Soul of Indiscretion

Bol

Francis Wheen’s brilliantly comic portrait of one of the 20th-century’s great characters, Tom Driberg: wit, parliamentarian, serial cottager, alleged communist spy and friend to the Kray brothers. In his obituary The Times described Tom Driberg as 'an unreliable man of undoubted distinction . . . he was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquantances'. But what friends, and what acquantances. And what glorious unreliability. A Brideshead-generation Oxford Socialist, Tom Driberg was also a flamboyant and promiscuous homosexual, an intriguer, gossip, friend to the Sitwells and the Krays (though not on the same evening) and one of the most colourful characters of the London social set. Living in an era when the establishment looked after its own and the press looked the other way, Tom Driber was able to shatter almost every idea of polite society from its epicentre. His was a glorious indulgent life that included a highly public wedding in 1951 just a few years after he had concluded an extravagant series of affaris with soldiers, sailors and airmen. Driberg had had a good war by his own unique standards. As could be truthfully be siad of the rest of his life. Francis Wheen’s brilliantly comic portrait of one of the 20th-century’s great characters, Tom Driberg: wit, parliamentarian, serial cottager, alleged communist spy and friend to the Kray brothers. There are few people for whom marriage was so ill-suited yet well attended: at Tom Driberg’s were cabinet ministers and mobsters, Betjeman and Waugh, but it was Osbert Lancaster who commemorated the sheer extraordinariness of the occasion, and with it celebrated the social life of Driberg, and an era of Englishness now passed into history when the Brideshead generation sang the ‘Red Flag’: Friends of yours and friends of mine, Friends we always thought were deadFriends who toe the party line, Friends we know are off their headLabour friends who’re gratified Girl-friends, boy-friends, friends ambiguousAt being allowed to kiss the bride. Coloured friends from the AntiguasArtistic friends, a few of whom Friends ordained and friends unfrocked,Are rather keen to kiss the groom. Friends who leave us slightly shocked,Friends from Oxford, friends from pubs, All determined not to missAnd even friends from Wormwood scrubs. So rare a spectacle as this!

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Pagina's: 464, Paperback, Fourth Estate