Culture | Biography

A man for all seasons

There was far more to Keynes than being an economist

Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes. By Richard Davenport-Hines. Basic Books; 416 pages; $28.99. William Collins; £18.99.

A BIOGRAPHY of John Maynard Keynes without the economics may seem like “Hamlet” without the prince. But Richard Davenport-Hines has set out to write such a book, and the result is utterly absorbing. His argument is that Keynes deserves to be remembered for much else besides his economic works: in addition to being an economist, the great man was also a boy genius, a civil servant, a national opinion-shaper, a lover, a connoisseur and aesthete, and a statesman. Indeed Keynes himself wrote: “The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts…He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree.”

Keynes saved Britain from financial ruin at least twice, the author argues: first by preventing calamity at the outbreak of war in 1914 when the City of London’s debt markets ground to a halt, and second by hectoring America to reduce Britain’s second-world-war debts. Partial success allowed the post-war Labour government to fund its welfare state and National Health Service. Keynes’s sagacity and wit shifted public opinion. In magazine articles and on campaign stumps he savaged the Versailles treaty as vindictive and the gold standard as a “barbarous relic”. He backed the Liberals in calling for spending on public works after the Depression.

Much of this will be familiar to readers of countless books on Keynes, including Lord Skidelsky’s definitive biographies. But Mr Davenport-Hines manages to pick out little-known stories, brilliant details and curiosities, relayed with affection. Edwardian Whitehall in its imperial pomp is clearly painted. Civil servants at the India Office were required to work from 11am to 5pm on weekdays and from 11am to 1pm on Saturdays, with an hour for lunch and two months’ holiday. Keynes said of the ministry’s upper echelons: “Half of those present showed manifest signs of senile decay, and the rest didn’t speak.” Character sketches, Mr Davenport-Hines’s great talent, reveal a horde of Treasury oddballs. Classicists, versifiers, an expert in Byzantine Greek and a translator of sacred Buddhist texts all helped set fiscal policy.

Keynes’s early gay love-life is laid out in full detail. Where Lord Skidelsky was tight-lipped, Mr Davenport-Hines is garrulous. It helps that the economist recorded his sexual statistics. In the nine months to February 1909 he records that he had 61 encounters, with 65 more the following year. Like a philatelist, Keynes kept a list of conquests: “…the actor of Whitechapel, 16-year-old under Etna, lift boy of Vauxhall, Jewboy, Grand Duke Cyril of the Paris Baths”. The revolutionary economic thinker becomes “Maynard, the iron copulating machine”, according to an ex-lover.

There is poignancy here too. In the years after Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency, many of Keynes’s lovers committed suicide or married women. Keynes himself married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina, with whom he had a sexual relationship. His letters to her reveal a deep love that grew with age.

The portrait of Keynes the aesthete is just as stirring. He helped the National Gallery buy major Impressionist works. He saved the Royal Opera House from demolition. In 1942 he was appointed chair of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, with Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, as deputy. Public money poured into the arts afterwards. Mr Davenport-Hines calls it a decisive moment in arts funding, though it happened, Keynes said, in a “very English, informal, unostentatious way”. The story, like much else in this accomplished biography, ought to be better known.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A man for all seasons"

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