Vol. 31 No. 1 1964 - page 67

THE
PROFUMO CASE
67
of serious artistic rebellion. We recall that Karl Marx isolated a
type he speaks of as the
lumpen-proletarian,
someone who has no
genuine identification with the interests of the working-class but
who is nonetheless allied to that class because of his exclusion from
or rejection of the middle class; by analogy, we can think of Ward
as a
lumpen-artist,
who pursued his minor talent not because of any
genuine involvement with artistic concerns but as an aspect of his
rejection of all the morally-strenuous business of life. As the
lumpen–
proletariat represented for Marx a parody of the class-conscious
working-class, so the Ward circle represents a parody on the serious
artistic consciousness of our day. Its conscription of its membership
from such a broad range of British society; its existence in a universe
making so little moral demand that it constitutes a moral and
therefore a social vacuum; the close interplay in its life between the
refusal of a defined social authority and a defined sexual authority;
the sense of community
it
would seem to have generated in its
devotion to the forbidden-for all these unstated principles which
seem to apply to Ward's group, contemporary art has its equivalents.
The
lumpen-proletarian
of Marx was often criminal, or edging
toward criminality. Similarly, the
lumpen-artist
today, especially if
he is a person of spirit, will tend to be drawn in this direction of
our current rebelliousness. Describing the followers of Louis-Napoleon
in France in 1850-and it is the same passage in which he speaks
of the
lumpen-proletariat-Marx
wrote:
Alongside decayed roues with doubtful means of subsistence
and of doubtful origin, alongside ruined and adventurous off–
shoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds . . . tricksters, gam–
blers,
maquereaux
[procurors], brothel-keepers, porters,
literati
. . . in short the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown
hither and thither, which the French term
la Boheme.
. ..
One's mind leaps at once to present-day Cliveden, the estate of Ward's
friend Lord Astor, where the British patriciate had only to dip into
the swimming pool to come up with the fulfillment of a roue's dream,
procured for him by a portrait-painter to royalty. Marx's vivid sketch
of Bonaparte's followers is emotionally overcharged, but it leaves us
in no doubt of the intimacy between the raffish and the criminal
I...,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66 68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,...162
Powered by FlippingBook