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| Philip Larkin - also at a station A promotional photograph for The Whitsun Weddings (This is one of Larkin's best- loved poems about what he sees on a long train journ |
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| John Betjeman Statue, St Pancras Photograph by author. |
I usually read some poetry in bed before I go to sleep, finding it a good way to wind down at the end of the day. There is a pile of poetry books by my bed, several of them anthologies I dip into more or less at random. Recently, however, I have been working my way through two of my favourite poets: Philip Larkin and John Betjeman.
Neither are particularly original or outrageous choices but old favourites with virtually national treasure status now. Both looked like bank managers, usually wearing suits and ties, bald, bespectacled and distinctly unsexy. Being a writer, however, can win you success with women and neither lacked for female company in their lives, although Betjeman did famously regret that he had not enjoyed more sex and Larkin was reputedly jealous of his friend Kingsley Amis’s feats in that area.
Why do we read poetry? Not to speculate about the sex life of the poet, although that inevitably occurs. We read it to see the world clarified in a few words, to see a thought expressed concisely, as we recognise it but could not verbalise it ourselves.
It was William Thackeray who said that it was the writer’s job to ‘make the new familiar and the familiar new’. It is the second of these I value most, I suppose, in poetry. A poem should present a familiar, almost banal scenario, and give it some kind of new life and both Betjeman and Larkin were capable of doing this. Train journeys, going into old churches, lusting after unobtainable women: they wrote about all of these.
Although they both had the look of conventional Englishmen and often dealt in similar subjects their lives were very different. Larkin was the son of a town clerk (who was an admirer of Hitler) brought up in Coventry. He later became a librarian and moved to Hull. He preferred a predictable world or work, which he referred to as ‘the toad’. Betjeman was a child of the London suburbs, which he often wrote about. He rejected the chance to run the family business, drifted through Oxford and then made a fair bit of money from his writings, both prose and poetry, and his television work. He was something of a star, Larkin more a recluse.
You picture Betjeman with a grin on his face, smiling at the absurdity of a world in which bouncing girls beat him at tennis and thumping crooks hold hands with little women In a Bath Tea Shop. Larkin seems grumpier then Betjeman, happier on his own than in company. He becomes positively miserable in old age as he contemplates the extinction that will inevitably follow it in Aubade, one of the most powerful poems about imminent death ever written.
Betjeman makes you feel good but occasionally – and not always successfully – lapses into satire when he parodies the town clerk or the ruthless businessman. Larkin disturbs you more, but in a thoughtful way. Sometimes he surprises you by raising smile in An Arundel Tomb where he notices the touch of the absurd in the little dogs at the couple’s feet and then concludes with 'our almost instinct, almost true, what will survive of us is love’.
Betjeman’s cheerfulness is undercut by moments of mortality when he recognises that he is growing old and should not still be looking at athletic young women with an old man’s lustful eye. Larkin’s aloofness hides his vulnerability, both his fear of being alone and his need to be by himself so much. I always think that Larkin lost out by not marrying and having a family. If there is a next generation to follow, your own oncoming extinction seems somehow to be easier to bear. (It is for me anyway.)
Both men liked enjoyed a drink and liked going into old churches – ‘Yet, stop I did. In fact I often do' the unbelieving Larkin says in Church Going, one of my favourite poems. Betjeman was more charitable towards the people he wrote about, while Larkin dismissed those near death as ‘old fools’, knowing he would be one before long.
Betjeman fought hard to keep old buildings alive, even as they fell into disuse and his daughter helped to keep his memory alive in turn, unveiling a plaque to him at Marylebone station. There is also a statue at Saint Pancras station, in which he looks a little like a commuter in a hurry to get home to his beloved suburbia.
Both Larkin and Betjeman were offered the position of Poet Laureate, a then unpaid position, but one of great prestige. Betjeman, knowing that the laureateship would boost his book sales, accepted and even insisted on being given the traditional payment, which was made in sherry – 720 bottles of it, which would have kept him going for a while. Larkin wrote about drinking sherry at a boring party, but turned the post down, thinking that his creative fires had burned out. He spent his later years drinking cheap red wine instead. He seemed to be waiting for death, which he both dreaded and welcomed. There was no long and idle retirement and the end came when he was only sixty three, the year after he turned the laureateship down.
Few people who write can hope to leave much behind that is well-known and much-loved by both their contemporaries and succeeding generations. Larkin and Betjeman, Englishmen with many similarities, seem to have mastered the knack.
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This post is early, as I am going to Ireland for a week and will try to do so without a computer.
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com Edwin Lerner.
