Small Wreath

SLICK BUT NOT STREAMLINED (185 pp.)--John Betjeman--Doubleday ($3).

John Betjeman, an Englishman with a Dutch name, is one of the pleasantest minor writers in the world. This book, a selection of his verse and prose, introduces him to the U.S. public. Betjeman (pronounced Betch-man) is minor but not slick; he is, in a very light and quiet way, a serious poet. If laurel wreaths may be awarded for a variety of sane satires and affections, for blandness of style and an ear for delectable rhythms, Betjeman deserves at least a small one.

Once an editor of England's Architectural Review and author of two Shell guidebooks to the English counties (at the moment he is doing another guide to Buckinghamshire), Betjeman is a deliberately "provincial" poet. He has an equal passion for industrial cities and for gaslit towns, entered by bicycle and artfully explored. In his prose Betjeman defends the dignity of places that humorists have poked fun at and social critics have deplored.

Suburbs & Seaside. After three years of fire raids on South London, it was characteristic of Betjeman (who worked at the Admiralty) to celebrate one of the homelier disappearances:

Oh, in among the houses, The viaduct below, Stood the Coffee Essence Factory Of Robinson and Co.

Burnt and brown and tumbled down And done with years ago Where the waters of the Wandle do Lugubriously flow.

During wartime, at the southeast coast resort of Margate, he recalled (in a jarringly British rhyme):

How restful to putt, when the strains of a band Announced a the dansant was on at the Grand.... How lightly municipal, meltingly tarr'd Were the walks through the Lawns by the Queen's Promenade....

In Westminster Abbey has become a famous war poem:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans. Spare their women for Thy Sake. And if that is not too easy We will pardon Thy Mistake. But, gracious Lord, what e'er shall be, Don't let anyone bomb me.

In other poems, apparently as light, readers may find themselves stirred before they know it by nothing more than the spoken clarity and intense local atmosphere of Betjeman's verses. Among his prose pieces are two in which Oxford (Betjeman went to Magdalen College, where his tutor was Author C. S. Lewis) gets the smoothest and most thorough panning of modern times.

Betjeman, his wife Penelope and their two children live near Wantage (birthplace of Alfred the Great) in Berkshire, in an old rectory designed by Inigo Jones. He farms, earns side money by reviewing books for the London Daily Herald. He would like to be a stationmaster on a small country branch line (single track). But, says he, "journalism is a better way out for weak characters, such as I am, who are slaves to nicotine and drink."

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