Kevin J Gardner - Betjeman on Faith: An anthology of his religious prose

Kevin J. Gardner is Associate Professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. A Betjeman scholar, he is the author of Betjeman and the Anglican Imagination (SPCK, 2010). He is also the editor of Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman: An anthology of his religious verse (Continuum, 2005) and Poems in the Porch: The radio poems of John Betjeman (Continuum, 2008). In addition to his work on Betjeman, he has published on a wide variety of literary figures over the years, and has a particular interest in twentieth-century writers who address issues of faith and religion.

First published in Great Britain in 2011

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
36 Causton Street
London SW1P 4ST
www.spckpublishing.co.uk

Preface copyright Kevin J. Gardner 2011
All other chapters copyright the Estate of Sir John Betjeman 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

SPCK does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, and are reproduced by permission of the Crowns Patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crowns Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 281 06416 8
E-ISBN 978 0 281 06663 6

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset and eBOOK by Graphicraft Ltd, Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press

Produced on paper from sustainable forests

To Hilaryand
and to Graham

I long for Jesus as a Man, I long to see Him, to be lifted up to Him, to love Him, not to injure Him as much as I do all the time. I try to long for Him when I dont long for Him. Jesus is the centre of my faith and the Sacraments are one of the ways by which I try to know Him.

Letter to Penelope Betjeman, 2 June 1949

Contents

Part 1
FAITH AND CULTURE

Part 2
CHRISTIAN AESTHETICS

Part 3
CHURCHES AND CATHEDRALS

Part 4
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

Part 5
BELIEF AND DOUBT

Poet, journalist, broadcaster, preservationist and beloved icon of Englishness: to John Betjeman these successes meant nothing without his faith. Underlying everything he wrote and all he campaigned for was an encompassing Christian commitment that to him meant a regular observance of the sacraments, a lifelong spiritual struggle to merit salvation, and an aesthetic pleasure in the material culture of Anglicanism. As he admitted to Evelyn Waugh, Of course, upbringing, habit, environment, connections all sorts of worldly things make me love the C. of E. But this would not matter a straw, if I knew , in the Pauline sense, that Our Lord was not present at an Anglican Mass. Faith, complex and serious, was not compartmentalized and separated from his public life. The struggle to sustain his faith and invigorate his church infuses every genre in which he wrote: poetry and letters, essays and journalism, radio broadcasts and television films. Unabashedly revealing his personal beliefs and doubts, he explored theological dilemmas that challenge rational thinkers, argued for the interconnectedness of religion and the arts, discussed the dependence of English society on its established Church, instructed his readers about the life and history of parishes and church buildings, and in moving elegies lamented the loss of churches. He is without doubt one of the most important voices of faith and culture in the twentieth century.

To read Betjeman today is to discover a mind profoundly engaged with a striking variety of topics pertaining to Christian faith and experience. Questions of belief were inescapable for him, and they remain so for anyone who reads Betjeman closely. This volume is sure to portray the more sombre aspects of Betjemans personality, easily manifested by a sudden recollection of his own mortality or of the uncertainty of eternity. Though religion was a subject of great seriousness to him, it did not always prevent him from injecting a note of humour into a portentous topic. There were parish arguments about cow parsley on the altar, for instance, which he includes among those cherished hallmarks of Englishness most under threat of imminent Nazi invasion. Such memorable whimsy typifies Betjemans voice, and is rarely absent except in moments of the most sober reflection. Not surprisingly, superficial pleasures can open the door to seriousness, as he admits in a 1937 letter to Alan Pryce-Jones: The thing that has happened to me is that after years of sermon tasting, I am now a member of the C. of E. and a communicant. I regard it as the only salvation against progress and Fascists on the one side and Marxists of Bloomsbury on the other.

Indeed, surprise is one of the great experiences in reading the work of John Betjeman. Who knew what undiscovered glories hung/Waiting in locked-up churches, he wrote in his autobiographical poem. The same question could be asked of the archives holding Betjemans papers. For many the most surprising undiscovered glory in this book may be the sermon he preached at St Matthews Church, Northampton, on 5 May 1946. Privately printed in a slim volume with sermons preached there by other laymen, Betjemans sermon is a homiletical masterpiece that suggests an alternative career in the Church had he been so inclined. However, the anxiety he felt determined him not to accept future such requests. Perhaps it was stage fright before a congregation of 600, perhaps it was the distress of having to follow in the pulpit his old Oxford tutor and antagonist, C. S. Lewis. Despite his misgivings, his sermon is rhetorically powerful and theologically substantive, a work of both beauty and humility and also not without its wry moments of self-deprecating humour. It contains some of the most affective prose that he ever composed and is moreover a deeply personal revelation.

This sermon is surely my most fortuitous discovery about Betjeman and remains for me the central text of this collection, which grew out of original research that I was conducting for my book, Betjeman and the Anglican Imagination (London: SPCK, 2010). It was while preparing to write that book that I began to realize that religion was not simply one of Betjemans many interests but the central preoccupation of his life, and one that influenced his thinking on all other matters. In his poetry, Betjemans explorations of faith and doubt and his celebrations of the life of the Church are relatively well known, but perhaps this is rather less the case with his prose. Until now, much of Betjemans religious prose has remained uncollected, available only to readers with access to microform, out-of-print books, and archives. This anthology of Betjemans religious prose is intended to reveal the great diversity of his thinking and writing on the subjects of the spiritual and social natures of Christianity.

Scholarship can be a lonely business, so it is gratifying to have made the acquaintance and earned the respect of other writers devoted to Betjeman. As always, I am profoundly grateful to Bevis Hillier for his friendship and encouragement and especially for laying the foundation for all my work on Betjeman. His magisterial biographical trilogy continues to inspire and impress me, and all scholars of the life and writings of Betjeman owe Bevis a debt of gratitude. I must also acknowledge two other scholars whose work has made this anthology possible. Bill Petersons John Betjeman: A bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006) made the identification and location of Betjemans more obscure prose a much less exhausting task, and Stephen Games identified several interesting pieces and graciously provided me with copies from his own collection. I deeply admire their scholarship, and I remain grateful for their support, advice and assistance.