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

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СКАЧАТЬ with his intellect undimmed, was not ashamed to employ that intellect in an attempt to impose a sophistry on the junior Treasury official in front of him.’ (Keynes was Moulton’s junior in age, by thirty-nine years, but not his subordinate in official powers.) The interview – so eloquent of the grasping mood of the time, and yet conducted with finesse – made Keynes both ironical and inquisitive. He tried to discern, and even to sympathize with, the springs of motive that brought Moulton to the Majestic. ‘It was not a dull act,’ he decided, ‘but sprang out of a vitality which still, in the evening of his life, was overflowing. The old man was sensitive, capable of understanding and enjoyment, apprehensive of the shifting movements of the visible world. I fancy, therefore, that, rightly judged, his act was one of artistry, not of avarice; and the impulse came, not at all from greed, but from the necessity still to exercise a perfected talent.’41

      Keynes’s first active intervention in the peace negotiations occurred in January 1919 when he and Norman Davis, a Tennessee-born financier who had made a fortune in dealings with Cuba, and was serving as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, boarded the train carrying Marshal Foch and his entourage to Trèves (Trier), where they were to meet Matthias Erzberger, the German Minister of Finance, with his delegation to negotiate the second monthly renewal of the Armistice agreement. Keynes, Davis, Sir John Beale, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food, and an American functionary played bridge day and night throughout the journey, and continued when they were not conferring with the Germans in Trèves. The kings, queens and knaves falling on the bridge-table were like a dumb-show of what had been happening across Europe. ‘It seemed to all of us an extraordinary adventure in January 1919 to step on German soil,’ Keynes said. ‘We wondered what the streets would look like, whether the children’s ribs would be sticking through their clothes and what there would be in the shops.’42

      Erzberger’s negotiating team, which reached Trèves by a later train, was ushered into the saloon of the Allied officials’ railway-carriage. ‘We crushed together at one end of the carriage with a small bridge-table between us and the enemy,’ Keynes wrote. ‘They pressed into the carriage, bowing stiffly. We bowed stiffly also, for some of us had never bowed before. We nervously made a movement to shake hands and then didn’t.’ He studied the Germans across the bridge-table: ‘a sad lot they were,’ he thought, ‘with drawn, dejected faces and tired staring eyes, like men who had been hammered on the Stock Exchange’. From among the hammered men, in Keynes’s words, ‘stepped forward into the middle place a very small man, very exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar, which seemed cleaner and whiter than an ordinary collar, his round face covered with grizzled hair shaved so close as to be like in substance the pile of a close-made carpet, the line when the hair ended bounding his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve, his eyes gleaming straight at us, with an extraordinary sorrow in them, yet like an honest animal at bay’. This was Carl Melchior, a lawyer who was the first non-family partner in the Hamburg banking house of Warburg and the representative of the Ministry of Finance on Germany’s delegation. Melchior was soon to emerge as German spokesman during negotiations and as a man of enduring significance in Keynes’s life.43

      No stipulation about Germany’s mercantile marine had been included in the Armistice of November 1918. German submarine warfare had so depleted the mercantile shipping of Europe that the Allies determined to make the immediate surrender of all German merchant ships, and their transfer to other flags, a condition of the January renewal of the Armistice. The great shipowners of Hamburg hastened to Trèves on learning of the proposed confiscation of their assets. They were too numerous to fit inside the railway-carriage so the meeting was held in a public house near the railway station. As Keynes put it, ‘We, the Allies, congregated in the parlour. They, the defeated, had no room given them, but collected uneasily in the bar, which continued, however, its usual business with the working men of Trèves drifting in and out.’ The meeting was chaired by ‘a vain and almost imbecile American who had made a fortune by purchasing for nothing from the inventor of it a small contrivance essential to the modern laundry machine’. He summoned the Germans into the parlour, where their leader made his opening address. The little French boy interpreter began, ‘Thees mann sez’, at which the German snapped in English, ‘Thees mann! Say, if you pleese, thees gentlemann!’ Keynes marvelled: ‘Thus did these sea lords, about to die, salute their fate, and in the back parlour of the public house the German Mercantile Marine passed from her.’44

      After this Trèves meeting, German negotiators demanded the liberty to use gold, which the victors had earmarked for reparation payments, to buy food before relinquishing their mercantile fleet. In March, at Spa, as negotiators with incompatible instructions skirmished over victualling Germany and receiving the surrendered ships, the prospect of German starvation loomed. Keynes retained every ounce of the Apostle creed that, although corruption and cruelty abounded in the world, truth, beauty and justice were attainable by imaginative sympathy. As a loyal Apostle, who sanctified the redemptive power of personal relations, he achieved moments of perceptive intimacy and collusive trust during the negotiations with unlikely men. One such moment happened at Spa with Carl Melchior, the Hamburg banker.

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