Can We Consume Our Surplus?” or John Maynard Keynes on “The Influence of Furniture on Love

John Maynard Keynes was an aesthete in the most capacious sense. Questions of beauty and artistic creation were at the heart of his ethical and political thinking.

My co-presenter of the podcast, Cam Abadi picked this up as the somewhat off-center approach to Keynes that we took at our recent live recording in NYC. You can hear the episode here.

In the course of my reading for the show, I came across a variety of very interesting writings about Keynes and aesthetics, notably the essay by Gilles Dostaler on “Keynes, art and aesthetics.” in the collection Keynes’s General Theory After Seventy Years. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010 edited by Robert W. Dimand, Robert A. Mundell and Alessandro Vercelli.

Dostaler made reference to a fascinating-sounding essay that Keynes contributed in 1909 as a young man to the Apostles society with the intriguing title: “Can We Consume Our Surplus? or The Influence of Furniture on Love”.

In the recording last week in New York, I quoted from this essay indirectly, provoking both mirth and disbelief. Can it really be true that Keynes wrote about sex and furniture?

Oh, yes, my friends he did! Thanks to a fascinating scholarly discussion by Alice Purkiss you can find the essay below in full.

As Purkiss points out, the key figure in the intellctual background of Keynes’s light-hearted and risqué essay is G.E. Moore

In his memoir My Early Beliefs (first read to members of the Bloomsbury group’s Memoir Club in 1938 but not published until after his death in 1949), Keynes describes how Moore converted him and his friends to what the Bloomsbury scholar S. P. Rosenbaum has called “a limited yet pure religion of love, beauty and truth.”² Keynes writes: “Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. … The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first.”³ My Early Beliefs also includes an anecdote which has particular relevance to the 1909 essay: “Moore had a nightmare once in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables. But even when he was awake, he could not distinguish love and beauty and truth from the furniture. They took on the same definition of outline, the same stable, solid, objective qualities and common sense.”⁴

Keynes gave his paper on “the influence of furniture on love” to the Apostles Society on November 13, 1909. A year after giving his paper, in his rooms at King’s, Keynes and his lover Duncan Grant would create the first interior scheme to “epitomize Bloomsbury’s house style”.

The murals, widely regarded as obscene, were later painted over and were only rediscovered decades later.

Below you find the full text of Keynes’s paper, as it was passed down to us by the Apostles’ arcane note-taking practices. For ease of reading I have not set this in block quotes. Thanks to Alice Purkiss for making it readily accessible on line:

The influence of furniture upon love is a subject which ought properly to be treated in an historical way by the Moderator. The influence of Chinese, Franco-Roman, Druid or late Jacobean furniture on the manners of those times it requires little learning to understand. The spiked style of the Early Christians, the leather beds of the German Barbarians, the hieroglyphically inscribed stone couches of the Chaldeans supported upon revolving globes and cycloids, or the less substantial supports of late ruins, Rococo, Empire, or Nouveau Art closely interacted with the emotions of their possessors.

This paper will deal, however, with the influence of furniture in our own case. Does it really make a great difference to us in what rooms we live, whether we clothe them with chintz or with velvet, whether they are hard or padded? That it makes a difference in some ways, is obvious. These things affect our pleasure and our convenience. But do they do more than this? Do they suggest to us thoughts and feelings and occupations?

The effect on us of their external architecture is, I believe, much slighter than their internal proportions. I myself have spent most of my life inside buildings which are as pompous as possible. But what effect has a flitting between Eton, King’s, and Whitehall had? People who live in the Great Court at Trinity are very different beings from those who live in the Fellows’ Buildings at King’s. But I put it down to the inside shapes of the rooms, much more than to the different look outs. And it is consistent with this that those who live in the little rooms in Neville’s Court are not so very different from themselves in the Great Court.

The shape of the rooms, however, seems extraordinarily important to one’s calmness and the flow of ideas in work, anyhow. It is difficult to be at ease in a very high room or in one which is crowded with a great variety of objects.

In what sort of rooms does one fall in love? Take this room, for instance. Could any human being hope to fall in love here? There is nothing very aphrodisiac, is there? Chintz within walls of pale green. This room is cool and reasonable.

Besides it is not secret enough. Few rooms in King’s are. But consider some of the rooms in Trinity, dark and secret. It is in them that I should choose to fall in love.

But when we consider our spirits, then the advantage is in a room like this. Here one is, at least, cheerful. The best way, perhaps, is to fall in love in other people’s rooms and enjoy yourself in your own.

Apart from the proportions of rooms and their colours, the comfort of the chairs has an important emotional effect beyond their mere comfort. Their discovery alone must make an insurmountable gap between ancient and modern times.

Why is the furniture of women so different from the furniture of men? It is as different as their dress. Who could commit sodomy in a boudoir or sapphism in Neville’s Court? It represents and it evokes an entirely different set of feelings. One of the reasons why people are not allowed to smoke in women’s rooms arises out of the fact that the smell of smoke is so unsuitable to the furniture which they keep in them.

The nature of the furniture which surrounds women suggests, perhaps, that the contents of our rooms are effects, not causes. In that case we all have, within the upholsterer’s limits, the furniture that we deserve. (J. T.) Sheppard deserves to be uncomfortable, and Gerald (Shove) insolvent. In fact Lytton had his shelves built to measure, and (Henry) Norton dreams of his own bedroom.

Never since my first term have I seen a room for which (Ralph George) Hawtrey himself was responsible, and then only for a moment. It was in a tower of the New Court.

If this is true, our furniture is, after all, very unimportant, and leaves us very much where we should be without it. But I don’t think it is quite true. Our furniture may be the best we can do, and yet we may deserve something much better. My poems do not really do my feelings justice. My landscapes even do not truly suggest the influences of nature to which I am most sensitive. Why should the opposite be true of my furniture? Sheppard really requires the most refined and luxurious suite, and would be much happier and better if he had one. If Norton slept in the bed of Marie Antoinette, what might not his dreams be? If Hawtrey worked on the temple of Osiris at Philae, the currency of the Straits Settlements would be as stable as the Pyramids.

It is important, therefore, that we should live in rooms and on chairs built to our measure by the most skilled upholsterers.

Can one deduce, do you think, from reading Plato that never in his life had he sat in a padded armchair? On the other hand is it possible to believe that Voltaire had no fountain pen?

My paper is nearly finished, and I should like to return again to the question with which I began—the influence of furniture on love. The kind of person, I mean, and the kind of way in which one falls in love seems to be connected with one’s visual surroundings. One would not easily, for instance, become in love with Cleopatra in the King’s Combination Room.

—John Maynard Keynes

As Francesca Wade pointed out in the pages of the TLS in 2016:

It’s striking how many of those associated with Bloomsbury articulated the idea that houses, as well as being shaped physically by the tastes and attitudes of those who live in them, also possess a less tangible power to influence the destinies of their inhabitants. “In my experience”, Leonard Woolf wrote in his autobiography, “what cuts the deepest channels in our lives are the different houses in which we live.” For Lytton Strachey, houses are “curious contraptions of stones or bricks … in which our lives are entangled as completely as our souls in our bodies–what powers do they not wield over us, what subtle and pervasive effects upon the whole substance of our existence may not be theirs?” In a paper delivered to the Cambridge Apostles entitled “The Influence of Furniture on Love”, John Maynard Keynes concludes that “the comfort of the chairs has an important emotional effect beyond their mere comfort”, pondering “who could commit sodomy in a boudoir or sapphism in Neville’s Court? It represents and it evokes an entirely different set of feelings”.

Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space (1959) that interior space is deeply connected with our interior selves, and that childhood memory is rooted in the houses where we first experience consciousness. Looking back on their pasts for papers written for the Memoir Club–a gathering of friends for the purposes of uncensored reminiscence and self-probing –both Strachey and Virginia Woolf anticipated Bachelard’s theory, declaring their formative memories to be inextricable from a sensory recollection of their Kensington childhood homes: dark, dank Victorian houses, permeated with a smell of sewage–on Strachey’s part–or the must of wine and cigars, on Woolf’s.

And she goes on to add fascinating historical context for Keynes’s thinking about interiority in 1909 and 1910:

In the autumn of 1910, Bloomsbury’s imagination was captured by the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, curated by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries, which brought the work of Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne to London for the first time, and catalysed the transformation of Bloomsbury home decoration from a personal affair to a professional enterprise. In the Post-Impressionists’ bright colours, simple forms and aura of spontaneity, Fry saw a “spirit of fun” that could be transferred to interior design, which he felt had spent too long pandering to “the dull and the stupidly serious”. “What if people were just to let their houses be the direct outcome of their actual needs, and of their actual way of life, and allow other people to think what they like?” he wrote of Durbins, the Surrey home he had designed himself, where portraits of friends lined the walls of a two-storey sitting room, and where visitors were greeted in the hallway by a wall-painted procession of life-size nudes, marking the path through to the garden where Grant and Bell had begun a mosaic showing a game of badminton mixed doubles. Inspired in part by William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, which urged people to “think about their homes, to take the trouble to turn them into dwellings fit for people free in mind and body”, Fry began to raise funds for a workshop whose pieces would break down “the rigid distinction between picture making and applied art”, and offer a living wage to artists (including Grant and Bell, Paul Nash and Wyndham Lewis) who would work collectively and anonymously, creating vibrant furniture and fittings from designs banked in a communal store. The Omega Workshops were inaugurated in July 1913 with an opening dinner (saumon, salade russe and glaces a I’Omega–Grant’s watercolour menu design is on view in Bath) in their headquarters at 33 Fitzroy Square. Dancing figures in evening dress were painted into recesses on the first-floor balcony. Visitors soon flocked to its showrooms, following newspaper reports of “revolutionary furniture”: “walls that are inspiring and instructive, chairs that are witty, hangings that are humorous, and curtains that sing gaily in a wild transplant of colour”. Some were intrigued by the more salacious press: Fry’s assistant led a tour of the basement storeroom for two women who had shiftily asked whether there was “some furniture that we didn’t show everyone”, only to discover they had been enticed by rumours of “immoral” fittings (“‘Oh’, said I, ‘that’s only because we paint our chairs scarlet!'”). In a prospectus circulated in 1913, the Omega offered to decorate entire houses quickly and cheaply (“A Post-Impressionist Flat: What would the landlord think?” tutted the Daily Mirror), advertising wall paintings, furniture, hand dyed cushions, rugs, curtains and crockery, “in all of which”, promised Fry, “they employ their power of invention with the utmost freedom and spontaneity of which they are capable”.

From 1918 onwards Keynes would join the ranks of the art collectors. The famous opening scene of The Economic Consequences of the Peace in which he recalls a prewar London gentlemen ordering up the produce of the world by telephone ….

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep;

… reads somewhat differently when we add to the picture that Keynes’s own bedroom was decorated with Cézanne.

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