It is not just the buildings that he opened our eyes to and helped to save, though, God knows, there are plenty of those: Norman Shaw’s Bedford Park – ‘the most significant suburb built in the last century, probably the most significant in the Western world’ (Betjeman never minded overegging the prospectus in an urgent cause) – the great barn at Avebury, the old Foreign Office, the choir screen in Hereford Cathedral, St Pancras, the purlieus of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Marx Memorial Library and so on ad gloriam infinitam. There were also the campaigns to restore the human scale that he began fifty years ago and which are still churning on with varying degrees of success – against supermarkets, against motorways and tower blocks and intensive agriculture:
We spray the fields and scatter
The poison on the ground
So that no wicked wild flowers
Upon our farm be found.
Most people who count themselves civilized now pay some lip service to these causes, and it is easy to forget how numerous and high-placed their enemies used to be. Worse even than the planners and developers in Betjeman’s book were the traitors within, such as Sir John Summerson, who damned the Euston Arch with his faint praise and did his best to damn Bedford Park too, or Sir Edward Playfair, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence and later chairman of the National Gallery, who wrote to The Times urging that St Pancras station be pulled down and declaring that ‘not enough is said about the virtues of demolition’.
Not least among those rotting in Betjeman’s well-populated hell were the clergymen who referred to their churches as ‘plant’, like the demolition-minded rector of that temple of the Arts and Crafts, Holy Trinity, Sloane Street:
You your church’s vastiness deplore:
‘Should we not sell and give it to the poor?’
Recall, despite your practical suggestion,
Which the disciple was who asked that question.
Betjeman had always possessed what his not uncritical friend Anthony Powell called ‘a whim of iron’. In professional matters he knew what he wanted. When demanding black endpapers with bells on them for Summoned by Bells, he said, ‘I don’t insist. I only know I am right.’
At the same time he never ceased to be nagged by self-doubt and a sense of harassment amounting to paranoia. In the early fifties, just as he was coming to the years of fame that were to lead, it seemed ineluctably, to the laureateship, he wrote to James Lees-Milne, ‘I travel third and am cut by people who count and looked down upon by the new refugee “scholars” who have killed all we like by their “research”.’ In his ongoing feud with Nikolaus Pevsner, it was JB who was mostly the aggressor against someone who, however dry as dust and disparaging he might be, was on the same side in most of the big scraps. And just as he resented academic architectural historians out of an unjustified sense of inferiority, so he resented the Leavisites and other litcritters who wrote him off as a penner of sentimental jingles:
When all the way from Cambridge comes a wind
To blow the lamps out every time they’re lit
I know that I must light mine up again.
The better poets of his time all recognized and sometimes loved his work – Auden, Dylan Thomas, Roy Fuller, R. S. Thomas, Larkin. But professional critics continued to reproach him for his lack of formal innovation. Only a younger generation of poetcritics such as James Fenton and Craig Raine had the wit to see what he was up to. In Raine’s words, ‘You can scarcely understand Betjeman’s poetry until you have grasped that he writes “badly” in order to write well.’ This was not merely, I think, a matter of his subverting (to use a trade term he would not have cared for) traditional verse forms. There were always subtleties and surprises in his use of everyday motifs – slang, advertising slogans, brand names. These were, so to speak, first dipped in irony and then shown from another angle to remind us that these things were part of our own experience in all its heartbreaking seriousness. ‘Nostalgia,’ Betjeman claimed, ‘is a word my critics always use about my verse. I describe what people have been through.’
Everyone thinks they can do a Betjeman parody, and Hillier quotes plenty. Whether composed by fans, friends or enemies, they are almost invariably dire and instantly distinguishable from the real thing. Larkin, always excellent on Betjeman, warns us not to discard the funny poems in order to invent a uniformly serious poet: ‘Quite often there are things that you can only say as jokes.’
Yet you will still look in vain for Betjeman’s name in most encyclopedias of poetry and poetics. This is not because his preference for rhyme and metre is out of fashion (it is not), but rather because his whole view of poetry is antipathetic to the modernist project which insists on distance, disruption and estrangement, on the shattering of the heart’s affections, whereas Betjeman, like Blake, stood for their holiness and wholeness. In fact, he reminds me more and more of Blake, both in his anger at the cruelties of the world and his determination to render that world in what Blake called ‘minute Particulars’. Two tubby Londoners in search of lost innocence, looking for a time when
The fields from Islington to Marylebone
To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood
Were builded over with pillars of gold
And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.
Behind the never-failing jokes and the ever-growing veneration, this is a sad book, which has to chronicle Betjeman’s physical decline through the slow-showing onset of Parkinson’s, later punctuated by a series of strokes. He becomes prey to fits of weeping, panic attacks and deep pools of guilt about his abandonment of his wife Penelope for Lady Elizabeth Cavendish who selflessly cared for him through his last years. He held the two of them in a state of tension, never willing to let go of Penelope entirely – though at one period they only met for gloomy lunches at the RAC – but at the same time never quite publicly acknowledging Elizabeth. Was this, like Dickens, because he thought his respectable public wouldn’t like it? Or was there a deeper reason?
In his second volume, Bevis Hillier quoted a curious passage from Alan Pryce-Jones’s disappointing memoir, confusingly also called The Bonus of Laughter, though it was Betjeman who coined the phrase. Pryce-Jones claimed that, at the funeral of John’s father Ernest, a second Mrs Betjemann (it was John who dropped the final n) turned up complete with second family, of whom until that moment nothing had been known. A fascinating detail, to put it mildly. But Hillier tells us no more. Was it true? And if Ernest was another Ackerley père, then were John’s feelings of guilt deepened by the realization that he was treating Penelope just as Ernest had treated his mother?
Certainly he prettified the views he had originally held of his parents. Hillier records a searing passage that was in the original text of Summoned by Bells but later suppressed:
These hideous people, were they really his?
That sagging woman with her ‘Craven A’?
That beefy business man with steely eyes –
‘Sir James was telling me the other day’ –
The studied ease with which he said ‘Sir James’,
The half-pay colonels whom he called his friends,
Their jolly voices and class-conscious air,
The war-time captains who were more his sort:
‘How well he thought of men who made their way’ . . .
And in some gas-lit bedroom did they mate?
And was I the undesired result?
Betjeman’s attitude towards his son Paul strikes a chilly note too, in which it is hard not to diagnose jealousy, Paul being good-looking and charming without having to work at it. In the two volumes of John’s letters published by his daughter Candida, there is only one letter to the adult Paul, known as the Powlie (significantly a neuter noun); he complains to Penelope that Paul is selfish and ‘still hung up in his sub-conscious’. Paul’s decision to become a Mormon, live in America and be a jazz musician suggests a strong desire to get as far away from his father as possible. Paul also collected snakes. Thirty ye
ars ago I was billeted on the Mead for a party and put to share a bedroom with Paul and his snake tanks. Both Paul and the snakes were delightful, it was the absent John who cast the pall.
Well, pied pipers are not much good at family life, and Penelope, though just as amusing and original in her own style, could be insufferably bossy and disinclined to share the limelight. But even John’s greatest friends had to concede that he sometimes showed the heartlessness of a child. Indeed, John himself conceded that he was a case of arrested development – ‘arrested, I should say, at about the age of 13’. He had the child’s sudden uncalculated generosity; he would give you the picture you were looking at together or the book he happened to have in his hand. And he could express, with a child’s lack of self-consciousness, all the terrors he felt. Which was also why he could instantly click with children of all sorts and ages – like the thirteen-year-old William Norton.
Perhaps that was also why he could enter so completely into the moment and draw you in too. I remember an evening he took a party to Deptford town hall to see the stars of the old music hall, by then in their seventies if not their eighties – Hetty King the male impersonator, Wee Georgie Wood, Randolph Sutton singing ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’. As with other Betjeman outings, nostalgia was decidedly not the word for it. The ancient comics and hoofers were so ebullient, so very much all there, pounding the dusty boards and making the rafters ring, that the whole thing was a live celebration not a commemoration.
This wonderful biography is bursting with such moments. Here’s one, no more than a footnote to page 471. During a visit to the Isle of Man, one of his favourite haunts, on Hallowe’en some Cubs outside were singing the Celtic song ‘Jenny the Witch’, while JB was studying some pictures by Archibald Knox, the Manx Art Nouveau artist and jeweller. He invited the Cubs in and they sang, in the Manx tongue for all I know, ‘Jenny the Witch flew over the house, To fetch a stick to lather the mouse’, while the old laureate went on squinting at Archie Knox’s watercolours – neither of them so nouveau any more – and when the Cubs had finished, he murmured in that inimitable Tennysonian moan, ‘We are as near heaven tonight, in this house, as any of us will ever be.’ Sentimental? All right, but who cares?
RONALD BLYTHE: GLORY IN THE RUTS
Ronald Blythe has not budged much. In eighty-nine years, he has moved only a few miles down the Stour Valley, and he has never left his home on the Essex-Suffolk border for more than a month on end. Nor did his ancestors, a long line of Suffolk shepherds who took their surname from the River Blyth, which dawdles past the great windows of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, into the estuary at Southwold. Rootedness on this scale may seem odd to us who like to feel footloose, but it comes naturally to our great country writers: Thomas Hardy and William Barnes in Dorset, Richard Jefferies in Wilts, and John Clare in Northants (though William Cobbett did get about a bit). They stand out from other writers, too, by coming from the labouring classes as often as not, the sons of stonemasons and farmers, and in youth often labourers themselves. They have now and then been joined at the plough by the sons of the professional classes, such as John Stewart Collis and Adrian Bell, but the native sons of the soil are somehow different.
By staying put, they develop a uniquely painful sensitivity to change. Their most poignant effects come from observing the way that history cuts so brutally across the recurring seasons. Blythe’s masterpiece, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969) records a dying agricultural past of which he himself just caught the tail end. Yet the book is anything but an unqualified lament. It has the iron ring of a spade on Suffolk flint. So unsparing is the description of an agricultural labourer’s life and of the unthinking callousness of farmer and squire, that a Norfolk landowner is said to have tossed the book out of the window in disgust before the train reached Colchester. Blythe, like his hero John Clare (he is president of the John Clare Society), sees ‘glory in the ruts’. But he describes every bone-shaking, clay-cloying, mud-splattering step of the cart track. At the Yeoman’s House is an elegy, but an elegy in a harsh key, for Bottengoms, the very old farmhouse Blythe has lived in ever since he inherited it from the painter John Nash, whom he nursed when he was dying (from the nursing came another of Blythe’s most admired books, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age (1979)).
For centuries, Bottengoms was a farm with 70 ill-favoured acres, from which the yeoman, defined by Cobbett as ‘above a farmer and lower than a gentleman’, scratched a precarious living. Gradually the acres fell away into other hands. In the 1920s, what was left was sold for £1820, in 1936 for £1200 and in 1944 Captain John Nash, official war artist, snapped it up for only £700. Now there is only the tumbledown brick farmhouse, together with Eric Ravilious’s even more tumbledown greenhouse donated by his widow and giving new meaning to the term ‘lean-to’. Indoors, the sole change since the Nashes’ day seems to be that the local stream no longer flows in an open brick channel across the kitchen floor. Outside there is the horsepond:
this was where the work horses drank century after century, sinking belly-high in the blissful coolness in July, throwing up their huge heads in the shade, and the water running ceaselessly, clouding then clearing. For ever and ever. I have waded naked in it to weed it and rake its outlets, and it became a liquid silk on my skin. Dead ash had to be dragged from it, soddenly preserved boughs looking like spars from the Mary Rose. In the spring its surface is a mat of marsh marigold, caltha palustris, and in late summer a diadem of dragonflies. But there are weeks when it can descend into sullenness like a Thomas Hardy place for suicide.
But now the horses are all gone, along with the cows, chickens and goats, and all those women gleaning in the fields and the eight-year-old children harvesting the flints for pennies, as Blythe himself was one of the last to do when he was that age.
As he says, you have to be pretty old now to have witnessed the depth of agricultural toil, to know what it was like to give all your bodily strength to the same few acres, year in, year out. Blythe confides that even when he was writing Akenfield, he found it impossible to believe that all of it was going for good. His latest book has ‘a requiescat quality’, the phrase he uses to describe Men and the Fields, the collaboration between Adrian Bell and John Nash just before the war, which was an earlier homage to the landscape created by the yeomen who had stubbornly farmed the valley that Bottengoms is sunk at the bottom of.
At the time Nash was illustrating the book, he was mourning the death of his only child in a motor accident. So even the inheritance of Bottengoms has its tragic aspect. Blythe never underplays the hardness of the past. But he never over-sneers at the present either. The incomers wondering whether their Chelsea tractors will make it down the track do receive the odd sideswipe, but he is quick to point out that there are probably more trees in Suffolk now than when Elizabeth I made her royal progress to visit Sir William Waldegrave’s enormous new mansion at Wormingford.
This is a production of old age, gentle but not soft, both tough-minded and charitable. Blythe is a lay reader in the Church of England and nearly became a priest, like William Barnes and George Crabbe and Gilbert White before him. Yet I find his unillusioned, lyrical tone curiously similar to those ruralists who were lifelong atheists, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies. It is as though the unblinking countryman’s eye has no room for religion, one way or the other.
One of the incidental pleasures of At the Yeoman’s House is Blythe’s delight in euphonious lists. He breaks off to give some of the names on the sixteenth-century marriage register in the local church: ‘Alexander Sturdyfall and Annis Bird, Thomas Coo and Anes Hollburrowes, Leonarde Hartlife and Joane Lurkine’. He can hear their long-dead feet making ‘brick music’ on the kitchen floor at Bottengoms. And so can we.
THE SUBURB AND THE VILLAGE
The late J. G. Ballard was famous for living in suburbia, Shepperton to be precise. He thought it odd that anyone should think this odd. The suburbs were, in his view, the logical subject for any writ
er seeking to track shifts in culture, for the important post-war cultural trends had started there. The ’burbs were where it was at; they were socially as well as geographically edgy, to use the sort of language he wouldn’t have used.
It is hard to think of a more unfashionable claim. To the intelligentsia, the suburbs were and always have been the place where nothing happens, or nothing good. While the fates of the city and the countryside vex every bien-pensant breast, nobody pays much attention to the people who live in between, except to finger them as the Enemy. Lewis Mumford, in his heyday as the urban guru, declared that the flight to the suburbs ‘carries no hope or promise of life at a higher level’. D. H. Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo of the ‘utterly uninteresting’ suburbs of Sydney (where he had been for all of a fortnight): those myriads of bungalows offered ‘no inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally’. From Byron to Graham Greene and Cyril Connolly, the ‘leafy middle-class suburbs’ have been denounced as smug, small-minded and spiritually derelict.
Architects and planners made common cause with novelists and poets to deplore the relentless advance of the little boxes and the little people who lived in them. Clough Williams-Ellis and his wife Amabel Strachey launched two famous polemics between the wars: England and the Octopus (1928) – the octopus being ribbon development – and Britain and the Beast (1937) – the beast being the bungalow. The latter was a volume of essays written by, among others, Maynard Keynes, Cyril Joad, G. M. Trevelyan and Patrick Abercrombie, the great planner and preserver, and endorsed by a blaze of luminaries – Lloyd George, George Lansbury and Julian Huxley. Every sword in Bloomsbury leapt from its scabbard to fight against the development of Peacehaven on the cliffs above Brighton. And they did indeed make sure that such a thing never happened again, for the Town and Country Acts of 1947 introduced state control of land use on a scale that even William the Conqueror might have thought excessive.
English Voices Page 24
