It's hard to count the ways in which Niall Ferguson was wrong when, during his recent attack on the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, he attributed the great man's "short-termist" views to what Ferguson regarded as his sexless, childless marriage. According to reporters at the California conference where Ferguson was speaking, the historian attributed Keynes' alleged lack of interest in the economic health of future generations to the fact that he "was a homosexual and had no intention of having children". By way of proof, Ferguson added that Keynes, after all, was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of "poetry" rather than procreated.
I have only a superficial knowledge of Keynes's economic theory, but as the biographer of his wife, Lydia Lopokova, I do know about his marriage. When I was researching the background for Bloomsbury Ballerina, I had access to thousands of notes and letters that Lopokova and Keynes exchanged when work or travel kept them apart. And from the frank, intimate detail of their correspondence, it's clear that theirs was an extraordinary relationship, and very far from a "mariage blanc".
They first fell in love at the end of 1921, when Lopokova was still a star ballerina with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. At that point, Keynes had risked only a few experimental episodes with women, and the love of his life was still the painter Duncan Grant. Like many men of his generation whose early experiences were homosexual, he didn't discount the idea of marriage and children, but even so he was disarmed, even terrified, by the power of his feelings for Lopokova. It wasn't just that she was a woman – she was also so alien. As the daughter of a Russian peasant and an itinerant, erratically educated dancer she had little contact with Keynes's own world, whose fixed points were Eton, Cambridge and Bloomsbury.
But Keynes and Lopokova were both exceptional oddities: he possessed a rare intellectual curiosity and subtlety of imagination; she had an intuitive comic charm and intelligence. Lank and Lydochka, as they called each other, were enchanted by each other's differences. And while Duncan Grant initially wrote to Vanessa Bell that the idea of them as a couple "beggars my imagination", they married in 1925 and that marriage turned into a long, loyal and happy one.
As for the sex – references in the correspondence to his "slender subtle fingers", her "foxy lips", their vivid "fluctuations" in bed, indicate that, despite early conflicts over Keynes's desire to maintain a male lover, they made each other very happy. Keynes never stopped desiring beautiful men, but he was physically beguiled by Lopokova and settled into a very uxorious husband. Certainly they wanted children, and even before their marriage Keynes had anticipated them "starting their work on population", and imagining the "poet" they would produce together. If he was disappointed by their failure to become parents, Lopokova was temporarily very depressed by it.
The reasons for their childlessness remain unclear. Robert Skidelsky – Keynes' masterly biographer – believes that Lopokova conceived and then miscarried, but I think that assumption is based on a misinterpreted letter. My own guess is that their couple's fertility was badly impaired: either because Lopokova (like many dancers at that time) had suffered one or more botched abortions earlier in her career, or because by late 1926, when they seriously began to try for children, Keynes was in his mid-40s and a heavy smoker.
As for the economic short-termism and implied selfishness of which Ferguson accuses Keynes, that appears to be based on a disputed interpretation of the economist's famous, impatient remark "in the long run we are all dead". But before Keynes himself died, he would make enormous personal sacrifices for what he considered to be the long-term good. By the time the second world war broke out, he was seriously unwell, suffering from a degenerating heart condition, yet he didn't spare himself in the fight for Britain's economic survival. From 1941 onwards he was criss-crossing the Atlantic, engaged in exhaustive negotiation with Washington over fairer conditions for US war loans to Britain; he was also jockeying hard at Bretton Woods to maintain both British and liberal interests in the setting-up of the post-war economic institutions, the IMF and the World Bank.
It was work that might have felled a younger, fitter man – especially since Keynes was, in addition, orchestrating the foundation of the new Arts Council of Great Britain and the establishment of Covent Garden as home to the future Royal Opera and Royal Ballet. But he was now very frail, and while Lopokova remained by his side, trying to mitigate the physical and emotional stresses of his war work, in April 1946 he suffered his last and fatal attack.
Like many people, Lopokova believed that her husband had worked himself to death for his country, and while she revered him for it, she was also miserably bereft. Shortly after his death she wrote: "And now I am so utterly alone without him. The light is gone. I grieve and weep." It was an agonised tribute to their long and tender marriage – and it could hardly be more different from the specious snapshot so glibly offered up by Ferguson.