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John Betjeman and 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel' [for an unfinished book on poetical manuscripts]

Sir John Betjeman is still the most popular and widely known English poet of the twentieth century. Since 1958 his Collected Poems has been reprinted thirty-eight times and sold nearly 2,000,000 copies. He achieved this through the immediate accessibility and charm of his verse, his public visibility, effervescent personality and loveable eccentricity. By side-stepping his more intellectual masters and contemporaries, including T.S. Eliot who actually taught him at Highgate Junior School, he gave back poetry to the general public.

Betjeman's poetic voice and engaging tone are entirely individual and unmistakable, in spite of his predisposition for earlier and popular forms and feeling himself to be 'old fashioned and trivial.' Highly memorable, perfectly-crafted and often lyrical, his verse exhibits a wistful nostalgia for things Victorian and Edwardian and a sympathetic observation of 'Man in relation to created things'. Other 'chief motives' in his poetry were, he said, 'sex, architecture, topography, seaside and fear of death.' He is mostly whimsical, self-deprecating or affectionate, but when needed he can reach down into a current of irony, mild satire and plain -- sometimes quite sharp -- disapproval, which with an undertow of melancholy and yearning rescue his work from being, in the words of one commentator, 'merely cosy'. Recent biographies have revealed a very single-minded side to Betjeman which led him to be nothing short of cruel to some of his family and close intimates.

Poetry aside, he was a prodigiously hard-working author of architectural books and guides, a film-maker and conservationist. An inveterate 'church-crawler', he co-founded the Victorian Society and was an official, friend or member of no less than two hundred societies or associations. As a journalist, reviewer, contributor and editor he published some 2,200 items. He was on the radio 735 times and made 494 appearances on television. His ability to communicate without condescension, his sheer gusto and rollicking sense of fun and of the ridiculous won him a wide range of admirers. Knighted in 1969 and appointed Poet Laureate in 1972, Betjeman had established himself as 'the Wordsworth of suburbia', the avuncular 'art master' and 'teddy bear of the nation'; a National Treasure.

Partly through his school-fellow the future art historian and spy, Anthony Blunt, Betjeman discovered at Marlborough that Oscar Wilde 'was someone one ought not to mention; so naturally he had great attraction for me.' The photograph shown here of Betjeman striking a Wildean pose was taken during his last year at Magdalen College, Oxford, of which Oscar Wilde had also been an alumnus. Five years later, in 1933, by which time Betjeman was assistant editor of The Architectural Review (the 'Archie Rev'), he published 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel' in the society mazagine Oxford and Cambridge with a full-page Art Deco illustration by R.S. Sherriffs, after Geoffrey Grigson had rejected it as 'smart and frivolous.' In the poem Betjeman adopted the dialectical method of Robert Browning and was perhaps influenced by a scene in John March's homo-erotic verse-story, The Wild Party (1928). There are a number of verbal differences between the present manuscript and the printed version which include: 'in' for 'at' in the title; 'half wits' for 'cretins' (line 19); 'hask' for 'ask' (line 33); and 'to' for 'tew' (lines 31 and 33). 'Hask' is a loss; 'tew' a dubious gain. He consistently mispelled seltzer as 'selzer' in the manuscript, and in the printed version the entry of the police is dramatised with two sizes of capital letters. Sir John once claimed to leave the punctuation in his literary compositions to his publishers; this seems to be only partly borne out by the present manuscript.

His working methods are best described by him and his daughter, Candida (''Wibz', 'Waba', 'Wuba' or 'Wubz'):

First there is the thrilling or terrifying recollection of a place, a person or a mood which hammers inside the head saying 'Go on! Go on! It is your duty to make a poem out of it.' Then a line or a phrase suggests itself. Next comes the selection of a metre. I am a traditionalist in metres and I have made few experiments. The rhythms of Tennyson, Crabbe, Hawker, Dowson, Hardy, James Elroy Flecker, Moore and Hymns A[ncient] & M[odern] are generally buzzing about in my brain and I choose one from these which seems to me to suit the theme...(Betjeman, The Spectator, 8 October 1954; see also Letters, ii. pp. 66-67, 69)

[He] never wrote his poems in a quiet room, shut off from the world. My mother always said he wrote most of them on trains. As well as trains, I remember him writing them in station waiting rooms and on the backs of menus in restaurants. He would write two or four lines and build them up...(Letters, i. p.197)

The best lines come from the Management [viz. God] I generally write on the backs of envelopes and flyleaves of cheap books and gather the material together -- generally all in one day. Then I type the thing out and look at it the next morning, think it's very bad and forget about it, and it gets lost. This happens to much that I write in verse. If I do not commit what I have written to the typewriter pretty well at once, I forget what I have written, as I cannot read my own writing -- nor will God be able to... (Letters, i. p.206)

Among his pet hates were his tutor C.S. Lewis (in Continual Dew Betjeman acknowledged his indebtedness to Lewis for a fact, making reference to a page that did not exist), 'Granny' Pevsner, town clerks 'from north of Trent', footnotes ('the rash of foot and note disease') and 'abroad' (until he actually went, although he never warmed to Cincinnati). When a Punch cartoonist in 1892 speculated on the successor to Tennyson as Poet Laureate he came up with the remarkably Betjemanesque figure illustrated below, which could easily be taken for an ad vivam portrait of Sir John himself. He was less prescient about his character's verse: 'Tootsy, wootsy, pooty sing, / Mammie's darling, icky thing!...'

Bibliography: John Betjeman, Collected Poems, 1995 (Introductions by Lord Birkenhead and John Hanbury Sparrow--'Spansbury') Bevis Hillier, Young Betjeman, 1988, Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman: A Life in Pictures, 1984 John Betjeman: Letters, 2 volumes, edited by Candida Lycett Green, 1994-1995 John Press, John Betjeman, 1974 Philip Larkin, 'The Blending of Betjeman' and 'It Could Only Happen in England', Required Writing, 1983; A.N. Wilson, John Betjeman, 2006.

Handwriting:

Betjeman's handwriting, which ranged, he said, from being 'so affected that it is incomprehensible to all but true art lovers' to the positively 'insultingly bad' and spidery, could be so difficult to read that once Mary Wilson, poet and wife of the then Prime Minister, had to ask him to address his letters to her in his 'fair round hand, because the messengers mistook Mrs for Mr. Consequently your letter went downstairs and was opened by Philistine hands...' Sir John blamed the decay of his handwriting on biros and journalism and increasingly took to the typewriter (despite thinking it was rude to type letters) or even to writing whole letters in his individual majuscules, which owed much to his 'artsenkrafts' mentors, particularly Charles Francis Annesley Voysey.

His hand varied according to his correspondent and the paper he was using, prompting such descriptions as 'Vorticist', 'art nouveau', 'fair Bedford Park' and 'Cadbury garden city in style.' When writing to his wife Penelope ('Propellor', 'Philth', 'Yellow', 'Plymouth', 'Plymmie' et al), he used a 'sort of cockney mixed with Greek code' consisting of mad phonetic spellings. Many of his letters were illustrated with funny drawings, he gave most of his friends nicknames and even wrote spoof letters to some of them in others peoples' names, for instance Chesterton. In his neatest handwriting (a near-final draft dated 1952 is illustrated by Peter Croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language, ii. p. 189 and opposite, and one dated 1955 in A Life in Pictures, p. 132) the most obvious idiosyncrasies are in the formation of k (a downstroke with an backwards-leaning r or v attached to the right-hand side of it); f which can easily be taken for undotted j (he simultaneously mixes this with one made up from the shaft with a central crossbar after a pen lift); W with its 'crossed-swords' oblique middle strokes (he also uses a rounder W); of with the o attached to an 'undotted j'; and the variant forms of d, g, r and G in any one manuscript. The hand in the present manuscript (written in c. 1933) is a less sophisticated form of that later 'engrossing' hand, mostly without the idiosyncrasies, although it has the beginnings of what might be called the 'hobbity' feel of the later version, both with plenty of unlinked letters. His rougher hands (one is illustrated in the Letters, i. frontispiece; another in A Life in Pictures, p. 155, after he had suffered strokes and the onset of Parkinson's Disease), pass from the just decipherable to the virtually unintelligible. Betjeman frequently used his handwriting as a way of expressing humour which introduces innumerable variations, some quite difficult at first sight to accommodate in one's general sense of his handwriting.