"Love Is Greater Than Taste": The Moral Architecture of John Betjeman and John Piper

Abstract: Poet John Betjeman and painter John Piper shared an emphasis on visual attentiveness to place, which in its moral and aesthetic valuation, challenged contemporary standards of taste, especially those modern ones that excluded ornament and the picturesque. With regard to English Christianity, as I argue, both pursued forms of neo-Romantic, moral architectural praise and analysis, engaging the socio-cultural debate, not in terms of a set of frozen critical laws, but within a flexible practice of personal engagements that, nonetheless, set forth strong positions on sentiment, tradition, and sacrament. In doing so, both men reemphasized rootedness and love. "[I]t wasn't a question of creating a taste for Gothick or anything else that JB makes fashionable because he, JB, is really, not just fashionably, in love with the subjects and that love is greater than taste.... JB doesn't satirize things because he doesn't hate them: what he does satirize is the absence of love which he does savagely." --Myfanwy Piper to John Murray (Hillier, New Fame 401) "[L]ook to the Victorians, not for a copy book but for an example: an example that in matters of colour it is better to be too vulgar than too nice; too fussy than too simple ... that marbling is still more attractive to the eye than marble veneer, that to express your taste in your shopfront, whether it is good or indifferent taste, is more laudable--and will ultimately attract more and better custom--than to adapt a fashion that forbids self-expression." --John Piper, "Shops" (Mowl 101) Introduction The poet and critic John Betjeman and the visual artist John Piper were good friends for much of their adult lives. They shared an interest in the regional towns and locales of England, and did much in their own way to promote and to protect these. They also shared a love for English architecture, including ecclesial architecture, for both were practicing Anglicans throughout their mature careers. Their mutual influence is an inevitable aspect of the criticism of either man, and this is especially true in regard to how each worked out what he loved in his art. (1) Much of Betjemans work as a poet, as an architectural critic, and as a preservationist grew out of love of place, but not simply place. Betjeman believed he wrote out of reverence for people and for the places bound up with them (Letters 1.426-27). Locale for him was not just spatial, but also social and historical. (2) Architecture at its best represented historical accumulation, and what he repeatedly denounced was the removal of the accretion of the past in such a way that it rendered a place no longer itself. It was Piper in the late 1930s and '40s who helped Betjeman to see that love as a moral and aesthetic response was larger than models of taste, that attentiveness to a place was a wider, less judgmental category than critical absolutism. Piper's attentiveness as a visual artist recognized the contextual thickness of a building--its social use, its history, its location, its scenery--and yet did so in search of aesthetic form. Their shared method of response both influenced and was influenced by their Anglican faith, though often very differently. Despite the importance of their faith, Piper's chief biographers, David Fraser Jenkins and Frances Spalding, have expressed some discomfort with the artist's religious leanings and, thus, tend to downplay faith's importance to his aesthetics. This has not been the case with the chief scholars in Betjeman studies--the biographer Bevis Hillier, the anthologist Stephen Games, and the critic Kevin J. Gardner. Gardner, in particular, has done much to show the importance, even centrality, of Betjeman's faith to his poetry, his architectural preservationism, and his general topophilia. In this, I am persuaded by much of Gardner's work, though where Gardner tends toward an existential and personalist reading of the poet, I am interested in further exploring how Betjeman and Piper were part of a series of intellectual and cultural resistances. …