'The Antiquarian Works that No One Reads'

Sir John Betjeman (1906-84) has never satisfactorily crossed the Atlantic and is infrequently known by American readers and critics. I first read him some twenty years ago and found his poems unexpectedly tough going, not because of willful Modernist or postmodernist incoherence (he writes metrically, often in rhyme) but because of their essential Englishness. The American edition of his Collected Poems includes an index of place names, most of which are unfamiliar to me. I can’t think of a close counterpart among American poets, one whose allusions are so indelibly of the United States as to make them opaque to most foreigners.

Betjeman was Poet Laureate, a founding member of the Victorian Society, a champion of Victorian architecture, a serious Anglican, a popular broadcaster and a bestselling poet in England. This combination of qualities has make him a difficult sell to American readers, some of whom distrust any poem that makes sense and gives pleasure. Only repeated readings across time have made Betjeman a rewarding writer for this reader.

Here is a passage from Section VI, “London,” of Summoned by Bells, Betjeman’s blank-verse autobiography first published in The New Yorker in 1960 and in book form later that year. He recounts an experience readers of both nations understand:

“Then I found

Second-hand bookshops in the Essex Road

Stacked high with powdery leather flaked and dry,

Gilt letters on red labels--Mason’s Works

(But volume II is missing), Young’s Night Thoughts,

Falconer’s Shipwreck and The Grave by Blair,

A row of Scott, for certain incomplete,

And always somewhere Barber’s Isle of Wight . . .”

I’ve read only the Young and Scott, but I know the excitement of book hunting, even the incidental detail of a volume missing from a set of Scott’s prolific output (probably Ivanhoe, the one novel still read today). Betjeman continues:

“The antiquarian works that no one reads –

Church Bells of Nottingham, Baptismal Fonts

(‘Scarce, 2s. 6d., a few plates slightly foxed’).

Once on a stall in Farringdon Road I found

An atlas folio of great lithographs,

View of Ionian Isles, flyleaf inscribed

By Edward Lear – and bought it for a bob.”

Book collectors and readers (discrete though overlapping species), high on bookish anticipation, live for such moments.

“Perhaps one day I’ll find a ‘first’ of Keats,

Wedged between Goldsmith and The Law of Torts;

Perhaps – but that is not the reason why

Untidy bookshops gave me such delight.

It was the smell of books, the plates in them,

Tooled leather, marbled paper, gilded edge,

The armorial book-plate of some country squire,

From whose tall library windows spread his park

On which this polished spine may once have looked,

From whose twin candlesticks may once have shone

Soft beams upon the spacious title-page.

Forgotten poets, parsons with a taste

For picturesque descriptions of a hill

Or ruin in the parish, pleased me much.”

A few lines later, satisfied for the moment, purchases in hand, Betjeman writes:

“Outside the bookshop, treasures in my hands,

I scarcely saw the trams or heard the bus

Or noticed modern London: I was back

With George the Fourth, post-horns, street-cries and bells.”