Betjeman

by A. N. Wilson

  For as long as he stayed in Cloth Fair, Betjeman could at least technically remain his own man. But, with Wantage sold, and nowhere comfy that he could call home, the outlook was alarming. Cloth Fair was all right as a book-lair and a bachelor pad during the week. But, like the flat ‘high in Onslow Gardens’ in one of his best poems, ‘Eunice’ – ‘it’s cream and green and cosy, but home is never there’.

  In 1973, Elizabeth Cavendish acted decisively. A house ten doors along from her own terraced cottage, 19 Radnor Walk, came on the market, and she bought it and installed Betjeman in it – Number 29.

  ‘My Darling Plymmie’, he wrote to Penelope in April 1973.

  I am now very nearly in 29 Radnor Walk, SW3 4BP [Tel] 352-5081 to give it its full titles. This is my first letter from it. The long delay is due to the horrors of moving. The new place is very tiny but very cheerful and much easier to reach than the City. Wibz has been very helpful and so has E. I am going to Cornwall while the workers are in on the toilets and other luxuries like shelves. There is no garden. That will have to be at Kulu-on-Wye.

  But they both knew that was fantasy. No wonder there existed between Betjeman and Kingsley Amis such a rapport. Amis’s novels, especially the later ones which were written while he was friends with Betjeman, cover the painful territory of men and women failing to understand one another, and actually hating while needing one another. They also confront failing powers of memory and sexual potency, and they see, really, only one area of consolation: drink. Although Kingsley Amis was a brusque person with strangers, this manner hid a person who was full of terror (he could not sleep the night alone in a flat or house) and who dreaded madness. There was much in Betjeman, man and poet, to which he could respond. At the time of his move from Cloth Fair, Betjeman often went and stayed with Amis and his wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, when they were living at Lemmons, Hadley, Hertfordshire. Betjeman called it, not inaptly, Gin-and-Lemons.

  His friendship with Amis’s friend Philip Larkin has already been mentioned. When Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate, died in May 1972, Larkin and Betjeman were both spoken of as likely successors. It was Betjeman who was chosen. He was pleased, but knew that many of the poets laureate in the past had been nonentities. ‘Alfred Austin is my favourite laureate after Eusden’, he wrote. Alfred Austin (1835-1913) was the author of the lines about the appendicitis of the future Edward VIII – ‘Across the wires the electric message came / He is no better, he is much the same’. Laurence Eusden, who was laureate 1718–30, was lampooned in Pope’s Dunciad –

  Know Eusden thirsts no more for sack or praise;

  He sleeps among the dull of ancient days.

  There were plenty of fools who would be prepared to take Betjeman at his own estimation and place him among those unintended jokes of literary history. As had happened before, it was left to Larkin to see the point. Larkin wrote in the Sunday Telegraph,

  In a sense Betjeman was Poet Laureate already: he outsells the rest (without being required reading in the Universities) and his audience overflows the poetry reading public to take in the Housman-Omar Khayyam belt, people who, so to speak, like a rattling good poem. In this he is like Kipling, and if Betjeman had not been appointed the two of them would have gone down the ages as the two unofficial Poets Laureate of the twentieth century. Lucky old England to have him.

  It is true that he was already the laureate in the sense of being a poet who had been taken to the heart of the English people. Look at the poem ‘To the Crazy Gang’, of 1962. That is public poetry of a good jobbing kind. He was now sixty-six years old, and it is very unusual for any poet to write much which is any good past this age. ‘I have become so public and overexposed that I am dry and self-piteous.’ Tennyson and Goethe and Waller and Thomas Hardy are the exceptions. Most poetry is written by those who are young or middle-aged, and most poets are only any good for a very short period of their writing lives. Even Keats’s Annus mirabilis of 1819 would probably never have been repeated even if he had lived – certainly nothing he wrote after it was much good.

  How many poems of the two hundred or so which Betjeman published actually hit their mark, achieve what they are setting out to achieve?

  I’d say about thirty out of a little over two hundred – ‘Death in Leamington’, ‘Croydon’, ‘The Sandemanian Meeting-House in Highbury Quadrant’, ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, ‘Death of King George V’, ‘Oxford: Sudden Illness at the Bus-Stop’, ‘Myfanwy’ and ‘Myfanwy at Oxford’, ‘Parliament Hill Fields’, ‘A Subaltern’s Love-song’, ‘Ireland with Emily’, ‘Invasion Exercise on the Poultry Farm’, ‘Youth and Age on Beaulieu River, Hants’, ‘St Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London N.’, ‘Harrow-on-the-Hill’, ‘Christmas’, ‘The Licorice Fields at Pontefract’, ‘Middlesex’, ‘Late-Flowering Lust’, ‘Sun and Fun’, ‘Devonshire Street W. 1’, ‘In Willesden Churchyard’, ‘Business Girls’, ‘Eunice’, ‘Felixstowe, or The Last of her Order’, ‘By the Ninth Green, St Enodoc’, ‘The Cockney Amorist’, ‘Aldershot Crematorium’, ‘The Costa Blanca’, ‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’. This is not to say that the others are devoid of charm, or that they do not have good lines in them. But if most of Betjeman’s poems were suits, you would say that they needed at least two more fittings at the tailor’s. If you were trying to make a case for Betjeman, as I very much am, these thirty or so are the poems you would bring forward. By the standards of most poets, thirty good poems is quite a large number. Many famous poets of the twentieth century only produced two or three good poems, and some famous poets did not produce any good poems at all. In Betjeman’s case the imperfect verse is simply doggerel, and often quite bad doggerel at that. The older he got, the lazier he became, and he concentrated all his creative energies on television.

  When John Guest produced a Penguin book called The Best of Betjeman in 1978, Betjeman thanked him characteristically – ‘Oh Gosh, thanks. Reading a book all by oneself – it feels as good as masturbating.’ Some eighteen of the poems named above are chosen by Guest. What prompted him, for example, to choose ‘Inland Waterway’, a dull laureate poem about the opening of the Upper Avon at Stratford by the Queen Mother – ‘Your Majesty, our friend of many years, / Confirms a triumph now the moment nears…’? At least Guest did not choose the absurd verses addressed to the wife of the Prime Minister, about going ‘by train to Diss’.

  The trouble with all these later duds is that they encouraged those who disparaged Betjeman to think of him as no more than a camp joke; and encouraged all those such as Mrs Wilson herself who wrote bad doggerel to think that they were poets. The second bit does not matter, the first does. Betjeman at his best was actually in tune with something, his ear was cocked, his eye was alertly open, his heart was beating; and the laziness which allowed the bad stuff into print did not do his reputation any good.

  * * *

  After the move to Radnor Walk, Betjeman was regularly in London on a Sunday and took to attending the Grosvenor Chapel in South Audley Street, the place where, in the 1950s, Rose Macaulay had recovered her faith. It is a robust eighteenth-century preaching-box (Wilkes is buried there) beautified by twentieth-century Anglo-Catholicism. The sanctuary was reordered by Betjeman’s beloved Ninian Comper in 1912. Here the sensible, old eighteenth century of Dr Johnson and Bishop Butler, represented by dark-varnished box pews, and galleries supported by pillars, meets the mystery of T.S. Eliot’s church or Charles Williams’s represented by gilding and incense and Latin vestments. The priest in charge of the Grosvenor Chapel at this date was John Gaskell, an exceptionally direct and intelligent preacher, as well as being a much sought-after confessor. With hair en brosse and an aquiline nose he resembled a slightly frightening Roman emperor until his face breaks into laughter. Betjeman and Elizabeth, sometimes accompanied by Princess Margaret, would sit in the same box pew to the left. During the sermon, Betjeman sat with a slightly goofy frog-like expression on his face during the sermon, leaning forward and appearing to hang
on every word the preacher spoke. ‘Dear John, what a marvellous opening & inspiring sermon you gave us yesterday morning at the 11. The church is so full of beauty my heart misses a beat’, he wrote in one letter, and in another, ‘I love the Grosvenor Chapel and its plentiful incense’. On the way out, however, he would be all laughs. Betjeman used Father Gaskell as his confessor, sometimes coming to Gaskell’s house for supper, and kneeling down before the meal in the kitchen to confess his sins. On one occasion, after the poet had been absolved from his sins, he rose from his knees, keeping one hand on the kitchen table, which had been covered with a cloth for dining. He made some observation, adding ‘Touch wood!’ Then he lifted the cloth to see that in fact the table was covered with formica. ‘Bloody plastic!’ he exclaimed. Religion fitted him like an old slipper. The priest, though no prig, was mildly startled that Betjeman should swear so soon after being absolved. But for him, the borderlines between the sacred and the profane were beginning to fade.

  He moved easily from gawping attentively at the preacher to teasing him at the church door, just as he could not always stop himself, when at his devotions to the Blessed Sacrament, forming devotions of a more profane character. It was not long after he had begun worshipping at the Grosvenor Chapel before he formed one of his crushes, this time on the extremely beautiful Joan Prince, nicknamed, before Betjeman knew who she was, ‘the Mistress’. Appropriately, she was the beauty editor of Harper’s Bazaar and she was married to a man who was a sidesman at the Grosvenor Chapel, Michael Constantinidis.

  Betjeman’s poem about her appeared in his 1974 collection, A Nip in the Air, as ‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’. It encapsulates something essentially Betjemanic. He is not the poet of the grande passion, he is the poet of the crush. It is the form of love which Englishmen learn at their boarding schools, and for many it remains a repeated emotional habit. It feels very often deeper, creates more of a glow, than consummated love affairs, certainly it is more exciting than the day-to-day life with mistress or wife. To the glorious company of Clemency the General’s daughter, Emily in Ireland, Myfanwy leaning kind o’er the kinderbank, and of course Joan Hunter Dunn, was added another, though nameless, one –

  Isn’t she lovely, ‘the Mistress’?

  With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,

  The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,

  Her glance of amused surprise?

  How nonchalantly she wears her clothes,

  How expensive they are as well!

  And the sound of her voice is as soft and deep

  As the Christ Church tenor bell.

  But why do I call her ‘the Mistress’

  Who know not her way of life?

  Because she has more of a cared-for air

  Than many a legal wife.

  How elegantly she swings along

  In the vapoury incense veil;

  The angel choir must pause in song

  When she kneels at the altar rail.

  The parson said that we shouldn’t stare

  Around when we come to church,

  Or the Unknown God we are seeking

  May forever elude our search.

  But I hope the preacher will not think

  It unorthodox or odd

  If I add that I glimpse in ‘the Mistress’

  A hint of the Unknown God.

  Any Betjemaniac would see that he had here given us his Credo. It may not be his best poem but it is one of his most haunting and touching, and it is the last one where we really hear the voice of the master.

  * * *

  There was something fitting in the choice of title in the longest poem in his final volume, A Nip in the Air – ‘Shattered Image’. This was now the telly age, and as one of the most successful TV ‘personalities’, Betjeman, like it or not, had become public property. He became naturally touchy about any attempt to dislodge the treasured picture of himself which existed in the minds of millions of delighted television-viewers. The homosexual side to his nature, for example, was something which he loved to play up in private. This joke was something which became more and more pronounced with the years.

  ‘Diana Mosley has asked me to stay in Paris’, he said mournfully one day to John Guest:

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘No’.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I hate Paris – nasty food. Nasty architecture’.

  ‘What would you rather be doing?’

  ‘I’d like to go tenting in North Wales with Prince Edward’

  – then barely a teenager.

  With John Guest, Harry Williams and others he loved to camp it up. They read aloud to one another from The Priest and the Acolyte by John Francis Bloxham, a paederastic Victorian clergyman whose life had been ruined when J.K. Jerome, of Three Men in a Boat fame, threatened to ‘expose’ him. When Betjeman learned that Humphrey Carpenter was researching the biography of W.H. Auden which was published in 1981, he at first implored the fledgling biographer not to include the episode in which the two young poets had slept together at Oxford, and then threatened legal action if Carpenter did not come to heel.

  When Betjeman and his friends had been young, there were strict rules governing gossip columns in the press. Details of other people’s emotional or sexual lives could only be printed when they had been used in evidence in court – in divorce cases, for example, or cases of gross indecency.

  Candida’s friend Richard Ingrams, as one of the founders and (almost from the beginning) editor or pirate-chief of Private Eye, changed the limits of how far the boundaries of privacy could be stretched. Private Eye was published by a company called Pressdram Limited so Betjeman nicknamed Ingrams Pressdram or Dear ole Pressdram. The two men liked one another, and were in some ways natural soul-mates – both Anglicans, both melancholic solitaries who paradoxically throve on publicity and riotous company.

  Evelyn Waugh’s son Auberon wrote a scabrous ‘Diary’ for Private Eye, a cruelly Swiftian assault on all and sundry. Absolutely anyone was considered fair game – even the Queen, with whom Waugh claimed to be on intimate terms: she massaged his feet for him while bemoaning the commonness and stupidity of her children. Cardinals, close friends and neighbours could all find themselves held up for ridicule. Some of the ideas in the ‘Diary’ – that Churchill was a drunken, debauched old war criminal – were simple matters of opinion. Others, like Bron’s idea that Mountbatten was a Soviet agent, had a sort of crazy plausibility in the minds of his fans even if they have never quite been substantiated in fact. Bron had a deep affection, and admiration, for Betjeman, but at this stage of his career, it was sometimes hard to know where the fictitious Private Eye Diary of Auberon Waugh ended and the kindly, amusing, affectionate young man Bron began.

  The flavour of his friendship with Betjeman – both Betjeman’s wariness and Bron’s capacity to put the most wounding or damaging facts down on the printed page regardless of who got hurt – was conveyed in a letter Betjeman wrote on 6 December 1973, in response to an essay Bron had evidently written about him, in which he had let slip the idea that Betjeman had been the lover of his old schoolfriend from Dragon School days, Hugh Gaitskell.

  For your information, I never went to bed with the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. It’s a good story but quite untrue and probably springs from the fact that Lionel Perry and I shared a flat with Hugh in Great Ormond Street for a few weeks when I was in transit from having been a private school master to starting journalism on the Architectural Review … Sex played no part in our lives and it was characteristic of Hugh’s generosity to let me live rent free when I was penniless, having been despaired of by my parents. Hugh at the time was courting Dora, and I would hate to be involved in a libel action which my lawyer tells me this statement, which I have marked in brackets at the bottom of page 5, and the top of page 6, involves. I must therefore insist that ‘From a rumbustiously homosexual youth – he is surely the only Poet Laureate who can claim to have been to bed with someone who was lat
er to become leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition’ comes out.

  It was Betjeman himself who was responsible for the ‘libel’. He had once remarked to Osbert Lancaster that Hugh Gaitskell was ‘the only Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition I ever went to bed with’. It was no doubt a joke. He loved playing up the whiff of bisexuality in his character. Lancaster was a great gossip, and loved amusing Ingrams, his young neighbour (at Aldworth, Berkshire), with titbits of this kind. It got repeated back to Bron and was in danger of being put into print. In his dealing with the young men at Private Eye, quite firmly suggesting that, if the story went into print, he would sue, Betjeman showed what Anthony Powell called Betjeman’s Whim of Iron. Incidentally, though the jury will ever be out on the question of how homosexual Betjeman was in temperament, there is no evidence that he was ever, in grown-up life at least, a practising homosexual. And one priest who was very close to him avers, to me convincingly, that all his erotic interests were really in young women.

  Bron’s affection for Betjeman was deep and reciprocated, and, once the younger man had been called to order with the mention of a lawyer checking his writings, the friendship continued merrily as before. Indeed, Betjeman loved Private Eye, its indiscretions and all, and saw it as a useful weapon, which it was, against the spoliations and corruptions of modern architects, planners and shyster developers. On 13 February 1975, from 29 Radnor Walk:

  Dear Bron,

  I very much enjoyed yesterday’s luncheon, so did my friend Harry Williams. We talked about it all the way back in that luxurious car to this place. It was very kind of you to ask me. I was silent and preoccupied. This was because, I now realise there was welling up in me a desire to let the cat out of the bag about an enormous land deal being made by British Railways over the sites of Liverpool Street and Broad Street Stations. It will not only mean goodbye to the Great Eastern Hotel with its dome of many coloured glass, to the Abercorn Rooms and the Masonic Temples; to that glorious elevated walk across from Bishopsgate; through the Miss Hook of Holland part of the station and on to those interlacing Gothic arches of the original Great Eastern. It will mean goodbye to Broad Street echoing and forgotten and to those Lombardic stairs that climb up its southern side to the North London Railway war memorial. Instead the whole area will be covered by offices. We know what they’ll look like and under the offices there will be amid fumes and the tannoy system some platform for trains to East Anglia. It will be the new Euston only much worse, if that were possible, and much higher of course because the buggers will feel fully justified in being higher than the Stock Exchange or the appalling new Barbican. Much ridicule will be poured on preservation-mad nostalgics such as yours truly, for admiring this essentially ‘second-rate’ collection of buildings, and for not seeing the glorious smooth-running-future the financiers see for their new slabs. I think there has been some pretty smart land dealing and I can’t find out about it, but you can with your brilliant staff.