutton / Getty Images)

BETJEMAN

A Life

By A.N. Wilson

Farrar Straus Giroux.

375 pp. $27

There should be a warning sticker on the cover of this biography of the English poet John Betjeman (1906-84): "Anglophiles Only!" A.N. Wilson -- a prolific and much admired novelist, biographer and historian, graced with a pleasing, conversational style -- readily assumes familiarity with the Brideshead Generation of writers and eccentrics (Evelyn Waugh, Kenneth Clark, Lord Berners), fond memories of British television in the 1950s and at least partial sympathy for a past where God was in his heaven and all was right with the world because stalwart Englishmen kept their word, knew their place and honored their traditions. Few Americans fit all these qualifications, and far more are likely to start by asking: Just who is this Betjeman that we should be mindful of him?

In some ways, Sir John Betjeman represents a familiar type: a public nostalgist for a world we have lost. As a poet and architectural preservationist, he loathed our crass modern society's noise, vulgarity and gimcrack ugliness: "The magic-lantern is broken and we laugh at the mission hymns," as he wrote in one of his poems ("The Ballad of George R. Sims"). And yet he attained immense fame through his journalism, travel guides (sponsored by Shell Oil!) and frequent appearances on radio (735 times) and television (494 times). By the end of his life, he was not only England's poet laureate but also one of the most beloved public figures in the country, half Walter Cronkite, half Walt Disney.

Betjeman wasn't born to aristocratic privilege, but his family, who had been in trade for generations, was modestly well to do. From an early age, he hoped to become a poet, and through one of those convergences beloved by Fate, the young T.S. Eliot was briefly his schoolteacher. Alas, the future author of "The Waste Land" apparently didn't see anything exceptional in the boy's verses. Later, at Oxford in the 1920s, Betjeman's tutor was to prove similarly distinguished -- but C.S. Lewis actually disliked him as a frivolous, silly-ass slacker. The collegiate aesthete's most faithful companion, after all, was Archibald Ormsby Gore, a stuffed teddy bear, who was not only a strict Baptist but also"very interested in Temperance work at Clacton-on-Sea."

Throughout the 1930s and the following three decades, Betjeman scribbled away as a journalist while composing poems on the run -- according to his daughter, he liked to write in railway station waiting rooms and on the backs of restaurant menus. Inspired by old hymns and music-hall songs, his poetry is so bouncy and winning that many critics even now dismiss it as light verse. And yet Betjeman was deeply admired by poets as fastidious as Philip Larkin, who commended his metrical skill, and W.H. Auden, who neatly summarized him as "slick but not streamlined" (a phrase later used as the title for one of Betjeman's collections). His most famous anthology pieces are probably "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel," in which the doomed playwright sips hock and seltzer while awaiting the arrival of the Cockney policemen; "Slough," which earnestly solicits German bombers to destroy an ugly industrial town; and "In Westminster Abbey," the prayer of a selfish upper-class woman during wartime. To these, one must add the great favorite, "A Subaltern's Love Song." It opens:

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,