ONE OF THE SEVEN LIVES OF MAYNARD KEYNES WAS THAT of a connoisseur. The paramount trait of connoisseurship is discrimination. Connoisseurs need not be aristocratic, but must adopt or reject people and tastes according to a patrician sensibility that ignores the worlds of productivity and profit. Money is esteemed as a means to acquire what they value, but despised as a provider of power, showiness, luxury, over-eating or barbarous hobbies. Connoisseurs are fastidious, privileged and more ornamental than useful. Their opinions are trenchant, not insipid; but never hectoring. Spontaneity is not much prized. Connoisseurs play with their senses, memories, perceptions and instincts. They share affinities and antipathies. They adopt foreign fashions; they have their own decorum.

As an Apostle Keynes had disputed, elaborated and sharpened his answers to the ethical question: how best should humankind live? An abiding concern for him was how civilized people could use their time and abilities well, and fulfil themselves in virtuous, responsible, productive lives. All his intuitions, expertise, priorities and advice revolved around these quandaries. His lives as an economist, as an official, as a pundit, as a lover, as a patron of creativity, as a Londoner and latterly as a country gentleman might seem to be sealed in distant compartments; but they were indivisible in their ethical underpinning.

Keynes’s life as a connoisseur began in 1909, when he rented a back bedroom in a ground-floor flat which Duncan Grant had leased at 21 Fitzroy Square, in the north-western corner of Bloomsbury (the front room was used by Grant as a studio). In 1911, together with Grant, Keynes became an inmate at 38 Brunswick Square – the home of Virginia Stephen and her brother Adrian. George Duckworth, the elder half-brother who had earlier molested her, was sufficiently shameless to remonstrate in prudish tones about a household containing unmarried people of opposite sexes. ‘Oh, it’s quite alright, George,’ she replied, ‘it’s so near the Foundling Hospital.’ This communal household was joined by Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia Stephen soon married. Keynes was allotted the ground-floor dining-room, on the walls of which Grant painted a London street scene dominated by a fallen cab-horse, the cab tilting forward on to the pavement, with the driver of the hansom perched precariously aloft.1

During the early war years Keynes rented Bloomsbury footholds in Great Ormond Street and Gower Street. At the latter house Keynes aimed to achieve a form of ‘salon civilization’, so Clive Bell reported in 1915, as an antidote to war barbarities and gloom. Bell however hoped that ‘when the Barbarians come they will find something prettier than a gramophone party in corduroy trousers’. In 1916 Keynes and Jack Sheppard, a King’s man who was a temporary official at the War Office and had recently been his sexual partner, moved a couple of streets eastwards in Bloomsbury to Bell’s house at 46 Gordon Square. Keynes let his Gower Street house to Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry, who occupied the ground floor, while the painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington took upper storeys. Subsequently Keynes took over the lease of 46 Gordon Square, which remained his London home until his death. The Duke of Bedford was his ground landlord: the Duke’s other houses in the square had black or navy-blue front doors; number 46 signalled its distinctiveness by having vermilion paint on its front door. Later Keynes leased 47 Gordon Square, next door to his house, demolished the wall separating the adjacent first-floor drawing-rooms, and thus created a spacious new room. In this he emulated his father, who had bought the next-door house in Harvey Road and demolished a wall to create an enlarged study.2

These scene-shifts installed Keynes at the centre of what was called in his lifetime the Bloomsbury Set. Its thirteen core members in 1912–14 were Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and Adrian Stephen – painter, novelist and future Freudian psychoanalyst respectively; the novelists Morgan Forster and Molly MacCarthy; the novelist turned political commentator and literary editor Leonard Woolf; the bellettrist Lytton Strachey; the painters Duncan Grant and Roger Fry; the critics Clive Bell and Desmond MacCarthy; Keynes; and Saxon Sydney-Turner, now a cultivated Treasury official with the manner of an automaton. Most of them gelled together by sharing households or living in proximity in Bloomsbury: the MacCarthys lived in Chelsea; otherwise even Forster, who was based in Surrey, kept rooms in Brunswick Square. Seven of the ten men had been Apostles: Forster, Fry, Keynes, MacCarthy, Strachey, Sydney-Turner and Woolf. However, Quentin Bell (the observant son of Clive and Vanessa Bell) said that Keynes, his mother, his uncle Adrian Stephen, Fry and Grant were the only Bloomsbury groupers who reckoned themselves to be adherents of Moore. Forster denied that he had ever read Principia Ethica.

This gifted little clan liked to startle with their daring, to scorn sentimentality, to trust instinct, and yet to cultivate mental order. They tended to frugality and even discomfort, in a high-minded way, rather than to profusion; but they found drabness intolerable. This was what parted them from many of Keynes’s Cambridge colleagues: his fellow economist Dennis Robertson was an extreme case of a wider tendency in making his splendid rooms overlooking Trinity Great Court so unsightly, mortifying and comfortless as to convince Lionel Robbins that he was a domestic masochist. It was perhaps inevitable that Robertson broke over economic principles with Keynes, who visualized rooms when he was trying to recall a mood or evoke an incident, and to whose imagination the shape of houses mattered. Bloomsbury groupers strove to be observant, and had painterly ways of regarding people, rooms and street-scenes. They took pride in spotting outlandish possibilities in the mundane: Keynes savoured incongruities.

The clan felt compelled to confide, gossip, analyse, dispute, convince, explain. Their stock phrases – ‘exquisitely civilized’, ‘How simply too extraordinary!’ – stressed their amused wonder, incredulity, tolerance. These virtuosi maintained that whatever has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, is likely to be untrue. They were not prattlers whose highest aim was irresponsible brilliance in their talk. They did not indulge in the battledore and shuttlecock style of chatter, which sends mindless blurts winging back and forth to prevent uncomfortable silences. They recognized anecdotes as inimical to good conversation: Bloomsbury groupers never hoarded yarns to let loose on captive listeners; never began their remarks with those depressing phrases, ‘That reminds me …’ or ‘Did I ever tell you …’; they felt anecdotists to be egotistical, disruptive and indecent among intelligent companions. Instead, they met Percy Lubbock’s excellent definition of friends as ‘the people who put a fine edge on one’s mind’. Some of their best thinking was done in analogies. They refused to be captives of Victorian or Edwardian taboos, conventions or fears. It had been instilled in most women to promote men’s self-important talk without listening to it. But Bloomsbury men and women talked and listened on equal terms, and valued one another’s wit. The Edwardians’ crushing insensitivity to other people’s ideas and florid philistinism repelled them. Twittering fin-de-siècle aesthetes, with their exalted talk of the sublime and the infinite, bored them. They believed, and acted on the belief, that human affairs, public and personal, should be guided by reason. They upheld all that they judged truthful, but decried all that seemed shoddy and meretricious.3

Clive Bell’s tract On British Freedom (1923) is a key Bloomsbury text, which Keynes often paraphrased. It denounced, with a welter of convincing detail, ‘the Goody-Goody gang’, the ‘busybodies and spoil-sports’, who had ‘converted what once was merry England into a place of proverbial gloom’. The Goody-Goodies were, said Bell, in a quintessential Bloomsbury dismissal, ‘mainly recruited from the class which has a passionate love of self-expression and nothing of value to express: also, since by joining it, mediocrity stands a chance of cutting a figure, vanity without talent rallies to the black flag’. It was Bell’s spry wit and his countryman’s earthiness that saved the Bloomsbury group from being frigid, other-worldly zealots in their aestheticism and pursuit of abstract truth. The other wits who redeemed the sect from priggery were Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Desmond MacCarthy, Keynes and an outlying Cambridge-based Bloomsbury grouper, Harry Norton. Keynes was the toughest and supplest among this brittle crew. In the early years his popularity with them was undermined by Strachey, who felt unforgiving of his sexual success with Grant. During 1915–18 his collusion with a government that imposed conscription and waged war à l’outrance renewed the group’s distaste for him. He reclaimed his standing by publishing Economic Consequences in 1919, but found in the 1920s that once people reach their forties, conversational brilliance replaces sexual success as a cause of jealousy.⁴

‘No subject of conversation has been taboo, no tradition accepted without examination, and no conclusion evaded,’ a young man down from Cambridge, Raymond Mortimer, reported in 1928 of his incursions into the Bloomsbury Group.

In a hypocritical society, they have been indecent; in a conservative society, curious; in a gentlemanly society, ruthless; and in a fighting society, pacifist. They have been passionate in their devotion to what they thought good, brutal in their rejection of what they thought second rate; resolute in their refusal to compromise. ‘Narrow in their tastes, loose in their view of morals, irreverent, unpatriotic, remote, and superior,’ their enemies say. And, I think, truly. For will not relentless reasoning and delicate discrimination make a man all of these things?

Notoriously, though, Bloomsbury conversations nauseated D. H. Lawrence. ‘To hear these young people talking really fills me with black fury: they talk endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good or real thing said,’ he raged to Ottoline Morrell in 1915 after meetings with Keynes, Grant and Birrell. The dandyish witticisms and unassailable self-assurance of the Cambridge youngsters riled Lawrence, who was socially insecure and cankered by class resentment. The prolix gaiety of these young men who had been each other’s lovers, their abrupt shifts and interruptions, the ways they made life into a collage of jokes, vehemence and passive-toned subversion, above all their gamesmanship in immorality, repelled Lawrence’s earnest puritanism: ‘Their attitude is so irreverent and so blatant. They are cased, each in a hard little shell of his own, and out of this they talk words.’5

The Bloomsbury group was ‘rooted in the previous age’, said a younger outlying Cambridge-based member, George ‘Dadie’ Rylands. Proletarian taste, new-money ostentation, patriotic swagger and provincialism revolted them. Egalitarianism dismayed them. A world without social barriers ‘would be a rice-pudding world, a white counterpane world’, said Virginia Woolf. ‘Democracy and civilization are incompatible,’ preached Clive Bell. Triumphant masses marching in step to authoritarian music aroused fear and contempt in them. Bloomsbury agreed with Sir Osbert Sitwell who averred in his Who’s Who entry that he favoured the suppression of Public Opinion in the interests of Free Speech.6

Bloomsbury groupers thought political talk was boring because it made people speak in catchphrases. ‘Liberty, Justice, Equality, Fraternity, Sanctities, Rights, Duties, Honour, all these expensive vocables may mean anything or nothing,’ said Clive Bell. ‘There are few things for which a good-natured, liberty-loving man or woman cares less than political activity.’ To his set of friends, living through the parliamentary clichés, blunders and chicanery of the 1920s, it seemed undeniable that party passions led to muddled or dishonest thinking, made people unreasonable or stereotypical, and lacked long-term perspective. ‘Politics have always bewildered me and always will,’ Grant said, ‘because I do not keep time with events.’ When driving-tests became compulsory shortly before the general election of 1935, he was astonished that so many Liberals with motor-cars were proclaiming their party allegiance with L-plates tied to their bumpers. The influence of Bloomsbury dwindled in the culturally politicized 1930s. The deaths of Lytton Strachey in 1932 and of Roger Fry in 1934 eroded the group’s cohesive identity; but the chief damage was inflicted by Bloomsbury values seeming obsolete to young Marxists and to the Auden generation resisting cultural fascism in the 1930s.⁷

If Bloomsbury’s ideas were progressive, they did not rest on brotherly love. Lord Chalmers at the Treasury, Cecil Lubbock at the Bank of England, all manner of men whom Bloomsbury would have deprecated as sterile, cautious, conservative and Christian, had gone to live in the slums of Whitechapel after university with the hope of regenerating the East End’s suffering poor. Bloomsbury did nothing of the sort: they saw themselves as raffish nobility with a taste for innovation. ‘They did things better before the French Revolution came and made such a mess,’ Lytton Strachey complained in 1912. ‘In the 18th century the aristocracy was the intelligent class. In the Victorian age, it was the upper middle class. And now – ! – What’s the intelligent class now? A few queer people scattered over London, and occasionally to be found in the Upper Circle during the Russian Ballet!’ Fourteen years later, in 1926, Keynes lectured on Britain’s industrial future to a working-class socialist summer school held at the Essex country home of an extinct aristocratic family for whom some of his paternal ancestors had been tenants or employees, and from whom his forename was derived: the Maynards. Beatrice Webb, who heard and watched him among the factory-workers in the Maynard house and grounds, afterwards wrote a pithy assessment of his temperament. ‘He is contemptuous of common men, especially when gathered together in herds. He dislikes the human herd and has no desire to enlist the herd instinct on his side. Hence his antipathy to trade unions, to proletarian culture, to nationalism and patriotism as distinguished from public spirit. The common interests and vulgar prejudices of aristocracies and plutocracies are equally displeasing to him – in fact he dislikes all the common-or-garden thoughts and emotions that bind men together in bundles.’8

Keynes was patrician in outlook. He suspected that liberty was incompatible with equality, and had a sharp preference for liberty over the chimera of equality. His copious historical imagination had been enriched by the opulent beauty of Eton and King’s: he trusted educational or creative elites. With his nonconformist ancestry and lifelong exposure to the puritanism of Cambridge University, sloth and waste were unforgivable to him. Accordingly, he tended to dismiss the aristocracy as idlers, spendthrifts, sots, philanderers, or as strenuous out-doors bores; but his intolerance receded when he met noblemen who were informative, picturesque, amusing or public-spirited. Shortly before his death he described a House of Lords debate in which Lord Cranborne, with his ‘pure Cecilian utterance’, delivered a ‘masterly’ snub to the millionaire arch-spiv Lord Beaverbrook. What attracted Keynes to Cranborne was ‘the combination of his diffidence and unimpressive appearance with some inherent quality of dignity and authority’. Cranborne’s father, ‘old Lord Salisbury, as beautiful and pure a picture as ever, was there to hear him’, Keynes told Lord Halifax. ‘I have never in my life been able to resist a Cecil.’ Thirty-five years earlier Keynes had been happy to spend his nights chatting in the basement of a Ramsgate lodging-house with ill-paid Christmas pantomime comedians, whose merriness he found seductive. At the end of his life he was still attracted to opposites, was still curious about other people’s experiences and expectations, and still savoured whatever seemed romantic, vivid or theatrical. But the international statesman, uxorial husband and twentieth-century philosopher-prince was susceptible to different performers, sporting different costumes and playing different parts, from the edgy young don chasing other men.9

The Cecils represented historic stability, caste manners, hereditary authority and a tradition of public service perpetuated since Elizabethan England. These factors pleased Keynes, who was (like most Bloomsbury groupers) saddened by the transience of human memories, and shocked by the way that emotions of once solid intensity were vaporized by the unforgiving passage of time. In this respect the archetypal Bloomsbury novel is Virginia Woolf’s threnody on historical change, The Years. The past, one of her characters thinks, ‘so interesting; so safe; so unreal … and, to her, so beautiful in its unreality’. Keynes said that it was her best book. One scene, he thought, surpassed even Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard for its poignancy. On a snowy day in 1913, after the death of old Colonel Pargiter, his spinster daughter in her fifties, Eleanor, and an old maidservant, Crosby, leave for ever the vacant white-stuccoed town-house, emptied of furniture, bare of carpets and pictures, damp-stains showing on the walls, where they have lived for forty years. Inwardly Eleanor rejoices at her liberation, sees all the old impediments crumbling away, plans journeys to Italy and India; ‘but for Crosby it was the end of everything’. The old servant weeps: ‘She had known every cupboard, flagstone, chair and table in that large rambling house, not from five or six feet of distance as they had known it; but from her knees, as she scrubbed and polished; she had known every groove, stain, fork, knife, napkin and cupboard. They and their doings had made her entire world. And now she was going off, alone, to a single room at Richmond.’10

Keynes’s mourning for defunct times, his wish to resuscitate the best of pre-1914 England, his sensual memories of the scrub and polish of Edwardian flagstones, were central to his outlook after his return from the Paris conference. ‘To resist living in one’s own time, to attempt to live in an imaginary past,’ the American scholar Edward Mendelson has written, ‘is human in the same way that being neurotic is human.’ Bloomsbury groupers – the novelists among them particularly, but also Keynes – had a propensity to resist the contemporary drift, and to devise imaginary pasts that were more hospitable. Keynes’s imagination, his nerves and his sensibility all leant this way. This was not hackneyed nostalgia for pre-war scenes or sensations: cricket played on a village green, raspberries and cream, wicker chairs in sunny gardens, the smell of lily-of-the-valley, shire horses standing high on the horizon. Instead, Keynes honoured, as he said in 1938, ‘the undisturbed individualism which was the extraordinary achievement of the early Edwardian days, not for our little lot only, but for everyone else, too’. After the shocks, calamities and European dégringolade of 1914–18, the past came to represent the old calm sanity in ways that would have been unimaginable to him as a restive young Apostle.¹¹

His friends in Cambridge thought this way. As early as 1920, after reading The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Lowes Dickinson expected ‘bolshevism and anarchy from Vladivostok to the Rhine’. The men who concocted the treaty of Versailles had ‘destroyed Europe and the whole heritage of its civilisation’. Younger Apostles agreed that they lived in degenerate times. ‘More and more … the old ideals of liberty [tend] to be replaced by the organization, discipline and efficiency of the Termite State,’ F. L. Lucas grumbled in 1929. ‘There are, indeed, countries where bodies and souls are nationalized and rationalized already. The process is said to be excellent for the train services; but for the human beings?’12

Leonard Woolf was a grave, wintry man with an ardent sense of justice who saw much of Keynes for forty years, but never warmed to him. He, too, harked back to Edwardian England and pre-war Europe as forfeited civilizations. ‘In those days there was an ordered way of life, a law, a temple and a city … there were certain standards of public right and wrong, of justice, law and humanity.’ Violence was endemic, but systematized atrocities were unknown before the First World War. ‘If you opened your Times on a morning in say 1907, you did not expect to find its columns filled with horror piled upon horror, fear treading upon the tail of hatred, and hatred upon the tail of fear,’ Woolf wrote in his jeremiad Barbarians at the Gate published in 1939. In Europe before 1914, innocent men were imprisoned, judicial killings were perpetrated, Russian Jews and Armenian Christians were hunted and killed, but there was no political culture requiring ‘the wholesale torture, persecution, expropriation, imprisonment or liquidation of hundreds of thousands of persons’. Woolf conceded that the ruling culture was based on class privilege and colonial exploitation, but felt that undeniably it was ‘a progressing and expanding civilization’. The ease of travel across Europe without a passport showed how pre-war European nations had seemed bound together in assumptions that made national frontiers seem nugatory.¹³

Unguarded European borders remained a mark of civilization to Keynes’s friends. So, too, did the existence of the Latin Monetary Union, which came into force in the 1860s with Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Switzerland as early members. The Union, which was emulated by the Scandinavian Monetary Union of 1873, was joined in 1889 by Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, but juddered apart under the strains of continent-wide war after 1914. Keynes, in his pre-war travels, found Belgian, French and Swiss francs, Italian lire, Spanish pesetas, Greek drachmae, Bulgarian lev, Romanian lei and Serbian dinars all pegged and exchangeable in gold and silver coins across most of non-German-speaking Europe. The system worked well, except when Vatican cardinals or Greek finance ministers tried to cheat, and seemed a generous-spirited antidote to aggressive nationalism and frontier disputes. ‘To our trusting youth it seemed a pleasant and a vivid world,’ Lucas recalled of going to Trinity with a classical scholarship in 1913. ‘Travel was free – we had never even seen a passport – should as soon have thought of taking a stage-coach. The same silver coinage circulated freely from Brussels to Athens.’ Thanks to the Latin Monetary Union, he remembered the thrill of receiving as change in the Roman Forum a Greek five-drachma silver coin as if Pericles was still alive.14

Although Keynes mourned the past as much as anyone in Bloomsbury, and was susceptible to the despondent alarms of Dickinson, Lucas and Woolf, he had a dissident optimism. In boyhood he had been a sunny creature who never submitted to his father’s overloaded apprehensions. He was resolved, too, to resist Bloomsbury’s woefulness as best he could. He would not see the world as doomed, broken, inane. Keynes felt sure that he could help by not thinking like that.

The morbid mood of his friends must have been affected by the district where they lived. Bloomsbury should have been a graceful, sacrosanct purlieu; but its houses, built for the Georgian mercantile gentry, seeming too big for single families in a democratic age, were sub-divided into boarding-houses for poor foreigners and University of London students. Houses were grimy from the smoke and fogs of the city; they looked lacklustre in daylight with their chipped or faded paint; seemed unwelcoming at night with their shuttered windows. Keynes, when young, expressed ‘that intense sense of infinite multitudes and endless whirl of traffic that alike oppresses and excites me in London’. The hooting motor-traffic puffed exhaust-fumes, which mixed with other urban pollution to give Bloomsbury the colour of a dirty dishcloth: houses and pavements looked as if they had been smeared with a film of grease.15

The district may have influenced Keynes when he wrote in 1940, ‘Civilization is a tradition from the past, a miraculous construction made by our fathers of which they knew the vulnerability better than we do, hard to come by and easily lost.’ Bloomsbury stretched northwards from Covent Garden towards the great railway termini of Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross – the last with its trains, on which Keynes travelled thousands of times, to Cambridge. Bloomsbury was owned partly by Herbrand Russell, eleventh Duke of Bedford and partly by the Foundling Hospital. Ill-advisedly, in 1913, the Duke gave an option to buy nineteen acres of his Covent Garden estate, which had been owned by his family since 1552, to a property dealer and cut-price tailor called Sir Harry Mallaby-Deeley, who swiftly sold his option to Sir Joseph Beecham, the patent medicines millionaire. The Duke invested his £2 million from the Covent Garden sale in Russia, lost the lot in 1917 and felt obliged to sell yet more Bloomsbury property. In 1924 the Foundling Hospital sold its adjoining fifty-six acres to the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Company, which sold on to Mallaby-Deeley in 1933. These transactions – the careless Duke dispersing the miraculous construction of his patrimony, glossy but unsavoury Mallaby-Deeley seizing his chances – signalled the loss of a precious form of urban order.¹⁶

The ducal estate was honeycombed with spacious squares between the straight lines of tall houses. These squares were private gardens, with gates that could be opened only by key-holders, and with gravel paths raked by gardeners. ‘On summer evenings there is tennis on the lawns, and the Vicar’s daughters can be seen playing with the bigwigs,’ Raymond Mortimer wrote in 1928. ‘Around are figures reading and talking, and as night falls, the mourning veils in which London soot has dressed the Georgian façades become unnoticeable, and in these gardens you may fancy yourself in the precincts of a college.’ By contrast Coram’s Fields, part of the Foundling Hospital property, which local outcry had prevented Mallaby-Deeley from building over, was opened in 1936 as a public park, with asphalt paths and boisterous playgrounds.17

Pre-war Vienna was Keynes’s ideal city. He stayed there in 1912 while returning from a holiday in Hungary with the endearing bisexual Apostle Ferenc Békássy. ‘I’ve never found a town so completely to my taste – it’s by far the pleasantest European capital to visit,’ he told Duncan Grant. ‘You can imagine nothing more civilised or magnificent or comfortable. One’s never bored and never tired. The part of the town that matters is very compactly placed and is nearly all of the most splendid baroque.’ There was abundant and confident modern architecture ‘of which I am told Viennese taste complains but which I think very fine and which fits in quite well with the old baroque’. He admired the yellow-painted palace of Schönbrunn, ‘in the style of Versailles but more austere, with endless allées of enormous clipt trees’, and its zoological gardens displaying outlandish animals with unscientific frivolity. ‘And the Prater – Vienna’s Hyde Park – but wild and most beautiful, in the dark recesses of which one buggers wild Bosnian soldiers. And excellent food and cafés to give one a club at every street corner. And excellent theatres, splendid pictures and streets packed with gay people as charming and polite as the Berliners are not.’ He spent his mornings in picture galleries, where he was excited by the work of Breughel and Rubens, and his evenings at theatres, including the Opera House, where he was impressed by Bruno Walter conducting Figaro.18

When, as a half-the-week Londoner, Keynes became interested in the redevelopment of the capital, his imagination recalled Habsburg Vienna. ‘Why not pull down the whole of South London from Westminster to Greenwich, and make a good job of it?’ he asked in a radio broadcast in 1931 on unemployment. It would be possible to house there, ‘near to their work, a much greater population than at present, in far better buildings with all the conveniences of modern life, yet at the same time providing hundreds of acres of squares and avenues, parks and public spaces, having, when it was finished, something magnificent to the eye, yet useful and convenient to human life as a monument to our age. Would that employ men? Of course it would!’ Five years later he was posing more rhetorical questions for BBC listeners. ‘Why should not all London be the equal of St James’s Park and its surroundings? The river might become one of the sights of the world with a range of terraces and buildings rising from the river. The schools of South London should have the dignity of Universities with courts, colonnades, fountains, libraries, galleries, dining-halls, cinemas and theatres for their own use.’¹⁹

Keynes had scant interest in painting until he met Grant. He stopped work on his Treatise on Probability to sit for Grant’s portrait of him, because it was important to Grant. His love for Grant made him want to see with Grant’s vision. The Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, in which the Bloomsbury grouper Roger Fry introduced Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh to England, stimulated his imagination. So, too, did the Omega workshop (supplying furniture, textiles, mosaics and stained glass, with designs influenced by Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism), which Fry, abetted by Grant and Vanessa Bell, opened at 33 Fitzroy Square in 1913, and which survived until 1919.

But the decisive episode came in 1918 a year after the death of Degas. Hearing that the contents of Degas’ studio were to be sold, Grant obtained a catalogue, and convinced Keynes that this was an unprecedented chance for the National Gallery to buy major Impressionist paintings. Keynes first squared a crucially placed Treasury official; then visited Sir Charles Holmes, Director of the National Gallery; drafted a letter which Holmes agreed to send him; arranged for Holmes to nobble Lord Curzon of Kedleston, a Cabinet minister and Gallery trustee; and (armed with Holmes’s letter and Curzon’s endorsement) won the support of Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Law, who was amused by his zeal in the cause, allotted £20,000 (550,000 francs) to buy works for the National Gallery. Keynes accompanied Holmes to Paris in March 1918 in a party led by Austen Chamberlain. Holmes shaved his moustache and wore spectacles to disguise himself from Paris dealers.

The auction occurred in the week that German troops broke through the Allied line at the Somme, and advanced forty miles. The French Commander-in-Chief predicted that capitulation by English soldiers would lead to the vanquishing of his own armies. Preliminaries for evacuating the French government from Paris were initiated. Keynes’s rail journey took him within seventeen miles of the fighting, as he told Ottoline Morrell, through ‘stations full once again of peasant refugees with bundles, parrots and babies’. This crisis, emphasized by shell-bursts from Big Bertha which punctuated the bidding, worked to the advantage of buyers. Prices were low. Keynes secured for under £500 a small Cézanne painting of seven apples, a drawing Femme nue by Ingres, several large charcoal drawings by Degas and a small picture Cheval au pâturage by Delacroix, together with a drawing by Delacroix which he gave to Grant. The Franco-American art-dealing firm of Knoedler bid on behalf of Holmes, who refused to buy any Cézannes, missed the chance of an El Greco and returned with £5,000 unspent – but who did bag works by Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Manet and Gauguin. Keynes returned from Paris, via Folkestone, with Austen Chamberlain, whose motor-car dropped him at the end of the lane leading to Charleston. ‘I’ve got a Cézanne in my suitcase,’ he announced after trudging to the farmhouse. ‘It was too heavy for me to carry, so I’ve left it in the ditch, behind the gate.’ Grant and Bunny Garnett loped away to retrieve the bag, and bore it back in triumph between them.20

Keynes amassed the collection that Grant would have made if he had been richer. With advice from friends, he attended sales and exhibitions, and scrutinized catalogues. He had particular bursts of buying in 1924 (Cézanne, Derain) and 1937 (Braque, Cézanne, Delacroix, Picasso). His taste was ‘rather Cambridge in its austerity’, but more eclectic than scholarly. Ultimately he bequeathed 150 works to King’s, including the works of friends alongside modern masters. Many of these works are now at the Fitzwilliam Museum.²¹*

After starting to collect paintings, Keynes considered how best he might help painters. In 1925, at the prompting of Roger Fry and with support from Samuel Courtauld, the millionaire collector of Impressionists, he started the London Artists’ Association, which opened a gallery in Old Bond Street to hold exhibitions of modern works and thus to improve the prosperity of individual artists. William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore both held their first solo exhibitions under the Association’s auspices. Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, William Roberts and Paul Nash sold works there. Keynes was disappointed when Vanessa Bell and Grant defected to a more lucrative dealer, and the Association succumbed in 1933. Clive Bell thought Keynes had a poor eye for a picture: where John Buchan found Keynes offensively cosmopolitan, Bell thought him insular. ‘France, Italy, America even, he saw them all from the White Cliffs of Dover, or, to be more exact, from Whitehall or King’s combination room.’22

Keynes used to speak of ‘the Ins’: the politicians, officials, administrators and educated readers of the weekly journals who ran or participated in public life. He knew the importance of being recognized among the ‘Ins’ – what came to be called, ten years after Keynes’s death, the Establishment – and was careful to attend such clan gatherings of the ‘Ins’ as the imposing memorial service for Lord Bryce, the Liberal statesman, at Westminster Abbey in 1922. He was the only Bloomsbury grouper to enjoy an entrenched position in this smart, veneered set: his more unworldly confrères thought that ‘“Society” is the affectation of everything – of wit, good manners, art, literature, and, above all, love.’ Perhaps, too, some felt that his aspirations beyond Bloomsbury were social adultery.²³

Edwin Montagu sponsored Keynes among the ‘Ins’ by introducing him to the Asquiths. In 1915 Keynes stayed for his debut weekend with the Prime Minister at Sutton Courtenay, where he and Margot Asquith won £9 at bridge from Montagu and Lady de Trafford. A year later, when Keynes was again visiting Sutton Courtenay, his hostess reproached him for not playing tennis: ‘You’re an ass not to play. Think of your bridge – if you didn’t play, you wouldn’t know a cat.’ Keynes admired the working-habits of a man whom others found too casual or tipsy in wartime Downing Street. ‘He worked, as a Prime Minister must if he is to survive, with great economy of effort,’ he wrote in 1928 after the death of the Earl of Oxford and Asquith (as Asquith became in retirement). ‘He could deal with printed and written matter with the rapidity of a scholar. He never succumbed to the modern curse of shorthand and the verbosity it brings. Lord Oxford belonged to the lineage of great men, which will, I pray, never die out, who can take up a pen and do what is necessary in short notes written in their own hand.’ (Unlike Keynes, Asquith detested using telephones, and on one occasion, when he was forced to take a call from an importunate and annoying man, was surprised in the act of pouring a bottle of black ink into the telephone’s mouthpiece in the belief that the ink would leak out at the other end into the ear of his antagonist.) It was a signal mistake of Asquith’s, though, to forget about a piece of business once he had signed it off, thought Keynes, ‘not to carry it about with him in his mind and on his tongue when the official day’s work was done’.24

After Keynes had been stricken by appendicitis in 1915, he spent part of his recuperation among the droves of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s guests at Garsington, near Oxford. She was tall and haggard with the sovereign warmth of a character-actress forcing emotional intensity on her audience. Her husband was also stagey in his vigorous geniality: he strode about in leather boots, riding-breeches, double-breasted waistcoat and rat-catcher coat; unsure of himself, a little bogus. Together they made wartime Garsington into a privileged place. Oak-panelled rooms were painted peacock blue-green or dark sealing-wax red. There were silk curtains, Persian carpets, bowls of pot-pourri, orris-root and desiccated oranges studded with cloves; knick-knacks abounded; gregarious pugs trotted underfoot snuffling. Keynes was pictured by his hostess, lying convalescent on the lawn, which sloped towards an oblong stretch of ornamental water screened by yew hedges fronted by statuary: ‘His influence and advice are always in favour of hard work, and point towards the high road of life, not to flights and dilettantisms. His intellect is of a fine steel-like quality, and his mind works more rapidly than any I have ever known.’25

At this stage of his life Keynes liked to change compartments at short intervals. Accordingly, he left plush Garsington to go to stay at Bellecroft, the seaside villa on the Isle of Wight which his boyfriend Sidney Russell-Cooke had inherited from his mother in 1914. Russell-Cooke had enlisted in the Post Office Rifles after the outbreak of European war, but had recently been invalided home with shell-shock, and spent the duration of the fighting in the Intelligence Department of the War Office. The two invalids found sexual consolations together during their convalescence.

The leading Liberal households, the Asquiths, McKennas and Runcimans, became Keynes’s familiars. They introduced him to people as varied as King Edward VII’s ‘Court Jew’ Sir Ernest Cassel and Mrs Winston Churchill. After the war, the Asquiths retrenched by moving to Bedford Square in Bloomsbury. There, during a typical occasion in 1923, Keynes was placed between Lady Desborough and the equally aristocratic and glamorous Lady Hartington: Siegfried Sassoon was among the other guests. In 1925 Sir Abe Bailey, the South African financier, gave a dinner to honour the role of Lord D’Abernon, the British Ambassador in Berlin, in the seeming triumph for peace represented by the treaty of Locarno. ‘A Belshazzar feast, of a refined order, with a wonderful collection of guests,’ noted D’Abernon. ‘Two ex-Prime Ministers, Balfour and Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, Geoffrey Dawson, the Editor of The Times, Keynes, Philip Kerr, and several newspaper magnates.’ A few years later, when Lady Desborough’s daughter married Keynes’s Sussex landlord, George Gage, the names of Mr and Mrs Keynes appeared on the guest-list along with those of the G. K. Chestertons, the Walter de la Mares, the Kiplings, Osbert Sitwell. There were also couples with historically resonant territorial names: Devonshire, Lansdowne, Linlithgow, Londonderry, Northampton, Plymouth, Portland, Rutland, Westminster, Westmorland.26

From 1916 onwards Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Norton, Sheppard and others regretted that Keynes was betraying his principles to serve his ambitions, and prostituting his gifts to what Bell called ‘the dirty work of governing’. Grant was the only Bloomsbury friend to sympathize with Keynes’s testiness when – working long hours under strain, and bearing heavy responsibilities – he heard his friends offer glib, ill-informed opinions which he could not counter without betraying official secrets.²⁷

One evening in 1918, Keynes returned from late work at the Treasury to find the Gordon Square household discussing the London government’s rejection of the Vienna peace initiative of Emperor Karl. He showed brusque contempt for their views before denying that anyone could be a genuine conscientious objector. When Vanessa Bell and Norton contested this, he said crossly, several times, ‘Go to bed, go to bed,’ at which Sheppard, who was the angriest after the Emperor Karl dispute, grew pompous: ‘Maynard, you will find it a mistake to despise your old friends.’ Sheppard condemned Keynes for self-importance and snobbery: he had been incensed by hearing Keynes say to Jessie, their cook, as he left for Lady Cunard’s, ‘I’m going to dine with the Duke of Connaught. Isn’t that grand?’ Yet the antagonism of Bloomsbury groupers to Keynes’s worldliness advanced his career. Their fault-finding led him to scour his motives and to subject government policies to searing scrutiny. ‘His friends’, said Garnett, ‘kept him aware of the danger that he might, for the sake of a brilliant official career, be a party to bringing about terrible evils.’ Bloomsbury’s scolding put him in the mood to resign from the Treasury and to write his protest against the terms of the peace treaty. His dissent, in turn, brought international fame.²⁸

One instance of his celebrity occurred in 1920. He was travelling in Italy with Vanessa Bell and Grant, whom he chivvied into accompanying him on a visit to Mary and Bernard Berenson at I Tatti. The Berensons had assembled a house-party including her brother Logan Pearsall Smith, Keynes’s fellow Apostle Robert Trevelyan, and Bella Greene, Pierpont Morgan’s librarian in New York. ‘Everybody in Florence wanted to crowd up and get a glimpse of Keynes, who is emphatically the Man of the Moment,’ said Mary Berenson. ‘He told us a lot that he did not print about the personalities on whom the fate of the world depended during those awful months, when they were behaving in such a fatally stupid way.’ Vanessa Bell was determined not to be impressed. ‘Maynard is a huge success,’ she reported to Roger Fry. ‘At every meal there are nondescript foreigners and millionaires who hang on his lips.’29

The I Tatti house-party was invited to a sumptuous fête given by Charles Loeser, a Brooklyn-born department-store heir who had been Berenson’s Harvard contemporary. Berenson and Loeser had feuded for a quarter of a century, and this great party was to mark their reconciliation. In Loeser’s villa Torri di Gattaia, said Grant, ‘one large room always seemed to lead to another even larger. The walls gleamed with beautiful things. Chattering people seemed to be everywhere. Great painted platters of cakes were handed round, and one’s glass was constantly replenished with ice-cold marsala.’ Loeser led Grant round introducing him to people who were startlingly deferential. It was only at the end of the party that Grant realized that Loeser had mistaken him for Keynes, and had been introducing him as il gran’ economista inglese to eminent Italians, including the Governor of the Bank of Italy. Loeser owned ten or a dozen Cézannes, which he had bought for a few hundred francs apiece: while Grant dissimulated about economics, Keynes declaimed about painting to the collectors.³⁰

An important Bloomsbury sub-section was the Memoir Club, which was formed in 1920 and disbanded in 1964. Its members (initially the luminaries of pre-1914 Bloomsbury) met to read aloud their reminiscences in acts of community remembrance which often, although not invariably, hallowed memories of Edwardian England: the club served to cherish souvenirs and recollections that became a cohesive part of what Leonard Woolf called ‘communal psychology’. The Memoir Club met two or three times a year, dining together in a restaurant, and repairing to the Keynes house in Gordon Square, where one or two members would read aloud short memoirs devised to revive their common recollections. ‘Lydia would usher us upstairs to the great room which Maynard had had constructed by throwing the drawing-rooms of Nos 46 and 47 into one,’ recalled Bunny Garnett of the late 1930s. ‘Maynard would lie, half-reclining on a couch, to rest his heart, with a reading-lamp beside him and his head in shadow, joining in sometimes with his own memories of the events or persons spoken of.’31

It was for the Memoir Club that Keynes wrote and read, in 1921, his reminiscences of the peace negotiations entitled ‘Dr Melchior’. It awed Forster: ‘A most wonderful paper. Privilege to listen to it.’ But after sleeping the night at 46 Gordon Square, he commented: ‘don’t think these people are little; but they belittle all who come into their power unless the comer is strong, which I am not. Great as is my admiration for the Club, I shall resign.’ Seventeen years later, in 1938, while convalescing after a life-threatening illness, Keynes read his memoir on his early beliefs – partly as a reproach to the gullible youngsters present who had been duped by Marxism. ‘Maynard read a very packed profound & impressive paper so far as I could follow, about Cambridge youth; their philosophy; its consequences; Moore; what it lacked; what it gave,’ Virginia Woolf noted. ‘I was impressed by M. & felt a little flittery & stupid.’ They ate ham sandwiches and hot cakes, and talked no politics.³²

In 1929 Keynes was elected to the Cranium Club, which had been founded in 1924 by Francis Birrell and Garnett. Its members dined together on the first Thursday of every month in a private room in the Verdi restaurant in Wardour Street: dinner cost six and sixpence, and was paid individually; but wine was purchased from club funds. The entrance fee was two guineas. Seating at the table was chosen by lot (as it still is) on the model of the Apostles and the Keynes Club at King’s. It is likely that Keynes had been blackballed in an early candidature (as Isaiah Berlin reputedly was, years later, by someone who considered him not bright enough). The Cranium’s twenty-eight members in 1929 included Keynes’s former lovers Birrell, Garnett, Grant, Sprott and Lytton Strachey; and fellow Apostles including Dickinson, Forster, Fry, Alec Penrose, Bertrand Russell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Leonard Woolf and Russell’s barrister friend Charles Sanger, who wrote a book on Wuthering Heights. Other members were familiar in Bloomsbury: Gerald Brenan, Raymond Mortimer, Eddy Sackville-West, Adrian Stephen and Arthur Waley. Oliver Strachey (Lytton’s cryptographer brother) was a member with his sculptor son-in-law Stephen Tomlin (a former lover of Grant’s) and the latter’s barrister brother Garrow Tomlin. Most Cranium diners were inquisitive, knowledgeable, quick-witted, playful, even lightly flirtatious men. Their talk was expressive, thoughtful and cultivated. Although there might be earnest or emphatic exchanges, there was more banter than self-importance. There were no women members of this Bloomsbury adjunct until Keynes’s nephew and godson Stephen Keynes proposed Frances Partridge in 1982: no one was so shameless as to blackball her.33*

The Tuesday, the Other and the Cranium were all dining-clubs where like-minded men met to share ideas. Keynes was not an habitué of the Pall Mall or St James’s Street clubs where members went to read newspapers, write letters, grumble, gossip, drink, tell tales, make bets and swap tips. He had no idle time for grazing in the pastures of clubland. He preferred to know whom he was likely to meet, and to feel sure that their views would be worth hearing. However, in 1942 he was elected a member of the Athenæum in Pall Mall, only a fortnight after being proposed, which was the Athenæum’s equivalent of instantaneous election. The arrangement was convenient, for the Treasury, where Keynes then had an office, was a few minutes’ stroll across St James’s Park and up the Duke of York Steps. Many of its senior officials were Athenians, who used the club as a lunch-time canteen. Keynes’s proposer was Sir Alan Barlow, a Treasury grandee and sometime chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery, who like Geoffrey Keynes had married into the Darwin family. Roy Harrod, Keynes’s future biographer, seconded his nomination.

The Athenæum had not changed appreciably since it was pictured by Arthur Benson in 1904: ‘The Ath is a rather terrible place, so much infirmity, such limping & coughing. The Abp of York, pale, iron-grey, stalking about in great dignity.’ The club stood high on stilts of prestige, but low in comforts and spirits. A visitor, who was taken there in 1940 and needed a liqueur after his lunch to obliterate the taste of the food, was told there was only cooking-brandy available. ‘At one time the Athenæum was a sort of Holy of Holies in club-land,’ reflected the stinted guest. ‘All the most respectable Bishops and Deans belonged to it, and famous scientists, judges and literary big-wigs considered their election as a sort of Order of Merit. Most of them had to wait a long time for the honour – no club in London can count so many white-haired and bald men among its members.’ Keynes had often lunched there with such members as Ramsay MacDonald and Josiah Stamp. The cooking had never been good, and during the dour privations of wartime austerity, at the time of Keynes’s election, it was sickening.34

The supreme coterie in Keynes’s life was his college. He returned to King’s in 1919. During the university terms of the inter-war years he journeyed by train to Cambridge on Thursday evenings, and remained at King’s until Tuesday afternoons. His mid-weeks were spent at Gordon Square. In the vacations between the three university terms, Keynes stayed in London, or after 1926 at his house at Tilton in Sussex. His Cambridge schedule demanded a punishing round of meetings and socializing. In term-time, he attended the King’s College Council, which met weekly on Saturdays from late morning onwards. ‘Yesterday was a terrible day,’ he told his wife on a Sunday in 1926. ‘I had a College meeting (where I had to make speeches all the time) from 11 to 5.15. Very exhausting … Then I was a fool in the evening. I played bridge in the Combination Room which was nice, but after the others had gone I stayed playing patience with myself with a bad head until half past one; so I am rather muzzy to-day.’³⁵

In 1919, as second bursar of King’s, Keynes took charge of college investments. He sat on the Estates Committee, and by the end of 1920 had induced the college to sell almost one-third of its land-holdings and to invest the proceeds in securities. From 1924 until his death he held the post of first bursar: by 1946 the initial funds, with no net addition, had multiplied in value twelve-fold under his stewardship. All this entailed a heavy burden of meetings beyond the College Council. As he complained on a bank-holiday Monday of 1924: ‘This has been one of my dreadful wasted days, – I have spent more than eight hours in College and University Meetings and am much too tired to do anything sensible.’³⁶

Sir Walter Durnford, who had been an Eton house master in Keynes’s time until compelled to retire by gout, succeeded Monty Rhodes James as Provost of King’s in 1918, when James moved to the provostship of Eton. Durnford’s death in 1926 marked the end of Etonian dominance in college history. The younger dons wished to elect Keynes as his successor, but the provostship went to a biblical scholar named Alan Brooke, who provided a stable interregnum, until the election of Jack Sheppard as Provost in 1933. One Council Meeting during Brooke’s reign, in October 1931, showed the prim belief in self-denial, and the cavilling, parsimonious and ingrained puritanism of most Cambridge colleges. Council debated whether, given the country’s financial crisis, King’s should suspend the holding of Feasts, or at least stop serving wine at them. They vindicated their patriotism, said Keynes, by resolving ‘to give Feasts but without ostentation substituting beer and cheap claret for champagne!’37

Sheppard became a monstrous poseur: clowning, petulant and callous to some Fellows; a self-travesty who gambolled, cut capers and showed off to undergraduates. Keynes found Sheppard ‘a little dotty’, but (as a former casual lover) forgave him much. When his proposal to create a fellowship for non-Kingsmen ‘was defeated by the reactionaries’ at the Council, he noted that Sheppard ‘made a most painful speech – really making rather an exhibition of himself, quite losing control of his nerves’. As Provost, Sheppard was feeble, procrastinating and digressive when chairing Council. His maundering anecdotes in Council, which he treated as a congenial way to fill Saturdays, were so tedious that the frustration may have hurt Keynes’s health. The mutual affection between Lydia Keynes and Sheppard survived her telling him that Geoffrey Keynes’s son Stephen, who read history and then economics at King’s immediately after the war, thought him ‘a silly old man’.³⁸

Keynes’s progressive, outward-looking influence was far-reaching in a traditionally insular university. ‘Cambridge is the one satisfactory English institution,’ Francis Birrell said in 1932. Partly due to Keynes, it had in the 1920s ‘really made an effort to keep up with the times.’ Keynes’s London commitments made him seem rather fast. ‘He is not formidable & talks with ease & good temper about anything that I turn up,’ Arthur Benson noted in 1924 after Keynes had dined at Magdalene. ‘He is freely said to live with the famous Russian danseuse (Pavlovsky) but no one seems to care. He is much in the Bloomsbury set.’39

Keynes restricted himself to eight economics lectures, in the Michaelmas term, on his work in progress. There were none of the empty places and stolid apathy of other lecture-halls. ‘It was as if we were listening to Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton,’ recalled Michael Straight, who matriculated in 1934. Keynes also limited his tutorial supervision of undergraduates. Until the mid-1920s, his pupils were young men who were satisfied with obtaining second-class degrees before entering family businesses. In 1924–6 first-class minds began to come to him at King’s.⁴⁰

The Bells’ son Julian, who went to read history at King’s in 1927, found Cambridge rowdy – and he was a robust undergraduate who went beagling on most winter days. On one occasion a mob of hearties tried to raid his rooms. He had been mowing long grass earlier that day, and had left the whetstone of a scythe lying on a table. He hit the first man over his threshold on the shoulder with the whetstone, and broke his assailant’s collar-bone. Thereafter, to meet any renewed attack, he kept Duncan Grant’s knobkerrie by the door. Violence coexisted with leisurely fulfilment. ‘The atmosphere of intellectual excitement was intoxicating,’ recalled a man who won a scholarship in classics to King’s in 1931. ‘The dominant fashion was literary humanism fostered by close links with Bloomsbury, as represented by Maynard Keynes and George Rylands. For all its brilliance, King’s was something of a lotus land; many of us had no ambitions to succeed in business or in public service; our main desire was to perpetuate the cultured intimacy we had just discovered. We were Epicureans.’⁴¹

The Apostles’ Saturday-evening sessions were revived by Lucas and Sheppard: Richard Braithwaite, Alec Penrose, Sprott, Frank Ramsey and Rylands were among the young new Apostles of the 1920s who mattered in Keynes’s life. Julian Bell felt that he ‘had reached the pinnacles of Cambridge intellectualism’ when he was elected to the Apostles in his second year as an undergraduate. The society remained more important in his life than any other institution. Politics were considered beneath discussion on the hearthrug in 1928: ‘it was an intellectual climate of Bloomsbury un peu passé’, with homage to the critical writings of I. A. Richards and a smattering of Freud.42

Keynes sat on King’s Fellowship Committee, and was active in securing the election of Lucas as a Fellow in 1920, of Braithwaite and Ramsey in 1924, of Rylands in 1927 and of Richard Kahn in 1930. All but Kahn were Apostles. Whereas Sheppard pooh-poohed research and protected second-class minds, Keynes wanted superlative achievement. One criterion for recruitment was, in his words, ‘how many Fellows will find a place in the Dictionary of National Biography’.⁴³

Keynes abominated nail-biting. Aristotle, he emphasized, classed ‘the biting of one’s fingernails as bestiality along with buggering bulls and ripping open females with a view to devouring the foetus’. He inspected young men who were candidates for King’s fellowships to check that their manicures were not bestial. On one occasion, at least, the fingernail inspection was to prove of historic importance. ‘I had to lunch to-day the Fellowship candidate who seems much the cleverest on paper to inspect him and his fingernails,’ he told his wife in 1935. ‘He is excellent – there cannot be a shadow of doubt about it. Fingernails as long as yours (in proportion) – it is infallible. And he was very nice – Turing his name …’ On a Sunday evening a year later Keynes dined in hall at King’s beside W. H. Auden, who was in Cambridge addressing undergraduate societies. ‘He was most charming, intelligent, straightforward, youthful – a sort of senior undergraduate; altogether delightful, but but but – his finger nails are eaten to the bottoms with dirt and wet, one of the worst cases ever seen.’ Such infantilism was disconcerting: ‘all other impressions so favourable. But those horrid fingers cannot lie.’44

Christianity marred the beauties of King’s chapel for Keynes. The memorial service for Provost Durnford ‘touched me a little, but not much’, he wrote in 1926. ‘The choristers sang sweetly and the organ mumbled and the priests lifted up their mezzo-bassos, but somehow there was just a little pretending about it all, a sort of silly suggestion that the poor old provost now has wings.’ His ambivalence about King’s chapel extended to its music. Inviting a Hungarian Jewish exile to a service in 1939, Keynes promised, ‘You would hear English Church music in its most exquisite form and in the grandest possible environment. To my thinking, though exquisite, it is lifeless and even moribund, and always falls on my emotions flatter than I expect.’ Nevertheless, he continued, ‘if you have never been to one of these highly respectable, quasi-aesthetic Victorian performances, where deathly moderation and pseudo-good taste have drowned all genuine emotions, you might find it an interesting experience.’⁴⁵

A connoisseur should be a rentier. Patrons and collectors need investment income to support their benefactions and acquisitions. After resigning from the civil service in 1919, Keynes lost his salary of £1,200 a year and therefore sought new means to support his burgeoning interests. He joined the boards of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society in 1919, the Provincial Assurance Company in 1923 and the Independent Investment Company in 1924. He was associated in these businesses with his wartime Treasury colleague ‘Foxy’ Falk, empurpled and rasping in his bad moods, but ‘boyish, pink and happy’ after establishing himself in 1927 in ‘an open and acknowledged ménage à trois’ with Asquith’s daughter Violet Bonham Carter and her husband. Keynes’s ever-loyal friend Sidney Russell-Cooke, who was ‘intensely enthusiastic’ as a City director and ‘never failed to inspire’, was recruited to the board of National Mutual – doubtless at Keynes’s instigation. The latter’s speeches at annual general meetings of National Mutual, the board of which he chaired from 1921, were well reported: he retired from the board in 1938, on the pretext of ill-health, although his frustration at challenges to his investment strategy was the underlying reason.46

Keynes liked aggressive investment tactics. He and Falk believed in the 1920s that this entailed taking advantage of changes in the relative prices of long- and short-term fixed-interest securities and equities over the course of the credit cycle. They lost on the Stock Exchange between 1923 and 1929. After 1930, Keynes ceased to be an active dealer seeking short-term gains on predictions of changes in the credit cycle. Instead, he took long-term views, and concentrated on investing in a limited number of businesses which he felt were under-valued. During the 1920s he initially made substantial net gains in currencies and commodities; but lost heavily in commodity speculation at the end of the decade, when his net worth fell to under £8,000. In the early 1930s, however, his investment strategy recovered, and raised his net worth to over £500,000 in 1936. Slumps on Wall Street and in London meant that his investments depreciated during his illness of 1937–8. His net assets were worth £506,222 at the end of 1936, but only £181,244 by the end of 1938. His gross income fell from £18,801 in 1937–8 to £6,192 in 1938–9. However, his net assets doubled again by 1946.

Two (among many) of Keynes’s statements about investment strategy can be quoted. ‘It is from time to time the duty of a serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself,’ he told his National Mutual co-director Francis Curzon (a stockbroker at Panmure Gordon, and brother of the minister who had supported Treasury money being spent at the Degas studio auction in 1918).

Any other policy is anti-social, destructive of confidence, and incompatible with the working of the economic system. An investor is aiming, or should be aiming primarily at long-period results, and should be judged solely by these … The idea that we should all be selling out to the other fellow and should all be finding ourselves with nothing but cash at the bottom of the market is not merely fantastic, but destructive of the whole system.

Without perversity in his reading of markets, he upheld the Apostles’ view that it is otiose to follow the beliefs that everyone else practises. ‘My central principle of investment is to go contrary to general opinion, on the ground that, if everyone is agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive,’ he told the banker Sir Jasper Ridley in 1944.47

Keynes, in his lecture ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ of 1928, imagined a time ‘when the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance’. Then, he hoped, ‘we shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues’. He predicted – uttering the hope of all Bloomsbury connoisseurs – an epoch when people infected by the money-bug would be recognized as self-degrading. ‘The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a kind of shudder to the specialists in mental disease.’ Distasteful social customs and unjust economic rewards and penalties, which society upheld because they promoted capital accumulation, would go. ‘Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth … but the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.’48

John Buchan, Keynes’s fellow member of the Other Club, was a socially climbing Scotsman who had laboured to make a comfortable fortune: he resented Keynes’s attitude to money without noticing his respect for old institutions and families. Barralty, the cynical malefactor in Buchan’s novel The Island of Sheep, who is based on Keynes, is mistrusted for his attitude to wealth: ‘he professes to despise the whole money-spinning business. Says he is in it only to get cash for the things he cares about.’ Barralty’s money subsidizes ‘a peevishly superior weekly journal, and he imports at his own expense all kinds of exponents of the dernier cri. His line is that he despises capitalism, as he despises all orthodoxies, but as long as the beastly thing lasts, he will try to make his bit out of it.’ Keynes did not despise capitalism – he sacrificed his life trying to save it – but otherwise Buchan’s summary is an accurate if unsympathetic summary of Keynes as an investor-connoisseur.⁴⁹

Another side of Keynes’s connoisseurship was expressed in his cherishing of English landscape. This began in 1924, when he leased from Lord Gage a farmhouse called Tilton, where he spent much of July and August with Lopokova. Tilton was a pleasant walk away from Charleston, just as poky and rudimentary as the Bell–Grant ménage, set amid lawns and orchards, and nestling beneath Firle Beacon. The billowing South Downs of Sussex were a soothing contrast to the Cambridge flatlands, with their scourging east winds and cold rain that fell like needles. Gage granted a twenty-one-year lease on the farmhouse to Keynes in 1926. The new tenant employed his fellow Old Etonian and Cranium member the architect George Kennedy to design a library annexe, an enlarged staircase, servant-quarters, bathrooms and other amenities. The house, though, was never commodious. Keynes bought the shooting-rights over Tilton wood in 1934. He took a new lease on the house and surrounding farmland, amounting to 3,000 acres, from Gage in 1935–6. He recruited an able farm manager, reared pigs and made Tilton prosper. Keynes never felt a need to own his own homes, but remained a leaseholder in Bloomsbury and Sussex. He improved the houses that he leased from the estates of the Duke of Bedford and Lord Gage without frets about his outlay. Although he urged house-building programmes as a means of providing employment and of improving national prosperity, it would have seemed to him irrational and even indecent for citizens to buy their homes as capital investments, and to make heavy borrowings in the hope of speculative profits out of their domestic settings. This was to mistake the value of house ownership, and to degrade the value of having a home.

The Sussex Downs provided the terrain that Vanessa Bell’s elder son Julian celebrated in his poems about winter:

           Bare ploughland ridges sweeping from the down;

           Black hedges berryless; dead grass turned brown,

               And brown-tipped rushes on each field,

               And bare woods.

After Bell had been killed in the Spanish Civil War, to the fierce grief of his mother, Keynes ensured that her surviving son was protected from combat in 1939–45 by giving him a reserved occupation as a full-time farmworker at Tilton. Quentin Bell became the pig-man, and acquired a unique perspective as a Bloomsbury scion among the Tilton labourers. Although the younger men were proud of their employer’s national eminence, his attempts to unite the hamlet in ceremonial feasts and bonfires drew a grudging response. The locals muttered that these events wasted money. Despite the respect accorded to Lord Gage for organizing festivities for his villagers at Firle, Keynes’s expenditure seemed flashy. His problems as an incomer to a rural community were compounded by an eccentric Russian wife and a grey Rolls-Royce which smacked of the parvenu. There was incomprehension between Keynes and Tilton’s estate-workers. ‘He needed some reply to his fantastically brilliant conversation before he could be at ease with his interlocutors, or even before they could really exist for him,’ Quentin Bell judged. ‘When he talked about his labourers he described them as fantastic characters, as indeed they were, but they were for him purely fantastic, two-dimensional and not endowed with real passions. He found them comic but not sympathetic.’ Keynes believed that squires should lead, meld and protect their communities. But to achieve these laudable aims, so Quentin Bell objected, ‘he chose a role that is best played by the kind of stupid person who gets things right not by calculation but by instinct, and Maynard was wholly unfitted to play the part of a stupid person’.50

It was said, with justice, that Keynes knew little of England outside Cambridge and London; but he half understood the southern Sussex Downs. Tilton fulfilled him. He regretted the commodification of rural England and the loss of quiet privacy. As a schoolboy he had been influenced by his mentor, Luxmoore, who had sidled out at night to chop down an advertisement for Vinolia soap disfiguring a meadow at Eton, and pitched it into a pond where it floated with its legs in the air like a dead ox. Luxmoore later prosecuted, under regulations curbing the unbridled erection of advertising hoardings, a farmer who erected in a pretty meadow three eyesores advertising Heinz pickles. Morgan Forster had grown up in, and valued, as he wrote in Maurice, ‘an England where it was still possible to get lost’. Maps, signposts, building-works and a busier tempo had robbed his country of its lonely places, Forster felt. Keynes had similar feelings of loss. From boyhood, he had travelled back and forth between Cambridge and London: the journeying boy, looking up from the pages of a book, will have seen the woods of Hertfordshire, and the leafy, rutted lanes to farms and fields; but the commuting man will have seen the scarring developments prefigured by Forster in his pre-war novel Howards End. Trains from King’s Cross rattled through the station built in the 1920s for salubrious new Welwyn Garden City, past Welwyn, with Panshanger aerodrome to the east; traversed the valley of Tewin Water, and the cutting through the high chalk embankments at Hitchin; and ran parallel with the Hatfield bypass, on the A1 trunk road, which was built in 1927, with houses, roads, factories mushrooming everywhere except at the chalk downs near Royston. Trains from Liverpool Street chugged past the disfiguring developments of the Lee valley.

Similar encroachments near Tilton had been long foreseen. ‘These Downs will last my time but I can see that their end is not distant,’ Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, who lived nearby at Glynde, had told Henry James in 1902. ‘Hideous towns & jerry-built villas now cover what was not many years ago … sheep-loved turf.’ Day-trippers jeopardized Edwardian peace, said the Field Marshal: ‘irredeemably vulgar citizens from London pour in here daily by train to rob this beautiful Downland of all its greatest charms’. Lord Gage, Keynes’s landlord, was a doughty skirmisher determined to stop electricity pylons bestriding the Downs, stock-car racing destroying the peace, ‘ribbon development, advertisement nuisances and bungalow atrocities’.51

Keynes welcomed the process begun by the Labour government in 1931 which resulted in a standing committee on National Parks and in the appointment in 1945 of his boyhood lover Arthur Hobhouse to chair a National Parks Committee. He did not live to see Hobhouse’s recommendation in 1947 that twelve National Parks should be created, the ensuing National Parks and Access to Countryside Act of 1949 and the accomplishment sixty years later of the South Downs becoming the twelfth and last of the National Parks recommended by Hobhouse. Keynes was grateful for the preservation schemes in the Labour government’s Ancient Monuments Act of 1931, and for the controls in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1932. However, he deplored the tax on land values proposed in Philip Snowden’s budget of 1931 for implementation after 1933. This levy was intended partly to raise revenue and partly to advance a pre-Edwardian radical agenda of breaking up big ancestral estates and dispersing land ownership.

Keynes feared that woodlands, playgrounds and agricultural land with building potential would be taxed. Certainly, owners of land beside roads and lanes would be put under pressure by the tax to sell land for building. Such sales would stimulate ribbon-developments along the roads, the sale of ‘beauty-spots’ coveted by jerry-builders and the pollution of the countryside with shoddy structures. Many unselfish people were preserving, for farming or as woodlands, sites which they might sell for building, simply from love of beauty, consideration of their neighbours and a traditional view that they held land in trust for posterity. ‘These people are now to be penalised by taxation until the bungalow-builder and estate-breaker can have their way. If the state is going to use taxation as a means of forcing land into the market, it ought to decide what lands should in the public interest be built upon and what should not.’ Keynes had too much respect for property to welcome its reduction to a speculative commodity. He was so shocked that the Liberals supported Labour’s ‘reactionary and … unworkable Land Tax’, which he considered ‘fifty years out of date’, that he resigned as vice-president of the National League of Young Liberals.52

Keynes advocated the preservation of the English countryside for reasons of health, pleasure and natural beauty. It frustrated him that despite preponderant agreement on the urgency of preserving rural amenities, laissez-faire dogma, that ‘perverted theory of the State’, meant that ‘when a stretch of cliff, a reach of the Thames, a slope of Down is scheduled for destruction, it does not occur to the Prime Minister that the obvious remedy is for the State to prohibit the outrage and pay just compensation’ to the developers. Stanley Baldwin, a man of the shires, who published a homily On England in 1933, ought of all Prime Ministers to have realized the human importance of conserving natural beauty and wrest himself from ‘the thrall of the sub-human denizens of the Treasury’. For Keynes, reaching decisions affecting the whole community on the basis of a narrow calculation of profit was ‘the most dreadful heresy, perhaps, which has ever gained the ear of a civilised people’. In 1935 falls of masonry in Lincoln Cathedral threatened to collapse the Angel Choir and shatter the Great East Window: an emergency appeal raised private donations, but the government stinted any contribution. ‘Since Lincoln Cathedral, crowning the height which has been for two thousand years one of the capital centres of England, can collapse to the ground before the Treasury will regard so uneconomic a purpose as deserving of public money, it is no matter for wonder that high authorities build no more hanging gardens of Babylon, no more Pyramids, Parthenons, Coliseums, Cathedrals, Palaces, no more Opera Houses, Theatres, Colonnades, Boulevards,’ Keynes lamented on BBC radio. ‘Our grandest exercise today in the arts of public construction are the arterial roads, which, however, creep into existence under a cloak of economic necessity and by the accident that a special tax earmarked for them brings in returns of unexpected size.’ Keynes called for the appointment of a Commission of Public Places to prevent profiteering, eyesores and the wanton demolition of fine or historic buildings and to supplement the Royal Fine Art Commission’s supervision of architecture.53

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54

‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55

Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing.

A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.’⁵⁶

As an Eton boy he bought Aldines and Elzevirs (sixteenth-century editions prized by bibliophiles for their fine design and innovative typeface). As an undergraduate in 1903 he was a founder member of Cambridge’s Baskerville Club, which published bibliographies intended for book-collectors, including in 1914 a bibliography of John Donne compiled by Geoffrey Keynes. Maynard Keynes had a Midas touch in his foraging. In his first term as an undergraduate at King’s, he bought for a few shillings from a market stall a first edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia, which turned out to have pencilled annotations by Edmond Halley. Until the 1930s he was a discriminating, erudite collector of good editions (not necessarily first editions) of the works of philosophers, economists, poets and dramatists. At the age of about fifty he determined to amass a library of the history of thought: Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Hobbes, Berkeley, Descartes, Leibnitz, Butler, Gibbon, Rousseau, Bentham, Bacon, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Kepler, Galileo, Hegel, Kant. He sat through the whole of the sale at Sotheby’s in 1934 of Gibbon’s Lausanne library. Lord Mersey, who liked Keynes as a fellow Liberal and bibliophile, received an amusing account from him, just before his final visit to the United States, describing how he had bought his Aristotle editio princeps from the Hermitage Library in Leningrad. ‘The two Keynes brothers are experts at getting the best books from catalogues,’ Mersey noted: ‘the booksellers say, “Keen collectors telegraph, but the Keynes [sic] arrive in a taxicab.”’57

Bibliophilia was an expression of Keynes’s reverence for what he called ‘the Higher Intelligentsia of England’. It represented a more essential part of him than buying pictures. ‘M. adroit & supple & full of that queer imaginative ardour about history, humanity; able to explain flints & the age of man from some book he has read,’ Virginia Woolf noted in 1934. ‘He has a raging adventurous mind which I enjoy.’ His pleasure in mental escapades and in connecting remote mentalities was inextirpable. In 1940 he urged Clive Bell’s lover, Mary Hutchinson, to read the Dutch political economist Bernard Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees had first been published in 1705. ‘Here are two (not my best collector’s copies!) for you to experiment on. He was a very odd and modern mind.’58

In 1939 Keynes started to collect the minor Elizabethans and Jacobeans. He judged that these writers were worth reading (it was his rule to read everything that he bought), realized that these editions were rarer than was thought, reckoned that many of them were cheap, partly because no one else was buying them, and knew that ‘his was the last generation that would have an opportunity to buy them at any price’. Jacobean neuroses appealed to him in wartime. Sir William Davenant’s The Cruel Brother, which he bought in 1944, had ‘the most cruel and appalling plot that I had ever read. A pretty thrilling play, but ghastly.’⁵⁹

A former Cambridge roller-skating rink sparked another side to Keynes’s connoisseurship. Its site in St Andrew’s Street was developed during the 1890s as the New Theatre. It was there, in vacations from Eton and as an undergraduate, that Keynes acquired his appreciation of drama. As a young Fellow of King’s, staying in a cheap hotel in Birmingham with his actor boyfriend St George Nelson in 1913, he visited the city’s Repertory Theatre, ‘which is exactly what we ought to have at Cambridge’, he said at the time. He continued to hanker for a Cambridge repertory theatre.⁶⁰

In 1933, some years after the New Theatre’s conversion into a cinema and following the destruction by fire of the university playhouse known as the ADC Theatre, Keynes proposed to build a new, efficient theatre on King’s land a minute’s walk from the college gates and twenty seconds from the small flat in St Edward’s Passage that he shared with his wife. ‘I was terribly exhausted at the College Meeting yesterday fighting through … the first stage of the Theatre scheme,’ he reported to her in 1934. ‘I made eight speeches altogether, one lasting nearly half an hour and another three-quarters of an hour – so they must have got tired of me! But the scheme went through.’ Inspired partly by his love for Lopokova, who was too old to continue ballet-dancing but had ambitions to interpret roles in Ibsen’s repertoire, he persevered in countless conferences, site-meetings and fund-raising efforts. The project’s total cost of £38,000 was mostly raised by loans, including £17,500 from Keynes. The arts must be self-supporting, he believed, and so the Cambridge Arts Theatre had by the time of his death repaid all these loans from its profits.61

The theatre opened in February 1936 with a cycle of Ibsen plays in which Lydia Keynes performed as Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House and as Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder. In 1938 Keynes transferred control of the theatre to a charitable trust, so as to escape entertainment tax and to gain income tax relief on donations; but he remained chairman of the trustees. With the Cambridge Arts Theatre Keynes sought to entertain and edify both his university and his native town. It prepared him for his wartime responsibilities for national arts. He used Culture as his watchword even after the Nazis had sullied it with their use of Kultur.

Dadie Rylands, who helped to run the Cambridge Arts, felt vitalized, although occasionally exasperated, by Keynes’s brio. ‘The theatrical world is a baffling, enraging and exciting one, full of paradoxes and surprises and miscalculations and triumphs and disasters,’ wrote Rylands. ‘[Keynes] was fascinated by statistics of bar-profits, and programme money, and matinée ices, and cups of coffee. Here was a change from Treasury finance and the balance-sheets of insurance companies and college audits. And when, in the early days, empty stalls or carping critics vexed or disappointed his fellow directors, he counselled patience and good humour.’⁶²

Keynes became a part-time impresario who (for example) was involved in the first productions of the Auden–Isherwood plays The Ascent of F6 and On the Frontier. ‘The two authors have considerable talent, and I much looked forward to reading the ms.,’ Keynes told a producer who had sent him the typescript of The Ascent of F6. ‘But almost the greater part of it strikes me as both puerile and perfunctory, equally in theme, sentiment and diction. Since both the authors are as clever as monkeys, this return on their part to a sort of infantilism must be presumed to be deliberate.’ The play resembled a charade composed by sparky pubescent boys and seemed inordinately long to him: ‘by the time I got to the end I am afraid the whole thing seemed hopeless’. Lydia Keynes took the part of Anna Vrodny in On the Frontier: it included a love scene which made Louis MacNeice ‘long for a sack to put one’s head in’.63

The prestige of the Cambridge Arts Theatre was conceded by the philistines who imposed theatrical censorship from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Before the war Jean Cocteau’s play about the Oedipus myth, The Infernal Machine, had been refused a licence for performance because of its incestuous theme. But in 1943 Lord Clarendon, the Lord Chamberlain, relented after receiving advice from his official Henry Game, who was considered a liberal because he had wanted in 1939 to permit the performance of anti-Nazi plays so long as their subject-matter was ‘ruritanianised’ to reduce the offence to Hitler. Keynes’s eminence impressed the censors, who were obsessed with immunizing the working classes from dangerous ideas, but judged that there was little danger of Cocteau exciting Cambridge men into incestuous lust. ‘The production is now sponsored by the Cambridge Arts Theatre Trust, of which the trustees are … a galaxy of Economic, Municipal, Musical and Scholastic eminence,’ Game advised Clarendon. ‘The play will be performed before a cultured audience, and there is no fear of it later being performed before an un-cultured one: they would be bored to death and would never sit it out; the ordinary theatre-goer shuns the highbrow theatre like the plague-house.’⁶⁴

Another mooted production was John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633). This had a title, Keynes hoped, likely to draw men serving in nearby RAF bases. Lord Clarendon licensed the play on condition that not a single word was omitted: his advisers intended to make it too long and verbose for plebeian audiences to endure. Keynes proposed mischievous publicity hinting at the salacity of an unexpurgated text: ‘The Lord Chamberlain insists on our making no concession to modern squeamishness by the omission of a single expression …’65

When the University of Cambridge’s Public Orator presented Keynes (shortly before his death) with an honorary degree, he extolled him as a man who excelled in understanding the importance of Aristotle’s dictum that the proper aim of business is to provide leisure. This strain of thinking was evident from 1928, when Keynes observed in a lecture that, for the first time in history, humankind faced the challenge of coping with permanent freedom from economic worry: ‘how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well’. There were no nations that could ‘look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.’ Rich people of the 1920s, who were the advanced guard of the leisured classes, ‘spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there’, set depressing precedents. With ‘independent income but no associations or duties or ties’, said Keynes, ‘they have most of them failed disastrously … to solve the problem which has been set them’.⁶⁶

This lecture bore the influence of Clive Bell’s book, Civilization, published in 1928 and dedicated to Virginia Woolf. Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: ‘A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words – sweetness and light.’ Bell argued that ‘as a means to good and as a means to civility a leisured class is essential’. The Bloomsbury group was necessary because ‘It is only when there come together enough civilized individuals to form a nucleus from which light can radiate, and sweetness ooze, that a civilization becomes possible. The disseminators of civilization are therefore highly civilized men and women forming groups sufficiently influential to affect larger groups, and ultimately whole communities.’67

In places Bell’s book is precious and complacent, and carries the mistaken implication that sleeping with one’s friends and agreeable supper-party talk are locomotives of civilization rather than minor by-products. Nevertheless, Bell’s ideas had testamentary power for Keynes. They are indispensable in understanding the mainsprings of his later life. Given his precarious health after 1937, the effort that he made to promote Bloomsbury’s faith in artistic civilization is an exemplary case of the Apostles putting their deliberated, heartfelt beliefs into action.

Keynes’s ideas resembled those of Sir Kenneth Clark, the prodigious Director of the National Gallery, who had signalled his wish to democratize access to the arts by opening the gallery on Cup Final Day. During the war, Clark superintended the evacuation of the art collection from jeopardy under London bombardment to safety in Welsh caverns, organized morale-boosting lunch-time music recitals in the emptied gallery, and brought one masterpiece a month for display to Londoners who were avid for culture. England, Clark and Keynes both felt, was fighting for European arts and intellect against barbarism. They believed that the arts intensified people’s appreciation of life. The two men’s wartime collaboration began when Keynes became a trustee of the National Gallery in November 1941.

There were two counter-views of popularizing culture and disseminating civilization. Virginia Woolf pictured a London cinema queue in 1937: ‘faces mobbed at the door of a picture palace; apathetic, passive faces; the faces of people drugged with cheap pleasures; who had not even the courage to be themselves, but must dress up, imitate, pretend’. She disbelieved that such people could be improved. The alternate view was put by a young poet. ‘Habit makes me think,’ Louis MacNeice wrote in ‘Autumn Journal’ (1939),

        That freedom means the power to order, and that in order

            To preserve the values dear to the élite

        The élite must remain a few. It is so hard to imagine

            A world where the many would have their chance without

        A fall in the standard of intellectual living

            And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.

        Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinking

            That, if you give a chance to people to think or live,

        The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher

            And not return more than you could ever give.68

It almost seemed a response to MacNeice’s optimistic urgings when an organization to promote and sustain cultural life in wartime, the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), was founded in January 1940 with £25,000 seed money from the Pilgrim Trust. It had been instigated by ‘Buck’ De La Warr, President of the Board of Education, which subsidized its activities with Treasury grants. Lord Macmillan, whose committee on industrial finance Keynes had animated in 1929–31, was its first chairman. In May 1940 Keynes proposed to CEMA that it should fund a provincial theatrical tour organized by the actor-manager Donald Wolfit, who had recently presented several plays at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. CEMA demurred, but agreed to give a financial guarantee against losses to Wolfit after Keynes had offered to pay one-quarter of the guarantee. This brought him forcibly to the attention of CEMA: in December 1941 (a month after becoming trustee of the National Gallery) he was offered the chairmanship, with his appointment to take effect from 1 April 1942. Kenneth Clark, CEMA’s vice-chairman, deputized for him during his recurrent absences as an English financial envoy to the United States.

CEMA received a Treasury grant of £100,000 for its first year under Keynes’s chairmanship, and a Parthian grant of £12,000 from the Pilgrim Trust. In an article entitled ‘The Arts in Wartime’, published by The Times in 1943, Keynes expressed relief that CEMA had ‘an undefined independence, an anomalous constitution and no fixed rules, and is, therefore, able to do by misadventure or indiscretion what no-one in his official senses would do on purpose’. He believed in benefactors providing capital endowments, loans or bank guarantees against losses; but opposed subsidies to loss-making activities without hope of repayment. Perhaps only he could have accomplished – in wartime – CEMA’s transition from a makeshift committee to a valiant new institution entitled the Arts Council of Great Britain and protected by a Royal Charter: still less, every year in wartime, cranked up its Treasury grant so that it reached £320,000 by the time of his death – with £500,000 promised for the coming year. This was a decisive moment in the history of English arts funding.69

Dadie Rylands insisted that the social and political criticism in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy of 1869 was as strong an influence on Keynes’s outlook as any nineteenth-century economist. ‘He shared Arnold’s approval of Schiller’s dictum that all art is dedicated to joy; he believed in sweetness and light, in spreading the best that has been thought and written in the world, as he believed that money was for spending.’ His wartime work for national arts and intellect was commensurate with lifelong sentiments. ‘Events are taking charge, and the near destiny of Europe is no longer in the hands of any man,’ he had written in Economic Consequences in 1919. The continent was governed by unpredictable, subterranean, unstoppable forces. ‘In one way only can we influence these hidden currents,’ he had continued: ‘by setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion. The assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men’s hearts and minds, must be the means.’ This was the ideal behind CEMA during the war and after.70

Music, drama and paintings were taken to air-raid shelters, hospitals, small halls, workshops and mining-villages. Keynes supported factory concerts and touring exhibitions, but he stopped CEMA from financing amateur choirs, and insisted on high quality rather than folksiness, sentimentality or cant. He wanted surpassing excellence, not amiable mediocrity. He fostered a project to rebuild the Crystal Palace site in south London to provide a sports stadium, swimming-pools, restaurant, concert hall or opera house, with facilities for outdoor spectacles and pyrotechnics. Philistine officials and meddling killjoys however dogged his path. Customs and Excise had an obtuse committee charged with assessing whether plays were amusements, and therefore liable to pay swingeing Entertainments Duty, or educational and therefore exempt from tax: Euripides and Ibsen were both suspected of being entertainers by tax-collectors whom Keynes called illiterates. He resented taxes being levied on entertainment as he did all examples of English puritanism. He fumed when, after CEMA had striven, at his instigation, to help repair and reopen the bombed Theatre Royal at Bristol, the city’s Director of Education refused to let pupils attend performances of Shaw’s St Joan because it was not on the examinations syllabus. The Scottish committee of CEMA exasperated him by its time-consuming claims for special treatment and thistly personnel. ‘I would rather hand them over their share of the money, leaving them to stew in their own feeble juice,’ he declared, ‘than agree to a separatist precedent which would allow them to get the best of both worlds.’71

In 1944 a Conservative backbencher asked in a parliamentary question whether, given ‘the poor quality and debasing effect of the pictorial art evinced at the exhibitions provided by CEMA’, the Treasury grant of £100,000 could be cut, or CEMA restricted to music and drama. Contemporary artists had been included in only six of the twenty-five art shows sent on tour by CEMA, but several Royal Academicians, including Keynes’s fellow member of the Other Club, Munnings, addressed a fulmination to The Times. These exhibitions were devised to promote ‘the baleful influence of what is known as “modernistic” art’, the RAs claimed. ‘This is a subversive moment which, with its several “isms”, has been for many years endeavouring to undermine the traditional glories of painting and sculpture.’ The Academicians called on the government to halt ‘public money being spent on the promulgation of objectionable painting’. Keynes retorted in The Times that Munnings’s co-signatories ‘do not explain whether it is their wish that no contemporary pictures should be circulated or only those of a particular school. The latter suggestion would be unworthy of the freedom and comradeship of art, besides being, in the light of the past history of taste, vain and childish’.⁷²

‘I do not believe it is yet realised what an important thing has happened,’ Keynes said in a BBC broadcast on 8 July 1945 announcing the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain as a permanent, peacetime successor to CEMA. ‘It has happened in a very English, informal, unostentatious way – half-baked if you like.’ Public enjoyment would be the first aim. ‘We have but little money to spill … Our wartime experience has led us already to one clear discovery: the unsatisfied demand and the enormous public for serious and fine entertainment.’ He doubted if this was merely a wartime phenomenon. ‘I fancy that the BBC has played … the predominant part in creating this public demand, by bringing to everybody in the country the possibility of learning these new games which only the few used to play, and by forming new tastes.’ The Arts Council aimed to make theatres, concert halls and galleries into ‘a living element in everyone’s upbringing, and regular attendance at the theatre and concerts a part of organised education’. Keynes hoped that BBC regional programmes (resumed after the war) would revive localized interests in culture. He wanted as many differences between the provinces in their cultural avocations as there were in accents or landscape. ‘Nothing can be more damaging than the excessive prestige of metropolitan standards and fashions. Let every part of Merry England be merry in its own way.’ At a time when there were thirty million regular cinemagoers in Britain, he cried defiantly, ‘Death to Hollywood!’73

There was one final related area of public service for Keynes. Covent Garden Theatre, owned by the Dukes of Bedford, had never prospered as an opera house. It was part of the property which passed, via Mallaby-Deeley the cut-price tailor, to Beecham the patent-medicine millionaire. The Beecham Estates & Pills Company, later renamed the Covent Garden Properties Company, contemplated the theatre’s demolition during the inter-war period. At the last opera gala there, in the summer of 1939, before a five-year lease converted it into a Mecca dance hall, Winston Churchill strode about the foyer exclaiming, ‘Götterdämmerung, Götterdämmerung, we shall never see the like of this again.’ But strenuous efforts by Keynes disproved Churchill’s prophecy. In 1944, while at the Bretton Woods conference, which settled the new post-war global financial system, he accepted the chairmanship of a committee to transform the building into the home of national opera and ballet companies. He undertook patient, subtle negotiations in Whitehall and with other interested parties: meeting the Earl of Lytton, chairman of the Sadler’s Wells governors, in the House of Lords, where they had assembled to hear King George VI read his speech on the opening of the new parliamentary session, he buttonholed him for a few minutes, assuaged his doubts about financial and operational details, and after months of shilly-shallying thus secured the Sadler’s Wells ballet company as the first resident company of dancers at Covent Garden.74

The cry of ‘Death to Hollywood!’ had echoes in the campaign for Covent Garden’s revival. When raising Treasury money for the Royal Opera House, and in other planning, Keynes emphasized that the new institution would foster an English national style in opera and would employ English performers. This proviso excluded talented, experienced foreigners from the artistic direction, and had undoubted disadvantages; but it was well judged for the post-war temper. Twenty years later, Isaiah Berlin (who served intermittently on the Royal Opera House board from 1954 until 1987) wrote of the tendency of Labour governments since 1945 to insist that ‘we can do as well as any foreigner – British singers, British players, British painters, British folk song, skiffle groups, arts and crafts, as against all this expensive, snobbish, highbrow nonsense’.⁷⁵

Weeks before Keynes’s death, in his last public appearance, on 20 February 1946, he attended the Royal Gala which celebrated the reopening of the Royal Opera House with its first post-war production, The Sleeping Beauty, with Margot Fonteyn in the title part. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and old Queen Mary graced a full house. ‘Though it was a cheerful and enthusiastic audience, it was a drab one,’ recorded the courtier Sir Alan Lascelles, who attended the royal family. The box which in Edwardian days had been rented by the Marchioness of Ripon, the patron who brought the Ballets Russes to London, was filled with cameras recording the gala for cinema newsreels. ‘It was a gallant effort to open a new chapter,’ Lascelles judged, ‘largely due to the initiative of Keynes, who was there to welcome Their Majesties, but at the last moment got palpitations of the heart and had to remain in his box.’ Keynes still took Sunday lunch at Harvey Road with his parents when he was in Cambridge. His father had stopped talking some years before, although he seemed to listen with comprehension. Describing the reopening of the Royal Opera House to his mother and to Stephen Keynes, who was a freshman at King’s, he shed discreet tears as he told how the usherettes at the opera house had donated their clothes-rationing coupons to provide fabric for new lampshades for the bracket lights illuminating the auditorium in time for the Royal Gala.76

Discrimination was necessary in all culture that challenged, lifted and enlarged human possibilities, Keynes believed. ‘This practice of regarding it as an act of impropriety to admit frankly and for the purposes of action that one man is better than another is sapping this country in every direction,’ he wrote in 1946 after seven months of Labour government. Elite values should be privileged, specialist expertise should be respected, and failed ideas, botched compromises and second-rate people should never be encouraged. ‘Honest plain speaking’ was needed – not patronizing insincerity – about poor results, poor work, poor initiative, poor efforts: not ingratiating, face-saving half-truths. ‘If we go down to perdition, it will’, he warned, ‘be in a foam of slop and soap.’⁷⁷

* The pick of his collection were: Delacroix, Cheval au pâturage (1819?), La Fiancée d’Abydos (1842) and Lion à la couleuvre (1847); Paul Cézanne, Oncle Dominique (c. 1866), L’Enlèvement (1867), Pommes (c. 1877) and Sous-bois (c. 1880); Auguste Renoir, Paysages avec Oliviers, Cagnes (1912); Walter Sickert, Théâtre de Montmartre (c. 1900) and The Bar-parlour (1922); Georges Braque, Nature morte (1911) and Femme nue (1925); Henri Matisse, Déshabillé (1917?); Pablo Picasso, Nature morte (1923) and Nature morte avec fruites (1924); Georges Seurat, study for Un dimanche après-midi à l’ile de la Grand Jatte (1884?); André Derain, Nature morte (pre-1920) and Dormeuse aux mains croisées (pre-1924). Grant, William Roberts, Ivon Hitchens and Henry Moore’s ‘Shelter’ drawings were included in his collection.

* In the same year as his election to the Cranium, Keynes was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (having been rebuffed in 1920, as described at the close of chapter 3). His first impact was to prompt the election of Beatrice Webb as the first woman FBA in 1931 (outmanoeuvring the misogyny of his former Treasury chief, Lord Chalmers). Despite his official duties and deteriorating health, Keynes in 1940 accepted the chairmanship of the Economic Section of the British Academy, and devoted time and thought to its activities. In 1944–6 he strove unavailingly for the election of Joan Robinson as a second female FBA.