Books: The yellow-faced boy

"[Compton Mackenzie] entertained me last week in Edinburgh with an example of Henry James's conversation which I will find it difficult to put into words. James was criticising Mackenzie's novel Carnival to him, saying that perhaps the lady delineated in the book was too delicately modelled for the vast structure in which she was set, and ending, 'but then I said the same thing to Flaubert about Madame Bovary'. Mackenzie, flattered, said that he was intending to rewrite the book. 'Never do that,' said James, 'I have wasted 12 precious years of my life doing such things. You are the one member of your generation who can throw up the ball and receive it back into his hands. But when I throw up the ball it hits first one wall, bounces to another and then another, until it finally rolls slowly down to my feet and with my aching, aged limbs I struggle to bend down and pick it up.' He told me that James used to send resumes of his novels before he wrote them to his agent Pinker and that these were marvellous short stories. I wonder what has become of them."

The transmitted image of the elephantine game, the ease and warmth in spite of the elegiac tone - and distinguished personnel - and the gossipiness combine in a typically Betjemanian way, telling us new things as though we were as soaked in context as the writer himself.

Betjeman's daughter has drawn together a collection that starts when the future Poet Laureate was at the Dragon School (then called Lynam's) in Oxford and ends in the 1970s with a television broadcast entitled "A Passion for Churches". All his life - he died in 1984 - Betjeman had to find a way of making money that was not his poetry. He became the Standard's film reviewer under Beaverbrook, and was leashed to the wheel of weekly book reviewing.

As his daughter says, "He fell into his jobs through circumstance rather than by design and was willing to work for almost anyone who paid him. He had no political leanings. He worked for Conservative, Labour and Liberal newspapers and magazines." She makes it clear that he "had to work to the end in order to subsist".

Yet the impression as this book reveals itself is of a character so anxious to confide enthusiasm and so without pretension that it is possible to feel very little of personal difficulty or melancholy; although Betjeman understands these very well, he uses this understanding as part of his amused and tender sympathy for human creatures and their creations. He seems propelled by a natural sweetness - nothing so crass as merriness - towards the impulse to praise. This was surely part of his religious faith, about which there are moving passages in this book. Very early on, as the child who we know from his poetry heard and saw everything ("John is rather a common little boy"), Betjeman, teased at his London school for having a German name, though it is of course Dutch, was observing buildings. Later, in 1930, he began to work on the Architectural Review, and he saturates the Shell Guides to Britain that formed the architectural consciousness of a generation. It is hard now to enter a sequestered church or open a hymnal without thinking of him (I've always wondered about the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould and there is a piece here that places him quite).

Such preoccupations are touched today by the neat furbelows of Past Times, the touristic clout of heritage. This wasn't always so. That we have the buildings we do today is considerably to the honour of this energetic enthusiast (I use the term at its most literal and sublime).

It becomes clear early on in the book that Betjeman was a genius, a being wholly like himself. And yet he is without the hectoring capacity to know best; he is a kind of genius our world disallows. He is not self-declared. Not that he deprecates; he simply never bullies, with the effect that we believe him, and listen. He expresses in his open prose things a blunter pen could render trite or vulgar, sentimental. In a time riddled with the rhetoric of the ersatz, it is salutary to read his workmanlike, impassioned, beautiful, dedicated, witty, and completely relaxed words.

In addition to revealing and amusing - and artistically astute - pieces about artistic contemporaries such as Waugh, Auden and Epstein, there are autobiographical sections of shocking self-knowingness. He describes himself as a yellow- faced child and a green-faced adult. The most magnificent sections seem to me to be the long, seductive, fascinated quests after unsung English eccentrics, glimpses at grandees and panjandrums including Max Beerbohm. There are a couple of initially squeamish - snobbish - moments which it would have been craven to excise. Rysbrack gets a new spelling. The account of a witnessed Black Mass confirms the reader in his sense that this wonderful writer was a saintly being. The articles upon museums and architecture make it clear as day that he was a seer. The choice of cover is a joy, Jane Bown's laughing short-trousered poet standing above his beloved Cornish sea.