Betjeman: A Life

by A.N. Wilson

John Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman , published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye , from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, History, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Betjeman, Britain's poet laureate, who died in 1984, was the best-known English poet since the heyday of Lord Byron in the early years of the 19th century.
His verses - his Collected Verse has sold more than two million copies - were as familiar in the lounge bars of Nottingham and Plymouth as in the salons of Park Lane and Belgravia.
In this sympathetic and elegant biography, AN Wilson presents a rounded portrait of a much-loved but often troubled man.
Betjeman's contradictions are many. Born with a Dutch name, he strove to establish and understand his Englishness in an era in which few thought about the idea in anything but opaque terms. Often caricatured as a happy-go-lucky and whimsical character, his life was coloured by melancholia and depression. And his stout Anglicanism was challenged by his lifestyle. He had a wife, lived much of his latter years with a mistress and relished the bachelor life until illness made this impossible.
Am improbable star of television, the assertion is that his Faustian pact with the medium stunted his poetic growth. And Betjeman's poor relations with his son, Paul, are laid out in all their stark, quotidian horror.
But Wilson is keen to point out, correctly, that John Betjeman was a poet of the first rank, and holds up a corpus of 30 magnificent works to prove his point. Though mocked by some as a master of doggerel, there can be do doubt that he was a lyric poet of great potency.
This is a crisply written work which is recommended to Betjemanophiles and newcomers alike.

[D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few reasons I wanted to read this book, and why I enjoyed it:

The England that Betjeman tried to preserve (architecture, Anglo-Catholicism, etc) is the England that I fell in love with as a kid (through reading and listening to things like Vaughan Williams' "Oxford Elegy") and which as I grew up I realized doesn't exist any more, much to my sadness. So I sensed a kindred spirit in Betjeman.

As a huge Waugh fan, I was excited to read about the inspiration for the famous teddy-bear toting Oxford student from Brideshead Revisited
.

And in a modern poetry course in grad school, the professor used a Betjeman poem as an illustration of what was wrong with poetry before modern poetry "rescued" it, in his opinion. So of course I became a Betjeman fan on the spot.

This was a very well-written biography that gave me a good sense of the man and his work. I'm looking forward to rereading some of his poetry now and perhaps digging up some of the BBC programs he did.

[Adrian Matthews · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really hard going because this biography was not well written. I can't quite work out whether AN Wilson just knocked this out quickly or what. There is so much raw material to work with. I got very little insight into the poems themselves and the context in which they were written. Hugely disappointing.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have had this for a too long a period in my "reading" category which is not technically correct, so i am trying to rectify that now. When I read a biography (or autobiography) of a writer (Proust, Joyce etc) or poet (Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, John Clare etc) I am inclined to attempt to concurrently read some of the work refereed to therein and invariably become side-tracked in the minutia of his or her life. OK that being said I can adequately comment now on this book. A.N. Wilson is a good writer his "After the Victorians" is especially worth the effort, however sometime the sensibility and life of a poet is best interpreted through the vision of a fellow poet i.e. Andrew Motion (his books on Larkin and Keats). This is a good biography and not intended as a literary criticism of Betjeman's work so full marks to Wilson on that score, he handled the Topsy-turvey world which John inhabited with even-handedness and understanding. I would have liked just a little more cross-referencing of areas of John's life that ended up in his work.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the writings of A.N. Wilson and this biography is no exception. Betjeman was a popular English poet of the 20th century and became widely beloved because of his easily grasped poems. He was a polymath and became well-known as a presenter on early BBC-TV on such subjects as churches, architectural preservation especially of Victorian era buildings, and the English country-side. A devout Anglican and a married man, he nevertheless lived most of his adult years with his mistress, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. He counted among his friends the Queen Mother. Wilson shows us a complex person yet a charming person. He was intensely loyal to his friends and worked hard to maintain friendships yet he was estranged from his wife and son. Wilson obviously likes his subject and wants us to know him in all his complexity.

[David Cheshire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very likeable biography, good on the life and the poems. Betjeman was the literary equivalent of Harold Macmillan. Both married Devonshire women (the big-shot aristo family, not the county). Both marriages turned out unsatisfactorily (Macmillan the injured party, Betjeman the injurer). Both affected upper-classness, yet both came from "trade." Both positioned themselves firmly within "tradition", yet both pioneered modern personae (Macmillan consumerism and wind of colonial change, Betjeman tele personalityship and album-releases. And both only got through life hiding behind their respective masks. But it's impossible not to like Betjeman in these pages, not so much despite his loopy Anglicanism, his dotty poems and his reckless infatuations, more because of them.

[Jbondandrews · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this deserves a 2.5, though it was muddly in places. I think Wilson wanted to do a good biography it didn't work out that way. He spent for too many pages on Betjeman's religious side and on his relationship with Cavendish. He didn't really focus on the literary side and family.

[Katharine Holden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprisingly uninteresting and seems to slip over bits that might have been interesting.

[Avril · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh dear. I HATED this book. I would have given up halfway through except I have a complex about not completing books once I have started them. But maybe I just hated the subject of this book, John Betjeman, apparently a man of great charm, beloved by his friends, who, to my mind, needed a good kick up the bum. He seems to have been dreadful to his wife and his son; he prevented his long term mistress from having the marriage and children that she wanted; he apparently never did a day’s work in his life; Wilson says he wrote 30 decent poems; he encouraged insular English people in their Little England-ness. He was deeply committed to the Church of England and his faith was important to him, but I wonder how ON EARTH his various Anglo-Catholic confessors offered him absolution given that he had no intention of ending the adultery that was central to his life. And as for the author’s appreciation of him - just UGH.

With the ridiculous idea that England’s churches need to be maintained because English atheists just like to have them there, I have NO sympathy. Wilson writes of English lovers of Betjeman that “They loved their Church, even if they did not pretend to believe its doctrines and did not wish to attend many of its services.” I’m sorry, but why should churches have to keep buildings open for people like that? If people don’t attend a church, why should they get to keep it as a pretty architectural destination for an evening walk? Goodness, this book makes me want to spit.

Oh well. At least Betjeman is dead. But A. N. Wilson is only the age of my parents and probably has a good few years left in him to document Brexiteers avant la lettre.

[Lesley Tilling · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading the life of Betjeman as I am sure he enjoyed living it. He had great friends all the way through his life, and a sense of himself as a poet. He had an interesting wife who loved him (and he loved her) and a succession of other women with whom he was intimate, until one of them stuck, and she became a wife in all=but=name. She was the sister of the Duke of Devonshire. Betjeman knew many interesting people from Evelyn Waugh to Barry Humphries and Richard Ingrams, and he loved architecture and hated to lose examples of Victorian England, because what replaced it seemed so lacking in beauty or even any aspiration to beauty.

He went travelling and enjoyed that, apart from one trip to Cincinatti, and spent the war in Dublin being charming to everyone and trying to win friends for the UK's interests. He often lived in houses which were very Spartan which was quite weird because he did love his creature comforts.

He loved his religion (HighChurch C of E) and was friends with a great number of clergymen even though he was irreverent in his language and about sex. So absolutely not po-faced. But believing in God's love for us and the divinity of Christ. Wilson picks out the poems of Betjeman's which he thinks are the best and says, without any equivocation, "these are the best." I always find that kind of certainty quite arrogant. But he picks out my favourites so perhaps I am a good critic too!!!

It's very well-written and very readable.

[Fionnbharr Rodgers · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sloppily written. A quote: ‘Louis MacNeice, a little older than Betjeman, grew up to be a very different kind of poet.

Betjeman was born in 1906; MacNeice in 1907. I spent five minutes staring blankly ahead, and another five googling the symptoms of a stroke.

However, I am perfectly fine; it seems Wilson has a natural proclivity for flippancy, as he also writes about CS Lewis (as a young man) that he was ‘anti-religious as perhaps only those born in Northern Ireland can be.’ As has been established, Wilson struggles with the concept of chronology, but learned readers will be aware that CS Lewis was not born in Northern Ireland, for the same reason as Jesus Christ was not born in Israel; and the north of Ireland of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century to which Lewis was born into would have been a model of quiet piety.

I now have two volumes of Betjeman’s letters beside me, so I am going to pillage those for any information rather than relying on Wilson’s second rate, second hand nonsense.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always enjoyed the poems and TV films which JB produced but this book cast a whole new light on his work. I dont normally read biographies but I found this both illuminating and enjoyable, putting into context so many of his works.

[David Highton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting biography of a man who did not become Poet Laureate until he was 66. Very well known on TV in the 1950s and 60s.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine life of poet and lover of architecture John Betjeman. Just the right length. Wilson appreciates Betjeman the way I do, which inclines me to like the book. He wrote a little over 200 poems, around 30 of which were very good. This is better than 99.9 percent of all other poets. What has always struck me about Betjeman is his love for the people and the land and the buildings that are his subjects. This love is direct and artless and unaffected. Irony and obscurity are not Betjeman's metier. He is not a poet of angst and gloom, though he is equally no pollyanna. I began to take Betjeman seriously when I discovered that Philip Larkin loved and respected him; Larkin knew what was good and what was bad. Among the best two or three biographies I've read in the last decade.

[Vicky Tazzyman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is hard going, it reads like a disjointed university essay and I couldn't finish it. I loved A.N Wilson's books on Queen Victoria and Albert, he came across to have a real interest and insight into them, whereas this seems to have been written to order. Disappointing.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whilst well told, it's a sad story of parental failure, marital unfaithfulness and poetry.