THE
PROFUMO CASE
65
which it can be taken to be the measure. And obviously the right
to explore those of our sexual instincts that are precisely
not
in the
service of civilization ranks high in the scale of the freedoms by
which the self is affirmed.
And yet, for all the license that a free sexuality currently takes
to itself in literature, we must remark how few perversities are ex–
plored in serious writing and how many still left to pornography.
So far, among the sexual activities which are thought to be perverse,
homosexuality has been the chief area for serious literary study.
Heterosexual oral and anal sexuality have been but lightly ventured
upon. Sado-masochistic activity remains virtually untouched. On the
other hand, the orgy, oldest of socially-sanctioned sexual discursions,
becomes our newest mythic activity, to which literary rebelliousness
attaches much of its wish for an assertion of personal freedom.
In revealing the sado-masochistic, orgiastic indulgences which
Ward provided for his clients to a world that responded as it did,
the Profumo affair served as a reminder that even today, when, as
I think, art creates more than it reflects the ordinary life of society,
there is yet the very widest gulf between art and actuality. But the
case also opened up to fresh inspection a territory that science had
once had the courage to move in on with full awareness of its human
immediacy but which in more recent years it has, to all public
appearance, surrendered to statistics. The perversity of everyday life
which a Kinsey Report tabulated for us we were able to receive
without affect; there were no people behind those charts and tables,
only subjects of interviews.
It
was the sad accomplishment of Stephen
Ward to present us with the material of statistics in a live man.
And when he killed himself because he had become such a figure of
public shame, all people of sensitive feeling must intuitively have taken
some responsibility for his isolation, even his illegality, in a culture
that prides itself on its large-minded view of the sexual life.
And yet of course it was only as he was brought into the public
glare, a man accused, that Ward spoke to us of loneliness. Until he
is arrested, whoever makes a commerce of sexual perversity never
lacks company or customers. His enterprise, whether it is on the
fringe of respectability or outside its boundaries, has a built-in gre–
gariousness. Happily, the names of the wealthy gentlemen who used
Ward's services, the masked men and naked waiters, have been with-
