KEYNES THOUGHT HIMSELF UGLY IN APPEARANCE AND voice. ‘Yes, I have a clever head, a weak character, an affectionate disposition, and a repulsive appearance,’ he told Arthur Hobhouse, whom he found sexually desirable but was hesitant to seduce. Repulsive was a repeated word with him. ‘My dear,’ he told Lytton Strachey in the year that they became lovers, ‘I have always suffered and I suppose always will from a most unalterable obsession that I am so physically repulsive that I’ve no business to hurl my body on anyone else’s. The idea is so fixed and constant that I don’t think anything … could ever shake it.’ Other people agreed that he had horrid looks for which he atoned by his talents. ‘He is an ugly devil, but said to be a financial genius,’ Lady Cynthia Asquith, the ex-Prime Minister’s beautiful and clever daughter-in-law, noted after walking with him in 1918. Two years later Virginia Woolf likened him to ‘a gorged seal, double chin, ledge of red lip, little eyes, sensual, brutal, unimaginative’. After his fortieth birthday she revised her opinion: she still found him ‘very gross’, with ‘a queer swollen eel look, not very pleasant’, but his eyes she conceded were ‘remarkable’. Keynes compensated for feeling unattractive by flirting. Men and women who interested him were likely to have his toying charm exerted on them. Flirtation was part of his equipment – along with his intelligence, intuition, lucidity and improvisation – as the great persuader.1

Ottoline Morrell described Keynes’s flirtatious technique as projecting ‘the atmosphere of his personality’. He gave ‘a detached, meditating and yet half-caressing interest in those he is speaking to, head on one side, a kindly, tolerant smile and very charming eyes, wandering, speculating, then probably a frank, intimate and perhaps laughing home-thrust’. Harold Nicolson, who had been Raymond Mortimer’s lover and knew other cadet Bloomsbury groupers, recalled Keynes gazing with ‘probing, gentle eyes’ at ‘the humble or the young’ as if they were ‘about to say something supremely important’. His approach must have been similar when, in 1909, after dinner at Simpson’s in the Strand, he walked to Liverpool Street station for a late-night Cambridge train. ‘I got into a carriage with three sailors and an exquisite young cavalry man. The Jacks fell deeply in love with the Tommy, who really was lovely. The conversation was general; we all drank a great deal of neat whisky out of a bottle, and everything became very friendly. They were going onto Norwich and must have been in one another’s arms before 2.20 a.m.’ Keynes was open to the possibilities in many people and situations when young. His enduring humanity rested on these early perceptions. Moreover, he created fresh prospects for others. ‘You … manage to create an atmosphere in which all is possible,’ Vanessa Bell told him in 1914. ‘One can talk of fucking and Sodomy and sucking and bushes and all without turning a hair.’2

Flirtation launched Keynes’s career as a public man. His appointment to the Royal Commission on Indian Finance, his discovery by politicians such as Austen Chamberlain and businessmen such as Lord Cable, the impression he made on hautes fonctionnaires such as Blackett and Chalmers, his recruitment to the Treasury in 1915 and his introductions to the Asquiths and to smart Liberal society – all these he owed to Edwin Montagu, who had first spotted him when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. During the general election of 1910 he and Montagu addressed a political meeting attended by Chivers jam-makers at Histon: ‘the audience’, he said, ‘was entirely male and very much excited in our behaviour’. Montagu treated Keynes with nervy, chattering coquetry in which he approached close and then started back. ‘He was an inveterate gossip in the servants’ hall of secretaries and officials,’ Keynes wrote. ‘It was his delight to debate, at the Cabinet, affairs of State, and then to come and deliver, to a little group, a brilliant and exposing parody, aided by mimicry, of what each of the great ones, himself included, had said.’ What Montagu loved most, Keynes continued, was ‘when he could push gossip over into intimacy. He never went for long without an intense desire to unbosom himself, even to exhibit himself, and to squeeze out of his confidant a drop of – perhaps reluctant – affection. And then again he would be silent and reserved beyond bearing, staring stonily with his great hand across his mouth and a staring monocle.’ Montagu said that the two people who meant most to him in life were Asquith’s paramour Venetia Stanley, with whom he had an undersexed if not unconsummated marriage, and the youngest member of Asquith’s Cabinet, Bron Lucas, a one-legged misogynist. Montagu and Lucas were self-torturing men; and there were knotty, non-avowable complications in the former’s mentorship of Keynes.3

There are many grades to flirtation. During 1921 Keynes gave a series of evening lectures at the London School of Economics. The banker Sir Charles Addis was one of the eminent men in the audience. Afterwards, despite the damp, dark nights, the two men, who belonged to a hardy generation, walked and talked together, from Aldwych to King’s Cross station, where Keynes entrained for Cambridge. ‘I like him much,’ Addis noted, ‘such a luminous intelligence!’ It was Keynes’s radiance, his attentive intensity and desire to impress his personality on listeners that made him such a seductive talker. He dallied with people as different as Lloyd George and Albert Einstein. ‘I had a terrible flirtation with Ll.G. yesterday,’ he confessed to his wife Lydia Lopokova, ‘and have been feeling ashamed of myself ever since!’ As to the theoretician of relativity, whom he first met in Berlin in 1926, ‘A naughty Jew-boy, covered with ink, pulling a long nose as the world kicks his bottom; a sweet imp, pure and giggling’ was his description. Keynes discussed politics and life with Einstein: ‘I had indeed a little flirt with him.’4

Keynes was a demonstrative man who liked physical contact. After a dinner of the Tuesday Club in 1930, at which he had led a discussion about free trade, he walked away from the Café Royal arm in arm with Reginald McKenna. Still linked, they strolled down Regent Street, across Piccadilly, to McKenna’s flat in Pall Mall, discussing a gold speculation. Ten years later Virginia Woolf met Keynes: ‘A blank wall of disapproval; till I kissed him, on wh. he talked of Lydia, having a book about the ballet, in his eager stammering way.’⁵

Many of Keynes’s dealings had an amorous undertow in which sexual desire had no part. He cherished his lively, diminutive aunt, Fanny Purchase: ‘the one I always flirt with’, he called her in 1923. Another redoubtable old lady, Mary Marshall, was delighted by his flirting, and insisted that his tender solicitude saved her life during a grievous illness of the 1930s. Only coarse spirits would take all his expressions of love as lustful. It would be absurd to find eroticism in Keynes’s remark, while a guest at Sutton Courtenay in 1917, less than a month after Asquith’s ejection from Downing Street, that he found himself ‘falling in love’ with the deposed Prime Minister, ‘sweet and gentle but bruised in spirit’. Yet the meanings of Keynes’s affections have been degraded. As recounted in chapter 3, he closed his account of his meeting at Spa with the banker Melchior, in which two men on opposing sides recognized their brotherhood and strove to avert German starvation, with words reminiscent of Tolstoy’s faith in the boundless power of loving humanity: ‘In a way, I was in love with him.’ The historian Niall Ferguson, who has shown a reiterative need to make illiberal references to Keynes’s carnality, reinterpreted these words. Keynes, he wrote in 2010, ‘felt an almost sexual attraction to Melchior’.6

Keynes thought that his sexual history mattered. He wished his experiences to be understood. Accordingly he preserved, with care, his incriminating correspondence written during his early manhood with Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and others. The letters were exchanged at a time when it was unlawful for men to have sex with one another. They were secreted by him from prying eyes. Although they chronicle, with more vivid authenticity than is possible for most historical figures, the initiations, experiments, risks, sprees, settled confidence and ultimate stability of his sexual history, from pre-pubescent schoolboy to late-middle-aged invalid with waning libido, his first biographer, Roy Harrod, writing long before the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967, quoted them gingerly. Yet euphemisms, suppressions and guesses were contemptible to Keynes. Although he felt ashamed of his looks, and unlovable because of them, he was unapologetic about his sexual preferences.

The English disease is that ‘one’s private life is so damned private that there is too great a gulf between it and the public appearance’, he told the vicar’s son Bernard Swithinbank in 1906. Few people had true communion with one another: ‘their privies are so private that they don’t even know themselves that they have got them’. Yet there were prurient nosey-parkers in many households, including parents, butlers, housekeepers and landladies, spying, eavesdropping, reading intimate letters and sending denunciations, as Hobhouse, Grant, Keynes and others found. Mummification best describes the mentality that Keynes withstood. This chapter unravels the mummy to find what lay beneath the stifling, tight-bound linen cloth.⁷

Keynes’s sex life was one of the seven activities that made the universal man. His affections and desires permeated, although they never dominated, his development at Eton, his influence at King’s, his epiphany as an Apostle, his ambivalence about his responsibilities as a government official, his flinching from the false fronts of politicians, his irresistible persuasiveness, his developing interest in the arts and his commitment to the public patronage of private creativity. As with classical economic orthodoxy, so with homosexuality: around the age of forty he had second thoughts, and changed the direction of his ideas. More than that, his flirtatious powers – his mixture of intensity, frivolity and flattering attention – were akin to his persuasive powers. He studied people, impressed his personality on them, charmed and subjugated their resistance, in similar ways. Intelligence was a major component in his sexuality. So, too, was the compartmentalization that he practised in common with most intelligent Englishmen of his class. He measured distances and evaluated reciprocities between people. Although he felt unashamed of his intimacies and longings, Keynes kept them in a discreet compartment of their own. Some trusted colleagues and contemporaries had easy admittance, but Tuesday Club members, Liberal party associates, Treasury officials and many others were excluded.

The ghost of Oscar Wilde haunted the sex education of middle-class Edwardians. His degradation and imprisonment defined how young men of comparable tastes thought of themselves after 1895. ‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort,’ says the hero of Morgan Forster’s novel Maurice. In 1914 Forster lent Keynes the manuscript, which was only published posthumously, because he feared that the police might open a criminal investigation into his friends or start a prosecution for obscenity. Forster instructed Keynes in the sexual samizdat of their generation: ‘Give back M.S. to Dickinson when you’ve done with it – don’t show or mention it to anyone.’ Wilde’s trials taught several generations of Englishmen that certain sexual acts, if detected or avowed, brought criminal prosecution or social ruin. The reverberations of his case suggested that practitioners of those acts were a freakish minority of intermediates, distinct and estranged from the rest of manhood, or an unruly tribe, with weird rites, launching raiding-parties on the normal majority of the human race, and with a tendency for their lives to plunge into calamitous disorder.8

Oscar Wilde’s name recurred at defining moments among the Keynes children. In 1906 the two brothers travelled together in Germany. Geoffrey had recently left Rugby School, where he had been swaddled, it seemed, in sexual ignorance. ‘My dear, here he is at nineteen and all agog to hear what any self-respecting lower boy would die of boredom to hear repeated,’ Maynard told Strachey. ‘It all came out at once and quite suddenly. He has found Germany all ears for O.W. and has read a brochure hinting.’ Geoffrey asked what Wilde had been accused of. ‘Sodomy,’ said his brother. ‘What’s that?’

I fell pale and shivering on the ground: and it then transpired that although he vaguely knew that people were sometimes ‘bunked’ for it, he had never known a case and had never even heard the question raised on a single occasion during his whole time at school.

‘Do they do it at Eton?’ said he.

‘Yes,’ said I – giggling. And he looked a little interested, but nervous.⁹

Geoffrey Keynes had an inquisitive sexuality. Rupert Brooke was not the only male beauty to whom he was susceptible when young. However, as a physician in a London teaching hospital, he was cowed by the threat of scandal into personifying discretion. As Brooke’s literary executor, he went to lengths that now seem pitiful to suppress evidence of his hero’s slight relations with men. His frets, too, inhibited Roy Harrod, whose cryptic treatment of homosexuality, in his official Keynes biography, was however chiefly necessitated by the criminal sanctions in force when it was published in 1951. It is impossible to know what loneliness, fear, frustration and regret he may have endured in the sixty years after the revelation to him in Germany of Oscar Wilde’s abasement, gaoling, ostracism and ruin. In old age Geoffrey Keynes’s inhibitions relaxed. Someone close to him said with a grin that you only had to walk down the street with him and see him swivel his head after certain passers-by, to see the appeal to him of young men. During the 1970s he was charmingly attentive to a series of handsome Cambridge undergraduates. As a widower, he seemed to be in love with an artistic blond at King’s, who did not mind being caressed as he knew the old man was too ancient to follow through. He enjoyed a pleasant swansong of affections.10

Two years after the Wilde explanation in Germany, at Christmas of 1908, the three Keynes children were invited to a fancy-dress dance. Margaret startled Maynard by saying, ‘I think you had better go as Oscar Wilde,’ but he found with relief that she was addressing Geoffrey; and their mother immediately quashed the idea, exclaiming ‘Oh! that would be a horrid thing to do.’ That afternoon the Keynes family went for tea with the Darwins. There Maynard heard Margaret Darwin (aged eighteen), who married Geoffrey Keynes nine years later, ask Margaret Keynes (aged twenty-four), ‘Was Oscar Wilde imprisoned for stealing?’ His sister replied, slightly flustered, ‘Oh I don’t know: for that and other things.’ This made him suspect that she knew what she had implied in the morning.¹¹

Margaret Keynes’s artless candour more than once disturbed the equanimity of her elder brother. It seems as if she sometimes set him teasing tests. In 1908 Keynes discussed with her and their mother a short-lived university scandal caused by the bursar of Trinity Hall marrying the daughter of a lodging-house keeper. ‘Most unwise,’ said Mrs Keynes, ‘he’ll find her dreadfully dull in the end.’ The dialogue continued:

        Me – Not much duller, I expect, than most women dons marry.

        Margaret to me – I expect you know lots of men you wouldn’t mind marrying, don’t you?

        I (hedging) – Well, they wouldn’t be so dull anyhow.

        My mother – You mean to live with.

        Margaret – Anyhow, I know several females I’d be quite willing to marry. We’d better arrange it that way.

        My mother laughs at our absurdity and the conversation veers off to the question whether it wouldn’t be a good thing to clear out the Atlantic Monthlys and make more room on the shelves opposite.

In 1910, at one of his weekly lunches at Harvey Road, Keynes was cornered by his sister into what would a century later be called a coming-out. ‘I had a dreadful conversation on Sunday with my mother and Margaret about marriage,’ he reported to Grant, ‘and had practically to admit to them what I was! How much they grasped I don’t know.’12

Margaret Keynes, before her marriage in 1913 to Vivian Hill (a physiologist who was a Fellow of King’s 1916–20, elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918 and co-winner of a Nobel prize in 1922), had ‘a Sapphistic affair’, in her elder brother’s phrase, with Eglantyne Jebb, who had been taught economics at Cambridge by Mary Marshall, worked with Florence Keynes in Cambridge charities and wrote a path-breaking treatise on social policy in Edwardian Cambridge. Jebb later compiled the authoritative, neutral-spirited ‘Notes from the Foreign Press’ in the wartime Cambridge Review, which led to the magazine’s offices being ransacked by rowdy patriots. In 1919 she co-founded the Save the Children Fund. ‘She’s much too sensible to make a fuss,’ Margaret said of Jebb after her engagement to Hill was announced. The Hills – conversationally at least – became an eccentric couple. At family meals they would take turns to speak at inordinate, unbreakable length for minutes on end without any reference to what the other had said.13

The three Keynes children were boxed together in the high-minded, liberal, open-hearted, smothering household in Harvey Road. Their undisclosed sexual imagination and clandestine initiatives provided a way to evade the fine mesh of their family cage. Willa Cather in an essay once praised Katherine Mansfield (Keynes’s sometime tenant in Bloomsbury) for portraying in her stories ‘happy families’ living unremarkable lives, without crises, shocks or bewildering complications, ‘yet every individual in that household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavour’. Within Mansfield’s precincts, said Cather, ‘the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be oneself at all’, creates tension ‘even in harmonious families’. The result is a double life: the outward respectability of households, and their underworld, ‘secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.’ Aside from their inborn predilections, Maynard and Margaret Keynes, if not their anxious younger brother, enjoyed the surreptitious excitement, private dialects and specialized nuances of their illicit desires. Bisexuality provided one way of saving their souls from being quenched in the family’s collective identity. It offered miscreant vividness beyond the inexpressive and perpendicular rectitude of Harvey Road.¹⁴

One physical fact about Maynard Keynes’s childhood raises both probabilities and hypotheses. He and his brother were subjected to late circumcisions: probably in 1891, when Maynard was eight and Geoffrey four. The motive was to discourage masturbation, which the Victorians feared as enervating of virility and deprecated because it was the one sexual act that they could not sentimentalize. Neville Keynes was sufficiently anxious about his sons feeling themselves to make a cryptic diary entry when Maynard was eleven: ‘the poor boy was very sad this morning because the pockets of his overcoat were sewn up’.15

Circumcision was coming into vogue at this time. It was believed that the retractable foreskin drew boys’ attention to their genitals at an age when sexuality was supposed to be latent. John Harvey Kellogg, in Plain Facts for Old and Young (1888), recommended that circumcision should be performed on pre-pubescent boys without anaesthetic, ‘as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment’. Discouragement of masturbation was Kellogg’s aim: ‘the soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten’. The foreskin ‘conduces to masturbation and adds to the difficulties of sexual continence’, a physician urged in the British Medical Journal in 1890. Another physician reading ‘A Few Notes on Foreskins’ to a medical conference at Sheffield in 1891 ‘attributed the frequency of hip-joint disease, of affections of the spinal cord, of hernia, of epilepsy in young subjects, to the neglect of the condition of the prepuce’. A medical practitioner in Hertfordshire reported in 1899 that ‘of late years most parents’ asked him to circumcise their newborn sons. Nevertheless another surgical discussion concluded: ‘circumcision is a relic of barbarism … practised by many of the least civilised peoples on the face of the globe’. It counselled that ‘the prepuce is not the valueless or mischievous appendage that some represent it to be, nor is its removal so entirely harmless as some would have us believe’.16

The politician Lord Hailsham, who was born in 1907, recalled after seventy years his experience of being circumcised at a similar age to Maynard Keynes just before being sent to boarding-school. The first page of his memoirs opens with the shock of the event. ‘I was not told that it was going to be done; no anaesthetic was administered; I was just laid across the doctor’s knees,’ Hailsham recalled in 1990. ‘I can still remember the pain, the blood, and my sense of total betrayal by the adult world.’¹⁷

Hailsham’s coeval, the poet W. H. Auden, also underwent circumcision, at the age of seven, in 1914. These late circumcisions made some boys feel impaired, injured or incomplete, and influenced the direction of their adult sexual activity. Auden, in his Berlin journal of 1929, noted as a driving impulse of men’s sexual interest in other men the ‘comparison of circumcised with uncircumcised and vice versa’. Neither the physicians who performed nor the parents who paid for these mutilations (especially those inflicted in mid-childhood) foresaw the effect on some young Englishmen, already desirous of their own sex, whose quests for other men were spurred by their delighted curiosity about foreskins, their identification of them with real men, and their connotation of circumcision with reduced manliness. For such youngsters lust was intensified by the inquisitive belief that there is as much interesting variety in the shape, size and character of men’s penises as there is in their faces. There are signs that Keynes’s sex life when young was influenced by his late circumcision. He liked to discover whether other men were cut or uncut. ‘He is charming and he is affectionate,’ he wrote of his first Eton boyfriend Dillwyn Knox in 1906, ‘and he is uncircumcised.’ Of his first great love, Arthur Hobhouse, he added, ‘you will hardly believe it, but I don’t know whether Hobby is circumcised or not – you can’t conceive his precautions’.18

At Eton, when new boys arrived, they were addressed by the head master, Warre. ‘There he stood, waiting, this great square man, with a broad, silk band round his middle, gazing at a high window, and chewing the inside of his cheek,’ recalled Sir Lawrence Jones, who overlapped at Eton with Keynes. ‘Then he spoke to us, paternally, dropping his final G’s, moving his strong lips as one does to a lip-reader, now in a vibrant bass, now in a sudden tenor. He spoke of our responsibility as Etonians … He told us to beware of “filth”, to avoid even talking “filth”.’ Jones at thirteen was baffled: ‘Could he be telling us to look where we trod, because of the occasional dog-mess on the pavements? And who ever wanted to talk about these horrors?’ In old age it saddened Jones that it had been axiomatic at Eton in the 1890s, ‘uncontested by masters or boys, and a particular obsession of visiting preachers, that sex, although given to us by God, was a dirty little secret. The strongest of human impulses, the most delectable of human enjoyments, was equated, in our hierarchy of values, with ordure.’¹⁹

There were scandals of the usual sort often enough. In 1899 Richard Powell, one of Keynes’s election at Eton, was (as Neville Keynes noted in his diary) ‘made to withdraw from College for reasons more or less veiled in mystery. Maynard understands that he has been received at Haileybury.’ In adulthood, Powell became sports editor of The Times, married Lord Courthope’s sister and was killed in action in 1915. When Cecilia Fisher expressed shock after learning of a schoolboy misdemeanour similar to Powell’s, she was rebuked by her mother Blanche Warre-Cornish, the wife of a house master. ‘Don’t be a prig!’ Mrs Cornish said. ‘It’s the traditional, ancient, aristocratic vice of Eton. What do they know of it in those modern, sanitary, linoleum schools?’²⁰

Sublimation predominated at Eton, among masters as well as boys. Percy Lubbock wrote of Keynes’s mentor Henry Luxmoore that his passion for beauty was too purified. ‘It was bigoted, it was repressed and encroached upon by many a prejudice,’ Lubbock observed: ‘it suffered much from an obstinate fear of the devil and his works … he hid it, screened it, and denied its air. He worshipped beauty, but he couldn’t trust it.’ Whatever may have happened in boarding-houses, in College, among King’s Scholars such as Keynes, so his Eton contemporary Bernard Swithinbank recalled in 1948, ‘emotion and desire were directed almost exclusively towards the male sex – I knew hardly anyone who ever thought of women. This does not mean that there was a great deal of “vice”; indeed, it was looked on with disapproval, not untinged with envy, by the many who repressed their desires through shyness or virtue.’21

Keynes first had sex with another boy in 1901 when he was seventeen or so. We know this from a list of sexual partners, identified by their initials and years, which he compiled in 1915 or 1916, and which was released into the Keynes archive at King’s years after the bulk of his papers were accessioned. The boy was Dillwyn Knox, known as ‘Dilly’. In a cool, inquisitive and systematic way, the two youths set themselves sexual and mental tests to resolve the question of what choices, feelings and acts were requisite to live well. Pleasure, they decided, was more essential than morality or duty. Knox had vowed to be impregnable in his feelings after being bereft by his mother’s early death: as grandson and son of bishops, he had much to reject. Keynes’s classical education ensured that his limited susceptibility to guilt was nearer to Plato’s than to a Christian’s. Together they defied the preachers’ admonitions against ‘filth’ and explored possibilities. Sexual incidents between them recurred throughout 1901–2. Knox went in 1903 as a scholar to King’s College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in classics in 1909. He had a passion for solving puzzles, discovered a genius for cryptography while working in naval intelligence during 1914–18 and after the war forsook Cambridge for the Government Code and Cypher School, where he became a leading man.22

Keynes’s second Eton boyfriend was Daniel Macmillan, son of the publisher and elder brother of the future Prime Minister. Their affair during 1902 ended when they left school, but the attraction did not peter out. When in 1906 Keynes visited Oxford, where Macmillan was an undergraduate, it reignited. ‘I succeeded yesterday in catching Dan alone – for about an hour,’ he told Strachey. ‘We sat on a sofa together and things ended in only a semi-embrace, but I could have done anything – if only I had the nerve. He goes on about the most silly Eton Oppidans [those who were not King’s Scholars] and likes to talk theoretically about women.’ The difficulty in renewing ‘l’affaire Dan’ was Keynes’s inhibition in going too far. ‘You see, I am so terrified of losing the right to fondle him and hold his hand. I feel that if I once attempted rape, he would never [again] sit close to me on a sofa and rub his knee against mine.’ Keynes was sympathetic when Macmillan caught venereal disease in 1909. A year later he invited his friend to stay in a house which he rented for August in a pretty little market town in the Cotswold hills. ‘Dan I find in a rather distressed condition – verging on melancholia. Very nervous, very depressed, not able to sleep, worrying over every detail of life, and – chiefly – thinking himself an utterly worthless creature, foolishly repining over all his supposed misdeeds. Isn’t it dreadful? I believe it’s due to the nature of his family life.’²³

Keith Murray and Alwyn Scholfield, two Cambridge undergraduates recently arrived from Eton, went to tea with the former Eton master Arthur Benson in 1904. ‘Both strong against “the aesthetes” like Keynes – but I couldn’t find out what they meant, except that K talked of things they didn’t understand,’ recorded Benson, who well knew what the code-word ‘aesthete’ denoted after the Wilde trials. ‘Altogether,’ Benson continued, ‘I felt the tinge of complacency about Murray which I did not quite like – the public-school Pharisaism.’24

There were Pharisees enough in Cambridge. A scholar of Trinity who went for tea in Lytton Strachey’s rooms said through blanched lips afterwards: ‘The conversation was too horrible! And the pictures and atmosphere!’ Leonard Woolf warned Strachey, whose talk was lascivious as compensation for being sunk in the isolation of timid chastity: ‘they think you are a witch and given up to the most abandoned and horrible practices’. Puritanism stifled the university. It vexed Keynes when, in 1909, the theologian Arthur Mason, who was Vice-Chancellor, prohibited the award of Swinburne’s poems as a university prize, because he judged them ‘immoral’.²⁵

The Pharisees were muted at King’s, where to Keynes’s benefit the domineering figure of Oscar Browning sponsored a different sexual tone. The Keyneses’ Harvey Road neighbour Sir Charles Villiers Stanford complained in 1904 that Browning was depleting the membership of the Athenæum club in London by signing his name for everyone he found without a seconder in the candidates’ book: ‘O.B. has an unfortunate way of running candidates of the Oscar Wilde type – & so there are members who blackball everyone he seconds.’ Among King’s undergraduates, though, the sayings and doings of the second most famous Oscar were magnified and reverberated. In his rooms, on Sunday evenings, he would entertain scholars, creative types, fit lads and noblemen. No one was fazed by a Tommy in scarlet uniform playing the clarinet there or, when ‘O.B.’ finished his boisterous rendition of a Mozart aria on the piano, by the clarinet-player spanking him. His erotic friendships were never soulful, but merry, hospitable bouts with young soldiers, artisans and stable-lads. He joked that he preferred to sleep at night with a muscular companion lest he was seized by sudden illness.26

The classicist Sir Maurice Bowra famously described his allies in Oxford university during 1920–39 as variously the Immoral Front, the Homintern and the 69th International. A generation earlier Browning cultivated a similar Immoral Front at King’s, which upheld and affirmed young men like Keynes. As an undergraduate Keynes was not a favourite with Browning – perhaps he was too ugly or acerbic. But after O.B.’s reluctant retirement in 1908, he sympathized with the old man’s boredom and poverty, and helped him with financial advice. In affectionate gratitude O.B. in 1918 urged Keynes, as ‘the most distinguished of the young Kingsmen’, to stand for the provostship and make King’s ‘the most intellectual college in the university’. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s phrase, in his Dictionary of National Biography article on Browning, that O.B. during his last years in Rome ‘assisted young Italians, as he had young Englishmen, towards the openings they desired’, conveys the arch hints of the happy world in which Keynes dwelt at King’s.²⁷

Dickinson’s character and ideas mattered to the young Keynes: ‘I had a lot of letters from Goldie at different times, but was apt to throw them away out of dislike for the paper and the typing,’ he told Dickinson’s biographer E. M. Forster. Although ‘Goldie’ found no sexual appeal in Keynes, his influence helped to turn the Apostles into an adjunct of Cambridge’s Immoral Front and thus to disinhibit its younger members such as Keynes. He was a masochist who yearned to be trampled by the boots of strapping young men of normal tastes but extra-normal kindness. The earliest of these obliging friends was Roger Fry, an Apostle of unfaltering heterosexuality. ‘Sex of course is one long muddle, and I suppose always will and must be,’ Dickinson later wrote to Fry. He was then preparing his memoir of another Apostle, McTaggart, who, said Dickinson, ‘had a nonsexual ideal passion for men, but sexually only for women’.28

The Apostles’ notion that the love of man for man, when it precluded sexual acts, surpassed the love of man for woman was known as ‘Higher Sodomy’. They considered that sexual activity was abasing, which is why they coined the phrase ‘Lower Sodomy’ to indicate sexual acts between men. Many of the Edwardian Apostles were sexually abstinent, which exacted as heavy a tax on their nerves and happiness as Luxmoore’s idealization of beauty at Eton. At Trinity, for example, G. H. Hardy seems to have been a practitioner of the higher sodomy with Russell Gaye, who held a temporary classics fellowship there. In 1909, aged thirty-one, Gaye was found by his bed-maker in his college rooms, having shot himself in the mouth. Lytton Strachey attributed the suicide to Gaye’s mortification at failing to convert his fellowship into a permanent post, and to stress in his relationship with Hardy. James Strachey described Hardy’s Trinity rooms as they looked in 1911: ‘There’s an appalling life size head of the Dear Departed over the mantelpiece with an eye that one’s forever catching. The whole suite has the air of a mortuary chapel and I felt sure that the drawers contained endless love letters and relics. I only ventured to open one – and found a pair of poor Gaye’s fives-gloves, and a cricket ball.’ Remnants and keepsakes seemed safer to some Edwardians than flesh on flesh.²⁹

Keynes began at King’s as a higher sodomite. He recorded no sexual contacts in 1903–5. With his friends discussing sex incessantly, this felt frustrating and futile. As the young Apostle and Trinity mathematician Harry Norton lamented to him, after a reading-party with the economist Ralph Hawtrey and Arthur Hobhouse, ‘we all talk of sodomy & fornication & none of us have any practical knowledge of either carnal act’. In his paper entitled ‘Modern Civilisation’, delivered to the Apostles in 1905, Keynes criticized the brotherhood for insular theorizing and for unadventurous libidos. ‘We cannot’, he urged, ‘ignore the outside world, [nor] real life – London and New York and Paris and Vienna, where fortunes are made and tragedies enacted, where men really bugger and go to prison for it, where some are hungry and others are cruel and rapacious, not because they are wicked, but because they are in the grip of the machine.’ Just as at Eton he and Knox had determined to expand their experiences and test their reactions together, so he was preparing for further exploratory advances.30

Keynes’s timid paces began in 1905 when he helped to secure Hobhouse’s election as an Apostle, and then spent three weeks with him at Truro cramming for examinations: they indulged intense emotions together, but remained chaste. Strachey, who was infatuated by the boy, felt supplanted by Keynes, against whom for months he evinced virulent, demented loathing. Despite these tantrums, when a few months later Strachey’s closest friend at Trinity, Leonard Woolf, went to Ceylon, Keynes was promoted to the role of Strachey’s chief confidant. Around the same time Hobhouse became the boyfriend of Strachey’s cousin Duncan Grant, with whom he spent rapturous summer weeks in Scotland. Hobhouse, however, had to hide his affections from his suspicious, controlling mother, and halted their activities after Grant’s ardent pleadings were overheard by a butler. The cousins Strachey and Grant had previously enjoyed sexual exchanges together: for Grant their tussles were simple fun; but for Strachey, ‘I kissed Duncan for the first time – oh! it was hardly a kiss – and plunged into a sea of passion.’³¹

These Strachey–Grant–Hobhouse manoeuvres preceded Keynes’s overdue relinquishment of the higher sodomy. During 1906 he had three sexual partners: Lytton Strachey, the latter’s younger brother James, and Hobhouse. They made a safe quartet, all of them Apostles, who kept one another’s secrets. They were, in this phase, experimenters, who knew that if experiments are to have value, they must be repeated and refined. Neither Keynes nor Hobhouse considered themselves to be effeminate. Only Hobhouse was handsome.

Lytton Strachey was tall, skinny, ungainly, bespectacled, with a beaky nose, shrill voice, unkempt reddish beard, lank hair and an air of debility. He yearned to prove his genius, but feared that he was a fool or, worse still, ordinary. Perhaps to expunge any taint of ordinariness, he was self-dramatizing. He had an affinity with other Cambridge puritans who felt it was impermissible to enjoy pleasure without agonized soul-searching. His temperament was dogmatic yet irresolute. Although he demanded sincerity in others, he had a forte for self-deception. Neither Strachey nor Keynes could forget their physical inferiority; but Keynes did not submit, as Strachey did, to self-victimization. Strachey was astounded if a younger man responded to anyone as unappetizing, if not absurd, as him. He reacted with precarious neediness, with disabling insecurity, with self-mortifying, theatrical misery. His bodily discomfort held him captive. By contrast, from the age of twenty-four or so, Keynes set out to enjoy his body, even if it looked repugnant, rather than accept a life sentence of solitary confinement within it.

The fact that Lytton Strachey was a vivid, inveterate letter-writer has pushed him unduly to prominence in the Keynesian narrative. It is true that his allegiances, jokes, gossip, jealousy, histrionics and spite marked Keynes’s life before 1920. Yet there were other men, admittedly less articulate, who mattered to Keynes, and who were more generous in their influence. Strachey was the good friend who did Keynes most harm. He tried to spoil Keynes’s happiness during the most important male love affair of his life. In talk with their mutual friends he scratched at Keynes with feline claws and left wounds that festered: he depicted him as selfish, greedy, coarse and sexually mechanical. Strachey’s jibes at Keynes’s collusion with the wartime government smarted too. He envied, though he affected to despise, the Whitehall officials with whom Keynes mixed: ‘those infinitely cultivated and embittered eunuchs’, he called them against the background din of japanned pots insulting black kettles.32

James Strachey (the thirteenth child in his family, born when his father was seventy and his mother forty-four) was pallid, flimsy and epicene. Keynes regarded him as a winning proselytizer for homosexuality among Edwardian undergraduates. As one example of his reach, he was in 1909 invited by Keynes for Sunday parental lunch in Harvey Road. Another guest was George Mallory, who fifteen years later became an English hero second only to Scott of the Antarctic when he perished near the summit of Everest. Mallory did not match the Harvey Road measurement of a first-class mind – he thought Ibsen was an English dramatist – but James Strachey and Mallory fell for one another. They spent six months communing, exploring their emotions and stroking one another’s faces in public before consummating their affair in July.

James Strachey met Rupert Brooke at the age of ten: they were best friends at preparatory school; were separated when they went to different schools aged thirteen; but were reunited at Cambridge in 1906. When Geoffrey Keynes, as Brooke’s literary executor, edited and published Brooke’s correspondence in 1968, he excluded the poet’s remarkable exchanges with Strachey, which were not published for another thirty years. Their voluminous letters chronicle an ardent but sexually unconsummated relationship at Cambridge and afterwards: Strachey, normally objective about life, is fervent, possessive and vulnerable towards Brooke; Brooke’s responses are alternately demure, obscene, patronizing and unkindly teasing. Brooke, who felt embarrassed by his virginity at the age of twenty-two, went to bed one night in 1909, not with his adoring suitor, but with an amenable young man called Denham Russell-Smith – having calculated that it would be easier to have sex with a young man than with a young woman. ‘I wanted to have some fun, &, still more, to see what it was like, and to do away with the shame … of being a virgin,’ he told Strachey. ‘I thought, I shall know something of all that James & Norton & Maynard & Lytton know & hold over me.’ The experiment, and James Strachey’s frequent talk of his experiences, doubtless shaped the lines in Brooke’s poem ‘The Great Lover’: ‘the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon / Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss / Of blankets’.33

James Strachey was sacked from his job as assistant editor of the Spectator when he refused to register his availability for military service under Lord Derby’s wartime recruitment scheme of 1915. He began to cohabit with a manly, deep-voiced woman in 1919: the couple underwent psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud in 1920–2, and subsequently translated and edited twenty-four volumes of Freud’s psychoanalytical works. When Keynes described Strachey to the Apostles in 1921 as ‘being disintegrated at the hands of Professor Freud, rendered immortal by Professor Steinach, and being fitted out with a more than ordinarily complete sex apparatus at the expense of the poorer classes of Vienna’, he was making a Keynesian topical joke. Eugen Steinach was a physician who promoted vasectomies as a means of rejuvenation: a satisfied patient, who had paid £700 for a Steinach vasectomy, had a month before booked the Royal Albert Hall to give a lecture entitled ‘How I Was Made Twenty Years Younger’, but dropped dead just before going to the podium.³⁴

Keynes continued to have sexual encounters with James and Lytton Strachey throughout 1906–8, and indeed sexual activity with the former continued into 1909. This was more than many Cambridge contemporaries achieved, although their earnest prattle about sex continued day and night. One evening in 1908 Keynes attended a talk given to the university’s Fabian Society by a King’s classics scholar who was later known as Arthur Waley. ‘A dreadful, silly, maundering paper, followed by a blithering speech from Daddy Dalton,’ he reported to Grant (his disdain for Hugh Dalton as a bumptious undergraduate tinged his later estimate of Dalton both as an economist and as a Labour minister). ‘In spite of the serried ranks of females, the paper was chiefly about sodomy which is called “the passionate love of comrades”.’ Each generation was prone to think that homosexuality was more prevalent than in the preceding age: Keynes, recently returned to King’s after his stint at the India Office, felt ‘the thing has grown in leaps and bounds in my two years of absence and practically everybody in Cambridge … is an open and avowed sodomite’.35

In his first week as an undergraduate Keynes had befriended a fellow King’s freshman called Charles Fay. He liked Fay – a sturdy youth who played rugby for Lancashire – for his ‘hearty, broad-bottomed wit’, for talking with ‘superb inconsequence’ and for his eager, random curiosity about people and places. Fay, who left Cambridge in 1906 to become a research student at the London School of Economics, seems to have been the friend who nudged Keynes towards questing for men in London. ‘I am off to dine at a low sodomitical haunt in Soho which Fay has discovered, where guardsmen offer their services at half a crown a bottom,’ Keynes trilled to Lytton Strachey in 1906. ‘This seems to me a sordid oriental vice without warrant in Hellenic literature; I haven’t found any philosopher who thought it the part of a sage.’ This was some ten years after the Wilde trials, but he assured Strachey, ‘so long as no one has anything to do with the lower classes or people off the streets, there is not a scrap of risk – or hardly a scrap’.³⁶

The sexual statistics for the period before 1916, which Keynes compiled and preserved, record four encounters between 13 May and 12 August 1906, and roughly the same hit-rate during 1907. His partners were presumably the Stracheys and Hobhouse rather than guardsmen in Soho. From May 1908 to February 1909 he had sixty-one encounters: mainly with Grant, but some still with Stracheys. After renting his own London bedroom in Fitzroy Square, he became emboldened, trawled the haunts to which Fay had alerted him and picked up young men off the streets. He loved the onrush of the pavements, and making eye-contact with the one person in a hundred who was not hastening by with scared eyes downcast towards their feet. From February 1909 until February 1910 he had sixty-five encounters: some months later the young King’s economist and Apostle Gerald Shove warned that, unless he kept his taste for picking-up working-class Londoners within bounds, he would end up in the dock. There were twenty-six encounters in the same period 1910–11; thirty-nine in 1911–12. ‘Nothing,’ he told Ottoline Morrell, ‘absolutely nothing, pays in love like perseverance.’37

How did he meet his partners? Offering or lighting cigarettes, asking the time of day, standing side by side gazing into shop windows (the duller the contents, the better the sexual prospects), spotting a young man with his fingers crossed or with both hands crossed behind his back, friendly glances at passers-by – these were discreet openings to sexual overtures. There were numerous pick-up points in London: the bronze statue of Achilles, showing naked muscles and an adamant look, near Lover’s Walk at Hyde Park Corner, was popular (not least for its proximity to the Horse Guards’ barracks). There were twenty-five public baths, ranging downwards in cost from the Savoy Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street and the basement amenities of the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square to those in Whitechapel and Bermondsey. Frank sexual approaches and uninhibited responses, without fear of complaints or arrest, were possible in most sauna-baths: it was enough to watch the movements of other men’s eyes, and to see whom their looks were following, to discover whom it was safe to accost. The Jermyn Street baths were also conveniently located for those who preferred to scrutinize younger men, with towels girding their loins, before offering to take them for tea at Lyons Corner House or home for bed.

These forays were fun for Keynes. But he retained an ironical curiosity about himself and his partners; liked to quantify and analyse his experiences; and brought his love of classification, first learnt in stamp-collecting with his father, later exemplified in his cataloguing as a bibliophile, to his sex life. Accordingly, he kept lists of his pick-ups, sometimes specifying nationality as with foreign stamps, and recording other descriptive features, as if to note Elzevir editions, Baskerville typeface, blue morocco binding, duodecimo pages, mottled paper:

        Stable Boy of Park Lane

        The Swede of the National Gallery

        The American of Victoria Street

        The Sculptor of Florence

        The Baron of Mentone

        The Soldier of the Baths

        The Bootmaker of Bordeaux

        The Art dealer on the Quays

        The French Conscript

        The Shoemaker of the Hague

        The young American near the British Museum

        The young man in the Park

        The Medical Student

        The beautiful young man in the P. shed

        The clergyman

        The chemist’s boy of Paris

        The Irish nobleman of the Whitechapel Baths

        The Blackmailer

        The Actor of Whitechapel

        Sixteen year old under Etna

        Lift boy of Vauxhall

        Jewboy

        Grand Duke Cyril of the Paris Baths.38

Grand Duke Cyril is presumably Keynes’s soubriquet for a man who was either haughty or très bien monté. It is more than improbable that Keynes had an encounter with the authentic Grand Duke, who became the senior Romanov claimant to Russia’s imperial throne after the massacres of 1917. The cosmopolitanism of this preceding list – Americans, Frenchmen, Italians, a Dutchman and a Swede if not a genuine Russian – shows that national distinctions meant less in this sexual market than in other contemporary spheres. Each generation had its own test questions for sounding the availability of foreign men whom they met: the German baron in Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains asks the young Englishman, do you know Naples, how are the Horse Guards, have you read Winnie the Pooh?

Naturally Keynes paid on some occasions. One September night in 1911 he went strolling in London and brought a youth to his Bloomsbury room. His pick-up told him that boys were sparser than usual because policemen had been detaining them on the streets. The police had been goaded to action by the previous Sunday’s assembly at Speaker’s Corner, by the Marble Arch, where soap-box orators had decried ‘hundreds of painted boys fighting the women for a living’. This conjured up to Keynes ‘a sublime scene’, he told Grant. ‘What a superb place London now is. But I’m afraid it must have reached or almost reached the zenith of its accomplishment.’³⁹

Some London partners were given surnames in Keynes’s lists: Ives, Erskine and Bonnyman, for example; and they are worth attention.

Ives was George Ives, the Primrose Hill penal reformer and campaigner against sexual taboos, who was sixteen years older than Keynes. He had been an undergraduate at Cambridge, which he often revisited at weekends. Oscar Browning professed devotion to him, and he was a friend of many men known to Keynes – Arthur Benson, Lowes Dickinson, Magnus Hirschfeld, Robert Ross, Jack Sheppard, Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, John Withers and an Austrian-Dutch undergraduate at Trinity named Ernst Goldschmidt who had once worked as an expensive Vienna rent-boy. Ives was an ardent cricketer, who played in teams organized by Arthur Conan Doyle and J. M. Barrie, and was supposedly a model for Willie Hornung’s fictional gentleman-thief Raffles. He had a broad, endearing smile, which got him likened to the Cheshire cat. His fervent belief that sexual liberation would improve human nature and accelerate social progress made him seem in 1906 either ‘an optimist lost in the glamour of the Future’ or ‘a Pagan missionary, looking towards dead cities [Sodom and Gomorrah] for a cult’. He liked prowling in dark recesses of public parks, and hankered for London to be provided with a ‘spoonitorium’ – a bushy Arcadia where young people and lovers could disport without fear of arrest for public indecency. He venerated the memory of Oscar Wilde, whom he had known, and advocated repeal of the law which had sent Wilde to prison when Keynes was twelve.

In short doses Ives was a winning character, but his voluminous diaries reveal him as self-obsessed, histrionic, platitudinous, a lovelorn and mawkish lecher, timid and yet longing for destiny to call him to greatness. He could be absurd, travelling in crowded railway-carriages with a silk handkerchief over his face to preserve his aloofness, and finicky (‘I utterly refuse to mix with the common herd, and always have. Nice people occur in every social scale’). He disapproved of frivolity (unlike Keynes, he hated dancing and dancers), and believed that women, liking to be tyrannized by male brutes, were happiest in harems. Ives was avid in devouring newspapers, and compiled forty-five volumes of newspaper cuttings, many of them concerned with sexual policing, judicial prejudice, parapsychology and human absurdity. Keynes, who read all the criminal reports and smutty stories in Reynold’s News, would have been delighted if shown the black and gold albums that Ives kept.40

David Erskine was the laird of Linlathen, outside Dundee, and scion of a family that had graced Scotland’s Enlightenment. He was seven years older than Keynes, served as Liberal MP for West Perthshire in 1906–10, and was chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery of Scotland from 1908 until his death in 1922. ‘His stalwart figure might have been that of a typical Norse hero, and his sunny, cheerful presence was ever welcome,’ said an obituarist. ‘Soon after leaving Harrow, he spent some time in France and Germany, thus early encouraging his love of art and travel, which were perhaps hereditary tastes and certainly two of his main interests.’ Like many of Keynes’s sexual partners he was the reverse of self-seeking or immodest. Indeed, his character sounds like that of a dilettante version of Grant: ‘tolerant judgment … delicate consideration, and … unselfish nature’ were his governing traits. Erskine was the sort of partner who might have been encountered in the Jermyn Street baths.⁴¹

So, too, was Charles Bonnyman, a captain in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. In May 1911, at the age of twenty-nine, within a year or so of meeting Keynes, Bonnyman took a fatal dose of potassium cyanide in Hyde Park. His suicide occurred a fortnight after the London Gazette had published a notice stating that he had relinquished his commission in the army. The coroner’s inquest was told that Bonnyman had been dismissed from his regiment on account of a kidney stone, was appealing against his dismissal and was distressed that people might think that he had been cashiered on other grounds. Perhaps his sexual inclination had been betrayed to his commanding officer and talk of the kidney stone was intended to save his family from disgrace. Reports of the inquest suggest a concerted attempt to minimize discussion. Twentieth-century physicians often reported that sodomites had an inherent tendency to suicide without reflecting that the vulnerability of men like Bonnyman, facing criminal sanctions or wrecked careers, herded them into isolated despair from which only death brought release.42

All these preceding men were bits of fun – although Bonnyman’s death agonies in Hyde Park were not a happy sequel. Much more than fun – indeed the supreme male love of Keynes’s life – was Duncan Grant. Eighteen months younger than Keynes, he had lived with the Strachey family while he was a day-boy at St Paul’s School, and then used a legacy of £100 to study art in Paris in 1906–7. The affair between Grant and Keynes began in June 1908. They continued to have friendly sex until at least 1915, although the intensity of their meetings dwindled in 1909 chiefly because Grant became jaded by monogamy, secondarily because Keynes cherished Cambridge while Grant thrived in London, and perhaps also because Keynes’s disheartening shows of intellectual superiority sometimes made Grant pettish. ‘The Idiot’, Virginia Woolf called Grant – meaning a holy fool or divine simpleton of the Russian sort. He was ill-educated, scatter-brained, disorganized, with limited numeracy, but shrewd and intelligent. Although moody, he was never unmannerly without intention. He loved music and dance as much as pictorial art. He was a delicious tease.

‘Duncan was the most entertaining companion I have ever known,’ recorded his lover Bunny Garnett – who later married Grant’s daughter.

He was intensely observant and amused and interested in everything he saw: and the things he saw were especially those to which the majority of people are blind. One only had to walk down the street with him to find this out. Duncan’s eyes were always roving; he would notice a woman brushing her hair in front of a second-floor window, or a cat stealing fish on a basement table while the cook’s back was turned: all the little dramas which were going on were instantly perceived, and they delighted him.

Grant’s vision was watchful, percipient and with an arresting slant: it enlivened Keynes’s scrutiny of the universe, as passages in his writings demonstrate over and again.43

Like many painters and sculptors Grant was a good listener. His judgements were magnanimous and sincere. He became the most important man in Keynes’s life, as Lydia Lopokova was the most important woman. The painter and the dancer had similar sensibilities: they were responsive, instinctual, imaginative, sympathetic, astute and unstudied. Keynes saw rare integrity in each of them, and liked to be protective of them. One of Grant’s greatest gifts to Keynes is seldom noticed. The two men were bound together in their sexual imaginations as men who have had sex together for seven years always must be. If it had not been for the example of Grant’s fulfilling affair with Vanessa Bell, which produced the child whom Garnett married, it is doubtful that Keynes would have been inspired to pursue, set up home with and marry Lopokova. Without her, he would have been less happy in his forties; without her, his great academic work might not have been accomplished in his fifties; and without her vigilant love, he must have died years before he did.

Lytton Strachey screamed like a herring gull when he discovered that his ex-boyfriend Duncan Grant had become Keynes’s lover. ‘Oh heaven! heaven! the thought recoils, and I find myself shrieking and raving,’ he wrote to his brother James on 15 July 1908 after a confrontation with Keynes, who, he claimed, had ‘come to me reeking with that semen’ spent on Grant. Imagining Keynes coupling with Grant pitched him into ‘wretched agony’. He flinched at the memory of ‘that spectre grinning with amusement, and retailing to me how well it had been done, and the narrow escapes, and all the statistical details – ugh!’ Keynes and Strachey met again a week later with similarly stagey effects. ‘It went off on the whole as well as might have been expected,’ the latter reported. ‘He wept, and I had an erection, and that was all.’ Through all these storms James tried to commiserate with his brother, ‘whom the Universe tortures quite incredibly’, as he told Brooke.44

These scenes did not succeed in wrecking Keynes’s happiness. ‘Dear, dear Duncan I love you very much,’ Keynes wrote on 28 July: ‘if I could kiss you and hold your hand I should be perfectly happy.’ Grant was staying with his cousin Thomas Middlemore, a hardy mountaineer with sporty, hard-drinking house-guests, who had sold his Birmingham leather-goods business and Coventry bicycle-saddle factory and spent the proceeds on buying the 40,000-acre Melsetter estate in the Orkneys. ‘You are the only person I feel I can speak to,’ Grant replied on 2 August. ‘You cannot imagine how much I want to scream sometimes here for want of being able to say something that I mean. It’s not only that one’s a sodomite that one has to hide but one’s whole philosophy of life; one’s feeling even for inanimate things I feel would shock some people.’ Keynes wrote daily to Melsetter during five days that he and his sister spent with Mary Berenson at Iffley near Oxford: ‘We bathe and lie naked in the sun and eat too much and hear conversations on the principles of ART and punt out on the Thames at night with the beautiful body of the punter black against the moon,’ he told Grant. ‘I want to see you again dreadfully and find that even in the midst of a crowd I am continually sinking into a trance and thinking about you.’45

Keynes was reunited with Grant on 18 August. They spent a fortnight together in a hotel at Stromness; rented a ground-floor bedroom at Orgill Farm on the isle of Hoy for several weeks; moved to Melsetter on 18 September for ten days; returned to Orgill; and did not leave Hoy until 22 October. These two months, with Grant painting and Keynes writing his Treatise on Probability, were blissful to both men, as Grant’s tender portrait of Keynes at work attests.

During 1909 the Strachey brothers pursued a sly, deadly denigration of Keynes as a heartless lecher, greedy eater and crude-minded technician. Their target felt temporarily shunned by some Cambridge friends, and suffered more lasting damage. The denigration even reached to Ceylon, where Leonard Woolf was then working: his lifelong ambivalence towards Keynes, despite their cooperation in inter-war work, dates from this time. It was unforgivable to Lytton Strachey to be bested in love by Keynes; but hurtful, too, that Keynes prospered and fulfilled his ambitions in Cambridge while he drudged in Belsize Park as a magazine reviewer. Lytton coined the nickname Pozzo de Bongo, which alluded to a sewer and was not used affectionately. Grant, by contrast, helped to conciliate Bloomsbury friends to Keynes.

One sequel to Keynes’s love affair with Grant was his cheerful romance with St George Nelson. Keynes first met this lissom, sprightly, happy seventeen-year-old when the boy was posing as a model for Grant in 1909. They became sexual partners swiftly. Francis Arthur St George Nelson had been born on St George’s day in 1892, at Brockley on the south-east edge of London. His father was a commercial clerk and insurance agent, his grandfathers were respectively a cheesemonger and a farm bailiff, and his younger brother became an electrician. He grew up in meanly proportioned Deptford streets. Unusually for people of their class, his parents divorced when he was a child.

The boy, who in addition to occasional work as an artist’s model joined a succession of financially precarious theatrical touring companies, deserves commemoration. He and Keynes continued to meet and live together intermittently in every year between 1909 and the outbreak of war in 1914. Keynes spent the December holidays of 1910 not at Harvey Road but with Nelson. ‘What do you think I’m doing at the Victoria Commercial Hotel, Ramsgate?’ he asked Grant on Christmas Eve. ‘A letter came from St George yesterday asking me to come down here and stay with him, so I came, and spend my evenings in the basement of a lodging house chatting with low comedians – whose chief characteristic seems to be their extraordinary kindness.’ The rest of Keynes’s letter shows his humanity, his openness and his sympathies – qualities that he would never have developed so well without the sexual expertise that he had developed since sampling the haunts recommended by Charles Fay. ‘Poor St George I found in rather a bad way. He has had the clap from which he’s only just recovered; and weakened by that he’s been suffering a great deal from toothache and a bad throat. In addition his mother has gone bankrupt and been sold up.’ Nelson, he said, had been overworked and depressed.

After touring Wales, where he was always cold and wet and stopt at a different place every night, he had to hurry here where he rehearses the pantomime from 9 to 6 without meals … However he’s in very good looks, with rather long hair and handsomely dressed (in complete taste); and has a great deal to recount. He’s really quite unchanged after a year’s adventures. His companions seem very fond of him, and call him Bubbles (or Bubs). It seems this has always been his pet name, because of his former devotion to the blowing of soap bubbles. Don’t you think Bubbles a very good name for him?

While Nelson was in rehearsals, Keynes worked all morning before walking to Broadstairs in the afternoon. ‘This is a most remarkable place. Lodging houses and hotels tower one above another to an incredible height against a lurid sky, and below long empty esplanades … and a muddy sea. The streets are full of sailors home for Christmas. Everything is second or third class.’46

A month or so after the Ramsgate holiday James Strachey regaled Rupert Brooke with an incriminating story in which he bestowed protective aliases on Keynes (whom he called ‘Leigh’), Grant (‘Applegate’) and Nelson (‘Herbert’) in case the letter was snitched. ‘Herbert, though a member of the lower classes, was just seventeen, at the amiable age when one’s on the turn – hoping, a little shyly, for a pair of breasts to put one’s hands between, but oh! ready in one’s randiness for narrower hips and shorter hair. Well, as it rained so, Leigh said one morning: “Let’s go up to London for the night, Herbert, and I’ll give you a woman.”’ The pair met Grant in the brilliantly lighted saloons of the Hôtel & Grand Café de l’Europe in Leicester Square. Nelson was attracted by a woman sipping whisky and soda, who chatted to them. She proved to be Mrs Anderson, whose husband was a physician in Brighton. She murmured to Keynes that she’d like to go to bed with Nelson: ‘as for you, my dear, it’s easy enough to see which way your tastes lie, you and your other friend’ – nodding at Grant.

On the following Saturday, Mrs Anderson, Keynes and Nelson dined in a Soho restaurant before going to a nearby hotel. She wanted to watch ‘you two boys having a bit of fun together’. Keynes refused from nervousness, left the hotel and strolled to the Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street: a notable congregation point for clerks, shop assistants, civil servants and workmen who could afford its low prices and wanted to meet other men (on the first floor was a Sunday tea-time venue nicknamed the Lily Pond, which was a recognized pick-up point). Outside the Corner House Keynes met a young man from Ealing wearing a bowler hat, who typified the Edwardians who ‘went up West’ to stroll the teeming streets at the heart of the capital, or to loiter at busy spots, hoping to pass unnoticed by the mass, but exchanging covert recognition signals with like-minded men out on the pick. Keynes and the Ealing man returned to Mrs Anderson’s room, where they found the lady in a pair of stays and Nelson naked in bed except for her boa and muff. Keynes was shy at this sight, and retreated to an upstairs bedroom with his Ealing companion: ‘After long embraces, they undressed and lay on the bed and embraced again for a long, long time, and copulated, and remained at last in a quiet naked ecstasy.’ Then Nelson appeared in their room wrapped in a blanket, and took them downstairs, where the three men joined Mrs Anderson in bed. Although the young men were excited by her, Keynes ‘was horrified; all his elevation of spirits left him’ as she kissed and licked his genitalia. He lay frigid until she slung Nelson and the Ealing youngster on him: then ‘he was happy again, and grew warmer, and stirred his legs, and panted a little, and was passionate at last. The six arms wreathed together, the six legs were interlaced, the kisses rained.’47

In 1913, when Keynes attended a conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Birmingham, the lovers were reunited. They shared a bedroom in a superior public house called Bullivant’s Hotel. ‘I found St George last night (cured, thank God, of his disease) and he’s living with me at this quasi-hotel, – though, in effect, only at night, as I desert him all day for my scientific friends,’ Keynes reported to Grant. The lovers went to the theatre together, and on Saturday afternoon watched a football match between Aston Villa and Blackburn Rovers attended by 40,000 spectators. ‘The scene was very much as I imagine the Coliseum,’ he told Grant. ‘The ground is built on the same model, – an immense oval rising all round tier above tier in about 50 rows … The crowd maintain a dull roar nearly all the time, rising into a frenzy of excitement and rage when the slightest thing happened. The match was between the two principal “league” teams of England. The local people were beaten by a team from Lancashire, who had, so I was told, “the best right wing in England, and the most expensive”.’ Each evening the two young men returned to Bullivant’s for bed. ‘Last night, when I got back, it was seething with “young laads” and their lasses slightly tipsy, – there was scarcely a customer over 25. They drink, the host told me, mainly beer and “French wines” – namely Benedictine and Cream de Ment [sic]; and the combination naturally makes them very sick, which I suppose is healthy.’48

This is the last documented meeting with Nelson, although Keynes certainly continued their liaison into 1914. It is likely that neither Grant nor Keynes knew Nelson’s fate: gentle, frolicsome ‘Bubbles’ was caught in the war, sent to the Western Front (where it is hateful to imagine him) and killed on 11 September 1916 on the Somme. His name is inscribed on the war memorial at Cromer, where his mother retreated after her bankruptcy.

In his sexual adventures, as in other aspects of his public and private lives, Keynes held fast to his principle of intelligent compartmentalization. In London he met boys on the streets and strangers in sauna-baths. So far as one can tell, they were not camp, although they doubtless had discreet inflexions that indicated their interests. In his Cambridge compartment he limited affairs to younger men of his own class, whom he met in college rooms. He did not waste time, make himself conspicuous or risk adverse reactions by pursuing ambivalent, strapping, demanding types such as George Mallory. He never jeopardized his position by looking at youths from the town. Some of his Cambridge boyfriends – Francis Birrell and Nigel Farnell, for example – were effeminate. Others, such as Sidney Russell-Cooke, were simply gentle and affectionate. It is unlikely that they were as exciting as the Londoners, but softer intimacies can be pleasurable enough.

Keynes first had sex with Francis Birrell in 1910. Birrell was an undergraduate reading history at King’s, six years younger than Keynes, an Old Etonian, and son of an ineffectual Liberal politician. Keynes and Birrell revived their bouts in 1913, when Birrell was working in the textile department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and again in 1915 before Birrell, as a conscientious objector, joined the Quakers’ War Victims’ Relief Mission rebuilding devastated villages on the French battlefields. Birrell convinced another of Keynes’s boyfriends at this time, Bunny Garnett, to join the Quaker Relief Mission: after the war, in 1920, they became partners operating as antiquarian booksellers. Birrell had a will-to-failure without being enervate. He treated the shop not as a profit-earning enterprise, but as a salon where he could amuse customers with his picturesque exaggerations, playful malice and provocative sallies. He had a pert face, with flitting expressions, as if interior facial strings were being pulled on a marionette. Keynes got him work as theatre critic of the Nation, for which he also reviewed books. He translated Diderot, and became expert on the works of Proust and Pirandello. He broadcast film reviews on BBC radio, and wrote a short, lively biography of Gladstone; but his mind raced too fast for the task of literary composition. He lacked ambition, mistrusted successful people and rejected the obvious.49

When Garnett brought Birrell to visit D. H. Lawrence in 1915, there was a panicky outburst of repudiation from Lawrence. ‘Never bring Birrell to see me any more,’ he ordered Garnett. ‘There is something nasty about him, like black-beetles. He is horrible and unclean.’ Lawrence knew or intuited that Garnett, then aged twenty-three, had had sexual exchanges with Keynes. ‘I never myself considered Plato very wrong, or Oscar Wilde,’ he explained to Garnett. ‘Why is there this horrible sense of frowstiness, so repulsive, as if it came from deep inward dirt – a sort of sewer – deep in men like K?’ After seeing Keynes in his King’s rooms, in pyjamas and blinking with sleep, he felt repulsion. ‘David, in the name of everything that is called love, leave this sect and stop this blasphemy … Truly I didn’t know it was wrong, till I saw K. that morning in Cambridge. It was one of the crises of my life. It sent me mad with misery and hostility and rage. Go away, David, and try to love a woman.’50

Nigel Farnell, son of an Eastbourne surgeon, and nephew of the head of an Oxford college, was three years younger than Keynes. He attended St Paul’s School in Kensington at the same time as Grant and James Strachey (he was midway between the two in age). In 1906 he was sent down from Corpus Christi College, Oxford without taking a degree. He was admitted at Jesus College, Cambridge in 1907, and remained on the college books until 1910, but again failed to take a degree. James Strachey found him rather a compromising acquaintance, ‘whom one really can’t have about’, in the Cambridge of 1908, because he wore cosmetics at a Fabian tea-party. He taught at a preparatory school in Winchester before starting as assistant master at the City of London School in January 1914. He soon left to serve as a private in the Great War, but after demobilization returned to teach English, history and French at the school until 1938. He proved a vivifying aesthete with a flair for instilling a love of literature in his pupils. The compelling effervescence of his readings and recitations, whether in prose or verse, captivated even dull youths (Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy and George Eliot were his favourites). Pupils relished his quirky benevolence: he studied their latent gifts, and developed an instinct for what was best in them. He was acclaimed for his zest in directing school plays, and for casting unlikely boys in parts in which they triumphed. He married in his late forties, and bequeathed his library on the arts, archaeology, the classics and music to City of London School.51

Farnell receded from Keynes’s life, but Sidney Russell-Cooke, with whom he had intermittent sexual bouts in 1913–15, remained a lifelong friend and colleague: they lunched together on the day of Russell-Cooke’s death. ‘Cookie’, who had been an undergraduate at King’s, lived with his twice-widowed mother in a spacious villa called Bellecroft at Newport on the Isle of Wight. First married to a Liberal MP (brother of Sir Charles Dilke, whose political career was ruined by being cited in a divorce), she then married Russell-Cooke’s father, who had been legal adviser to the Liberal party. There was gentle but solid affection between the two men: Keynes tried to get Russell-Cooke to accompany him on a gambling spree at Monte Carlo in 1913; Russell-Cooke sought his advice in Stock Exchange flutters. Russell-Cooke had a reputation as a yachtsman and all-round sportsman, and passed as a hale fellow in the stockbroking firm in which he became a partner.

The statistics of his sexual conquests that Keynes compiled between 1906 and 1915 were shown to selected friends, some of whom gasped. ‘Maynard, the iron copulating machine’, James Strachey described him to Brooke in 1909 after seeing the figures. The statistics, or a version of them, were possibly displayed in 1910, when Keynes, Lowes Dickinson and Hugh Dalton were invited to dine by Edward Dent, a Fellow of King’s and a musicologist, to meet Magnus Hirschfeld, the Berlin campaigner for the decriminalization of homosexuality, who was investigating the scene in London (‘particularly baths in the East End, Dent says’). ‘Now his investigations have reached Cambridge. So Dickinson and I have been selected as leading cases for him to begin on!’ Keynes thus became one of the 10,000 case-studies in Hirschfeld’s treatise Die Homosexualität (1913). He may have completed one of Hirschfeld’s questionnaires aimed at defining the physical and psychological traits of his sample: ‘Can you easily separate your big toe from the other toes by its own force? … Are you a good whistler, and do you like to whistle? … During intercourse, do you imagine performing the act with another person? … Are you talkative? Are you logical?’52

In 1906 Alys Russell, first wife of Bertrand Russell and sister of Mary Berenson, mustered a reading-party of young Englishmen as companions for her nieces, Karin and Ray Costelloe, at the Berenson villa, I Tatti, near Florence. The Englishmen were Geoffrey Scott, a nephew of the editor of the Manchester Guardian, and Maynard Keynes. Arthur Hobhouse was forbidden to join the party by his mother, who overheard her sister Beatrice Webb discussing Mary Berenson’s adultery. Keynes was collected at the Uffizi Gallery, taken for tea, quizzed by Bernard Berenson about mathematics, and invited to install himself with Scott at I Tatti. Three weeks later, on Easter Monday, Mrs Berenson pictured her guest: ‘Keynes was too funny, he lay curled up in a rug, all huddled together and looking indescribably wicked. He is quite a clown in his way, and now that he feels at home, he does the most ridiculous things.’⁵³

The excursions and luxuries that Hobhouse had been forbidden from sharing were reported to him by Keynes. ‘We have seen an incredible number of places, the laughter has been continuous and La Belle B. has treated us sumptuous.’ The house-party had toured the countryside and historic towns in sybaritic motor-cars. ‘The boys are good looking – but only in some villages; and the whole country is lunatic with excitement over a visit of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Even the Franciscan friars at Assisi would speak of little else.’ A child whom they stopped to ask the way said that his school had closed for the day because all the schoolmasters had gone to Perugia to see Buffalo Bill. ‘So we whisked him into our car and swept him along fourteen miles across the plain to Perugia and landed him at the gates of the Wild West with 5 francs in his hand.’ (This was in the happy heyday of the Latin Monetary Union, when the silver and gold coins of Mediterranean countries, including the French franc and the Italian lira, were readily exchangeable.)54

That summer of 1906 Mary Berenson visited England, where she saw both Keynes and Scott. The latter confided in her about a love affair. ‘I had to be very careful’, she reported to her husband,

not to encourage him in what will probably lead to disaster. So I took the line that such affections might well be beautiful and inspiring in youth but become dotty and disgusting if men persisted in them into middle age. He knew this, and cited several Dons and said he knew he must get out of it in time – but then, he said, it was so wonderful to adore a handsome, talented, beautiful youth, he wasn’t sure that it might not be worth everything in life.

A flirtation had begun in Italy between Mary Berenson’s daughter Ray Costelloe and Keynes. They were together in the house-party at Iffley which Keynes joined before going to the Orkneys. He was elated by irrepressible thoughts of Grant, for the young woman ‘gathered from his talk, which is sometimes rather wild and mystical, the whole doctrine of the peculiar culte to which he and Scott belong’.⁵⁵

In the spring of 1907 Mary Berenson summoned Scott after receiving an anonymous letter, in disguised handwriting, with an Oxford postmark. It warned against letting her ‘innocent’ daughters associate with Scott, ‘known in Oxford as a disciple of the deplorable practices of Oscar Wilde’, and added that ‘under the pretence of “Greek fiendships” [sic]’ some of Scott’s friends ‘cloak the most unnatural & shocking form of vice’. In alarm at the risk of criminal prosecution, but with studied flippancy, Scott informed Keynes: ‘Funny thing – what? You & I will pick oakum yet.* Or if you get off I look to you to raise the fuss in the Press & to petition the Home Secretary.’⁵⁶

Keynes tried to persuade himself that Mary Berenson’s mischievous brother Logan Pearsall Smith was responsible. In fact, her housekeeper at the rented Iffley house had sent the denunciation. ‘One of the recurrent scares which terrify you more than me has occurred,’ Keynes told Lytton Strachey on India Office notepaper. ‘It just shows how damned careful one has to be … and in this respect one is so hopelessly in the hands of others.’ Two days later he wrote again to Strachey from his Whitehall desk. ‘Worse and worse – at least so it seems to me. I have never felt more nervous.’ It had become obvious from Mary Berenson’s letters to Scott that she ‘knows about me. This is news: I have always been a model of discretion – neither word nor hint.’ Moreover, ‘La B has told Ray and goodness knows who else besides.’ In saying this, he underestimated both mother and daughter, to whom his interests had become obvious respectively at I Tatti and Iffley. ‘I have no doubt now, that, although they are too polite to mention it, everybody in England is perfectly well aware of everything. Well, I suppose it is a fair penalty for going about with such people. But – in the present state of public opinion – damn and damn and damn.’⁵⁷

The only solid upshot of this affair was that Alys Russell, hearing that Scott, and probably Keynes, was ‘a sod’, struck them off her visiting list. Not everyone was as silly. Vanessa Bell, after spending a country weekend with him at Easter of 1914, imagined him enjoying ‘all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy’ before ‘buggering one or more of the young men whom we left for you’. Similarly, his sexual rapacity was obvious to Ottoline Morrell. ‘That satyr Keynes, greedy of work, fame, influence, domination, admiration; soigné and attractive, and desirous of being attractive, very sympathetic to the ambitions of young men’, she called him in 1915.58

Scott exemplified the hazard – one of which Keynes was at small risk – of a man wasting his energies chasing after other men and therefore, in the Apostles’ parlance, leaving no footprints with his work. Virginia Woolf first met Scott at Florence in 1909, and then did not see him for sixteen years. In the interval, he acquired ‘the distinguished face of a failure’, she noted, and came to resemble all the ‘other “brilliant” young men, who remain “brilliant” & young well into their 40ties [sic] & never do anything to prove it’. Scott, like Farnell, Birrell and other Keynesian friends such as Swithinbank, was intelligent, cultured, insightful, but too pliable and self-conscious to impress the world. Oscar Wilde’s short story, ‘The Remarkable Rocket’, is a parable of their pathos. Hard work saved Keynes from this.⁵⁹

Wars provide opportunities for casual sexual encounters between men; but there were mounting suspicions, dangers and antipathies for Keynes. In September 1914 he took a set of rooms at 10 Great Ormond Street in Bloomsbury. There he went to bed with Birrell and Garnett, and took some casual pick-ups. His landlord or landlady became aware of his habits, and made blackmailing hints: as a result, in February 1915, he moved to a nearby house of his own at 3 Gower Street. There was another disturbing incident in 1917 when Keynes was staying in Paris as part of a delegation led by Balfour, Reading and Northcliffe. He was intercepted at the Hôtel de Crillon by a young man sporting a French aviator’s uniform, and resisted an invitation to the bedroom of the tempting pilot, whom he suspected of being a German agent set on compromising him. Some months later, amid lurid publicity, a disreputable MP named Pemberton-Billing set himself up as a vigilante rampaging against homosexuality and espionage. Clarence Barron, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who visited London in 1918, had an interview with ‘Professor Keynes of the British Treasury’ on the subject of the exorbitant levels of tax levied on the Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Astor and other American millionaires resident in England. Keynes was ‘a kind of Socialist’, the San Francisco-born London hostess Lady Cunard had forewarned Barron, who commented after meeting the so-called professor, ‘My judgment is that he is a Socialist of the type that does not believe in the family.’ (‘Lady Cunard is rather a sport, with her frankly lower-class bounce,’ wrote Lytton Strachey. ‘She takes to me, she says, for the sake of that dear nice Bernard Keynes, who’s such an intimate friend of hers.’) The queer-hating Robert Vansittart, who saw much of Keynes during 1919, recalled: ‘I liked him, but not much; he smelled of Bloomsbury.’60

The perils of bachelor life in Bloomsbury were discovered by Sydney Cope Morgan, the barrister who was the Liberal parliamentary candidate instead of Florence Keynes at Cambridge in 1924. He lived in Woburn Place, and one night, wearing evening-dress after dinner, he visited the dark urinals in Percy Mews. There a half-undressed young man, whom he mistook for a ‘tough’, but who was an off-duty police constable and (the newspapers insisted) ‘an old public-schoolboy’, accused him of indecent assault and dragged him all the way to Oxford Street struggling and protesting. At one point another man, who had followed the wrestling pair from the urinal, where he had been loitering, broke Cope Morgan free from the constable’s clutches. After two court appearances and a masterly defence, the barrister was acquitted: ‘if he has friends who alter their relationships to him following the misfortune of this charge’, declared the magistrate, ‘he is as well without them, for they are fools’. Despite coming close to ruin, Cope Morgan later became leader of the Parliamentary Bar.61

Various wartime circumstances shifted the direction of Keynes’s affections. As previously signalled, the sexual excitements between Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, which had begun in 1915 when Keynes was still going to bed with Grant, were doubtless crucial in arousing his imagination with bisexual curiosity. During the war years, there were no undergraduates to interest him in Cambridge: previous boyfriends, and congenial male beauties, were away in the armed forces, or dispersed in rural districts where they laboured on farms. Grant’s former lover Adrian Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s brother) married Mary Berenson’s daughter Karin Costelloe in 1914. Gerald Shove, who had been in love with Rupert Brooke, and a lover of Birrell and Ferenc Békássy, married Virginia Woolf’s niece, Fredegond Maitland, in 1915. Lytton Strachey was drawn to Dora Carrington, with whom in 1916 he went to live in a mill-house (Keynes contributed £20 a year towards the rent). In 1917 Geoffrey Keynes married Margaret Darwin (then working in an Admiralty department which deciphered German codes). Geoffrey Scott had an unsettled affair with Mary Berenson followed by an unsuccessful marriage with one of her Tuscan neighbours in 1918. Grant fathered Vanessa Bell’s daughter Angelica, who was born on Christmas day of 1918. After the androgynous couple of James Strachey and Alix Sargant-Florence had married in 1920, Fredegond and Gerald Shove assured them that it was ‘such a comfort to be married’, so ‘convenient’, without making ‘any difference’ to basic feelings. Bunny Garnett, the former lover of both Keynes and Grant, married in 1921. ‘Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged,’ Keynes wrote in 1930: so, too, it seemed to be thought, is sodomy.⁶²

Keynes first had sex with a woman – presumably paying money for the experience – at Alexandria in 1913. Although he liked Ray Costelloe and other young women from the intelligentsia, they were too similar in their patterns and colour, and too familiar in their histories, to fascinate him. Then, two months before the end of the war, he first saw the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. She was fathoms deep in exoticism and furlongs distant from any bluestocking. Her unprecedented originality – her difference from all he knew – intrigued him.

Born in 1891, Lopokova was the daughter of a handsome, almost illiterate peasant, who served as a soldier, learnt German and became a well-tipped usher at the best theatre in St Petersburg. In relative prosperity, he became drunken, foul-mouthed and loutish: his death in 1912 was hastened by alcoholism. It was, however, his pushing that got Lopokova enrolled in the Imperial Theatre School in 1901. She first danced with Nijinsky in 1905, joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1910 and became a favourite of the impresario during a European tour. After conquering Paris in the lead role in Stravinsky’s The Firebird choreographed by Fokine, she was lured by lavish fees to dance in the United States, where she worked for five years. The theatre critic Heywood Broun wanted to marry her and became her lover; but on a rash impulse, in 1916, at Minneapolis, she underwent a secret marriage ceremony with Diaghilev’s sleek business manager, Randolfo Barocchi, whose divorce from his previous wife had not yet been finalized. The marriage soon failed: during the Spanish tour by the Ballets Russes in 1916–17, Lopokova probably slept with Stravinsky. She definitively separated from Barocchi, possibly after he stole her wages. Vague tales hint that she became pregnant by a Russian officer.63

Lopokova reached England for the first time in August 1918. She delighted London balletomanes when the Ballets Russes season opened a month later with Cléopâtre and Les Femmes de bonne humeur: ‘the personification of gaiety and spontaneity’, as Osbert Sitwell recalled, ‘her wit entered into every gesture’. Keynes first went to see the Ballets Russes in September, kept returning to the spectacle, and began visiting ‘Loppy’ in her back-stage dressing-room after performances. But his flirtation with the Russian dancer made no advance for three years. Then, in November 1921, Diaghilev staged, at the Alhambra in London, Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (retitled The Sleeping Princess) to the music of Tchaikovsky. Lopokova danced two secondary parts, the Lilac Fairy and Princess Florine, and undertook limited performances as Aurora. London audiences wanted modernism from the Ballets Russes, not a nineteenth-century treasure of the imperial Russian repertoire, so the production was a financial failure: it ended months early in February 1922. Keynes, however, took his brother to meet Lopokova in her dressing-room after the opening night, and returned over and over again. In December he told Vanessa Bell that he was ‘very much in love’ with the dancer: ‘she seems to be perfect in every way’. This was information, too, for Duncan Grant, with whom Vanessa Bell was wintering in St Tropez. His letter to them presaged a love affair every bit as improbable as theirs.64

There was perhaps another influence at work. In mid-December 1921 his ex-lover and continuing friend Sidney Russell-Cooke announced his engagement to marry Helen Smith, the only child of the captain of the Titanic. The couple were quickly married, in January 1922, at a smart Mayfair church. Russell-Cooke’s choice of best man was significant: Sir Campbell Stuart, ‘a pansy’ in the words of Hugh Gaitskell, ‘a very odd fish indeed’ in the words of C. P. Snow. Inviting Keynes to meet his fiancée, Russell-Cooke wrote: ‘She’s certainly lovely, reasonably intelligent, some money (more in prospect), damn randy & good tempered. In addition she is ambitious & adventurous.’ The couple had two children. In July 1930, while his wife was in a nursing-home, Russell-Cooke lunched with Keynes in London. ‘He seemed in absolutely good spirits,’ Keynes told Jack Sheppard after hearing that a few hours later their friend had been killed by a gun-shot wound to the abdomen in his chambers in King’s Bench Walk. He was ‘much upset by poor Cookie’s death. It’s difficult in such a case to believe in an accident, but I really think it is the more probable explanation.’ The suggestion by Skidelsky that Russell-Cooke shot himself after sustaining Stock Exchange losses must be wrong: he left an estate exceeding £120,000. The fact that Russell-Cooke had been shell-shocked was mentioned at the inquest; but his happy lunch, hours before his death, with an ex-lover who continued to matter to him, raises the possibility that he shot himself in a lonely paroxysm of miserable regrets at his married life.65

Keynes was in 1921 deep in his last romance with a man: in this case, a bright, handsome youngster, fourteen years his junior, who was known as Sebastian Sprott. Sprott had reacted against a harsh boarding-school by becoming a dashing, quick-witted aesthete when he started as a Cambridge undergraduate in the first post-war intake of 1919. He was elected to the Apostles in 1920, graduated with a double first in moral sciences in 1922, and then obtained work in the university’s Psychological Laboratory. He was a protégé of both Strachey brothers, and was appointed by Forster as his literary executor. For Keynes their affair was a fling: ‘shallow waters are the attraction – up to the middle, not head over ears, at my age’. For Sprott, who hoped to anchor himself in Cambridge and dreaded a provincial future, the affair was more fraught. ‘A gentle, clever, courteous creature, in considerable depression as to prospects &c, but really conversable,’ Arthur Benson described him after lunching together in 1924. The following year Sprott left Cambridge with sorrow to become a lecturer in psychology at University College, Nottingham, which was being expanded by the benefactions of Jesse Boot the retail chemist. In Nottingham he became a pioneering sociologist, a befriender of ex-prisoners and a sponsor of criminology as an academic subject. He resembled many of Keynes’s boyfriends in being hard-working but unsoiled by ruthless ambition. Like others, he tended in adversity towards passivity.66

Keynes spent Christmas of 1921 staying with Lytton Strachey, Carrington and Sprott. Shortly afterwards, on a foggy Sunday, he and Lopokova went to bed together at the Waldorf Hotel, where she was living. Early in 1922 he arranged for her to move to rooms in Gordon Square a few doors from the house where he lived. His subsequent resignation from the Royal Commission on Indian Tariffs was surely prompted by his wish to stay in Bloomsbury with her rather than be separated for months while he journeyed with his fellow Commissioners to the sub-continent.

Lopokova’s biographer, Judith Mackrell, concludes that the affair succeeded by its gratifying play of fingers and mouths. In their letters there are merry references to fellatio: Keynes, for example, wrote from Genoa, where he was working as special correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, ‘I want to be foxed and gobbled abundantly. It is only half a life here, says the fountain pen to the metronome.’ Lopokova makes grateful references to her lover’s ‘subtle fingers’. Mackrell also suggests that Keynes, as a don who valued background research, bought a copy of Marie Stopes’s sex manual Married Love, which explained female orgasm and how a man might ‘charm and stimulate’ the clitoris to achieve it. As a corollary, Roy Harrod once asked Frances Partridge if it was true that Keynes inclined to premature ejaculation in penetrative sex. ‘I hadn’t ever been in a position to know,’ she recorded, ‘but had always heard so.’⁶⁷

Throughout this time Keynes was still involved with Sprott, as Lopokova knew. The plan that the two men would spend the Easter holidays of 1923 together in north Africa roused her to protests which routed Sprott from Keynes’s sex life. Soon Loppy (acting under her lover’s guidance) began legal proceedings to break her ties to Barocchi. The divorce was complicated, rather than eased, by the fact that the Minneapolis marriage of 1916 was bigamous; but eventually, after wearisome and costly legal proceedings, she received the decree absolute of her divorce, and a few days later, in August 1925, at St Pancras Registry Office, she married Keynes. Grant was the only male friend invited: he took the part of Sir Campbell Stuart at the Russell-Cooke wedding and acted as best man. The couple honeymooned in a rented house in Sussex, where Wittgenstein came to stay for six days and made the bride’s life miserable with his ferocious questions and rasping contempt for her. But Keynes gave his bride the best of wedding presents: a visit to her surviving family in Russia.

Generally the Bloomsbury group mixed hedonism with steady work. Lydia Keynes irritated them because she disrupted their schedules at their easels and desks. Vanessa Bell, in particular, was annoyed by her chatter, inane jokes and time-wasting, and became a cruel critic of the Russian interloper. Lytton Strachey and others were grudging too; but Virginia Woolf liked the dancer’s non-cerebral influence. ‘How does her mind work? Like a lark soaring; a sort of glorified instinct inspires her.’ Woolf recognized, too, the reliability under the skittishness. ‘Lydia is composed, & controlled. She says very sensible things.’ Even so, Loppy inspired aspects of a character in Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925): Lucrezia Warren-Smith, the lonely Italian floundering in an uncomprehending marriage to a shell-shocked, hallucinating Englishman, who defenestrates himself from their Bloomsbury boarding-house and is impaled on spiky railings below.68

Lydia Keynes had a tight grasp of facts, but a pleasing way with fancies. She had none of the prevalent vinegary Bloomsbury flavour. Her puckishness relied on intentional malapropisms to jolt people out of their settled lines. Before taking her to meet Geoffrey Keynes’s wife Margaret Darwin, Keynes primed her, perhaps excessively, about On the Origin of Species. ‘So you are the granddaughter of the man who wrote Genesis,’ she said on being introduced.69

In middling successful marriages involving a gay man and a straight woman one cause of discontent, or depression, is the woman’s realization that what matters primarily to her sense of herself, her femininity, is valued less by her husband than her secondary characteristics. Loppy, for example, knew that Keynes liked her to dress in boyish clothes resembling a frivolous parody of a midshipman. But she was also confident that he loved and needed her above all else. Her assurance made their marriage a mutual delight. The revolution in Keynes’s sexual order perhaps freed him to disarrange and then remodel other aspects of his life. He made a revealing aside when A. C. Pigou’s book Industrial Fluctuations was published in 1927. ‘Rather miserable’, Keynes thought Pigou’s ideas. He was busy revising his own economic principles, and moving in as different a direction as when he gave Sprott his marching-orders and committed himself to Lopokova. She was said to be the only woman ever to have kissed Pigou, whose sex life was supposedly limited to inviting young male alpinists to stay at his cottage overlooking Lake Buttermere, encouraging them to swim naked and watching through binoculars. So there is significance in Keynes’s criticism to his wife of Pigou as a hidebound bachelor who had not renewed or enlivened himself by trying new lines: ‘perhaps … he should have married, his mind is dead, he just arranges in a logical order all the things we knew before’.⁷⁰

Despite the known difficulties for ballet-dancers in bringing pregnancies to term, the Keyneses tried to conceive a child during 1926. He was a sympathetic monitor of her menstrual cycle – what she called ‘a certain lunar complaint which even the best behaved women have sometimes’. In the spring of 1927 they were briefly in hopes that she was pregnant. Even Keynes’s optimism was quelled by repeated disappointments: the couple had stopped discussing conception in their letters by 1928.71

It was characteristic of Keynes’s brisk liberal humanitarianism that having got the knack of heterosexuality, he took up the cause of contraception for men and women who did not want children. Earlier, in 1907, he had been scornful to discover from a Customs manual that condoms were treated as contraband: ‘presumably in order that the God-sent syphilis may prosper’. (Until the 1980s English Customs officers were instructed to treat any traveller carrying condoms in their luggage as a suspect person, and to search for drugs or other unlawful items.) Keynes advocated the easy availability of contraceptives as well as instruction in their use. Accordingly, in 1923, perhaps through the influence of his former pupil Dominick Spring Rice, who helped to run a birth-control centre in north Kensington, Keynes agreed to serve as a vice-president of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, which had been founded by Marie Stopes to provide contraceptive advice to married people. Other vice-presidents included such progressive physicians as Sir Archdall Reid and Sir Arbuthnot Lane, together with Julian Huxley and Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (author of The Prisoner of Zenda). However, the unstable enthusiasms of Stopes annoyed Keynes, who effaced himself from her organization. He was irritated to discover in 1939 that he was still on its letter-head as a vice-president.⁷²

In Moscow in 1925 Keynes gave a lecture on ‘birth control for Russia’ which aroused hilarity in his communist-ridden audience. This lecture doubtless resembled his address to the Liberal Summer School at Cambridge in that same year. He urged that Liberals should break bounds by public discussion of ‘sex questions’, which were so widely discussed in private. As ‘there are no subjects about which the general public is more interested … I cannot doubt that sex questions are about to enter the political arena’, he assured fellow Liberals, who did not titter like the Muscovites. Readers of Clive Bell’s polemic On British Freedom will have recognized phrases as well as sentiments in Keynes’s speech. ‘Birth control and the use of contraceptives, marriage laws, the treatment of sexual offences and abnormalities, the economic position of women, the economic position of the family – in all these matters the existing state of the law and of orthodoxy is still medieval – altogether out of touch with civilised opinion and civilised practices and with what individuals, educated and uneducated alike, say to one another in private.’ These were not the minority concerns of a sophisticated elite, but urgent issues that offered ‘new liberty, emancipation from the most intolerable of tyrannies’ to all women. ‘A party which would discuss these things openly and wisely at its meetings would discover a new and living interest in the electorate – because politics would be dealing once more with matters about which everyone wants to know and which deeply affect everyone’s own life.’ Contraception was an issue of women’s freedom for Keynes, who also recommended in 1925 that women’s pay must be regulated to ensure fairness. It took over forty years for Keynes’s pioneering views to be met by legislation: male homosexuality was partially decriminalized and contraception made available to all women under the Sexual Offences and Family Planning Acts of 1967; the injustice of women’s low earnings was first addressed in the Equal Pay Act of 1970.73

In 1929 Keynes was enlisted in support of the literary critic William Empson, who was deprived of his fellowship at Magdalene after condoms had been found in his rooms by college porters. Empson was the secretary of the Heretics, a Cambridge society which excluded Christians from membership, met to discuss religion, philosophy and art, and had elected Keynes to honorary membership. Arthur Benson had been succeeded four years earlier as Master of Magdalene by another virginal bachelor, Allen Beville Ramsay, who had been an Eton master when Keynes was a pupil. Ramsay, who had founded Eton’s boy scouts troop and delighted youngsters by reciting his version of ‘Little Jack Horner’ in Latin, told Empson with sorrowful emphasis ‘that anybody who had ever touched a French letter, no matter when or why, could never again be allowed with safety in the company of young men, because he was sure … to pollute their innocence; and this in spite of the fact that his own intellectual powers would have been destroyed’.74

Openness in sexual discourse rather than witless repression was what Keynes wanted. He was unrepentant when, in 1938, the New Statesman, of which he was chairman, was criticized by rival magazines for carrying personal advertisements that enabled men to make contacts with one another: man ‘not interested in the fair sex’ seeking holiday companion; ‘young man of aesthetic, philosophic interests, unaffected, wants another to share gemütlich [homely] villa, lovely situation, above Ancona’; ‘cultured young man wishes another to share modern flat … Music-lover’; ‘young woman, married, travelled, adventurous but not adventuress, with happy background, no complexes; with only a restricted circle of mediocre friends, would like to meet another woman for companionship’. The New Statesman had become ‘a recognised clearing-house for this type of “personal”’, Keynes noted with satisfaction. ‘I wonder how many replies are received!’⁷⁵

In one respect, though, marriage did not improve Keynes. Back in 1907 he had gone with Charles Fay on a holiday centred on Biarritz. One excursion took him to the Val d’Aran, the only part of Catalonia on the northern side of the Pyrenees. ‘As I sat in it, gazing on the irises and lilies, its waterfalls and fountains, its forest and glades, and high red battlemented cliffs with the snow mountains beyond, I heard a laugh from the top of the rock under which I lay,’ he told Lytton Strachey.

As I looked up, there was the most beautiful shepherd boy in the world, smiling and holding up my aluminium flask which I had lost and he had found. I offered him half a franc. Nanni, nanni [sic] he cried, waving it from him with a laugh and a gesture. Then we fell into conversation; and when every minute or so he discovered that I couldn’t understand a word of Spanish or speak one, another roar of laughter and a glance and a smile. So he prattled on and I helped him drive his two cows with their calves about 8 miles down the valley. When we reached his father’s house which was almost next door to where I was staying, he tried most desperately to explain something to me; but it was no good. Only with Fay’s assistance afterwards did I discover that he was offering me a bed in his father’s house at a franc a night for ever … there was no kiss, only a hand lightly on the shoulder.

This Arcadian scene reaches to the heart of the young Keynes. Such flirtations ensured that ‘he suffered fools and foolish thoughts, not gladly, but patiently and kindly’, as Fay remembered him at this time.76

This was decreasingly true after his marriage. He had never spared his intellectual peers. ‘Keynes’ intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known,’ said Bertrand Russell. ‘Annihilating argument darted out of him with the swiftness of an adder’s tongue. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.’ But when Keynes halted in his intellectual onslaught for carefree interludes with a Catalonian shepherd, with sailors on the late train to Norwich, with a youth from Ealing loitering outside Lyons Corner House, with Aston Villa supporters saturating themselves with Benedictine, he had patience with slower minds, tolerance for cloudy thought, avidity for larks. After 1925, the old captivating dalliance receded, though it never quite expired. His illness of 1937–8, and the certainty that his time was foreshortened, exacerbated the tendency of his married life: impatience with dullards and sluggards. Sir Kenneth Clark, who worked closely with Keynes in the 1940s, thought he displayed his brilliance ‘too unsparingly’. He saw him, despite his kindness, ‘humiliate people in a cruel way’. Keynes had the happiest of marriages, and the best of wives for him, but marital contentment narrowed his outlook and temper.77

This does not mean that the glee ended. Let one cameo represent over twenty years of jinx. In July 1944 Lord and Lady Keynes arrived by air at Ottawa. They were met on the tarmac by Malcolm MacDonald, the High Commissioner of Canada, together with several officials, bedecked in morning suits. Lydia Keynes alighted from the aircraft in a voluminous fur coat, and embraced MacDonald, whom she had never met before. ‘O, my dear High Commissar, how are you?’ she cried. ‘Last night I dreamed zat I was lying in bed, and zat you were lying in my arms.’ Some hours later, the High Commissar and his apparatchiks arrived in the Keyneses’ hotel suite hoping to open discussions. They found the two Keyneses rummaging for the key to open his official red box where confidential papers were held securely. The search had been abandoned, and the official talks were under way, when Lady Keynes reappeared. She was clad in a short, flimsy white chemise (MacDonald hoped for underwear beneath).

In that state of near nudity she stood in apologetic manner casting a half-guilty, half-mischievous look at Keynes as she said: ‘O Maynard darling, I am so sorry. You did give me ze key; and I forgot zat I hid it for safety between my little bosoms.’ At that she clutched in her hands a ribbon hanging round her neck, and as she lifted it over her head raised from between her breasts – which so far as we could detect were not quite so small as she suggested – the lost article.

With Keynes chuckling, ‘she blew him a kiss, turned in a ballerina’s pirouette on her toes, glided through the door, and closed it behind her’.78

So might St George Nelson have pranced before going on stage in the Christmas pantomime at Ramsgate. Loppy was the right wife for Keynes.

*Picking oakum was a monotonous and humiliating chore imposed on inmates of Victorian prisons.