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DIANA TRILLING
held, and we can only guess how wide was the objective ground on
which Ward could persuade himself that
his
sexual occupations
were not too divergent from socially-approved behavior. But
it
is
fair to conjecture that Ward's clients were not only numerous enough
but sufficiently well-placed to have constituted a considerable social
authority for someone who would seem to have had but a weak
hold on all realities. In Profumo's instance, exposure-by which I
mean, here, not merely the public scandal but the enforced acknow–
ledgment of a social power apart from and stronger than personal
desire-produced, it would seem, an hysteria; for how else, except
as hysteria, explain his impossible lie to Macmillan and to the House
of Commons? In the instance of Ward, the confrontation with a
divided social authority-an extreme of social condemnation living
side by side with the condonation he had known within his own
circle-destroyed him.
From a clinical view, Ward's split consciousness of authority
probably points to a personal pathology. But it of course does more
than this too: it also points to the nature of our culture. Although
the division between official and dissident values
is
inevitable in
any society, it is where a culture is most divided in itself that we
are most likely to find a segment of the population exercising its
right to widen rather than close the breach. Sometimes this effort is
profoundly serious, and takes the form of art. More generally, it
will take the form of moral improvisation, perhaps available to public
examination, perhaps shielded behind an outward conformity. The
life of Ward and his friends was nothing if not frivolous, nothing
if not improvised and outwardly conformable; and yet in a curious
way it partook of the quality of the life of art in our time. Indeed,
in the gross, even grotesque, connection we can trace between the
life of Ward and his group and the dominant movement of con–
temporary artistic thought lies one of the continuing interests of
the case.
It is clearly ridiculous to think of Ward as a serious artist, or to
think of his circle as participants in any of the serious movements
of contemporary protest. Even on its surface, the half-world he
shared with his friends gives unmistakable signs of having been a
cultural half-world as well, where there was no discrimination between
an easy knowingness-what we call sophistication-and the substance
