Books & Poetry

The late poet and broadcaster branded ‘the nation’s teddy bear’ stares out from the cover of ‘Betjeman’ glazed of eye and pursed of lip, a semi-self-discarded pet in a crumpled heap on the floor of Cecil Beaton’s studio. His dress and mien recall vintage and parodic British Empire comedians from Naunton Wayne and Max Miller to Barry Humphries and Rowan Atkinson. Aptly so, as one thing everyone who knew Betjers agrees on is his irrepressible play-acting tendency, and how ill it concealed the complex fears and anxieties he was so concerned to conceal, except in his plain-speaking yet luminous poetry.  

As this near-incomparably popular poet was born exactly 100 years ago, the Eng Lit establishment will be wallowing in diverse forms of Betjemania for at least the rest of this year. Wilson’s 376 pages contrast sharply with the 2,000-plus of Bevis Hillier’s three-volume ‘John Betjeman: The Biography’, which the old boy himself asked Hillier to write in 1976. Wilson has the advantage of retracing and selecting from the ground so diligently gumshoed by Hillier. He has also accessed an archive of hitherto undisclosed revelations about JB’s private life, notably masses of letters from Penelope Chetwode, his wife for 50 years. And unlike Hillier, Wilson got full co-operation from their daughter Candida Lycett Green.Wilson’s debonair lightness of touch is more Betjemanesque than Hillier’s style which, while admirably exhaustive, can get a tad exhausting unless you’re a JB addict.

Wilson conveys his subject as ‘a depressive who lived on cycles from elation, when he loved clowning and showing off, to deep melancholy and self-doubt’. Betjeman suffered serial guilt-pangs for spending most of his married years with the docile and mega-supportive Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, and for his near-lifelong estrangement from his elder child Paul.Around two-and-a-half million of Betjeman’s ‘Collected Poems’ have been sold to date. I agree with Wilson that at least 30 of the poems will go on being read, quoted and remembered with unique pleasure and enlightenment by millions more for many moons to come.