Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘My dear old Top’, Betjeman wrote to Osborne on 10 September 1964:

  Here in the calm of the morning, I affirm what I said to you last night – that is a tremendous play. The best thing you – yes, even you – have ever written. Apart from the sentiments in the diatribe – which I heartily endorse – it is the most heart-rending and tender study of every man who is not atrophied. We want to avoid giving pain and we want to be left in peace. Love makes us restless and we resist it. I felt increasingly that the play was about me and that is what all the great playwrights and poets can do for their watchers and readers.

  While it is true that everyone, while watching Hamlet, for example, is the Prince for the duration of the play, in the case of Inadmissible Evidence, it actually was about Betjeman, or Bill Maitland-Betjeman, as he signed himself.

  Secretly proud, I showed off merrily

  is one of the key lines in Summoned by Bells. He was a melancholic introvert with an exhibitionistic compulsion. It is a temperament which has often led to a career in the theatre. Ever since early childhood, he had both hugged to himself his inner life, his life of prayer, of wonder, of dread and depression. He had also been a natural clown, who loved attention, who wanted his poems to be performances, who, as a young man working for the Architectural Review, sang music-hall songs on the pavement outside cinemas, supposedly to collect enough money to see the film, but in truth to attract the attention of strangers. A television career could not have been more perfect for such a man. And yet, as always with those who wish to project themselves, did he want full exposure?

  With a part of his nature, the answer to this question is obviously, yes. He kept a huge quantity of his correspondence – the archive of letters written to Betjeman, now at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, is enormous. His wife, likewise, kept all the records of their fights and quarrels, as well as of his marital infidelities. His hero Alfred, Lord Tennyson compared the art of biography to ripping someone open ‘like a pig’. Tennyson was simply an introvert, without the exhibitionistic compulsion. Betjeman was a more complicated psychological case, and one reads in the letter to Osborne both panic and excitement that so much of his secret life had been paraded on the London stage. In life, such sailing near the wind filled the ever-timorous (as well as often exhibitionistic) Betjeman with terror. But, ‘beyond the veil, beyond the veil…’? What does he want or think now?

  Osborne’s play dwelt upon the mystery of Betjeman’s private character. His continued exposure of himself on television in some ways built up a carapace by which the image could provide a mask. Since he was so good at television, it was not surprising that he was in constant demand. He said yes to most suggestions that he should appear on it, partly because it had become an addiction, a compulsion.

  Penelope, free at last, had finished for the time being with her travels in Spain and had returned to India, her first and greatest love. He wrote to her regularly, as she rode ‘on horseback among the jeep-infested Himalayas’. The more time they spent apart, the more their relationship changed and developed. They had been unable to stay together without quarrelling, and their paths were very different. From the beginning of their long love affair and marriage, she had made no secret of the fact that she wanted to ride about India on horseback studying antiquities, and being uncomfortable. This passion she could now guiltlessly indulge. He had wanted to stay in England, look at architecture, and see hundreds of friends. This he could now do, often with the companionship of the other woman he loved, Elizabeth. At its worst the situation was the guilt-ridden anguish of Inadmissible Evidence. At its best, it worked rather well for both the Betjemans, though for Elizabeth there was the grief of not being with her all-but-husband more than a fraction of the time, and not having the children she craved.

  ‘After all the poverty you must be seeing in India’, Betjeman wrote to Penelope:

  I expect there is a lot to be thankful for. Nehru was obviously a wonderful man (an Old Harrovian) and you will be able to see the papers on your return. [Nehru had just died.] Wibz had her snap in the Daily Express as an expectant mother. She is now mad on cooking and being a housewife and has forsworn literature it seems. I am away a lot at the moment and have hardly seen her. I go to Hull today for much of next week (the White Horse Hotel, Hull) for Telly and then to Truro for more Telly and I have to be in H[amp]s[hire] and Sussex and Truro all on Telly. I have got an efficient agent now who may well be able to help you. I love hearing from you and very much love you but want you to do what you feel suits you best about your book. You are truly gifted and don’t know you are. Spansbury [John Sparrow] and Maurice [Bowra] have always realised this. I am so busy, I am quite happy and as I said, without you, the pull of Wantage is nought.

  If the death of the Old Harrovian Nehru on 27 May 1964 was a cause for respectful remembrance, the death of T.S. Eliot on 4 January 1965 was a genuine shock. ‘I feel very sad today’, Betjeman wrote:

  He was an old friend and a delightfully funny man to be with, who kept one in fits of laughter with his slow, modulated stories generally against himself. The end of his life with his second wife was very happy, except for his chest trouble, and I am sure he didn’t mind the idea of the next world and stepping across into it, though I much dread the process myself.

  As his sixth decade drew towards its close, Betjeman was also facing not merely his own mortality, but the failures of his domestic and family life.

  As their two children grew up and left home, the question of what remained of the Betjemans’ marriage would pose itself with a new starkness. Candida married Rupert Lycett Green in May 1963. Their new life began. Rupert had done his National Service ‘with that Guardsman’s calm one expects of him’, in his proud father-in-law’s opinion. Candida and her husband were able to become friends with Penelope – more than Candida had ever been when she was single – and to befriend ‘Darling Dadz and Liz’, as she addressed the pair. Rupert had soon made a success of Blades, his fashionable tailoring business, and the pair produced five children. As young grown-ups in London, later in Wiltshire, they had a wide circle of friends, many of whom Betjeman shared. It was possible for their relationship to grow and move onwards.

  With Paul Betjeman, everything was rather different. After National Service in Germany, mainly with the US forces, he had gone to Trinity College, Oxford, to read Geography. It was not a subject which interested him, and he devoted more time to the saxophone than to his studies. It was gradually becoming clear to him that he wanted to devote his life to music. (‘It was clear I’d earn my living as a player or a writer.’) He went to New York, in the fall of 1962, without realising that he had begun a life of exile in America. Later he enrolled at Berklee School of Music (which became Berklee College of Music in 1973) in Boston, Mass. He had found his metier, and escaped the parents who had made a perpetual joke of him, calling him ‘It’ and ‘the Powlie’. Moreover, he had begun to study music academically. His father ‘didn’t understand music. He wasn’t a musical person’, in Paul’s vision, though it was with his father that Paul had begun to listen to Renaissance church music. After Berklee, Paul had taught for a while at a prep school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Betjeman made it clear to his son that he would not help him any more financially, and feared that Paul was ‘becoming a perpetual student’.

  Penelope, however, took a more sympathetic line. She saw that Paul was a late developer, who, after the ‘important mistake’ of reading Geography at Oxford, had only just begun to engage with things which interested him, namely philosophy and the academic study of music. He enrolled, at his mother’s expense, at the Harvard College of Education to train as a professional teacher and took a couple of courses on music history.

  He joined various musical groups, and among the young musicians whom he got to know, he found some whose religious outlook awakened in him ‘the beginning of the spiritual interest … A couple of them were very good musicians. It had a lot to do with the people around me, whom I liked.
They were very vivid intellectually.’ These people were Mormons. Paul’s next step was to become a Mormon himself and to continue his study of music history at Brigham Young University, Utah.

  It felt to the young man like a positive step in his own spiritual development; to the very publicly Anglican father it seemed like the ultimate rejection. Betjeman watched wistfully as other families of his acquaintance followed more conventional routes than Paul’s. He took a great shine, for example, to R.S. Thomas’s only son, who came to see him in London to ask about Magdalen College, Oxford, whither he was bound. ‘He is a wonderful fellow’, Betjeman wrote to Thomas, ‘if he wants advice and thinks I can help, tell him to apply.’ The next year, when the younger Thomas felt unhappy at Oxford, Betjeman wrote, ‘[W]hile your son is disillusioned by the Magdalen dons, mine has become a Mormon and is a student at Brigham Young University, Utah. Mors Janua vitae, and there are of course, lots of different januas to get to it.’

  Betjeman had quarrelled violently with his own father. And he had himself always been obsessed by the byways of religious experience, sympathising with those who sought out strange ways to God. One of his earliest and most haunting poems was about the Sandemanian Meeting-House in Highbury Quadrant. He had himself been a Quaker. But in Paul’s journey there was too strong an element of psychodrama for the father to be able to bear it easily. In old age, Betjeman liked to quote Larkin’s lines, written in 1971:

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  When I met Paul Betjeman in New York in November 2005, it was not long before he himself was quoting the lines, his eyes, very recognisably those of his father, filling with tears.

  13

  LAST YEARS IN CLOTH FAIR

  ‘In very early January 1966, Penelope had a motor accident in London, driving alone. Her head was cut, her teeth knocked out, and a rib was broken. She woke up in a dismal hospital near Kensal Green but is at last out and back to the Mead but still a bit tottery.’ It was, Betjeman thought, typical of her that she implored the hospital not to telephone him in the middle of the night, but to wait until morning before telling him what had happened. Betjeman told this news to the vicar of St Augustine’s, New Basford, near Nottingham, the Reverend Harry Jarvis.

  There was a deep friendship between these two men. And this is one of the difficulties of describing the very full life of Betjeman as he entered his sixties. His capacity to form new friendships, and his determination to hold on to old friendships, was undimmed. It would be possible to write a whole Life of Betjeman, from 1966 to 1971, as seen through the eyes of Harry Jarvis, friends and neighbours in Berkshire, and his family, on the one hand, and with Elizabeth Cavendish on the other, with absolutely no reference to his public fame. He still continued to see old friends such as the Lancasters, the Pipers, Billa Harrod and the Barings. Church and local life at Wantage was part of his weekends. Driberg and Sparrow and Bowra still came to Sunday luncheons. And yet the fame took its toll, and, as well as constant television appearances, he also gravitated towards celebrities, public figures, televisionaries, members of the royal family. It was a tendency which Penelope had noted a good decade earlier and which she had done her best to stop, because she felt it was wasting his gifts. It is the place of wives to wish their husbands other than what they are, but not their biographers. Betjeman was as he was. When Jonathan Stedall asked him if he did not regret spending so much time making television programmes when he could have been writing poems, he replied, ‘I like to think they are poems.’

  After the succession of female secretaries, Betjeman had turned to Freddy Hood, wondering if he could supply him with clergy who had, in Canon Hood’s phrase, ‘stepped aside’. This meant, stepped aside from the straight and narrow path; usually it meant getting themselves into scrapes over boys (very occasionally over women).

  Betjeman had in fact first met Harry Jarvis in 1951 when he was a chaplain at Summer Fields, the prep school in North Oxford. Towards the end of that decade, Harry ‘got myself into a little bit of trouble’, and worked for Betjeman as a secretary for a few months. Then he was a curate at Worksop, a vicar choral at Southwell, and then the vicar of St Augustine’s, New Basford, from 1965 onwards – when Jarvis was forty-five years old. In April of that year he married Jean Cunliffe, whom Betjeman called the Smasher, and they had a daughter, Rebekah, who became Betjeman’s god-daughter. (‘My love to the Smasher’, he ended one letter. ‘Kiss her downy cheeks for me, and then her full red lips.’)

  Betjeman would come over from Edensor, which was not far away from New Basford, and Harry Jarvis would quite often go over to Edensor. Harry Jarvis was at some stage Betjeman’s confessor, but he was also the recipient of confidences outside the confessional, and it is from his very full interview with Candida Betjeman, preserved in the Betjeman papers, and largely quoted in her edition of her father’s letters (Volume II) that we have such a clear picture of Betjeman’s relationship with Elizabeth and Penelope. Jarvis in turn tried to counsel Betjeman –

  I offered the Mass for you today and commended you to the Almighty … I do offer a quick one for you every day but this was a bit more special. I do sympathise with you and wish there were something that I could say, or better still do, that would be of the slightest use or help. Sometimes one gets caught in a lot of circs. which are completely out of one’s control and have no easy solution (even if they have a solution at all) except death … At least one is normally spared the horror that poor dear Cowper had to face that he would be carried off into hell while still alive.

  Harry Jarvis, perhaps more than any of the other counsellors, confessors and friends, saw that Betjeman completely loved both women in his life and was tormented by guilt at the agony this caused them both, and himself. Any solution seemed wrong. Mindful of the Church’s teaching he could not contemplate divorce, even though Penelope offered it. Even had his conscience allowed it, this was not what he wanted. But nor was it thinkable that he should be separated from Feeble, who had become his devoted companion, helpmate and friend and whom he had allowed, for many years now, to sacrifice the possibility of getting married and having children in order to devote herself to him.

  ‘Feeble is OK but v pressing about Penelope and me’, he told Harry Jarvis. ‘She feels that I have deprived her of children and she loves children and I can’t bring myself to tell her that I love Penelope as well as her.’

  The Betjemans could not live together, but nor did they really wish to face up to the implication of this fact, namely that they should live apart. ‘I had a horrid dream last night that you had hidden yourself in a cupboard and refused to have me back’, Betjeman wrote to his wife. ‘I was very offended.’ She spent more and more time travelling, especially to India. He threw himself with manic fervour into television work and, in the recollection of his daughter, ‘could think of little else’.

  It is not surprising that old friends such as the Pipers felt that he was being corrupted by television. They did not mean by this that he gave himself airs, any more than he had ever done, or that he thought of himself, as a famous person, too grand for old friends. Rather, they felt that he was dissipating his energies on stuff which was not of lasting value, and that he therefore had less time for the architectural and topographical studies, for old friends, and for poetry.

  A constant leitmotiv, both of Betjeman’s adult life and of his friendship with the Pipers, was the production of the Shell Guides. Betjeman himself rewrote his 1934 guide to Cornwall, and published it exactly thirty years later. The early self, who had been employed as a disciple of P. Morton Shand on the modernist Architectural Review, had been an austere guide to the duchy. Its aim had been to draw attention ‘to the many buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have architectural merit’. The 1964 book found far more architectural merit in the great Victorians than had young Bet
jeman. Whereas in 1934 he had believed that Pearson’s Truro Cathedral had been constructed in ‘the E.E. style not suited to Cornwall…’ and that it was no more than ‘an interesting essay in the Victorian manner and the correct Gothic style’, in 1964 he could see it for the masterpiece it is – ‘the most interesting cathedral built since St Paul’s in England’. Above all, the 1964 book breathes a love of Cornwall as a place, and not just as a setting for fine architecture. It evokes the wilds of Bodmin Moor, the beauty of slate-roofed cottages in remote villages, the smell of fish in ports, the dankness of holy wells, the sudden green of valleys such as St Kew, the deep fissures, white sands and rocky islands surrounding the granite coastline of St Levan. It is a celebration of his homecoming to Trebetherick, and of the church where he worshipped, St Endellion, ‘a windswept parish high on the Atlantic coast with much to show inland and on its rugged slate coastline. The pinnacles of the granite church tower peep like a hare’s ears over the hill crest and the churchyard has Georgian inscribed headstones, with particularly good rhymes on them.’

  This is the essence of Betjeman. Brilliant as John Piper was, both as a painterly and a photographic eye (he photographed many of the best illustrations in the Shell Guides), he was primarily an artist. He was not a writer. He was a good-humoured and very lovable man, but he lacked the gifts which made Betjeman such an inspired general co-editor of the whole series, and which called forth some of the best titles in it, such as Billa Harrod’s Norfolk, James Lees-Milne’s Worcestershire and the Rev. Henry Thorold’s Lincolnshire. The question of whether Betjeman went on with the Guides was one which he meditated with Hamlet-like agonisings, often in letters to Piper. In the years 1964-6, he wrote three very long letters to Piper all rehearsing the history of how the Guides came into being. ‘I got a salary of £800 a year from Shell for editing and doing the make-up and writing the guides.’ They were intended as ‘prestige and advertising subsidised by Shell’. Of course, they became something much more than that, especially in the volumes which came out in the post-war years. Writers with a lifelong knowledge of, and love for, a particular county wrote highly distinctive and original topographical essays.