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John Betjeman: The Biography

A not so cuddly teddy bear

Bevis Hillier
John Murray, 590pp, £18.99,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 16th August 2006

Hillier is on first-name terms with his subject; Wilson is not. His Betjeman is a darker one, and more selfish. His book zeroes in on Betjeman’s struggles with his faith, which he places at the dead centre of the life and work, and on his family difficulties, and does so with extraordinary imaginative sympathy.

The emotional cost of Betjeman’s long and all but institutionalised affair with Elizabeth Cavendish (she nursed him through his Parkinson’s disease) is muted in Hillier. It screams from the pages of Wilson — not least because he quotes extensively from his wife Penelope Chetwode’s letters. Ordinarily, they exchanged correspondence in whimsically misspelt ‘Plymmie-ese’ (among his nicknames for her was ‘Plymstone’), and its survival in even her angriest letters is especially painful — you can see a deep and old love, only partially smashed up.

I shall give you SIX MONTHS IN WHICH TO GET OUT OF YOUR CAVENDISH ENTANGLEMENTS and fulfil your various commitments in London after which you must chuck up the flat and Sec and live BETWEEN HERE AND CORNWALL [she wrote in 1956]. I WILL TAKE NO HALF MEASURES. I AM FED UP WITH YOUR DIVIDED LIFE AND COMPLETELY FALSE SET OF VALUES. Have the GUTS to tell your smart friends that you are tired of the rush and worry of London and that you are clearing out and WISH TO BE LEFT ALONE. [. . .] I’M DAMNED if I am going on with you in this perpetual dichotomy with insomnia, hysterical nerves, fear of losing your reputation etc etc. We have only got another 20 years [. . .] and it is simply not worth being as MISERABLE AS YOU ARE OWING TO PHOBIAS LISTED ABOVE. Take it or leave it. ELIZABETH OR ME. Yewrs very truly Plymstoine.

Betjeman, though, was unable to choose, and Penelope didn’t act on her ultimatum.