I think that I got this due to seeing it quoted in a book about Guy Burgess, but I honestly don’t remember — Tom Driberg overlapped with so many people I’m interested in (Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon among them) that there are a variety of ways I could have stumbled across this. The forward informs us that this was not completed before Driberg died, although it does cover a lot of his life. I do think it shows at points throughout that this was unfinished, as the narrative can be unfocused. He was a Member of Parliament in the Labour Party for a long time (although he started as an Independent since he was a Socialist and had more of an outsider point of view) and was a journalist, primarily working for the Express and then Reynolds News. The main draw here for me is that he was gay and writes very openly for 1977 about it; the forward describes him as “defiant” and “crusading” for doing so.
For me the best sections were those about his childhood and whenever he would travel as a newspaper correspondent. It’s always so striking when you get to the chunk in a man’s autobiography from the British upper classes when they start their private school, because it’s always the worst time of their life and they’re clearly traumatized from it. I don’t think I’ve read one memoir where the guy had even an okay time, and then they’ll send their kids to the same school (if they have kids)! Talk about transmitting your trauma to the next generation. Even here, when Driberg was the only day boy, he had a nightmarish time with a sadist headmaster and gets punished via “a school mobbing,” when the whole school is directed to rush at him and beat him up. His whole childhood and relations to his family are sad, as there was a lot of dysfunction and conflict, and he ends by saying he thinks it would have been better if he “had been dumped anonymously on the doorstep of a prosperous, childless widower,” but his account of it all made for engaging reading.
The information about cruising in the 1930s and 1940s was especially interesting and made me think about differences in sexual connections then and now. It seems like there used to be a lot more sharing a bed and casual nudity between men that could then end up in an assignation. Tom makes overtures to a large amount of the strangers he meets and they seem to usually be open to it. I wondered if there was some sort of philosophical shift that’s happened with increased knowledge that gay people exist, where if you then categorize people strictly as gay or not gay, the more fluid in between space becomes lost. While I would rather have a lack of persecution and the ability for people to be open and to understand themselves, this felt like a glimpse into a world where the strong categories were a bit more permeable.
The sections from the columns that he included were often more engaging to me than the chapter surrounding them. Maybe it was the 1930s patter that would entice me, who knows. The political chunks especially were just not for me, because I’m just not a political history person, and I dragged through it. Overall, this was a thought provoking read but it also felt circular and not the most focused in some parts, perhaps because he didn’t actually finish this before he died. I would only recommend this for people who are already very engaged in this time period.
