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

– in order to make these cohere into clearer precepts for living. The motive force of his life was that, if only human stupidity could be overcome, and pessimism eradicated, most of the world’s evils were remediable.

      Keynes was a man of joyous vitality. At times he was too optimistic – so ardent was his faith in the power of reason and persuasion (especially his own). Always he was the centre of vigorous, disciplined activity. He believed that all problems were soluble in principle by rational thought – though obtuseness could prevent the solution being enacted. His method was first to identify the intellectual solution; then to devise an administrative technique to apply that solution; and finally to persuade others of the sense of his recommendations. He was a gregarious intellectual, who relied on the stimulus of fast, incisive discussion with his friends and protégés, although his constructive planning was detailed, methodical and sure. T. S. Eliot and other contemporaries extolled the concision, lucidity, word-perfect vocabulary and irony of his prose.

      Not everyone liked Keynes. He was the model for a shifty stockbroker called Joseph Barralty in John Buchan’s novel The Island of Sheep (1936): Buchan had ample chance to study Keynes, as they were fellow members of the Other Club, and dined together at the Savoy Hotel for a dozen years. ‘Tallish, lean, big-nose, high cheekbones,’ an official from Scotland Yard says of Barralty. ‘He has a moustache which has gone grey at the tips, and it gives him a queer look of innocence. That’s one aspect – the English country gentleman. In another light he is simply Don Quixote – the same unfinished face, the same mild sad eyes and the general air of being lost that one associates with the Don. That sounds rather attractive, doesn’t it? – half adventurer, half squire? But there’s a third light – for I have seen him look as ugly as sin. The pale eyes became mean and shallow and hard … and the brindled moustache with its white points looked like the tusks of an obscene boar.’ Worst still, ‘he’s a first-class, six-cylindered, copper-bottomed highbrow. A gentlemanly Communist. An intellectual who doesn’t forget to shave. The patron of every new fad in painting and sculpting and writing. Mighty condescending about all that ordinary chaps like you and me like, but liable to enthuse about monstrosities, provided that they’re brand new and for preference foreign.’ What made the Scotland Yard man long to finger Barralty’s collar was his condescension: ‘His line is not the fanatic, but the superior critic of human follies.’10

      Intelligence cuts its way through conventions, beliefs, dogmas, traditions, sentiments, and social codes as an engineer hacks his way through forests and mountains, surmounts outcrops of nature, opening them up or slicing them away, forging ahead and imposing the shortest path. ‘The mind of Maynard Keynes was an extraordinary instrument, powerful, subtle, swift and penetrating,’ wrote Kingsley Martin, who worked with him for the last fifteen years of his life. ‘It was silly to try to argue with it; you could only change his conclusion by offering a new premise. He could – and did – do most things better than anyone else.’ Keynes reached rapid conclusions, and revised them just as swiftly. His reputed inconsistency ‘was nothing of the sort; it was merely the mental gymnastics proper to a King’s don’, judged Martin (referring to the Cambridge college of which Keynes was a member for over forty years). ‘He was willing to try any workable expedient.’11

      Among those who only knew him socially, and had no working connection with him, Keynes was less intimidating. ‘Maynard was the cleverest man I have ever known,’ the art critic Clive Bell remembered. ‘His cleverness was of a kind, gay and whimsical and civilized, which made his conversation a joy to every intelligent person who knew him. In addition he had been blest with a deeply affectionate nature.’ Bell, in truth, was ambivalent about Keynes’s worldliness, but acknowledged that ‘he was magnificently generous: generous to his country, generous to his college … generous to his less fortunate friends’.12

      Bell did not add that Keynes was the least envious of men. ‘Envy’ was a word that no one who knew Keynes associated with him. He was singular in lacking the faintest blotch of this trait. The thirty volumes of his collected works, the thousands of letters that he sent men and women, are devoid of envy, and of its attendant malice, discontent, grudges. Instead they show a man who was thankful to his core. Although Keynes’s interest in money was intense, there was never a moment’s covetousness: he wanted to share his gifts, and to spread abundance.

      While writing this book my memory reverted to my first meeting with a Keynes. In June 1976, when I was working in the University of Cambridge on a doctoral dissertation on the history of English armaments companies between 1918 and 1936, I was taken up by a soppy old Swiss interior decorator named Konrad Kahl, who slunk about the purlieus of Cambridge colleges during May Week. He was missing either an eye or a leg (at this distance of time I forget which) and unable to drive. Offering me cooling drinks in compensation, he dragooned me into becoming his chauffeur, and hence his captive audience, for as we bowled along the byways of Cambridgeshire he pontificated in slow-moving monologues, full of periphrasis and coy hints and philosophical saws, about the sufferings of the artistic temperament, the nobility of Greek love of man for boy, the singularity of the Swiss soul, the harsh ingratitude of the world towards the elect who appreciate fine objects.

      One afternoon Kahl took me to visit Sir Geoffrey Keynes, a spry, self-reliant and upright widower in his late eighties, who was the economist’s younger brother and a renowned bibliographer. He lived at Lammas House near Newmarket. This was a solid, comfortable country house, with soothing shadows in the summer heat, which (as I learnt while writing this book) had been bought for him unseen, by his shrewd and decisive mother, in 1949. Konrad Kahl spoke with ersatz self-abasement to Geoffrey Keynes, whom he presented with a hideously printed and garishly designed volume, with something of the jazziness of the Savoy Cocktail Book, which contained dispiriting quotations from Swiss professors about the joys of literature. Keynes received this gift with grave courtesy, and assured his benefactor that he knew exactly where he was going to put this remarkable object. He adopted towards Kahl a manner of seasoned patience, civil but impersonal, which the interior decorator, on our return journey to Cambridge, fidgeting with delight, told me was so very English.

      Towards me Sir Geoffrey Keynes was less unbending. He looked at me directly, with a scrutiny that was both friendly and appraising. He seemed pleased to have a young visitor. He was too honest to be flattering, but he asked interesting questions and seemed attentive to the answers. Our exchanges were not quite conspiratorial, but they had a clandestine touch to them, for they occurred in a complicit undertone, while Kahl orated about Rupert Brooke and Goethe with such satisfaction to himself that he remained oblivious to our minimal responses.

      Three moments in my afternoon with Geoffrey Keynes I remember well. His wife Margaret (Charles Darwin’s granddaughter) had died two years earlier. ‘It was a good thing,’ he said to me in a matter-of-fact way. ‘She was quite off her head at the end.’ This was my induction to the unusual and sometimes discomfiting truthfulness of the Keynes family.

      The second moment came when we were ushered into a dining-room where a good old-fashioned tea was arrayed. Keynes took me aside, tugged from under the table an old deed-box and asked me what I thought of the contents. These were sheaves of pale-blue paper covered with firm handwriting in fading black ink, on which children’s crayon drawings of animals and ships were superimposed. It was, he said, the manuscript of a book by Charles Darwin (either On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man), which the frugal Victorian, receiving back from the printers, had handed to his small children as scrap-paper. While I handled these fragments, properly speechless, Konrad Kahl was reaching for some fruit-cake and dilating on the naturalness of men swimming naked together in Alpine lakes.

      The third incident matters a trifle to this book of mine. Geoffrey Keynes – learning that I was training as a historian of the interwar period – asked what I thought of Robert Skidelsky. Skidelsky had recently proposed to write an enlarged, modernized and comprehensive biography of Maynard Keynes, which was intended to replace the standard life written a quarter of a century earlier by Sir Roy Harrod. Geoffrey Keynes told me that a few interested parties (some at King’s, but also, he implied, Harrod) had been deterring him from cooperating with Skidelsky.