Letters from Keynes

  • From Keynes to Arthur Hobhouse - 27 April 1905

    “I have always suffered and I suppose always will from a most unalterable obsession that I am so physically repulsive that I’ve no business to hurl my body on anyone else’s. The idea is so fixed and constant that I don’t think anything… could ever shake it”.

  • From Keynes to Lytton Strachey - 19 April 1906

    “My dear, here he [Geoffrey Keynes] is at nineteen and all agog to hear what any self-respecting lower boy would die of boredom to hear repeated…it all came out at once and quite suddenly. He has found Germany all ears for O.W. and has read a brochure hinting. ‘So what was he [Oscar Wilde] accused of?’ says he to me ‘Sodomy’ ‘What’s that’. I fell pale shivering on the ground: and it then transpired that although he vaguely knew that people were sometimes ‘bunked’ for it, he had never known a case and had never even heard the question raised on a single occasion during his whole time at school. ‘Do they do it in Eton?’ said he. ‘Yes’, I said – giggling. And he looked a little interested, but nervous”.

  • From Keynes to Lytton Strachey - 12 April 1907

    “Worse and worse – at least so it seems to me. I have never felt more nervous. Scott has forwarded to me a letter from La B to himself on the subject. From this it appears

    (i) That she has always known all about him (that indeed I knew: he admitted he had told her)
    (ii) That she knows about me. This is news: I have always been a model of discretion – neither word nor hint…”.

  • From Keynes to Lytton Strachey - 1 August 1907

    “I kissed Duncan for the first time – oh! It was hardly a kiss – and plunged into a sea of passion”.

  • From Keynes to Duncan Grant - 12 April 1910

    “I had a dreadful conversation on Sunday with my mother and Margaret about marriage and had practically to admit to them what I was! How much they grasped I don’t know”.