68
DIANA TRILLING
in the bohemianism of more than a hundred years ago. Today this
intimacy persists. The chief difference is that today the outraging of
law is explicit rather than merely incidental in our programs of
protest.
And one must suppose that
it
was the discernible parallel between
Ward's style of life and the tendencies of contemporary dissidence
that led certain well-known British writers, whose consciousness of
themselves as social rebels is definitive of their work, to send a wreath
to Ward's grave. Their intuition that there existed a bond between
the enterprise of modern literature and Ward's death, self-inflicted
but dictated by established social forces, was as sound as their decision
to signalize his burial was then honorable.
But more even than a tendency in radical art is mirrored in
the Profumo affair: there
is
also a close parallel between Ward's
political protest and the main direction of modern political protest.
In his official report of the case, Lord Denning said of Ward that
he was "without doubt a Communist sympathizer" who was "much
under the influence of Ivanov," the Soviet intelligence officer who
was having an affair with Christine Keeler at the same time as
Profumo. While it may of course be true that Ward was much under
the influence of Ivanov, the discipleship is not required to explain
how Ward got mixed up in pro-Soviet activities, his political excursions
follow so logically from his life-style. For a personal protest like Ward's
has necessarily these days to be in some degree a social-political protest
as well: this is how things are now in the world, and Ward was
a worldly character. Not since the 1920's has rebelliousness, however
private its impetus, been free to express itself in purely private terms.
While in earlier decades of the century we assumed that the refusal
of the moral values of the middle class referred only to the living
of one's personal life or perhaps to the individual's need for an un–
encumbered social vision, today we demand that personal protest
wear the cloak of social responsibility. It is not alone on his own
behalf but on behalf of all mankind, even on behalf of the physical
survival of the race, that the individual now announces his rejection
of an established social authority. In our decade, rebellion without
a social "cause" is the mark only of the illiterate or of those who
are hopelessly without tie to society.
In this situation, political ignorance or light-mindedness, such
