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Book Review, 07 September 2006 Anglo-Catholic Platitudes
Betjeman This year's centenary celebrations of John Betjeman's birth pay tribute to a Poet Laureate who wrote several dozen poems arguably as good as any written in English in the last century, with a command of verse technique at once deft and unflashy; at Betjeman's best, not Housman nor Larkin is better. But what of the man? Why does A.N. Wilson think we need another look at him? Betjeman's family was well off but socially uncertain, comfortably Anglican. These legacies of religion and social hyper-awareness stayed with Betjeman all his life. At Oxford, his tutor at Magdalen was C.S. Lewis, then only 27. Betjeman blamed Lewis for the end of his Oxford career (although the real problem was Betjeman's laziness and exam funk); in later life, he came to loathe him. Wilson, author of a fine biography of Lewis, here adopts Betjeman's jaundiced reading of events wholesale. Although he didn't manage a degree, Betjeman, who was endlessly and whimsically amusing in company, did at least leave Oxford with rich, smart, often aristocratic friends. One of these connections landed him a job at The Architectural Review; here he consolidated the remarkable knowledge of domestic architecture - church architecture in particular - that defines him as a writer and (later) television performer. It also confirmed his peculiarly Anglican substitution of aesthetics for theology or morals - the notion (which Wilson and Betjeman seem both to ascribe to) that an adequate grasp of proper principles of the first can make up for woeful confusion in the second. Wilson sees Betjeman as a natural inhabitant of that porous intellectual hinterland of Anglicanism, which is broad-minded and subtle enough to "see both sides of religious questions", rather than taking refuge in "childish simplifications". Evelyn Waugh tried persistently to get Betjeman to look at the inconsistencies in his "Anglo-Catholic" religious position but Wilson is not interested in the arguments, and attributes everything to sexual jealousy on Waugh's part. He quotes Maurice Bowra with relish: "Dear Evelyn was never very highbrow. 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." After a quiet war (Ministry of Information, cultural attaché in Dublin, then back to London "chain-smoking and writing book reviews in office time"), Betjeman settled into a busy life of journalism, speech-making and architectural punditry. The poems continued, but after the 1950s they thin out: "his crowded life ultimately left no room for the poetry to grow". Increasingly, he frittered away his considerable literary talent making television programmes, writing for the newspapers, and, wearing his Poet Laureate's hat, turning out occasional doggerel for royalty. Wilson rightly points out that few poets produce much verse after the age of 40, and even those who do (Tennyson, Robert Graves) often have lapses in quality. The trouble with Betjeman is that he didn't produce anything else, but appeared constantly on television. His wife urged him for years to write serious books on Victorian architecture: no one since Ruskin could have done a better job; but Betjeman was too mired in television and mordant self-loathing even to begin. There were, it is true, his tireless crusades against the destruction of old buildings. But many of them came to nothing (London's Euston Arch was still pulled down), and if the national mood has shifted in favour of preservation, how much of this is down to Betjeman is a moot point. If Betjeman's career as a writer is mildly tragic, it is nothing beside the wreckage of his personal life. After some youthful homosexual dabblings, he married, aged 27, a field marshal's daughter, Penelope Chetwode. There were always rows; and, on his side certainly, low-level adulteries, mixed in with "crushes". In 1948 his wife became a Catholic; thereafter things between them got very bad indeed (Osbert Lancaster acutely said, "For Betjeman, going to church with a woman mattered more than going to bed"). There were some further short affairs; then, in 1951, he took up with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and a solid Anglican to boot. Thereafter he led two parallel lives: with his mistress in London and at Chatsworth, and his wife in Oxfordshire (he refused to divorce her, although she offered), interspersed with practical bachelordom at his own London flat. How well this suited Betjeman is open to debate. He and his biographer talk of agonies of remorse but he took no steps to change anything, protesting he "loved them both". If he was only questionably happy, there is no doubt the other parties involved were made miserable. Elizabeth Cavendish was only 25 when the affair began (Betjeman was then 45); she never married or had children, which she deeply desired. Penelope was left much to her own devices; their two children he practically abandoned. Their son, in particular, seems to have been constantly snubbed or ignored (his parents referred to him as "It"). He moved to America, became a Mormon and played the saxophone for a living. Meanwhile his father took faintly macabre foreign tours with Lady Elizabeth and various clerical hangers-on (prominent, boozy, usually homosexual), and fretted about his soul. On the surface Betjeman had, or so we are told, "blinding charm"; in the depths of his heart, if one can guess, may well have been faith, and charity; but if we go simply by his actions (Anthony Powell talked of Betjeman's "whim of iron"), they suggest a mixture of self-absorption, acute selfishness, and laziness masquerading as moral paralysis, a combination which surrounded him with a penumbra of others' misery. Wilson's coverage of Betjeman's "double life" is his largest advantage over Bevis Hillier's solid three-volume biography. There is also some highly entertaining gossip. But we might have expected something a bit more polished. The prose is not exactly sloppy, but it has the knowing allusiveness of high-class journalism, often falling into cliché. The proof-reading is bad: Betjeman's early architectural mentor Hubert de Cronin Hastings is "Obscurity Hastings" on page 85, but "Obscurity Cronin" for the next three; elsewhere, Graham Greene's mistress Catherine Walston becomes Katherine Woolston. Dr Johnson's remark on the need to keep friendships repaired turns up no fewer than five times in as many chapters; and can Wilson really have meant to write, of Betjeman's undergraduate girlfriends, "Betjeman's inner daimon, the soul which made the poetry, feasted on such attachments"? It is all very odd. Nothing in this book really does what Wilson sets out to do, explaining Betjeman's remarkable vogue. Perhaps charm is always like this. For the rest, Betjeman's life is more admonitory than edifying; but even then, there remain the poems - and they will last.  |
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