Betjeman First and Last Loves

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28692-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

'Oh prams on concrete balconies, what will your children see? Oh white and antiseptic life in school and home and clinic, oh soul-destroying job with handy pension, oh loveless life of safe monotony, why were you created?' First and Last Loves is a collection of Betjeman's essays on architecture, first published to coincide with an exhibition at the Soane Museum, and a worthwhile volume in its own right. Introduced with a lively tirade against mediocrity entitled 'Love is Dead', Betjeman discusses a range of topics including conservation battles, modern architecture and his passion for railways.

Poet and architectural critic, Sir John Betjeman was born in North London in 1906. He was taught by T S Eliot at Highgate Junior School and was rusticated from Magdalen College Oxford for failing Divinity. He published several poetry collections, including New Bats in Old Belfries and A Few Late Chrysanthemums, and several works on architecture. His Collected Poems was published in 1958 and the first edition sold over 100,000 copies. He was knighted in 1969 and appointed Poet Laureate in 1972. He died in Cornwall in 1984.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Betjeman, John

Leseproben

Love is Dead

ENGLAND though not yet so ugly as Northern France and Belgium, is very nearly so. The suburbs which once seemed to me so lovely with their freckled tennis girls and their youths in club blazers have spread so far in the wake of the motor car that there is little but suburb left. We are told that we live in the age of the common man. He would be better described as the suburban man. There is a refinement about him which pervades everything he touches and sees. His books are chosen for him by the librarians, his arguing is done for him by Brains Trusts, his dreams are realised for him in the cinema, his records are played for him by the B.B.C.; the walls of his rooms are in quiet pastel shades, he has cereals for breakfast, and he likes everything in moderation, be it beer, religion or tobacco. He has a wife, a motor car and a child. He is the Borough Engineer, the Listener, the Civil Servant, the Town Clerk, the Librarian, the Art Historian, the Income Tax Inspector. So long as he is not any sort of creative artist he can be assured of an income and a pension at the end. He collects facts as some collect stamps, and he abhors excess in colour, speech or decoration. He is not vulgar. He is not the common man, but the average man, which is far worse.

He is our ruler and he rules by committees. He gives us what most people want, and he believes that what is popular is what is best. He is the explanation of such phenomena as plastic tea-cups, Tizer, light ale, quizzes, mystery tours, cafeterias, discussion groups, Chapels of Unity, station announcers. At his best he is as lovable as Mr. Pooter, but he is no leader. He is the Lowest Common Multiple, not even the Highest Common Factor. And we have put him in charge of us, whatever his political party at the moment.

His indifference to the look of things is catching. We discover it in our attitude to the horrors with which the delicate variety of our landscape has been afflicted. We accept without murmur the poles and wires with which the Ministry of Fuel and Power has strangled every village, because they bring electric light and telephones to those who have been without these inestimable benefits. We put up with the foully hideous concrete lamp-standards for which the Borough Engineer and the Ministry of Transport are jointly responsible—each playing off the other—because the corpse-light they spew over road and pavement makes it safer for kiddies to cross and easier for lorries to overtake one another round dangerous corners. We slice off old buildings, fell healthy trees, replace hedges with concrete posts and chain-link fencing, all in the name of “safety first” which is another phrase for “hurry past”. We accept the collapse of the fabrics of our old churches, the thieving of lead and objects from them, the commandeering and butchering of our scenery by the services, the despoiling of landscaped parks and the abandonment to a fate worse than the workhouse of our country houses, because we are convinced we must save money. Money is even more important than health or road-widening, so it is obviously infinitely more important than something so indeterminate as beauty. He is a foolish man who in a letter to a paper, or at a local council meeting or in Parliament dares to plead for something because it is good to look at or well made. He is not merely a conservative. He is a crank. He is unpatriotic and prepared to sell the country for an invisible asset. We have ceased to use our eyes because we are so worried about money and illness. Beauty is invisible to us. We live in a right little, tight little clinic.

Oh come, come, Mr. Betjeman, aren’t you allowing your eloquence to run away with you? Things are not so bad as you imagine. I doubt if there has ever been a time when the desire for culture has been so widespread among our menfolk and womenkind. The interest in ballet, in opera, in chamber music and documentary film is something phenomenal. Museums have never had better seasons, and even picture galleries are widely patronised. Then you must admit that in your field of architecture the government housing schemes, particularly for our rural dwellers, have shewn a taste and reticence unknown in the evil days of private speculation by the jerry builder.

I doubt whether this interest in culture is more than an expression of restlessness. It is reaching for something that cannot be explained in terms of economics. It is a desire for the unworldly. It is a search for religion and it is far smarter than Christianity. As for the taste and reticence of government control, it is certainly easier on the eye than the brutalities of the speculator. By looking only at well-laid out municipal estates and averting one’s eyes from the acres of unimaginative modern housing, by forgetting those terrible pipe-dreams come true of thick-necked brutes with flashy cars, elderly blondes and television sets—those modernistic, Egyptian, beaux-arts and other façades of the new factories outside every large town, by ignoring all these and much more, it is possible to live in a fool’s paradise of imagined culture, a sort of Welwyn Garden City of the mind.

But look for a moment at what is really there, and the suburban man is before us again. The old High Street just peeps above the shop façades. The well-known chromium and black gloss, Burton the Tailor of Taste, Hepworth, Halford, Stone, Woolworth & Co., Samuel, Bata, The Fifty Shilling Tailor, the Co-op, have transformed what was once a country town with the characteristics of its county into a home from home for the suburbanite, the concrete standards adding the final touch. When the suburbanite leaves Wembley for Wells he finds that the High Street there is just like home, provided that he does not raise his eyes from the pavement to see the old windows and uneven roofs, or go so far off the beaten track as to wander down a side-alley and see the backs of the houses and their neglected Somerset craftsmanship. Enterprising brewers, backing culture for all they are worth, have turned the old inns into “pubs” and “locals”. They have made a virtue of the solemn drinking of their chemicals. They have had Izal and porcelain put in the gents, and made the bar similar to it, save that they have added little tables and a counter. Sawdust and oil lamp or engraved glass and gas light, all the subtle distinction between private, jug and bottle, public and saloon, are being merged into the cleanly classlessness of the road-house. The local crudely-painted inn sign is replaced by the standardised sign with the big brewer’s name. And inside, the old photographs of local teams and the framed picture from Pears’ Annual are put in the dust bin, the walls are painted a light biscuit colour and reproductions of favourite artists of a brewers’ publicity board are hung in their place. Nationalised or not yet nationalised, the gradual suburbanisation of enterprise continues, the killing of local communities, the stamping out of local rivalries and the supplying of everything by lorry from industrial towns. By luxury coach and local bus the villages are drained of life. Jealous of the misery created by too much road transport, the railways are trying to standardise themselves too. Those colours by which we were wont to know the part of England we were in—red for Midland, brown for Great Western, grained oak for East Anglia, green for Southern—have disappeared. For the convenience of suburbanites who like everything uniform and call it Administration, the trains are one of two colours.

Oh prams on concrete balconies, what will your children see? Oh white and antiseptic life in school and home and clinic, oh soul-destroying job with handy pension, oh loveless life of safe monotony, why were you created?

I see the woman with a scarf twisted round her hair and a cigarette in her mouth. She has put the tea tray down upon the file on which my future depends. I see the man on the chain-belt feeling tired, not screwing the final nuts. In a few months I see the engine falling out of the motor car. I see eight porters, two postmen and an inspector standing dazed for forty minutes on a provincial station, staring into space and waiting for what was once the Great Western which is now forty minutes late. I see those sharp-faced girls behind the buffet and the counter insulting the crowds who come to buy. Too bored to think, too proud to pray, too timid to leave what we are used to doing, we have shut ourselves behind our standard roses; we love ourselves only and our neighbours no longer. As for the Incarnation, that is a fairy story for the children, if we think it healthy for children to be told fairy stories. We prefer facts. They are presented to us by the thousand and we can choose those we like. History must not be written with bias, and both sides must...