SPRING BOOKS

A great Englishman

John Osborne

JOHN BETJEMAN: LE1 1ERS, VOLUME 1, 1926-1951 edited by Candida Lyeett Green Methuen, £20, pp. 569 Isay! What a fulsome letter . . . Gosh! I did enjoy myself . . . My God it's exciting, ain't it duckie?

AND SO IT IS. Into the black well of last week, the stone rolled back, light appeared and this gorgeous book thumped me into remembrance of the possibility of redemption from sloth and despair, a bolt- ing revelation which has left me blinking and dazed with delight.

I know next to nothing of the technical problems of such things, but it seems to me that Candida Lycett Green has achieved a miraculous service of homage to her father's head-down genius in her editing and annotation of his letters from 1926 to 195L All is lean, clear and informative. When she told an enquiring, dusty don what she had undertaken, he replied, `Mmm. . That should take you 15 years or conceivably 20.' Blessedly, she blew hot against this academic frost and took Michael Holroyd's gentle counsel: 'You just have to love your subject, that's all.' To have had to wait for the appearance of such a heavenly comet, as precious and exhilarating as the explosion of Boswell's Life of Johnson, would have been a cruel deprivation and a graveside blow struck to the very heart of J. B.'s own glorifying immediacy.

What an almighty and uncloying marveller he was. Unforced gales of grate- ful laughter sweep up line after line of these incontinently exuberant pages, exploding in postscripts, inspired, ridicu- lous nicknames, dark, mischievous fantasies and the joyous doodledums of happy and affectionate sketches. To Lionel Perry: 'My Dear Old Lil . . . You filthy old thing with your round head like an 18th-century gatepost.' To Nancy Mitford: 'Your hand- writing is like that of a maid . . . I have had to call up what the telephone operator calls Sloone sex-four-seven-sex'. Or, of his wife, Penelope, in 1950:

I am getting on very nicely with Propellor who has gone in for a new hairstyle called, I believe, 'windswept'. She had it done in Wantage where 'Marguerite' the perm- specialist is an RC. The brain and face beneath the hairstyle are happily the same.

He breathed in the island ozone of his own curiosity, fantasy and invention and it exploded into the air above his friends, like Spring squalls at the end of Southend Pier. He had the supreme clown's gift of holy self-deflation. He signs himself off:

Tonkety, tonk old boy . . Your's in Calvin's name . . Ever your adoring fag . . . From that poverty-stricken old rip, J. B.

It is hard to think of anyone whose compa- ny incites the word 'merriment' itself, who could pipe, dance and lead his correspon- dents from devout solemnity to girly-

giggling irreverence back to the awesome delights of molecular divinity to be found even in a brand of smokers' matches England's Glory. J. B. writes to a public school prefect:

I like England's Glory for the jokes, yes. Wasn't it frightful when they gave up the jokes and had reviews of the Cabot Tower, Brakes Statue etc!? I wrote and complained. They said it was only an experiment and now I'm glad they've gone back to the jokes again.

Without drawing breath, he informs this young stranger:

I think I am Catholic in a low way. Red velvet and a couple of candles for illumina- tion. Prayer book version of the Mass. In fact Georgian 'High' Church. Frequent mass, celebrated in a long surplice and black scarf at a red velvet covered communion table. Clear glass. Box pews. There was once a man at St Mary-le-Bow who thought like that.

Reading or, rather, clinging to these pages like a whirling carousel horse, the image of that elegant rotundity of mind, body and spirit braces, astonishes and infuriates the blood in a month when the dismal Dr Carey attempted to betray the nation's history and common intelligence with his Slough-like slouching towards incantations of his imagined 'ordinary little country'. What an Archbishop would have been John Betjeman, with his English gift of turning the inconsequent into circumstance and the ordinary into the divine. Oh, contemptible Carey, how I wish J. B. Cantuar were here to mock you gently for the cuntuar: he would have had a few larks with Carey, hairy, Mary, dairy, fairy. Only he could do it, entertainer that he was, in boater or panama, natty vaude- villian of the heart's true ease. Why a `minor poet'? Another fiction, like 'flawed masterpiece', the babble of eunuchs who have no idea of the cost and usage of a storm-room of energy. In his case, it was prodigious.

How could anyone possibly accept the fairground roundabout spectacle of his lurching folly and hate-clutching curiosity as anything but a superb and mocking pantomime? This was a sportive, dolphin god-on-earth, sonically beamed into sight and sound beyond the range of most mortal apprehension. His instinct for parody was unerring, the invitation for ridicule masterly. The selective aloofness of Archibald, his bear, was tuned as finely as everything else in that dolphin wavelength. In 1940, he wrote of him: 'Archie is very well, and pro-Hitler, I am sorry to say. It is the Nuremberg manufacture that must have done it.'

Mrs Lycett Green plaindeals:

I want to show the world how great he was; how he was, unlike most of us, interested in things other than himself; how he laughed an inordinate amount and when he put his head back and shook with laughter, you couldn't help laughing too.

He was also a great Englishman. I keep thinking of this common grocer-divine, Carey, when reminded of the 29-year-old J. B.'s list of interests: ecclesiastical archi- tecture, three-decker pulpits, Irish peers, Irish architecture and pre-Celtic twilight Irish poetry (or 'Oirish', as he would have it, signing himself Sean O'Betjeman), Salkeld's Catalogue, branch railways, suburbs, provincial towns, steam trains. His dislikes, sniffed out and exposed by that rooting terrier passion, included aero- planes, main roads, insurance companies, `development', local councils, and material- ism, dialectical or otherwise. His hopes were for 'a Triumph of Christianity and a town plan for England'. It is an agenda that makes one think of Sir Christopher Wren, discouraging calls while designing St Paul's.

But, I say! This book is full of surprises. To me, at least. J. B. and Penelope Chet- wode were married, unknown to the bride's disapproving parents, at Edmonton Registry Office. They then spent a few days at the Green Man pub in Braxted, Essex. `Oooh, I did enjoy Essex,' said the bride. Then off she went to Berlin. J. B. wrote: `Oi am thinkin of you at the moment quiv- erin loike a jelly on the English Channel. Oi do hope you won't be orribly sick.' Upset and insecure, he bought a farmhouse and employed a pretty girl with dark brown hair, one Molly Higgins. He confessed to his bride in Germany. 'I did not realise until I got yours this mornin that you were actually in love with Molly H.', she replied. By the time P. B. returned for Christmas 1933, the affair had faded and, adds J. B.'s enchanted daughter, 'my mother was very much in command'.

In 1929, J. B. wrote:

I have got to go out with a lot of jolly girls now — oh God I wish I were dead . . . As

usual, I am on the rocks . . I wallow in the pleasures of Melancholy . . . I have been at the door of death have discovered a rather beautiful girl here and my sex becomes rampant. I think I must be a bit better.

Miraculously, he never really changed. I hope to learn from this book for years to come and not simply mourn my own mis- spending and that imposed upon me by those who have empowered themselves over my life.

In the meantime, would Mr Patten distribute this monumental history of the ineffably unordinary to every sullen, ignorant teacher in the land and force them to read it aloud above the ethnic clamour and drown the general grudge?

My hat! What a fulsome review. Gosh! I did enjoy myself My God it's exciting, ain't it, duckie?