John Maynard Keynes.

ROY HARROD's "official" biography of John Maynard Keynes, published in 1951, was a most unwelcome kind of tour de force: a boring book about a fascinating man. One would have thought it impossible to write dully about an economist who claimed that his only regret in life was that he hadn't drunk more champagne, but The Life of John Maynard Keynes is grim proof that, to the pedant, all bad things are possible.

Harrod's main problem, of course, was that he was unwilling to discuss Keynes's homosexuality and consequently unable to write honestly about his private life. ("This is the biography of Lord Keynes," a friend remarked after reading it. "Someone else must write the life of Maynard.") Others have written frankly about Keynes since Harrod--most notably Michael Holroyd in his Lytton Strachey biography and Leon Edel in his elegant Bloomsbury: A House of Lions--but Keynes's private life has remained for the most part unchronicled.

Until now, that is. Charles H. Hession, an American economist, has brought out a "personal biography" of Keynes that is certainly an icebreaker. If the author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was ever really in the closet, Mr. Hession has blasted him out of it once and for all.

Beyond its rather mild shock value, however, it is hard to see any lasting merit in Mr. Hession's book, which suffers from a bad case of undefined audience. Dorothy L. Sayers called her novel Busman's Honeymoon "a love story with detective interruptions"; depending on your point of view, John Maynard Keynes is either a psychobiography with economic interruptions, a popular biography with technical interruptions, or a critical biography with psychological interruptions. Unfortunately, it is far too short to serve as anything more than a sketchy introduction to Keynes the economist, and Mr. Hession is not nearly good enough a writer to convey Keynes's personality with the force and vividness of a Leon Edel; economists are likely to find John Maynard Keynes trivial, lay readers to find it dull.

As a psychologist, Mr. Hession is--well, an economist. He has, of course, a theory: that Keynes's homosexuality made him an "outsider" and thus left its mark on every aspect of his private and public life.

Several economists have been puzzled at his critical stance toward English society--how could an elitist such as he, the precious product of upper-middle-class society, the aristocrat of Eton and Cambridge, take so critical a view of the Establishment? It seems to defy the Marxian analysis of the social class structure and of class consciousness. What such a view overlooks was that as a homosexual he was an outsider, or rather, considering his access to those in power, he was an outsider insider. . . . Keynes's skepticism of conventional belief . . . in [the areas of sex and religion] probably contributed to his questioning attitude toward the respectable and accepted in the economic and political realms.

Leaving aside the absurd image of Keynes as "outsider insider," this is an undeniably compelling argument, one which both George Steiner and Malcolm Muggeridge have made a great deal of in their varying ways. (Commenting in Time on the Anthony Blunt case, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: "I remember reading an account of Lytton Strachey sitting on a rock in the Isle of Skye, weeping over a lost lover he had shared with Maynard Keynes, and thinking to myself how perfectly they got their own back, Keynes by inventing an economic theory which, after a period of spurious prosperity, must infallibly bankrupt the countries which adopt it, and Strachey by overturning the gods of the Victorian age, and with them the virtues such as thrift, hard work, integrity, and truthfulness which they symbolized.") But Mr. Hession drains it of its moral force and reduces it to a Freudian hobbyhorse, dragging in gratuitous citations from one pop psychologist after another to make his all-too-obvious points. The notion of Keynes as the Unholy Ghost of Economics, merrily debauching the currency to get back at the House of Lords for sending Oscar Wilde to jail, is plainly a ridiculous oversimplification; but at least it has an intellectual tang that Mr. Hession's bland excursions into psychoanalysis-and-water lack.

Such a notion might have served as the organizing principle behind a really good popular biography of Keynes--something on the order of, say, Mr. Muggeridge's scathing little book about Samuel Butler. And a pithy brief life of Keynes would meet a real need. No doubt Robert Skidelsky's forthcoming multi-volume biography of Keynes will win the Nobel Prize for seriousness; still, it would be nice if somebody got around to writing a stylish, intelligent book about the late-rising champagne-lover who married a ballerina and whose confused, persuasive theories led to the precarious economic situation the world is in today. Leon Edel or Peter Drucker could have done it. Charles Hession's John Maynard Keynes, despite its good intensions, doesn't even come close.