Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines

16 October 1906 Keynes began as a junior clerk in the Military Department of the India Office at a salary of £200 a year. His first task was to arrange the shipment of ten Ayrshire bulls to Bombay. From the outset he dreaded stagnation in lifeless routine, and feared that he might become a bore holding his friends in listless conversation. Mary Berenson, wife and business manager of the art historian Bernard Berenson, with whom he had stayed at Villa I Tatti near Florence during the spring, visited the fledgling civil servant in the service flat, 125b St James’s Court, which he leased for an annual rent of £90. ‘I dined with Keynes last night, his first visitor in his bachelor quarters,’ she reported to her husband on 27 October, ‘a nice little flat, like College rooms, with a nice dinner, well served. He feels rather desperate at being labelled [as a government official] and is ready to do almost anything to escape from the impending monotony of doing the same thing every day at the same time for the next 40 years. I daresay he would get married – it is the psychological moment – if he weren’t too wrapped up in his men Friendships.’3

      Virginia Woolf pictured the clerks of Edwardian Whitehall as they transcribed documents, drafted memoranda, docketed new files, wrote minutes on circulating files and sent defunct ones to the registry. ‘Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of rice-fields, the growling of hundreds of workpeople, plotting sedition in back streets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forces in the uplands of Albania.’ All went for the scrutiny of ministers, who inscribed comments in the margins or initialled their agreement at the bottom. At first Keynes liked his work, especially after being moved to the Revenue, Statistics and Commerce Department. ‘There I sit in a charming room to myself, looking out over the park, writing a blue book on The Moral and Material Progress of India. A special feature of this year’s edition is to be an illustrated appendix on Sodomy … In the last census returns no less than 235,000 persons gave “catamite” as their trade, profession or occupation; I was surprised to see that quite a number were over 50 years of age.’ He proved adept at mastering and synthesizing the circulating files on which the India Office’s huge paper-bound bureaucracy depended. ‘Foreign Office commercial negotiations with Germany, quarrels with Russia in the Persian Gulf, the regulation of opium in Central India, the Chinese opium proposals – I have great files to read on all of these.’ He attended his first meeting of the Council of India, the official advisers to the Secretary of State: ‘half of those present showed manifest signs of senile decay, and the rest didn’t speak’.4

      Keynes declined a resident clerkship, with higher pay, because he did not want to work longer hours, and valued his Saturday escapes to meet the Apostles during Cambridge term-time. ‘I’m thoroughly sick of this place and would like to resign,’ he wrote to Lytton Strachey after eleven months in the India Office. ‘Now the novelty has worn off, I am bored nine tenths of the time and rather unreasonably irritated the other tenth whenever I can’t have my own way. It’s maddening to have thirty people who can reduce you to impotence when you’re quite certain you are right.’ He deplored the tendency of ministries never to admit mistakes or injustices. The shirking of individual initiative or responsibility by officials, and their evasion of any course for which they might be personally blamed, ‘prevents any original or sporting proposal ever being made … the risk to India of free speech in the India Office is nil. But you may be “snubbed”.’5

      In 1908 Keynes determined to resign from the India Office if he could get a fellowship at King’s. ‘He will be throwing up a certainty and taking risks,’ his father noted. ‘That fits in with his scheme of life but not with mine.’ On his twenty-fourth birthday (5 June 1908), after being offered a lectureship in economics by the University of Cambridge, he resigned from the civil service. His last working day in Whitehall was 20 July. ‘The peerless Maynard dined with me,’ Mary Berenson reported. ‘He is too happy at having shaken himself free of the India Office. He hopes to get a Fellowship at King’s for £100, another £100 for lecturing in Economics, and his family will give him still another £100. But he will never rise to £1000 a year and a KCB.’6

      The twenty months that Keynes spent in the India Office instilled in him the mental habit of seeking administrative solutions to economic problems, and of treating policy-making as a matter of management tactics rather than of dogma. As a result, he was not, until his late forties, a theoretical innovator as an economist. Well into middle age he trusted the classical economics taught by his father’s Cambridge friend Alfred Marshall, who was his own sponsor in economics. He operated, until after Marshall’s death in 1924, as a pragmatist who relied on his mastery of detail and adaptive intuitions.

      Keynes was elected to a prize fellowship at King’s on 16 March 1909. He returned to historic beauty, to old friends, to imposing dignity, to observances and amenities that he prized beyond measure. Soon he was allotted the rooms above the gatehouse leading from King’s Lane to Webb’s Court, where he stayed until his death. Arthur Benson began to meet him at college dinners in Cambridge: ‘so much nicer & simpler & more humorous & charming than he used to be when younger’. Keynes went again to dine at Magdalene in 1913. ‘A very intelligent creature’, Benson wrote after a long talk ‘about coercion – religious, parental, social. He took rather extravagant views of liberty, but no doubt believes that people are as reasonable as himself.’7

      In 1913 Keynes was appointed a member of the Royal Commission investigating Indian Finance and Currency. He owed his nomination to his mentor Edwin Montagu, who was then Under-Secretary at the India Office. ‘He was one of those who suffer violent fluctuations of mood, quickly passing from reckless courage and self-assertion to abject panic and dejection – always dramatizing life and his part in it,’ Keynes wrote of Montagu. ‘At one moment he would be Emperor of the East, riding upon an elephant, clothed in rhetoric and glory, but at the next a beggar in the dust of the road, crying for alms but murmuring under his breath cynical and outrageous wit.’ The high-strung affinity between the two men was crucial to Keynes’s precocious influence.8

      No one outside Cambridge knew the name of Keynes at this time. The Royal Commission provided his first experience of being a professional economist exercising his influence on public affairs. It added an accretion of new contacts to those he had already made through Eton and Cambridge. His fellow Commissioners influenced and remembered him. He learnt the mannerisms, responsibilities and benefits of being a private man exerting public influence. The Commission’s chairman was Austen Chamberlain, who had recently failed in his bid to become leader of the Conservative party and was to recur at intervals in Keynes’s life for the next quarter-century. The secretary of the Commission was Basil Blackett of the Treasury. Sir Robert Chalmers, the then Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, was another colleague. Keynes impressed these men by his close questioning of witnesses, and by his meticulous approach. He mastered a welter of detail about the institutions and intricacies of India’s financial and monetary system, the sub-continent’s seasonal flows and crop variations, and the multitude of influences on transactions between England and India.

      One of the Commissioners was a leading Calcutta merchant and industrialist called Sir Ernest Cable, who had recently acquired the Lindridge estate, near Bishopsteignton in Devon. Lord Cable, as he was to become, together with Keynes, prepared a scheme for the formation of a state central bank in India which was printed as an appendix to the main report and aroused wider interest. Keynes spent a week staying with Cable at Lindridge, during 1913, finalizing their bank proposal. Their discussions gave a far-reaching prompt to Keynes’s thinking. Cable often complained that in India there was a huge discrepancy between savings and investment, and criticized the high rates of interest caused by people who did not lend their resources. He urged that the Indian public, instead of hoarding large amounts of sterile wealth, must be induced to fructify their stockpiles of gold and silver by investing in public works, railway-building and industrial enterprises. There can be small doubt that Keynes imbibed Lord Cable’s opinion for future use.9

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