Tom Driberg - Oxford

Oxford

Oxford in 1924 was dominated by an avant-garde aesthetic movement in which personalities such as Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Cyril Connolly and, a little later, W. H. Auden were leading lights. Driberg was soon immersed in a world of art, politics, poetry and parties: "There was just no time for any academic work", he wrote later. With Auden, he discovered T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which they read again and again, "with growing awe". A poem of Driberg's in the style of Edith Sitwell was published in Oxford Poetry 1926; when Sitwell came to Oxford to deliver a lecture, Driberg invited her to have tea with him, and she accepted. After her lecture he found an opportunity to recite one of his own poems, and was rewarded when Sitwell declared him "the hope of English poetry".

Meanwhile, together with the future historian A. J. P. Taylor, Driberg formed the membership of the Oxford University Communist Party. During the General Strike of May 1926, most Oxford students supported the government and enrolled as special constables and strike-breakers. A minority, which included the future Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell and the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman, sided with the strikers, while Driberg and Taylor offered their services at the British Communist Party's headquarters in London. The Party showed no urgency to employ them, and Taylor soon left. Driberg, given a job distributing strike bulletins, was arrested by the police before he could begin and was detained for several hours. This ended his active role in the strike. Notwithstanding his extreme left-wing associations, he secured 75 votes (against the winner's 152) in the 1927 elections for the presidency of the Oxford Union.

Throughout his time at Oxford, Driberg followed his passion for Anglican rituals by regularly attending Mass at Pusey House, an independent religious institution with a mission to " the Church of England's Catholic life and witness". In spite of the prevalent Oxford homoerotic ethos, his sexual energies were largely devoted to casual encounters with working-class men, rather than to relationships with his fellow undergraduates. He experienced sexual relations with only one don, whom he met outside the university, unaware of the latter's identity. One of Driberg's elaborate hoaxes was a concert called "Homage to Beethoven", which featured megaphones, typewriters and a flushing lavatory. Newspaper accounts of this event raised the interest of the notorious practitioner of black magic Aleister Crowley. Driberg accepted an invitation to lunch with Crowley for the first of several meetings between them, at one of which Crowley nominated Driberg as his successor as World Teacher. Nothing came of the proposal, though the two continued to meet; Driberg received from Crowley manuscripts and books that he later sold for sizeable sums. The consequence of these various extracurricular involvements was neglect of his academic work; failure in his final examinations was inevitable, and in the summer of 1927 he left Oxford without a degree.