BOOKS
Laudator temporis acti
Philip Hensher
COMING HOME by John Betjeman, edited by Candida Lycett-Green Methuen, £20, pp.537 Betjeman's letters, which have been issued in a two-volume selected edition, also edited by his daughter, Candida Lycett Green, reveal a personality perfectly attuned to getting people to do his bidding. In the fashionable jargon, Betjeman was a `passive-aggressive' personality. He was someone who, by projecting neediness and weakness, elicited the love and protection of a great many people, though, it must be said, also the uncontrollable irritation of quite as many — and thereby got his own way. He very much resembled Dickens's Harold Skimpole, who spent much of his life being forgiven — forgiven for silliness, forgiven for the narrowness of his talent, his waywardness, general unreliability and a surprising degree of bad behaviour, because he was so evidently vulnerable, so evidently in need of protection and praise. And in the end he largely got his own way.
There are some things, however, which were beyond achieving, and one of the interesting things about this generally inter- esting collection of miscellaneous prose is how much of it is devoted to lost causes. It is no accident that Betjeman is Oxford's favourite son; he was a high romantic who carried the idealism of the home of lost causes into adult life. Indeed, as soon as a cause started to look as if it might be won, he had something of a tendency to aban- don it. The early defence of modernism in architecture becomes significantly more muted once it starts to become a general tendency. The early, highly extravagant praise of Jacob Epstein — 'Probably no artist, save Rembrandt, has been such a master of light as Epstein' — was possible while the great mass of public opinion was opposed to modernist sculpture. When things started to go Epstein's way, Betje- man had to retreat into more recherché enthusiasms — for obscure or unfashion- able Edwardian poets, like Theo Marzials or Henry Newbolt, for deeply demo& architects such as Norman Shaw or the Australian Francis Greenway. In architec- ture, at least, taste has shifted very strongly towards Betjeman's point of view, his praise of Pugin and his more or less single- handed campaign to get a knighthood for Ninian Comper are not only deeply admirable, but make him seem something of a pioneer. I suspect, however, that Betje- man, whose tastes had changed and changed again, would not have carried on with quite such enthusiasm once the mass- es had discovered the delights of Victori- ana and the Edwardian baroque. By now, he would probably be writing pieces in praise of Erno Goldfinger.
Nothing is more interesting here than Betjeman's changing attitudes to suburbia. In a late-thirties piece about Bristol, we have an irritated final paragraph about 'vil- las which were as ugly, as out of keeping, as silly, as pretentious, as betimbered, as bestained-glassed, as berockeried as any of the worst outside London'. Launceston suf- fers from 'some disastrous lines of modem and sub-Frank Lloyd Wright villas'. But by the late 1940s this sort of thing had become so commonplace an opinion that Betjeman shifted into a curious gushing sentiment about the suburbs. Reviewing a book by J.M. Richards, he claims it represents his `own point of view':
He makes an effective plea for the fake half- timber, the leaded lights and bow windows of the Englishman's castle... it's no good being superior about `Jerrybethan' and 'suburbia' and making pleas for simplicity and restraint and 'good taste'...
No good, but that had never stopped Betjeman before.
The most persistent strain in all Betje- man's writings about architecture and other matters is, in a sense, the most perfect of lost causes, a hope that will never be ful- filled. Much of this volume is an elabora- tion on a single imperative, the desire that nothing should change. Buildings should not he knocked down, interiors should not be altered, cars should not besmirch ancient cities with their presence, the coun- try should not be built on. Sometimes it seems to be the England of the 1930s that ought to be preserved, sometimes the high Victorian landscape, sometimes the 18th century. The truth is that Betjeman's atti- tude to towns and townscapes was that of an elegist, a poet, who always preferred to write about the poignancy of loss and regret than make serious proposals for the way we are to live now. He irritated those who have to plan towns a great deal, and no wonder. Those who, from the Prince of Wales downwards, have tried to put what is fundamentally a poetic expression of mem- ory and nostalgia into terms of planning, of bricks and mortar, quickly find that Betje- man was not a town planner, but an admirably irresponsible poet, who said what he said precisely because he knew it was not feasible, and, like most poets, loved the impractical, the unattainable, whatever is lost forever.
There is a certain view of Betjeman as a populist, someone who spoke for the mass- es and who loved ordinary people. I'm not so sure. One of the persistent strains here is a certain superciliousness about unre- markable people. In one of his most famous television films, Metro-land, be includes a sequence at a ladies' luncheon club meeting in a house of Norman Shaw's, Grims Dyke. The speaker, a Mrs Elizabeth Cooper, remarks: `I think it's the most beautiful house in Har- row, one of the most interesting both archi- tecturally and historically.'
To which Betjeman's voice-over adds, `Dear ladies, indeed it is.' I don't really see why Mrs Elizabeth Cooper's appreciation of Grims Dyke deserves to be patronised,
Soon a thousand couples are moving beauti- fully, the cotton dresses of the girls like vivid tulips in all this pale cream and pink, the sports coats and dark suits of the men a background to so much airy colour. The rhythmic dance is almost tribal, so that even a middle-aged spectator like me is caught up in mass excitement, pure and thrilling and profound.
It's characteristic, in writing about work- mg-class pleasures, for Betjeman to make the emphatic point that he is not a part of it. That 'moving beautifully' encapsulates a profoundly patronising attitude. The sym- pathy and interest are always generalised, and there is never a sense of individual human beings. When he does write about individuals, as in two lamentable short sto- ries about working people, 'Move with the Times' and 'South Kentish Town', they are always types; we do not believe for a sec- ond that Betjeman has ever spent any time with commercial travellers or clerks, or is in the least interested in them. This sort of thing is amusing and effective in light verse, but when Betjeman tried to put the manner of his comic poems about gymkhanas, travelling salesmen or Slough into the flatter, more revealing light of Prose, the artifice and unreality of his char- acters becomes embarrassing. But if the praise of ordinary people and ordinary pleasures seems always forced and unconvincing, Betjeman's praise of build- ings and countryside is always genuine and occasionally thrilling. As I said, one could not erect any kind of coherent plan on his wayward enthusiasms, but that was not what they were there for. At his best and this well-chosen and readable antholo- gy contains a lot of engaging writing — he could evoke a building or a landscape with wonderful swiftness. His radio talk on the church of St Protus and St Hyacinth at Blisland in Cornwall makes one want to go there immediately. And the essays on indi- vidual towns are often remarkable, if read Principally as exercises of the emotions, as excuses for that sober, melancholy regret Betjeman did so much better than anyone else. Best of all, I think, are the essays on Poets. He sees, quite rightly, that the best Way to convey the flavour of a poet is to quote substantially, and quote well; his review of The Whitsun Weddings, his pieces °n Theo Marzials or Parson Hawker do not always compel agreement, but politely Include large amounts of his subject's work, and in each ease he succeeds in raising the reader's interest. He is an enthusiast, not a critic or polemicist, and if one is sceptical, in the end, about the substance of a great deal of his work, it is because enthusiasm on its own can only achieve so much.
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