by A. N. Wilson
Already, in the late 1930s, people were beginning to look to Betjeman as the man who would voice their dismay at the vandalistic destruction of good architecture. A letter from R.L.P. Jowitt, secretary of the Georgian Group, written to Garrard’s Farm after the outbreak of war, tries to enlist his support to save the Old Town Hall in Devizes, and speaks of a threat to demolish the Clarendon Hotel in Oxford and replace it with a Woolworth’s shop. Already, at thirty-three years old Betjeman had become a figure to whom people were beginning to look as a natural saviour of threatened architecture. In 1938, he published An Oxford University Chest, an impassioned mishmash of a book, which lambasts the heedless manner in which the university, as landlords, allowed their property to be developed. Graham Greene, in his review of the book, singles out for especial praise, Betjeman’s evocation of St Ebbe’s, with its Georgian alleyways and little shops with ‘their painted firescreens, writhing vases, cumbersome clocks such as might deck the parlour of some small farm among the elms ten or twenty miles away’. It is almost as if both men could foresee that this fascinating bit of old Oxford would be gouged out in the fullness of time, and in the late 1960s replaced with the ‘Westgate Centre’ with its supermarkets and multi-storey car park. The blend of humour, whimsy and anger in Betjeman’s writing was becoming an acquired taste for a wider public.
8
BETJEMAN AT WAR
Betjeman never entirely threw off the pacifist convictions which are required of Quakers. A month after the outbreak of war, he made a retreat at the Cowley Fathers’ monastery in Oxford, and was still agonising about the morality of warfare. ‘At present fighting in a war seems to me to be committing a new sin in defence of an old one.’ Nor did he ever enter entirely into the ‘wartime spirit’. ‘Archie is very well and pro-Hitler I am sorry to say’, Betjeman confided to Gerard Irvine, a schoolboy pen-pal (‘Dearest little chum’) whom he had come to know in the late 1930s after accepting the boy’s invitation to give a talk at Haileybury. Perhaps the bear had succumbed to the conversational charms of Lady Mosley, something which was very easily done. Obviously Betjeman did not share his teddy bear’s Hitlerite political beliefs, any more than his religious ones. (Archie was a strict Baptist.) Nevertheless, one wonders what Nancy Mitford made of his remark, made in May 1944, ‘I’d like to see Diana and Co. Give them my love. One form of state control is as bad as another.’
His pacifist doubts about committing a new sin in defence of an old one, were confided to one of his heroes, the architect Ninian Comper. Betjeman’s mind, even in the opening months of the war, was still focused on the things which were its perpetual concern.
There is no doubt that you have transformed church architecture in England and you stand on your own as the only creative genius in that sphere – with F.C. Eden a little lower down the scale. That is something which is its own reward and a greater reward than is given to other people in your art because your work has all been to the Glory of God.
The letter, which is a long one, is in the nature of an aesthetic manifesto, in which he thanks Comper for opening his eyes, and his heart, to how architecture affects the human spirit. How could it be, he asks himself, that he could appreciate the design of Greenwich Hospital, and of a really well-made underground train? The doctrinal modernism of the Archie Rev had been missing something. It was while he was sitting in the back of Comper’s masterpiece near Baker Street Station, St Cyprian the Martyr, Clarence Gate (built 1903), that the truth dawned. ‘I saw as I sat in St Cyprian’s, proportion, attention to detail, colour, texture, and chiefly the purpose – the tabernacle as the centre of it all. This is as much of the present age as the aeroplane. It is not aping a past age, that is bad; or what pretends to be modern, and is not; that is worse.’ As his copious wartime correspondence shows, Betjeman never stopped absorbing the messages given him by great architecture. His eye and feeling for place found new objects on which to focus, but his preoccupations were unshaken by the war. Nevertheless, a lurking dread hovered.
If he had any doubts about the sinfulness of fighting and killing, there was also another horror to be faced by those volunteering for service, namely the prospect of going abroad. ‘What a joke about your being a Captain, if it is really true’, he wrote to Alan Pryce-Jones. ‘But how distasteful for you, having to go to France. Abroad is so nasty. I would rather die in Wolverhampton than Aix-la-Chapelle.’ Becoming a captain, or indeed entering any of the services, was more difficult than Betjeman at first imagined.
One of the surprising things about the Second World War, for those living afterwards and reading accounts of its beginnings, is the difficulty encountered by so many men in getting enlisted in any sort of military service or war work. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy fictionalizes his difficulties in finding a regiment. The wartime novels in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence reflect a similar failure to get suitable work on the part of a writer willing to do his bit.
Since 1938, Betjeman had been a volunteer in ‘a silly thing called the Observer Corps’. Its members were given an instrument, known jocularly as a ‘Heath Robinson’, which consisted of a flat circular map table and a spindly tripod. It supposedly enabled the observer, before radar had been fully pioneered, to plot the movement of enemy aircraft in the skies above Britain. Such occasional work hardly qualified as full-time. Betjeman wrote to Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, and asked what chance there was of getting a job in the Ministry of Information.
Dear Betjeman,
I do not know the origin of this deplorable idea that I have anything to do with the Ministry of Information and can get people jobs there. On the contrary I am trying hard to get a job there myself, without the least success. If I get there before you do I will try to wangle you in and hope you will do the same for me.
Sir Kenneth Clark and his wife were to become quite close friends of both the Betjemans and the Pipers, prompting Bowra’s inevitable joke, when he felt that he had met Sir K and Jane Clark wherever he went – ‘Jane and Sir K in all around I see’.
When Betjeman turned to the field marshal for help in finding a post, he received some characteristically brisk responses.
‘My dear John’, wrote Philip Chetwode on 3 October 1939,
I don’t quite understand what part of the Air Force you want to get into. You are I suppose over age to join the regular Air Force, but perhaps you have heard of some job as Observer where they take men over 30. Do you know of any specific job you are qualified for which they are taking men of your age? [sic]
The officers round you at Uffington would know. I might then write to people in the air ministry but one can’t just write to say please get so and so a job. They have probably got 5000 names asking for them.
Three months later, the field marshal was writing with equal exasperation,
I cannot understand what you want me to do. Your letters are so vague. It is no use saying you want a job in a thing. What job are you looking for?
You say your friend Evelyn Waugh is an officer in the R.M. Why not find out from him first how people get in? I imagine you would have to go through the ranks like everybody else does nowadays. I have not the remotest idea how the Marines are organised, and whether there is any section dealing with maps, photographs, etc. Waugh could tell you so.
Tell me any particular department or anything in which there are vacancies and I will certainly write to Winston Churchill.
Betjeman was supposedly turned down for the RAF on health grounds, though it has never been specified what these were. The thought of him flying a Spitfire during the summer of 1940 would have added a new dimension to the Battle of Britain. In the event, Kenneth Clark did fix Betjeman up with a job in the Ministry of Information, where he worked for about a year. It was based in the University of London’s Senate House at the bottom of Malet Street, the newly completed building by Charles Holden, an architect whom, especially as a designer of London Underground stations, Betjeman greatly admired.
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He lived with his mother-in-law in St John’s Wood during the week and returned to Uffington at weekends. The ‘war work’ consisted in advising the Government about the use of film as a propaganda tool. Betjeman was required to read scripts of short films designed to promote such ideas as Digging for Victory or economising on water and fuel. Probably had he stayed there throughout the war his natural talent for film-making would have been used. As it is, posterity remembers Betjeman’s time at the Ministry of Information not because of the work he did there, but because of the crush he formed on the bossy young woman who ran the canteen. Her name, to Betjeman’s ears, had already become a line of poetry. ‘Gosh’, he remarked to Osbert Lancaster, ‘you know I bet she is a doctor’s daughter and I bet she comes from Surrey and by Jove do you know, I was right?’
If he got this slightly wrong (she was from Farnborough, Hampshire, not from Aldershot, Surrey) he had nevertheless seen, and immortalised, a young woman who spiritually lived in Surrey. The poem he wrote is his best known, and, together with the letter to Comper, written at about the same time, encapsulates the other side of his vision. If Comper enshrined his religious and aesthetic vision, Joan Hunter Dunn, whom he hardly knew, represented not only a picture of the athletic young womanhood he found so erotically alluring, but also a vision of his England. Nobody else could have written this poem. He wrote over two hundred poems, some very good and some not so good, but in this one he achieved perfection.
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won.
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less …
Every word is right. It contains his lower-middle-class love of his social superior, his bisexual love of ‘The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy’, his unfit love of the sporty; his feeling for her father’s house and garden, the shiny euonymus in the garden, the six-o’clock news and the lime-juice and gin, the dance at the golf club, the car park – ‘Around us are Rovers and Austins afar’, the love. The poem is the most triumphant bit of war work. ‘We must all do our bit … There’s a war on you know’, as he wrote to Cyril Connolly, who published the poem in his magazine Horizon.
In the spring of 1940, Murray published Old Lights for New Chancels. If, in that crucial year of European conflict, Britain had somehow been obliterated, and this volume of verse had survived, it would have left an unforgettable set of snapshots of England; of the ‘leathery limbs of Upper Lambourne [sic]’, of Pam, the Surrey girl, ‘you great big mountainous sports girl’, of Captain Webb from Dawley, the man who swam the Channel, and whose image used to appear on the old England’s Glory matches, rising rigid and dead from the old canal which brought the bricks from Coalbrookdale to Lawley; of Cheltenham; of the Arts and Crafts church Holy Trinity, Sloane Street; of an old poet who remembers Oscar and Bosie in the Café Royal – no doubt pronouncing it, as Max Beerbohm did, as if it were French; of a don’s wife dying at an Oxford bus stop near the Dragon School; of Trebetherick (‘Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea’) and of the Lake District, which is very decidedly not that of Wordsworth or of Ruskin, but that of the ramblers from Manchester – ‘I pledge her in non-alcoholic wine / And give the H.P. Sauce another shake’. If the Nazis had won during that summer, as they easily might, and if England as everyone had known it had vanished, would not these poems in a strange sort of way have preserved a picture more accurate than the propaganda films whose scripts he was editing at the Ministry of Information?
The least successful poem in the book (in a way) is one of the most popular, often finding its way into anthologies and recitations, namely the Lady of ‘In Westminster Abbey’. After the woman has prayed for the Germans to be bombed, she reminds The Management,
Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots’ and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
What makes Betjeman such a delightful writer for his admirers and so irritating for those who do not subscribe to the cult is that he both thought these sentiments ridiculous and subscribed to them wholeheartedly.
Old Lights for New Chancels is a great advance on the previous two volumes. Whereas they had only contained a handful of good verses, mixed with many more duds, this one was largely dud-free. He was discovering his voice … Or was he? What is that voice? It is impossible to get to grips with it if you try to judge Betjeman by the standards which you would bring to the study of any of his contemporaries. The successful poems home in with disconcerting directness on such emotions as lust mingled with piety. They suck the reader into experience whereas the modernistic mode developed by Eliot and Pound and imitated to a certain extent by all the English rising hopefuls – Spender, Auden and Co. – was not to write about yourself directly. Yeats pioneered a special kind of romantic egotism in which his experiences, his friendships, his loves, are mythologised in the reader’s mind, so that Maude Gonne and Lady Gregory become as familiar to us as characters in Greek myth. But Yeats’s prayer in Byzantium was answered, his bodily forms are not natural, they are fashioned like things formed by Grecian goldsmiths, ‘of hammered gold and gold enamelling’.
Betjeman steps into this tradition, behaving as if it did not exist, and draws on two traditions, popular song and hymns, to resurrect the notion of poetry which actually draws directly on experience. The fact that these experiences might seem odd, or alien, to some readers does not matter because the direct effect of them is so strong. In any case, although many readers might not share his fondness for Cornish saints or Arts and Crafts London churches, there are very many who would, did, and do respond to his frank depictions of sexual and emotional chaos.
I think one can take ‘Senex’, his kinkiest published poem to date, to be a candid description of experience. It is basically a poem about ‘cruising’, about the mad, lustful moments which occur in most young male lives, when more or less anything would satisfy the craving, when almost any depravity could be imagined or indeed committed. He wants to subdue the flesh, he enjoys the sights of the bicycles in the hedge, he knows what they signify, he hopes that religion will somehow or another subdue these chaotic and in some way painful, because uncontrollable, emotions. When he published this poem, ‘Senex’, he was just thirty-six years old. They are not the thoughts of an old man but of a sex-troubled youngish man. The book also contains two of the best poems he ever wrote, ‘Myfanwy’ and ‘Myfanwy at Oxford’. Here lust/love mingle with as well as clashing with his religious impulses. Gold Myfanwy was not his contemporary at Oxford, nor was she, as in the poem, at St Hilda’s; she was at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. But she was the star of the book, and, with her husband, the dedicatee of the volume. Given this fact, her letter of response, dated 19 March 1940, might strike some readers as a little graceless.
Having told ‘my darling Poet’ that the dedication is ‘a source of great pride and pleasure’, she continued,
You will think it rude and not a little unkind of me to write in this vein but I have your career so much at heart that I must tell you what I feel – I know you can do anything you want if you give your mind to it. And if only that talent, that brilliant observation, could be turned towards things of real worth and employed in the service of that beauty of which there is only too little in this modern life. You could do so much good, and would, I sincerely believe, be so much happier.
Penelope was to make similar pleas to hi
m over the next fifteen to twenty years – to produce something more ‘worth-whoile’, either serious poetry, or an architectural monograph. The fact is that, while he obviously saw what they meant, hence his constant self-reproach and self-deprecation as a fraud, an arriviste, a ‘pop poet’, he had, obviously, a very vivid awareness of his particular territory and talents. There was always going to be a tight-rope walk between frivolity and seriousness, between doggerel and poetry. The kinship he felt with showbiz people, either the old music-hall artistes who had delighted the early half of his life, or the telly celebrities whose ranks he would join in later life, was telling. He was as much at home with them, as with the poets. His popular appeal sprang from the fact that he was doing something very different from some of the more run-of-the-mill of his poetic contemporaries.
* * *
At the end of 1940, Betjeman learned that his life at the Ministry of Information, its shared office jokes, its love-fantasy in the canteen with Miss J. Hunter Dunn, and its regular returns to Uffington, was to come to an end. The British Ambassador in Dublin was looking for a press attaché who could launch a charm offensive on the Irish. The Irish Republic was neutral in the war. There was a press attaché at the German Embassy in Dublin, Karl Peterson, and, according to Sir John Maffey, ‘a damn nice chap he was too’. This was not a view universally held. When Betjeman got to Dublin, he found out that Peterson was sleeping with Sally Travers, the pro-German daughter of the Anglo-Catholic architect (Martin Travers). According to Betjeman, Peterson was ‘unpopular … except among politically minded tarts and stockbroking and lawyer place-hunters’; Betjeman concluded that he ‘does his cause more harm than good’. It was Maffey’s daughter, Penelope Aitken, who first went to the MoI to sound Betjeman out. (He told her afterwards that she was so beautiful that after she had left the office he had to go and lie down.) ‘I met John Betjeman, who is arriving over as your Press Attaché’, she wrote to her father,