BEING BETJEMAN(N)

JONATHAN SMITH

Galileo, 224pp, £9.99

Jonathan Smith is a playwright and novelist who in the course of his work has imagined being Albert Speer, Winston Churchill, Auguste Rodin and Alfred Munnings among others. But being Betjeman was ‘a much deeper thing than merely taking him off or ventriloquising’. When he first wrote a piece in the poet’s voice he felt he was, ‘in quite a disturbing way, inhabiting his skin’. He had a breakdown while being Betjeman, and then he developed Parkinson’s, the disease of Betjeman’s old age. Smith proceeded to write Mr

Betjeman’s Class and Mr Betjeman Regrets, two much-admired radio plays. Benjamin Whitrow played the older Betjeman shortly before his death, when Robert Bathurst took over the role.

Now Smith has written a beguiling hybrid of a book, which mixes dramatised scenes from Betjeman’s life – rows, mainly, with his father, his wife and his son – with discussions of poems, some thirdperson narrative about Betjeman and some first person passages about Smith’s admiration for the poet, for which he was much mocked at Cambridge in the 1960s. Nigel Andrews in the Literary

Review praised Smith for bringing alive both the light and the dark in the poet’s make-up, and for recognising that he ‘took a kind of pleasure, even pride, in his transgressions and shortcomings’. It was a book ‘every Betjeman lover – and, come to that, every Betjeman mocker – should read’. Benjamin Riley in the New

Criterion described it as ‘a diverting, and highly personal, account’ while John Sandoe’s, the booksellers, liked it so much that they have produced a limited hardback edition.