The dilettante and the dons
Volume 18 Number 3, Trinity 2006
The undergraduate John Betjemann posing as a Wildean aesthete.
Before John Betjeman (1906-84) became Sir John Betjeman, Poet Laureate, national treasure and cuddly celebrant of the suburbs, he was John Betjemann, 'artiste et arriviste', flamboyant idler and thorn in the side of the University authorities at Oxford, who far from cherishing the youthful bard of Bardwell Road and his faithful teddy bear, Archibald Ormsby-Gore (the progenitor of Sebastian Flyte's Aloysius), dismissed them both nullum honorem: with no honour.
The son of relatively prosperous but undoubtedly bourgeois cabinet-makers of German descent - hence Betjemann - the young John was educated at Highgate Junior School, The Dragon School in North Oxford, and finally at Marlborough College, where his contemporaries included Louis MacNeice and Anthony Blunt. A precocious writer of verse, at the age of 10 Betjeman presented the manuscript of 'The Best Poems of John Betjeman' to his favourite teacher at Highgate, 'the American master', Mr T S Eliot. The manuscript no longer survives, but the meeting between the austere high priest of Modernism and the affable taxonomist of Metroland remained one of the few happy memories of Betjeman's schooldays. 'Thank God I'll never have to go through [that] again', he wrote of his time at Marlborough, before entering Magdalen College as a commoner in Michaelmas term 1925.
One of Oxford's most beautiful colleges - Magdalen's emblem, the Waynflete lily was said to epitomise both the buildings and the students, who toiled not, neither did they spin - Betjeman set the tone for his official undergraduate career by failing to get a scholarship and deferring the maths element of the University matriculation exam, Responsions.
However, he impressed the President of Magdalen, the legendary snob and former Professor of Poetry Sir Herbert Warren, with his college entrance paper and some of his Marlborough poems, and on the strength of this he was offered a place to read English in the recently established School of English Language and Literature.
'Privacy after years of public school; / Dignity after years of none at all - / First college rooms, a kingdom of my own', Betjeman later rhapsodised in his verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells. 'No wonder, looking back, I never worked', but then, nor did most of the Oxford set to which he aspired - the heirs of the so-called Brideshead Generation - for whom the University in the Jazz Age was essentially a social experience, of parties and routs, sports cars and gramophones, with London society and the forbidden delights of the West End a mere hour or so away by train, courtesy of the notorious 'Flying Fornicator'.
It was an Oxford peopled by not-yet clichéd Bright Young Things; art-loving Aesthetes with their shantung ties, coloured shirts and ritual beatings-up at the hands of the athletic Hearties; a douce city of fine bindings and plovers' eggs that Philip Larkin felt he had missed out on when he was at St John's during the Second World War, but which Betjeman relished. Clad in his silk dressing-gown, surrounded by the buildings he adored, he made his friends for life and joined the prestigious rival salons of the famously witty Dean of Wadham, Maurice Bowra ('a man more dined against than dining'), and his arch rival, the outrageously effete University lecturer in Spanish, George Kolkhorst, nicknamed the Colonel, who wore a sugar cube round his neck 'to sweeten conversation'.
More than a poseur
'Life was luncheons, luncheons all the way', Betjeman wrote, not quite accurately, because he was also an active member of the University Dramatic Society and a regular contributor of poetry and architectural comment to the student magazines Isis and Cherwell, which he edited in 1927. In fact, Betjeman worked tirelessly at what interested him, and if Bishop Betjy was an Oxford character, he was always something more than a poseur. Already a recognised authority on architecture, Betjeman was widely read in the most obscure as well as traditional authors, and he shared his dedication to becoming a poet with another undergraduate and close friend, the decidedly unswanky W H Auden of Christ Church.
Yet like Auden (who instead of a predicted First Class got a Third), Betjeman's experience of English literature at Oxford was, academically speaking, a disaster. It is a common misconception, fostered by Betjeman himself, that he 'Failed in Divinity!' and as a consequence left Oxford for ever: a Byronically outcast 'soul in hell'. But University records indicate that the truth was more complicated and painful than this, and derived in part from the state of mutual antipathy that developed between Betjeman and his tutor, a passionately didactic young don from Northern Ireland who had only just begun teaching at Magdalen in Betjeman's first term: Clive Staples Lewis.
Although only eight years older than his pupil, C S Lewis's undergraduate experience of Oxford had been very different from Betjeman's. Born in 1898, he attended University College for one term before being shipped out to the Western Front in 1917, where he was wounded by an exploding shell at the battle of Arras. He returned to Oxford after the war and took a First in Greats, then a degree in English, but like many ex-servicemen he found himself completely at odds with the fast cars and flappers mentality of the early and mid-'20s. There had been just twelve other undergraduates at University College in 1917, when Lewis was 18 and the right age to be carefree. By the time he returned, he was 21 and had lived through a war that had killed the golden boys of his generation and he was in no position to appreciate the so-called Golden Aesthetes of Betjeman's day.
Moreover, there was the additional problem of the School of English Language and Literature, whose establishment in 1894 had attracted the sort of intellectual opprobrium usually reserved for Media Studies today: 'a school for soft-optioners, school teachers, and women'. In order to elevate the study of English above 'mere chatter about Shelley', the emphasis in the taught syllabus was on language rather than literature. Alongside the big writerly guns (Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton), undergraduates were required to study Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and the history of English language and philology. Without an intimate knowledge of Grimm's Law formulating sound-change in early Germanic consonants, even the most diligent student taught by an entirely sympathetic tutor would struggle to excel if language was not their metier, and so Betjeman the puckish dilettante and Lewis the unyielding pedagogue embarked on a fraught master-pupil relationship, the repercussions of which haunted Betjeman for the rest of his life.
Lewis's idea of a literary salon at this pre-Inklings, pre-Christian stage of his career was a roistering beer-and-baccy session, reciting Norse sagas in his booming voice and encouraging his students to chant linguistic mnemonics out loud. His teaching style was pugnacious, and with his tweed jacket, pipe and aggressively unpoetic vocabulary (excellence was indicated by a laconic 'all right'; defaulters were said to need 'a smack or so' to get them into line), Jolly Jack Lewis appeared to be the embodiment of everything that was hearty and antithetical to the fey, Anglo-Catholic aesthete Betjeman, who admired Victoriana and minor poets and incensed his tutor by insisting that Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (with whom Betjeman had enjoyed an illicit correspondence when he was at Marlborough), was a greater writer than Shakespeare.
'I wish I could get rid of the idle prig', Lewis confided to his diary. 'I was rung up on the telephone ... from Moreton in the Marsh, to say that he hasn't been able to read the OE, as he was suspected for measles & forbidden to look at a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?' Or again, when Betjeman did deign to turn up, he 'appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn't mind them, as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn't help replying that I should mind them very much myself but I had no objection to his wearing them.' Betjeman's attempt to win his tutor over by inviting him to tea in his rooms in St Aldate's only alienated Lewis further, as he was forced to participate in conversations about lace curtains and to mingle with 'a galaxy of super-undergraduates', including 'an absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person called McNeice [sic]'.
It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Betjeman failed the elementary but compulsory First Public Examination in Holy Scripture, his tutor was less than supportive of his requests for help. What was perhaps more surprising was that 'Bishop Betjy', with his attachment to all things ecclesiastical, should have been unsuccessful in his 'Divvers' exam, not once but twice in his third year, before being sent down at the end of Hilary term 1928.
Moderators satisfied
The Oxford section of Summoned by Bells leaves the young poet at this point, thus creating - whether intentionally or not - the familiar trajectory of the dramatic close of Betjeman's university career as an examless reject, whose tutor told him 'You'd have only got a Third'. But in reality, Betjeman had been rusticated for a single term in order to revise for his Divinity exam, which he successfully resat that summer, appearing in the Moderators' 'satisfied' list on 18 July 1928. He then returned to Magdalen in Michaelmas 1928, not even as a potential Third Class student but, with Lewis's permission, as an ignominious Pass degree candidate: qui nullum honorem ambiunt. Betjeman wrote to his tutor accusing him of sabotaging his job prospects, and Lewis replied: 'Dear Betjemann, You called the tune of irony from the first time you met me, and I have never heard you speak of a serious subject without a snigger. It would ... be odd if you expected to find gushing fountains of emotional sympathy flowing from me whenever you chose to change the tune. You can't have it both ways.'
After publishing a special 'Divvers' number of The University News, complete with cut-out Old and New Testament cribs in the form of shirt cuffs to enable candidates to cheat in the exam, Betjeman finally left Oxford in December 1928, having satisfied the Pass degree examiners in only one Group of the required three: 'B.(6): A period of English Literature, together with portions of the works of authors, of whom Shakespeare shall always be one.'
In the aftermath of their Oxford experience, Betjeman and Lewis turned their attention to guying the other in print. Lewis's one attempt was ineffectual (Betjeman appears as a spoiled pantomime dame, Victoriana, in The Pilgrim's Regress), but Betjeman's campaign was, by his own admission, malicious and sustained.
It began with the 1933 dedication to Ghastly Good Taste, in which Betjeman thanked 'Mr. C. S. Lewis ... whose jolly personality and encouragement to the author in his youth have remained an unfading memory for the author's declining years', and continued with slighting verse references, like the one in 'A Hike on the Downs':
Objectively, our Common Room
Is like a small Athenian State -
Except for Lewis: he's all right
But do you think he's quite first rate?
In 1939, 'still [waking] up angry in the night' about his Oxford 'mess', Betjeman wrote Lewis an eight-page letter (which he never sent), castigating his former tutor for his blinkered teaching and lack of creative imagination: 'that white unlived-in room of yours in New Buildings ... which always depressed me'. For the rest of his life Betjeman's correspondence was littered with spiky comments about his 'great enemy ... a beta-plus man', the opposite of a 'true friend', as he wrote to John Sparrow in 1976, thirteen years after Lewis's death. 'I don't miss C. S. Lewis.'
Betjeman himself died in 1984, having received an honorary doctorate from a, by then, appreciative Oxford University in 1974. For many years he lived within 20 miles of the city, where he served on the Oxford Preservation Trust and the Oxford Diocesan Advisory Committee, and maintained the friendships of his undergraduate days with Bowra, Kolkhorst, Sparrow and the 'rock of goodness [whom] I loved' - the only tutor exempted from Betjeman's Magdalen hate-list - J M Thompson. A rather plaintive note addressed to Betjeman on college letter-heading exists. It is dated 28 May 1938 and is from C S Lewis: 'Why do you never drop in and see me?' But for Betjeman, Lewis was, and remained, the man who expelled him from sunlit Oxford's 'sweet hothouse world of bells' and sent him into adult exile, where the chimes are harsh summonses to work and death for the prankster who finally 'smiled alone, alone, / And went his journey on his own'.
Dr Judith Priestman specialises in twentieth-century literature in the Department of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and co-curated the centenary exhibition 'Summoned by Bells: John Betjeman and Oxford', which continues at the Bodleian until 28 October 2006 (see p. 39)
For more on Betjeman at Oxford, see the first volume of the indispensable three-volume biography, Young Betjeman (John Murray, 1988; pb, 2003) by Bevis Hillier (Magdalen 1959).