On the trail of John Betjeman’s ghosts
Two plays shed new light on the complicated life of England’s favourite poetic uncle. Orlando Bird speaks to one of the stars
When did you last hear of a poetry book selling in the millions? Or any book, for that matter, that isn’t about magic or bondage? John Betjeman’s Collected Poems – with their crisp vignettes of suburban tennis matches and inedible sandwiches, dusty pubs and absentminded clergymen – might not sound like literary gold-dust, but sales since their publication in 1958 have almost reached the 2.5 million mark, and they’re still going strong.
When Betjeman died, as the Poet Laureate, in 1984, he was the nation’s favourite poet (as his only real competition, Philip Larkin, willingly acknowledged). Thanks to his work as a broadcaster and architectural campaigner, he was a celebrity, too, embedded in the public imagination: an avuncular chipmunk, swaddled in an old raincoat, grinning from a train window or checking out some misericords on the BBC. Twinkly, wistful, gently patrician – people loved him.
Things are never so simple, though. To viewers of Metro-land (his BBC documentary paean to the commuter counties) or the more self-explanatory A Passion for Churches, Betjeman might have embodied a certain kind of Englishness as completely as his poems – but that wasn’t the whole story. His life was marbled with insecurities, frustrations and busted relationships. And then there was the question of literary worth. His direct, euphonious poems were easy prey for critics, who routinely trashed them (ignoring their ambivalent, melancholic undercurrents); and for many readers they’re still something of a guilty pleasure. Betjeman was always defiant, refusing to budge in his devotion to clarity, but I’m not sure he was joking when he complained about not being “taken seriously by the TLS”.
These themes are the focus of two radio plays by Jonathan Smith, to be broadcast over Christmas:
Mr Betjeman’s Class, about his early twenties, and Mr Betjeman Regrets, which is set towards the end of his life.
“He was not an easy person – really not,” says Robert Bathurst, who plays Betjeman in the second of these. “He mistrusted his celebrity persona, and I think one of the reasons was that he wasn’t this cuddly teddy bear of fable. He had a complicated and rackety life … the second play is full of late-life regret, about the relationship he had with his wife, and his son … and the opportunities missed along the way.”
Bathurst – probably best known as hapless posh boy David Marsden in Cold Feet – came to the production late. Benjamin Whitrow (a brilliantly weary Mr Bennet in the 1995 film of Pride and Prejudice) was originally cast, but he died halfway through recording the second play.
Though separated by 20 years, Whitrow and Bathurst went back a long way, to 1983. “He was the lead in Noises Off [by Michael Frayn], which was my first proper job, and we’d been mates ever since. He’d had a really rotten year, for health reasons, so he was delighted to be asked to play Betjeman… I went to his funeral, then later, at his house, his wife suggested I offered myself as his replacement.”
Bathurst was in an odd position, having to summon up the spirit of Betjeman in the shadow of his friend (both his and Whitrow’s voices are in the second play). “I had to get over that… it was strange. I had to work out where his voice came from, fairly high up in the chest. But I’m not trying to impersonate Ben – it’s announced that he didn’t make it to the end.”
I can’t persuade Bathurst to give me a sample. But at several points he breaks into verse and his voice changes, presumably into the one he was practising for weeks. Its tone is distinctly Betjemanian – slightly fusty, like a Fifties public service broadcast, but always on the verge of mischief. Betjeman’s poems, likewise, are traditional but not stuffy; they take on the big themes – love, death, faith, doubt – without sacrificing their light touch. They lead a kind of double life.
Bathurst believes the first play is alive to these complexities. As a title, Mr Betjeman’s Class can be read in two ways. It picks up just after he’s been kicked out of Oxford and taken the once well-trodden route from that to prep school teaching. But it also hints at one of his lifelong anxieties. “He was from Highgate Hill,” says Bathurst, “very conscious of the fact his father was in trade, making fine ornaments for other people to use. At university he was mixing with a more landed lot.”
In what universe, you might wonder, does a Highgate upbringing leave someone feeling socially disadvantaged? But Betjeman felt it, and Bathurst reckons it was creatively useful. “He had a very good eye for that world, and it often takes an outsider to write about it.”
It wasn’t all ironic detachment, though. Betjeman really did spend his undergraduate years wandering around with a teddy bear and cultivating the art of wellbred bitching (he described his contemporary Louis Macneice as “that f------ little Oxford aesthete who lives near Belfast”.)
Then he married Penelope Valentine Hester Chetwode. The breakdown of their marriage, and his marathon affair with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, is a central subject in
Mr Betjeman Regrets, as are his failures as a parent, for which his son, Paul, never forgave him.
In a spectacular rebellion against his father’s compromised Anglicanism, Paul moved to America and became a Mormon. (Betjeman’s friend, the classicist and professional aphorist Maurice Bowra, was delighted: “It combines the religious fervour of the mother and the polygamous tendencies of the father.”)
Bathurst thinks the second play gets “much closer to Betjeman [than] the BBC films and [1977] Parkinson interview. It’s human, it’s sad, it’s crumbling”. Betjeman wrote of “trains and buttered toast”, valorised “Fuller’s angel-cake, Robertson’s marmalade”, but also told God in On a Portrait of a Deaf Man: “You ask me to believe You and/ I only see decay.”
There’s a theme that won’t go away. Betjeman might be seen as the reverse image of Larkin (for whom “Life is first boredom, then fear”), but he can be bracingly bleak too.
So does Betjeman still speak to us? I suggest to Bathurst that the gulf between suburban and metropolitan lives, such a dominant aspect of Betjeman’s work, seems particularly relevant today. “Well, no one can afford to live in the centre now, so his world is increasingly ambient. But I don’t see why everything should be relevant. The poems are about life as it was, and we shouldn’t be so hung up on the present that we don’t look at history. He wrote through his own particular prism with great wit, taste and also insecurity, and we should enjoy him for what he was.”
It’s a fair point. After all, Betjeman was never really cool, even 70 years
‘He was not an easy person – really not. He was not this cuddly teddy bear of fable. He had a rackety life’
ago. On the other hand, maybe there’s one sense in which he should be more relevant today. I can’t claim to love the Victoriana and the nostalgia and the jokes about non-u words, but it’s a shame we don’t have anyone quite like him now.
I suppose you could cite Alan Bennett, if he were on TV more – or Stephen Fry, if he were on TV less. But Betjeman was a genuine, ever-present ambassador for poetry, and he got lots of people reading it; these days poetry has an even tougher time than fiction.
This resonates with Bathurst.
His latest project is a show based on the work of his favourite poet of all, Christopher Reid, and he’s had to be creative to attract audiences. “I didn’t use the word poetry once in the marketing – I called it ‘lyrical narrative’. And we got them all in before they realised it was in verse.”
I think Betjeman would have approved. Mr Betjeman’s Class is on BBC Radio 4 at 2.15pm on Christmas Day; Mr Betjeman Regrets is at 2.15pm on Boxing Day