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

Bell’s cherishing of Duncan Grant as both an artist and impish life force had developed into a sexual affair in 1915. This romance soon became one of the happiest partnerships between two painters in the history of art. Both lovers remained on the best terms with Vanessa Bell’s husband Clive, who had long-term affairs of his own. At weekends Keynes often went to stay in the Sussex farmhouse occupied by Bell and Grant, Charleston, where the chickens were once painted red, white and blue in mockery of the surrounding patriotic fervour. He was there for a Friday-evening party, with Garnett and the painter Dora Carrington among the other visitors, in February 1917. ‘Soups, Beef sausages and Leeks, Plum Pudding, Lemon Jellies, and Punches afterwards!!!’ Carrington reported. Next day she and Keynes went slithering across the ice of a frozen pond, and walked on the Sussex downs above Charleston: ‘I slid all the way down the Firle Beacon on Maynard’s despatch case.’ This was the black bag which made some villagers suspect him of being a spy engaged in nefarious deeds. Keynes was Charleston’s most frequent London visitor. He would regale the household with his war news on the night of his arrival: his inside information was resolutely cheerful – ‘he who knew what was happening always seemed to know the best’. He breakfasted in bed, where he spent the morning at work on a heap of official documents. The papers he tore up after dealing with them: he always took pride at weekends at filling his wastepaper basket to its brim before lunch. Keynes preserved his official air by wearing town clothes at Charleston, and looked incongruous among the shabby artists. Henry James, after meeting Vanessa Bell a few years earlier, said she looked as if she had been rolled in a duck-pond. Following lunch, Keynes would go into the garden, kneel on a scrap of carpet that he carried, and spend an hour or two weeding the gravel path with his pocket-knife.33

      Keynes went to Washington in September 1917 to help extract from the US Treasury an agreement to make monthly loans to schedule rather than in a sporadic dribble. This was the first of many momentous American visits. The Apostles, including him, tended to see the United States as a philistine and mechanized hell-hole, where size, speed and money were fetishized. ‘The two things rubbed into me in this country are (1) that the future of the world lies with America, (2) that radically and essentially America is a barbarous country,’ Lowes Dickinson had written during an American tour. ‘It is a country without leisure … a country whose ideal is mere activity, without any reference to the quality of it; a country which holds competition and strife to be the only life worth living.’34

      A sense of Europe’s cultural primacy contributed to Keynes seeming ‘rude, dogmatic and disobliging’ on this visit, as Basil Blackett wrote from Washington. Keynes found the Washington administration to be serpentine, and was brusque with US Treasury officials whom he found verbose, dilatory and evasive. Washington seemed ‘very oriental’, he told Mary Berenson: ‘Wilson like an invisible Sultan spending most of his time in the harem, and all the others talking endlessly and slowly and never getting to business.’ He was displeased to find the US ‘full of the utmost ferocity of war fever’, he told Edwin Cannan of the London School of Economics. America seemed ‘a country where minorities get precious little quarter; and to my astonishment I find myself looking back to England as a land of liberty!’35

      By this time Keynes had reached the rank of Acting Principal Clerk: only Bradbury and Chalmers, the two Joint Permanent Secretaries, stood above him in the Treasury hierarchy. Yet he was discontent. ‘My Christmas thoughts are that a further prolongation of the war, with the turn things have now taken, probably means the disappearance of the social order we have known hitherto,’ he told his mother on Christmas Eve. ‘I am on the whole not sorry. The abolition of the rich will be rather a comfort and serve them right anyhow. What frightens me more is the prospect of general impoverishment. In another year’s time we shall have forfeited the claim we had staked out in the New World and in exchange this country will be mortgaged to America.’ It seemed certain that the USA would supersede the British Empire in the world order. ‘Well, the only course open to me is to be buoyantly bolshevik; and as I lie in bed in the morning I reflect with a good deal of satisfaction that, because our rulers are as incompetent as they are mad and wicked, one particular era of a particular kind of civilisation is very nearly over.’ A few months later into 1918 he remained unwontedly gloomy about prospects. The Americans, he thought, were set on reducing Britain ‘to a position of complete financial helplessness and dependence in which the call loan is a noose around our necks.’36

      Alarms about German military advances in the spring of 1918 yielded to burgeoning Allied confidence in the approaching defeat of Germany. In a memorandum dated 31 October 1918 Keynes argued that in seeking war reparations from Germany, the Allies must assess Germany’s capacity to pay, and must not destroy Germany’s productive power. Germany needed to earn foreign currency by exports if it was to pay reparations, and could not export if its factories were unproductive. Keynes’s paper was the basis for the Treasury memorandum of 26 November 1918 which offered the preliminary figure of £4,000 million as the Allies’ claim for reparations, calculated that Germany could not afford to pay more than £3,000 million and, on the basis of Germany’s expected post-war export surplus, judged that £2,000 million would represent a satisfactory achievement in the circumstances. It reiterated that if Germany was to make satisfactory reparations, it must not be impoverished. Yet there was a regiment of ‘trade warriors’ – Dudley Docker’s Federation of British Industries (founded in 1916), the protectionists and the jingos – who wanted to disable the German manufacturing economy and leave the way unchallenged for English exporters. They resembled the hard-liners who supported the Morgenthau plan to dismantle German industry in 1944–5.

      As a ploy to win votes in the general election called for 14 December 1918, Lloyd George appointed a committee to investigate the level of war reparations to be extracted from Germany. The committee was chaired by the Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, who preened himself in the part of an audacious colonial teaching sense to starchy Europeans. It reported on 10 December that the war had cost the Allies £24,000 million (six times Keynes’s provisional estimate), which Germany had the power to repay in annual instalments of £1,200 million. Hughes and Cunliffe, together with a judge, Lord Sumner, were selected to represent Britain on the Reparations Commission at the Paris Peace Conference: Keynes and the Treasury were excluded; and Cunliffe with Sumner confronted the Germans with exigent and swollen demands. Sumner was the most eloquent law lord of his day, famed for his cynical epigrams and acidulous sallies: Asquith had considered appointing him Lord Chancellor in a Liberal Cabinet as recently as 1915, for he had once been a radical, but by 1919 he was a last-ditch reactionary who kept to his brief and belaboured the German defendants. Keynes likened him to a vulture, and Cunliffe to a pig.37

      At the general election of 1918 the most eminent Liberal leaders, namely Asquith, McKenna, Runciman, Sir John Simon and Sir Herbert Samuel, were defeated by a gaggle of unmemorable mediocrities. Lloyd George remained Prime Minister at the head of a coalition of Conservatives and his pick of Liberal candidates who held loyal to him. The rump of Asquith’s supporters were derided as ‘the old gang’ in the gutter press, were reviled in the London clubs, cursed in the pubs, insulted in caricatures. Yet the electoral paroxysm that yelled for the Kaiser to be hanged, the obliteration of German prosperity and the humiliation of the Liberal leaders who had resisted conscription was already spent by April 1919, when the pro-Asquith Liberal candidate, Joseph Kenworthy, beat the coalition Conservative nominee, Lord Eustace Percy, in the Central Hull by-election.

      Keynes was sitting in Chalmers’s room in the Treasury drinking tea on the first day of the new Parliament while members were taking their seats. When Stanley Baldwin, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who had the next room to Chalmers, looked in from the doorway, Keynes asked of the new MPs, ‘What do they look like?’ Baldwin replied, with the phrase that Keynes made immortal by quoting it in his best-known book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, ‘A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they have done well out of the war.’ Keynes annoyed R. B. McCallum, the Oxford election analyst and biographer of Asquith, by publicizing Baldwin’s quip. McCallum, in his pioneering study Public Opinion