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

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СКАЧАТЬ mind at Eton, liked to spend his Christmas holidays at King’s. ‘It is like a most splendidly appointed club in which each member has a suite of noble rooms to himself & is paid an income instead of subscribing,’ he wrote in 1902 at the end of Keynes’s first term. One night Montague Rhodes James, the first man to be successively Provost of King’s and Provost of Eton, read a blood-curdling horror story, which he had written, to the other senior members of the college who had dined together in hall. Afterwards they played a card-game called ‘animal grab’ in which victorious players had to make the noises of animals and birds: ‘Moo-Moo’, they shouted for a cow, ‘Hee-Haw’ for a donkey, ‘Hobble-gobble’ for a turkey and so forth. ‘The cleverness & gaiety of them all is wonderful & yet if it goes on like this in term time – & it does – where is the strenuous [intellectual] life, & search for truth & for knowledge that one looks for at College?’ Luxmoore wondered. ‘Chaff & extravagant fancy & mimicry & camaraderie & groups that gather & dissolve first in this room & then in that like the midges that dance their rings in the sunshine, ought to be only the fringe of life & I doubt if here it does not cover the whole, or nearly so.’ Yet for all this frivolity, King’s excelled most Cambridge colleges by standing out against the prevalent culture of insularity, obscurity, opacity and smugness. ‘There are three things that no Cambridge man can endure,’ one Fellow of King’s, Oscar Browning, told another, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. ‘One is, that a man should know anything outside his own subject. The second is, that his name should be known outside the University. The third, that he should be able to express himself lucidly, either in speech or writing.’ Rhodes James, Browning, Dickinson and other King’s men did not bundle themselves inside the college, but pursued wide questing interests and national fame.36

      Maynard Keynes was bought life membership of the Cambridge Union debating society by his father at the time of his matriculation in the university. There, in November 1902, he gave his maiden speech, four minutes long, in support of a motion deploring party government. This speech, which presaged a lifelong distaste for the waste of partisanship, drew the admiration of the Union’s president, Edwin Montagu, who fostered him as a speaker at the Union, of which he was elected president in the Lent term of 1905. ‘I owed – rather surprisingly – nearly all my steps up in life to him,’ Keynes said of Montagu. He had his first experiences of electioneering in support of Montagu as (the successful) Liberal parliamentary candidate in 1905 for West Cambridgeshire (‘the home of a peculiarly sturdy type of Nonconformity’). Later Montagu sponsored him as a Whitehall man of influence. As Under-Secretary of State for India, Montagu got Keynes on to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency in 1913. As Financial Secretary of the Treasury in 1915, he clinched his appointment as a Treasury official. Montagu introduced him to the world of political dinners, official secrets and confidential plans. ‘He was so moody and temperamental and unhealthy and ugly to look at, that I daresay he wasn’t very sorry to die,’ Keynes reflected after Montagu wasted away at the age of forty-five. ‘He was an Emperor, a tout and a child; also a wit, an actor and a gambler; he ate and drank too much and always had indigestion afterwards. Although he was extraordinarily hideous, I (unlike many) never found him physically repulsive.’37

      At Cambridge Keynes was recruited to a body that – far more than the debating union – was crucial to the course of his life. In his second term at King’s, Keynes was identified by two undergraduates from Trinity, Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, as a potential member – in their private jargon, an embryo – of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, which had been founded in 1820 and was generally known as the Apostles. On 28 January 1903 he was initiated into the society as Apostle 243 in a ceremony which included the reading of a secret oath or curse. Election to the Apostles in his twentieth year forged much the strongest corporate bond of his life. For five or six years he thought, talked and confided about Apostle meetings, and plotted over Apostle elections, as much as about sex. The personal importance of individual Apostles, and of the Apostolic circle, to his thinking, choices and actions cannot be overstated. Their meetings accentuated his preoccupation with private intimacies and affinities; they promoted the priority he gave to aesthetics and philosophy; and they demoted his respect for political controversy.

      The Apostles met every Saturday evening during term, behind a locked door, to eat anchovies on toast, drink tea or coffee and listen to a paper read by a member on a previously agreed subject. The members present drew lots to settle the order in which they questioned and discussed the paper. Like the speaker reading his paper, they stood in turn on the hearth-rug to deliver their remarks. Although they sometimes answered one another with vehemence, their remarks were hallmarked by precision and composure. As Keynes wrote, ‘victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility’.38 The Apostles constituted a sort of intellectual freemasonry with their arcane ceremonials, exclusive jargon and oblique allusions that served as passwords. The anchovies on toast were known as Whales, for example, even after sardines had superseded anchovies. Philistines were called ‘stumps’. The Apostles’ stealthy exclusivity and air of clandestine privilege intensified the intellectual and emotional excitement of meetings.

      At the time of Keynes’s recruitment, the Apostles included two other King’s undergraduates, the classicists Jack Sheppard and Leonard Greenwood, and three from Trinity, Saxon Sydney-Turner as well as Woolf and Strachey, who had recruited him. Older King’s men, including the art critic Roger Fry and the novelist E. M. Forster, returned to the college for meetings. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson was resident in the college. The Trinity contingent was formidable: it included the philosophers Bertrand Russell, J. M. E. McTaggart, G. E. Moore and A. N. Whitehead, the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the historian G. M. Trevelyan, his poetaster brother R. C. Trevelyan, and the littérateur Desmond MacCarthy. McTaggart, Moore, Russell and Whitehead were preoccupied by moral philosophy, while Forster, MacCarthy, Strachey and others were drawn to aesthetics. Hardy had a maxim that it was never worth a first-class man’s time to express a majority opinion: by definition, there were plenty of others to do that. The Apostles met to dispute and define minority views.

      The Edwardian Apostles were ambitious men who wanted their work to endure in memory. They even had a code-word, ‘footprints’, for the guiding-marks which they hoped to leave for posterity. The best test of the value of work, they believed, is that it continues to please or impress future ages. Bertrand Russell once recounted to G. H. Hardy a distressing dream in which he stood among the book-stacks of Cambridge University Library two centuries in the future. A librarian was winnowing the shelves, taking down books in turn, glancing at them, restoring them to their places or dumping them into an enormous bucket. Finally he reached three volumes which Russell recognized as the last surviving copy of his Principia Mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled by what he saw, shut the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated: Russell presumably awoke with a shuddering cry, for the devaluation of their work, or the absence of footprints, was the Apostles’ nightmare.39

      They liked in-jokes, teasing, cryptic allusions, irreverence, oblique personal meanings and passionate affection for friends. Imagination was as much valued by them as knowledge. They tended to mistrust showy brilliance, but prized integrity especially if it came in the wrappings of unworldliness. Henry Sidgwick, who had been elected to the Apostles in 1856, described their meetings as ‘the pursuit of truth with absolute devotion and unreserved by a group of intimate friends, who were perfectly frank with each other and indulged in any amount of humorous sarcasm and playful banter, and yet each respects the other when he discourses, tries to learn from him and see what he sees. Absolute candour was the only duty that the tradition of the society enforced. No consistency was demanded with opinions previously held.’40 The Apostles’ state of mind can be summarized by the detail that Ellis McTaggart, the Hegelian philosopher and metaphysician from Trinity, always wore a string around one of his waistcoat buttons in case, as he explained, he should meet a playful СКАЧАТЬ