Francis Wheen. TOM DRIBERG: HIS LIFE AND INDISCRETIONS. Chatto &
Windus, #18 (pp 452); Quentin Crisp. HOW TO GO TO THE MOVIES. Hamish
Hamilton, #14.99 (pp 224).
DURING his lifetime Tom Driberg's main claim to fame was as
Beaverbrook's first and finest William Hickey columnist on the Daily
Express. After his death, at the age of 71 in 1976, he claimed
considerable infamy with his posthumous autobiography Ruling Passions.
The former Labour MP and later Lord Bradwell came rushing out of the
chamber as a roaring homosexual, an affluent gentleman with a penchant
for rough trade, especially Scottish rough trade (his mother was
Scottish). ''His homosexuality truly was his ruling passion,'' observed
Michael Foot in a postscript to the autobiography.
As an exceptionally gifted gossip, Driberg intended his own account of
his homosexual adventures to entertain rather than offend. There was the
charge of indecent assault on two Scottish miners, Driberg being cleared
with a little help from Beaverbrook. There was the incident in Edinburgh
when he was caught with a sailor in Princes Street Gardens: on telling a
shocked policeman he was William Hickey he was let off with a warning, a
tale he told to Bob Boothby who told it to Compton Mackenzie who used it
as the basis for his novel Thin Ice. There was the night of passion with
a Black Watch soldier (''a sandy-haired Scot of remarkable beauty'') who
assured Driberg ''Only sissies like women''.
Francis Wheen retells these tales with relish in his biography, adding
his own interpretative explanations. For example, in the case of the two
Scottish miners, Driberg claimed he was innocent of any erotic
intention. Wheen is not so sure: ''It would be just like Tom to give one
of the men an exploratory fondle,'' he says. Not exactly
earth-shattering stuff, you might think, and the same can be said of
other (obviously apocryphal) anecdotes about the private parts of Nye
Bevan and Jim Callaghan. More amusingly Driberg, who tried to persuade
Mick Jagger to stand as a Labour candidate, remarked, on scrutinising
the singer's trousers, ''Oh my, Mick, what a big basket you have!'' No
wonder Jagger blushed.
A pugnacious journalistic gossip in the Driberg tradition, Wheen
answers various allegations against his hero, not always plausibly. It
has been assumed that Driberg married Ena Blinfield in 1951 (''buggers
can't be choosers'', joked Churchill on seeing a photograph of Ena) as a
respectable cover for a possible ministerial post under Attlee.
''Nonsense'' insists Wheen: Driberg knew he had no chance of becoming a
cabinet minister, pointing out in Ruling Passions that Attlee (like
Harold Wilson after him) was a ''deeply prejudiced'' puritan who
detested homosexuals. Driberg, Wheen believes, married to gain a
companion to share Bradwell Lodge, his stately home in Essex. Yet the
marriage was a predictable farce that took on tragic overtones as Ena
tried to cope with the strain of Driberg's pursuit of young men. If
Driberg only wanted a domestic companion it is obvious he should have
chosen a compatible one, presumably a uniformed youth. I still think the
marriage was a foolish plan for political promotion.
On another issue Wheen is more convincing. Two years after Driberg's
death, Chapman Pincher's book Inside Story suggested the late Labour MP
and former Communist was possibly a KGB agent. Driberg had written a
sympathetic biography of his friend, the Soviet spy Guy Burgess, in
1956, and Pincher drew his own conclusions. ''But,'' declares Wheen
indignantly, ''Pincher is hardly the best judge: as urinal to the men of
M15 and M16 he cannot rid himself of the stench imparted by his patrons'
acrid piss.'' In Wheen's opinion, the book on Burgess was no
KGB-inspired tract but a text reflecting ''Tom's genuine
preoccupations'' with justice and Christian socialism.
It is Wheen's contention that Driberg, evidently more sinner than
saint, was both promiscuous homosexual and sincere Christian. Wheen
argues his case eloquently, leaving an impression of Driberg as a
victim, not a villain. This is exactly the kind of affectionate
biography Driberg would have wished on himself, though the heterosexual
reader will find the special pleading a shade too pious.
Quentin Crisp, a less desperate homosexual than Driberg, has
profitably made an exhibition of himself in print, on film (vicariously,
courtesy of John Hurt) and on stage. Now, in a sequence of short essays
reprinted from Christopher Street magazine, the pun-loving, movie-mad
''effeminate homosexual'' offers characteristically crisp comments on
his favourite cinematic exhibitionists. His aesthetic criteria are
simple enough: a film should be larger than life (television is
dismissed because it ''diminishes the scale of our fantasies'', a
filmscript should be unashamedly escapist (''We ought to visit a cinema
as we would go to church''), a filmstar should be a colossal fantasy
figure (''an ideal of virtue of mystery or depravity''). He loves
Crawford, Davis, Dietrich: all the movie monsters.
According to Crisp, Hollywood, once ''a lacquered pavilion of women,
an exotic aviary of actresses'', is currently ruled by men, money and
machines (''Producers no longer need women; they have robots''). When
Crisp is not waxing nostalgically about the glory that was Hollywood, he
is scattering his eccentric opinions like gunshot, often missing the
mark by a mile. Discussing the film A Bigger Splash, he recognises only
four great painters of the twentieth century, namely John, Dali, Warhol
and Hockney, which is bad news for admirers of Picasso, Leger and the
like. Turning to Prick Up Your Ears he explains that Joe Orton was
murdered because of his ''heartless, strident and masculinity'' and
describes the dialogue as Pinteresque when Alan Bennett's script is
superlatively Ortonesque.
Film buffs will find Crisp's perception of movies as fantasy-factories
too trite but fans of Crisp will enjoy provocative remarks which always
say more about the star-struck author that the phenomenon of film
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