I’ve been trying to get into Betjeman.
Quite possibly mostly on account of Rick Stein quoting or mentioning him so often. Teresa watches Stein most days!
So I bought this book, quite recently. It’s a collection of radio talks he did, broadcast on the BBC (of course!), from before during and just after WWII.
I’d have to say that I’m somewhat disappointed. Not totally surprisingly so, to be candid. He’s a dotty old duffer, for sure. C. S. Lewis, who tutored him at Oxford, called him ‘this idle prig’!
The first x chapters/talks are on provincial West Country towns. Then there’s a bunch on the loose theme of eccentrics. And I’m currently wading through a segment on religious folk.
I like poetry and the arts, and I’m interested in architecture, as Betjeman is, as a kind of index on our current cultural state. I share some of his views, on all of these things. But by no means all. Far from it!
Thanks to his poetic and linguistic skills, he occasionally puts things very nicely – or at least amusingly – such as when he describes London as ‘that vile octopus’.
But his rather wet almost effete old-fashioned tweediness can grate a bit, at times. And I find his very dewy-eyed conservatism in relation to Christianity pretty baffling.
Nevertheless, I’m glad I bought the book. And I am, on balance, enjoying reading it. I guess I ought to go to his poetry next? That’s possibly a better bet? We shall see…
The above, illustrated by David Genitalman, looks worth a punt. I think I also have this (somewhere?):
