This volume deals with Betjeman's zenith years. Now he wins fame not just for his poems but as a tastemaker opening eyes to the Victorian ages, as a battling conservationist and as a television personality, one of the Old Masters of a new medium. The book opens with the Betjemans' stormy married life (their German maid thought John's first name was Shutup). There are chapters on Betjeman as film critic for the Evening Standard ('Do you mind if I say you like English Perpendicular?', he asked Myrna Loy) and as editor of the Shell Guides with John Piper, whose wife Myfanwy - Goldilegs to Betjeman - became one of his enduring muses. When war came he was posted to neutral Ireland as a diplomat - some thought, a spy. An IRA officer was sent to shoot him; luckily Betjeman was on leave at the time. Betjeman's loves and longings are described, as well as the beginning of his close and enduring friendship with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish. The inspirations of favourite poems are discovered.His love of Metroland, or remote churches, dim peers and obscure clergyman poets, his antipathy to business bishops and to Pevsner, the Herr Professor Doktor, together with an enormous range of his friends, including Nancy Mitford, Osbert Lancaster and James Lees-Milne. Here too are his hitherto unpublished diary entries about W.H. Auden, his skirmishes with Evelyn Waugh over religion and his anguish when his wife became a Roman Catholic. The narrative is crowned by the huge success of his Collected Poems in 1958, a really thrilling moment of triumph.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"One of the richest and most entertaining biographies of recent times." John Bayley. -- Literary Review "It is a book to read slowly for fear of coming too fast to the end." -- Guardian "The book is crammed with very funny stories." -- Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Bevis Hillier has dedicated more than twenty-five years to writing Betjeman's life, a task entrusted to him by the poet himself. Patrick Taylor-Martin wrote: 'It is impossible to imagine the job done by anyone more intelligent, industrious or sympathetic.' Like Betjeman he was at Magdalen College, Oxford; later he joined The Times, became Editor of The Connoisseur, and a columnist on the Los Angeles Times, as well as writing for many other papers and journals. He is an authority on nineteenth-century ceramics and on Art Deco. He edited Betjeman's Uncollected Poems (now included in Collected Poems), compiled John Betjeman: A Life in Pictures ('a heavenly book', A. L. Rowse) and is the author of Young Betjeman. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Hampshire. Young Betjeman has been reissued as a companion to this new volume.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A monumental work,
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This review is from: John Betjeman (Hardcover)
Bevis Hillier's second volume of his Betjeman biography is a massive, extremely detailed work which will appeal to the same audience that enjoyed the first volume, Young Betjeman. The book follows JB's life and career from the early days of his marriage to Penelope Chetwode in the early thirties to the massive success of his "Collected Poems" in the late fifties. Don't expect any opinions on Betjeman's poetry, except for excerpts from contemporary reviews. This is a book about his life, not his work. And what a life! At the start of his career, working as a film critic on the Evening Standard, his colleagues included Robert Bruce Lockhart (the celebrated/notorious "British Agent"), Malcolm Muggeridge and Osbert Lancaster, who became his lifelong friend. He was an unabashed social climber starting from his days at Oxford, and managed to charm his way into the very top echelons of British and Irish society. Bevis Hillier has a clear, neutral and unobtrusive writing style that makes for easy reading. Having said that, this is a non-fiction book and not a "page-turner". It took several weeks of bed time reading and the wealth of detail would be too much to take in over a short period. It would also spoil the enjoyment of the book not to take time to mull over some of the episodes. There are several hundred notes at the end of the book, almost all of them attributions, but with the occasional anecdote. After using a second bookmark for a little while, I decided to just read the book. Having finished it, I then read through the more interesting notes. Among these was the information that Lady Elizabeth Cavendish (Betjeman's long-time companion), along with Arthur Calder-Marshall (who?), was the only person who refused to provide any help whatsoever with the book. This book, along with the preceding volume and the third, expected later this year, took twenty-five years to assemble. Many of the interviewees are now deceased. We can be thankful that Bevis Hillier had the tenacity to gather this information, and the skill to put it together with such grace.
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