Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography - a Review Article

Of all forms of writing, a biography is, on the surface, the least demanding since one deals with facts which naturally arrange themselves chronologically. But a moment's reflection shows that biography has its problems. The writer must be selective in the choice of facts. What principle will he follow? Should the historical background be given a role and, if so, how much of a role? Does the historical background include the intellectual too? Should one peer into the psychology of the subject, perhaps to throw light on his intellectual creations? In the preface of his biography of Keynes, Professor Moggridge is cognizant of these problems: he stoutly rejects, for instance, the Stigler-Walker view that the biography of an economist must be solely concerned with his economic theorizing, with the arduous climb from error to truth. Indeed, Moggridge introduces his preface with a quotation from Virginia Woolf to the effect that a biography should give us "the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders." Moggridge agrees: "facts do not speak for themselves . . . Selection and arrangement do matter . . ." Alas, anyone tackling J. M. Keynes' biography has his work cut out. By his own admission, Keynes was a compulsive writer (see My Early Beliefs) and a hoarder of paper. One suspects that when he took the train or went to the theater, he saved the ticket to enable future biographers to follow his footsteps. This Moggridge does with unrelenting thoroughness. Via appointment calendars, diaries, letters and carbon copies of letters, aides de memoir, financial records, tabulations of "sexual activities" and of "partners" (see Plates 9 and 10), and memoirs and records of conversations, he gives a thorough account of his subject's life. He examined the Charleston Papers, the Keynes Papers, the Joan Robinson Papers, the Richard Keynes Papers, the Polly Hill Collection, plus the official public record of background events, and, of course, Keynes' own professional writings, most of whose thirty volumes Moggridge himself edited. Moggridge's diligent work on Keynes has stretched over two decades and, not surprisingly, has resulted in this most complete biography. There are so many facts demanding attention that sometimes the language creeks under the strain: "Maynard spent a further two to five days there [in Florence] before he went off to [sic] London via Germany to collect his brother who had been spending a term in the Black Forest improving his German before going up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read natural sciences."(1) The problem, of course, is the pace of Keynes' life: dinner parties, outings, weekends in the country, working lunches, trips abroad, addresses to various groups, sicknesses, arguments with Bloomberries, meetings with politicians, economists, friends; gambling excursions to the South of France . . . all demand attention and they get it. At the beginning of August [1919] he settled down to Charleston with the book [the writing of The Economic Consequences of the Peace] after a whirlwind ten days in London, during which he opened a discussion at the Tuesday Club on the Peace terms; gave evidence to the Official Committee on Indian Exchange and Currency, which was picking up where the Chamberlain Committee had left off in the Spring of 1914 as well as examining the appropriate post-war exchange rate for the rupee; addressed the Fight the Famine Council; went to the Diaghilev ballet season at the Alhambra twice (including the premiere of The Three Cornered Hat); and, with Clive Bell, threw an end-of-season ballet dinner party for thirty-three including a selection of Bloomsbury, members of the cast plus Derain, the Picassos, Massine and Ernst Ansermet. He remained there, except for two overnight visits to London, until the beginning of October.(2) (A footnote adds the information that Lydia Lopokova was not at the dinner, having "disappeared," much to Keynes' regret). …