Books
Adventures in the rough trade
Alan Watkins
Ruling Passions Tom Driberg (Jonathan Cape £5.95)
'Tom Driberg', Evelyn Waugh wrote in his Diary in 1942, 'has been elected Independent Member for Ma!don by a large majority ... In recording the result' [the newspapers] simply describe him as a journalist and a churchwarden, which gives a very imperfect picture of that sinister character.' Thirty-four years later, when Driberg died, A.J.P. Taylor described him in the New Statesman as 'a good man'. The claim struck me then, as it does now, as odd, even perverse. Though I was never in any sense close to Driberg, I came to know him quite well in the last few years of his life, when he did longish stints as the NS's diarist, and I was the paper's political columnist. He was tiresome, snobbish, affected — a sneerer at sauce bottles — old-womanish and sad. Indeed no one could have been in the proper sense less gay than Tom. His evident loneliness and his fundamental diffidence, however, lent him a certain pathetic charm. Several sexually formidable, not to say predatory, women found him highly attractive; maybe because he posed them no problem, or, as the phrase goes, offered them no threat.
And he undoubtedly did have attractive qualities. He had a love and a concern for English, though he persistently used 'intriguing' as an equivalent for 'interesting'. He also had a kind, considerate, even sweet side. But 'a good man'? Well, up to a point, Lord Bradwell. His posthumous autobiography is a classic of its kind: always, as far as I can judge, commendably frank, often highly readable and sometimes literally shocking, even to those normally neither squeamish nor censorious about sexual matters. Certainly it it will help us make up our minds about whether Taylor or Waugh was nearer the truth. And mercifully it contains no tedious account of the Labour Party Executive, to which Driberg was re-elected with a monotonous and inexplicable regularity.
Before his death Driberg told me that what was important in his life — at any tate, what he wished to communicate — was the sex in it. Having managed to put the sex on paper, he was reasonably satisfied. His first significant experience occurred at the age of five. He was standing between the legs of one of his much older brothers. Some stitching in the crutch, young Tom noticed, had come undone. Warily he inserted his finger in the gap, so gently that his brother did not notice. Though he did not, as he puts it, 'touch flesh' (presumably his brother was wearing pants), the episode gave him his first 'authentic sexual thrill'. There were more, many more, to come.
At about the same time he was being escorted to his kindergarten in Crowborough, where the family lived, by the gardener, one Hemsley, middle-aged, moustached, married. 'Hemsley,' piped Tom, 'will you please take down your trousers?' Hemsley made no response but proceeded doggedly with his troublesome and demanding charge. Driberg's subsequent prep school, to which he went as a day boy, seems to have been quite horrible. He claims that 'the headmaster was a notable former county cricketer and practising sadist named Frank Gresson'. (I can find no record of any Gresson in Wisden. He may have been removed or have played only a few games; in which latter case he can hardly have been 'notable'.). Though Driberg was maltreated only once, he found consolation in the school lavatories. The boys were expected to go to the lavatory by rote. 'Have you done your business yet, Tom?' the headmaster's wife would inquire. He had indeed: touching up another boy who seems to have been a willing enough partner. The whole ambience, he says, gave him a permanent love-hate relationship (his phrase) with lavatories.
When he was twelve he discovered a really splendid underground lavatory in Tunbridge Wells. He would have an erection merely by listening in anticipation to the steps descending the stairs. His taste then was for middle-aged men rather than for boys of his own age. Indeed Driberg, to his credit, did not go in for little boys. His later and permanent predilection was for young men of the working class, 'young proletarians' as he calls them, in other words rough trade. At Tunbridge Wells, however, he persuaded an old tramp to masturbate him. Unhappily the performance was not up to standard: 'he did it rather roughly, with a mechanical action'. The young Driberg became an authority on the lavatories of several South Coast resorts, notably Brighton. After a vigil, usually successful, he would visit churches and contemplate their architectural beauties.
For religion was his other adolescent passion. It remained a passion in later life. His taste was for ritual, ceremony and general carry-on rather than for the scriptures, doctrine and dogma. This was paralleled in his politics. He was a member of the Communist Party from his Oxford days to his expulsion (which Driberg seems to have, considered unnecessary and unfair) shortly before his election to Parliament. But he possessed little interest in Marxism or in political theory generally. At Lancing he was a 'success'. He had Waugh and Hugh Molson as friends. He also became deputy head of the school. Alas, despite his general taste for older men, he could not keep his hands off the lads. Two of the boys in his dormitory complained to the school authorities about his nocturnal lunges. Driberg left school under the proverbial cloud. After tuition from a young barrister named Colin Pearson (later a Law Lord), he won a scholarship to Christ Church.
He had an affair at Oxford with, among others, a don, managing 'what I have experienced, otherwise, only'once in my life — an exercise in soixante-neuf culminating in exactly simultaneous ejaculation? (not a specially difficult technical feat to bring off, I should have thought, but there it is). He also began visiting the West End and its lavatories, or 'cottages' in the argot. He becomes quite lyrical about the cottages, most now demolished, of old London; like Sir Harold Wilson, say, reciting the names of the Huddersfield team that won the Cup in 1922: `to do one's rounds of the cottages — the alley by the Astoria, the dog-leg lane opposite the Garrick Club, the one near the Ivy, the one off Wardour Street, ending up always in Of Alley, off Villiers Street — provided homos, not all of whom are given to rougher sports, with healthy exercise.
Membership of the House did not abate his activities. Rather he was emboldened. Having spoken at a by-election, he was caught sucking off a Norwegian sailor — sodomy was never his favourite pastime — in an Edinburgh air raid shelter. The young Scottish -policeman who apprehended him let him off, Driberg having promised never to do it again. Subsequently the two formed a kind of friendship, though Driberg did not try to seduce him. (He did seduce a young imposter who had been masquerading as William Hickey of the Daily Express.) Later Driberg retailed the Edinburgh adventure to Harold Nicolson and Robert Boothby. Nicolson was a homosexual, though more timid than Driberg. Another homosexual policitian of the time was Sir Henry (Chips) Channon. Driberg records with some envy that he was so rich he could 'rent' anyone he liked. One of those he rented was a wellknown (and unnamed) playwright. Channon and Driberg also discussed which MPs were sexually attractive. Channon said the one he really fancied was Sir Hartley Shawcross. Driberg demurred: he admired Shawcross's brain, he said, but did not find him, as he puts it, bedworthy. In any case, Shawcross could hardly be classified as rough trade.
At this point some people may say `how sad' (in general, I mean: not sad that Driberg did not fancy Shawcross). Driberg is among them. His book, honest as it is, has a consistent tone, of self-pity, 'of 'it's not fair'. He even blames his parents for sending him to his prep school as a day boy rather than as a boarder. Take, for instance, the matter of pick-ups in public lavatories. Driberg seemed to think he had a natural right to go about making a nuisance of himself. 'No homo, cottage-cruising,' he writes, 'ever prevented a hetero from merely urinating.' At which I feel like saying: come off it, Tom, you old humbug. I should certainly have advised any young man whose welfare I had at heart to give a widish berth to any lavatory in which Driberg might be lurking. There is no more reason to allow homosexuals to hang about men's lavatories in the hope of picking up boys than to allow heterosexuals to hang about women's lavatories in the hope of picking up girls. (In a sense, admittedly, Driberg is right to complain about the disappearance of the cottages. With the closing too of the lavatories at the underground stations, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the citizen going about his lawful occasions to have a straight pee in London. But this is hardly what exercised Driberg.) Take, furthermore, his expulsion from Lancing. The school authorities surely behaved with exemplary consideration. Driberg was neither beaten nor abused in any way. Indeed the school rightly conspired with his elder brothers to keep the news from his mother. Thus he was not expelled immediately. Though deprived of his offices, he was given a private sitting room, the better to work for his scholarship. He ate his meals with the housemaster, his Wife and the matron. Driberg considered this segregation humiliating. It was, on the contrary, a nicely struck balance between Driberg's welfare and that of the other boys.
Or take, again, his relations with Lord Beaverbrook and 'the capitalist press', as he calls it. I am not one of those who believe that Driberg was disloyal in writing Beaverbrook (1956). It remains a very good book, a useful and indeed necessary corrective to Taylor's more recent work of adulation. Still, one wishes that Driberg could sbow a little more gratitude to his benefactors. For not only was he happy to accept Beaverbrook's money for fifteen years, earning enough to maintain a mews flat in Kensington and a chauffeur-manservant: more, When he was charged with, and acquitted of, indecent assault in 1935, Beaverbrook both Paid for expensive counsel and kept the case out of the papers. As for the,capitalist press, he was given virtually complete freedom to write what he liked, Though I think he exaggerated the amount of covert Comm. unist propaganda which he managed to Insert into 'Hickey', it is arguable that it was Driberg who was behaving dishonourably. Had he been a scrupulous man he would have written for the Daily Worker. But then It would have been good-bye to the mews flat and the manservant.
• Of course he had courage. He took appalling risks, and not only with the cruel law of the time There were risks of violence, of blackmail and of theft. Driberg records the theft only of a pair of shoes in America. He does not mention blackmail. And though he was certainly assaulted, it was in ways of his own choosing. But what, after all, did he want? Sometimes he sighs for the ideal lifelong homosexual partner, and laments that he is incapable of the requisite fidelity. This condition is not exceptional — indeed it • is usual — in heterosexuals as well. Men with wives and families want girls and flats; while men with girls and flats want wives and families; mutatis mutandis, the same goes for women. As we stagger through this vale of tears, in which there is much to be endured, and little to be enjoyed, we can none of us have exactly what we want all the time. There is no need to whinge and whine about the normal human condition as Driberg does. The truth is that he was exceptionally lucky. If he was sad and lonely, as he was, it was not, I think, because he was a promiscuous homosexual but because he was a sad and lonely man anyway. Yet he had a good run for his money. He received an expensive education. He was early recognised and rewarded in his chosen profession. He enjoyed the company and, more important, the protection of the rich, the smart and the powerful, as was demonstrated by the character witnesses at his trial. At the same time he was esteemed in the people's party. He ended his days as a life peer. If he did not become a minister, nor did numerous other MPs, equally able and not homosexual. He even managed to get married — a mysterious episode of June 1951 that goes unmentioned in the present book.
However, the frontispiece to his aptlyentitled diary The Best of Both Worlds (1953) shows a youthful-looking Driberg — he was then forty-six — in smart suit and buttonhole with his bride on the Terrace of the Commons. She is motherly, older than he. In fact she was a widow, kind, Yorkshire-Jewish, and, like Driberg, lonely. Dri berg's friends say he married not as a 'cover' (which would have been absurd) but for companionship and as an insurance against old age. Predictably the marriage did not last very long. At all events, Driberg invited his old friend Waugh to the wedding. Waugh was abroad and could not accept. In his letter of refusal he wrote: 'I will think of you intently on the day and pray that the church is not struck by lightning.' The lightning did not strike. Indeed, the lightning held off for the entire course of the old reprobate's life.
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