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

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СКАЧАТЬ of the glories of history. Compared with its forerunners, it was socially elastic. Its uppermost echelons were beguiling in their intelligence, and a tradition of adaptive self-renewal was instilled. The high officials in the ministries did not bend to populism; they stood beyond the swerves and crashes of public opinion; and they tempered the moody enthusiasms of voters and incoming ministers. There were neither political placelings in departments nor putsches of staff by politicians. Officials aspired to monastic clarity of thought. They honoured continuity, formality and objectivity. This system, it can be objected, discouraged initiative, venerated hierarchical authority and ossified departmental character; but until the late twentieth century it represented the acme of civilized organization.

      Some commentators complain that this system produced administrators who were remote from the needs of industrial society, who disdained entrepreneurship, deprecated profit-chasing and, by valuing private avocations as well as productivity, brought amateurism to public life, and thus spread timidity, low productivity and economic failure. Such reproaches can be overdone. They ignore the extent that from 1915 onwards, in wartime and in peace, government departments recruited bankers, industrialists, merchants and tradesmen as privileged advisers and consultants. It undervalues the extent to which Whitehall – while trying to balance the counter-claims of trade unions and a globally dispersed empire – was receptive to the demands of the business community. Officials, if anything, had an inferiority complex where profit-making was concerned, and were at times too compliant with the imperatives that the business community brought them.

      Lord Chalmers, Keynes’s wartime chief at the Treasury, used to say that every man ought to drive two horses abreast, one his work and the other some scholarly enthusiasm which would give relief from his duties. Chalmers chose his hobby early: he took up the study of Pali, and translated sacred texts of Buddhism. As a further pastime he read and re-read Virgil, Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divina Commedia and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Basil Blackett, who first recruited Keynes to the Treasury, was an expert translator of Byzantine Greek. Otto Niemeyer, a classical scholar from Balliol who won first place in the civil service examinations of 1906, remained a keen classicist throughout his Treasury career. Sir George Barstow, Niemeyer’s colleague, was a wit and versifier, and so polished an amateur of the arts as to be elected to the Society of Dilettanti. Frederick Leith-Ross for a time contributed a weekly article to Vogue as well as poems to the Pall Mall Gazette. One could feel pride in being governed by such men.

      It was settled in the Keynes family that Maynard was to join this governing class. In the civil service entrance examinations of 1906, he came second out of 104 candidates, behind Niemeyer. The Foreign Office was unthinkable for Keynes, because it entailed overseas postings far from Saturdays with the Apostles, and from other precious King’s affinities: he plumped for the India Office as the government department with the next highest prestige. It had a peaceable reputation – the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury had recently described the India Office as ‘an office where everything goes right and there is little Parliamentary interference’ – as well as the shortest working-hours of any of the great ministries: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays; 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday; with an hour for lunch, two months’ annual holiday, and remission from attendance on bank holidays and Derby Day. Keynes used these long hours of leisure to work at his Treatise on Probability, which was the first systematic English exploration of the logical foundations of probability since his father’s mentor John Venn had published Logic of Chance in 1866.2

      On 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 СКАЧАТЬ