by A. N. Wilson
‘What is the matter, Betjeman,’ growled Lewis.
‘I’m hopeless. I’ve failed to produce an essay yet again. I shall be a failure. I shall have to take Holy Orders. But, you see, I am in such an agony of doubt, I can’t decide!’
‘What can’t you decide, Betjeman?’
‘I can’t decide whether to be a High Church clergyman with a short lacy surplice or a very Low Church clergyman with long grey moustaches.’
Like many of Betjeman’s jokes, it was almost true. In the intervals of getting to know almost everyone in Oxford, attending all the parties, and wowing people with his charm and eccentricity, Betjeman was sampling the church life of the place. He made a particular cult of a Low Church, long since demolished, called Holy Trinity, Gas Street. It was not a fervent or an evangelical church; it was old-fashioned Low, with the Lord’s Supper, on the rare occasions when it took place, being celebrated, as the 1662 Prayer Book demands, at the north end of the Holy Table. The incumbent of this church was called Arber. Betjeman, to the end of his days, liked to call Low Church clergy ‘Father’ and High Church clergy ‘Rev.’ or ‘Revd’, deliberately incorrectly omitting their initials or first name. So the High Church Frederic Hood would be Rev. Hood, and this was Father Arber. One of Betjeman’s High Church friends stole a little notice from the Kardomah café and placed it on the altar at Holy Trinity, Gas Street. It read ‘No service at this table’. This joke was not in Betjeman’s style. His jokes about religion always held back just this side of mockery. He genuinely revered Father Arber – who became one of those many figures whom he discovered, invented, cultivated, of whom others either could not see the point, or had not hitherto seen the point until Betjeman invented it.
At the other end of the ecclestiastical spectrum from Holy Trinity, Gas Street, was Pusey House in St Giles’s. When the venerable figure of Dr Pusey died, his High Church disciples believed, with the great Victorian churchman himself, that Christianity was about to be snuffed out in Oxford. The college chapels, they believed, would soon be emptied. Anglican worship would no longer be obligatory for undergraduates. Darwinism and cynicism would sweep away seven hundred years of Christianity from Oxford and its shrines. They therefore established a religious institution in St Giles’s, the broad street going northwards out of Oxford which gives the place the air of a Cotswold market town. The architect of the chapel was Temple Moore, a figure whose work meant so much to Betjeman from this date onwards. When Betjeman was an undergraduate, Moore’s somewhat austere Gothic chapel – a monastic chapel from Moore’s native Yorkshire – had not yet been refurbished by another favourite architect of Betjeman’s, Ninian Comper. (A glorious gilded baldachino, hung with fabric of ‘Comper pink’, came in 1937.) As well as the chapel, at Pusey House there was kept Dr Pusey’s considerable theological library, to which a modern theological library had been added. There was a principal and a small community of priests known as librarians. The Principal was an ancient Victorian bigot, always known as The Darwell, the Reverend Dr Darwell Stone, a bearded figure who resembled Melchisedek, according to a contemporary. He was unworldly to a degree, enjoying controversies about such esoteric questions as the Reservation of the Sacrament, but not much understanding the world. (He once said the greatest day of his life was when he was asked to contribute an article to The Smart Set – though no one could tell whether he had accepted the invitation.) Once, when a breezy undergraduate told the Darwell that he had been to see the Dolly Sisters during the vacation, he received the reply, ‘That is a religious order of which I have not heard.’
It was the younger priest-librarians at Pusey House who made an impression upon Betjeman, especially Frederic Hood (Freddy) who conducted a service of ‘Devotions’ to the Blessed Sacrament every Saturday evening to prepare the congregation for the awesome moment next morning when they would receive Holy Communion. Many who laughed, or smiled, at the sight of Freddy sitting at the harmonium singing ‘Sweet Sah – crament Divine’ with his strange lisp on the letter ‘r’ would stay to pray among the incense-smoke. The place made a huge impression upon Betjeman, as he recorded in his autobiography. It was to Freddy Hood that he made his first confession, a practice he continued until the end of his life.
Betjeman’s religious life, however, went on against a background of riotous sociability. And, unquestionably, Betjeman, in common with all those lucky enough to know Maurice Bowra, learned more at his parties than he learned at lectures or tutorials. Isaiah Berlin, in his tribute at Bowra’s memorial service in 1971, said,
Those who knew him solely through his published works can have no inkling of his genius. As a talker he could be incomparable. His wit was verbal and cumulative: the words came in short, sharp bursts of precisely aimed concentrated fire, as image, pun, metaphor, parody, seemed spontaneously to generate one another in a succession of marvellously imaginative patterns, sometimes rising to high, wildly comical fantasy. His unique accent, idiom, voice, the structure of his sentences, became the magnetic model which affected the style of speech, writing, and perhaps feeling, of many who came under its spell. It had a marked effect on some of the best-known Oxford-bred writers of our time.
Berlin was probably here thinking of Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Quennell, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Henry Green, to name only a few of the writers who first gathered at Bowra’s feet as undergraduates.
‘But’, Berlin continued,
his influence went deeper than this. He dared to say things which others thought or felt but which they were prevented from uttering by rules or convention or personal inhibitions. Maurice Bowra broke through some of these social and psychological barriers, and the young men who gathered round him in the twenties and thirties, stimulated by his unrestrained talk, let themselves go in their turn. Bowra was a major liberating force.
A young don, who had been through the war, Bowra was teaching classics at Wadham College when Betjeman came up. He was a clever man, even a learned one, who was prodigiously well read in a wide variety of languages. He was noticeably small. (‘Arise Sir Maurice’, the wags imagined the Queen saying, when he was knighted, to receive the curt, barked retort, ‘I have arisen, Your Majesty.’) Anthony Powell brilliantly captured his appearance – ‘this lack of stature emphasised by a massive head and tiny feet, Bowra – especially in later life – looked a little like those toys which cannot be pushed over because heavily weighted at the base, or perhaps Humpty Dumpty whose autocratic diction and quick-fire interrogations were also paralleled’. Born in China, he had mastered Russian as a boy when crossing the great Russian land mass by train. He read Pushkin and Lermontov in the original. He knew all the great German, French, Italian and Spanish poets. He was a serious intellectual who despised bluffing or pseudery and who spent every morning at his desk. His parties, riotously enjoyable as they were, with all the malice and jokes for which he was famous (‘Don’t tell me – let me guess’, he said to the porter when he saw the college flag at half mast) were interspersed with readings from favourite poets, especially Yeats for whom he had a passion.
Through Lionel Perry, his best friend at Magdalen, Betjeman met a schoolfriend of Perry’s, John Dugdale. Both young men belonged to the smart set, accustomed to dining at the George restaurant in Broad Street, and known as the Georgeoisie. Dugdale’s parents lived at the extraordinary Sezincote, built by a nabob during the Regency, a sort of Brighton Pavilion set down in the Gloucestershire countryside. Designed by Samuel Pepys Cockerell for his ‘nabob’ brother Sir Charles in the very early years of the nineteenth century, the house is an amazing Moghul extravaganza, onion-domed, fretted, carved. ‘Indian without and coolest Greek within’, Betjeman described it. John Dugdale’s father, Colonel Dugdale, was a farmer; the mother, Ethel, was an ardent socialist, and here Betjeman renewed his old friendship with Hugh Gaitskell, and came across ‘Major’ Attlee, the future Labour Prime Minister. This was Betjeman’s first taste of country-house life, and he loved it. There is no mystery about why this
generation of middle-class boys found country house life so exciting. Boys of Betjeman’s class (unless they happened to be geniuses such as Turner, kept at Petworth House) simply were not asked to such houses before the twentieth century. Who could not be excited by houses of such architectural splendour as Sezincote, with its large rooms, and the opportunities which parties in such a house can provide, of hugely enhancing and expanding one’s social circle? No wonder they were so-called ‘snobs’. The Dugdales also provided Betjeman with an example of something of which he had no first-hand experience in his own tiny family, a harmonious marriage, and a happy family atmosphere. Sezincote, he tells us, became a second home.
As his memoirs show, Bowra was happy to be asked to the country houses and London dinner tables of such luminaries as Sibyl, Lady Colefax, or Lady Ottoline Morrell. In Bowra’s company, Betjeman’s keen social ambitions became a possibility. He shared none of Darwell Stone’s hesitancy about wishing to get into The Smart Set. Anthony Powell, pondering in old age the success, or otherwise, of his middle-class friend’s social climbing, picked out Betjeman as ‘in a sense the most socially successful, particularly because at the same time avoiding almost all opprobrium for being snobbish, anyway to the extent of cases such as Waugh, Beaton, and other fellow-climbers’.
In the summer of 1926, Pierce Synnott, one of Bowra’s favourites, asked Betjeman and Bowra to stay at Furness, Naas, County Kildare. Bowra was in love with Synnott, but the only occasion he had manifested physical affection, putting an arm around Synnott’s shoulder, he was told firmly, ‘Take it away.’ Synnott’s father had died in 1920, and he had inherited Furness, a fine old house of 1740, with delicate plasterwork ceilings, a park or demesne as they are called in Ireland, complete with ice house and hermitage. The New Buildings, that is, the crumbling eighteenth-century buildings at Magdalen, with their view over the deer park always reminded Elizabeth Bowen of Irish country houses. Having sampled such architectural beauty at Oxford, Betjeman was now seeing the Irish country house for himself, with all its beauty, all its tragedy. At this date, 1926, the Irish Civil War was just over. Many of the great houses owned by Anglo-Irish gentry had been torched, and landowners threatened with death. Nevill Coghill, an aesthete don at Oxford, came from the Protestant enclave of West Cork. During the Troubles, he was taken by the IRA to a tree on his estates, blindfolded, and told to prepare for death. Being a ‘High Church nancy’ – to use the contemporary jargon – he made the sign of the cross. The men rushed forward, removed the bandage from his eyes and apologised. ‘Sure, Mr Nevill, and we never knew you were a Catholic.’
Synnott introduced Betjeman to the world celebrated by Yeats in his poetry, the ‘rich man’s flowering lawns’, threatened with destruction not merely by the Troubles, but by the march of the Modern.
What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished floors
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?
Some of Betjeman’s greatest friends came from the Anglo-Irish gentry or aristocracy. There was Billy Clonmore: ‘Cracky Clonmore. He was about the least known peer there was.’ There was Patrick Balfour, later third Baron Kinross. There was Basil Dufferin and Ava, whom Betjeman called Little Bloody. In grown-up life, some time in his fifties, Betjeman met Lady Caroline Blackwood, ‘Little Bloody’s’ daughter. He ‘was so moved by her resemblance to Ava, and so attracted to her, that he decided he could never meet her again’. We learn this from the diaries of Betjeman’s friend James Lees-Milne, who adds,
then he told me that he was more in love with Ava than with any human being he had ever met in the world. His Oxford career was ruined by this unrequited love for ‘Little Bloody’. He loved his gutter-snipe good looks, his big, brown, sensual eyes, sensual lips, dirtiness generally. Never received so much as a touch of a hand on the shoulder. He then said that in after-life no loves ever reached the heights of schoolboy loves.
Three things need to be considered as a footnote to this diary entry of 21 July 1980. One is that Lees-Milne is not a completely reliable source. Second, Betjeman, as we shall see in the course of this book, was a sympathetic conversationalist. If someone told him they loved redheads, he would turn out to have exactly the same taste. Sado-masochism? Likewise. In the company of his many gay friends, he liked to play up the homosexual side of his nature, but there is no evidence of his ever having had a full-blown love affair with someone of his own sex though there might have been schoolboy or undergraduate fumblings. Third, and most importantly, if we take this confession as roughly speaking true, it tells us much about what Betjeman thought of ‘love’. Nearly all his best love poetry is addressed, not to his wife or his long-term mistress, but to figures who were almost or actual strangers. The crush, the love from afar, were what inspired his muse.
The experience of being painfully and unrequitedly in love throughout university years, or indeed throughout one’s twenties, must be very usual. In loving Little Bloody, Betjeman was undoubtedly loving a person of huge charm and fascination, but also he was loving the whole world of the Anglo-Irish gentry and aristocracy. ‘The Anglo-Irish are the greatest race of Western civilization’, he wrote in 1938 to Elizabeth Bowen, herself an ornament of that race. He meant it. Among his other friends made at Oxford there was Bryan Guinness, later Lord Moyne, and Frank Pakenham, later seventh Earl of Longford. Of course, the grandeur of the ancestry, displayed in portraits lining long galleries and old libraries, was exciting to a middle-class boy. But these places and people appealed not merely to the snob, but also to the poet in Betjeman, not least because Ireland, really throughout his life – its changes only accelerated with grants from the EU and the coming of peace in the North – remained closer in touch with the old world than did England. The Village of Goldsmith was Deserted but there was still more here of the world Goldsmith lamented than could ever have been found in England. Here, too, was the world which had been loved by Edmund Spenser in that first generation of Anglo-Irish settlement during the sixteenth century. Spenser, one of the favourite poets of Betjeman’s hated tutor Lewis, had loved Ireland. But Lewis had all but no visual sense, and as Betjeman once complained to his tutor, in a letter never posted, ‘nowhere in [your] excellent book do you say anything appreciative or discerning of Spenser’s amazing powers of topographical description, which are best appreciated when one has visited the neighbourhood of Clonmel, Waterford and Youghal’.
At home, when they were not all quarrelling the three of them, the Betjemans sat around listening to Bess talk of her ailments, or the latest cheap novel from the lending library. During schooldays, Betjeman had enjoyed conversations with soulmates about architecture or landscape. But it was only when he became an undergraduate, and began to mix, first with Bowra, and then in the country houses of Ireland, that he tasted the joy of talk among clever people. Cracky Clonmore took his brilliant young friend Betjeman on the rounds. They visited the Irish poet Katharine Tynan – she had known Gerard Manley Hopkins – they went to tea with ‘A.E.’ (G.W. Russell), where they had met Yeats ‘divinely clothed … He talked very passionately, holding the floor the whole time about the Lane pictures, and was very polite to us.’ When Betjeman left Naas to meet up with Ernest Betjemann, to travel back to England, he travelled as far as Galway with Yeats.
The taste for country-house life, and for its good talk, was greatly enhanced by that first summer visit to Ireland.
Social life was not a distraction from his education; it was his education, as a sympathetic tutor might have seen. A rival salon to Bowra’s was that of Colonel Kolkhorst, which convened after church on Sunday mornings in rooms in Beaumont Street – now demolished to make way for the extension to the Taylorian Institu
te. Kolkhorst was as unlike a colonel as it was possible to be, which was why the young bestowed this nickname upon him. He taught Spanish and Portuguese, but he was no scholar. His rented rooms (he was waiting to inherit Yarnton Manor, near Woodstock, from his father) were approached by a staircase reeking of gas and of his landlady’s untrained dogs. His small apartments were crammed with clutter – suits of Japanese armour in which mice had nested, oriental figurines under dusty glass domes, Satsuma vases of questionable authenticity. A photograph of Walter Pater (‘The Master’) himself of confusingly military bearing – now he could have been a colonel – and dog-eared copies of the Yellow Book all attested to his Aesthetic Nineties credentials. ‘Gug’ – another of ‘The Colonel’s’ nicknames – had been discovered by Cracky Clonmore, though Bowra, who in jealous mood claimed that Kolkhorst did not exist, maintained that he was Betjeman’s invention. The parties, at which almost no dons ever appeared, consisted of groups of undergraduates, chiefly homosexual, drinking far too much sherry. Marsala was dispensed to those who had somehow ‘blotted their copybook’. The Colonel held aloft a lump of sugar on a piece of cotton to sweeten the conversation, but, as at Bowra’s parties, malice, particularly about other dons, was actively encouraged. Here, too, Betjeman encountered other lifelong friends – Alan Pryce-Jones, man of letters and future editor of the Times Literary Supplement; Osbert Lancaster, artist, cartoonist, wit; Colin Gill, immensely tall, immensely High Church priest, who composed some of the songs sung about the Colonel, which must have been funny once when sung with plenty of sherry inside you, but which always look a bit feeble when transcribed in Summoned by Bells and elsewhere.
In addition to the parties, and the churches, Betjeman spent his time at Oxford honing two skills which were to be his professional stocks in trade, and which enabled him to pay his bills more regularly than poetry ever could: journalism and public performing.