Grand Pursuit

by Sylvia Nasar

  Like Webb, Robinson had to reinvent herself. Despite her impressive pedigree, cavernous family mansion, and posh private schooling, she was being groomed to support a husband’s career rather than to pursue one of her own. But at fourteen, she was already dreamy, bookish, and introverted. The world of her imagination seemed more vivid than the world around her. She wrote constantly: essays, stories, poetry. She wanted an audience badly enough to declaim her poems at Poet’s Corner in Hyde Park.

  The Maurice affair, which occupied Parliament in 1918, was a source of pride as well as pain. Even by Edwardian standards, Major General Maurice was an aloof and distant father. All emotion, he believed, was selfish. When he was forced out of the army, he wrote to his children that he was “persuaded that I am doing what is right, and once that is so, nothing else matters to a man,” adding that this was what Christ meant when he directed his followers to forsake their parents and children for his sake. His son-in-law Austin Robinson observed, “He no more noticed anything irrelevant to his immediate preoccupation than shadows reflected on a wall.”25 On one occasion, Joan’s sister Nancy was behind their father on a ski trail when she slipped on a bridge and wound up hanging upside down over the gorge. A passing ski instructor had to rescue her.

  Despite her family’s numerous connections to Cambridge, Robinson was the only one of the four Maurice sisters to go to university. Higher education was still considered superfluous for an upper-class English girl. And her father’s forced retirement may have made it unaffordable had Robinson, as single-minded as her father when she wanted something, not won a teacher’s scholarship. She enrolled at Girton College, the oldest women’s college at Cambridge, whose mock-medieval architecture and remoteness from the men’s colleges prompted the philosopher C. S. Lewis to compare it to the Castle of Otranto in Horace Walpole’s Gothic novel.26

  As a student at St. Paul’s School for Girls during the painful and prolonged recession of 1920–21, Robinson had done volunteer work at a London settlement house. When she went up to Cambridge in the late summer of 1922, the downturn was entering its third year. With unemployment in the double digits and the subject of heated political debate, Robinson decided that she would give up history, her favorite subject at St. Paul’s, and take up economics instead. As one of her biographers, Marjorie Turner, observed, poverty and unemployment were blemishes of the society in which she and her family occupied a privileged position, and she felt compelled to understand them.

  Cambridge in the 1920s may have seemed like a lush suburb of Bloomsbury, where T. S. Eliot, Roger Fry, G. E. Moore, and John Maynard Keynes wandered about, but female undergraduates were forbidden many of its fruits. Countless rules limited intellectual intercourse with resident geniuses, whether dons or students. The one that forbade them to wear gowns to lectures like the men and required them to wear dresses and hats instead was only one of many daily reminders of their inferior status. When Bertrand Russell was scheduled to lecture at Newnham College, the second-oldest women’s college, the panicked authorities first threatened to rescind the invitation, then issued an injunction forbidding any young lady “to accompany him from lecture room to door.”27 Robinson and other female students of Arthur Pigou, an eminent economist who held Alfred Marshall’s former chair, could only deliver their essays to the porter’s lodge, whereas his male students could bring them directly to his rooms, where they might easily be invited to stay and chat. The Union, where the undergraduate Keynes had sharpened his debating skills against those of future prime ministers, was off-limits to women, except for the upstairs gallery. So was the Cambridge Conversazione Society, aka the Apostles, where the mathematician Frank Ramsey, who was exactly Robinson’s age, came to the attention of his future mentors Keynes and Russell. Keynes’s own nursery for future stars, the Monday Political Economy Club, was open—by invitation only—to male but not female undergraduates.

  Instead of having one of Cambridge’s Olympians as a tutor, Robinson was assigned a smartly dressed daughter of a New York perfume manufacturer. Still in her twenties, Marjorie Tappan had studied economics at Columbia University—although there is no record there of her having received a doctorate, as she claimed—before working for the American economics team at the Paris peace talks for two years. Robinson detested her. Whether her resentment was due to the fact that Tappan was a rich American whose family was in “trade” or simply the fact that Tappan was not one of the luminaries is hard to know. The only thing that seems to have rubbed off on Robinson was Tappan’s habit of using a long cigarette holder when she smoked, and gesturing with it while talking with her students.

  Robinson attended the lectures of Pigou on economic theory and the less frequent ones of Keynes on current economic issues, but her undergraduate papers gave little hint of her future. “Beauty and the Beast,” delivered at the Marshall Society in her third year at Cambridge, was a charming pastiche that proved that she could write and had a firm grasp of Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics. But compared with the problems some of her male peers were solving, it was sophomoric. At twenty-one, Keynes’s protégé Frank Ramsey had published a devastating paper on Keynes’s probability theory, a forceful critique of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and an article for Keynes’s Economic Journal showing that a wildly popular economic panacea, the Douglas social credit scheme, was based on a faulty premise.

  Despite some early successes, Robinson’s undergraduate career ended in tears. She took part one of the economic Tripos in 1924, and part two the following year. Her second-class results on both, which dashed any hope of a college fellowship, were “a great disappointment” to her.28 Years later she was still fretting over “being so badly educated.”29 Mortified, she moved back home to London, where she spent the fall and winter in a “wretched state” living in a “grubby room” in London’s East End and working in a government housing office.30 She was so miserable that she asked her father to investigate various possibilities in America, among them a scholarship to Harvard’s sister college, Radcliffe. But in the spring, she decided to opt for the traditional solution to a female career quandary. On the eve of the General Strike of May 1926, Robinson was in Paris with her sister Nancy shopping for wedding clothes.

  Her fiancé was a clean-cut thirty-two-year-old Cambridge don. The son of an impecunious parson, Austin Robinson was a decorated World War I seaplane pilot who was so electrified by Keynes’s 1919 lectures on the Versailles peace treaty that he switched from classics to economics. Bright, efficient, and incredibly hardworking, he was invited by Keynes to join the Monday-night Political Economy Club, got a first-class degree in economics, and was elected fellow of Corpus Christi College. By Joan’s second year, he was giving lectures on monetary economics. They did not become a couple until Joan left Cambridge for London.

  While Austin was besotted, Joan was cooler, refusing him the first time he proposed. He was handsome, intelligent, upright, respected, kind—and seemingly unthreatened by her expressed desire for some money-making occupation. Yet, against the bold canvas of her imagined future life, he lacked color. A dozen years later, when Stevie Smith, one of her many literary acquaintances, invited her to suggest a plot for a novel, Robinson proposed one about a girl who was torn between two lovers, one of whom was a conventional young man with a good job who promised to provide her with an “orthodox life” that she “tries to force herself to want.”31 It was an unpromising start for a marriage.

  “I want desperately to stay in Cambridge,” Austin confessed to her after they became engaged.32 But despite Keynes’s patronage, his prospects of a salaried university position there or anywhere else in England were far from good. There were simply no academic openings. When Joan learned, from a friend’s father, that the old maharajah of Gwalior, India—an Anglophile who insisted on naming his children George and May and importing tutors from Cambridge—had died, leaving behind a ten-year-old heir in urgent need of instruction, she pressed Austin to apply for the post. While they waited for job opportu
nities to open up at home, she pointed out to Austin he would be earning several times as much as any lecturer in England.

  The newlyweds wound up spending the first two years of their married life in an ancient Indian city with “broad streets, beautifully carved balconies, doors and latticed windows, mosques and temples, old and new Palaces,”33 on the main line between Delhi and Bombay. Although Joan was close to her family, it was delightful for the couple to be on their own. Life in Gwalior involved riding at dawn with the lancers and the boy maharajah, lessons in Hindi at lunchtime, tennis, newspapers, and cocktails at the club before dinner. With a personal staff of a dozen servants, including five gardeners, Joan felt free to teach an economics course at a local secondary school. She worked on a paper that Austin was asked to write on India’s likely future contribution to British tax revenues. Meanwhile, she thought about how she might best help her husband secure a permanent lectureship at Cambridge University, and also about what work she might do. Dorothy Garratt had teased her that if she had not married a minister’s son she would “probably be scrubbing lavatory seats in a leper colony or embroidering chasubles for curates.”34 At one point, she thought about opening an import business in Indian handicrafts.

  With her husband’s three-year tutoring contract due to expire at the end of 1928, Robinson went back to Cambridge on her own that July. Her idea was to personally deliver the report they had written together and to use her connections to pave the way for Austin’s return. She was, and would always be, an enterprising and persistent networker. Less than two years later, by May 1930, Austin had his appointment as a permanent, full-time university lecturer. Until then, while Austin wrote his first book, they lived on their considerable savings. Only after Austin’s future was assured, say her biographers, did she begin to focus seriously on her own career.

  India and marriage had restored her intellectual self-confidence, and Austin gave her access to the university community. Her husband’s success and his friendship with luminaries such as Keynes were gratifying. Lacking a college fellowship and a first-class degree, she paid a £5 fee to get a master’s diploma and let it be known that she was available to coach undergraduates for a modest wage. She could not help being aware that she was still on the outside, an onlooker instead of a participant in the intellectual feast. High table, fellows’ rooms, and clubs were all off-limits to her because of her sex.

  Everything changed in the months after the American stock market crash. Two developments were crucial.

  While she was waiting for Austin to get his appointment in the 1929–30 academic year, Robinson attended a seminar where she learned about a theoretical challenge that had preoccupied some of Keynes’s Cambridge disciples. The seminar had been organized by Piero Sraffa, a brilliant but neurotic autodidact, economist, and communist who fled Mussolini’s Italy in 1927. He had gotten Keynes’s attention with an article calling for a revamping of economic theory to reflect the monopoly elements of modern business: the rise of giant corporations, branding, and advertising. Economists assumed competitive markets with large numbers of buyers and sellers selling identical products. Under such circumstances, no single firm could influence the price at which it sold its output, any more than a farmer could influence the price of wheat or a miner the price of silver. But modern businesses mimicked monopolies and spent large sums to influence prices. That invalidated, Sraffa argued, the principle rationale for competition, namely that a free market economy produced maximum output at minimum cost and opened the door to government intervention. What was needed was a theory. He and several others were already working on various approaches.

  Robinson also befriended Keynes’s “favorite pupil” Richard Kahn, a beautiful, dark-eyed Orthodox Jew who became her ally and helpmeet. Kahn was so gifted that Keynes enlisted him to help him revise A Treatise on Money even though he had had less than a year’s formal training in economics. It was thrilling to interact with men whose intellect she could worship because it was superior to her own.35 She started telling Austin that he was a mere plow horse while Sraffa was a tiger, and she was willing to overlook Kahn’s immaturity, narcissism, and dysfunction. She was becoming aware of a bigger game, and now she wanted to become a player.

  Austin suggested a topic for Sraffa’s challenge when he, Joan, and Kahn had lunch one day. With the help and support of her lover from mid-1930 to early 1933, she took up the challenge. She and Kahn developed a theory to show how advertising, branding, and product innovation caused firms in seemingly competitive industries—that is, in industries with lots of buyers and sellers and no barriers to entry—to behave like monopolies. Instead of minimizing prices to consumers and maximizing output and employment, they used their market power to gouge consumers and earn extraordinary profits, depressing employment and lowering wages. In the context of the Great Depression, Robinson saw herself working out an explanation of how, even under ideal circumstances, the free market economy tended toward long-run unemployment, excess industrial capacity, and stagnation.

  As Robinson’s confidence grew, so did her ambition. In March 1931 Robinson informed Kahn, “I am now toying with the idea of producing a complete book with all this stuff . . . It is not I who am bringing out this book. It is a syndicate of you A + me.”36 Like a general commanding her army, she assigned tasks; Austin would write the introduction, Kahn would pose problems and write the mathematical appendix, and she would draft the book. Six months later, Robinson asked Dennis Robertson, a highly regarded collaborator of Keynes and an expert on the theory of the firm, to write a preface. She told him that she had written five chapters and sketched out another ten. As Aslanbeigui and Oakes observe, Robinson was “clearly planning to publish under her name alone.”37 For the next year and a half, Robinson and Kahn worked intensively on the book, which Robinson soon renamed her “nightmare.”

  Meanwhile, her collaboration with Kahn let her join Keynes’s inner circle. In the first half of 1931, Keynes was grappling with criticisms of A Treatise on Money—especially those of Hayek—and working out some of the ideas that would mature into The General Theory. Between January and May a group of young Cambridge economists, including Sraffa, Kahn, and Austin, that called itself “the Circus” acted as Keynes’s sounding board. Joan attended the weekly meetings and started to send notes to Keynes via Kahn. “Keynes seemed to play the role of God in a morality play,” another participant recalled. “He dominated the play but rarely appeared himself on the stage. Kahn was the Messenger Angel who brought messages and problems from Keynes to the Circus and who went back to Heaven with the result of our deliberations.”38 For Robinson, it was an extraordinary opportunity to gain access to Keynes’s latest thinking as he tried to understand the worst economic crisis in modern history, as well as to hone her own analytic powers.

  Whether her new status was helpful in winning her first formal, if temporary, university teaching post is unclear. In any case, she was appointed junior assistant lecturer. One of her students that year remembered Joan as “young, vigorous and beautiful.” He described her lectures: “She addressed us in abstruse terms . . . I understood little but sat spellbound.”39

  Despite the new demands on her time, her own manuscript was nearly complete by October 1932. At that point, any hesitation on her part to claim ownership had disappeared, write her biographers.40 Husband, wife, and lover seemed to communicate by Cambridge’s five-times-a-day post the way modern couples exchange e-mails. Robinson dashed off a triumphant note to Austin:

  I have found out what my book is about. It was quite a sudden revelation which I only had yesterday. What I have been and gone and done is what Piero said must be done, in his famous article. I have rewritten the whole theory of value beginning with the firm as a monopolist. I used to think I was providing tools for some genius in the future to use, and all the time I have done the job myself.41

  Hitherto she had regarded herself strictly as a teacher. “I used to feel ‘I must tell these people what economists think’—n
ow I really feel I am an economist and I can tell them what I think myself.”42 She told Kahn that “AR” would find her “a Changed Woman. I have recovered my self-respect.” She left no doubt, however, that she now considered herself first among equals, the original thinker, the guiding genius: “You and Kahn and I have been teaching each other economics intensively these two years. But it was I who saw the great light and it is my book.” It is hard to miss the note of glee at having beaten the boys.

  Meanwhile, Kahn was falling in love with Robinson. By 1931 they were having an on-again, off-again affair, greatly alarming Keynes, who feared for his protégé’s career, and made Joan nervous lest a scandal spoil her own imminent academic success. Austin had gone to Africa for six months, and Joan insisted that Kahn also leave Cambridge to cure himself of “lovesickness.” He decided to visit America for a year. Alone, under great stress, and feeling that she was on the verge of a breakdown, Joan worked feverishly to finish her book. While she was proofreading her manuscript, Kahn was at the University of Chicago promoting the book, convincing a doctoral student and future Soviet spy, Frank Coe, to incorporate her as-yet-unpublished analysis into his thesis. Then Kahn delivered a bombshell. Edward Chamberlin, a young Harvard professor, was about to publish a book, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, that overlapped with hers and would precede hers by at least six months. In February, Kahn visited Harvard, where he arranged to deliver a lecture one day before Chamberlin’s book was released. When he claimed that Robinson’s theory and analytical techniques were superior, Chamberlin, who was in the audience, failed to deliver an effective rebuttal. “I feel a viscious [sic] pleasure at hearing that Chamberlin is no good,” Robinson wrote to Kahn on March 2, 1933, in response to his account of the confrontation. She added that she would “just put in a note” in her preface that she had known nothing of his work. She considered asking Keynes to let her review Chamberlin’s book for the Economic Journal but realized that “on second thought that would be bad” and that she could “deal with him sometime after I am out.”43