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DIANA TRILLING
political enemies, of different races and ethnic groups, the values of
the emotionally ill and the sexually deviant? "I am over-sexed,"
Ward announced in solemn self-diagnosis, and the very primitiveness
of the statement indicated his belief that could he but present his
clinical "insight" with enough immediate simplicity, there was bound
to be the proper response of "understanding," such as the courts and
even the general educated public are nowadays presumed to have
learned from psychiatry.
It was moving that Ward never collapsed or cringed before
public opinion, that he never tried to make himself out to be other
than he was. No more than we would now expect a writer of any
degree of personal dignity and social conscientiousness to deny the
public charge of homosexuality, did Ward deny his departure from the
sexual norm of the society that was assessing his right to equal mem–
bership in it. What one saw in him was the need at least partially
to separate himself out, as a man, from the criminal activities in
which he had been engaged-this and the futile struggles of someone
overtaken by a social force of which he had but poor awareness until
its full punitive strength had descended upon him. So might a drug–
addict, explaining his addiction and admitting that it had led him
to steal, yet resist the verdict of law as a whole moral judgment on
him as a human being. His defense, except where it was directed to
concrete allegations of the prosecution, was medical although without
a medical language, cultural and even intellectual though with no
real power of mind to further the still-difficult minority position.
The forlorn attempt to comprehend his fate and to bring into rational
accord the personal and the social considerations that had now become
so at odds with each other set the tone of his public performance,
and
it
was a tone that qualified him in some awkward way as the
small hero of the scandal, perhaps in embryo its man of consciousness
and therefore its sole victim to rise to the level of tragedy.
Certainly a personal history could not have been more bizarre
than Ward's: the substantial rearing, the good natural endowment
of looks and charm or, more strictly, facility; then the many-faceted
career of osteopath, portrait-painter, pimp. The conjunction of the
two professions of osteopathy and art is of course stranger in America
than in England; while even in England osteopathy may lack the
prestige of medicine,
it
is not the marginal profession there that it
is
