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

Author:Richard Davenport-Hines [Davenport-Hines, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
ISBN: 9780465060665
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-05-11T22:00:00+00:00

*Picking oakum was a monotonous and humiliating chore imposed on inmates of Victorian prisons.

CHAPTER 6

CONNOISSEUR

ONE OF THE SEVEN LIVES OF MAYNARD KEYNES WAS THAT of a connoisseur. The paramount trait of connoisseurship is discrimination. Connoisseurs need not be aristocratic, but must adopt or reject people and tastes according to a patrician sensibility that ignores the worlds of productivity and profit. Money is esteemed as a means to acquire what they value, but despised as a provider of power, showiness, luxury, over-eating or barbarous hobbies. Connoisseurs are fastidious, privileged and more ornamental than useful. Their opinions are trenchant, not insipid; but never hectoring. Spontaneity is not much prized. Connoisseurs play with their senses, memories, perceptions and instincts. They share affinities and antipathies. They adopt foreign fashions; they have their own decorum.

As an Apostle Keynes had disputed, elaborated and sharpened his answers to the ethical question: how best should humankind live? An abiding concern for him was how civilized people could use their time and abilities well, and fulfil themselves in virtuous, responsible, productive lives. All his intuitions, expertise, priorities and advice revolved around these quandaries. His lives as an economist, as an official, as a pundit, as a lover, as a patron of creativity, as a Londoner and latterly as a country gentleman might seem to be sealed in distant compartments; but they were indivisible in their ethical underpinning.

Keynes’s life as a connoisseur began in 1909, when he rented a back bedroom in a ground-floor flat which Duncan Grant had leased at 21 Fitzroy Square, in the north-western corner of Bloomsbury (the front room was used by Grant as a studio). In 1911, together with Grant, Keynes became an inmate at 38 Brunswick Square – the home of Virginia Stephen and her brother Adrian. George Duckworth, the elder half-brother who had earlier molested her, was sufficiently shameless to remonstrate in prudish tones about a household containing unmarried people of opposite sexes. ‘Oh, it’s quite alright, George,’ she replied, ‘it’s so near the Foundling Hospital.’ This communal household was joined by Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia Stephen soon married. Keynes was allotted the ground-floor dining-room, on the walls of which Grant painted a London street scene dominated by a fallen cab-horse, the cab tilting forward on to the pavement, with the driver of the hansom perched precariously aloft.1

During the early war years Keynes rented Bloomsbury footholds in Great Ormond Street and Gower Street. At the latter house Keynes aimed to achieve a form of ‘salon civilization’, so Clive Bell reported in 1915, as an antidote to war barbarities and gloom. Bell however hoped that ‘when the Barbarians come they will find something prettier than a gramophone party in corduroy trousers’. In 1916 Keynes and Jack Sheppard, a King’s man who was a temporary official at the War Office and had recently been his sexual partner, moved a couple of streets eastwards in Bloomsbury to Bell’s house at 46 Gordon Square. Keynes let his Gower Street house to Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry, who occupied the ground floor, while the painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington took upper storeys.

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