Brains Alone John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed

By Melvin Maddocks

When John Maynard Keynes was five, his great-grandmother wrote to him, "You will be expected to be very clever, having lived always in Cambridge." The advice came late. Precocious Maynard, with the assistance of his father, a Cambridge don, had already begun collecting stamps and would soon go on to collect butterflies, pen nibs and numbers. Any numbers. Cricket statistics, people's heights and weights, train schedules.

Still, it took a while for the very clever boy to tally his sums and become an economist: he did not read Adam Smith until he was 27, and it took him even longer to become a complete human being. In the first of a two-volume biography that promises to be definitive, Robert Skidelsky, a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick, England, illuminates sensitively and in great detail how the making of an economist finally coincided with the making of a man.

During his dazzling years at Eton and Cambridge, nobody doubted that the very clever boy would build a very clever career. But at what? He was as interested in medieval Latin poetry and Peter Abelard as he was in math and the laws of probability. When he took the civil service exams that led to his first job in the India Office in 1906, his lowest score was in economics. Even after he returned to Cambridge as a don and took to editing the Economic Journal, he was most comfortable among the aesthetes of Bloomsbury. Philosopher Bertrand Russell once referred to Keynes' intellect as "the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known."

Even so, there was something of the perpetual schoolboy in the don during his 20s, and as Skidelsky observes, "No one in England gets far on brains alone." Keynes would not or could not be charming. As he bitterly appreciated, his lanky, uncoordinated body and equine face were not assets. Virginia Woolf placed him among the Bloomsbury men she classified as deficient in "physical splendour." "Rude" was one of the words his friends used to describe him, to which Skidelsky adds "arrogant" and "prickly."

The unformed Keynes was no more at ease with himself than others were. His most serious homosexual attachment, to the painter Duncan Grant, caused him, in the end, profound confusion as well as pain. Furthermore, for all his Cambridge-debater disapproval of Christianity, he was, Skidelsky remarks, "close enough to the 'believing' generation to have a need for 'true beliefs.' "

It took World War I to bring Keynes to fulfillment. As an adviser in the Treasury, he began to develop Keynesian ideas--for example, that the "main use of gold reserves is to be used." The artist manque appeared. Keynes began to regard money the way a painter looks at his palette. Understanding that currency confronts human beings with two great alternatives--hoarding or gambling--the sometime player at Monte Carlo defined money as "that which one accepts only to get rid of it." He raised monetary theory to poetry when he described money as "a subtle device for linking the present to the future."

As the war drew to an end, Keynes had his fill of politics. His hope was that a reasonable treaty, calling for moderate reparations, might save postwar Europe from the economic disasters he foresaw. When Woodrow Wilson, among others, foiled his plan, he referred to him as "the greatest fraud on earth." All his frustrations, all his suffering poured out in the book that made him famous, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

It would be six years before Keynes resolved his bisexuality in marriage. It would be 16 years before the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which argued that only government action can break up a certain kind of economic stagnation, an idea that laid the groundwork for America's New Deal and Britain's welfare state. With Keynes' white-hot essay against the prohibitive peace that followed the costly war, Skidelsky has found the perfect stopping point for Volume I. Here, at 36, in the fullness of his moral indignation, the very clever boy came to ripeness as a man as well as an economist. Presuming that in this century "only economics could provide the correct reasoning for the achievement of the chivalrous society," as Skidelsky puts it, Keynes staked the claim of the economist to be king.