Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines
age of forty-five. ‘He was an Emperor, a tout and a child; also a wit, an actor and a gambler; he ate and drank too much and always had indigestion afterwards. Although he was extraordinarily hideous, I (unlike many) never found him physically repulsive.’37
At Cambridge Keynes was recruited to a body that – far more than the debating union – was crucial to the course of his life. In his second term at King’s, Keynes was identified by two undergraduates from Trinity, Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, as a potential member – in their private jargon, an embryo – of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, which had been founded in 1820 and was generally known as the Apostles. On 28 January 1903 he was initiated into the society as Apostle 243 in a ceremony which included the reading of a secret oath or curse. Election to the Apostles in his twentieth year forged much the strongest corporate bond of his life. For five or six years he thought, talked and confided about Apostle meetings, and plotted over Apostle elections, as much as about sex. The personal importance of individual Apostles, and of the Apostolic circle, to his thinking, choices and actions cannot be overstated. Their meetings accentuated his preoccupation with private intimacies and affinities; they promoted the priority he gave to aesthetics and philosophy; and they demoted his respect for political controversy.
The Apostles met every Saturday evening during term, behind a locked door, to eat anchovies on toast, drink tea or coffee and listen to a paper read by a member on a previously agreed subject. The members present drew lots to settle the order in which they questioned and discussed the paper. Like the speaker reading his paper, they stood in turn on the hearth-rug to deliver their remarks. Although they sometimes answered one another with vehemence, their remarks were hallmarked by precision and composure. As Keynes wrote, ‘victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility’.38 The Apostles constituted a sort of intellectual freemasonry with their arcane ceremonials, exclusive jargon and oblique allusions that served as passwords. The anchovies on toast were known as Whales, for example, even after sardines had superseded anchovies. Philistines were called ‘stumps’. The Apostles’ stealthy exclusivity and air of clandestine privilege intensified the intellectual and emotional excitement of meetings.
At the time of Keynes’s recruitment, the Apostles included two other King’s undergraduates, the classicists Jack Sheppard and Leonard Greenwood, and three from Trinity, Saxon Sydney-Turner as well as Woolf and Strachey, who had recruited him. Older King’s men, including the art critic Roger Fry and the novelist E. M. Forster, returned to the college for meetings. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson was resident in the college. The Trinity contingent was formidable: it included the philosophers Bertrand Russell, J. M. E. McTaggart, G. E. Moore and A. N. Whitehead, the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the historian G. M. Trevelyan, his poetaster brother R. C. Trevelyan, and the littérateur Desmond MacCarthy. McTaggart, Moore, Russell and Whitehead were preoccupied by moral philosophy, while Forster, MacCarthy, Strachey and others were drawn to aesthetics. Hardy had a maxim that it was never worth a first-class man’s time to express a majority opinion: by definition, there were plenty of others to do that. The Apostles met to dispute and define minority views.
The Edwardian Apostles were ambitious men who wanted their work to endure in memory. They even had a code-word, ‘footprints’, for the guiding-marks which they hoped to leave for posterity. The best test of the value of work, they believed, is that it continues to please or impress future ages. Bertrand Russell once recounted to G. H. Hardy a distressing dream in which he stood among the book-stacks of Cambridge University Library two centuries in the future. A librarian was winnowing the shelves, taking down books in turn, glancing at them, restoring them to their places or dumping them into an enormous bucket. Finally he reached three volumes which Russell recognized as the last surviving copy of his Principia Mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled by what he saw, shut the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated: Russell presumably awoke with a shuddering cry, for the devaluation of their work, or the absence of footprints, was the Apostles’ nightmare.39
They liked in-jokes, teasing, cryptic allusions, irreverence, oblique personal meanings and passionate affection for friends. Imagination was as much valued by them as knowledge. They tended to mistrust showy brilliance, but prized integrity especially if it came in the wrappings of unworldliness. Henry Sidgwick, who had been elected to the Apostles in 1856, described their meetings as ‘the pursuit of truth with absolute devotion and unreserved by a group of intimate friends, who were perfectly frank with each other and indulged in any amount of humorous sarcasm and playful banter, and yet each respects the other when he discourses, tries to learn from him and see what he sees. Absolute candour was the only duty that the tradition of the society enforced. No consistency was demanded with opinions previously held.’40 The Apostles’ state of mind can be summarized by the detail that Ellis McTaggart, the Hegelian philosopher and metaphysician from Trinity, always wore a string around one of his waistcoat buttons in case, as he explained, he should meet a playful kitten.
From their earliest meetings in the 1820s, Apostles discussed Christianity, doubts and heresies without reserve when they stood on the hearth-rug, although, until religious tests were abolished in 1871, doctrinal conformity was obligatory in Cambridge. The secrecy of the Apostles was therefore a precaution which allowed impartial analysis and fearless speculation during the half-century when the university authorities penalized religious dissent and repressed scepticism. The Cambridge outsiders who knew of the Apostles’ existence tended to mock the society’s self-mystification: in the late twentieth century, after the unmasking of the Apostle Sir Anthony Blunt as a communist spy, English journalists, with their hatred of locked doors, denounced the society as a nursery of espionage.
Although most Apostles in Keynes’s time were vehement in their rejection of Christianity, and loathed the penitential temper, they had many residual Christian beliefs. Arthur Benson in 1905 noted that McTaggart ‘tho’ an Agnostic Philosopher is at heart a medieval prelate, a believer in privilege and tradition. “I believe in the Apostolic succession, but I don’t believe in God” is one of McT’s dicta.’ Christianity stressed the importance of every moment: time was precious, and accounting for one’s well-spent hours was the mark of a good Christian. There were few time-wasters among the Apostles: Keynes’s fatal regime of overwork was instilled in him by ambitious, nonconformist parents, sermons heard in boyhood, but also by the example of his fellow Apostles. ‘Most people can do nothing at all well,’ wrote Hardy in true Apostolic spirit. ‘Perhaps five or even ten per cent of men can do something rather well. It is a tiny minority who can do anything really well, and the number of men who can do two things well is negligible. If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.’41
The Apostles could seem too isolated, rootless, impressionable and fervent. Virginia Woolf once watched Dickinson in intellectual contention: ‘poor old Goldie wrinkled his forehead & flung himself lightly & ardently into one question after another in his usual way – the way of a bachelor who lives by plying his mind & moving by that means from person to person, having no settled abode’. Christians had been taught for nearly two millennia that they were never alone, because God was always with them; but the Apostles faced the metaphysical loneliness of a godless existence. They accentuated their isolation even as they sought to mitigate it by intellectual intensity. A pupil of McTaggart’s described him: ‘he did not smile or attempt to put you at your ease by any arts whatever; his manner of speaking was dry and terse; he appeared to care nothing for your feelings or your past history or tastes or anything like that; you knew at once that none of that was to the point – it had better not be spoken about; and yet you got an impression of utter benevolence’.42
The lovelorn earnestness of the Edwardian Apostles is indicated by Keynes’s account of a conversation between McTaggart and a younger Apostle, Harry Norton, in 1908.
McT has been in love five times and is still in love with