Young Betjeman: 'Wanting to be up to date but really preferring all centuries to my own'

I've been reading Ghastly Good Taste, or a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture, a little book written in 1933 by the young John Betjeman - reading it not, alas, in the original edition with its typographical extravaganza of a front cover, but in a 'National Trust Classics' reprint from the Eighties.
 The fun begins with the Preface, in which the author professes himself indebted to 'Mr C.S. Lewis, of Oxford, whose jolly personality and encouragement of the author in his youth have remained an unfading memory for the author's declining years'. In fact, Lewis showed undisguised contempt for the young Betjeman, regarding him as an 'idle prig' and effete socialite, and doing his bit to ensure Betjeman's ignominious (if well deserved) academic failure at Oxford.
 There follows Betjeman's introduction to the 1970 reprint of Ghastly Good Taste - An Aesthete's Apologia - which is arguably the best thing in the book. 'I wrote this book 38 years ago,' he begins. 'I was 26, in love, and about to be married. When Anthony Blond said he would like to reprint it, I thought I had better read it, and he kindly sent me a copy. I am appalled by its sententiousness, arrogance and the sweeping generalisations in which it abounds. The best things about it were the fancy cover, which I designed myself... ' and the Street of Taste, or the March of English Art Down the Ages, a deliberately old-fashioned pull-out drawn by Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh (and sadly absent from my reprint).
 By way of introduction, then, Betjeman  treats us to an entertaining 'aesthetic autobiography' up to the date when Ghastly Good Taste was published. This seems to him, he says, the only way to explain the state of mind that led him 'to dash out this book in something like a white-hot fury'. It was the product, he concludes, of a 'muddled state - wanting to be up to date but really preferring all centuries to my own'. And it is undeniably a muddle of a book, though an often rewarding and sometimes glorious muddle, and never less than fun.
 After an opening chapter, written in the form of an address to 'One of the Landed Gentry', Betjeman begins the second chapter thus: 'The first chapter of this book was in the nature of an apostrophe. Those who have understood it need go no further, for the succeeding chapters are but elaborations of the opening theme; those who did not understand it need go no further, since the elaborations will not help them. There is little reason for my continuing the rest of the book beyond pleasing my publisher, and indulging my own pleasure in writing and gaining that money which I cannot come by honestly.'
 It is also quite possible, though Betjeman doesn't point this out, to glean the argument of the book from the running commentary at the top of every right-hand page (another deliberately old-fashioned feature). Taken sequentially, they read:
 'The curse of the expert, the blind man in the street, the smug architect - and his awfully jolly assistants - but what is architecture? Oh! for a faith to work for wholly! The architecture of faith is characterised by logic and fearlessness, is liable to misinterpretation. The loss of faith and the growth of pedantry resulted in an incongruity of style properly called Jacobethan. The fine old English renaissance, this was hard and reasonable and fit for autocrats who will have no nonsense in freak styles from abroad but, instead, honest buildings at once impressive, dignified and original and, withal, Protestant. O natural and unaffected spacious days of the Regency, with your modest terraces, sound sense, no style being all styles and deceit being no style. Then, England knew how to build for the Hanoverians, for the Empire and the towns, and not only for the autocrat. The pride of the purse and the incipient snobbery of aristocrat and plutocrat caused a travesty of Regency styles and an uneducated, machine-made Gothic. But good old vulgarity is preferable to 'refeenment' - from which the great William Morris. In unity is strength.'
 For a short book, Ghastly Good Taste is surprisingly full of long quotations - some from architectural historians but most from miscellaneous literature and letters, including a long correspondence between Lord Ongley and his architect, Batty Langley (and a poem by Betjeman himself). There are also some amusing footnotes by the later Betjeman. A reference to 'hard logic' is footnoted 'About which I didn't then know anything, and still know nothing.' Mention of 'the sham classicism of Norman Shaw' inspires the note 'Who, I now realise, was our greatest architect since Wren, if not greater.'
 Ghastly Good Taste ends with one final flourish, listing the places in which it was written (in the manner of Joyce's 'Trieste, Dublin, Zurich' at the end of Portrait of the Artist):
 'Castlepollard - Capri - Heston-Hounslow - Wiesbaden.'
 Not bad for a book 'dashed out' in 'something like a white-hot fury'...

Tea

It was on this day 70 years ago that the result of the 1945 general election finally became known (it had been a very long drawn out count because so many voters were overseas with the armed forces). At 10 Downing Street, the Churchills listened in stunned disbelief as the full extent of the calamity became apparent - a Labour landslide. The loyal housekeeper rose to her feet and headed for the kitchen with words that sum up so much more than a mere election result: 'I don't know what the world's come to, but I'm going to make some tea.'

Sauce

Back home after a complicated family day (a vomiting bug on the rampage - though happily I seem to have escaped so far), I was cheered to find my post about vintage BBC-banned songs on The Dabbler...

The Iniquity of Oblivion

In a famous and beautiful paragraph in his Hydriotophia, Or Urne Buriall, Sir Thomas Browne writes:

'But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting register. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.'

As it happens, today is the anniversary of the infamous burning down in 356BC of the great temple of Artemis [Diana] at Ephesus, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. The name of the arsonist Herostratus lives on, yes, but despite the best efforts of the horrified Greeks, who decreed that it should never be mentioned again, under pain of death. The historian Theopompus ignored this, and so Herosrtatus's name has come down to us - as, incidentally, has that of the architect. He was a Cretan called Chersiphron, assisted by his son Metagenes. Like Herostratus, they are known for but one thing.

Galorious Abundance

Well, what a difference a change in the weather can make. A few weeks ago, I was lamenting how few butterflies were on the wing, despite mostly dry and sunny weather through May and June - dry and sunny but simply not warm enough. Now, however, we have had a few mostly warm/hot weeks - and oh the difference... Down in Sussex at the weekend, I took a morning stroll around a former meadow that is now edged with brambles, ragwort and drifts of purple thistles, and the sheer abundance of butterflies was quite wonderful to behold. Huge numbers of Skippers (Small and Large), Gatekeepers, Meadow Browns and Ringlets galore were flying, along with Tortoiseshells, Commas, Peacocks, Painted Ladies, Red Admirals, Small Coppers (my first of the year), Marbled Whites (plus [the unrelated] Large, Small and Green-Veined), Common Blues - and, as a glorious surprise, a passing White Admiral gliding majestically over the scene. This was more like it - this was butterfly abundance on the kind of scale I remember from boyhood summers. All thanks to warm sun - and the benign neglect of a meadow. As the Met Office has just issued a dire forecast of grim weather coming our way, I'm sure we can look forward to this glorious sun continuing to shine.

A James Centenary

It was on this day 100 years ago that Henry James, in a rare affirmative foray into the world beyond the personal (as he might have put it), became a British citizen.
Carl Van Doren in The American Novel describes the moment thus:

'The war shattered his peace beyond repair. This lover of art who had not taken the trouble to form an opinion concerning the Dreyfus case, who had little more to say of the Boer War than that it doubled his income tax, who had vaguely hoped that the war with Spain might educate Americans as imperialism had educated the English, who had looked with candid contempt upon the Irish aspirations for freedom, now woke to the crisis of the world with a passion which ceased only with his death in 1916. There was nothing complicated in his loyalty, nothing critical in his attitude toward the drama being enacted. His “Europe”—France, England, Italy—had been assailed in utter wantonness; the barbarians were pounding at the gates and might at any moment break in to befoul the pavements and violate the shrines of his sacred city. His own distant country looked on without lifting a helping hand, and he saw no better way to signify his protest and his allegiance than by becoming a British citizen in 1915, declaring “civis Britannicus sum” with a Roman boast, and ending his career, as he had begun it, on the note of romance.'

Missing the Wonks

Hugely relieved though I am to be shot of office life, I must admit it had some advantages - notably that much-maligned entity known as 'technical support'. For all their shortcomings (in the matter of speaking comprehensibly, for example), the little army of asocial wonks with dubious dress sense certainly had their uses. Whenever there was a breakdown in the technology on which my work - like most people's - was totally dependent, these useful chaps (and they were nearly all chaps) could usually be relied upon to turn up, work their incomprehensible magic and quickly fix whatever it was that had gone wrong.
 Now that I'm retired, it's down to me to take care of these things - and  as someone who is to tech-savviness what Stephen Hawking is to ballroom dancing, this is not a happy prospect. I work on Apple Mac rather than PC - which limits the potential for catastrophe - but still things need to be done from time to time, and I am the last man on Earth to do them. For the past few days, I have been attempting a couple of what you might think were pretty straightforward jobs: installing Microsoft Word (for Mac) so that I have some word processing ability, and setting up the printer I bought some while ago so as to have a printer at my disposal that will, er, print things.
 My first attempt to acquire Word fell at an early hurdle - attempting to install something called Yosemite, which I was told I'd need in order to run Word. Yosemite took an unconscionable long time a-loading, before crashing somewhere along the way, losing me my internet connection and leaving me with what seems to be a half-loaded Yosemite - and, of course, no Word. The printer project began promisingly, inasmuch as I assembled, loaded and fired up the printer without any problems, inserted the disc, followed the instructions all the way up to 'ready to print' - and then found myself unable to print as the printer 'could not be found'. Somewhere along the way, I must have missed something - something rather crucial...
 All this is of course immensely frustrating - not least because I haven't a clue how this apparently magical box of tricks called a computer works. I am reliant on the priesthood of techies - and of course the young, who seem to take this stuff in with mother's milk (maybe it's time to let my three-year-old grandson have a go?). Meanwhile, however, a breakthrough: this morning I managed to install Word after all, by the simple expedient of going for the earlier version (ignoring the discouraging onscreen messages). It loaded up a treat, much to my surprise and delight. I guess there's a lesson in this... Yes of course - go retro, back to the future!