Don't stand so far from me ... Cate Blanchett and Andrew Simpson in Notes on a Scandal
On Friday February 9 the first words I read, as on every day, were in the Guardian. Among the home news was a report that a married teacher, Steven Edwards, 34, had been jailed for five years for having had sex with three female pupils, aged between 14 and 18. The jury's decision was prompt and unanimous, the judge's comments harsh.
Later that same Friday, as is again my habit, I bought the new TLS. February is the month of WH Auden's 100th birthday, and the lead article was a lengthy appreciation of the great poet. In passing, the author of the piece, Nicholas Jenkins, made the point that we have no authoritative biography because of "an only slow-fading reticence about Auden's love life".
As Jenkins went on to explain, "it has only recently become possible to discuss directly in print, or even to name, Michael Yates (1919-2001), who was a schoolboy of 13 when the 26-year-old Auden [then a schoolmaster] fell in love with him in the summer of 1933, and whom scholars have had to refer to as 'the person who is the subject of the poem, Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love'", which, alongside Funeral Blues, is among Auden's most famous. As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I was instructed that it was directed, heterosexually, to some un-named adult woman.
Jenkins, like other Auden critics, offers no moral criticism. He refers, neutrally, to the boy as Auden's "lover". The implication is that what matters is the poetry that resulted; not the offence (if such it was) that gave rise to it. If Steven Edwards had written exquisite lyrics as a result of the experience of seducing his pupils, would the court have gone easier on him? Would posterity have been indifferent to his crimes, 70 years later - grateful only for the literary residue of his philandering?
Finally, again as I normally do, I went to the cinema on Friday night and caught the film that was currently packing in audiences, Notes on a Scandal. The plot revolves around a 30-something art teacher who has an affair with a 15-year-old pupil. She, in consequence, falls victim to a wicked old lesbian. The moral design of the film is complex. But, judging by audience reaction, there was more sympathy for the seductress Sheba (played by delicious Cate Blanchett) than for her spotty fifth-form "victim", or the ugly old dyke Babs (played, with magnificent malevolence, by Judi Dench). If Steven Edwards had been a stunningly good-looking woman, and his victims male, would the court have gone easier on him? And, if not the court, then public opinion?
What to make of this? Not, I think, that there is one law for great poets, and beautiful women and another, harsher law for the rest of us. What these three, Friday the 9th , examples indicate to me is that moral judgment where sex is involved defies generalisation. Which, probably, is why it makes such good art - if, from time to time, bad behaviour.
