Christmas books II
The bureaucrat's friend
Norman Stone
John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920 Robert Skidelsky (Macmillan 14.95) When Keynes was in his first term as an undergraduate at King's, he was already a shrewd collector of books. One of his purchases was a first edition of Newton's Principia, which he bought for four shillings in the market-place. It was characteristic of Keynes that the book had pencil markings on it, which turned out to be annotations by Halle.. For Keynes was a man with a Midas touch; and there is more than a hint, in this new biography, that it went together with a degree of emotional shrivelling: his friends called him 'The Machine'. Still, Skidelsky's verdict is clear enough: 'It is hard to think of any economist who has achieved so much prac- tical good'.
Robert Skidelsky has now produced the first volume of his long-awaited life of Keynes. Unlike most long-pondered books, it is freshly and vigorously written. For reasons that Skidelsky makes explicit, the book replaces Roy Harrod's rather mar- moreal effort, which, since it was published within the life-time of jealous guardians of sources, suppressed some episodes in the life that might have been seen as discreditable (Keynes's homosexual affairs, and his sympathy with conscientious objec- tion to 1914-18). That the Keynes family have co-operated generously with Skidelsky in this new and frank biography is altogether to their credit.
The volume covers the first half of Keynes's life, from his early years in late- Victorian Cambridge, through Eton and King's to the Treasury in the First World War. it ends with the publication of Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace, the denunciation of Versailles which gave him a world-wide reputation. To follow Keynes, you have to be something of a polymath, for his interests were very wide- ranging: he could never really decide bet- ween classics and mathematics, and in the end, for the scholarship examination, of- fered both. He began as a would-be philosopher, and took up economics more or less 'on the wing': it was an easy subject, in comparison with his investigations of the border-country between ethics, aesthetics and logic, and he had only eight weeks' for- mal training in it (in 1905). Skidelsky has a very good shot at all of this, The result is not only a vigorously-written biography which replaces Harrod, but also an ad- mirable exercise in intellectual history. The first hundred or so pages are a brilliant exposition of a certain kind of 'Englishness'. On the face of things, Keynes had everything that England had to offer: Eton and 'Pop', King's and the Apostles, the Treasury, Bloomsbury. It was no wonder that American officials, put off by his superior ways at Bretton Woods, called him 'Your Royal Highness'. In practice, they had much more in common with him than they knew. For Keynes was a scholar- ship boy: he owed a very great deal to a not- at-all remote nonconformist background. Both sets of grand-parents were Calvinists. One grandfather was a small tradesman who made good, and the other was a Con- gregational minister who entertained his family with spirited renderings of Gladstone's budget speeches. The Calvinist work-ethic seems to have crippled Keynes's father, Neville: although he turned out to be a diligent mathematician and a promis- ing economist, he found it all rather a strain, and refused offers of promotion to Chairs. Instead, once he had married, he relapsed into university administration, and concentrated on bringing up his children, getting up very early with them to prepare for various scholarships. As Keynes said, if the children all went on passing exams at their sort of rate, the family would end up as a royal dynasty in 300 years' time. At the origins of Keynes's worldly success lay the non-conformist tradition. At one level, it meant a stupendous amassing of techni- ques. At another, the leathery old birds who communicated that tradition were often responsible for the emotional crippl- ing of their sons and daughters (though there was nothing in Keynes's past to equal the feats of Ruskin's mother, who took rooms opposite the main gate of Christ Church when her son went up there, to make sure he behaved himself (God knows, he did). As things turned out, Keynes was a synthesis of Chapel and Church. He com- bined drive and sophistication in rare degree.
The extent of his interests and achievements was extraordinary, and if he had not made his name as an economist, he would have made it in many other ways. As a child he was a clever collector of stamps, and would no doubt have made a fortune out of that, in those days, strangely popular pastime (King Victor Emmanuel had a vast collection, on which he spent most of his time). His eye for books never deserted him; by 1911, he was well-launched on picture-collecting as well, and on the very day of Ludendorff's break-through in March 1918, Keynes was in Paris, buying up Cezannes from the sale of the contents of Degas's studio. But Keynes was also a brilliant writer, and you can spend hours and hours with the volumes of his writings (as is the case with George Orwell, though I cannot imagine that the two men would much have cared for each other: Orwell was never comfortable with the 'devastating omniscience' and 'horn-rim spectacle refinement' of Keynes's world).
Keynes's greatness depended on unremit- ting concentration and compartmentalis- ing: it was characteristic of the man that he wrote his first journalistic piece, a very technical exposition of shipping and bank- ing, in an hour and a half at the request of The Economist; throughout this book, when you think that Keynes already has easily enough on his hands, there he is, turn- ing up with some new feat which he has squeezed in with the others (he wrote his Fellowship dissertation while engaged in the India Office, full-time, in 1907-8). The counterpart of this cost-benefit-analysis cast of mind was a fear of emotional mess, especially of women. Homosexuality was a constant, unremitting theme in Keynes's early life, as Skidelsky makes abundantly (and perhaps excessively) clear: protected by the ramparts of King's and Bloomsbury, Keynes and his friends repressed nothing. Much of this makes for depressing reading. Keynes did get a tremendous lift from the early months of his affair with the painter, Duncan Grant (during which he wrote his King's dissertation on Probability) but the affair underwent a long petering-out in nag- ging and infidelity, conducted in muted English style; Grant was put down by Keynes's continual display of intellectual superiority, and he responded with pet- tishness. Eventually, the affair imploded, driving Keynes — in his mid-thirties — towards women, but for a long time he was in agonies. His powers of self-discipline were such that he carried on working through them. In the years before war broke out, he lectured, on technical sub- jects, to capacity crowds (in later life he got bored with that, and just read out the proofs of his books); he started to make money on the stock-exchange; he financed Bloomsbury; he advised the government on complex matters of Indian finance; and he wrote his first book, characteristically in three months, on that subject. Maybe there was something inhuman to it all — an in- humanity that surfaces in his hindsight vision of the pre-1914 'Eldorado': one lay in bed, sipping one's morning tea, and rang up one's stock-broker to shift one's money all over the globe.
Is there any sign, in this Keynes, of the creativeness that produced the General Theory? According to Skidelsky, no: a great parade is made of Keynes's 'or- thodoxy'; in his lectures, he accepted the Quantity Theory (of which, in an appendix. there is an excellent exposition) and was what, nowadays, would be called monetarist. It seems to me that SkidelskY insists too much on this. After all, economic theory was not very far
developed. Keynes's great predecessor, Alfred Marshall, thought that economics had 'no theory to speak of', and was really a question of sums-plus-ethics. In any case, Keynes had to write many lectures on technical subjects in a hurry, and was very young: it is not surprising that he reached obvious opinions from the shelf to . give them coherence, and he should not be judg- ed on them. Later on, when he dealt with Indian finance, there are surely clear signs of an attitude different from other members of the government commission's views. In India, the Gold Standard was dif- ficult to operate because people hoarded; yet, if you developed the use of silver or notes as an alternative, you ran into pro- blems of depreciation. The answer, Keynes thought, was to develop the banking system, and put India on a different form of Gold Standard, in which the bullion just stayed in London. Oddly enough, Austrian and Italian economists in this same era, also wrestling with problems of under- development, hoarding, and cumbersome banking, also came to suggest adaptations of the Gold Standard: it is probably not too much to argue that this led, in the end, to a questioning of the Quantity Theory though the Austrians, typically, ran away from the consequences of their own suggestions.
Keynes was, of course, a first-class technical economist but he enriched that with a first-class philosophical understand- ing. One of the most original parts of Skidelsky's book is his discussion of the philosophical atmosphere of Cambridge around 1900: the Apostles fell for Moore's Principle Ethica, especially its final chapter. For us, nowadays, there is a strong smell of deadness from these washed-up philosophical systems (the same might be said of Bergson or Solvay) but at the time Moore provided a synthesis of public duty and private conduct which meant much to his own generation. Skidelsky is too clever to fall for the Frankfurt-School trap of linking things which, in their nature, are untinkable: but there is no doubt that Moore provided an important part of the Intellectual genealogy that related the un- willingly doubting world of Henry Sidgwick ('prodigies of inconclusive enquiry') with the impatiently anti-metaphysical Alfred Marshall (who founded the Economics Tripos, separate from the Moral Sciences to Which it had been attached) and the genera- tion of Maynard Keynes. With Moore, you could break the rules and still be ethical, though it all involved a degree of self- regarding that made the whole system sterile. Underneath all of the relativist aestheticism, there is more than a suspicion that they were all just having their cake and eating it. If Keynes's early life was marked by a sYnthesis of Church and Chapel, his early Professional career was affected by a syn- thesis of a more modern kind:that between rentier and technocrat. In the First World War, at the Treasury, he helped to create the great State which this century has seen develop to a point unimaginable even three generations ago; taxation, bureaucracy, monopoly, inflation. These things have done a great deal to destroy the comfort- able world in which Keynes himself grew up. In the 1880's, his parents had three, and sometimes more, servants; his father bought a large house in Bateman Street for a sum equivalent to two-thirds of his annual income; when he and his wife spent a month in Switzerland in 1891, the whole thing cost £68; and when Maynard Keynes started teaching undergraduates, he was paid at the rate of 10/- per hour — a sum equivalent, to-day, to as much as £40 if we judge it in terms of the average wage. What a world.
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