Books: To Be a Poet

SUMMONED BY BELLS (97 pp.)—John Betjeman—Houghton Mifflin ($3).

For a modest man, which he is, British Poet John Betjeman has unsuspected temerity. Although he has done nothing more significant in life than to farm a little, review books, write guides about the English countryside and turn out delightful light verse, Betjeman at 54 has published an autobiography of his boyhood and young manhood. What is more, he has written it in verse. At first glance, this might seem to be a supremely unnecessary exercise. In fact, it is a tour de force of considerable charm.

Considered coldly, Poet Betjeman's life seems anything but exciting; yet in his graceful blank verse he creates drama from the ordinary. His father owned a small factory and was well-to-do, but

I knew we were a lower, lesser world

Than that remote one of the carriage folk.

Young John's trouble was that he wanted almost from the first to be a poet. That way lies collision with the world for any boy. It began with his nurse:

She rubbed my face in messes I had

made

And was the first to tell me about Hell

Admitting she was going there herself.

At school he hated games, feared the roughhousing and hazing that passed for manliness. When he was challenged to fight, he cravenly told his challenger that his mother was ill and that he had no stomach for combat. When World War I came, his very name became a trial. Originally it had been Dutch, but now his schoolmates sang:

"Betjeman's a German spy—Shoot him down and let him die."

The boy was a bitter disappointment to his father, who wanted him to take over at the factory one day and refused to take his scribbling seriously. John's early versifying was pedestrian enough. At Highgate Junior School he bound his verses into a book.

The Best of Betjeman, and handed it

To one who, I was told, liked poetry—

The American master, Mr. Eliot.

That dear good man, with Prufrock in

his head

And Sweeney waiting to be agonized,

I wonder what he thought? He never

says When now we meet, across the port and

cheese.

Despite the lack of encouragement from T. S. Eliot, young Betjeman persisted. He haunted bookshops, became a passionate connoisseur of church architecture, a champion of the Victorian and other obsolescent styles. At Oxford he went through a lot of his father's money but did not get his degree, because, with all his love of churches, he failed in divinity.

And so he, who hated sports, had to take a job at a prep school as cricket master. There ends Summoned by Bells, neither major poetry nor an exceptional life, but a memoir suffused with moving scenes of an older England, a singing recollection of what it was to be John Betjeman—young and a poet.

Great was my joy with London at my

feet—

All London mine, five shillings in my

hand

And not expected back till after tea!