by A. N. Wilson
The subversive nature of homosexuality was one of the things which made it frightening, its apparent capacity to undermine the solid fabric of family life and morals. Wilde’s trial for offences under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 revealed, not that he was guilty of buggery – hitherto the chief, if not in effect the only, charge which could be brought against homosexuals – but that he had made various challenges to ‘decency’ in the presence of a strange galaxy of rent-boys and other juvenile hangers-on. The cause of his downfall, however, had been his romantic obsession with Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, and whom Wilde had met in 1891. Wilde was a married man of thirty-seven. Douglas, an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, was just short of his twenty-first birthday. It was when Douglas’s father, the Scarlet Marquess, became obsessed by the relationship, and left a card at Wilde’s club to ‘Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite [sic]’ that Wilde sued Queensberry for libel. Queensberry was acquitted, and the witnesses whom he had accumulated (and in some cases bribed) to provide evidence in his defence, also provided enough evidence to send Wilde to prison for two years’ penal servitude.
Betjeman was imaginatively caught up in this story. When he was a schoolboy at Marlborough, his burgeoning emotional life took a homosexual direction. Summoned by Bells speaks of
First tremulous desires in Autumn stillness –
Grey eyes, lips laughing at another’s joke,
A nose, a cowlick – a delightful illness
That put me off my food and off my stroke.
Here, ’twixt the church tower and the chapel spire
Rang sad and deep the bells of my desire.
That is the published version. In the original typescript, preserved in the British Library, Betjeman had written
Electric currents racing through my frame –
Was this the love that dare not speak its name?
The phrase, which had entered the language as a synonym for homosexuality, comes from the poem ‘Two Loves’, of 1896. Its author was Alfred Douglas.
Betjeman discovered Douglas’s poems at Marlborough and began the affectation, which he carried into grown-up life, of considering Douglas a better sonneteer than Shakespeare. ‘When I was at Marlborough, I discovered that Oscar Wilde was someone one ought not to mention; so naturally he had a great attraction for me … Then I discovered that Lord Alfred Douglas was actually still alive.’ The schoolboy wrote to the poet, then in his early fifties, and a correspondence ensued. It began when Douglas was living in Belgium with his mother to escape imprisonment for criminal libel. (He had accused Winston Churchill, when First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, of publishing a false report of the Battle of Jutland in order to satisfy the Jews.)
The correspondence continued into the holidays, and the letters, arriving at Trebetherick, must have been read by Bess Betjemann. One day after lunch, his mother and Nancy Wright, sister of his friend Ronnie Wright, left the room, and Ernest Betjemann, by now very deaf and getting on badly with his son, took him for a walk up a lane. He accused him of having a correspondence with Lord Alfred Douglas. The adolescent Betjeman admitted it. His father then asked him if he knew what Douglas was, going on to explain that he was a bugger. Although young Betjeman had heard the word he did not know its precise anatomical meaning. After the graphic description given by Ernest, his son ‘felt absolutely sick and shattered’.
Ernest Betjemann confiscated the correspondence and locked Bosie’s letters in a safe. After Ernest died, Betjeman gave them to a biographer of Lord Alfred. ‘They weren’t very interesting.’
The letters themselves might not have been interesting, but the pen friendship, which turned into an actual friendship, was revealing, and typical of Betjeman. He delighted in collecting out-of-the-way friends and making a cult of them – developing what he called ‘manias’ for them. He was also a very loyal friend, and did not drop them simply because someone disapproved. In fact, disapproval by prigs was something which actively encouraged him to keep such friendships in good repair – witness, after the Second World War, his continued friendship with the ‘disgraced’ fascists Oswald and Diana Mosley.
Bosie was the perfect friend in all these respects for the schoolboy Betjeman. There was another thing, however, to be noted about the relationship. It might be thought that when a fifty-something poet, whose name was notorious for homosexuality (although Bosie was a married man), starts a correspondence with a schoolboy, that the man would be the more powerful or authoritative in the relationship. What struck Bosie, however, about Betjeman from the first was the surprisingly authoritative strength behind the larky, whimsical mask. Also, behind a mask of vagueness was a sharp and well-stocked mind. Bosie was the first to notice how learned Betjeman was. In 1939, when Betjeman and Bosie were still friends, Lord Alfred gave a flavour of their relationship to his perhaps surprising friend Marie Stopes. ‘He signs his name “Moth” because that is the name I bestowed on him when he was a boy at Marlborough, after Armado’s page in Love’s Labour’s Lost … a “well-educated infant”. I called him that because even in those days he was omniscient.’
And naturally it was his friendship with Bosie, and his lifelong preoccupation with the tragedy of Wilde, which inspired one of Betjeman’s finest poems of his early maturity, published in 1937 – ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’. Its nine quatrains give a stronger sense of Wilde than many of the weighty biographies.
Betjeman pasted into his copy of W.B. Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse one of Bosie’s typically vitriolic telegrams, sent to the editor –
W.B. Yeats, Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Your omission of my name from the absurdly named Oxford Book of Modern Verse is typical of the attitude of the minor poet to the major one. Had Thomas Moore been editing such a book he would have omitted Keats and Shelley. Incidentally why drag in Oxford? Why not Shoneen Irish? Alfred Douglas
Presumably, too, it was the friendship with Alfred Douglas which directed Betjeman, after school, to his choice of Oxford College – Magdalen – that beautiful combination of medieval and eighteenth-century buildings where first Wilde and then Bosie had studied. With its large chapel, its surpliced choir singing daily renditions of the Prayer Book Matins and Evensong, its deer park and its meadow, where Addison in the eighteenth century had walked among the purple fritillaries, it was surely the ideal setting in which a young poet could spread his wings. Perhaps, like the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, author of The Cloister and the Hearth, Betjeman was destined to become a ‘lay fellow’ of this ancient foundation? Destiny, or what Betjeman sometimes called The Management, had crueller plans.
4
OXFORD
When John Ruskin went up to Oxford as a gentleman-commoner in 1837, he went as the son of a tradesman; but the money made by his father as a sherry-merchant purchased him the status of a nobleman. ‘Gentleman-commoner’ was a rank normally only occupied by noblemen. (It entitled the young men to wear golden tassels on their caps – the ‘tufts’ which snobs hunted when they were known as ‘tuft hunters’.) No one in Ruskin’s family, however, supposed that he would follow his father into trade. His life as an aesthete and a connoisseur had been assured since boyhood.
With the growth of public-school education, more and more members of the commercial classes aspired to the university education, which since the eighteenth century had tended to be the preserve of the professional and upper classes. The First World War, with its cataclysmic culling of young men, increased the proportion of middle-class boys who would leave boarding school and go on to university.
G. Betjemann & Sons was a firm which had been founded in the 1820s, and from generation to generation, during the reign of Queen Victoria, father had handed over to son. John Betjeman’s decision not to take over the business from Ernest was seen by himself as an intensely personal crisis; but it was one which was replicated in middle-class families all over Britain. Trade brought them money.
They used the money to ‘better’ themselves, by which they meant, send their sons to the actual schools (Eton, Harrow, etc.) or imitations of them (Marlborough, Lancing) which were designed to train not tradesmen but soldiers and professionals, not manufacturers but bishops and judges. There is no wonder, particularly after the trauma of the First World War, that Betjeman’s generation felt a heady sense of liberation, but also a feeling of disorientation from their roots. Oxford confirmed a process which had been begun when he first went to the Dragon School.
Moreover, Oxford itself, in its recovery from the devastation of the First World War, passed, in the early 1920s, through something like an extended festival or mardi gras. The generation following the Great War, those who came up and took their degrees immediately after the Armistice, included many who had been in the armed services. Figures such as C.S. Lewis, wounded at Arras in 1917, or Maurice Bowra, who had taken part in heavy fighting in the region of Villers Bretonneux, provided the backbone of the rising generation of dons. These men, who had endured experiences so terrible that often they could not talk about them, were different in kind from the ones who came after. The next intake, in which hearties threw aesthetes into ponds, and such figures as Harold Acton and Brian Howard posed and minced, signalled the coming of a new age. It was silliness with a purpose. Betjeman and the friends he was to make for life arrived immediately after these.
* * *
‘My diary’, Betjeman wrote desperately to a friend with whom he had been staying in April 1940, ‘(a red Oxford University one) I lost it and it has made me very sad and helpless.’ Just as he liked to use stamps from the Isle of Man, a place he had only visited a few times, so he always, to the end of his life, carried an Oxford University pocket diary, a perpetual badge of exile from the university which he attended only for a few short years, and which he left without taking a degree. Samuel Johnson who likewise left Oxford without taking a degree, in poverty, and with little hope of promotion or preferment, retained an exaggerated devotion to his old university.
For all Betjeman’s passionate interest in literature, Oxford taught him little, if anything, any more than it had taught Samuel Johnson, who arrived having a far wider knowledge of Latin literature than the dons, or any more than it taught the poet Shelley whom it expelled. In his jokey, mythologised version of events in Summoned by Bells, he makes it seem as if he was so frivolous, so devoted to parties and smart friends, that his own expulsion without a degree was almost inevitable. But in the decade or so after it happened, staying awake at night and thinking about it with uncontrollable rage, this was not how it seemed. Looking back aged thirty-three, he could see that he had been
a very usual type of undergraduate, caught up with the latest fashions in ‘art’, pretentious and superficial. But all that, I have since discovered is quite right in this type … [he means the aesthetic temperament] … Indeed it should be encouraged, for it argues an awareness of what is going on and an incipient sensibility which can easily be crushed or misdirected for ever by an antipathetic tutor.
Betjeman was unlucky enough, when he came up to Magdalen College in the Michaelmas Term of 1925, to find that he had as his tutor C.S. Lewis, a figure who was as antipathetic as it was possible to be.
Oxford was the place where Betjeman met those who were to be his friends for the rest of his life. To that extent, it was a place of incalculable importance to him. Without Oxford, he might never have met Maurice Bowra, ‘Colonel’ Kolkhorst, Father Frederic Hood, Osbert Lancaster, Kenneth Clark, Bryan Guinness, A.L. Rowse, W.H. Auden, Alan Pryce-Jones, Tom Driberg, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Billy Clonmore, Robert Byron, Frank Pakenham, Graham and Joan Eyres-Monsell, Lionel Perry, John Dugdale, Edward James, Randolph Churchill, and their friends, families, girlfriends, sisters who constituted his enormous ‘circle’ for the rest of his life. Almost instantaneously this compulsively sociable and gregarious young man entered into a social circle which saw the point of him, rejoiced in his humour and encouraged all that was best and worst in his character.
While most of these figures saw out their full three, or in the case of classicists four, years at Oxford, Betjeman did not. His friend and undergraduate contemporary Osbert Lancaster, who was at Lincoln College, spent most of his time, when not going to parties, studying drawing at the Ruskin School or acting in the OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society). He ended his time there having read as little as possible ‘of the insufferable Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ with ‘an honest Fourth’. Anthony Powell, another contemporary, at Balliol College, also got a fourth. Betjeman was not allowed to try.
He obviously was not good at passing exams. In those days, aspirant students had to pass an elementary test in Latin and Mathematics called Responsions. It is inconceivable that, having been at the Dragon School and Marlborough, Betjeman did not have reasonable proficiency in both subjects, yet when he tried Responsions in the spring of 1925, he failed it not once, but twice. Fortunately, the President of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren, obviously liked the sound of Betjeman. Ernest suggested to his son that he send the President a sonnet for which he had won a prize at school. He received the reply:
Dear Mr Betjemann,
I am glad to have your poem. I am much interested in it. I shouldn’t have called it a ‘typical’ Prize Poem at all and I have written one and read a great many in my time. I think the Marlborough authorities must have been open-minded and discerning to give it the prize.
In other letters, Warren urged Betjeman to read Matthew Arnold. (‘It might be suitable to read “Tristan & Iseult” at Trebetherick.’)
Warren was a legendarily snobbish man, who had been proud when the Prince of Wales came to the college as a commoner. At Christ Church, the Emperor of Japan had entered his son. When, however, the Crown Prince had, on some application form, been asked to name his father, he had written the word GOD, a blasphemy which the Dean of Christ Church, also dean of the cathedral, felt was inadmissible in so stoutly churchy an institution. When the Japanese Crown Prince applied rather to Magdalen he was welcomed by Sir Herbert, with the assurance that Magdalen was used to undergraduates of the most distinguished descent.
Nevertheless, Warren was not so snobbish as to turn down the son in Betjemann & Sons, manufacturers of luxury goods in Pentonville Road. He must have seen Betjeman’s qualities in an interview and in the poems he sent in. Why, it might be asked, was the President of the College conducting so much of the admissions business himself in the case of the English Literature students? Because, until that summer, they did not have an English Literature tutor, and had only elected C.S. Lewis to the Fellowship a few months before Betjeman’s eventual arrival.
Lewis might not come across as a man who was uncertain of himself, but as a fledgling university teacher, he was. He had seen himself getting a Fellowship in philosophy, and making a name as a poet. His first effort by way of verse was a long parricidal fantasy entitled Dymer at which he had been working since the end of the war. He had a relationship with his own father which made Betjeman’s with Ernest appear harmonious by comparison. Since the end of the war, Lewis had been secretly living with a married woman, the mother of a comrade killed in action. Nowadays, when a completely different ethos prevails, it is hard to imagine that a man’s whole career could founder because of such private matters. (The poet William Empson was asked to leave his Fellowship at Magdalene, Cambridge when a contraceptive was found in a drawer of his bedroom by a servant; Empson’s name was expunged from the college lists, so deep was the disgrace considered.)
The Lewis, therefore, whom Betjeman met was an edgy twenty-seven-year-old with many personal problems. He was always awkward with poets, envious of them, and unable to see their merits because he so much wanted to be a poet himself. He disliked Betjeman’s school contemporary Louis MacNeice. He made philistine jeers at T.S. Eliot. He once had a fight in a pub with Roy Campbell – admittedly on a non-literary question. He was also at this date a militant atheist, anti-religious
as perhaps only those born in Northern Ireland can be.
Lewis took an instant dislike to Betjeman. The fledgling aesthete from Marlborough was equally horrified by Lewis, who had a barking voice, with just a trace of Ulster in it, and who organised ‘Beer and Beowulf’ evenings for his pupils to help them master sound change and other intricacies of Anglo-Saxon philology.
Thus Æ to E they soon were fetchin’
Cf, such forms as ÞÆC and ÞECCEAN,
Lewis boomed. (His nickname was ‘Heavy Lewis’.) Soon his cantankerous diary was making such entries as
Betjeman appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection to his wearing them – a view which I believed surprised him.
It would not be fair to say that Lewis had no humour. Once a term he forced his pupils to ‘the English binge’. Excuses were not accepted. ‘Nothing above the belly or below the knee tonight!’ he would call out, as the drink flowed, and they were all obliged to indulge in what he called bawdry. But humour of a more delicate kind often passed Lewis by. On one occasion when, for the third week running, Betjeman had failed to produce an essay, he was astounded when his pupil threw himself down on the hearth-rug of Lewis’s ‘arid room’ in the New Buildings.