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Chapter One

Curing Invalidism

I

TYPES OF INVALIDISM

Dominating the upper part of the vale of the Clwyd, in north-eastern Wales, is the ruin of Ruthin Castle. It stands on a rock 270 feet above sea level. Nestling under its walls on their northern slope is the ancient town of Ruthin. Rhudd-ddin means Red Fortress in Welsh, and it was so called because it was built from the red sandstone on which it stood. The original castle was founded by Edward I in 1281 as a royal base, part of a chain of forts built to garrison the country he had just conquered in a brutal war. The outer walls, fortified by seven great towers, enclosed an area of about a hundred acres, including the castle proper, a chapel and a well a hundred feet deep. It was at Ruthin that the Welsh patriot Owen Glendower raised the standard of revolt against Henry IV in 1400, ‘plundering the English who had come [to the fair] with their goods, slaying many of them, sacking the town and concluding his day's work by firing it’. In the Civil War the Castle was held for the King by Colonel Marcus Trevor, who surrendered it to Parliament after a two months’ siege on 12 April 1646. General Thomas Mytton wrote to Parliament: ‘The reducing of the Castle of Ruthin has cost me more time and ammunition than I expected ...’. It was then demolished. From the Myddletons who owned it, the property came, by marriage, into the hands of the West family, which, in the mid-nineteenth century, built a strange three-storeyed, red-sandstone, castellated edifice on the edge of the old ruins. Colonel William Cornwallis West entertained the Prince of Wales there in 1899; a year later his son George (aged twenty-six) married another of his house guests on that occasion, the widowed Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's mother (aged forty-six). The Colonel started selling off the Ruthin Castle estate in 1919. Today it is a luxury hotel.

    When Keynes was conveyed there by car on 18 June 1937, it had been for fourteen years a private sanatorium, a kind of convalescent home for the sickly rich. He had been preceded by Calouste Gulbenkian and Lady Ottoline Morrell, and would be followed by John Buchan. Keynes had been moved from Cambridge as soon as he safely could be following his coronary attack a month earlier. F. C. Scott, a fellow director of the Provincial Insurance Company, had recommended it as ‘supreme in diagnosis’ if rather primitive in its methods of treatment. Started at Duff House, Banff, in Scotland, it had moved to more accessible premises in 1923, and now advertised itself as a ‘clinic or private hospital for the scientific investigation and treatment of illness, and for the maintenance of health ... the first institution of its kind in the United Kingdom’. It comprised three groups of buildings set in 475 acres, including the old castle ruins, with sixty-four patient rooms, as well as a grand reception room, library, dining room, consulting rooms, laboratories, kitchens, larders, staff rooms, offices, diet rooms, an X-ray department and medical baths. The Vale of Clwyd enjoyed what the brochure called ‘a mild and equable but not relaxing climate’, being buffeted by mountain and moorland air, supplemented by breezes from the Irish Sea. But ‘the friends and relations of patients’, it promised, ‘will find abundant interest in the neighbourhood. The town has a nine hole golf course ...’. The weekly charge, inclusive of meals, nursing and ‘ordinary X-ray examinations’, was 15 guineas upwards. Keynes stayed in the superior Castle Wing, in a huge, red-carpeted room with views on to the Clwydian hills and with a private bathroom. He would have paid 30 guineas a week. He spent over three months at Ruthin altogether, from 18 June to 25 September. He then went back to his country house, Tilton, in East Sussex, where he was based for a further eighteen months in a twilight between sickness and health.

    When Keynes came to Ruthin he was the most famous economist, and even then one of the most famous men, in England. But his reputation was precariously poised. His General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , published the previous year, had claimed to prove that full employment might be beyond the reach of an unmanaged market economy. This being so, it ought to be the goal of government policy. Critical reaction to his great book was inconclusive. To young economists it was a ‘Manifesto of Reason and Cheerfulness’. To most of their elders it was little more than an inflationist tract, ‘the dying voice of the bourgeois crying in the wilderness for the profits it dare not fight for’, as Joseph Schumpeter put it. Most of Keynes's Cambridge colleagues sat on the fence, shaken but sceptical.

    The fate of the Keynesian Revolution thus depended on economic and political events. Had Keynes diagnosed the condition of contemporary capitalism aright? It was a subtle reading. His capitalist system was no longer in a state of rude health, as in the nineteenth century; but neither was it mortally wounded as Marxists claimed. Its ‘natural’ twentieth-century state was one of invalidism . Bereft of its old vigour, it might still get on perfectly well with the aid of stimulating tonics. In the late 1930s these propositions started to be put to the test. By the spring of 1937 Britain's national government had presided over four years of strong private-sector-led economic recovery from depression. Balanced budgets and huge Conservative majorities had restored business confidence; cheap money had fuelled a building boom; lower taxes and rising incomes had led to a consumption boom. This is as the orthodox economists would have expected. Nor was there as yet any undue apprehension of war. Despite the disturbing presence of Hitler and Mussolini, the times, it seemed, were slowly returning to ‘normal’; and even Hitler and Mussolini might be bought off with African colonies. In the immediate aftermath of the General Theory , Keynes seemed more isolated than he had been at any time in the inter-war years -- not altogether unlike Winston Churchill, whose warnings of a coming war went unheeded.

    Yet by 1939 Keynes had recaptured a central, if not yet commanding, position in British public life. After four years of recovery, the American economy went into a steep decline in the summer of 1937, and the British economy followed suit. The patient was not yet cured. The decisive push, though, came from two men. It was Hitler who forced Keynesian economics on to Neville Chamberlain's anti-Keynesian government; and it was Keynes himself who made sure that the rearmament programme would be understood as an experimental test of his employment theory. The author of the Keynesian Revolution became its impresario. For two years the cure for an invalid economy was propounded by the invalid at Tilton.

II

THE INVALID

What exactly was wrong with Keynes? The enquiry was conducted by the magnificent Sir Edmund Spriggs, KCVO, who had been consulting physician to King Edward VII, and was now consulting senior physician at Ruthin; he was assisted by the resident physician, Sydney Wentworth Patterson, a bacteriologist. Sir Edmund was resident, too. He lived in one of the smaller neo-Gothic castles on the estate and was driven around in a splendid Rolls-Royce of buff colour. In the former library, now the hotel bar, are seventy-five bound copies of volume one of the Duff House Papers , which Spriggs edited, dealing with disorders of the stomach. These, together with the antique Rolls-Royce, still garaged on the estate, appear to be the only relics of Sir Edmund Spriggs's regime at Ruthin Castle.

    The official diagnosis was ‘coronary disease, large heart and aorta; septic tonsils.... The condition is due to coronary and myocardial trouble probably associated with the tonsils.’ The doctors discovered, Maynard told his brother Geoffrey, that his tonsils were in a ‘shocking condition, covered with pus to the naked eye and creeping apparently with animals called fusillaria.... I gather he [Patterson] took the view that there was enough poison distilling in the system here to account for all the other symptoms. They have been tackling this by painting the tonsils ... with a preparation of organic arsenic.’ The Ruthin doctors, that is, had diagnosed subacute bacterial endocarditis, caused by streptococcus viridans, green bacteria which lodge in and attack the valves of the heart, or, in Lydia's phrase, ‘dripped poison into the systeme’. This diagnosis was almost certainly right. It suggests that Keynes had been in trouble since the bouts of the intercostal rheumatism he had been experiencing since 1931. Unfortunately, no known treatment of it was effective. Antibiotics had not yet been invented. Neither treating the throat with arsenic (more familiar in treating syphilis), nor applying Mandl's paint, a compound of iodine, which succeeded Keynes's arsenic preparation, would have cleared up the bacterial infection. So the Ruthin diagnosticians fell back on the two most ancient of remedies: rest and hope.

    Keynes spent his first six weeks at Ruthin in bed. He started in a ‘luxurious’ private room, with a four-foot-wide bed which Edward VII, he gossiped, had shared ‘in happier days’ with Mrs Cornwallis West -- a slightly inaccurate reference to Lady Randolph Churchill, known later in life as Lady Randy, who had stayed with the Prince of Wales at Ruthin in 1899. ‘I am in outrageously good general health and very cheerful,’ he wrote to his mother on 25 June, though he was somewhat disturbed by the snores of his fellow patients, who included Lord Derby and ‘the American Ambassador (who drinks, I should suspect!)’. The ambassador, R. W. Bingham, died a few months later. On 19 July Keynes was moved into a less palatial room and put into a Bergonie's chair, a traction machine for restoring movement. On the 27th he was freed from his ‘horrible Chair’ and allowed up for the first time. He hoped he would soon be able to walk again ‘like a human being instead of a poodle on its hind legs’.

    Lydia stayed in the town of Ruthin in a ‘mousy room’ in the Castle Hotel, with a ‘hen party of Castle widows’. Except for a couple of short visits, Florence Keynes tactfully left Lydia in charge. Lydia sent her reports on Maynard's condition, in her own inimitable style. On 19 July she told Florence that ‘the throat does not smell any more for the last three days, it shows the grubs are cornered and destroyed’. When the unrelaxing weather allowed, she and Maynard went for drives, interspersed by walks. When it rained, she translated articles from the Russian émigré press. One of them stated that ‘out of 2,000,000 Communists belonging strictly to the party 1,000,000 ha[ve] been wiped out’. Maynard had a ‘flop’ in mid-August, ‘yet I can't help seeing that he is improving, the wounded bird's look in his eyes is disappearing’. He now realised that ‘mental effort upsets the heart, which he refused to believe before’. On 22 August ‘cardiag is definitely better’. He was walking a little more every day. By 13 September Maynard was sleeping ‘without a dope’, but fretting to leave. ‘The change will be welcome for both of us, because my nerves are getting very ragged, and sometimes I simply break up in torrents of tears.’

    Maynard was allowed a modest amount of work in the mornings. ‘I get my papers alright,’ he wrote to Richard Kahn two days after arriving. 'markets seem stoner dead than ever.... Don't hang on to the maize.... 24/6 is now looking good.’ A letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer followed a few days later. ‘Lying in bed, I think a good deal about foreign policy,’ he wrote to Kingsley Martin on 1 July. An article in the New Statesman duly followed on 10 July. Duncan Grant, who read it, wrote to his old friend: ‘Do you write under your bed clothes without the knowledge of your Doctor?’ His secretary, Mrs Stephens, visited fortnightly. He bombarded Norman Higgins, manager of the Cambridge Arts Theatre, with programming instructions and Richard Kahn, now assistant bursar at King's, with investment instructions. ‘I wish I knew how far linseed oil and cotton oil are substitutes,’ worried the imperious patient at Ruthin. ‘I am sending Weller some short notes on gilt-edged for the Bursars’ meeting.’ He apologised to Kahn for causing him so much trouble over commodities. ‘But it's a pure game,’ he added lightly, ‘and should not use time available for serious tasks.’ Kahn, too, made the pilgrimage to Ruthin -- with an inflamed Achilles tendon.

    Keynes did not give up the ‘management’ of his Revolution. Illness made him no less combative. ‘It seems to me the work of a sick man,’ the far from sprightly Keynes commented after reading an attempted refutation of his theory by Arthur Pigou, his Cambridge colleague. Pigou, too, had heart trouble. ‘Why is there such obstinacy and wilfulness in error?’ he asked about Gottfried Haberler's Prosperity and Depression , which he got Kahn to savage in the Economic Journal , which he edited. As for Miss Myra Curtis (subsequently Principal of Newnham), who had written something on money, ‘the poor girl seems to have taken complete leave of her senses. I am writing to Lerner to suggest that he might deal with it ... in a couple of pages.’

    In her final report from Ruthin on 22 September Lydia wrote that ‘The dilated muscle is diminishing, but the complete recovery is still to come for a long time, and Maynard is to go on with the same regime.... he still has pains in the chest (not what they were) ...’ Dr Patterson left written instructions for his convalescence. Apart from a diet which looks surprisingly ample, Keynes was to take breakfast in bed, have a good rest after lunch, retire to bed before dinner, stay in bed one day a week. As he explained to Virginia Woolf, ‘I have got to continue my present semi-bed regime for a considerable time to come. But a point has now been reached when it is admitted that I can do it quite as well at home.’ Keynes returned to Tilton on 30 September, after a stopover in London. In retrospect, he and Lydia agreed that the Ruthin regime had been a ‘strange mixture of first-class medicine and first-class humbug’.

    He left Ruthin in an upbeat mood, with the doctors promising him recovery within six months. He would take the autumn off from Cambridge, but would spend most of it in London, gradually picking up the threads of ‘real life’. In fact, he stayed at Tilton till February. There was a three-week visit to London and Cambridge in February-March and another of the same length to Cambridge in May-June, with mixed results. After that he did not leave Tilton again till October 1938. The reason is that his recovery turned out to be much slower than he expected. Till Janos Plesch took over his treatment in March 1939, he remained an invalid, subject to almost daily fluctuations in health, and serious setbacks whenever he came under any strain.

    Lydia now became his heroic, devoted nurse. Love certainly, but also basic peasant instinct dictated that she tend her sick mate. Keynes's debility redressed the internal balance of their marriage. Lydia had been his responsibility; for the rest of his life he became hers. She had been necessary for the completion of his egoism; now he depended on her for his survival. Without being asked, she took control. To her care she brought the discipline she had shown as a prima ballerina . For three years, she recorded every fluctuation in his health, mood, appearance; enforced his regime; kept at bay unnecessary business or visitors. For the first time, she found herself useful, in fact indispensable, to Maynard. Besides, Maynard was now her whole life. Her acting career was petering out, though she still did occasional broadcasts for the BBC; she had no children; her family was far away in Russia. Maynard understood and accepted the rearrangement. He never went far without Lydia again. He increasingly invoked her authority to protect him against irksome or tiring demands. He hated being an invalid; at the same time, as Dadie Rylands shrewdly noticed, he ‘enjoys the atmosphere of the nursery’. This was the first of Keynes's illnesses when he had not been nursed by his mother. It says a great deal for her understanding of the situation that Florence Keynes willingly surrendered the care of her adored, famous son to a Russian ballerina, dismissed by Bloomsbury as canary-brained.

    Lydia set out to enforce the programme of rest prescribed by the Ruthin doctors. Since Keynes could barely crawl up the stairs, his bedroom at Tilton was moved to the ground-floor ‘boot room’ to the right of the front door as one entered, a Cézanne hung on the wall, and Lydia installed next door in the wing Keynes had built for guests. He spent half the day in bed. He was allowed to work for two or three hours in the mornings, propped up in bed or on a couch with his writing board. In the afternoons, taking advantage of the exceptional sunshine that October, he and Lydia were driven to nearby places like Glynde, Firle, Lewes or Eastbourne, so that he might be ‘aired’, as Lydia put it in a letter to her friend Samuel Courtauld, ‘in harmonious foliage’. Tea would be followed by rest. After an early supper, Keynes would be back in bed again, relaxing with a book, a play or the wireless. He often took what Lydia called ‘dope’ to fall asleep. Mrs Stephens (known as ‘Missie’) came once a week for his correspondence, but if these sessions continued too long they were liable to leave him ‘aggressive’ and ‘chippy’. Visitors were discouraged, as talk made him too excited, leaving him flat and depressed. If she thought they had stayed too long, Lydia would suddenly throw them out, as the doctor had told her to: ‘Now you must go.’ She saw at once when Maynard was tired, and told him to lie down and stop talking -- ‘the only cure for the heart pain’.

    His long convalescence and growing involvement in the affairs of his small estate made Tilton increasingly important to Keynes in the last years of his life. As his mother described it, it was ‘essentially a house with views -- north, south, east and west’. The front door, almost invariably wide open, framed ‘an enchanting view of meadows fading into the distance at the foot of the South Downs’. The long drawing room, early brightened by the morning sun, opened on to a stretch of lawn, backed by an ancient orchard ‘more remarkable for the fantastic forms of the aged trees than for the fruit they bore’. To the south, connected to the house by a covered way, was the loggia built by George Kennedy in the 1920s, now glassed in, giving a wide view of the South Downs to Firle Beacon. Here Keynes would spend part of the day reading. Finally, to the west was the guest wing, which Lydia now occupied.

    Tilton had an ample if fluctuating staff. Penny Weller, otherwise ‘Auntie’, Lydia's old dresser, together with her nephew Edgar Weller and his wife Ruby, formed the core. Edgar Weller was now confined to the garden, his erratic place at the wheel of Keynes's Rolls having been taken by Fred Woollard, Auntie's nephew-in-law and apparently a great mechanical genius, whom Lydia adored and who combined the improbable duties of ‘librarian-chauffeur-masseur’. Beatty, an attractive twenty-six-year-old, cooked ‘delicious’ meals. Her mind, though, was ‘beyond belief’. There were two housemaids, Roma, who was Swiss, and a Norwegian girl (unnamed). The household was completed by Patsy, the survivor of the Keyneses’ three dogs, a ‘squat, yapping brown-and-white mongrel’ with evil breath. ‘It is rumoured that Patsy has caught a rat with his breath,’ Maynard scribbled on one of Lydia's letters to Richard Kahn.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES by Robert Skidelsky. Copyright © 2000 by Robert Skidelsky. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.