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

author of Alpine Notes and the Climbing Foot (1896) and Notes from a Knapsack (1900), he savoured the inarticulate camaraderie of men who climbed steep mountains roped together. He had gone to Cambridge by an arbitrary route that was characteristic of its period. At the age of twenty-one, having qualified in medicine at a London teaching hospital, he was invited to a whist party by the house surgeon. There, when someone cited Tennyson’s ‘Northern Farmer’, he capped the quotation with one from Virgil’s Aeneid. Perhaps this seemed bumptious, for the surgeon retorted that Wherry was too immature to practise medicine, and sent him with a letter of recommendation for further studies at Cambridge. A young physician who quoted Virgil, climbed Alps, analysed old bones in the Fitzwilliam Museum and wrote a monograph on Charles Lamb was the only man present at the birth of Maynard Keynes.

      Neville Keynes listened at the bedroom door (Tuesday 5 June 1883) as his mother-in-law Ada Brown and Dr Wherry handled the delivery. ‘I saw her at intervals till about nine, but after that they wd not let me go into the room,’ he recorded in his diary.

      At 9.30 I went to listen outside the door … Florence was giving a slight groan every now & then (they say she was very brave) and at 9.45 I heard such a hullaballoo, & Mrs Brown just came to the door, & said it was a boy … Everything went well, except for a little tear, wh Wherry sewed up. Just before eleven I was allowed in to see her, & I thought her looking bonny. They say that the boy is the image of me. It’s ugly enough.

      Next day Neville added in his diary: ‘I am already getting very fond of him notwithstanding his ugliness … I could sit & look at him for hours. I love the contortions of his little face and his little hands.’ This harping on the baby’s ugliness may have persisted: as a boy, Maynard Keynes was convinced of his ugliness, and in manhood he continued to feel that his appearance was repulsive.11

      The forenames ‘John Maynard’ were chosen, but ‘the little man’ was never known to his family, friends and contemporaries by any forename except Maynard. The formulation ‘John Maynard Keynes’ is used on the title-page of his books, in library catalogues and by people who never knew him. He disliked this wording, and in letters to intimate friends always signed himself ‘JMK’: ‘John’ was used only by his mother at rare moments of stress.

      The baby delighted his parents, who watched him with love and pride. ‘With my own eyes I really did see him smile this morning,’ Neville Keynes noted after a month. ‘He is beginning to look about him a good deal, & he is particularly fond of colour. We think him the sweetest baby that ever was. Florence is getting so fond of him as almost to surprise herself.’ And when the infant was approaching two months old: ‘We don’t think it possible that we could love any other baby as we do our little Maynard. He looks so sweet and so pathetic when he begins to cry. I would [that] I could photograph his looks upon my memory. I fear to forget them. His intelligence is increasing, & this enables him to be more patient when his Mother is getting ready to nurse him. He at least half understands what is going on.’ A fortnight later, in mid-August 1883, the doting father noted (with a characteristic touch of unease behind his pleasure): ‘the little man has again been making a distinct advance. He laughs a good deal and looks so pretty … He sometimes tries to sit up by himself, & he likes to feel his feet; but they say that is not good for him.’12

      Neville Keynes loved the watchfulness, the receptivity, the thoughts and the growing articulacy of his children. He valued the childlike, and his children’s pride of accomplishment. ‘It is our dear little boy’s third birthday,’ Neville noted on 5 June 1886. ‘He is quite a little man now; & we can send him to any part of the house by himself on errands. There is nothing he likes better than being entrusted with an errand … I wish he weighed more the little shrimp.’ On summer holiday at Hunstanton in 1887, he grabbed his four-year-old for boisterous play: ‘O Father,’ Maynard remonstrated, ‘you are so frisky!’ When his aunt Fanny Purchase, who was married to a Weybridge grocer, remarked that she had a bad memory, Maynard chirped out, ‘O, I have a very good one.’ His aunt asked if he wouldn’t give her a little bit of his memory. ‘He thought for a moment and then he said, “But I don’t know how to get it out of myself.”’ Just before Christmas of 1887 (aged four and a half) he impressed his father with his latest philosophic enquiry: ‘How do things get their names?’13

      When that same autumn Neville admitted ‘that I shall be so sorry when he grows big so that I can no longer carry him about and hug him’, Maynard promised to remain small and not grow up. Neville Keynes wanted his boy to remain a sprightly, skinny little darling full of bright quips and treasured confidences: half dreaded him turning into an independent, long-legged stripling striding away to an unpredictable future in which misfortunes could pounce on him.14

      During the spring of 1888 Neville Keynes began reading aloud to his elder son for ten minutes every evening at bedtime, which increased their mutual trust, intimacy and pleasure. One night, when Neville was reading Grimm’s tales, he spoke the sentence: ‘A certain father had two sons, the elder of whom was sharp & sensible.’ A little voice piped up, quite seriously, ‘Why that is like me!’ A few weeks later, Grimm was put aside, and Alice in Wonderland started. ‘He is a delightful little man to read to. His attention never wanders for an instant, & he hardly misses a single point.’ At the age of six he told his mother that he was interested in his own brain. ‘Just now, it’s wondering how it thinks. It ought to know.’ Both parents read aloud to their children: on a holiday in 1894, for example, Florence read Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda; Neville, Kipling’s Jungle Book.15

      For the nonconformist intelligentsia, for whom personal morals, religious faith and social duty were indivisible, it was inconceivable that godless people could remain good. Neville Keynes disliked the idea of his children being reared without religious influences. In January 1884, at six months of age, the baby was therefore baptized by his grandfather at the Bunyan Meeting in Bedford. Nevertheless, when Maynard was eleven, his father was ‘appalled’ by his ‘ignorance of Bible History’. Maynard was a witty, self-confident boy who reacted against his father’s pessimistic anxiety by developing an outlook of sunny optimism. He stuttered, especially if excited or tired by pressure, but was outspoken, as his father recorded in 1888 when the boy was five: ‘Maynard generally likes to go to chapel with us in the morning, although he gets rather bored when he is there. To-day as we were returning home other members of the congregation surrounding us – he cried out in his loud clear voice “It is the prayers that I dislike the most!”’16

      Maynard Keynes entered a kindergarten in 1889. Three years later he began at St Faith’s preparatory school in Trumpington Road. The headmaster at St Faith’s, Ralph Goodchild, proved to be a formative influence. Educated at the Clergy Orphan School at Canterbury and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Goodchild had been appointed headmaster of St Faith’s in 1883 at the age of twenty-three. He was trusted as a kindred spirit by Neville Keynes, who recruited him from St Faith’s in 1909 to become assistant secretary of the Cambridge University Appointments Board. From the outset, Goodchild was impressed by Maynard’s brightness and pluck. At the age of nine the boy had finished book 1 of Euclid, was studying quadratics in algebra, Ovid in Latin and Samson Agonistes in English. Algebra was his forte. ‘Maynard’, noted his father in 1894, ‘is in high glee because he is to have two hours special mathematical teaching four days in the week.’17

      Keynes absorbed much from his father. He did school work beside him in the study at Harvey Road, and dealt with his father’s post when the latter was away. For a time the logician Willy Johnson, a Fellow of King’s, lunched at Harvey Road almost once a week. The two men would sit endlessly over their meal discussing logic: ‘I would be in a fidget to be allowed to get up and go,’ Keynes recalled, and yet he learnt rudimentary ideas which contributed to his later work on probability. At his father’s table he heard, said Jack Sheppard, his colleague at King’s for forty years and occasional