Michael Dirda

We in the tournament -- you against me!

And it ends, as the couple go off to a country club dance:

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,

Above us, the intimate roof of the car,

And here on my right is the girl of my choice,

With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,

And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.

We sat in the car park till twenty to one

And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

You can see why some might regard such poetry as little better than a nursery jingle or a Hallmark greeting -- and why it was so popular with ordinary people.

Throughout his life, Betjeman was always falling in love. After a brief homosexual phase, de rigueur among public school boys of his generation, Betjeman was generally attracted to what he called "a great big mountainous sports girl," with strong legs and arms. "Oh! Would I were her racket press'd with hard excitement to her breast" ("The Olympic Girl").

He married Penelope Chetwode, an ardent horsewoman, who was known to bring her favorite stallion, Moti, into friend's houses. But marriage didn't prevent Betjeman from yearning after waitresses and secretaries, the wives of friends and the daughters of aristocrats. Sometimes more than yearning went on, though as Wilson suggests, Betjeman was a man of crushes rather than grand passions. At least until he met Lady Elizabeth Cavendish.

The sister of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, this young woman could have wed almost anyone in England. But she and Betjeman fell in love, and for the rest of his life, he spent his weekends in the country with his family and his weekdays in London with Elizabeth. Many knew of the arrangement, and it periodically caused a good deal of pain and hurt to all three parties. Yet Betjeman, as others before him and since, refused to choose between family loyalty and romantic passion. In the end, when he was largely disabled by Parkinson's disease, he would be cared for mainly by Elizabeth. Princess Margaret would help her push the wheelchair-bound poet to church on Sunday.

Churches were very important to Betjeman. During his years as a columnist for the Architectural Review and later as an activist for the preservation of the national heritage, he wrote often about the beauty of old English churches and worked hard to save them from the wrecker's ball. More important, he clung to his Anglican faith, partly from conviction, partly from his innate melancholy and fear of death. Appropriately, he called his best-selling verse autobiography Summoned by Bells.

A.N. Wilson tells Betjeman's story briskly and engagingly, but without the dense, factual richness of his earlier historical works, such as The Victorians. Many of the details in this review, for instance, are gleaned from Candida Lycett Green's superb two-volume edition of her father's letters -- a very amusing book, scrupulously edited and annotated. (It includes a wonderful picture of Betjeman wearing roller skates, while standing next to a dour Evelyn Waugh.) I haven't read Bevis Hillier's two-volume authorized biography, but it would doubtless offer far more detail and substance than Wilson's charming portrait. Still, this a good work to start with -- he covers the main outlines of his subject's life, does so with brio and affection, and will send readers on to the Collected Poems (recently reissued by Farrar Straus Giroux). Be warned, though: Wilson imagines his audience as wholly English, and the American reader should be prepared to feel a little like a tourist on a first trip to London -- somewhat lost at times, but quite happy nonetheless. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.