Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

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  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  1. Beginnings

  2. Cornwall – and the Dragon

  3. The Secret Glory

  4. Oxford

  5. Making a Mark – Archie Rev

  6. Marriage

  7. Mr Pahper – The Defining Friendship

  8. Betjeman at War

  9. The Path to Rome

  10. Defections

  11. Mindful of the Church’s Teaching

  12. Summoned by Bells

  13. Last Years in Cloth Fair

  14. The Mistress

  15. Love is Everything

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDEX

  ALSO BY A.N. WILSON

  COPYRIGHT

  To Paul and Candida

  Bright as the morning sea those early days!

  1

  BEGINNINGS

  The fashionable King’s Road, Chelsea, on a Sunday morning in the 1980s was quiet. The shoppers who had milled about in their thousands during Saturday afternoon had returned to different parts of town, and the revellers of the previous evening, in clubs and restaurants and bars, were sleeping off their excesses. Dog-walkers or churchgoers were about. Such as these might have seen, as a regular occurrence on Sunday mornings, a large black car pull up in Radnor Walk, a small street off King’s Road. Out of it would step a small woman in her early fifties, with auburn, almost bronzed hair in the perm-helmet fashion which had become obsolete twenty years before. She would ring a door-bell. From a tiny artisan’s terraced cottage, built to house the workers at the Chelsea Pottery in the nineteenth century but now, in the late twentieth, occupied by the rich, there emerged a six-foot tall, aristocratic lady with a girlish face and springy, greying, short-cropped hair, struggling to help a stout, elderly man who by now needed the assistance of a wheelchair to make even rudimentary street walks. After getting him out of the front door and into the wheelchair, the three of them would process out of Radnor Walk, and down the King’s Road, where only a few hours before, clubbers and young people out for a good time had staggered towards their mini-cabs. In one of his best poems, the man in the wheelchair had imagined a bleary-eyed nightclub proprietress coming into the club the next day and seeing the brimming ashtrays and unwashed glasses. ‘But I’m dying now and done for’, she exclaims. ‘What on earth was all the fun for?’

  All three in the little procession had in their different ways enjoyed life, though with the limitations of their office or class in society. The man in the wheelchair, who had recently wowed television audiences by complaining that he had not had enough sex in his life, was the Poet Laureate. His tall, willowy minder, lover and friend was Elizabeth Cavendish, sister of the Duke of Devonshire, a magistrate, and someone who had become his life-companion. The third party, known to the man in the wheelchair as ‘Little Friend’, was the Queen of England’s sister, Princess Margaret. Before the onset of Parkinson’s disease, the man in the wheelchair, with his tall companion, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, and her ‘Little Friend’, had attended another church, the Grosvenor Chapel in Mayfair, but for the time being, Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, a church which could be reached on foot from Radnor Walk, was their destination.

  Ever since a Chelsea boyhood, the man in the wheelchair, the Poet Laureate, had been aware of this church, designed by J. D. Sedding and built in 1888–90. Its Arts and Crafts architecture had fascinated and delighted him. Before his thirtieth birthday he had written a poem about it, and some time before his seventieth birthday he had found himself, together with, to use his own phrase, ‘that excellent artist Gavin Stamp’, campaigning for the salvation of this church from demolition. It was one of the hundreds of beautiful buildings which, during that vandalistic period of English history, the poet had campaigned to save. Now in the premature old age which Parkinson’s disease had inflicted upon him, he seized eagerly upon this place both as a church which was within reach of his home, and as somewhere which adhered to the Book of Common Prayer – another bit of the past which the British seemed intent upon throwing heedlessly away.

  John Betjeman, the man in the wheelchair, being pushed along by his lover, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish and her friend Princess Margaret (Cavendish was her lady-in-waiting), is the subject of the book which follows.

  Although the medical diagnosis of his condition was that he had been suffering since he was sixty-five from Parkinson’s disease, anyone seeing his face in the latter days could feel that more than simple disease had battered it. Because of his frequent television appearances in the previous thirty years, it had become one of the best-known faces in England – round, chubby, wistful, often lit up by a completely enchanting laugh, revealing appalling teeth. But the large eyes, as well as being humorous, were also full of fear. He was a depressive, who all his life had lived on cycles of mood swings from elation, when he loved clowning and showing off, to deep melancholy and self-doubt. Like many melancholics, he was of a very religious temperament. The churchgoing was no mere outward form; it was his bedrock and strength. But churchgoing did not prevent appalling consciousness of his own inadequacies, a morbid near-revelling in sin, and a deep, almost total doubt.

  ‘I hang on to faith by my eyelids, a lot of the time I think it is all rot.’

  The morbid guilt was deeply increased by the fact that this national icon, and pillar of the Church, was living apart from his wife, and by the fact that he was effectually estranged from his elder child, Paul. Both things preyed on his mind, and at times endangered sanity itself, driving out all capacity for happiness.

  Such was the wish of the nation to make him an entirely jolly figure – the tiresome cliché ‘the nation’s teddy bear’ was even applied to him – that no one really wanted to dwell on his private life. The public at large preferred the public image. In August 1974, the Daily Express had published an insinuating article alongside a photograph of Betjeman and the house in Radnor Walk – ‘Old friend Lady Elizabeth comforts Betjeman’. On television, his wife Penelope gave an interview in which she spoke very firmly as if they were still married – which, canonically and legally, they were. Both of them believed they were, and he loved his wife to the end.

  ‘The great thing about John’, Lady Betjeman told the television audiences in her surprisingly cockney, albeit ‘upper-class cockney’, tones, ‘is that he gets over rows very quickly, and my technique has usually been to pay no attention to him when he gets in a passion and that annoys him all the more. So on the whole it’s probably better if I do have a bit of a row. I think we have less rows than we used to when we married.’

  She neglected to mention that one possible reason for this was that they no longer lived together.

  ‘I did not like all the probing and prying in the Express’, Betjeman wrote to her. ‘I felt very sorry for you, what business is it of theirs, fuck them.’

  As long ago as 1964, John Osborne, then perhaps the most celebrated playwright in England, had written a play which everyone in the know recognised to be about Betjeman. ‘I have always been afraid of being found out’, says the hero of Inadmissible Evidence Bill Maitland, who is a married man with two children, two women (the mistress called Liz) and a furious obsession with the architectural wreckage of England.

  When Betjeman said that he was afraid of being found out, he was not, of course, simply referring to his ‘private life’, whic
h was an open secret among all his friends and a wider public. (Maurice Bowra, his old mentor from Oxford days, upon hearing that Betjeman’s son Paul had become a Mormon, crisply commented, ‘Excellent thing, excellent thing, Paul a Mormon, a Mormon. It combines the religious fervour of the mother and the polygamous tendencies of the father.’)

  What troubled Betjeman, surely, when he spoke of himself as a fraud, an arriviste, a poseur, was the sense that he might have thrown away his life in wasted time. Was he a ‘proper’ poet, or merely a rhymester? Intellectually snobbish critics dismissed him as little better than a joke, and he always believed them. For all his professed devotion to women, and his love poems to huge strapping athletic girls, and his perpetual talk of sex, was he particularly interested in it? And if he was, had he ever entirely shaken off the homosexuality of his youth? He once threatened a younger journalist friend with legal action if he went into print with the suggestion.

  The public create favourites, especially television favourites, in the image they themselves require. There is a good example of this in the diaries of an Anglican priest, Victor Stock, who describes a very celebrated radio-speaker, Rabbi Lionel Blue, coming to speak at his church of St Mary Le Bow. The rabbi spoke to an audience of about 350 people, very movingly and frankly, about his sexual orientation. ‘I’m an ungay gay.’

  Stock overheard two old ladies speaking to one another afterwards.

  ‘“He’s a lovely man, isn’t he?”

  “I like him so much, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I like him, too.”

  “Mind you, I didn’t like that what they said about him.”

  “No, I didn’t like what they said about him either.”

  “You know what I mean?”

  “Yes, they said he was one of those. Horrible wasn’t it?”

  “Nasty.”

  Well, “they” hadn’t said anything. Lionel had said it himself. But his fans couldn’t bear it and turned what they had heard into something they wanted to remember was said about him, not said by him.’

  Psychopaths actually murder their favourite stars and celebrities, either because in private life the reality does not match their image, or simply to hug them to themselves. The cult of personality is such, however, that even devoted and healthy-minded fans place a tremendous burden on the object of their adulation. Betjeman in his wheelchair was punch drunk, not just from Parkinson’s but from Publicity. What had begun as a habit of perpetual clowning, had attracted such a wide audience that he could barely cope with it. He was both addicted to it, right up to the end, not minding the humiliation of coming on television as an old dodderer in the wheelchair, but equally, hating it all, and especially hating the mountains of letters which arrived every morning.

  The sheer weight of a nation’s desire to make him into their ‘teddy bear’ screened from that nation what much of his work quite openly revealed. ‘Angry Old Man’ would be just as accurate a description. ‘Unmitigated England’ is viewed in much of his later writing with unmitigated hatred. The man who had written verses which called for the bombing of Slough just before the Second World War always had hated, as well as loved, England.

  This isn’t to deny his warmth, his humour, his infectious laughter. But lovers of the teddy bear evidently do not notice the fury of so much of the poetry. ‘The women who walk down Oxford Street / Have bird-like faces and brick-like feet.’ This one, ‘Civilised Women’, makes Kingsley Amis look pale. In ‘Shattered Image’, there is not only the most mordant sense of tragedy that a man has had his life, his career and his future ruined by his affair with an under-age boy; there is also a real hatred of the society which condemns him. Betjeman’s hatred of the society which sent Oscar Wilde to prison was lifelong. The wreckers of England in Betjeman’s vision are not just spiv developers who drive the firm’s Cortina. They are landowners, and greedy farmers.

  God save me from the Porkers

  The pathos of their lives,

  The strange example that they set

  To new-rich farmers’ wives.

  No ‘Green’ protester of the present day, against factory farms or Genetically Modified Crops, could be angrier than the Betjeman who wrote ‘Harvest Hymn’. ‘We spray the fields and scatter / The poison on the ground.’ His vision of life is as bleak as Larkin’s. The tragic pair of English pensioners in the Costa Blanca have no future, no money, no hope –

  Our savings gone, we climb the stony path

  Back to the house with scorpions in the bath.

  His life as a famous man on the lecture circuit is pure hell:

  When I saw the grapefruit drying, cherry in each centre lying.

  As for the three havens of his declining years – Chelsea, where he was cared for by his beloved Elizabeth, Cornwall, his childhood refuge, where he was to die peacefully, and the Church – each is seen with a vision jaded by disgust and disease.

  Between the dog-mess heaps I pick my way

  To watch the dying embers of the day

  Glow over Chelsea …

  Whereas, far away in the West in the ‘Delectable Duchy’ of Cornwall, ‘a smell of deep fry haunts the shore’, and Jan Trebetjeman, as he called himself sometimes, looks forward to the whole place being engulfed by the Atlantic, with only a few rocks, ‘a second Scilly’, jutting out of the angry sea. As for the consolations of Faith –

  ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’:

  Strong, deep and painful, doubt inserts the knife.

  Yet while some of the sillier Betjeman fans wanted to overlook this dark side to his poetry, it is in part the darkness and the complication, both in his character and in his writings, which created the charm. When he died, there was a palpable sense of national loss in England, comparable to what happens when a member of the royal family or a very deeply loved screen-star meets death. A journalist called John Ezard noted in his home pub of Brentwood, Essex, that he had interrupted a conversation about the Cup Final with the question, ‘Does everyone know John Betjeman is dead?’ Everybody in that bar spoke about him, and although most referred to his television appearances ‘a surprising number’ knew him from his written poems. Comparisons with Byron are sometimes made, but the truth is that there has never been another English poet quoted by people in pubs. This, quite as much as the packed congregation at Westminster Abbey for his memorial service, with the Prince of Wales reading the lesson, was a mark of what an extraordinary figure Betjeman had become in the public consciousness. Elizabeth Cavendish likens his impact on a wider public to that of Diana, Princess of Wales. Tens of thousands of men and women and children felt they knew him, simply from seeing him on television. Those who met either figure, even for a few minutes, remembered it all their lives. Both Betjeman and Diana possessed a healing presence and were assiduous hospital visitors. His lifelong friend (briefly his fiancée) Billa Harrod wrote to him in the sadness of his sick, depressed last days, from her village in Norfolk, after a visit to see him in Chelsea.

  You’ve always had guilt, which is I suppose a sort of fear; you shouldn’t have it now; you really are the tops – much more than you can know; you only know the official rather public, Londony side; but I know how you are regarded all over England by quite simple people who may, but not necessarily, have seen you on telly – but they’ve heard of you (not always even heard of you) and somehow your very extraordinary personality has come across and is now part of folk-lore. I really mean this, and it is no longer, ‘Oh Mr Betjeman, you would love it, it is so hideous’ – it is a sort of understanding and a deep affection that you have inspired. You may think this is all BALLS but it ain’t … You have done more good to make people understand the English landscape, the architecture (including, but not exclusively, the formerly despised Victorian) the language, and the atmosphere than those others [she has just listed some of her cleverest or most famous friends] put together … So you of all people, should not have guilt or fear. If that is what is stopping you walking, I think you could get up and run.
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br />   ‘If Billa were here now’, he remarked to a visitor to Radnor Walk at about this date, ‘I’d like her to take me upstairs and give me a jolly good talking-to.’ Perhaps this bracing letter is too kind for the sort of thrill he had in mind, but it is surely true. And it is to explain its truth, and expand upon it, that this book has been written.

  * * *

  When he was an old man, of seventy-two, John Betjeman wrote to his wife Penelope, ‘I have just re-read Goldsmith’s Deserted Village which influenced me more than any other English poem. Ernie [Betjemann, that is, the poet’s father] used to read it to me almost daily when I was six or seven. I still think that it is one of the best English poems…’ These words from the Poet Laureate in 1978 would have surprised many who saw him, rather crudely, as a throwback not to the eighteenth, but to the late nineteenth century. By then, he was seen as the defender of Victorian architecture and the lover of Victorian hymns, the celebrant of the suburban ‘Nobodies’, joked about in Victorian and Edwardian editions of Punch.

  He had also projected himself, in his hugely popular verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, as a man completely at odds with his father Ernest Betjemann (who hated being called Ernie), the third-generation manufacturer, in Islington, North London, of inlaid boxes, dressing-tables, onyx ashtrays, condiment-sets and, by the time of Betjeman’s own birth, cocktail cabinets. The theme of the autobiography, indeed, was how he resisted his father’s moral blackmail to take over the family business, and struck out on his own to become a poet. He was destined to be the most popular poet in England since the death of Tennyson. This very popularity, and the fact that it was enhanced by his genius as a television broadcaster, has led to some confusion about the nature of Betjeman’s life and work. Some of his friends, and many of the literary establishment, took his self-depreciation and jokiness at face value and made the mistake (as in very different ways people mistook Byron) of not seeing that it was possible to be funny about serious matters. Many missed the point of his allusions in Summoned by Bells to T.S. Eliot, who, by a bizarre chance, taught Betjeman at Highgate Junior School in 1916. They fail to see the nature of Betjeman’s jokey, but ironical, relationship with modernism, both in literature and in architecture. When he started to write his serious poetry, some time in his twenties, he did not try to imitate the modernist masters. Instead, he drew on the weakness of his own schoolboy attempts at poetry. ‘The lines of verse / Came out like parodies of A & M.’ That is, of Hymns Ancient and Modern, a Victorian compilation of hymns widely used in the Church of England in the lifetime of Betjeman and his parents.