An early fellow member of the Victorian Society and later to become its very efficient president was the austere German refugee scholar Niklaus Pevsner. Their relations were scratchy from the start. Betjeman was an emotional man and Pevsner regarded his love of Victorian architecture as a matter of the heart rather than the head. He regarded Pevsner as an inhuman Teutonic bore, a cold fish, an academic whose aesthetic and scholarly appreciation of architecture neglected the fact that human beings must live in the buildings architects designed. He often presented himself as a fraud, a benign teddy-bear of a man. But as a reviewer of A Few Chrysanthemums remarked of his writings, ‘It is rather as if something friendly, familiar and furry, easily frightened, had turned at bay and bitten one in the bathroom.’
He came to hate Pevsner and bit him very hard indeed. He was capable of harsh treatment of his wife, in what was always a tense marriage. He resisted all Waugh’s bullying attempts to make him abandon High Anglicism for the Catholic Church. When his wife converted to the true faith the marriage collapsed.
Even his fiercest critics must acknowledge that, like Hilaire Belloc, he was in his short poems a master of the unexpected line and rhyme:
Her sulky lips were shaped for sin,
Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack’d,
The strongest legs in Pontefract.
He lacks Milton’s majesty and cosmic vision. His poetry is limited in range and fixed in a specific time and place. His Oxford, where life was ‘luncheons, luncheons, luncheons all the way’, with the aesthetes dining at the George and the hearties eating in college, would be unrecognisable to today’s undergraduates. The England of the 1920s and 1930s was a country where class distinctions still mattered. In our classless society they hardly matter at all. He parodies the ghastly good taste of a pretentious upper-middle class into which he was born. What person under 60 would catch the implications in one of his best remembered lines: ‘Phone for the fish knives, Norman’?
Atheist though I have been since I was 13, my interest in religious experience as such has led me to attend Anglican weekend retreats. At them Betjeman was a star performer. His discourses on the minutiae of High Church rituals seemed to me a throwback to the days of Pusey and Newman rather than an effort to meet the challenge of Darwinism. Does all this mean that his audience will be limited and that he is losing out to the modernists?
I have always suspected that it is Betjman’s sincerity, for Larkin the test of a true poet, that made some of his best poetry live. In his monumental biography Bevis Hillier suggests that it was his sense of humour. This is abundantly present in Tennis Whites and Tea Cakes, and it makes the book a thoroughly enjoyable read.
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