A gaping hole in the centre
Richard Ingrams
YOUNG BETJEMAN by Bevis Hillier
Murray, f15.95, pp. 479 hen Penelope Chetwode told her parents Field Marshal Sir Philip and Lady Chetwode that she wanted to marry a young journalist called John Betjeman they were appalled. 'We ask people like that to our houses,' her mother explained, `but we don't marry them.' The hostility was understandable. Betjeman was a man without prospects. He was a scruffy jour- nalist with a German name, a silly grin, bad teeth and a regrettable tendency to play the fool. When the Chetwodes invited him to dinner he wore a made-up bow-tie on a piece of elastic which he flicked in and out throughout the meal. Later they com- plained to Penelope that he had been overheard imitating their accents.
They might have found it very hard to accept that this highly ineligible man was destined to become Poet Laureate and a nationally loved and respected figure who when he died would be given a memorial service in Westminster Abbey attended by all the great and good from the Prince of Wales downwards. But they would not have been the first or the last to get John Betjeman wrong or be misled by his manner into thinking him flippant and affected. He was always complicated and difficult to fathom. 'I very rarely talk about what I really feel' he once wrote in a letter to his father which he never posted, thus emphasising the point. His introverted nature was the result of his early years spent as the only child of incompatible parents and later at all-male boarding schools in an atmosphere of heartiness and boorish athleticism. In response to these conditions he adopted an aesthetic pose, similar to that of his early hero Oscar Wilde (Lord Alfred Douglas was also for a time his pen-pal until his father informed him 'what buggers did'). He wore his hair long and had himself photographed in stylised poses and high-camp settings. At Oxford, like so many of his contempor- aries, he went through a homosexual phase and went to bed with W. H. Auden and also, if Osbert Lancaster is to be believed, with Hugh Gaitskell (Osbert claimed that they were travelling together on a train when Betjeman read the news of Gaits- kell's appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 'The only Chancellor of the Exchequer that I've been to bed with!' he announced to an astonished compart- ment.) But Betjeman never suffered from the self-destructive urges of the hard-core homosexual like Auden. He was saved from a Wildean decline by his sense of humour and later by the strong and wholly beneficial influence of Penelope. Behind the fooling he was tough and knew what he wanted to do, namely to write poetry. More importantly, he was sustained all his life by very strong religious emotions. His devotion to the Church of England was often seen by critics as another form of pose but it was in reality so intense that when his wife became a Roman Catholic it upset him so much as to cause what amounted almost to a divorce.
It is hard enough for a man to define his own religious beliefs, let alone a bio- grapher. Even so, any account of Betje- man's life and work ought to address itself to the issue. It is one of the many unsatis- factory aspects of Bevis Hillier's book that he does not begin to tackle it. This may be because, lacking any religious feeling him- self, he regards the matter as trivial. Whatever the reason, it leaves a gaping hole in the centre of the story. It is by no means clear how or why Betjeman became religious. We are asked to accept that the loan of a book, The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen, by a Cornish clergyman, was a Road-to-Damascus moment in his life, and maybe it was. But there is very little here to explain why it might have been. Of the other major factor in the poet's early life, his parents, Hillier is equally evasive. We get no clear picture of his mother, and the father, a key influence who encouraged Betjeman's early efforts as poet and antiquarian, eludes us in Hillier's pages. Was he a tyrant as Betje- man later maintained, or was the son just being snobbish and disowning someone of whom he was really quite fond? A biog- rapher must come down on one side or the other.
Otherwise the faults of the book spring from its excessive length. It was surely a mistake to embark on a two-volume life of Betjeman, especially when so much of the material is familiar. In one chapter, for example, we are given again an exhaustive account of Oxford in the Twenties, with Maurice Bowra, Colonel Kolkhorst, Ken- neth Clark, Evelyn Waugh, old Uncle Osbert Lancaster and all paraded before us for the umpteenth time. Sometimes in his account of Betjeman's friendships the poet almost disappears from view in a mass of detail about Waughs, Pakenhams or dim Irish aristocrats complete with interlocking family trees.
On the plus side, Bevis Hillier must be congratulated on the thoroughness of his research work. He has dug up a huge amount of stuff, even if he cannot shape it into a convincing narrative. Apart from the long account of John's love affair with Penelope, the best thing in the book, which as far as I know is quite new, is the story of his brief career as a prep-schoolmaster after leaving Oxford. It was probably the happiest time of his life. He had a real vocation as a teacher and inspired the boys with his enthusiasms and crazy practical jokes. Taking them for Sunday walks, he sometimes would lie down in the middle of the road and pretend to be dead, then leap up and run off when motorists stopped to investigate. His flirtatious 'affair' with the Joyce Grenfelly figure of the gym-mistress Vera Moule is altogether delightful (inspir- ing many excellent poems) and her re- miniscences are for once well worth print- ing verbatim. If only one could say the same of most of Mr Hillier's informants.
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