citizens – ex-soldiers and ex-sailors – in English history as in the mid-twentieth century. The result was a divided manhood, with some of the population drilled, submissive to authority and intent on proving their virility by disciplined aggression, with others seething against deference, enforced uniformity and violence. Keynes and his friends anathematized this regimented, militarized culture in the making. They were not alone. Lord Sandhurst, son of an army commander-in-chief, himself formerly a Guards officer, Governor of Bombay and Under-Secretary of State for War, saw ‘the agitation for conscription headed by The Times and Daily Mail’ as an intrigue to topple Asquith as Prime Minister. If conscription comes, Sandhurst wrote in 1915, ‘it will be the first time I shall feel low about the war … the thing most to be dreaded, war or no war, is a military party’.29
‘Here all is worry and confusion, everyone deeply depressed,’ Keynes wrote from Whitehall to the literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell on 4 January 1916 – before quoting lines from Wordsworth’s poem ‘Andrew Jones’ about a thieving bully: ‘“I wish the press-gang or the drum / With its tantara sound would come” and deal with all these bloody men who enrage and humiliate us.’ He thought there was a chance that working-class protests might defeat the Military Service Act: ‘I do not see the intellectuals can do anything – but ply a feeble pen occasionally and feel miserable.’ He yearned ‘for a general strike and a real uprising’ against the political cowards who were submitting to newspaper bullying. In the meantime good people must ‘(a) intrigue to prevent a general election, which would bring the Jingos back absolute (b) keep all our spirits up (c) enflame the minds of everyone we meet’.30
‘The Government have decided on compulsory service for single men,’ Neville Keynes noted on 6 January. ‘Maynard talks of resigning his post at the Treasury, and we are very much worried about him.’ Maynard explained his position to his parents a week later: ‘Things drift on, & I shall stay now, I expect, until they begin to torture one of my friends.’ His friends demanded his resignation, and expected him to claim conscientious objection. However, he anticipated that Wilson would summon a peace conference and enforce a settlement, and felt loath to renounce the stimulation of his office life. ‘He was sceptical about the value of almost all work, save for the pleasure it gives the worker,’ reported Virginia Woolf. ‘He works only because he likes it.’ Moreover, his official position enabled him to help friends who had been summoned before conscientious-objection tribunals.31
In February 1916 Keynes received a certificate of exemption from military service on account of his Treasury duties. Nevertheless, five days later, he applied for exemption on grounds of conscientious objection, which suggests that he contemplated resignation in protest against militarist compulsion. When summoned to a tribunal scheduled for March he responded that he was too busy to attend. After his exemption had been renewed by the Treasury in August, he did not renew his application for exemption on grounds of conscientious objection – probably because his thoughts of resigning from the Treasury had been dispelled. Meanwhile, he had convinced his ex-boyfriends the painter Duncan Grant and the younger, more outdoorsy David ‘Bunny’ Garnett (later a novelist and literary editor) that their best hopes of exemption from military service lay in agricultural work. Grant rented a Suffolk landholding, where he and Garnett set up as fruit-farmers specializing in apples and blackberries. Keynes represented them both before the appeal tribunal at Ipswich. Appearing there with a locked bag bearing the royal cipher, he demanded that the cases be heard post-haste, as he had urgent matters of national importance pending at the Treasury.
‘The Treasury depresses me just now,’ Keynes told Grant in January 1917. ‘I am badly overworked, need a holiday, and am filled with perpetual contempt and detestation of the new Govt. I should like to get away from it all.’ Although McKenna assured him that peace must come soon, Keynes feared ‘that L.G. will spin things out to let him taste a good draught of blood this spring. Did you read his last speech? “The war is a road paved with gold and cemented with blood.” God curse him … I pray for the most absolute financial crash (and yet strive to prevent it – so that all I do is a contradiction with all I feel); but we always seem able to struggle on three months more.’32
Vanessa Bell’s cherishing of Duncan Grant as both an artist and impish life force had developed into a sexual affair in 1915. This romance soon became one of the happiest partnerships between two painters in the history of art. Both lovers remained on the best terms with Vanessa Bell’s husband Clive, who had long-term affairs of his own. At weekends Keynes often went to stay in the Sussex farmhouse occupied by Bell and Grant, Charleston, where the chickens were once painted red, white and blue in mockery of the surrounding patriotic fervour. He was there for a Friday-evening party, with Garnett and the painter Dora Carrington among the other visitors, in February 1917. ‘Soups, Beef sausages and Leeks, Plum Pudding, Lemon Jellies, and Punches afterwards!!!’ Carrington reported. Next day she and Keynes went slithering across the ice of a frozen pond, and walked on the Sussex downs above Charleston: ‘I slid all the way down the Firle Beacon on Maynard’s despatch case.’ This was the black bag which made some villagers suspect him of being a spy engaged in nefarious deeds. Keynes was Charleston’s most frequent London visitor. He would regale the household with his war news on the night of his arrival: his inside information was resolutely cheerful – ‘he who knew what was happening always seemed to know the best’. He breakfasted in bed, where he spent the morning at work on a heap of official documents. The papers he tore up after dealing with them: he always took pride at weekends at filling his wastepaper basket to its brim before lunch. Keynes preserved his official air by wearing town clothes at Charleston, and looked incongruous among the shabby artists. Henry James, after meeting Vanessa Bell a few years earlier, said she looked as if she had been rolled in a duck-pond. Following lunch, Keynes would go into the garden, kneel on a scrap of carpet that he carried, and spend an hour or two weeding the gravel path with his pocket-knife.33
Keynes went to Washington in September 1917 to help extract from the US Treasury an agreement to make monthly loans to schedule rather than in a sporadic dribble. This was the first of many momentous American visits. The Apostles, including him, tended to see the United States as a philistine and mechanized hell-hole, where size, speed and money were fetishized. ‘The two things rubbed into me in this country are (1) that the future of the world lies with America, (2) that radically and essentially America is a barbarous country,’ Lowes Dickinson had written during an American tour. ‘It is a country without leisure … a country whose ideal is mere activity, without any reference to the quality of it; a country which holds competition and strife to be the only life worth living.’34
A sense of Europe’s cultural primacy contributed to Keynes seeming ‘rude, dogmatic and disobliging’ on this visit, as Basil Blackett wrote from Washington. Keynes found the Washington administration to be serpentine, and was brusque with US Treasury officials whom he found verbose, dilatory and evasive. Washington seemed ‘very oriental’, he told Mary Berenson: ‘Wilson like an invisible Sultan spending most of his time in the harem, and all the others talking endlessly and slowly and never getting to business.’ He was displeased to find the US ‘full of the utmost ferocity of war fever’, he told Edwin Cannan of the London School of Economics. America seemed ‘a country where minorities get precious little quarter; and to my astonishment I find myself looking back to England as a land of liberty!’35
By this time Keynes had reached the rank of Acting Principal Clerk: only Bradbury and Chalmers, the two Joint Permanent Secretaries, stood above him in the Treasury hierarchy. Yet he was discontent. ‘My Christmas thoughts are that a further prolongation of the war, with the turn things have now taken, probably means the disappearance of the social order we have known hitherto,’ he told his mother on Christmas Eve. ‘I am on the whole not sorry. The abolition of the rich will be rather a
