74
DIANA TRILLING
hysteria was bound to have its way with him, the purely psychological
explanation seems finally to fail in adequacy before the realization
of the simple other course open to him than that of lying. He could
have said, "I have done nothing to harm my country; my private
life is no one's business but my own."
As
a matter of fact, during
the case we were frequently reminded that when the Duke of
Wellington was being blackmailed by the famous courtesan, Harriette
Wilson, this was the stand he took: to her threat to include him
in her memoirs, Wellington replied, "Publish and be damned!"
The Wellington precedent is cited, of course, to suggest how
much the quality both of statesmen and of ladies of pleasure has
deteriorated with the passage of the years. And who, looking at
Profumo and at Christine Keeler, whose notion of life might have
been concocted for her by some tenth-rate Hollywood hack, would
wish to argue the opposite? Yet surely Profumo's failure to match
Wellington's firmness was dictated not merely by personal but also
by cultural weakness-when we are told how much better Wellington
behaved, what we are not asked to consider is the alteration in the
quality of society itself in these intervening years: the moral hypocrisy
which goes along with our progress in sexual freedom, the mounting
confusion which attends our wish to join our advance in science
and technology with an advance in moral wisdom.
If
we compare
our period with Wellington'S from the point of view of sexual
enlightenment, we can falsely persuade ourselves that we today
have entirely the better of things. The fact is that had the Minister
of War admitted his affair with Christine Keeler,
it
is doubtful
that Macmillan could have supported him successfully, that society
would have stood behind a truthful Profumo as
it
did behind a
truthful Wellington. The pressures of respectable opinion might well
have been too strong, pressures of a kind which seem actually to
increase in our society the more that sexual freedom becomes every
man's democratic right.
In his book,
Growing
Up
Absurd,
Paul Goodman describes our
period in history as a time of incompleted revolutions not only in
the sexual sphere but in all departments of life. We look back upon
the Profumo affair and wonder where we could find a sharper
demonstration of this insight. Ours is an era of "cases," starting
with the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920's, proceeding through the
