Betjers At 100

Poor John Betjeman. His life began with a German-sounding surname (it was Dutch), which did him no amount of good during an adolescence spent in an England's engulfed in its First World War against the "Hun." Nor did an enduring and altogether ridiculous obsession with a teddy bear named Archibald Ormsby-Gore, which not only recalled Sebastian Flyte's Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited but was likely the model for that stuffed tribute to arrested development. Charles McGrath sees a chummy parallel between Britain's most tele-friendly and "accessible" postwar (that's the second one) poet and its most hilariously nasty novelist:

Waugh and Betjeman were both middle-class, 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 that congregated around the legendary don Maurice Bowra — a group that included literary figures like Cyril Connolly, Henry Green, Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell — as well as the aristocratic Bryan Guinness and the Mitford sisters. Like Mary Lovell’s 2001 biography of the Mitfords, in fact, Wilson’s book is a reminder that British cultural life between the wars was almost claustrophobic in its smallness: everyone knew (and, in many cases, went to bed with) everyone else.

Philip Larkin wrote the best criticism of the poetry of "Betjers," who thought two very eccentric things for someone still stupidly yet inevitably thought of as a monument to something still stupidly yet inevitably thought of as "Englishness." They were 1) there is no such thing as a strict homosexual or a strict heterosexual, everyone's a bit of both; and 2) camp is the highest form of homage one can pay to the past.

Here is Betjeman's poem "Narcissus" about his boyhood love for a chap named Bobby. It takes as its symbolic pivot the eminent Victorian with whom Betjeman was always obsessed:

My Mother wouldn't tell me why she hated The things we did, and why they pained her so. She said a fate far worse than death awaited People who did the things we didn't know, And then she said I was her precious child, And once there was a man called Oscar Wilde.

It's true that A.N. Wilson, who wrote the requisite centennial biography, shoots out books like Ukrainian peasant women do babies, but McGrath makes a slight but significant mistake in saying that Betjeman

had no deeper register, and when he tried for a more serious note, he frequently fell into mawkishness and doggerel. It didn’t help his writing at all when in 1972 he was appointed poet laureate.

As it happens, one such public occasion — which admittedly took place before the laureateship — evinced a register deep enough to include those gem-like flames of irony and pessimism. It was Prince Charles' investiture in 1968:

Then, sir, you said what shook me through So that my courage almost fails: "I want a poem out of you On my Investiture in Wales." Leaving, you slightly raised your hand– "And that," you said, "is a command." For years I wondered what to do And now, at last, I've thought it better To write a kind of rhyming letter.

Somehow I can't quite see Andrew Motion, who, as the current poet laureate, wrote the not-bad introduction to the Collected Poems, also just published, putting the matter like that. (Motion certainly didn't aim at anything so modest as a "kind of rhyming letter" for the occasion of Charles and Camilla's wedding.)

The rest of this "ballad" peters out, focusing mainly on the weather and environs, until we hear the man who would be king referred to as a "victim." Then we get this closing couplet:

You knelt a boy, you rose a man. And thus your lonelier life began.

I won't end on such a trite note as to call that "Larkinesque" but… No, all right, I will. That's exactly what that is.