John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love
by Bevis Hillier
John Murray £25, pp480
In the 1960s and 1970s, John Betjeman was indisputably important. He was poet laureate; author of one of the most successful and popular volumes of poetry ever published in this country; a tireless campaigner for Victorian architecture and the person who, more than any other, encouraged the public to cease to revile the works of Butterfield, Street and Ninian Comper; an eccentric who would pop up endlessly on the box promoting the virtues of Metroland or small country churches.
He was the author of excellent guide books to Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, published by John Murray in the late 1940s and still in print 20 years later, as well as editor of the admirable Collins Guide to English Parish Churches and of the Shell Guides to English counties, which still provide the best concise introduction to English church architecture and include photographs by Bill Brandt as well as John Piper.
I remember in the 1970s listening to Betjeman's poetry set to jazz on an LP called Betjeman's Banana Blush, with a cover illustrated by Glyn Boyd Harte. Betjeman's ideas then appealed to a particular strain of English life, melancholic, preservationist and pastoral, lamenting the loss of architectural remains under the spread of suburbia.
Now, 30 years on, Betjeman comes across in his biography as comparatively minor, wilfully eccentric, more than slightly arch, inclined to snobbery and remembered by the daughter of the local farmer at Uffington in Berkshire, where he and his wife, Penelope Chetwode, once lived, as an 'airy-fairy nitwit'.
His extraordinary personal charm and prep-school sense of humour have faded. His wide circle of friends and allies, like John Sparrow and Maurice Bowra, are mostly dead. His books of poetry fill the secondhand bookshops of Hay-on-Wye. And only a collector would bother to travel round England with one of the original Shell Guides in hand, with their fake surrealist covers designed by Lord Berners and photographs of prize pigs.
Certainly, Betjeman does not seem to have done anything to deserve the magnificent, heroic, obsessional and, at the same time, faintly ludicrous three-volume hagiography which Hillier - himself a self-consciously Betjeman-esque figure - started to write in the late 1970s and of which the second volume has only just appeared. It documents in astonishing detail every aspect of Betjeman's working life, every person he met, everything he said, every practical joke, every bad poem, every hint of homoeroticism and everything that was said about him by people who did not necessarily know him well.
The result is stupendously boring and totally out of character with its subject, who had more than enough self-knowledge to have thought such excessive labour ridiculous. Who cares where he stopped for a drink one bank holiday driving to Lyme Regis? Who on earth could possibly be interested in who he sat next to in the offices of the Evening Standard when he was film critic there for a brief period in the early Thirties? Is anyone going to be remotely interested in the nannying arrangements for his son Paul?
The problem of such redundancy of piffling erudition is that it disguises the real interest of Betjeman's life. For example, the Shell Guides are of indisputable importance in the history of taste in the Thirties. They shifted public interest in architecture from the gothic and perpendicular to the late Georgian.
As Betjeman declared in a very characteristic teasing tone in the introduction to the first volume on Cornwall, published in June 1934: 'The antiquarian guide gives a full account of the history of the country, long extracts from Domesday Book and Leland, coupled with rhapsodical paragraphs on some thirteenth-century font. It has, however, rarely any remark to make on a building later than the reign of Charles I.' Yet Hillier's chapter on the Shell Guides gives a great deal of information about who worked alongside Betjeman in the offices at Shell-Mex House and almost nothing about the Cornwall guide.
More peculiar is the fact that Hillier has written a biography which makes relatively little reference to Betjeman's poetry. Yet what is interesting about Betjeman is his poetry and the ways in which his eccentric tastes, his offbeat sense of humour and liking for practical jokes were converted in his verse into something lasting and memorable, melancholic and visual.
I am not sure how highly regarded he is now as a poet, but he is interesting as a former poet laureate and someone who influenced Philip Larkin. Betjeman without the poetry is made to seem self-indulgent and tiresome. But Betjeman with the poetry is someone with an extraordinary ear for language and eye for the arcane, an inheritor of the nineteenth-century tradition of Tennyson and hymns. Without an interest in John Betjeman's poetry, I cannot imagine why Bevis Hillier has been so completely bonkers as to spend 25 years studying him.
