THE PROFUMO
CASE
63
here. The point about Ward in the English professional context is
the similar distance from center of his two vocations: even in England,
osteopathy is the branch of medicine as portrait-painting is the
branch of art which, while offering a reliable financial return, asks
the least investment of passion and imposes the lightest burden of
responsibility. That Ward, a man of manifest energies, exercised
his choice in both art and healing where there was a minimal demand
for thoughtfulness, or discipline, or professional commitment could
well be a clue to the personal disposition which led him to add to an
already busy life the peripheral career of procuring, for it suggests
that the single motive that wholly compelled him was sexual phantasy
-apparently it was to the demands of the sexual imagination that
Ward gave the dedication we look for in the artist or physician.
His urgent art or, we might put it, his urgent therapy, was sex,
perhaps chiefly in its perverse aspects.
Ward was thus in social effect, if not in precise legal fact, on
trial for his choice of dedication: the pursuit of his sexual dream.
And I suspect that this is why his ordeal, culminating in death, left
us with such a large residue of unresolved confusion and embarrass–
ment and the wish to close the book on the whole affair-there are
few sexual dreams that are not the common dream of humanity.
Of Profumo, we know that he was guilty of an indiscretion that
ruined his career, but the career and the indiscretion in the end
stood for nothing that really interests us.
As
a fallen figure he suggests
little more than foolishly-defeated worldly ambition.
As
for Christine
Keeler, she had always been the person with something to sell for
as much money as possible. Seemingly without personal principal,
without, we guess, the ability to feel any emotion commensurate with
her precocious experience of life or with the acute public situation
into which she had been catapulted, she was scarcely someone to
touch our sense of the significant; after Ward's suicide, a public
that had been all-too-naturally available to her seductions was quick
to retract its enthusiasm. Ward alone in the case was a representative
figure, someone in whom we can read,
if
we will, a record of our
times and of ourselves in our times. And now that the case has receded
as news, the need to bring him into this cultural-historical light begins
to press on us.
The role of sexual perversity in what we like to think of as
