Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  The contrast between life with Penelope and life with Elizabeth could not have been greater. Whereas life in the Old Rectory, Farnborough, and the Mead had been one of discomfort, punctuated by rows, Betjeman’s time at Moor View seemed like a fulfilment of the wish expressed by the Book of Common Prayer – ‘to pass our time in rest and quietness’. He wrote in 1958 a letter to Deborah Devonshire in which he spoke of

  dear, feeble, pale, freckled, soft-spoken Elizabeth. She and I and her Mum are engaged in reading Jane Austen out loud. She and I for the first time, owing to having been talked to about Jane Austen in the past and being put off by being told how much we would like her. But we do. She is terrifically funny & her theme, throughout, I’m happy to say, is class. We’ve read Emma, Mansfield Park, P&P since Christmas are nearly through Sense & Sensibility & have still Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. I absolutely understand people’s keenness on her & so does f.P.F.s-s Elizabeth. I am off to retreat in Nashdom Abbey (C of E) taking ‘Sons and Lovers’ as a counterblast to remind me of Notts …

  To give some idea of how mouvementé, perhaps in all senses, Betjeman’s life had become, that summer and autumn of 1953, as well as his annual fortnight in Cornwall with the family and his new friend Rowse, and two visits to Derbyshire, Betjeman had also made a pilgrimage to the West Country to Powderham Castle, and to Exmouth where, with Elizabeth’s sister Lady Anne Tree, he had offered advice about the Georgian shell-work at La Ronde. He visited Hertfordshire, which was less pleasant –

  Stevenage New Town in the rainy afternoon … Three miles of Lionel Brett-style prefabs interrupted by Hugh Casson blocks of flats and two shopping arcades and concrete roads and lampposts throughout and no trees, only muddy Hertfordshire inclines. I saw through the vast, unprivate ground-floor window of a house, a grey-faced woman washing up. My goodness, it was terrifying. And kiddies’ scooters lying out in the rain on the streets and a big vita-glass school on stilts.

  As the 1950s wore on, the old days at the Archie Rev, when modernist architects such as Lionel Brett might have appealed to Betjeman, seemed very remote.

  As he travelled around England and saw such places as Stevenage New Town, his anger grew. He saw old market towns everywhere being wrecked, and London, instead of being rebuilt well after the war, being shared out among spivs and speculators. A large share of the blame for this he attributed to those academic architectural historians who had lent their theoretical expertise and their good names to endorsing the modernist programmes which were uglifying towns and spoiling lives. Chief villain was ‘Professor Doktor Nikolaus Pevsner’. When Betjeman discovered that Bog employed Pevsner to write for the TLS he said he was

  HORRIFIED … This is not a personal matter with me. I don’t know him. I only know that if he writes about anything one really knows about, his work is inaccurate while purporting to be encyclopaedic, ostentatious and his aesthetic judgements are absurd. He has no eye at all. If you regard him as an ambitious impresario, you can be charitable about that side of him and his desire to establish himself as an Englishman.

  Throughout this busy period, Betjeman was earning money as a journalist, writing a weekly book review for the Daily Telegraph, and continuing to be the literary adviser for Time and Tide. From 1952 onwards, he also wrote a ‘Men and Buildings’ column for the Telegraph. In addition to serving on the Diocesan Advisory Committee for the dioceses of London and Oxford, he was also enlisted to the Royal Fine Art Commission. Much the most popular poet alive, he was now a public man, and what he stood for was something which was almost instantly recognisable. The hectic, overcrowded existence established after his move to Wantage was to set a pattern he would follow for the rest of his life, until illness and old age wrought another change. That pattern was, that he would spend the weekends, most of them, and holidays, with his family, and the rest of his time with Elizabeth Cavendish, or leading a bachelor existence either travelling round Britain or in London.

  His popularity and fame grew with his skills as a broadcaster. In terms of his career, and the shape which it was to take, perhaps the most significant thing to happen at the beginning of the 1950s was the appointment of George Barnes as the Director of Television at the BBC. Until the Coronation in 1953, television was not really going to become a popular medium. After that, people gradually began to buy or to hire television sets and families would gather round, like fair Elaine the bobby-soxer, for ‘sandwich supper and the television screen’. Even in 1951, Barnes and his colleagues could see its huge potential. Popular culture was transformed by it during the 1950s, and Betjeman’s star potential was something which Barnes saw, and nurtured, from the first.

  A very long letter written by Barnes in July 1951 outlined some of Betjeman’s ideas for a series of weekly or fortnightly films. One such idea involved a programme lasting thirty or sixty minutes in which he examined the history of just one church. He would look at the monuments in the church, and then take the camera out into the surrounding district to see the sort of people who had been commemorated, and the houses they lived in. He would examine old prints and see how the church interior had changed over the years. Anyone whose architectural education began by watching Betjeman on television – and that includes a whole generation growing up in the 1950s and 1960s – will remember his preternatural eye for detail. He early established such a good relationship with cameramen and such a clear idea of what he wanted them to look at, that his best programmes were in effect directed by himself, though of course his name did not appear as the director’s.

  A second type of programme would be to visit the homes of famous English poets by helicopter swooping down over the landscape which had helped to form their imagination – Shakespeare’s Warwickshire, Cowper’s North Bucks, Crabbe’s Suffolk coast, Tennyson’s Lincolnshire and the Isle of Wight. Again, anyone remembering the later films of Betjeman’s maturity – for instance, the staggering opening shots of his film about Parson Kilvert, with a camera playing over the huge green lushness of the Clyro Valley – will see that from the very beginning as a television broadcaster, Betjeman knew exactly what he was up to, and what effects he wished to achieve. A third idea, which as far as I know was never followed up, was for a film, or series of films, about transport, again using helicopters and aerial photography to follow Roman roads, coaching roads, canals and railways. The excitement in Barnes’s account of his conversations with Betjeman is palpable long before any of these programmes had been made; Betjeman had helped him see the potential of the new medium. The shared passion for making a success of television was something which deepened the bond between Betjeman and the Barneses; but also the fact that Anne and the Commander accepted Elizabeth as part of his life. (The Barneses took Elizabeth and Betjeman on holiday to France together in 1952.) Though Anne Barnes was Betjeman’s confidante, and though she always gave Betjeman and Elizabeth a shared bed when they stayed at Prawls, even to her there was an element of mystery in the Babes in the Wood style relationship, and she feared Betjeman’s religious guilt sometimes marred the happiness. Not normally much given to strong language, Anne Barnes once exclaimed – ‘I do hope he’s fucking her!’ after one of Betj and Feeble’s visits.

  Both the women in the triangle, Elizabeth and Penelope, assumed that he was going to choose between them. Programmed perhaps by a father who, if not an actual bigamist, had a number of extra-marital liaisons, Betjeman was never going to do this – though of course none of them knew this at the time. He dithered, and agonised, and the situation from the start took its toll on his temper and his health. Nevertheless, beneath his dithering was the ‘whim of iron’, and at some deep level he had no intention of breaking up his family for the sake of the new love. Life at the Mead, Wantage, therefore followed a frequently merry pattern, with friends old and new. Candida’s best schoolfriend was Anne Baring (Betjeman pronounced her name Arne, partly because she liked Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’). During the move from Farnborough, Candida lodged with the Barings, who lived at Ardington
House, near Wantage, and thereafter the families became firm friends, and holidays, Christmases and Sunday luncheons would be spent together, and with a group of other local families. Betjeman did not drop friends, so that the cumulative growth of his circle was immense, with Pipers and Lancasters continuing to see the Betjemans, and old friends from Oxford days such as Sparrow, Driberg and Kolkhorst still keeping in regular touch.

  In the friendship with Evelyn Waugh, the power-balance very distinctly shifted. The attempts to make Betjeman into a Roman Catholic had signally failed. ‘Oi habsolutely realise naow that the Anglican Church is yewer church and that Rome would be quoite alien and distasteful ter yew’, Penelope acknowledged though she continued to make wholly unsuccessful bids to have Candida brought up as RC while ‘the Powlie’ was allowed to be Church of England. Moreover, Waugh, who had in the late 1940s nearly sent Betjeman mad with his theological crusades, was now himself, under the influence of the combination of alcohol and chloral, suffering from those delusions which he would work up into the masterpiece The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Readers of that extraordinary book will recollect that Mr Pinfold is given a washstand designed by the Victorian architect and designer William Burges. This incident was all true, and the donor in real life was Betjeman. Burges was perhaps the most technicoloured artist-designer of the Gothic revival. In a BBC talk about Burges’s Cardiff Castle, Betjeman had said, ‘A great brain has made this place. I don’t see how anyone could fail to be impressed by its weird beauty … You see people coming out and blinking their eyes, awed into silence, punch-drunk as it were, from the force of this Victorian dream of the Middle Ages.’

  There is something on the verge of grotesque about Burges’s work. ‘Punch-drunk’ is just right. Betjeman loved Burges’s own house in Kensington, Tower House, and befriended the owners, E.R.B. Graham and his wife. It was their hope that Betjeman would take over the Tower House, something which in the event – Mrs Graham died in 1962 – he felt he could not afford to do. (She left him the remaining two-year lease on the house, but on the expiry of the lease, he would have been liable for £10,000-worth of dilapidations.)

  Early in the 1950s, the Grahams gave Betjeman the famous washstand. He would have liked to install it in the Mead, having decorated the house with rich wallpapers from Watts & Co., the ecclesiastical furnishers – the Gothic ‘Kinnersley’ in terracotta for the hall, and a blue tendrilly design for the drawing room. Having decided he did not want the washstand himself, he offered it to Waugh on the understanding that when Waugh died, or if he chose to dispose of it, it should be given to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Given the heat of their exchanges only two years before over the subject of Roman Catholicism, Waugh was winded with this act of generosity.

  Well, my dear fellow, all I can say is I am bowled over. What a present! I will see it never falls into the hands of the V&A. Did you know there is a note on Burges’s painted furniture in Waring’s Catalogue of 1862 Exhibition, with a plate of a cabinet which looks contemporary with Magnum Opus?

  It was an early symptom of his mental imbalance that Mr Pinfold clearly ‘remembers’ that the washstand had a serpentine bronze pipe which led from the mouth of the dragon into the basin. When the removal-men brought the washstand to Piers Court, Stinchcombe, near Dursley, Glos, Waugh remonstrated with them, accusing them of having lost this vital tap in transit. He then wrote to the haulage firm to complain and finally drew Betjeman into the controversy, only to receive the rather chilling put-down, ‘Oh no, old boy. There never was a pipe from the tap to the basin such as you envisaged.’

  In the novel, Betjeman is described as ‘a poet and artist by nature who had let himself become popularised’. Among the paranoid fantasies which Pinfold endures on his long voyage to Ceylon, overhearing the captain torturing and killing a Lascar steward, hearing voices in his cabin which accuse him of being a Jewish homosexual arriviste, and so on, he also ‘hears’ a BBC broadcast in which the Betjeman figure, Jimmy Lance, is reading out private letters from him, Pinfold, to a riot of studio laughter. Someone called June Cumberleigh is also joining in the laughter. ‘She was a wholly respectable, clever, funny-faced girl who had got drawn into Bohemia through her friendship with James Lance.’

  There was something a little wistful, too, in Waugh’s observation of the ease with which Betjeman had charmed his way into the Chatsworth circle. Whatever misgivings they all had about Elizabeth’s liaison with a married man twice her age, they all loved him and accepted him as semi-court-jester semi-family. Far more painful even than the madness in Pinfold is Waugh’s clear and sane recognition that he has made himself so unamiable. ‘He had made no new friends in late years. Sometimes he thought he detected a slight coldness among his old cronies. It was always he, it seemed to him, who proposed a meeting. It was always they who rose first to leave.’

  ‘Betjeman has flu’, Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford in November 1951, ‘and has retired to the house of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire where he was waited on & washed by Lady Elizabeth while the high-church butler reads The Unlucky Family aloud to him.’

  A soft answer turneth away wrath, but Betjeman did more than this with Waugh. By ignoring Waugh’s angrier taunts, and returning all Waugh’s abusiveness with jokes and kindness, he won a victory. Waugh wrote to Penelope that he loved Betjeman but did not feel his love was returned. There is some truth in that – in his own paranoid old age, Betjeman railed against Waugh’s books, his memory, his Catholicism – but it was more complicated than that. Friendships between writers are often marred and marked by edginess and rivalry. Both men revered one another, however, and respected what the other was doing. And on a surface level, both got on very well, having a shared sense of humour. Waugh was always a little abashed, however, by Betjeman’s preparedness to switch on charm, or, more simply, to be charming. When he asked Betjeman to come to St Mary’s, Ascot, to read poems and speak to the girls, his own daughters among them, he was bound to say, on Whit Sunday 1955, ‘It was remarkably kind of you to come to Ascot & amuse my little girls & their friends. It was plain to me, watching their bright faces, that they enjoyed your poems rapturously & will remember your visit all their lives.’

  Perhaps what created the edginess in their relationship was not their rivalry (if it ever existed) over Penelope, and not jealousy of one another’s artistic reputation, but a shared sense that there were demons in both men. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold concludes not with the simple medical discovery that Waugh/Pinfold’s delusions had been ‘caused’ by an unwise admixture of chloral, alcohol and some sleeping pills prescribed by the doctor. Rather, there is the private, personal sense of a victory having been won by Pinfold himself, without the help of priest or psychiatrist. Betjeman’s poems, as he approached his fiftieth year, are, in their different ways, dark, guilt-ridden, angry. They reflect as much unease about himself and about the world as do Waugh’s dyspeptic diaries and letters.

  A Few Late Chrysanthemums, of 1954, is the volume of poems whose contents reflect the range of his divided existence. It is a volume which contains solitary train-journeys, and games of seaside golf; there are hunter trials in Berkshire; there are splendidly evoked moments of seedy lust. There are evocations of agonising guilt about the emotional chaos of his private life. And there is above all, as the title suggests, a foreboding that in all these changing scenes of life, the grinning skull of death catches his eye to torture and mock.

  The most terrible of all these lyrics, ‘Late-Flowering Lust’ (he was still less than fifty when it was published), confesses that sex is no fun any more, that the drunken fumblings with which he paws his love upon their reunion only serve to remind him of how soon they will both be skeletons, their eye sockets empty, their mouths tongueless.

  Too long we let our bodies cling,

  We cannot hide disgust

  At all the thoughts that in us spring

  From this late-flowering lust.

  This is a truly chilling poem to have addresse
d to a lover who is still in her twenties. When one bears in mind that the experiences to which these poems refer all happened before he was fifty years old, and that he had thirty years of life in him after the volume was published, it might be thought that it was mere affectation which chose to see these vigorous stanzas composed by a highly popular poet in middle age as a few sprigs of autumnal flowering. But the fear of death, both in the poems and in Betjeman himself, was very real. And also, artists know themselves. Betjeman went on being able to write until he was about seventy. He continued to be a broadcaster of brilliance almost to the end. His distinctive vision of England, and his passionate concern about architectural vandalism, gathered pace in the second half of his life. It could therefore be said that the second half of his life was fuller than the first. But the autumnal title was accurate. Very few poets have been able to imitate Tennyson and continue to write well after their fortieth birthday. Although in Betjeman’s case there would be some good lyrics in the 1960s and 1970s, his crowded life ultimately left no room for the poetry to grow. He sensed this and it fuelled his self-doubt and self-reproach, which, though cloaked in the language of melodrama, were very decidedly not affectation. Against the background of all this, Penelope’s voice warned him against the waste of life involved in the journalism, the social life and the adultery. Her letters to an increasingly absentee husband ring like a terrible chorus throughout the 1950s. At a certain point in Paul’s schooldays, he does not quite remember when, his mother told him to stop writing joint letters home to his parents and to communicate with them separately.

  11

  MINDFUL OF THE CHURCH’S TEACHING

  The arrangement of staying two or three nights each week as the lodger of friends in London, and the rest of the week in Wantage, was a restless one. Betjeman needed a proper London base. George Barnes introduced Betjeman to Lord Mottistone; he and his friend Paul Paget were partners in a firm of City architects, Seely & Paget. (They were the architects to St Paul’s Cathedral.) Mottistone owned Cloth Fair, a narrow alleyway which had survived the Blitz, next to the great medieval priory church of St Bartholomew. They lived at number 45, and they let number 43 to Betjeman. The accommodation consisted of a narrow stairway, which Betjeman had papered with the William Morris willow pattern which he had in every house he ever occupied, an airy upstairs sitting-room which overlooked St Bart’s churchyard, a tiny kitchen, and upstairs, a small bedroom and bathroom. The rent was £200 per annum (the equivalent of £8,978.67 in 2002, so – very reasonable).