3. The Cambridge Apostle

The Cambridge Apostle

THE MOST favored education available to the English elite was secured for Maynard by his doting father. First, he was a scholarship student at “College” in Eton, the intellectual subdivision of England’s most influential public school. From there, Maynard went on to King’s College, which, along with Trinity, was one of the two dominant colleges at Cambridge University.

At King’s, Maynard was soon tapped for coveted membership in the secret society of the Apostles, an organization that rapidly shaped his values and his life. Keynes grew to social and intellectual maturity within the confines of this small, incestuous world of secrecy and superiority. The Apostles were not simply a social club, in the manner of Ivy League secret fraternities. They were also a self-consciously intellectual elite, especially interested in philosophy and its applications to aesthetics and life.

Apostle members were chosen almost exclusively from King’s and Trinity, and they met every Saturday evening behind locked doors to deliver and discuss papers.¹ During the rest of the week, members virtually lived in each others’ rooms. Moreover, Apostleship was not simply an undergraduate affair; it was membership for life and cherished as such. For the rest of their lives, adult Apostles (known as “Angels”), including Keynes, would often return to Cambridge for meetings, and they participated actively in recruiting new undergraduates.

In February 1903, at the age of 20, John Maynard Keynes took his place as Apostle number 243 in a chain that stretched back to the society’s founding in 1820. For the next five or six formative years, Maynard spent almost all his private life among the Apostles, and his values and attitudes were shaped accordingly. Furthermore, most of his adult life was spent among older and newer Apostles, their friends, or their relations.

An important reason for the potent effect of the Society of the Apostles on its members was its heady atmosphere of secrecy. As Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, writes,

One should never underestimate the effect of secrecy. Much of what made the rest of the world seem alien sprang from this simple fuel. Secrecy was a bond which greatly amplified the Society’s life relative to its members’ other interests. It is much easier, after all, to spend one’s time with people from whom one does not have to keep large secrets; and spending much time with them reinforces whatever it was that first drew them together. (Skidelsky 1983, p. 118; see also Deacon 1986)

The extraordinary arrogance of the Apostles is best summed up in the Society’s Kantian half joke: that the Society alone is “real,” whereas the rest of the world is only “phenomenal.” Maynard himself would refer to non-Apostles as “phenomena.” What all this meant was that the world outside was regarded as less substantial, less worthy of attention than the Society’s own collective life.

It was a joke with a serious twist (Skidelsky 1983, p. 118). “It was owing to the existence of the Society” wrote Apostle Bertrand Russell in his Autobiography, “that I soon got to know the people best worth knowing.” Indeed, Russell remarked that when the adult Keynes left Cambridge, he traveled the world with a feeling of being the bishop of a sect in foreign parts. “True salvation for Keynes,” remarked Russell perceptively, “was elsewhere, among the faithful at Cambridge” (Crabtree and Thirlwall 1980, p. 102). Or, as Maynard himself wrote during his undergraduate days in a letter to his friend and co-leader, Giles Lytton Strachey, “Is it monomania—this colossal moral superiority that we feel? I get the feeling that most of the rest [of the world outside the Apostles] never see anything at all—too stupid or too wicked” (Skidelsky 1983, p. 118).²

Two basic attitudes dominated this hermetic group under the aegis of Keynes and Strachey. The first was their overriding belief in the importance of personal love and friendship, while scorning any general rules or principles that might limit their own egos; and the second, their animosity toward and contempt for middle-class values and morality. The Apostolic confrontation with bourgeois values included praise for avant-garde aesthetics, holding homosexuality to be morally superior (with bisexuality a distant second³), and hatred for such traditional family values as thrift or any emphasis on the future or long run, as compared to the present. (“In the long run,” as Keynes would later intone in his famous phrase, “we are all dead.”)

¹ Asking himself why the eminent constitutional historian Frederic W. Maitland had no influence over the Apostles in this era, even though a member, Derek Crabtree answers that Maitland was unfortunate enough to hold his chair at Downing College, one of the lesser, uninfluential colleges at Cambridge (see Crabtree 1980, pp. 18-19).

² When the philosopher John E. McTaggart, a lecturer at Trinity who had been an Apostle since the 1880s, got married late in life, he assured the Apostles that his wife was merely “phenomenal” (Skidelsky 1983, p. 118).

³ Bertrand Russell, who was a decade older than Keynes, did not like the Keynes/ Strachey group that dominated undergraduate members during the first decade of the 20th century, largely because of their conviction that homosexuality was morally superior to heterosexuality.