2003-06-12 A monumental work

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.