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