LARGER THAN LIFE, the statue of John Betjeman (1906–1984) in the newly renovated St. Pancras International Station in London serves as a reminder of the late Poet Laureate’s love of rail travel. But its proximity to the Victorian Midland Grand Hotel has an added poignancy, for the hotel’s dining room was the scene of one of Oscar Wilde’s public humiliations. Decades after that incident, what A. N. Wilson would describe as Betjeman’s “lifelong hatred of the society which sent Oscar Wilde to prison” led to an unlikely friendship and would inspire one of his best poems.
In the mid-1890’s the Marquess of Queensbury (“the screaming scarlet Marquess,” as Wilde called him) was hounding the playwright around London, threatening hotel managers and headwaiters with a brawl if his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was ever found with Wilde on their premises. One evening word came to the Midland Grand that the Marquess and his men were downstairs and ready to trash the dining room if Wilde didn’t leave—which he did, immediately. Twenty years later, the schoolboy Betjeman struck up a penpalship with Lord Alfred. One fruit of this friendship was his poem, “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel.”
I celebrate the fact that one of the best-loved British poets of the 20th century has become a gay icon who helped to liberalize attitudes towards homosexuality through his poetry. But what makes Betjeman a gay icon? And why does he enjoy a large gay following? A deeper reading of his poems can offer some insights.
“The poet of Middle England” was appalled by society’s treatment of gay men and used his poetry as a vehicle to express his sympathy for their plight. The brutish attitude of the arresting police officer in “Cadogan Hotel” is echoed in “Shattered Image,” in which a man considers OD-ing on barbiturates when an affair with an underage boy ruins his life. His friends, repulsed by the thought of gay sex, desert him: “Of course it takes all sorts to make a world/ And God knows what we do when we get pissed/ But honestly I’ve never been so pissed/ I couldn’t tell a woman from a man.”
Believing people were neither gay nor straight, Betjeman hinted at his own bisexuality in one of his best-known poems, “A Subaltern’s Love Song.” The tennis-playing Miss Joan Hunter Dunn is described as possessing “the speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy.” There are gay nuances in his autobiography in verse, “Summoned by Bells.” In the original typescript he wrote, “Electric currents racing through my frame/ Was this the love that dare not speak its name?”
By the time he died, in 1984, Betjeman had acquired a reputation as a womanizing letch, partly as a result of his attraction to girls in shorts (“Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?”) but his creativity fed voraciously on unrequited love. The 2008 death of his muse and chief unrequited love, Joan Hunter Dunn, was front-page news in the UK. But it wasn’t just women who were his love objects. A crush on a dazzling young South African poet, Patrick Cullinan, who was invited to stay with the Betjemans in 1950, provoked the following: “I feel in love so much that I felt no physical sensations at all beyond being drained of all power of limbs.”
Betjeman can lay claim to being the most “homosocial” of English poets. He enjoyed the company of gay men—most of his friends belonged to either the Anglican Church or the “Homintern,” a cabal of influential gay men who supposedly controlled the arts. He once wrote to a gay friend, Patrick Balfour, recommending the roller skating rink at the Alexandra Palace as a cruising ground. “There are, without exaggeration, no less than five hundred cups of tea there and an introduction can be effected at once.” “Cups of tea” was Betjeman’s own polari-speak for gay men. He may not have actually trolled Alexandra Palace himself, but his affinity for gay slang shows how comfortable he felt around gay men.
Many gay artists have been drawn to his work. Dance director and choreographer Matthew Bourne’s television film Late Flowering Lust was inspired by Betjeman’s poetry. Marc Almond appeared on a Betjeman tribute album and the title of Pet Shop Boys’ single “Your Funny Uncle” is taken from a line in the poem “Indoor Games Near Newbury.” The sexually ambivalent Morrissey, who often performs Betjeman’s “A Child Ill” at the beginning of his concerts, paid homage to “Slough” in “Everyday is like Sunday”: “In the seaside town/ … that they forgot to bomb/ Come, come, come—nuclear bomb.”
I would argue that Betjeman was temperamentally gay. Drawn to outsiders because he felt like one himself, he became a lifelong “friend of a friend of Dorothy.” He loved old-time British music hall (similar to American vaudeville) and was a devotee of the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street, delighting in meeting the cast on the set. He was an Anglican churchgoer, which helped to shape his camp taste. (“The high camp at the high altar” is best expressed by Tallulah Bankhead’s comment to a priest swinging the incense: “Lovely drag, darling, but your handbag’s on fire.”) Memorably, his beloved teddy bear Archie was the inspiration for Aloysius, the bear owned by Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. His writing is saturated with camp. He had delightfully silly nicknames for friends, and he often employed humorous verse to appear frivolous about the serious. “Often most serious feelings are expressed in a joke,” he wrote.
By far the most popular poet in the UK in the 20th century, he became a national icon through his poetry, his appearances on television, and his broadcasts on radio. His Collected Poems has sold over two million copies, and his surname has become an adjective—an honor paid to very few poets. His death in 1984 resulted in an outpouring of public grief, and his popularity shows no sign of waning: Ricky Gervais (as David Brent) read “Slough” at the end of an episode of his sitcom The Office, set in Slough. In 2006, Betjeman’s centennial year, “the Wordsworth of suburbia” even entered the charts when Jamie T sampled “The Cockney Amorist” on his rap single “Sheila.”
Sadly, when Paris Hilton is chosen by Out magazine as the new gay icon, you know that the label has become meaningless, but the gay-friendly Betjeman truly deserves his iconic status and the affectionate admiration of gay people for his shining example of tolerance and respect.
Justin Gowers is a former administrator of Betjeman’s literary estate and has been a close friend of Candida Lycett Green (Betjeman’s daughter) for nearly ten years.
Discussion1 Comment
I don’t believe John Benjamin was gay,, but regardless of this he was a loveable character and seemed a very mystical person.
When I was 16 years old in 1962 I met him in Cornwall near Polzeath , when I accidentally trespassed into his garden. He invited me to tea at his home, but my parents who were ignorant as to whom he was, prevented me from keeping that appointment. with Mr. Betjemin and this deeply upset me because I had promised to tell him how I had enjoyed his book called ” Summoned by Bells ” This was a great disappointment to me !