by A. N. Wilson
He was in several productions of the OUDS, and was an accomplished performer. He got sacked, however, when ‘a cod photograph with a ribald caption’ appeared in the Cherwell, the undergraduate magazine, claiming to be a picture of the OUDS rehearsing. At this time, they were in fact rehearsing Lear, with Harman Grisewood playing the King, and Betjeman the Fool. Since Cherwell that term was edited by Betjeman, and he, of course, had been the author of the spoof, Grisewood pompously, and successfully, demanded Betjeman’s expulsion. ‘For playing the fool, John has been prevented from playing the Fool’, quipped Kolkhorst. If this is an example of Kolkhorst’s wit at its best, one understands why the other dons preferred to pretend he did not exist.
In the world of student journalism, Betjeman made encounters among clever people who would not have wanted to spend their time either with the Smart Set or with the Kolkhorst brigade. The gangling, chain-smoking figure of Wystan Auden was one such, an early fan of Betjeman’s poetry. The two were said to have had a fling, or perhaps a fumble, the legend being that Auden had to bribe his scout (college servant) £5 for keeping quiet when Betjeman was discovered in his bed. ‘It wasn’t worth the £5’, he is quoted, by his brother, as saying. The incident might have happened, but the joke seems too unkind for the essentially benign Auden, who always took sex (a matter which interested him far less than it did Betjeman) in his stride. Betjeman denied the story.
All Betjeman’s deepest emotional bonds were with those of the opposite sex; most of his friendships, and nearly all his loves, were with women. But this was a time when Oxford had almost no women. When Betjeman gave a party for Lord Alfred Douglas in his old rooms at Magdalen, then being inhabited by Harford Montgomery Hyde (later Wilde’s biographer), there were a few women present. One of them, Elizabeth Harman (later Elizabeth Longford), asked Betjeman how she had come to be invited. ‘Oh’, he replied, ‘you were one of the aesthetes’ molls – you and Margaret Lane and Margaret Rawlings.’ Later, in Ireland, after she had married Frank Pakenham, Harman was amazed by Betjeman’s interest in women. It was not something for which her Oxford experience of him had prepared her. ‘I remember going to a dance – one of those interminable Irish drives to some party forty miles away. And he was the life and soul of the party; he certainly flirted with every girl that he found himself with – to my amazement then, because this was not what I connected him with.’
Betjeman is not an overtly sexual poet. Very few poets ever have been – the author of The Song of Solomon, John Donne, or Rochester are far less usual than those who write about the emotional pains of being in love, rather than about the sensual pleasure of gratified desire. He carefully guarded his public image, especially during the period when the physical expression of the love which dares not speak its name was actually illegal. For example, when Humphrey Carpenter tried to repeat the story of the wasted £5 in his biography of Auden, Betjeman threatened to sue. In private, however, among gay male friends, he had the opposite tendency. With his chameleon-like desire to beguile his company, and show himself to be on his interlocutor’s wavelength, he played up his sympathy. To James Lees-Milne he spoke of wanting to kneel down and kiss the television when a certain male presenter came on. To John Guest, who compiled The Best of Betjeman, he claimed, in his late middle verging on old age, that he liked climbing on to the top of buses to rub himself against boys. All these claims have to be taken with the pinch of salt with which they were obviously delivered. He liked debating the percentage of homosexuality in male friends, and in conversation would always exaggerate the degree of it in himself, partly no doubt because he knew this was appealing to the sort of women, aesthetes’ molls, to whom he was ardently attracted.
Undergraduate years are the time when such confusions become less confusing, and when the young have time to reflect upon their true emotional natures. Part of Betjeman’s nature, both as a man and chiefly as a poet, was to yearn. Turgenev once confided in a woman that he could only write novels when he was in love. Betjeman was very nearly always in love, often unsuitably. Much of his best verse comes out of such experiences. One suspects that if he had had the sort of life which he claimed, from the wheelchair, to have wanted there would have been less poetry – no Joan Hunter Dunn, no Myfanwy, no Clemency the General’s Daughter, all of whom owe their great strength as figures in poetry to the fact that they were not figures in his bed.
Hence the importance, though dismissed as a joke by Bowra in his Memories, of two women whom Betjeman loved during his undergraduate life.
He picked up a waitress from an Oxford restaurant and took her out to look at churches, but gave her up when she did dance-steps up the aisle. At the other extreme was a very dutiful plain girl, the daughter of a clergyman, who appealed to his clerical tastes. She bicycled over to see him in Oxford and wore a strangely unbecoming raincoat.
The huge number of friends whom Betjeman made in such a short space of time at Oxford thought of both women as jokes, perhaps as jokes devised by Betjeman for their amusement. On one level, they were jokes. On another, they were Muses. Betjeman’s inner daimon, the soul which made the poetry, feasted on such attachments. Surely the reason his poems make such a wide and deep appeal is because, contrary to what some of his friends supposed, such feelings of abject love and longing are the most cherished part of the lives of most of us?
One would not expect this to be wholly understood by sophisticates such as John Sparrow, of New College, a clever future lawyer, one day Warden of All Souls, nor by Tom Driberg of Christ Church, aesthete, prankster and, by the testimony of his posthumous memoir, erotomane extraordinaire. Such is the paradox of things, and of Betjeman’s emotional make-up, that these two men, his undergraduate friends, were those to whom he invariably sent his poetry before publication to be checked and reworked.
If Betjeman had had a sympathetic tutor, his time at Oxford would have been an unspoilt triumph song. True, he would have been unlikely to get a very good degree, given the fact that he spent so much time acting, party-going, talking and doing undergraduate journalism. But these were days in which the more enlightened university teachers were able to see that ‘higher education’, as we now call it, consisted in more than passing exams.
Bowra, teaching Latin and Greek literature at Wadham College, and therefore having no influence at Betjeman’s own college of Magdalen, could see how exceptional this young man was. He already had a prodigious knowledge of architecture, and of out-of-the-way literature. Few of his contemporaries were really attuned to the fact that Betjeman was already beginning to find his voice as a poet. Bowra knew this, though. He saw in such early poems as ‘Death in Leamington’ and ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ ‘how original they were and how much more they were than merely funny’. Unfortunately, Bowra was not his tutor. C.S. Lewis was. ‘Heavy’ Lewis, liked by some of his pupils over the years but more often feared for his bullying manner, drove away another of Betjeman’s contemporaries, Henry Yorke, the novelist Henry Green, who was ‘irritated and bored’ by Lewis. Yorke positively wanted the experience which Betjeman was running away from. He was all too willing to go and work in the family ‘works’ – a beer-bottling factory in Birmingham, finding there rich material for his art, as well as a change from the rarefied, Etonian way in which his businessman father and upper-class mother had brought him up.
Betjeman fell foul of Lewis, and of the system, by failing an exam which in those days all Oxford undergraduates had to take – Divvers, or Divinity. Had he had a sensible tutor, such as Bowra, the man would have told him – ‘Come on, Betj, you can pass this exam easily. It only consists of a few easy questions about the Acts of the Apostles and one book of the Old Testament.’
Bowra believed that at some level, frightened of a disgrace in the serious exams – the ones for his degree – Betjeman’s psyche took the easy way out and failed an exam which, as a lifelong churchgoer he could have passed with ease. There may be some truth in this. For whatever reason, he failed Divin
ity, and was rusticated, that is, sent away from Oxford, and told to come back when he could pass the required exam. He got a job as a schoolteacher at Thorpe House, Gerrard’s Cross, a private boarding school for boys. Even this post had been achieved with some difficulty because Lewis would not write him a kindly testimonial. It was only another don at Magdalen, the Rev. J.M. Thompson who taught history, who vouched for him.
Betjeman wrote to Lewis, asking him if he could return to Oxford in the following autumn to complete his degree course. He found that Lewis had in effect demoted him by recommending him to follow a course known as a pass degree. This would entitle any one who took it successfully to write the letters BA (Oxon.) after their name. But it was not an honours degree, and those sitting for it were not allowed to study a subject. It consisted of three papers – one elementary language paper, one of military history, and one other, equally elementary, of literature. It was a course really designed for the rowing blues and rugby hearties.
Lewis gave Betjeman absolutely minimal help, even with the application to do the pass degree.
Dear Betjemann,
You must write to the Secretary of the Tutorial Board at once, telling him your position, and asking to be allowed to take a pass degree.
As to my being a ‘stone’, I take it we understand each other very well. You called the tune of irony from the first time you met me, and I have never heard you speak of any serious subject without a snigger. It would, therefore, be odd if you expected to find gushing fountains of emotional sympathy from me whenever you chose to change the tune. You can’t have it both ways, and I am sure that a man of your shrewdness does not really demand that I should keep ‘sob-stuff’ (is that the right word in your vocabulary?) permanently on tap in order to qualify me for appearing alternately as butt and fairy godmother in your comedy …
The Secretary of the Board was then required to ask Lewis why Betjeman was being put in for a pass degree, and to assess his chances of getting an honours degree if he returned to his original course. Lewis deemed that Betjeman’s chance of an honours degree was ‘none’.
‘When I went in for the English group’, Betjeman recalled bitterly in 1939, ‘I had a viva’ (an oral exam) ‘from Mr Brett Smith. My answers on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers were not, I suspect, bad, and Mr B-S asked me at the viva, “Why are you not in for the Honours School?” Lewis was sitting beside Brett-Smith at the time, and said nothing.’
Betjeman did his best to make life awkward for Lewis. For instance, in his language paper, he opted not to do Latin or French but Welsh ‘in the knowledge’, claimed Osbert Lancaster, ‘that in order to gratify this strange ambition Magdalen had been put to all the trouble and expense of importing a don from Aberystwyth twice a week, first-class’.
The fun was not to last for long. The 27 October edition of Cherwell carried a cartoon of Betjeman – is it by the youthful Osbert Lancaster? – wearing a scholar’s gown, with a lopsided smile. In the background, a biretta’d clergyman in a cassock, and another, possibly a bishop in a frock coat and top hat, scuttle about beneath the spires. The issue of 17 November announced the engagement of the former editor, Bryan Guinness, to the Hon. Diana Mitford. The 1 December issue had a special ‘Divvers Number’ with a mock-guide of how to pass the divinity exam. It contained the instructions – ‘Don’t be facetious. It never pays and it costs a pound a time. Remember JOHN BETJEMAN.’
By then, Betjeman’s fate had been sealed, and in spite of Sir Herbert Warren’s distaste for sacking undergraduates, Lewis had been harsh.
Betjeman felt not merely that a gross personal injustice had been done, but that Lewis had failed in more general terms. In his long diatribe written out eight years later, but never posted, he berated Lewis for his philistinism (‘I don’t see how anyone with visual sensibility can live in Magdalen and be unmoved by architecture if their job is partly that of teaching an appreciation of English literature’). He went on to say, ‘I was a very usual type of undergraduate, caught up with the latest fashions in “art”; pretentious and superficial. But all that, I have since discovered, is quite right in this type’ – that is, in a budding aesthete. ‘Indeed it should be encouraged, for it argues an awareness of what is going on and an incipient sensibility which can easily be crushed or misdirected forever by an unsympathetic tutor.’
He urged Lewis that, should ‘one of the Betjeman type’ come his way in the future, he should be sent to a more sympathetic tutor in another college. It is a perfectly intelligible letter, and it is highly characteristic. Betjeman, from early infancy, had ‘shown off merrily’, and been extremely thin-skinned, hyper-sensitive to criticism and bullying of any kind. Both these characteristics of the infant Betjeman were carried through grown-up life into old age. But with the showing-off there also went humility. He was never as certain as his admirers were of his talents, partly because he was an intelligent person, and he could see that the verses he was beginning to write were so unlike those of other aspirant serious poets such as his friends Auden and MacNeice. Everyone who recollected Betjeman, either as a Marlborough boy or as an undergraduate, recollected something totally extraordinary. (‘A sustained and successful effort to present a convincing impersonation of a rather down-at-heel Tractarian hymn-writer recently unfrocked’ was Osbert Lancaster’s description.) He was not ‘a very usual type of undergraduate’. He was not a very usual type of man. But, thanks to his tutor’s total lack of sympathy, he was now being thrown out into the world. Eventually, large numbers of his fellow countrymen would come to share the delight and fascination in his character which was felt during that delirious time at Oxford. But in the short term the prospects of earning his living were not promising.
5
MAKING A MARK – ARCHIE REV
In 1960, just after he had read Summoned by Bells, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary:
Betjeman’s biography. John demonstrates how much more difficult it is to write blank verse than jingles and raises the question: why did he not go into his father’s workshop? It would be far more honourable and useful to make expensive ashtrays than to appear on television and just as lucrative.
Waugh, three years older than Betjeman, had been introduced to him at Biddesden by Diana Guinness. He moved in the same circles of Bowra, Irish country houses, and upper-class Bohemia. By the time Betjeman came down from Oxford, Waugh had published his remarkable life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and made a notable hit with his hilarious first novel, Decline and Fall. The relationship between the two men was edgy, perhaps best summarised by Waugh himself in a letter to Betjeman’s wife on 7 January 1950 – ‘My love to John. Though he doesn’t love me as I love him.’
Anthony Powell, with his cool-eyed interest in the social-climbing skills of his middle-class contemporaries, perhaps put a little of the Waugh-Betjeman relationship into the friendship of Mark Members and J.G. Quiggin in A Dance to the Music of Time. Both are destined to become Men of Letters, but at the university have projected very different self-images – Mark Members writing modernist verse in the Day Lewis/Spender manner, and published in Public School Verse, Quiggin liking to think of himself as a Marxist working-class intellectual. In neither respect is either character like Betjeman or Waugh. The detail which is like, comes when Sillery the don whose rooms provide the nursery for so many careers and encounters confronts Quiggin and Members with his knowledge that ‘I had a suspicion that neither of you was aware of this … But you must live practically in the same street.’ Waugh, the son of a well-known publisher and man of letters, was born and grew up in Golders Green, an unpretentious suburb not far from West Hill, Highgate. Neither of them was like Mark Members or Quiggin in character but in both cases there was a fairly dramatic exit from the social world of childhood into a set of rich and aristocratic young people who were dazzled by their genius.
Ernest Betjemann fixed his son up with a job in the City with a firm of marine insurers – Sedgwick Collins & Company. He loathed it, and it was not long be
fore Basil Dufferin’s mother persuaded Sir Horace Plunkett to take John Betjeman as his private secretary. Plunkett, then in his seventies, was obsessed by the idea of forming agricultural co-operatives. ‘And being slightly off his head’, as Betjeman told Patrick Balfour, ‘has written the first chapter of a book of nine chapters no less than seventy-two times. He says the same thing over and over again and rarely completes one of his sentences which suits my style of thinking.’
This strange job lasted only a few months. Betjeman’s old Marlborough friend John Bowles stole the job off him, rather as Quiggin ‘takes over’ the novelist St John Clarke, who had employed Mark Members as his secretary in Powell’s Dance. There was the regulation spell as a prep-school master. Waugh had drawn on his teaching experiences to good effect and created the ludicrous Llanabba Castle in Decline and Fall. W.H. Auden was happy as a master at The Downs School, Colwall. He wrote a revue for the boys to perform and wanted Betjeman to come and hear his favourite boy sing one of the lyrics –
I’ve the face of an angel
I’ve got round blue eyes
But if you knew the things I do
It would cause you some surprise.
But where ignorance is bliss, my dears,
’Tis folly to be wise.
Betjeman got a job as the cricket master at Heddon Court Preparatory School in Barnet. One of the masters remarked to him, after a boys vs. masters match, ‘Do you know what Winters told me, Betjeman? He didn’t think you’d ever held a bat.’
As an English teacher, he tried to interest the boys in Alexander Pope and in Dr Johnson, without much success. He encouraged the boys who were interested in poetry, and even took favourites out to the cinema, choosing as unsuitable a programme as possible – the German lesbian film Mädchen in Uniform. ‘I think there are three types of schoolmaster’, Betjeman said later in life.
