Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  The Rev Pepler said just what the Rev Naish said: that my first duty was to keep my family as united as possible & that I must always make that my first concern

  This was meant to be reassuring but it could not fail to have the opposite effect. A marriage is a bond between two persons, not a contract effected by the supernatural operation of a Church or a clergyman. Even in Catholic theology, it is the man and the woman, and not the priest, who are the ministers of the ‘sacrament’. Outside the Roman Church marriage is not regarded as a sacrament anyway.

  Betjeman, always a mixture of overconfidence and terror, suffered something akin to a nervous collapse and the prospect of his wife deserting their shared Church was an infidelity quite as painful as, probably more so than, any adultery.

  Members of the younger generation, that is, of their children’s generation, have speculated whether the two betrayals, of the marriage bed as well as of the Anglican altar, were not in some mysterious manner connected. Undoubtedly the strongest character to bombard the Betjemans with arguments for Roman conversion was Evelyn Waugh. Waugh’s son Auberon (Bron), reviewing a biography of his father in The Literary Review, December 1986, wrote:

  Penelope Betjeman was most alarmed when, both before and after her marriage, Waugh made advances on her. ‘I remember being very shocked’ [she said] ‘as he was a practising Roman Catholic … he never attracted me in the very least’. Evelyn Waugh’s memory, at any rate in his later years, was different. On one of the last occasions I saw him, I happened to ask – apropos something he had said – whether he had ever been to bed with Lady Betjeman. The term he used was coarser and rather more explicit. ‘Since you ask’, he said after a pause, ‘yes.’

  This looks conclusive, but isn’t. Bron’s widow Teresa told me a slightly different version of the story. She was present, at the end of lunch at Combe Florey, when this conversation took place. No one had asked Evelyn Waugh whether or not he had been Penelope Betjeman’s lover. He remarked, out of the blue – ‘Are you asking me if I slept with her?’ Bron had supplied the answer, ‘Since you ask, yes.’ In subsequent conversation about the exchange, neither Bron nor Teresa could ever remember what Evelyn Waugh’s reply had been.

  In the issue following of The Literary Review, however, Bron’s friend Richard Ingrams recalled that the libel lawyer employed by Weidenfeld & Nicolson to vet the publication of Waugh’s letters deleted a request from Waugh to Penelope for ‘a fine fuck when I come back’. Ingrams also recalls Osbert Lancaster’s claim that Waugh complained, ‘She always laughs when I come.’

  If there had been some amorous link between Waugh and Penelope, it was surely long in the past by 1947. This was not like Graham Greene and Katherine Woolston fornicating as they discussed the moral theology of St Thomas Aquinas. (Greene even claimed they had done it on the altar of a church.) Yet it is hard to banish from one’s mind entirely the hearsay evidence of an erotic link between Waugh and Penelope, as one reads Waugh’s assaults not merely on the Betjemans’ faith but on their marriage. Certainly the letters confirm Anthony Powell’s judgement of Waugh as a ‘sadist’, pronounced by Powell ‘Sar-deest’. Waugh poured his feelings about Penelope into his novel, which he admitted is a portrait of her, about the Empress Helena. ‘Isn’t it nice that Penelope should be immortalised as St Helena?’ asked Bowra. ‘There are one or two points of difference, eg St H is very lacking in culture (notably in her inattention to the Latin translation of Homer) and rather indifferent to Oriental Mysticism.’ In January 1946, Waugh wrote pruriently to Penelope for detailed comments on the ‘hipporastic’ passages in Helena. ‘The Empress loses interest in such things when she is married. I describe her as hunting in the morning after her wedding night feeling the saddle as comforting her wounded maidenhead. Is that OK? After that she has no interest in sex.’

  But it was at the end of that year, thanking Betjeman for a Christmas card, that Waugh let fire the first of several lengthy theological salvoes at his old friend.

  I have been painfully shocked by a brochure named ‘Five Sermons by Laymen’. Last time I met you you told me you did not believe in the Resurrection. Now I find you expounding Protestant devotional practices from the pulpit. This WILL NOT DO …

  Your ecclesiastical position is entirely without reason. You cannot possibly be right. Zealous protestants may be (i.e. it is possible to say from the word go the Church was all wrong & had misunderstood everything Our Lord told them & that it required a new Divine Dispensation in the sixteenth century to put people on the right track again. That is just possible.) What is inconceivable is that Christ was made flesh in order to found a church, that He canalized His Grace in the sacraments, that He gave His promise to abide in the Church to the end of time, that He saw the Church as a human corporation, part of His mystical body, one with the Saints triumphant – and then to point to a handful of homosexual curates and say, ‘That is the true Church’.

  There was much, much more of the same.

  You must not suppose that there is anything more than the most superficial resemblance between Catholics & Anglo-Catholics. They may look alike to you. An Australian, however well-informed, simply cannot distinguish between a piece of Trust House timbering and a genuine Tudor building; an Englishman however uncultured knows at once …

  This provoked one of Betjeman’s best responses. ‘I am beginning to find that there is a lot to be said for sham half-timber. I have been visiting during the recent fine weather, some rich specimens in Metroland at Chesham and Amersham, sunk deep in bird baths and macrocarpa down lanterned drives.’ That itself is a Betjeman poem. Did Evelyn Waugh, a sharp but not a subtle mind, understand what Betjeman was trying to tell him, not just about Trust House timbering, but about the poor stabs human beings make at ‘authenticity’ and truth?

  The gentleness of Betjeman’s responses to the apoplectic Catholic apologist, never once asking Waugh to mind his own business, could be seen by a psychologist as classic examples of ‘passive aggression’. He wrote urging Waugh to come to Farnborough and enjoy a Ford Madox Brown window at the nearby church of Brightwalton. He consistently praised Waugh’s writing – on the biography of the Catholic convert Ronald Knox, of all things, ‘Just my subject and just my writer’. He even praised Helena. ‘What a wonderful book HELENA is … Congratulations too on the typography – it looks like Charlotte M Yonge.’ And in general – ‘I must write to tell you what I find myself doing after each publication you make that your last thing is the BEST THING YOU HAVE WRITTEN.’ But these torrents of praise were not all buried aggression. They sprang from a genuine admiration for Waugh’s writing, and a genuine shared sympathy and aesthetic vision. Over theology, they would never see eye to eye; and Betjeman knew his wife well enough to recognise that Penelope’s journey to Rome, though perhaps helped along by Waugh’s strange letters, was very much her own journey. It would almost certainly have happened even if she had not met Evelyn Waugh.

  ‘It would be a pity to go to HELL because you prefer Henry Moore to Michelangelo. THIS GOES FOR PENELOPE TOO.’

  Presumably, the point of that particular letter, written, one imagines, under the influence of alcohol, is to be found in these last capitalised words. ‘What I cannot believe – this is a far more important carbuncle (you would call it)’, Betjeman wrote back gently, ‘than my occasional doubts about the Resurrection – is that the C of E is not part of the Catholic Church.’

  For Betjeman this was not merely a, it was the, serious matter. It runs through all his poetry and much of his best poetry at that. Christ was found on the Highbury altar which fed Ernie and Bess in their early married days. Willesden ‘glows with the present immanence of God’. Recalling his days at Pusey House, with Freddy Hood seated at the harmonium on a Saturday night, singing ‘Sweet Sah – crament Divine!’ during a service of ‘Devotions’ to prepare communicants for receiving Holy Communion the next morning, he could write:

  Those were the days when that divine baroque

  Transform
ed our English altars and our ways.

  Fiddle-back chasuble in mid-Lent pink

  Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike:

  ‘Why do you try to ape the Holy See?’

  ‘Why do you sojourn in a half-way house?’

  And if this doubt had ever troubled me

  (Praise God, they don’t) I would have made the move.

  What seemed to me a greater question then

  Tugged and still tugs: Is Christ the son of God?

  Despite my frequent lapses into lust,

  Despite hypocrisy, revenge and hate,

  I learned at Pusey House the Catholic Faith.

  This is such a powerful statement of a personal religious position that it is hard to know whether it is good poetry or not. It certainly seems deeper, and truer, than Waugh’s childish simplifications, funny as those were. Betjeman’s existential experience of Christ was in the sacraments of his own church. In so far as he had known Jesus, it was in Holy Communion in Highgate, Oxford, Uffington and Wantage. To turn his back on that was not just a disloyalty to the Church of England, much as he loved that institution. It would have been turning his back on Christ Himself as experienced in those places.

  ‘If you accept an absurdity, as you do in pretending the Church of Wantage is the Catholic Church, and luxuriate in sentimental raptures’, Waugh had spluttered, ‘you will naturally break out in boils & carbuncles and question the authenticity of the Incarnation.’

  By April 1947, Penelope felt she had to write,

  Dearest Evelyn, I am very grateful to you for writing those letters to John tho’ it is very disloyal of me to write to you and say that I hope you will pray very hard indeed during the next few weeks for him because he is in a dreadful state he thinks you are the devil and wakes up in the middle of the night and raves and says he will leave me at once if I go over … However put yourself in his position: suppose Laura were to wake up and say to you tomorrow morning ‘I have had a revelation of the TRUTH it is only to be found in A. Huxley’s Yogibogi sect, I shall join it’. You would not unnaturally be a little put out. You might even threaten to leave the old girl should she persist. Well John feels just like that. He thinks ROMAN Catholicism is a foreign religion which has no right to set up in this country, let alone try to make converts from what he regards as the true catholic church of the country. Your letters have brought it out in a remarkable way.

  Waugh was to reply, ‘Dearest Penelope, I am by nature a bully and a scold and John’s pertinacity in error brings out all that is worst in me. I am very sorry. I will lay off him in future’, but the damage had somehow been done. Penelope herself, now aged thirty-eight, the ‘Empress’ – in Waugh’s fantasy comforting her wounded maiden-head and having no interest in sex – evidently was persuaded by the force of Waugh’s apologetics.

  At Christmas 1947, Waugh complained to Nancy Mitford –

  Betjeman delivered a Christmas Message on the wireless. First he said that as a little boy he had been a coward and a liar. Then he said he was sure all his listeners had been the same. Then he said he had been convinced of the truth of the Incarnation the other day by hearing a choir boy sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’…

  To Betjeman himself, Waugh – so much for his promise to ‘lay off’ – wrote:

  One listener at least deeply resented the insinuation … that your listeners had all been cowards and liars in childhood. Properly brought up little boys are fantastically chivalrous. Later they deteriorate. How would you have felt if instead of a choir boy at Cambridge you had heard a muezzin in Isfahan?

  The latter squib surely fails to hit the target. Betjeman in his Christmas thoughts was, once again, keeping his eye on the mainstream question –

  And is it true? And is it true,

  This most tremendous tale of all,

  Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

  A Baby in an ox’s stall?

  The Maker of the stars and sea

  Become a Child on earth for me?

  And is it true? For if it is,

  No loving fingers tying strings

  Around those tissued fripperies,

  The sweet and silly Christmas things,

  Bath salts and inexpensive scent

  And hideous tie so kindly meant,

  No love that in a family dwells,

  No carolling in frosty air,

  Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

  Can with this single Truth compare –

  That God was Man in Palestine

  And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

  The love which in the Betjeman family dwelt was put under severe strain that cold Christmas of 1947. It was the last Christmas when they all went to the same Church.

  For some days before she was ‘received’ into the RC Church, Penelope made a retreat at Cherwell Edge, a large red house on the edge of the University Parks, formerly the home of the historian James Anthony Froude, but now used as a hostel for Roman Catholic female students, especially nuns. It was not a silent retreat. ‘Oi as meals with the students ere and talk all ther toime’, she told her husband. He went off to Cornwall to escape the pain of it, and then on to Denmark for a series of public talks and readings.

  Penelope was conditionally rebaptised, another detail which upset Betjeman, in spite of her reassurance that ‘it takes 10 seconds in the vestry’. Then, on 9 March 1948 in St Aloysius Church, Oxford, a small group of Oxford friends, including Maurice Bowra – no Catholic he – turned up to hear her announce that she ‘hated and abjured’ her former heresies, before being officially admitted to her new denomination.

  To Geoffrey Taylor, Betjeman sent a version of a sonnet:

  In the Perspective of Eternity

  The pain is nothing, now you go away

  Above the stealing thatch now silvery-grey

  Our chiming church tower, calling ‘Come to me

  My Sunday-sleeping villagers!’ And she,

  Still half my life, kneels now with those who say

  ‘Take courage, daughter. Never cease to pray

  God’s grace will break him of his heresy.’

  I, present with our Church of England few

  At the dear words of Consecration see

  The chalice lifted, hear the sanctus chime

  And glance across at that familiar pew.

  In the Perspective of Eternity

  The pain is nothing – but ah, God, in time.

  Betjeman included the poem in A Few Late Chrysanthemums, but Jock Murray decided it was ‘too personal’, and at the last minute it was pulled out and never published until his daughter included it in Volume One of the Letters.

  Personal it is indeed, and Father Pepler’s hope that Penelope would be able at all times to make the united family her first concern was not one, given the very different personalities of husband and wife, which showed much sign of being fulfilled.

  Nine days after becoming a Catholic, she wrote:

  Darlin Tewpie … Oi know oi was ysterical on Tuesday morning. Oi oped and oi thought oi would be mooch calmer about everythin after moi reception into the arms of the scarlet Woman (Archie is dictatin this) boot oi serpose it cannot appen all at oonce. It as been a year of great strain and tension for both of oos and as given me indergestion since January boot oi think it is clearin oop now …

  Eighteen months later, Bowra, by being abrasively jokey, found words which must have been consoling to Betjeman.

  Dear Evelyn was never very high-brow. Perhaps it is just that which took him to Rome, which seems rapidly becoming a haven for those who have a natural aversion to thought. Poor Bog [Alan Pryce-Jones who became a Catholic for a very short period and then reverted to Anglicanism] seems to have made rather a b..ls of it, hasn’t he?

  One of the first things Paul Betjeman said to me when I met him in New York in November 2005 was – ‘Before 1948 everything was all right. You realise that? 1948 was the year when everything came apart.’ Osbert Lancaster spoke wittily, as always, but
truly, when he said that, for Betjeman, going to church with a woman mattered more than going to bed.

  The bitter blow of Penelope’s defection drove Betjeman more and more into the consolations of friendship, and of love. Without any doubt the most crucial figure in Betjeman’s professional life during this period was George Barnes, ‘the Commander’. Barnes disliked the nickname. He had tried to get into the navy during the First World War and been turned down on health grounds. It became even more embarrassing to Barnes when Independent Television started, since there was a real commander, Commander Brownrigg, at Associated Rediffusion, which somehow added to the absurdity when Betjeman asked people, ‘Do you know my friend Commander George Barnes, who has made himself a little niche in television?’

  They had met when Barnes was head of the Talks Department in 1930, and he had early seen Betjeman’s extraordinary potential for broadcasting, using him for wireless talks and learning to control his frivolities. Instead of reciting verses such as ‘It isn’t the same at St Winifred’s now Monica’s left the school’, Betjeman was urged by Barnes to give informative and well-turned talks such as one on Parson Hawker of Morwenstow. Barnes was always urging him to do a programme, or perhaps a series, on the Oxford Movement. Like Jack Beddington at Shell, Barnes could see that Betjeman’s unique combination of showmanship and topographical-cum-architectural knowledge made him the ideal broadcaster. George Barnes and his wife Anne became close friends, and Betjeman often retreated to their house near Tenterden in Kent – Prawls – as well as taking summer holidays with them in France. Like Penelope Betjeman, Anne Barnes was a lover of good food, and an excellent cook. Unlike Penelope, she enjoyed the occasional extravagance. On one occasion at Prawls, thinking to give Betjeman a treat, she bought a jar of caviare and hid it in the larder, intending to bring it out at dinner. She and a few guests stood on the lawn with drinks in their hands when Betjeman emerged from the house with a ‘Cat-who’s-got-the cream’ expression on his face. He had found the caviare and eaten the lot. Their young son Anthony, known by Betjeman as Little Prawls, was also a close friend from the beginning. Anne Barnes was a good listener, and was soon the recipient of Betjeman’s confidences. From 1944 onwards, Betjeman became a frequent guest at Prawls, even though Anne regretted never being able to persuade him to have a bath. Anthony, the first few times he met the poet, was overwhelmed by the pong.