Middle of the railroad

^^ A new biography of John Betjeman, the great chronicler of the English middle classes, is a judicious account of the late poet's life, loves and character. By Charles McGrath

Collected poems. By John Betjeman. Illustrated. Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19.10

Betjeman: A life. By A N Wilson. llustrated. Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, €20

The poetry of John Betjeman is a little like Marmite – a staple of British life for which there is no equivalent elsewhere, and probably not much appetite for it either. If you didn't grow up with the stuff, it takes some getting used to.
Betjeman, who died in 1984, was the great chronicler of English middle-classness. He wrote about churches and churchgoing, trains and train stations, public houses, seaside golf, pony clubs, jolly girls playing tennis and field hockey. And he did so in verse so clear and accessible, so old-fashioned in rhyme and metre, that it won him an immense popular audience. He was the bestselling British poet since Tennyson and in time he became a beloved television celebrity as well – a balding, portly chap with not very good teeth who took his viewers on tours of Victorian churches and seaside piers. He was once described as “looking like a highly intelligent muffin” and the shambling appearance only added to the appeal. He was revered because he was both the celebrant and the apparent embodiment of an almost vanished brand of Englishness.
In his new biography, A N Wilson compares Betjeman's popularity to that of Princess Diana, which seems way off the mark. But even now, in the centennial year of his birth, Betjeman is a sufficiently big deal in England. He merited not only a commemorative tea towel but frontpage headlines when early copies of Wilson's book turned out to contain a purported love letter from Betjeman that was in fact an acrostic hoax, with the first letter of every sentence but the first spelling out a scatological insult to Wilson himself. The perpetrator was eventually revealed to be Bevis Hillier, self-appointed keeper of the Betjeman flame and the author of a three-volume biography, which Wilson, famously waspish, had trashed both in public and in private.
Wilson's book, the latest to come off his seemingly non-stop assembly line, is a typically Wilsonian product – swift, efficient and a little glib at times. It's not un-fond of its subject, but is more judicious in its claims than Hillier's overstuffed version and, with access to some family correspondence that Hillier never saw, it's more frank and more gossipy about the ironies and oddities of Betjeman's personal life.
To begin with, Betjeman, far from being a man of the people, was a climber and a bit of a snob, who preferred the company of the clever and the well-born. In this respect he resembled his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh, with whom he had a good deal else in common – apparently including Betjeman's wife, whom Waugh claimed to have slept with in the process of converting her to Roman Catholicism.

Waugh and Betjeman were both middleclass, though Waugh's father, a publisher, was more genteel than Betjeman's, who had made his money selling something called the Tantalus – a drinks tray that could be locked up to prevent the servants from tippling and pilfering. After unpromising careers at prep school, both went to Oxford, where they slept with boys before gradually making the transition to women and where they instinctively gravitated to the smart set.
Both Waugh and Betjeman dropped out of Oxford without taking a degree, both taught for a while – disastrously – in dismal secondary schools and both, devoutly religious by this point (Waugh a Catholic, Betjeman staunchly Church of England), found vocations as writers. Betjeman, who had always loved old buildings, initially made his living and his reputation writing for Architectural Review and by 1933 he was sufficiently established to marry Penelope Chetwode, the pukka, horsey daughter of the former commander of the British Army in India. It was an unlikely match from the start and got weirder as it went on. He called her Philth or Propeller; she called him Tewpie and all her life wrote to him in imitation Cockney: “Darlin Tewpie, oi AVE got confidence in yer earnin and writin powers, oi thinks yew earns a tremendous lot boot oi know it is in er soul-destroyin way and that nearly arf is removed in taxes.”
Chetwode was a premature New Ager who studied Sanskrit, flirted with mysticism, turned the house into an animal sanctuary and died while on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas. But it was her 1947 conversion to Catholicism (under Waugh's influence) that effectively ended the marriage and by the early '50s Betjeman had more or less permanently transferred his affections to Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, sister of the Duke of Devonshire, one of the richest men in England.  
Divorce was out of the question for Betjeman, because of his religious convictions, and at some level he remained attached to Chetwode. He made dutiful visits to her while living on his own in a flat in London and enjoying a busy life – a social climbers fantasy, really – with Elizabeth and her circle, which included even the royals. Betjeman was not without guilt over the pain these arrangements caused, but the person who suffered most was Elizabeth, who not only sacrificed her own hopes of a family but wound up taking care of him during a long decline when he suffered from Parkinsons disease and bouts of depression and persecution mania.
Very little of Betjeman's personal sorrow makes its way into the poetry, except in his recurring theme of yearning and nostalgia for a simpler time and in a surprising number of poems that are essentially fantasies about being overpowered by strapping young women. Wilson writes, “If most of Betjemans poems were suits, you would say that they needed at least two more fittings at the tailors,” and concludes that, of the hundreds he wrote, only 30 are truly first-rate. That seems a little on the generous side.
Betjeman's taste in poetry overlapped with his taste in architecture: he had no use for the modern. He was actually a friend and former prep-school pupil of TS Eliot but he turned his back on Eliot's revolution and clung instead to the model of the Victorian poets who had shaped him in his youth. To contemporary ears much of his work sounds a little quaint and tinkly, like the old music hall songs he loved so much:
Beside those spires so spick and span
Against an unencumbered sky
The old Great Western Railway ran
When someone different was I.
To coincide with the publication of Wilson's biography, Farrar, Straus & Giroux is bringing out Betjemans Collected Poems. Wandering around in this hefty volume is a little like inspecting one of those great Victorian railway hotels he was always campaigning to save. You cant help marvelling that people once built edifices like this and noting that, though you might not want to stay in one yourself, for generations of edified travellers they had an appeal that the modern equivalent – spare, modest, virtually without ornament – can seldom match.
© New York Times