Authors: David Leavitt
The Indian Clerk (4 page)
Later, he tried to explain all this to O. B. Through the Apostles they had become, in a peculiar way, friends. Although O.
B. never made his famously salacious jokes to Hardy, or tried to touch him, he did have a habit of dropping by Hardy's rooms
unexpectedly in the afternoons. Often he would speak of Oscar Wilde, who had been his friend and whom he greatly admired.
"Just before he died I saw him in Paris," O. B. said. "I was driving in a cab and passed him before I realized who he was.
But he recognized me. Oh, the pain in his eyes . . ."
At this stage in his life, Hardy knew little of Wilde beyond what rumors had managed to slip through the fortifications that
his Winchester masters had erected to protect their charges from news of the trials. Now he asked O. B. to tell him the whole
story, and O. B. obliged: the glory days, Bosie's perfidy, the notorious testimony of the hotel maids . . . Even today, only
a few years after Wilde's death, the scandal was still fresh enough that one dared not risk being seen carrying a copy of
one of his books. Still, O. B. loaned Hardy
The
Decay of Lying.
When Hardy touched the covers, heat seemed to rise off them, as off an iron. He devoured the book, and afterward copied out,
in his elegant hand, a passage that had made a particularly strong impression on him:
Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.
It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of
its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own
progress.
So of art, he decided, of mathematics. Its pursuit should be tainted neither by religion nor utility. Indeed, its uselessness
was its majesty. Suppose, for instance, that you proved Fermat's Last Theorem. What would you have contributed to the good
of the world? Absolutely nothing. Advances in chemistry aided the cotton mills in developing new dyeing processes. Physics
could be applied to ballistics and gunnery. But mathematics? It could never serve any practical or warlike purpose. In Wilde's
words, it "developed purely on its own lines." Far from a limitation, its uselessness was evidence of its limitlessness.
The bother was, whenever he tried to articulate this to O. B., he got tied up in knots—such as on the evening when he complained
that the mathematics tested on the tripos was pointless.
"I don't understand you," O. B. said to him. "One day you're carrying on about how gloriously useless mathematics is, the
next you're grumbling that the mathematics that the tripos tests is useless. Which of you am I to believe?"
"I don't mean it the same way," Hardy said. "The stuff on the tripos isn't useless the way pure mathematics is useless. It's
not a question of applicability. If anything, the tripos stuff is eminently applicable . . . just antiquated."
"Latin and Greek are antiquated. So should we give those up?"
Hardy tried to put his position in a language O. B. would understand. "All right, look," he said. "Imagine you're taking an
exam in the history of English literature. Only for the purposes of the exam, you have to write your answers in Middle English.
It doesn't matter that you'll never be called to write an exam, or anything else for that matter, in Middle English ever again,
you still have to write your answers in Middle English. And not only that, the questions you have to answer—they're not about
major writers, they're not about Chaucer and Milton and Pope, they're about, I don't know, some obscure poets no one's ever
heard of. And you have to memorize every word that the poets wrote. And these poets wrote hundreds of thousands of terribly
boring poems. And on top of that, you have to memorize twelve sixteenth-century treatises on the nature of melancholy and
be prepared to recite any chapter upon being told its number. If you can imagine that, then perhaps you can imagine what it's
like to take the tripos."
"It sounds as if it would be rather fun," O. B. said. "Anyway, I still think you're making an artificial distinction. One
kind of uselessness you glorify because you enjoy it, the other kind you condemn because you find it dull. But it comes to
the same thing."
Hardy was silent. It was obvious that O. B. didn't understand, would never understand. Only a mathematician could. O. B. didn't
know what it felt like to be dragged away from something in which you believed passionately and forced to fix your attention
on something you despised. Nor did he understand the injustice of being obliged to devote years of effort to the acquisition
of skills that, once the tripos was over and done with, you would never again be called upon to employ. More and more O. B.
lived for spectacle: the petits-fours served and the music played at his "at homes," where sailors mingled with dons. He did
not care about ideas or ideals. His fellowship, so far as Hardy could tell, mattered to him only because it allowed him to
remain forever ensconced within the safe confines of King's College. By nature he was a creature of the college. Most of the
Apostles were. A few years earlier McTaggart had written of heaven: "It might be said of a College with as much truth as it
has been said of the Absolute, that it is a unity, that is a unity of spirit, and that none of that spirit exists except as
personal." But of course "the Absolute is a far more perfect unity than a College." With such a sentiment O. B. would not
likely have been in agreement, as for him King's was the perfect unity.
O. B., Hardy knew, did not much care for McTaggart. Nor did he appreciate McTaggart's "religion," a sort of anti-Christian
Christianity in which Platonic souls ascended to a paradise without a God. Hardy felt the same way. One of McTaggart's many
behavioral oddities was that he walked sideways—a habit cultivated during his school days, when he had had to keep close to
walls in order to avoid being kicked. He suffered from a slight curvature of the spine, and navigated the streets of Cambridge
on a lumbering antique tricycle. Years before, he had delivered a paper to the Society entitled "Violets or Orange-Blossom?"
in which he put forward an eloquent defense of love between men, which he believed to be superior to love between men and
women, so long as a clear distinction was drawn between the "lower sodomy" and the "higher sodomy." When he first gave his
paper, McTaggart firmly allied himself with the higher sodomy, and still did, despite his recent marriage to a robust New
Zealand girl, Daisy Bird, whom he proudly described as being "not the least bit feminine" and with whom, he told the brethren,
he shared everything, including a passion for schoolboys.
All told, Hardy found G. E. Moore more
(Moore, more)
congenial. They met during Hardy's first year at Trinity. The father was five years older than the embryo, but looked the
same age or even younger, which came as a relief. Already Hardy was growing tired of people mistaking him for a schoolboy.
Although Moore was not handsome in a conventional sense, he radiated a childlike gloom that made you want to protect him and
slap him, to tousle the hair creeping out over the wide forehead, and fondle the ears, which had no lobes, and kiss the look
of perpetual surprise off his mouth. Not that Hardy ever had the chance to kiss away that look. The only intimacy Moore conceded
was hand-holding. He was churlish on matters of sex—surprisingly so, given that one of the principal tenets of his own philosophy
(a sort of simultaneous extension and refutation of McTaggart's) was the belief that pleasure is the highest good in life.
Almost from the moment of his birth into the Apostles, he had been acknowledged as a genius, a savior sent down from the heaven
of the angels to awaken the brethren from the torpor of the
fin de siecle.
Walking through the meadows of Grantchester with Hardy, his small hand somehow limp and at the same moment grasping, he would
speak of "goodness." For him, goodness was indefinable, yet also fundamental, the only soil in which a theory of ethics could
take root. And where did goodness lie? In love and beauty. Perhaps unwittingly, Moore was offering the Apostles moral justification
for the pursuit of activities at which most of them were already proficient: the cultivation of beautiful boys and the acquisition
of beautiful objects. Later, out of his whole magnum opus,
Principia Ethica,
the reverent Bloomsbury set extracted a single phrase, placed it on a pedestal, and called it Moore's philosophy: ". . . personal
affections and aesthetic enjoyments include
all
the greatest, and
by far
the greatest, goods we can imagine . . ."
Affection, enjoyment:
on those walks in Grantchester, Hardy tried, and failed, to get Moore, by means of his own words, onto the grass. When their
tussles concluded, as they inevitably did, in frustration and the brushing of dandelions off trousers, Moore would turn the
conversation to mathematics. He would assure Hardy that he was absolutely right to want to pursue pure instead of applied
mathematics. Prime numbers, for Moore, were part of the realm of goodness in a way that sex never could be.
All first loves may be fated to leave one feeling deluded. Hardy's and Moore's only lasted through the first year of Hardy's
membership in the Society. Then Moore met Alfred Ainsworth. They paid their first visit to Ainsworth's rooms together on a
winter evening, to see if Ainsworth might be embryo material. Ainsworth had fresh cheeks and smoky breath. As he talked, he
flicked lit matches at the carpet. Afterward, as he and Moore were leaving, Hardy noticed the tiny burn marks that dotted
the rug, growing in density until they formed a charred circle near the chair on which Ainsworth did his reading.
It was the first and only time in his life that anyone left him for someone else. Within a few weeks Moore's fondness for
Ainsworth had developed into a full-fledged passion, though, as with Hardy, the affair never progressed beyond the hand-holding
stage. This was in part because Ainsworth, unlike Hardy, regarded physical intimacy between men with distaste. Yet surely
someone else—someone like John Maynard Keynes—could have nudged or badgered him into it. Once again, Moore's priggishness
was the sticking point. When, at a gathering of the Society, Moore was asked to sing Schubert lieder (he had a lovely tenor
voice), he attacked the music with gusto, all the while gazing at Ainsworth dreamily. But then he read a paper on whether
it was possible to fall in love with someone purely on the basis of "mental qualities." The knots he tied himself into! "Though,
therefore, we may admit that the appreciation of a person's attitude towards other persons, or, to take one instance, the
love of love, is far the most valuable good we know, and far more valuable than the mere love of beauty, yet we can only admit
this if the first be understood to
include
the latter, in various degrees of directness." Which was basically a way of saying that he could never fall in love with someone
who was ugly.
Had Hardy not considered himself ugly—and had Moore not left him for Ainsworth (whom he, too, thought beautiful)—he might
have greeted the betrayal with outrage or amusement. Instead he observed with dispassion the sorry spectacle of Moore undermining
his own desire. Moore adored Ainsworth, he wanted obviously to sleep with Ainsworth, yet even as he went so far as to move
to Edinburgh in order to live with Ainsworth, who was teaching there, he wouldn't admit it. Then Ainsworth married Moore's
sister, and Moore returned to Cambridge. Hardy didn't know what to say to him when they first ran into each other. Congratulations
on your sister's marriage to your great love? I'm sorry that he left you? It's what you deserve?
It didn't matter. He had learned something important from Moore: to go his own way. His name, he often thought, was providential.
By nature Hardy was fibrous, pertinacious. He stuck to his guns. If the Apostles could overlook Christianity, convention,
"the rules," then he could just as easily cast his attention, as it were,
across
the stupidity of England, even across the obtuseness that fancied itself imperiousness and the ignorance that fancied itself
superiority; across the emblematic channel itself. And where did that attention, once it had begun this tremendous journey,
finally land? In Lower Saxony, in the small city of Gottingen, acknowledged capital of pure mathematics, city of Gauss and
Riemann. Gottingen, which he had never visited, was Hardy's ideal. Whereas in Cambridge newsagents sold photographs of the
senior wrangler, in Gottingen the shops sold picture postcards bearing signed photographs of the great professors. Photographs
of the city itself revealed it to be beautiful and ancient and ornate. From the
rathaus
with its gothic arches and noble spire, cobbled streets extended, small brick houses winking over them like grandmothers,
their white balconies leaning out like aproned stomachs. In one of these houses, two centuries ago, the Gottingen Seven, two
of whom were the brothers Grimm, had rebelled against the sovereignty of the kings of Hanover, while in another the great
mathematician George Friedrich Bernhard Riemann had conjured—out of what? out of the ether?—a famous hypothesis concerning
the distribution of the prime numbers. Yes, the Riemann hypothesis, which Hardy once made the mistake of trying to explain
to the brethren. Still unproven. That was how he began his talk. "It is probably the most important unproven hypothesis in
mathematics," he said from the hearthrug, which sent a ripple of comment through the audience. Then he tried to lead them
through the series of steps by which Riemann established a link between the seemingly arbitrary distribution of the primes
and something called the "zeta function." First he explained the prime number theorem, Gauss's method for calculating the
number of primes up to a certain number
n.
Then, by way of indicating how far Cambridge had fallen behind the continent, he told the story of how, upon his arrival at
Trinity, he had asked Love whether the theorem had been proven, and Love had said, yes, it had been proven, by Riemann—when
in fact it had been proven only years after Riemann's death, independently, by Hadamard and de la Vallee Poussin. "You see,"
he said, "we were that provincial." At this Lytton Strachey, a recent birth (no. 239), gave a high-pitched, snorting laugh.
