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‘On the extreme left of celestial space’
John Maynard Keynes, 1924–1946

MAYNARD HAD BEEN brought up in a household with every academic door invitingly ajar, just waiting to be pushed, but with few windows open on the arts. His brother Geoffrey, who became an expert on the drawings of William Blake and was to serve as chairman of the National Portrait Gallery, recalled that, when the boys were young, their ‘home surroundings afforded no aesthetic stimulus of modernity or novelty’.¹ Yet as young men they both reached out beyond the cultural presuppositions of Harvey Road. For example, they shared a passion for the ballet. The bravura style of Serge Diaghilev’s productions, as seen in London from 1911, captivated both. Geoffrey eventually responded by composing a ballet himself, Job, produced in 1931 and based on Blake’s illustrations. Maynard’s response was dramatic in another sense; in 1925 he married a ballerina.

Falling for an attractive dancer, of course, can mean many things. Maynard’s relationship with Lydia Lopokova meant a further extension of his cultural hinterland – beyond the extension that Bloomsbury had already given him. Lest he be stereotyped as simply an academic figure, it should be remembered how he developed close friendships with non-academic writers, as we have seen. Lest he be seen as purely literary in his cultural tastes, it should be remembered that he became friends with active artists and also with art critics like Clive Bell and Roger Fry. It was the exhibition that Fry mounted in 1910, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, that effectively introduced the London public to Post-Impressionism and its Bloomsbury patrons alike. Keynes supported all of this financially and, during the First World War, began serious collecting himself on visits to Paris. Though small, his collection included works by Braque, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso; he later lent them freely for exhibition during the Second World War; and many of them are now on public display in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

For obvious reasons, Maynard was a patron of the paintings of his Bloomsbury friends. He had a close and passionate relationship with Duncan Grant, one of whose best works is his portrait of the young Keynes. Vanessa Bell, a painter herself, became a friend of Maynard’s through Bloomsbury; and it was when Vanessa succeeded in seducing Duncan that Maynard had to accept that their own homosexual relationship was over. But they all remained friends, albeit on Bloomsbury terms that allowed a good deal of latitude for bitchy gossip, some of it, behind Maynard’s back, about Lydia. By January 1922 Duncan was writing to Vanessa: ‘As for Maynard, until I see him carrying on with L. I must give up trying to imagine what happens – it beggars my fancy.’²

Lydia Lopokova had made her first London appearances with Diaghilev’s company in 1918, weeks before the end of the war. We know that Maynard met her then; that he went backstage; that he told Duncan Grant that he was offered the opportunity to pinch the legs of the vivacious and uninhibited Russian ballerina; and that he remarked that this offer would have appealed more to the unambiguously heterosexual Clive Bell.³ This was hardly the stuff of romance, especially since Lydia had for two years been married to Diaghilev’s business manager, a much older man.

How different, then, by January 1922! By now she had abruptly walked out on both Diaghilev and her husband (a bigamist, as it turned out) before returning to the former but not the latter. At twenty-nine, she was at the peak of her career. She was now treated as a celebrity – but so, in his way, was the thirty-eight-year-old economist who became her greatest fan.