Keynes: The Homosexual as a Married Man

Perhaps, the greatest accomplishment of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the 20th century’s greatest economist, was his marriage to the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova, characterized by his friend and former lover Lytton Strachey as a “half-witted canary.” Virginia Woolf, representing the view of the Bloomsbury group and complaining that his razor-like intellect was being dulled by marriage to a nonintellectual dancer, wrote “And they say you can only talk to Maynard with the words of one syllable.”

Bloomsbury included Duncan Grant, who had been Maynard’s greatest love; Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell; her husband Clive Bell, who was an appreciator of art and women living in mid-distance from his wife’s ménage which included Duncan Grant as her painting and living partner; Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf, a Labour Party colonial expert and publisher with her of the Hogarth Press; and Lytton Strachey.

Speaking for the public, the London Evening Standard, however, carried the headline starring the bride and ignoring the groom, “FAMOUS DANCER’S MARRIAGE SURPRISE.” Others

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also vigorously disagreed with Bloomsbury. The widow of England’s senior economist Alfred Marshall said of the marriage: “The best thing Maynard ever did.” When Lydia was in Paris on a dancing engagement, Maynard, referring to three couples with whom she was friendly, wrote her: “I consider how your circle follows you… Veras, Sams, Florries all in Paris… You are their elixir and without you they are not fully alive. I want some of that elixir.” Keynes’s brother Geoffrey, a balletomanic admirer, pronounced, “She brought joy to us all, especially to Maynard.” Bloomsbury itself was never comfortable with Lydia, however intelligent she showed herself to be on her own terms, but neither she nor Maynard let that disturb them. Bloomsbury came around.

Any marital prognosis would not have been optimistic, Keynes having arrived at Lydia after some twenty years of homosexual activity. Firmly established in the homosexual world since Eton, he has left a meticulous record of his romantic and gutter-cruising encounters. In 1906 until mid-1915 he noted 683 such contacts. A graph-making economist, he listed them in such a way that he could tell at a glance how a given quarter compared statistically with any previous quarter. Two lists he kept mentioned many of his sexual partners, friends like Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey, also other friends, former students, street pick-ups like the “Lift Boy of Vauxhall,” and, ominously, “the Blackmailer” and “the Blackmailer of Bordeaux.” He appears not to have suffered either blackmail or venereal disease.

How had Maynard risen from the homosexual gutter to the heights of the hymeneal bed? I suggest that young Maynard had been encouraged to repress his heterosexual side by family and environment. John Neville Keynes, a truly fine economist, was an anxious and highly emotional man subject to dramatic psychosomatic attacks. Falling in love with the infant, he established a closeness to him that shut out the mother while also slapping and “whipping” (Neville’s word) the normally rambunctious boy on disciplinary principle. If Neville expressed a feminine sensibility, Florence Ada Keynes began to function with an efficiency normally attributed to the masculine, progressing through charitable work to become the first woman as Cambridge Borough councilor and, ultimately, mayor. Until the boy went off to Eton at sixteen, his father, while hypersensitive to noise or other disturbances (thus the whippings), had him doing his homework in his study. Yet Florence Ada was a deeply loving, if slightly distant person. Eton reinforced this skewed balance. Only later did the unqualified feminine reach Maynard. In 1913, at the age of thirty, he wrote to Duncan Grant, no longer a lover but a lifetime friend, “I’m leaving for Egypt … I just learned that ‘bed and boy’ is prepared.” A month later he reported, however, that he had “had a w-m-n.” Meanwhile, his father became dim mentally and withdrawn in his early sixties and his mother grew closer to him. He also had developed a warm relationship with Vanessa Bell, the other strong, responsible power in Bloomsbury. But then Maynard had always liked women.

Maynard first met Lydia in September 1918, when she was a principal dancer with the Ballets Russes. At the time he found she had a “stiff bottom” and preferred her male partner, but his interest in male beauties was subsiding. He reported to Lytton Strachey on May 17, 1920, “Yes, the shallow waters are the attraction—up to the middle—at my age.” Another meeting with Lydia on December 11, 1921 ignited the romance. By December 30 it was an affair. By February Maynard had taken over Lydia, whose employment had vanished with the disappearing, debt-ridden Ballets Russes. With Vanessa painting in France, Maynard installed Lydia in her flat in Gordon Square, the group’s capital near the British Museum. Vanessa refused to be offended by his presumption, but defended her part-interest in him. On the matter of greater importance she tried hard, writing, “Don’t marry her…. [S]he’d be a very expensive wife & is altogether…to be preferred as a mistress (dancing).” Vanessa failed to discourage Maynard, and had sense enough not to attack the fait accompli.

A nullity suit was necessary to invalidate formally a marriage Lydia had entered into without knowing that the “husband” had failed to obtain a decree absolute erasing his marriage to an American woman. It was not until August 1925 that Maynard and Lydia were married. The relationship was nevertheless absolute from the beginning, Maynard and Lydia settling into it as into a preor-

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dained pattern. Yet, considering his homosexual adventures, the scheduling of their cohabitation might seem to confirm its shakiness. During the teaching half of the year, although they were otherwise together, they spent five of the seven days of the week apart. From Thursday to Tuesday Maynard was operating in his bachelor don’s quarters in Cambridge. One might ask if Keynes completely left his homosexual habits behind? Yet, if he had an occasional relapse (for which there is absolutely no evidence), it would not have been important. Yet in one sense he never left his homoerotic life behind. He remained a part of Cambridge University’s homosexual community and happily participated in its gossip, but this was as far it went. Maynard remained a happily married man.

Both Maynard and Lydia were consummate professionals; each had to do his/her thing. Among too many other activities, the work-compulsive busybody Maynard was teaching at Cambridge conscientiously, holding his Political Economy Club meetings and attending important King’s College committee meetings as bursar and member of the Estates Committee, writing his numerous articles and books, chairing the opinion journal Nation, editing the Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society, directing two insurance companies, and advising the government on economic policy. Assisted by Maynard’s contacts and money, Lydia, presiding alone over all-day Sunday lunches in Gordon Square, pursued her career as a freelance dancer and her life in the world of the ballet. The separation produced a steady flow of letters totaling a third of a million words.

Maynard and Lydia, as the letters document, were nice to each other. Maynard, who could be arrogantly dominating and rude, was never so to Lydia. She could become angry with him only when his compulsions endangered his health. This led to “stormy conflicts of will,” according to one biographer. Their life together began with a burst of uninhibited sexual ardor, with Lydia leading. During the early spring of their love she writes, “I gobble you dear Maynard … I re-gobble you…I blend into my mouth and heart to you … I have so much intensity for you.” Maynard’s response was cooperative but clumsily imitative: “I want to be gobbled abundantly.” The best he could do was to quote a Babylonian poem: “‘Come to me, my Ishtavar and show your virile strength.’” Lydia returns, “I smiled from head to foot.” Her next sentence strains English but is clear enough: “When I tell to you ‘thrillings’ she sais ‘touch with it my little place,’ a ‘positive woman’ she no doubt was.”

The intensity moderated as Maynard suffered his continual bouts of ill health. From inexplicable boyhood fevers he had progressed through pneumonia, diphtheria, an appendectomy on the kitchen table in Gordon Square, influenza, and always colds. Vanessa Bell told him, “But I don’t pity you very much as no doubt Lydia dances attendance on you very nicely and I remember her saying she always likes people when they are ill.” Given Lydia’s instincts for caring, the illnesses eventually became more of a bond than sex. By the end of the 1920s Lydia’s references to the physical became wistful, more reminiscent than actual.

From 1931 to 1937 Maynard was complaining of more and more cardiac discomfort. On May 16, 1937 he collapsed from a massive heart attack. This did not prevent the cardiac invalid from becoming a major player in British-American financial negotiations in World War II—to the extent of six heart-straining and dangerous missions to the United States. Inaction would surely have killed him sooner. Accompanying him always, Lydia kept him alive for nine more years after the attack—until Easter Sunday 1946, a few weeks short of his 63rd birthday. Lydia lived another thirty-five years, to 1981. Living at Tilton, Maynard’s Sussex County property, she was accompanied most of those years, one imagines with Maynard’s posthumous approval, by the farm manager he had installed there.

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