John Betjeman

[Emil Miller]

So Joan Hunter-Dunn was a real person! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Jackson

Google Earth gives me a view of the Slough Trading Estate from the outside and it looks like The Office gives me an interesting view from the inside.

It would be wrong to identify Slough as a specific thorn in Betjeman's side. It was simply that the town, which was one of many that sprang up as a result of the new technologies evolved from WWII wherein alloys and plastics marked a move away from the heavy indiustrial localities of pre-war Britain to the newly planned towns of the post-war period. Slough was archetypical of the change but it was built on what were formerly green fields and Betjeman understandably resented it.

[Neely]

Google Earth gives me a view of the Slough Trading Estate from the outside and it looks like The Office gives me an interesting view from the inside.

Yes, which is all part of why I like the lines in Slough below:

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

I've never watched a whole episode of The Office just because it puts me right in that grey and I can't be doing with it. It does well to capture the mood of the poem though.

It is interesting to read of Betjeman's sexual exploits. I did once read about an interpretation of the 'dancing' in the car with Joan Hunter Dunn as differently than we had it. I don't think it is correct reading but you have to look again to be sure.

I've just stumbled upon this poem. Similar stuff and more pinewood.


Indoor Games near Newbury

poem by John Betjeman



In among the silver birches,
Winding ways of tarmac wander
And the signs to Bussock Bottom,
Tussock Wood and Windy Break.
Gabled lodges, tile-hung churches
Catch the lights of our Lagonda
As we drive to Wendy’s party,
Lemon curd and Christmas cake

Rich the makes of motor whirring
Past the pine plantation purring
Come up Hupmobile Delage.
Short the way our chauffeurs travel
Crunching over private gravel,
Each from out his warm garage.

O but Wendy, when the carpet
Yielded to my indoor pumps.
There you stood, your gold hair streaming,
Handsome in the hall light gleaming
There you looked and there you led me
Off into the game of Clumps.

Then the new Victrola playing;
And your funny uncle saying
"Choose your partners for a foxtrot.
Dance until it's tea o'clock
Come on young 'uns, foot it feetly."
Was it chance that paired us neatly?
I who loved you so completely.
You who pressed me closely to you,
Hard against your party frock.

"Meet me when you've finished eating."
So we met and no one found us.
O that dark and furry cupboard,
While the rest played hide-and-seek.
Holding hands our two hearts beating.
In the bedroom silence round us
Holding hands and hardly hearing
Sudden footstep, thud and shriek

Love that lay too deep for kissing.
"Where is Wendy? Wendy's missing."
Love so pure it had to end.
Love so strong that I was frightened
When you gripped my fingers tight.
And hugging, whispered "I'm your friend."

Goodbye Wendy. Send the fairies,
Pinewood elf and larch tree gnome.
Spingle-spangled stars are peeping
At the lush Lagonda creeping
Down the winding ways of tarmac
To the leaded lights of home.

There among the silver birches,
All the bells of all the churches
Sounded in the bath-waste running
Out into the frosty air.
Wendy speeded my undressing.
Wendy is the sheet's caressing
Wendy bending gives a blessing.
Holds me as I drift to dreamland
Safe inside my slumber wear

by -- John Betjeman

http://www.poetseers.org/poets/john_...games_newbury/

[YesNo]

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

Those lines do remind me of the way the manager in The Office video treated his secretary.

It would be wrong to identify Slough as a specific thorn in Betjeman's side. It was simply that the town, which was one of many that sprang up as a result of the new technologies evolved from WWII wherein alloys and plastics marked a move away from the heavy indiustrial localities of pre-war Britain to the newly planned towns of the post-war period. Slough was archetypical of the change but it was built on what was formerly green fields and Betjeman understandably resented it.

It makes sense that Betjeman would not like Slough especially if it represented a recent change from an agrarian area. From a few miles up in Google Earth one might consider it the armpit of Greater London depending, of course, on one's attitude toward such progress.

Here are some pictures of Joan Hunter Dunn:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ga...1/#gallery3251

There is this other poem, The Licorice Fields of Pontefract, that expresses what Betjeman might have been looking for in a woman:

Red hair she had and golden skin,
Her sulky lips where shaped for sin,
Her sturdy legs were flannel slack'd,
The strongest legs in Pontefract.

He wants to be her "captive slave":

And held in brown arms strong and bare
And wound with flaming ropes of hair.

[Emil Miller]

I thought he was pushing his luck with

Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons.

But surely

Her sturdy legs were flannel slack'd,
The strongest legs in Pontefract.

is a couplet too far.

[YesNo]

Betjeman did seem to like legs perhaps a bit too much. That part of the body is perhaps the most important in tennis.

I was reading one of his poems, which was not about women, An Incident in the Early Life of Ebenezer Jones, Poem, 1828, that I found enjoyable.

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems...ones-poet-1828

A cruel "usher" in charge of students takes a stray dog up to a height and drops it to its death in front of the students. Ebenezer Jones, about nine years old, seeing what was about to happen went up to him and said, "You shall not". It was a nice poem of courage. Here are the last lines which I think make this poem very good:

Look on and jeer! Not Satan's thunder-quake
Can cause the mighty walls of Heaven to shake
As now they do, to hear a boy's heart break.

I didn't particularly like Jones' poetry, but I only skimmed some of it. The content seemed too vague. However, Jones' courage as described by Betjeman was a fitting memorial.

http://ia600400.us.archive.org/17/it...sati00jone.pdf

[Emil Miller]

Yes, flicking through a number of his poems, it seems that Betjeman was actually quite an eclectic poet even if fantasising about female tennis players with powerful thighs were more than a minor preoccupation. In 1990 a 15-year-old Jennifer Capriati reached the semi finals at Wimbledon and was interviewed by the BBC immediately after the match. She was on a high from the victory and was about as sweet as it's possible to be at that age. However, the beautiful bright eyed girl gradually gave way to the kind of amazon preferred by Betjeman.

[YesNo]

I can't imagine seeing Dolly Parton in that pose.

Betjeman's Myfanwy poem also contains the idea of being protected by women:

You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

I understand Myfanwy is a Welsh female's name. At first I thought it was some place. I had to look up how to pronounce it. It is nothing like I expected--sort of like "muh-von-noy". Here is the pronunciation: http://www.forvo.com/word/myfanwy/

[Emil Miller]

I can't imagine seeing Dolly Parton in that pose.

Betjeman's Myfanwy poem also contains the idea of being protected by women:

You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

I understand Myfanwy is a Welsh female's name. At first I thought it was some place. I had to look up how to pronounce it. It is nothing like I expected--sort of like "muh-von-noy". Here is the pronunciation: http://www.forvo.com/word/myfanwy/

Knowing very little about Wales, I have sometimes wondered how the name Myfanwy was pronounced but even in this poem Betjeman makes passing reference to her stockinged legs as she cycles home.
In an interesting introduction to a new selection of Betjeman's poems, Hugo Williams makes reference to their cinematic quality. It was something that struck me when reading them but I wasn't able to put my finger on it. Here's what he says:

The frisson of upward mobility is memorably caught in "A Subaltern's Love-Song" about the famous Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. The poem moves with the pace and timing of a good movie - from the tennis court to the verandah for lime juice and gin, back to his room to change, thence to her own room at the same moment for the essential blazer and shorts to be seen scattered on the floor, to picking her up later for the dance, then the short car ride in the Hillman, "by roads not adopted" to the golf club car park, where they sit, presumably necking, "till twenty to one / And now - I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn". The whole thing is a wonderful swooping dolley-shot of a poem, not unlike the spectacular opening crane-shot in Touch of Evil. It is customary to praise writers of all kinds, especially poets, for being "cinematic" but it is more likely that good films mimic the traditional techniques of good poetry: silent film scripts were often written as poems. Betjeman, a sometime film critic for the Evening Standard, was less than modern in his subject matter and verse forms, but his techniques of montage, cutting, fades and close-ups make him modern in spite of himself.

[YesNo]

Betjeman's poems do tell stories. I think this is what is partly responsible for the cinematic feature of them.

Although a lot of poets put place names in their poetry this is the first poet that has made me interested enough to open up Google Earth to look for those places. The place names also offer a larger set of rhyme words when he chooses to rhyme.

I'm still just skipping through the poems in his Collected Poems. He has a lot of interest in the Church of England and Calvinism. Although I'm familiar with Christianity, I suspect I might be missing part of the message here.

For a different view of women, there is "Invasion Exercise on the Poultry Farm". A lost paratrooper lands on Judy and her friend Marty thinks they are in an embrace and so

She fetches down a length of rope and rushes, breathing hard
To let the couple have it for embracing in the yard.
Crack! the pair are paralyzed. Click! they cannot stir.
Zip! she's trussed the paratroop. There's no embracing her.

[Emil Miller]

I'm not well up on religion, but Betjeman's interest in the Church of England appears to be twofold. On the one hand, as its name implies, it is the established religion of the country but I don't think that it designates itself as specifically protestant, despite periods when it has been at war with catholics. This may have appealed to the poet, as such ambiguity allowed the church to describe itself as Anglican; a name resonant with the Englishness that he obviously identified with and is reflected in its many churches that go back to Anglo Saxon times and are to be found all over the country. On the other hand, Betjeman had an abiding interest in buildings and they are a central theme throughout his poetry but it seems to be churches that feature most often; probably due to their different styles as the architecture changed with the passage of time.

[ruggerlad]

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn has "the speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy". Surely the attraction of the strong women was their boyish quality?

As is clear from Bevis Hilier's monumental three volume biography, Betjeman only got into sexual attraction with women after his student days. There's a story about him and Auden spending the night together.

And there is a long blank verse poem about a man whose career is about to be ruined following the discovery that he has had sexual relations with a young (possibly underage - I forget) man.