Betjeman: Writing the Public Life

Notes

187 s Notes Introduction 1 John Betjeman, “Pugin: A Great Victorian Architect” (BBC radio, 15 September 1952), in Coming Home: An Anthology of His Prose, 1920–1977, ed. Candida Lycett Green (London: Vintage, 1997), 275. 2 A title he earned in part because his public image was so lovable and in part because of his eccentric propensity for appearing in public in the company of his childhood teddy bear. It is often assumed that Betjeman was dubbed the “teddy bear to the nation” by a Times headline, upon the announcement of his appointment to the laureateship in 1972. However, that headline, “By Appointment: Teddy Bear to the Nation,” was not actually used until ten years later, when Alan Bell profiled the publication of Betjeman’s Uncollected Poems (Times, 20 September 1982, 5). 3 These included a star-studded West End charity gala attended by the Prince of Wales; a Cornish birthday party and concert; a steam locomotive dedication; numerous literary events and festivals; exhibitions at the Bodleian, the British Library, and Sir John Soane’s Museum; a week of dedicated Betjeman-themed programming on BBC radio 4; three new films on BBC Two; and rebroadcasts of Betjeman’s own documentary films on BBC Four and ITV. 4 “1830–1930—Still Going Strong: A Guide to the Recent History of Interior Decoration,” Architectural Review (May 1930); qtd. in Timothy Mowl, StylisticColdWars:BetjemanVersusPevsner (London: John Murray, 2000), 30. As Mowl notes, at the beginning of Betjeman’s career as an assistant editor at the Archie Rev—as he jocularly referred to it—he was “a functional s 188 Notes to pp. 2–4 modernist, though he remained, instinctively and paradoxically, a sentimental traditionalist” (32). 5 Stephen Neill, Anglicanism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1958), 418. The vagueness of Anglicanism can be frustrating. According to Neill, “the non-Anglican Churches are sometimes driven to distraction and infuriation by the uncertainties of Anglican action and the indefinable quality of Anglican thought” (387). For instance, the Anglican Communion is catholic but reformed, and it is nonconfessional but creedal; its traditional sources of authority—Scripture, tradition, reason (and in moments when these three offer no security, many Anglicans rely, as did Betjeman, on the even shakier authority of personal experience)—are no less seemingly exclusionary and mutually contradictory. 6 “‘Oh, to be in England . . .’” Listener, 11 March 1943, 295.This radio address has been retitled “Coming Home” in some collections. 7 “‘Oh, to be in England . . . ,’” 296. 8 Betjeman’s literary relationships have been fully explored by Bevis Hillier in three masterful and flawless volumes of biography: Young Betjeman (London: John Murray, 1988); John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love (London : John Murray, 2002); and Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter (London: John Murray, 2004). It is worth noting here in brief Betjeman’s personal connections with these three poets. Eliot by coincidence was one of Betjeman’s teachers at the Highgate Junior School in London; much later they developed a professional and eventually a personal friendship after Eliot pursued Betjeman as an author for Faber and Faber. Through their mutual and serious commitment to their Christian faith and through their shared delight in the quirks and eccentricities of English life, their personal bond grew (see John Betjeman, Letters, Volume One: 1926 to 1951, ed. Candida Lycett Green [London: Methuen, 1994, 2006], 142). Auden and Betjeman had known each other since their days together at Oxford, and it was Auden who put Eliot onto Betjeman’s poetry in 1936. Auden wrote an admiring preface to an American collection of Betjeman’s writings , in which he asserted that he was “violently jealous” of Betjeman’s poetry (introduction to Slick but Not Streamlined: Poems and Short Pieces by John Betjeman [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947], 9); he also dedicated his long poetic masterpiece, The Age of Anxiety (1944–1946), to Betjeman and referred to Betjeman’s “The Attempt” as among the most beautiful love poems ever written (see Betjeman, Letters, Volume One, 371). As for Thomas, a much more retiring and secluded figure than either Eliot or Auden, Betjeman was one of his earliest proponents, writing the introduction to Thomas’ Songs at the Year’s Turning: Poems, 1942–1954 (London: s Notes to pp. 4–7 189 Hart-Davis, 1955), 11–14. Thomas was among those who surprised Betjeman one November 1981 morning to present him in person with A Garland for the Laureate: Poems Presented to Sir John...