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The Bloomsburys were also drawn to the arts, Goodwin says, as emblems of truth, beauty, love, and friendship—values that stood for "civilization." That attraction was entwined with a deep distrust of strong national governments, a sentiment deepened by the devastation of World War I. In his essay "What I Believe," published just before World War II, E.M. Forster wrote that human relations should trump patriotic ties: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." It's a stirring line in its fervor about friendship. It's also a fraught line, Goodwin notes, and it became especially so in the era of the Cold War with the attendant accusations of disloyalty.
As a center of creative ferment, Bloomsbury was in some ways a model for a university community. Economists "like to think of Keynes as the Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, and editor of an economics journal," says Goodwin. "And they forget that he was, in fact, devoted to this group of friends, that he was very active in the administration of the arts in Britain. I think that makes him a much more meaningful figure."
Goodwin says the Bloomsburys had particular scorn for the universities of their day, which they considered hidebound. (Many in the group were products of Cambridge University.) When Roger Fry was asked what he thought of the then-reigning professor of art history at Cambridge, he mused, "The most intelligent thing he's ever said is, 'Next slide, please.' " In her polemical Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf writes dismissively of the university as a cog in the war machine. "No guinea should go to rebuilding the college," she declares, adding that a combustible combination of "rags, petrol, and matches" would helpfully serve to "burn the college to the ground."
In today's terms, the Bloomsburys would be considered interdisciplinary thinkers, according to Goodwin. "What the Bloomsburys discovered was that there really could be contributions made from a novelist to an economist or to a psychologist. All sorts of connections emerged, which are often quite subtle. I think, for example, that Keynes' understanding of human nature, which is really a very complicated understanding, grew out of his contacts with the novelists and psychologists—contacts that the typical modern economists don't have."
For the Bloomsburys, the flow of ideas worked in all directions. Goodwin singles out Forster's 1910 novel, Howards End, for raising a long list of questions about the causes and consequences of poverty, the significance of class distinctions, unemployment and its effects, charity and philanthropy, degradation of the environment and urban sprawl, neglect of local history and traditions, relegation of men and women to fixed social roles, empire, militarism, nationalism, and the search for "civilization." (With symbolic power, a bookcase falls on the head of a civilization-seeking protagonist.)
Like the other Bloomsburys, Keynes was convinced that human progress involved much more than economic growth. Human potential, then, would be realized not in economic relationships but through the arts, literature, and science. So Keynes' essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," published a year after the stock-market crash of 1929, envisioned an age in which technological improvement and capital accumulation would allow human beings to pursue projects of "greater and more permanent significance" than the pursuit of wealth, meaning the life of the mind.
Goodwin finds common cause with the Bloomsburys—the faith in friendship, the commitment to social reform, the eagerness to take on intellectual risks. Weeks before parts of his collection are due to be taken down for the Nasher exhibition, he pauses before one of his favorite works. It's Vanessa Bell's The Expulsion from the Garden, from 1952, a gloomy, gauzy, emotionally charged copy of a composition by the early Renaissance master Masaccio.
The Bell watercolor is reproduced in an essay by Goodwin, "Economic Man in the Garden of Eden." He writes that the Bloomsburys were fixated on what they took to be the stories, whether biblical accounts or ancient Greek myths, that served as instruments of social control. Those stories, they believed, prevented Britain from fully joining civilization; they caused the nation to "acquiesce in a foolish war, sustain an immoral empire, and continue the subjugation of women."
In his essay, Goodwin quotes Keynes as observing that "it seems clearer every day that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the love of money," "the habitual appeal to the money motive," "the universal striving after individual economic security," and "the social appropriation of money as the measure of constructive success." That reads like a remarkable statement about a still-unrealized civilization—and about the corrupted life mistaken for the good life—from one of the preeminent economists of all times. Given Keynes' circle of friends, though, perhaps not all that remarkable.
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