Diana Trilling
AFTER THE PROFUMO CASE
As
time settles over the Profumo affair, dimming our re–
collection of the daily excitements it provided at its height, only the
figure of Dr. Stephen Ward continues to have a hold on our memory.
Profumo himself, Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies: whoever
physically survived a case which once looked so imperishable vanishes
into the special oblivion prepared for scandalous public characters,
while the man who died takes more and more shape among his
ghostly colleagues. But this is not surprising. It was fairly early in
the drama that Ward captured the stage from the brilliant Christine,
who had already stolen it from Macmillan's Minister of War-he
must always have suggested a complexity, or a significance, missing
in the other leading persons. Then Ward committed suicide, and in
taking his own life took the remaining life out of the spectacle, leaving
behind him a brooding sense of public humiliation.
The British press was startlingly and at last subdued by Ward's
act of terminal self-definition. Up to that point it had been the voice
of a public which seemed quite to have lost its grip on actuality,
alternating an (I suppose) expectable lubricity with alarming bouts
of self-castigation. The scandal had started as nothing more than
the familiar low-down on life in high places-the form is established
in Western tradition; but all at once it became a metaphor of
national catastrophe. It was as if the drastic diminution of Britain's
prestige since the War, her failures at Bermuda and in the Common
Market, all these wounds suffered in the recession of Empire, had
been freshly exposed in the news of her "immorality." One listened