Guilty as Sin

Skylight by David Hare

Lyric Theatre, 1996

When a couple fall in love and both are free, single and over 21, the result can be all peaceful harmony and bliss. But it only needs one or both to be already committed elsewhere for the whole thing to become a morass of misery, remorse and recrimination. Julia Francis looks at the causes and effects of sexual guilt through the ages.

Guilt derives from any number of sources – the knowledge that you are deceiving a trusted partner; that there may be children involved who will suffer; that the affair goes against religious strictures, or conflicts with an age-old family feud as in Romeo and Juliet; or is liable to cause ethnic friction, as in West Side Story. It may even be that the lovers realise they are doing something that actually offends against their own natures or their deepest-held beliefs, which is a problem the characters in Skylight have to deal with. In such cases not only does the lover feel they are letting down others, they are betraying themselves. And if you can’t trust yourself, how can you expect others to?

This latter problem is most pertinent to those in the public eye who, rightly or wrongly, are expected to set an example. At the time of the Profumo affair in the early sixties, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan observed that people in public life should uphold “different standards from those prevalent today in many circles”. He was wishing for the moon then, and he would be asking the impossible now, as the likes of Clark, Mellor, Parkinson et al have proved. Whether morality generally has taken an irretrievable nosedive in the last thirty years, or is simply going through a cyclical trough, it still creates pressures on those with enough character to acknowledge they are doing something wrong even if they lack the willpower to prevent themselves from doing it.

John Profumo lied to protect himself, or at least his political career, and ended up in deeper water than he needed to be. On 22 March 1963 he made a statement to the House in which he denied having slept with Christine Keeler. She was also seeing Russian naval attaché Eugene Ivanov, but Profumo himself had already been cleared of being a security risk by MI5. Presumably the lie he told in the Commons was an attempt to save his marriage to the actress Valerie Hobson. In the end he came clean with her and his colleagues, and though the marriage survived, his career as War Minister didn’t.

But the public’s right to know is a double-edged sword and sometimes unsavoury revelations can help rather than hinder. Look at Paddy Ashdown, whose frank admission of an extra-marital affair slightly ahead of the press revelation of it actually increased for a time his popularity among the rank and file. Lord Wellington had shown the way more than a century and a half before. In 1825 he received a letter from former paramour Harriette Wilson to the effect that she was writing her kiss-and-tell memoirs but she would keep his name out of it for £200. He returned her note with the immortal words “Publish and be damned” scrawled imperiously across it. So she did. Whether she went to hell because of it, history doesn’t record – only the fact that three years later Wellington became prime minister…

So, no sexual guilt there. But brazening it out can always blow up in your face. Edward VII, leader of the fast Marlborough House set, played as fast and loose as his upper-class cronies did and twice was embroiled in a messy court case over his and others’ affairs. He was lucky in his wife, Princess Alexandra, who kept to the background and put up with it all, perhaps more mindful of her position and the need for dignity than he. Other wives of the time, however, were made of sterner stuff. Margaret Lloyd George finally called a halt over her husband’s long-term affair with his secretary Frances Stevenson, and left him with this chilling parting shot: “For half a lifetime you’ve treated me on a level with our dogs… Tell me, did you ask her to die with you too? Oh David, what are we supposed to do, sit on your funeral pyre, holding hands?”

Both Edward and Lloyd George enjoyed a measure of popular support despite, and sometimes because of, their peccadilloes (though whether they would have done so had they been women is another matter). An affair which doesn’t receive such public sanction is more likely to end unhappily, no matter how ardent, famous or even infamous the participants. National hero Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton placed themselves firmly beyond the social pale by living openly together for years, even while Sir William Hamilton, a great fan of the admiral’s, was alive. He even shared their ménage at Merton Place until his death in 1803. Nelson would hear no criticism of his mistress, coldly abandoned his wife for her sake, and even had a child with her. Yet despite Emma being Nelson’s ‘bequest to the nation’ at his death, her requests for a pension were turned down and she died in poverty ten years later.

But if secret affairs cause pleasure and pain in equal measure to the conscience-stricken participants, the effects of their revelation can be agonising in the extreme. Violence of one kind or another sometimes ends an affair as abruptly as passion began it. The 12th-century scholar Abelard and his young pupil Heloise resisted their mutual attraction as long as they could, but eventually embraced it and each other whole-heartedly. In response, Heloise’s uncle had Abelard castrated for his sins, a brutal example of sexual guilt finding its punishment on earth.

There is a theory that violence of this kind is a form of displacement of one’s own guilt upon the injuring party: “I didn’t make you happy and I can’t stand the thought of you being happy with someone else, so I’m going to make sure you both suffer in an access of self-righteous indignation.” Sometimes the couple will need no third party to deal the blow, but step willingly into the void off Lovers’ Leap. Is this through guilt, for having shattered family taboos? Or is it simply the despairing knowledge that no feeling can ever be as intense again?

The story of Sir Roger Casement even showed sexual guilt being experienced by others on his behalf. Convicted of treason for having provided Dublin with German guns for the abortive Easter Rising, Casement was sentenced to death for treason. His supporters called for a reprieve – until leaked extracts of Casement’s diary revealed him to be gay. His champions immediately melted away and the sentence was carried out. Apparently they would have supported a traitor but could not afford to be associated with a homosexual.

The artistic representation of the syndrome is generally easier to take than the haggard faces and gnawed fingernails of the real thing. The galleries of the world are hung with centuries’ worth of swooning lovers, from Leda and the swan up to Francesca da Rimini and beyond. How much jollier things could have been if the morals of Louis XIV’s court had prevailed throughout the Renaissance. The silk stockings and creamy bosoms of Fragonard and Boucher indicate that in 18th-century France, at least, love affairs were strictly for fun and recreation only.

In wartime Britian things were more strait-laced. The anguished lovers in Brief Encounter talk so much because their upbringing and sense of decency forbid them from doing anything else. Tragically, they can talk the emotion out without talking it away. Twenty years later Lara and Yuri in the same director’s Doctor Zhivago speak less but emote more. Their tryst, although ultimately carnal, is undertaken with even longer faces than their British predecessors because not only do they share the intention, they share its physical conclusion too, along with all the psychic trauma that goes with it. Fortunately for Zhivago he is able to work off some of his misery by writing poetry – a bonus for those who have an artistic outlet for their feelings.

For the rest of us, there is nothing for it but to take the guilt on the chin and see how long we can last out. Secret meetings, whispered phone calls, the mingled thrill and terror, the racking sense of wretchedness at betraying wife, husband, family, friends – it can indeed become a painful and tangled web. The guilt alone can almost be enough to drain the affair of its attraction. Almost, but not quite; otherwise, why would so many affairs flourish against the better councils of the lovers’ consciences?