Betjeman Read online

  Later, in the 1950s, Shand repented of his early love of the Bauhaus. Perhaps such 1930s tastes are comparable to the absolutist political doctrines which seduced so many intelligent minds during that turbulent decade and which, with hindsight, appeared dangerous and grotesque. ‘I have frightful nightmares’, P. Morton Shand admitted in 1958,

  and no wonder, for I am haunted by a gnawing sense of guilt in having, in however minor and obscure degree, helped to bring about, anyhow encouraged and praised, the embryo searchings that have now materialized into a monster neither of us [i.e. neither Shand nor Betjeman] could have foreseen: Contemporary Architecture (= the piling up of gigantic children’s toy bricks in utterly dehumanized and meaningless forms), ‘Art’ and all that. It is no longer funny; it is frightening, all-invading menace.

  Even during this unlikely ‘modernist’ phase of Betjeman’s taste at the Archie Rev, however, we can see Our Man being distinctively himself. In 1933, for example, he was sent by the magazine to report on the opening of E. Vincent Harris’s Civic Hall at Leeds. To understand Leeds, he wrote, ‘one must acquire a Leeds sense of proportion. And this is done by realising two things about Leeds. First, it is a Victorian city. Secondly it is parochial. These two qualities are far more blessed than is generally supposed.’ Timothy Mowl is right to suggest that it was in this article that Betjeman discovered his distinctive voice. He had gone north predisposed to mock the neo-Georgian Civic Hall. But discovering the building’s popularity among the people he spoke to in pubs, and walking about the centre of Leeds and getting a feel for the place, he realised that buildings can not be detached from topography, and that the most important part of a building’s context is not just its physical locale, but its place in the lives of actual people who live and work in and around it.

  Equally distinctive, and Betjemanic, in its different way, was his article in the Architectural Review on the old Arts and Crafts architect Charles Francis Annesley Voysey. Still spouting the P. Morton Shand line about the Arts and Crafts school, Betjeman heralds Voysey as the forerunner of modernism. But it is clear, even at the height of his modernist enthusiasm, that what excites Betjeman about Voysey is a whole cluster of things which have nothing whatever to do with Gropius or Le Corbusier. There is the fact that here he was, a survivor of the Victorian Age, one of those figures such as Bosie Douglas or May Morris, William Morris’s daughter, or Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James’s secretary, whom he enjoyed befriending because they could provide a link with a past at once close in time and imaginatively distant. Crossing St James’s Park to meet him, Betjeman found a small, bird-like, clean-shaven man. (‘His jacket had no lapels, as he considered those “non-functional survivals of eighteenth century foppery”.’) Voysey, collaterally related to John Wesley and to the Duke of Wellington, was a high old Tory. On the very page in which Betjeman saluted him as an unconscious influence on Le Corbusier, there was a short piece by Voysey himself, which ended: ‘When Gothic architecture ceased to be fashionable, away went that lovely quality so often to be seen in the towns of Holland, where all the houses are different, though sympathetically respecting each other, like gentlemen. Now an angry rivalry, or a deadly dull uniformity, is the dominant feature of our street Architecture.’ This last is far more in tune with the real Betjeman than the disciple of P. Morton Shand trying to toe the Archie Rev line. And surely one reason that he responded to Voysey had nothing to do with Shand, or the modernists or his new colleagues? It was because Voysey, since his boyhood, had been one of the architects whose work he had seen at first hand overlooking Daymer Bay at Trebetherick. It was as much a part of Betjeman’s inner land- and seascape as the mountains of the Lake District that stayed with Wordsworth all through his sojourns in Cambridge, London and France.

  If Betjeman at the Architectural Review allowed himself to be influenced by P. Morton Shand, Obscurity Cronin and the others, he was no less bumptious than he had been at Oxford. One colleague remem-bered how he would burst into rooms without knocking, ‘just storming in when he wanted to’. If this failed to draw enough attention, there were the by now well-tried paths of exhibitionism. One lunchtime, he went out busking, singing music-hall songs outside a cinema until he had collected enough money to go in and see the film. On a hot summer’s day, he wore the ‘very briefest of swimming trunks’ in the office. Peter Quennell, his old Oxford friend and contemporary, came into the office one day and found Betjeman’s chair unoccupied, though heaped with papers. ‘Among them I saw a huge blotting pad, evidently quite new, on which, using a sharp pencil and decorative Gothic script, he had inscribed the now familiar couplet:

  I sometimes think that I should like

  To be the saddle of a bike.’

  Another visitor to the office, and one whose highly developed sense of herself as a ‘character’ was quite as strong as Betjeman’s own, was a young woman called Penelope Chetwode. The daughter of the former Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, she had a deep, and serious, interest in Indian religion, art and architecture. The India of her childhood was something which, even when we read about it today, is difficult to reconstruct in the imagination. Figures such as the Chetwodes lived like princes, surrounded by servants. The Commander-in-Chief’s house in Delhi was so big that ‘it’s like a pantomime palace and we live a kind of pantomime existence’, she wrote. In India she had befriended Robert Byron, the Etonian traveller and aesthete later famed for his Road to Oxiana, and it was he who was responsible for her meeting Betjeman. She wrote an article on the cave temples of Ellora in the Deccan, and Byron suggested she took it to the Architectural Review to show it to Obscurity Hastings. True to form, Hastings made an excuse not to meet a ‘new person’. Instead, she was shown into Betjeman’s office. He was on the telephone talking to Pamela Mitford.

  Eventually, the conversation came to an end, and she introduced herself, in her whining, cockneyfied voice which immediately enchanted him. She remembered,

  we both got down on our hands and knees and I showed him all the photographs I had taken of Ellora. He wasn’t the least bit interested in Indian art. Anyway the long and short of it was that he did publish it, and that’s how we met. And I was suddenly very attracted to him and started falling for him.

  Not long after meeting her, he presented her with a copy of Mount Zion.

  Penelope Chetwode, I always think, is not only tastefully dressed despite the hours she wears out her clothes in the Reading Room of the British Museum, but is also the possessor of unique social charm that has made her the cynosure of all eyes – whether surrounded by the horn rims of Bloomsbury Spectacle frames or the paint & powder of a high class drawing room. So compelling is her character that I am obliged to write for her this facetious dedication. I am that clever chap John Betjeman.

  6

  MARRIAGE

  This was not to be a marriage, like so many, which began in harmony, developed strains, and then fell apart. From the very beginning of the relationship between these strong personalities, there existed those tensions and difficulties which characterised the marriage until his death. There was his own jealously guarded sense of self, around which there existed, even in the days before his fame, something in the nature of a cult. There was also his ambivalence, his inability to commit wholly to one other person, his lack of a monogamous sense. For her part, there was an equally strong sense of self, an assumed or innate oddity. There was a need to be alone, and a need to travel, especially in India. And there was a resistance to the cult, a fierce resentment of it, and a desire to cut him down to size. For both of them, the tensions were part of the attraction, part of the love. So, this was never going to be an easy marriage.

  Marriages are all ultimately secrets. More is known of this one than of most, because they spent a lot of time apart, and Penelope, in particular, articulated her feelings about what was going on between them in long letters. In the end, however, the secret remains, and it is certainly no part of this book’s brief to pluck out a mystery. What is worth re
membering, through a marriage which was by any standards extremely rocky, is that there is something palpably genuine in the love he expressed for her at its beginning, in its middle and in its last years. He always was, as he so often signed himself to her, ‘Yours trewly Tewpie’. From an early stage, they had begun to write to one another in a peculiar lingo imitative of Penelope’s distinctive pronunciation of English and to address one another by nicknames. She was Plymmie, after the River Plym, a waterway which divides Devon from Cornwall, and with which she had no obvious connection. How she came to be associated with the Plym in his mind, I do not know. There is a psychological aptness in the name which he might or might not have intended. Once west of Plymouth he was in his own world, his world of childhood. She was the Guardian of the borderlands between his buried childhood self, with its teddy bear and its tantrums, and the grown-up world of friends and practicalities. He sometimes called her Philth or Propeller. He was Tewpie.

  In later years, Penelope said that she didn’t think herself pretty enough to marry an aristocrat so decided to settle for a member of the intelligentsia. There is a sulky eroticism in all the photographs of her at this age which belies any such protestation. She was gamine of feature, but large-breasted, and strong, fully aware of her charms. When she met Betjeman she had two other Johns in her sights – Johnnie Churchill, painter nephew of Sir Winston; and Sir John Marshall, an expert in Indian archaeology, married and in his fifties. Marshall was married with two children, and her love for Churchill waned.

  It was quite different with Johnnie, just young adolescents being in love with love & all mixed up with that awful Wagnerianism. Then Sir John was pure physical passion although I tried, at the time, to think it was archaeology. I was never in love with him after I returned from India & only sorry for him. But for you I have a love which can never exist for anyone else, I don’t want it to & I know it cannot.

  He for his part, while being overwhelmed by Penelope and obsessed by love for her, was perfectly able to fall in love with someone else. When Penelope first told her parents of her feelings for Betjeman, they were appalled. ‘We ask people like that to our houses, but we don’t marry them’, Lady Chetwode said – a remark which somehow parallels Randolph Churchill’s explanation of why he helped to elect Cyril Connolly and Peter Quennell to White’s Club (‘We like them to see how we live’).

  The parents took Penelope to India to get her out of Betjeman’s way. While she was away, Betjeman went to stay at Sezincote and met a childhood friend of Plymmie’s called Billa (short for Wilhelmine) Cresswell, a glossy-eyed, dark-haired young sensualist who, like Penelope, was a soldier’s daughter. Her father had been killed in the First World War; her stepfather, General Sir Peter Strickland KCB, was at Aldershot when Penelope’s father the field marshal was commanding there.

  ‘We didn’t go all the way’, Billa said coyly, ‘we lay on the sofa and kissed and cuddled.’ Later, she was to object to the green slime with which Betjeman’s teeth always appeared to be coated. The intimacies at Sezincote were enough for the young people to consider themselves engaged. In a long letter written from the Architectural Review after the Sezincote weekend to Billa, addressed as ‘Darling East End girl’ – East End of England, that is, she was of old Norfolk gentry – he gleefully spelt out the reasons why he would be so unsuitable a husband –

  (a) Loose character, weak and self-indulgent and egocentric. Extravagant and selfish.

  (b) No birth – parents estranged from me and one another – and not at all the right class for Generals. No hope whatever of their getting on. ‘After all she must marry a gentleman.’

  (c) Contracted already to someone who undoubtedly loves me and to whom it is going to be horrible to have to be unkind.

  (d) Income £400 a year. Suppose in the first year I make nothing extra (it is all luck and highly probable) then this with your £100 makes £500. £500 = £7.12.1 a week …

  That is the short part of the letter, but there follow hundreds of words protesting his love. As for Philth – ‘Dishonesty is the best policy – and the kindest at present. I love you, I love you, I love you.’

  A month later, he was expressing his love for Mary St Clair Erskine.

  It will annoy Philth very much as she is always inclined to be jealous of my affection for you. It will also console me as I am beginning to think I cannot afford to marry Philth, as she is really an expensive person like you, although, unlike you, she thinks she can live in squalor on my few hundred a year and enjoy it … Also I think I should soon become as dim as hell and be known as the common little man Penelope Chetwode married …

  Penelope was always enraged by his vacillations, and by his emotional infidelities. She was equally and insistently aware, given the protective feelings of Betjeman’s fans, that she needed some time to herself, and she needed to be allowed to assert her own independence and freedom, alongside her love for him. To be faced with the possibility of one’s fiancé becoming engaged to one’s close friends as soon as one is out of the country could only have been troubling. But there was surely more to it than simple jealousy or sexual insecurity. In shrewd diaries of old age, Anthony Powell noted: ‘Although admiring Betjeman as a poet, I always felt I was regarded by him as not sufficiently captive to the Betjeman cult.’ If this was an element of friendship, how much more must this have been the case in that of a potential marriage. After she had expressed dismay at his engagement to Billa, and broken off her own engagement to Betjeman, Penelope received a letter of protest from Bryan Guinness:

  I have no right to interfere in the lives of either yourself or John, and it would be proper for me to apologise before attempting to do so; but I shan’t, as it can do you no harm to hear my views, and if they annoy you it will be easy for you to tear up this letter and no doubt, to forget what it says … Now there can only be two possible reasons for which you have broken off your engagement to him. One is that you do not love him any more … There is however the alternative possibility that you do care for John and that you have broken off your engagement as a result of parental pressure conscious or unconscious. If so, I cannot say how much I deprecate your cowardice. John is a very great person. He is eccentric and needs looking after: but he has a genius of a very unusual kind. (He is incidentally a very great and old friend of mine, as you know, or I should not be writing this.) Such a person endowed as he is for your service, with great emotional capacity, is not lightly to be cast on one side because your parents were not at the same public school as his. If you are soon to live a life of your own unhedged by the false barriers of snobbery you must stand fast. As for putting your fancy foreign travel before the course of your duty and the inclination of your heart, I would not have believed it possible that the shallowest nature could have urged so basely selfish and mundane an excuse … I can’t bear to see John so unhappy – that is why I have been so impertinent.

  Guinness conveniently overlooks, in this letter, Betjeman’s capacity to hurt Penelope, and the fact that she adored her father (in many ways it was the deepest love of her life), and was in turn adored by him. She knew that her marriage to Betjeman would hurt the old man.

  On 28 June, however, she wrote a hugely long letter from the South of France, where she had gone to stay with an aunt.

  I love you all right, you needn’t fear that, BUT just stop & think for a moment (think for a very long time) before you ultimately decide what it will mean for you. It is quite different for me, I shall be living in different countries I am very partial to, I shall be working at things which really interest me among nothing but congenial people but you will be living in London which you so rightly hate … Would you really be happier if you had a nice domesticated wife to keep house for you? A wife who liked the things you liked but had no strong opposing instincts of her own?… If you marry me now I probably won’t be able to give you that for 4 or 5 years & even after that time I may go off periodically for several months at a time. This means you’ve got another few years ahead
of noisy smelly London, & you’ll get the same nerves and headaches & sick feelings as you’ve had in the past – and your extra money will go mostly in taxis and entertaining … When you suggested living in Dorset my own county it wasn’t from dislike of the English that I objected – it was simply because I suddenly realised that I’d get completely out of touch with all my Injun things & consequently get unpleasantly irritable. But living in London wouldn’t have helped an atom.