Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  What is more, it was a situation which, the longer it went on, the more social embarrassment it caused, in some cases actually poisoning friendship. Those who had enjoyed the friendship of both Betjemans felt a pull of loyalty when introduced to Elizabeth. She, therefore, very understandably preferred Betjeman to mix with new friends rather than those, such as Billa Harrod, who took a dim view of his new love. Penelope herself felt humiliated by not knowing how many of her supposed friends were actually colluding in the new arrangement. Never one to mince her words, she wrote to Michael Astor, a country neighbour, in December 1961:

  I find it hard to understand that you can invite John and me to meals … and John and Elizabeth to stay together with you in Scotland. I mean I think it indefensible to encourage a relationship which can only bring unhappiness to three people, most of all to Elizabeth, whose chances of falling in love with someone unattached and making a happy marriage are becoming remoter and remoter.

  In such circumstances, especially at this date, when gay people were firmly told their relationships were incompatible with Christianity, when divorced people were excluded from the sacraments, and even common parlance spoke of unmarried domestic partners as ‘living in sin’, it would have been much easier to give up church than to slog on with all its guilt-making complications. (Rose Macaulay, one of Betjeman’s friends and fellow enthusiasts for Anglicanism, left behind letters which revealed a gap of thirty years in her churchgoing, and indeed in her life of faith, because of the sheer incompatibility of a married lover and a sacramental life.) Some will always be puzzled by Betjeman’s behaviour over this. Others, in the Church, would explain it to themselves by asserting, as did his old friend Freddy Hood, that the relationship with Elizabeth was ‘purely Platonic’ – a judgement expressed, admittedly, when Betjeman was old. As a judgement of the relationship from the beginning, one priest who knew all three – Hood, Cavendish and Betjeman – pronounced the idea of a Platonic relationship as ‘twaddle’.

  The doggedness of Betjeman’s faith in these circumstances, his regular attendance at Sunday Mass, almost without fail, his frequent confessions, his Bible-readings, his prayers, are very notable. Whatever else he was, Betjeman was a man who kept the faith.

  It showed in his friendship with George Barnes, a fellow believer, who, after becoming Principal of the University College of North Staffordshire at Keele, developed cancer. The move of the Barneses to Keele, taking them out of easy distance of London, might have estranged or cooled a friend who was rooted to one marital home or one workplace. But Betjeman always loved gadding about England, and Keele, whose Chancellor was none other than Princess Margaret, was conveniently close to Feeble’s mother in Derbyshire, and their happy retreat at Moor View, Edensor.

  ‘I love Stoke-on-Trent’, he rhapsodised to the Commander, and to Anne Barnes, ‘people in the Trent Valley are the nicest in England and the toofer, the naicer … When at Stoke you will love my Repton friends – the Lynam Thomases – both heavy drinkers and he the headmaster, she an ex-nurse and very pretty.’

  In fact, Barnes was not especially happy at Keele, and came to regard the visits of Feeble and Little Friend there as almost the only ‘escape’ from the place. Of Princess Margaret, a decidedly ‘hands-on’ Chancellor, he wrote, ‘I could not face Keele without her.’ When cancer struck, Betjeman was not one of those friends who, through grief or shy awkwardness, avoided confronting the horrible reality of the situation. The letters he sent to the Commander about pain, and about dying, must rank among the most impressive things he ever wrote.

  To Barnes in a nursing home, Nathan House, in Manchester, he wrote – 5 August 1959 –

  My dear Commander, I am deeply touched that from a sick bed and in the space between pains you should write to me.

  Like you, I’ve spent my life avoiding pain, mental and, particularly, physical. I only know tooth pains and have faint memories of my only other operation. I know enough however to know how awful pain is, I sometimes think it is the only thing which will reconcile me to dying – to get out of pain. But Anne is quite right. It either is or is not. And when it is not how wonderfully happy one is, even with a cream wall and beige dado which I expect you have at Nathan House. I cannot see that pain serves any purpose except to give one joy and thankfulness for not having it. And as all things on this earth have to be partly in shadow or one couldn’t see them, I suppose there has to be pain. I don’t think doctors know enough about pain … They don’t seem to realise what it is. They get case-hardened otherwise matrons wouldn’t use that word ‘not so comfortable’ for screaming agony. But Matron did tell me when I telephoned that you were going to get all right. That is something, even if you have to go through tunnels of torture on the way.

  How very rare, and how very brave it is, when speaking or writing to a sick friend to admit that ‘tunnels of torture’ are waiting. In another letter, he wrote:

  Like sorrow it goes in waves. First a high wave of it and then it subsides and the next wave is nearly as high but not quite and the next a little less. Only when one is tired, as you are, it subsides far more slowly and being tired, you are less able to stand up to it and it seems worse. Poor Commander.

  The next year, when the cancer continued its grim advance, Barnes ‘told me how immensely grateful he was for having made his confession and wished I had urged him to make it in the past’. The Commander was visited by his old Repton School contemporary Archbishop Michael Ramsey, and by Father Trevor Huddleston who anointed him. Anne Barnes, a non-believer, watched these goings-on with mixed feelings. ‘Though she never would admit it, she is greatly reconciled to the idea of a benevolent creator and the effectiveness of the Sacraments – though she calls them magic, she admits they work’, Betjeman wrote, when the Commander rallied a little after anointing. Anne, a month or so before the Commander’s death, gave a different perspective. ‘This morning he suddenly seized my hand & said, “this continuance of my life is utterly pointless” with a groan – backslip of the Management there I fear.’ [The Management was Betjeman’s word for God.]

  When the Commander died, in autumn 1960, Betjeman wrote:

  ‘Lord I am not high-minded…’ the final lesson you taught me,

  When you bade the world good-bye,

  Was humbly and calmly to trust in the soul’s survival

  When my own hour comes to die.

  Anne was less sanguine. ‘Alas I can’t possibly believe I’ll see him again. I can believe certain things that you do, but not that. However, I am always open to a pleasant surprise … Read Leonard Woolf’s Autobiog. for some powerfully phrased views of the Management!’

  12

  SUMMONED BY BELLS

  Before the Commander’s slow, agonising death, there had been another death, which sealed off a whole area of Betjeman’s past: Colonel Kolkhorst’s in the autumn of 1958. As the remaining years unfolded, those who had first come to know Betjeman in the Colonel’s smelly rooms in Beaumont Street, Oxford, acquired mythic status, like the few remaining members of Captain Flint’s crew in Treasure Island, or like the Greek warriors who returned with Agamemnon from Troy. To Alan Pryce-Jones, for example, in 1976, a full eighteen years after Kolkhorst’s demise, he wrote, ‘Jim Knapp-Fisher has died, so have Christopher Wood, John Bryson and Colonel Kolkhorst. The Widow [John Lloyd], Crax [William Wicklow] and you and I remain with the Reverend Colin Gill on earth … On the other hand Osbert Lancaster is still with us.’

  Colin Gill, now a clergyman and vicar of St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge (the church which inspired Eliot’s lines in The Waste Land with its ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’), preached the panegyric at Kolkhorst’s funeral, emphasising both the ‘dark and the light’ in the Colonel’s character.

  Crax (William Wicklow) wrote to Betjeman:

  It is so hard to believe it is all over. The times we had at Yarnton – and you remember when you and, who was it, went over to Yarnton, and found the Colonel and sister with an enormous t
ea on the table between them. Then when you asked if the Colonel was in and were told, ‘there’s no Colonel here’. And I remember those wonderful summer evenings, when the students came to dinner, with the Colonel at the end of the table mopping his brow (you will remember that gesture), driving shafts in to the pupils and opening his eyes when anything doubtful was said. It is hard to believe he is gone … And then there were the great days at Beaumont St; the sad thing is that so many people are dead there can be very few people who remember them, and so many people are scattered; do you remember Kenneth Ewart’s remarks in the Colonel’s book (this mysteriously disappeared). ‘Artificial genuineness pays its tribute to genuine artificiality’. And then the day when Rudolf Messel left and locked the door, and the Colonel stood by the door making conversation and pretending nothing had happened. Did you see Rudolf Messel has died suddenly in Spain? I suppose it was heart.

  And then one day (was it Andrew) Wordsworth arrived rather gauchely at Beaumont St, where he hadn’t been before, and asked if John Betjeman was there – ‘No’, said the Colonel, ‘but I have no doubt he’ll introduce you’. And then when we all used to sway from side to side, calling out, ‘The Colonel’s tight, the Colonel’s tight’.

  Wicklow and Betjeman, only just past their fiftieth birthdays, are reminiscing like Mr Justice Shallow and Falstaff recalling the Chimes at Midnight. Ever since the early years of the war, Betjeman had been at work on a long autobiographical poem which he sometimes referred to as the Epic. Kolkhorst’s death was the final catalyst which made him sit down and put it into publishable form, as always with the help from John Sparrow and Tom Driberg, who cut and altered and advised very extensively. The result was his verse autobiography, taking him from infancy in Highgate West Hill to the moment where he left Oxford and sought employment as a schoolmaster – Summoned by Bells. It is a perfect title, conveying the subject matter exactly. As a child at school, and now as a young man trying for a job in a prep school, his life was punctuated by the ringing of school-bells. But equally, of course – and this is the real key and core of the poem, and of Betjeman’s life – he felt himself being led by church bells: the bells of City churches in London, which called out to the budding antiquarian youth ‘by intersecting lanes / Among the silent offices’, and also the bells of High Church Oxford.

  Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,

  Some start upon that arduous love affair

  In clouds of doubt and argument; and some

  (My closest friends) seem not to want His love –

  And why this is I wish to God I knew.

  As at the Dragon School, so still for me

  The steps to truth were made by sculptured stone,

  Stained glass and vestments, holy-water stoups,

  Incense and crossings of myself – the things

  That hearty middle-stumpers most despise

  As ‘all the inessentials of the Faith’.

  ‘The secret of a man’s nature lies in his religion, in what he really believes about this world, and his own place in it’, wrote J.A. Froude in his Life of Carlyle, and it is certainly true that no one can begin to understand Betjeman who does not see ‘that arduous love affair’ as central to his existence, continued during earthly love affairs, and after they faded or changed into affectionate companionship.

  While he wrote the Epic, home life was stormy. Candida left school, and went to Italy in the autumn of 1959. In Penelope’s eyes, Betjeman was not pulling his weight either as a husband or as a father. On the Feast of St Michael Archangel 1959 (i.e. 29 September), Candida’s mother reported:

  … Wibz has been misbehaving in Florence and insulting the Contessa Marzotto … She now seems to have caused such disharmony in the Marzotto household that one almost suspects there is an evil influence at work within her and unless you as HEAD OF THE FAMILY, call her to task very severely next holidays, anything may happen. You are so weak you ALWAYS give in and start calling her Wibbly Wobbly and laughing when she is infernally rude to me.

  Meanwhile the (presumably menopausal?) Penelope had decided that Paul, doing post-graduate research in geography at Trinity College, Oxford, was also an enemy.

  I think it wants a sharp pulling up. I told you it arrived for lunch last Sunday at its own party to which it brought its very boring girl at 2.15pm. I am writing to tell it that unless it does ten hours a week work for me sawing logs and gardening when fine next vacation and Easter it can stay down in its flat. I HOPE you will support me in this. It cannot and DOES NOT EVER work all day at its geography …

  The prospect of Candida doing the ‘season’ in London horrified Penelope.

  I think it would be far happier for all four of is [sic] if I retire gracefully to Italy within the next month … Wibz has been so terribly unkind to me since her return and you seem so dead against me going to London that I will retire gracefully and be very happy thank-you. It will do the P [that is, Paul – ‘the Powlie’] the world of good to have to fend for itself next hols and live in cheap and uncomfortable digs while doing its thesis. I think it must be something to do with the decadence of the race the fact that most mothers nowadays get no support from their husbands in ticking off and reprimanding their kiddies. The Vicorian [sic] father had a lot to be said for him … I have no intention of letting C go and live in London with some other female while I live down here [i.e. at the Mead]. Either she behaves properly, supported by you, and treats me with respect, and you must see that she does this. Or you can both make your own arrangements and I will leave you to it …

  In old age, Lady Betjeman has marked this letter, now preserved in the British Library, as ‘Important’.

  It is not surprising, given the fact that these were the ‘noises off’ while he was sitting at Moor View, Edensor, with Moucher Devonshire and Feeble, finishing Summoned by Bells, that the poem sees his pre-married youth in Oxford in such roseate tones. When he gave the poem to Penelope to read, she could not finish it, and even fell asleep at the first attempt, something which hurt him very much. She tried to reassure him by saying, ‘Yew KNOW I have only to sit down by a warm fire after supper to go straight off EVEN WHEN I AM READING THEOLOGY.’ But she could not resist adding, as if there was something odd about this, that Betjeman has a ‘complex about yer poem’.

  Betjeman’s paranoia was stoked by the critical reactions to Summoned by Bells when it was published. It sold enormously. ‘After a first printing of 80,000, we are furiously reprinting’, crowed Jock Murray, its publisher. But the critics dipped their pens in poison.

  ‘Tear-in-the-eye whimsicality is not poetry’, wrote Julian Symons in Punch. John Wain in the Observer opined ‘that so many people find Mr Betjeman the most (or only) attractive contemporary poet is merely one more sign that the mass middle-brow public distrusts and fears poetry’. It was left to Philip Larkin to salute the ‘imaginative and precise evocation’ of the past in the poem, and its ‘splendid competence’. He rightly upbraided critics who were envious of a poet who had already sold 90,000 copies of his Collected Poems. He saw that ‘the age has accepted him [Betjeman], in the most unambiguous way possible: it has made him a television personality’, and he sees the point of the poem, namely that though the book ends in ostensible failure, ‘it is really a triumph. Betjeman has made it. He has become Betjeman.’

  Larkin’s admiration for Betjeman was heartfelt, and it was reciprocated, Betjeman admiring the competence and control of Larkin’s own verse, as well, of course, as its relentlessly pessimistic content. It should not be supposed that Larkin merely liked Betjeman as part of his innate Toryism. He really admired him as a craftsman, and saw how cleverly his poetry was made. At a time when confessional poetry such as Sylvia Plath’s was fashionable, and the Beat poets beginning to make their mark, while sour old hangovers, imitating the great modernists but having none of their skill, tried to produce their own slim costive volumes, Betjeman and Larkin stand out not simply as two poets who were intelligible, but as two poets who
valued, as all the great poets of the past had done, form. Larkin could also see that what made Betjeman’s poetry live was an absolutely transparent sincerity.

  The two men met for the first time in the spring of 1961. Larkin was surprised, finding Betjeman ‘much gentler and quieter than I expected’.

  Shy Larkin only appeared three times on television and twice it was with Betjeman. Patrick Garland made a memorable television film of the two poets after the publication of Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings. He filmed the Humber ferry looking towards Hull (‘Larkin’s country’) and with Lincolnshire behind them (‘Tennyson’s country’). Afterwards, Larkin joked in a letter to his mother that the film should have been called ‘To Hull with John Betjeman’, but the scene of the two of them in a churchyard, seemingly vying with one another to see which could be gloomier, showed Betjeman just as keen to be a Larkin disciple as vice versa. The very fact that Betjeman misquoted a line of Larkin’s, from his poem ‘Ambulances’ – ‘So permanent and black and true’ rather than ‘So permanent and blank and true’ – showed that Larkin’s verse, albeit imperfectly, was lodged in Betjeman’s head. The two were to be friends to the end of Betjeman’s days. There was a side of Larkin which responded enthusiastically to clowning. He enjoyed it when Betjeman went into a bar and ordered drinks in what he thought was a North Country accent. ‘We don’t speak laike that here’, said the ultra-genteel barmaid.

  Larkin’s poetic career as a laureate of provincial depression was matched in life by a need to be out of the metropolitan swim. He delighted in the fact, once he had become well known, that any ‘bore’ trying to visit him unannounced in Hull would have to change trains at Sheffield. Another uncompromising poet whom Betjeman greatly admired was R[onald] S[tuart] Thomas who has been described as the Solzhenitsyn of Wales ‘because he was a troubler of the Welsh conscience’ (Professor M. Wynn Thomas, no relation). Betjeman was drawn to Thomas’s work from the time of his first publication, The Stones of the Field (1946). The poems confront with a directness which recalled Kierkegaard more than Solzhenitsyn the felt absence of God, but the impossibility of life without prayer. They are the confrontations of a soul waiting in silence, often in harsh Welsh landscape, and deserted Welsh churches. Some of the early poems are seen through the eyes of a Welsh farm labourer, who in his uncommunicative way has wrestled with the very moral and spiritual complexities which obsessed the mind of Immanuel Kant.