by DUNCAN KELLY
John Maynard Keynes seated, with Duncan Grant, left, and Clive Bell, Charleston, Sussex, 1919 PHOTO/© The Granger Collection, NYC/TopFoto
Universal Man: The seven lives of John Maynard Keynes by Richard Davenport-Hines. 418pp. William Collins. £18.99
On December 3, 1913, John Maynard Keynes delivered an address to the Political Economy Club at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand. His title, “How far are bankers responsible for the alternations of crisis and depressions?” could hardly sound more resonant today, when we are still struggling to get to grips with the precise ways in which banking crises nearly triggered a global financial meltdown. In 1913, though, Keynes thought there was no clear and coherent theory of financial crisis. The evidence was lacking, and the principal account that had been recently proposed by Irving Fisher in The Purchasing Power of Money (1911) was “clever, rather than satisfactory”. As Keynes told his audience, in attempting to newly outline what he called a compensated dollar scheme (where the purchasing power of the dollar could be fixed even as the price of gold might depreciate relative to its weight), Fisher alongside others had missed a crucial point about the relationship between money and crisis. Keynes defended a claim that what “precipitates a reduction of banking facilities and a crisis is not a lack of money”, but instead, a “lack of free, uninvested capital”.
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Personally, Keynes couldn’t stand most politicians, even as he charmed them as much as he charmed almost anyone he found interesting or open to him. He nevertheless worked tirelessly for the Liberal Party across the country, and was offered the chance to run for election more than once. He declined. His apostolic sensibilities had instilled in him a constant search for personal, human connection, the spark of which often carried an emotional frisson as well as an intellectual, sexual or Platonic charge. It went beyond mere politics. In Versailles, seeking a way through the obstacles surrounding the lifting of the economic blockade, Keynes sought out the German representative, Dr Melchior, in a touching moment of humanity where they could speak as civilized individuals rather than collective enemies. It came to naught practically, but it signalled his need for the interpersonal and Keynes immortalized Melchior in a beguiling biographical portrait. Elsewhere, “I had a terrible flirtation with Ll.G yesterday”, wrote Keynes to Lydia after a meeting with the Prime Minister, “and have been feeling ashamed of myself ever since!” Later, he recalled another “little flirt” with Albert Einstein, and as Virginia Woolf once recounted, Maynard was sullen and silent until she kissed him hello, at which point he opened up and was full of charm and talk. His apparent need to impress his personality on everyone was part and parcel of what Davenport-Hines correctly views as his perpetual exercises in persuasion. He recognized the importance of being one of the “ins”. But to get what he wanted, and what he thought was right, he also displayed many of the characteristics we associate with successful politicians, the sort of men he otherwise decried for their vulgarity, duplicity and boorish rabble-rousing. Like them, Keynes flattered and cajoled. He could be ruthless too, though his ruthlessness was mostly intellectual and (once more) compartmentalized. Among his academic peers, he might be vituperative, sometimes full of rage, and often intellectually devastating. Bertrand (“Bertie”) Russell said that he feared argument with Maynard, likening it to taking his life in his own hands, while a loquacious Isaiah Berlin declared him the most intelligent man he’d ever met. During long, hard meetings with the Americans about debt financing during and after both world wars, however, his peculiar mix of mandarin speed and efficiency, mixed with high-wire intellectual acrobatics and intuition, all wrapped up in mellifluous argument, rubbed up against the grain of what he saw as cloudy American thinking and gridlocked administrative practice. The personal and the political clearly combined in Keynes’s presentation of self, but sometimes the realities of power politics trumped the power of his personality. The American century was coming, and Keynes could hardly stop it alone even if the magnetism of his character and intellect tended to win over all sorts of people.
The Times Literary Supplement for more