Young Betjeman by Bevis Hillier

(By coincidence, I discover that today is World Poetry Day...)

It's been 12 years since I last read a biography (Adam Smith). Not my most favoured genre, then. Yet I recently acquired (used of course) a three-volume biography of my favourite poet, John Betjeman (1906-84) by Bevis Hillier.

A real heavyweight of a read, over 1,600 pages plus footnotes and indices, a literary tour de force, incredibly well researched - so many references to private letters, student magazine back issues, interviews from people who remembered the Betjeman from his youth - so much detail, gathered over 25 years. Hillier's biography was published in three parts. Young Betjeman (covering  the years 1906-33) was published in 1988, New Fame, New Love (1934-58) in 2002 and The Bonus of Laughter (1959-1984) in 2004.

Having read the first volume, I look forward to starting the second one tomorrow. The biography - which Betjeman approved of, cooperating fully with the author - brings his familiar life story into much sharper focus for me.

Born into a well-to-do middle-class family, the son of a third-generation entrepreneur running a successful luxury-goods and cabinet-making business, Betjeman was obsessed by social class - convinced that he was looked down upon by the upper classes of similar wealth but of longer-standing aristocratic families. His childhood had everything that a young Edwardian gentleman should have enjoyed - a family car (before WW1!), nannies, private education, a pheasant-shooting and golfing father - and yet he was petrified of being thought common by his social betters.

Betjeman was incredibly well connected; even before his time at Oxford - a gay social whirl, luncheons and cocktails and a famously failed degree - he was educated alongside boys and young men that would 'rise and rule' in the words of the Harrow School song. He was friends with Randolph Churchill (Winston's son), the Mitfords, Lord Longford (as Frank Pakenham), W.H. Auden, and Labour politicians Hugh Gaitskell and Tom Driberg. He was taught by T.S Eliot at preparatory school and by C.S. Lewis at Oxford.

Such connections helped him enormously in getting jobs - and getting published - and getting good reviews. But his early success was due not only to being in the right place at the right time, it was also - as in any success story - down to his intense focus and work-rate. Even as a child, he knew he wanted to be a poet; armed with pencil and notebook, he'd set off to Hampstead Heath and record his feelings watching the sunset. As a ten-year old, he gave a handwritten booklet of his poems, entitled The Best Poems of Betjeman, to his teacher, T.S. Eliot, who had published The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock the previous year.

Socially, the young Betjeman strove to be popular, overcoming his perceived inferiority by playing the clown, using humour as a defence mechanism. He used his innate intelligence and quick wit to create a persona that would see him invited to the best parties in stately homes. Bevis Hillier interviewed scores of people who knew him from school, from Oxford and from his early years as a teacher and journalist before he became a published author. 

The overall picture of him as a young man turns out far more complex than that which Betjeman himself presents in his autobiographical poem, Summoned by Bells (1960). Young Betjeman covers much the same ground, ending the story a few years later than the poem, up to the publication of his first tomes and his marriage to the Hon. Penelope Chetwode, daughter of Field Marshal Philip Walhouse Chetwode, 1st Baron Chetwode, 7th Baronet of Oakley, GCB, OM, GCSI, KCMG, DSO, and Lady Alice Hester Camilla (née Cotton) Chetwode, daughter of the Hon. Richard Cotton. The son of a tradesman, as John Betjeman thought the aristocracy saw him, had scaled the social ladder.

The book's rich detail of upper-class life in prewar England fascinated me - looking at matters through a Polish prism, I can see just how different, and unique, England is.

With their estates, wealth, learning, aesthetic pleasures, untroubled by invasion, occupation or revolution, England's nobility conferred upon the country a set of solid foundations upon which to create great literature - helped by a language that lends itself to the clear communication of deep ideas. Continuity, tradition, security - and class division that broadly-accepted creativity could overcome. Then there is the overwhelming advantage of English, which by a series of historic processes (empire, Hollywood, rock'n'roll and the internet), has become the de facto global language.

[Poland's inter-war culture was so different - a state trying to reestablish itself after being off the map of Europe for 123 years, a nation rebuilding a single cultural identity from people who grew up in three different occupations in a country that had been crossed by the front line several times during WWI. Then there's Oxford - a seat of learning without parallel, producing the nation's talents on an industrial scale, as many Nobel laureates in literature (five) as Poland. And Poland's is ranked Number 6 in the global ranking for Nobel laureates in literature! - Forgive the Poland digression - it reminds me of the 19th-century joke about the French, the English and the Polish students who had to write a dissertation about the elephant. The French student's dissertation was The Amorous Life of the Elephant. The English student's one was called Class Stratification in Elephant Society; the Polish student titled his dissertation: The Elephant and the Polish Question.] 

More Betj biog soon (Part 2 reviewed here).


This time two years ago:
The mature mind's power over the instincts

This time seven years ago:
Welcome to spring

This time eight years ago:
Giving way or standing firm?

This time nine years ago:
Summerhouses near Okęcie

This time ten years ago:
A truly British icon