Authors: David Leavitt
The Indian Clerk (9 page)
The rain keeps up its pluvial dance. He runs all the way to Nevile's Court without opening his umbrella. He likes the feel
of the beads of water sliding down his forehead, and only wishes he wasn't so hungry.
One thing to be glad for is solitude. If he chooses to, he can go straight to bed. No phantom lover will visit him in his
dreams. (And of whom will Hardy dream? He shudders to think.) Or perhaps he won't go to bed at all. Perhaps he'll sit up all
night, studying the Indian's letter. And if he does, there'll be no one to scold him. No shadowed figure in a nightdress,
holding a candle, will beg him to come to bed. No child will call him to comfort her after a nightmare.
He steps indoors. The silence of his rooms is familiar, consoling. No two silences are alike, he thinks; each has its own
contours and shadings, because inside each silence there is the absence of a sound, and in this case it is the sound of Mozart
played badly on a piano, or Beethoven, played beautifully, issuing from the horn of a gramophone. He takes off his jacket,
and as he does he smells Anne's scent on it—very faint now. Then he kicks off his shoes, lights his pipe, and sits down to
reread the letter.
C
LOSE TO MIDNIGHT the rain thins a little. Hardy, in his pyjamas, watches it through the window that gives on to the archway.
Although of late he's got into the habit of going to bed on the early side, tonight he can't imagine sleeping. Despite his
mounting excitement over Ramanujan's new letter, he's fallen into a bad humor, thanks to Littlewood's barb about Mercer. It
was his own fault, of course. If he hadn't mentioned Littlewood's having been senior wrangler, Littlewood would never have
brought up Mercer. The fact is, Hardy doesn't want to be reminded of Mercer, whom—he cannot pretend otherwise—he has pretty
much abandoned. For instance, when Mercer returned to Cambridge last year, he sent Hardy a card inviting him to call on him
and his new bride. Hardy never replied. There was no good reason for it, either, other than that Mercer was no longer at Trinity.
Then again, Christ's College is hardly the other side of the world.
His new bride. What would Gaye have to say about that?
Almost automatically, Hardy glances across the room. From the mantelpiece, the bust gazes down at him
(Gaye gazes),
its aspect as reproachful as that of Sheppard's mother. It's a small bust, made when Gaye was fifteen, the expression, as
always, glinting and coy. Sometimes Hardy wonders what would happen if he took the bust and smashed it to pieces, or stuffed
it away in a cupboard, or presented it as a gift to Butler, who, given the circumstances, would probably stuff it in a cupboard
of his own.
The answer, of course, is that it would make no difference. Gaye's hand is all over the room. Grant him this much: he had
taste. He picked the Turkey carpet, and soaked the chintz curtains in a bathtub full of tea to give them their look of having
hung for years in a country house. He chose the checked fabric for the cushions on Hardy's rattan chair—the very cushions
Hardy is sitting on now. All this, even though Hardy was leaving him. Poor Gaye, always so drawn to martyrdom! The old painting
of Saint Sebastian he kept over his bed should have been a clue. It's gone now, taken away by his brother, along with everything
else that was of any value.
And why did Gaye's brother not take the bust? It's true, when he came around, Hardy made a point of standing it in a back
corner of his bedroom, not the most likely place to look. But he didn't hide it. Afterward, for years, he kept expecting a
letter from the family, demanding restitution of the bust. None ever came. Perhaps they were as eager to forget about Gaye
as everyone else was.
Around one, he gets into bed. Still, he can't sleep. Figures swirl in his head, fragments memorized for the tripos, and oddities
from Ramanujan, and the zeta function, its peaks and valleys and the spire soaring up to infinity when it takes the value
of 1 . . . This often happens to him. Sometimes such insomnia bodes well, means that a breakthrough will come in the morning.
More often he wakes ill-humored and unable to work. So why doesn't he share Littlewood's terror of false hope?
And then—just, it seems, as he is falling asleep (though later he will realize that he had been asleep for almost two hours)—there
is a knock on the door. At another time in his life, this wouldn't have surprised him. A visitor at three in the morning would
have been routine. Now, though, the knock disorients him, throws him into a panic. "Just a minute," he calls, putting on his
dressing gown. "Who is it?"
"Me. Littlewood."
He opens the door. Littlewood strides in, dripping and umbrellaless.
"The stuff about primes is wrong," he says.
"What?"
"Oh, sorry. Have I woken you?"
"It doesn't matter. Come in."
Without even removing his coat, Littlewood heads for the blackboard, still covered with Hardy's earlier scribblings. "I couldn't
sleep so I started looking over the letter and—may I?"
"Of course."
"Right, so this is what I think he's done." He wipes the blackboard clean. "Here's his formula for calculating the number
of primes less than
n.
Well, it's the usual Riemannian formula, except that he's left out the terms coming from the zeros of the zeta function. And
his results—I've tested them—are just what you'd get if the zeta function had
no
non-trivial zeros."
"Damn."
"I have a vague theory as to how the mistake came about. He's staking everything on the legitimacy of some operations he's
doing on divergent series, banking on a hunch that if the first results are correct, the theorem must be true. And the first
results
are
correct. Even up to a thousand the formula gives exactly the right answer. Unfortunately, he had no one around to warn him
that the primes like to misbehave once they get larger."
"Still, leaving out the zeros . . . it's not an encouraging sign."
"Oh, but there I disagree, Hardy. I think it's a very encouraging sign." Littlewood steps closer. "You must realize, ordinary
mathematicians don't make mistakes like this. Even very good mathematicians don't make mistakes like this. And when you consider
the other stuff, the stuff on continued fractions and elliptic functions . . . I can believe he's at least a Jacobi."
Hardy raises his eyebrows. Now
this
is high praise. Since starting at Trinity, he's kept up a mental ranking of the great mathematicians, putting each in the
class of a cricketer whom he admires. He judges himself the equal of Shrimp Levison-Gower, Littlewood on a par with Fry, Gauss
in the category of Grace, the greatest player in the history of the game. Jacobi, the last time Hardy ranked him, was somewhere
above Fry but below Grace—in the vicinity of the young and dazzling Jack Hobbs—which means that Ramanujan, if Littlewood is
correct, might have the potential to be another Grace. He could well prove the Riemann hypothesis.
"What about the rest?"
"I haven't had a chance to go over these other asymptotic formulas, but at first glance, they look to be totally original.
And significant."
"But no proofs."
"I don't think he really understands what a proof is, or that it's important to give one, because he's been working on his
own all these years, and who knows what books, if any, he has access to. Perhaps no one's taught him. Could you teach him?"
"I've never tried to teach anyone
why
you have to give proofs. My students have always just . . . understood."
There is a moment of quiet, now, of which Hermione takes advantage by rubbing herself against Littlewood's leg. When he tries
to pick her up, she runs for cover beneath the ottoman.
"A tease, that female. Come here, kitten!"
"She can't hear you. Remember?"
"Oh, of course." Littlewood regards the floor.
"And what are we to do now?" Hardy asks.
"Is there any question? Bring him to England."
"He's said nothing about wanting to come."
"Of course he wants to come. Why else would he have written? And what's he got in Madras? A clerkship."
"But if we get him here, will we know what to do with him?"
"I think the more apt question is, will he know what to do with us?"
Littlewood pushes his glasses up on his nose. "Have you heard from the India Office, by the way?"
"Not yet."
"Well, if you want my advice, which you may not, there's only one course to take, and that's to get a man to Madras. And soon.
I think Neville's supposed to give some lectures there in December."
"Neville?"
"Don't scoff. He's a decent chap."
"Neville is a perfectly capable mathematician who will never in his life do anything of consequence."
"The ideal emissary, then." Littlewood laughs. "Let's bring him in on it, shall we? And then, when he gets to Madras, he can
see this Ramanujan, feel him out, see what he wants and if he's what we want."
"But is Neville capable of such discernment?"
"If he's not, his wife is. Have you met Alice Neville? An impressive young woman." Littlewood is already moving toward the
door. "Yes, it's the best plan. What's the saying? If you can't bring Mohammed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed."
"Wrong religion," Hardy says.
"Oh, well, Vishnu then! Good God, Hardy, you can be quite a stickler." But Littlewood is laughing as he says this, laughing
as he descends the stairs, laughing as, with a whistle and whoop, he steps out onto the rain-soaked paving stones of New Court.
New Lecture Hall, Harvard University
O
N THE LAST DAY of August, 1936, the great mathematician G. H. Hardy put down his chalk and returned to the dais. "The real
tragedy about Ramanujan," he said, "was not his early death. It is of course a disaster that any great man should die young,
but a mathematician is often comparatively old at thirty, and his death may be less of a catastrophe than it seems. Abel died
at twenty-six and, although he would no doubt have added a great deal more to mathematics, he could hardly have become a greater
man. The tragedy of Ramanujan was not that he died young, but that, during his five unfortunate years, his genius was misdirected,
sidetracked, and to a certain extent distorted."
He paused. Did his audience understand what he meant? Might they think that he was referring to the five years Ramanujan spent
in England?
No, he wanted to say,
not
his years in England. I mean the crucial years just before he came to England, when he needed education as a newborn child
needs oxygen.
Or perhaps—and here, in his own mind, he stepped back—I really do mean his years in England, which in their way were also
years of damage.
He would have liked to say:
So little seems certain anymore. Words that I wrote in the immediate aftermath of his death, when I read them today, strike
me as rank with sentimentality. They emanate the desperation of a man trying to escape guilt and blame. I tried to make a
virtue of his ignorance, to persuade myself and others that he profited from the years he spent in isolation, when in fact
they were an insurmountable handicap.
Nothing ever came easily to him, and there is no way to pretend that this was to his good. He was very poor and lived in a
provincial town, more than a day's journey from Madras. And though he went to school (he was of a high caste), school was
not kind to him. Starting when he was fifteen, sixteen, he was treated as a pariah. The Indian educational system, in those
years, was terribly rigid, far more rigid than our own, on which it was modeled. The system rewarded the nebulous ideal of
"well-roundedness"; it was designed to churn out the bureaucrats and technicians who would oversee the Indian empire (under
our supervision, of course). What it was not designed to do was to recognize genius—its obsessiveness and its blindness, its
refusal to be anything other than what it is.
School after school failed Ramanujan because at school after school he ignored all his subjects except mathematics. Even at
mathematics he was at times mediocre, because the mathematics that he was being taught bored and irritated him. From his youth—from
when he was seven, eight years of age—he was following the signposts of his own imagination.
One example will suffice. When he was eleven, studying at Town High School in Kumbakonam, his maths teacher explained that
if you divide any number by itself, you will get 1. If you have sixteen bananas and divided them among sixteen people, each
will get one banana. If you have 10,000 bananas and divide them among 10,000 people, each will get one banana. Then Ramanujan
stood up and asked what would happen if you divided no bananas among no people.
You see, even then, when he was still doing well, the troublemaker in him was starting to emerge.
I think I sensed all this from his early letters. He was a man whom the dispensers of prizes had failed to esteem properly
and he resented them for it. Naturally this rejection led him to doubt his own worth; and yet from the start he also displayed
a certain hubris, a faith in his genius, and took a solitary pride in knowing that he was better than his time and place.
If the world in which he lived failed to value him, it was that world's fault, not his own. Why should he then cooperate?
Yet this is a very lonely sort of victory.
Of course, in this regard I was his opposite. I was the boy who won all the prizes—this, though I despised prize day with
an intensity that today only the sight of a church procession is likely to rouse in me. To hear my name called, and then to
have to get up before the entire school to accept my prize, provoked in me such a furor of shame and self-loathing as to make
my legs wobble; I would stagger onto the stage in a kind of fever, take the book or token with clammy hands, grit my teeth
so as not to vomit. By the time I got to Winchester, this peculiar variant of stage fright had got so bad that I started deliberately
giving the wrong answers on examinations, just in order to be spared the ordeal of the prize. But not—I must be truthful about
this—often enough that I might jeopardize my future. For I craved the imprimatur of Oxford or Cambridge, the approbation that
Ramanujan was denied.
Why such hatred of prizes? I think it was because I knew, even as I excelled on its greeneries, that the playing field was
rigged. It was rigged to reward the rich, the well fed, the well cared for. And, as my parents made sure constantly to remind
me, I was not one of these. I was lucky to be there at all. Talent would not assist the son of the miner in Wales:
he'd
spend his life in the mines, even if he had the proof for the Riemann hypothesis in his head. Always my parents told me to
pray for my own good fortune, and theirs.
Perhaps it is a sign of weakness that I played by the rules. No doubt some future biographer (if I merit one) will censure
me for this failure of nerve. For there is another way to look at Ramanujan: as the resolute mind whom genius permits no other
course but to follow its instincts, even at its own peril.
Once I arrived at Cambridge my mistrust of prizes, rather than abating, found a new target in the tripos. The men I despised
the most were the ones who, unlike me and Littlewood, viewed victory on the tripos as a goal in its own right, and made wranglerhood
the object of their education. It was to stop in its tracks the system that encouraged such fevered ambitions and immoderate
hungers that I set out to reform the tripos, if not abolish it outright. And the ironic result of my success was this: never
was the fever for tripos victory so intense as it was in 1909, the year the last senior wrangler was to be crowned.
Which brings me to Eric Neville—the man some credit with persuading Ramanujan to come to England. Later on, we became friends,
and remain friends to this day, his wife notwithstanding. In 1909, however, Neville existed for me merely in one dimension,
as the man considered the favorite, that year, to be senior wrangler. As it turned out, he came in second, and I remember
gloating a little bit, thinking that he would never recover from the disappointment. He wanted so desperately to go down in
history as the last of the senior wranglers.
But it is not of this tripos that I am thinking tonight; no, it is of an earlier tripos, the tripos of 1905, the one tripos
during which I myself (I am ashamed to admit it) played the very role I now vilify: that of coach.
The boy I coached was named Mercer. James Mercer.
How to explain my closeness to Mercer? I suppose, at first, I was drawn to him because, like me, he was an outsider. He had
come to Cambridge from University College, Liverpool, and was consequently older than most of the other men. Shy of his accent.
The first time he came to see me, he covered his mouth with his hand.
And now I see that I must go back further and tell you about Gaye. Yes, my narrative tonight is not so much unfolding as opening
inward, like a set of Russian nesting dolls being unpacked. Well, you must trust me that we will get back to the tripos—and
Ramanujan—and Mercer—in due time.
What year was that? 1904, yes—which means that Gaye and I had been sharing the suite a year; that suite of rooms through the
door to which I shall never again, so long as I live, pass; beautiful rooms, overlooking Great Court.
I don't know what to call him now. When we were alone, we were Russell and Harold. But when there were other people around
we were Gaye and Hardy. In those years, in our circle, men always called each other by their last names.
I met him—I forget how I met him. We simply knew each other not well, and then we knew each other well. It was like that at
Cambridge. The context might have been theatrical—I recall a student production of
Twelfth Night
in which Strachey played Maria and Gaye was Malvolio and I was "the critic." I was usually the critic. And Gaye and I talking,
talking. The small, soft mouth and the dark eyes, with their expression of mingled vulnerability and exasperation, made me
want to be near him as much as I could, and at the same time not to let on how much I wanted to be near him; to keep enough
distance not to implicate myself. For I was like him in many ways, full of wistful longing, and yet determined to gain the
upper hand, which he still had in those days before both Trinity and I expelled him. Of course, this was not long after G.
E. Moore had gone off with Ainsworth, and so the last thing I wanted to do was to show weakness.
I should add that I did not know then how weak Gaye himself was: weak and sly and impatient; possessed of that slashing wit
that is so often the obverse of vulnerability. From his mouth there were always emerging these perfectly formed little clevernesses,
like jewels or scarabs, all the more stunning for the wet innocence of the lips that uttered them.
No one thought anything of our choosing to share the suite. In Cambridge, it was common in those days for young men to be
"inseparable," and to function as couples, and socialize as couples. Gaye and I were hardly the only ones. We hosted little
suppers that first year, to which we invited people like O. B., who smiled upon us and gave us his blessing. Moore and Ainsworth
came to supper once, the four of us before the fire, and Ainsworth putting out his cigarettes on his plate. Gaye had more
to say to him than I did. I should mention that Gaye was a classicist, and a very good one, and that when Trinity let him
go, Trinity did him a monstrous injustice and itself a grave disservice.
The suite consisted of a sitting room with windows overlooking Great Court and two small bedrooms, each with a window overlooking
the roofs of New Court. As a rule, we kept the bedroom doors closed only when students visited, or when one of us needed quiet
to work. That year Gaye was translating Aristotle's
Physics
with another classics fellow whose name, confusingly, was Hardie. So the door to his bedroom was closed more often than not,
at least during the day.
Hermione was still a kitten. We had just acquired her from the sister of Mrs. Bixby, our bedmaker; she worked on a farm near
Grantchester where there was always a wealth of kittens. We'd had another cat, Euclid, but he had died. We were both very
busy, Gaye with his translation, me with my prize fellowships and the several undergraduates I tutored, Mercer among them.
Mercer, with his sea-glass beauty—the beauty of ill health, chronic and likely to get worse. You could see it in his skin,
in the rather weary way he sat in his chair. His eyes were a luminescent gray-green that Strachey, among others, remarked
upon. Even today—and he is dead several years now—his eyes are what I best remember of him.
It had been six years since I myself had taken the tripos. Nothing had changed in the interval except that Herman, not Webb,
was now the coach of choice. He fed the men "potted abstracts," as someone or other referred to them. In his model coliseum
the would-be gladiators were still called upon to recite Newton, to solve problems against the clock, to learn everything
there was to know two hundred years back about heat, lunar theory, optics.
Mercer came to see me because, like me, he couldn't stand it. I remember he wrung his hands. Literally. I don't think I'd
ever seen anyone actually do that before. I thought it was something people only did in novels. There was coffee on the table,
Mercer was wringing his hands, and at some point, he started weeping. I hardly knew what to say. I didn't notice it at the
time, but the door that led to Gaye's bedroom must have been open, for Hermione darted in. She regarded Mercer with an air
of merciless detachment.
(Mercer, merciless.
My brain does not relent from such useless wordplay. It is like a virus.)
He told me how it was. It was like hearing myself complaining to Butler, six years earlier. The tedium. The sense of energy
diverted, imagination stifled. (Would Ramanujan have stood for it?) I asked him how the other men felt, and he said, "Most
of them, they just look at it as what they're here to do. You know, because one's father was sixth wrangler, one's was fifth.
They want to beat their fathers, and get posts as government ministers or what have you. But I'm from Bootle. My father's
just an accountant."
And what of the ones who, like him, aspired to be mathematicians? He mentioned Littlewood. At this point I knew Littlewood
only in passing. ("Passing on his way to the Cam," O. B. reminds me, from the grave.) I'd heard from Barnes that Littlewood
was good. Quite possibly as good as me. And how did
he
feel about the tripos? "He says the whole thing's a waste of time," Mercer said, "but if he looks at it as a game—not a game
he particularly enjoys, but it's the one they play at this college, so what choice does he have?—well, then he can stomach
it. He'll just play with all his might, because he likes to win."
We sat there then. Mercer wrung his hands. I told him of my own experience. By then my opinion—my contempt for the tripos
and desire to see it murdered—was well known, which was probably why Mercer had come to me in the first place. In the meantime
the coffee grew cold. I don't remember exactly how or why but at some point a surge of empathy must have seized me, for I
found myself offering to coach him myself. I also lent him my copy of the
Cours d'analyse.
"For every hour we waste on the tripos," I said, "we'll spend an hour with Jordan. We will wash down the bitter pill with
fine wine."
