Distinguish himself he did. Cranleigh had nourished him but now offered him, at age twelve, nothing more. His parents, who had the highest aspirations for their prodigiously intelligent son, kept tabs on scholarships for which he might be eligible. Around this time, about the scarcest and most coveted scholarship of all was to Winchester, one of England’s most hallowed public schools and a traditional proving ground for the mathematically gifted. Its scholarship exam was among the toughest of its kind; one year in the 1860s, 137 boys competed for seven scholarships. To prepare for it, you normally went to a coach or special school. If you won it, you turned down anything else you might also have won. It was the ultimate feather in a boy’s academic cap.
Hardy applied for it and in 1890, among a field of 102 candidates, placed first.
By the early 1890s, Cranleigh School was beginning to shed the easygoing openness of its early years, Hardy’s father had been named bursar, or treasurer, and the family was living in what was probably a more spacious home, “Connel.” But by then, G. H. Hardy was gone from Cranleigh, headed off to the wider world.
3. FLINT AND STONE
If originally endowed, as were many venerable public schools, to educate poor scholars, Winchester had long ago evolved into a preserve for the gentry. A few hours by rail from London’s Waterloo Station, in the cathedral city bearing the same name, Winchester was the real thing—the sort of place you conjured up, along with Eton, Harrow, and Rugby, when you thought of public school, and which occupied heights to which Cranleigh’s founders could only dream of aspiring.
Over the years, the school graduated more than its share of those whom one school historian could aptly class as “gentlemanly rebels and intellectual reformers.” And twenty years later, it would be fair to describe Hardy as one of them. Winchester didn’t try to, of course; its more usual products were reserved, patrician, conservative social and political leaders. But those who did rebel often became distinguished rebels.
At Winchester, Hardy found much against which to rebel. From outside the ancient complex, he confronted the original college wall, all flint and stone, pierced by tiny slotted windows; these formidable architectural details stemmed from the Peasants’ Revolt, and from bloody town-gown battles at Oxford, both still of recent memory in the fourteenth century when the school was founded. Scholarship students like Hardy lived in a sort of intellectual ghetto within the college, a fortresslike complex of medieval, gray stone buildings, worlds apart from the sunny openness of Cranleigh.
As a new student, Hardy was grilled on “notions”—a vast lexicon of jargon and slang peculiar to Winchester. Some of them went back to the Latin, some were submerged in the mists of the school’s medieval past. Collectively, they defined good form and bad, as Winchester, across the span of centuries, had come to see them. “Tugs” was stale news. To “brock” was to bully. A “remedy,” derived from the Latin remedium, meant “a holiday.” A “tunding” was a flogging at the hands of a prefect, or senior student officer. Learning your notions made for no idle study. There were thousands of words, with whole published glossaries given over to them, some graced with exquisite drawings and illuminated capitals. All had to be memorized.
Making sure they learned their notions and otherwise conformed were the prefects. It was Student Power run amok. Even after Matthew Arnold’s reforms, expressly aimed at curbing the power of the older boys at English public schools, Winchester lay in the grip of these prefects, who lorded it over the younger and weaker students. Conditions were better than a quarter century before, when a particularly cruel incident of tunding—thirty strokes, with a ground-ash stick, across the back and shoulders of a student who bristled at taking his notions exam—had outraged a parent and brought in the press. But Winchester was still reckoned among the most brutal of the public schools. Beatings were the rule, not the exception. And student prefects were still left free by school officials to exercise a Lord of the Flies–like savagery. The place was a vast adolescent hierarchy, a tribal society built on power, privilege, and force.
And tradition. If anything, the current headmaster, W. A. Fearon, was strengthening tradition’s grip on the place. While Hardy was there, he began “Morning Hills,” a twice-yearly schoolwide trek to the top of St. Catherine’s Hill culminating in prayers and a calling of the school roll. He also revived the ancient processions around the Cloisters, where students sang the morning hymn, lam lucis orto sidere, as they solemnly circled through the stone-arched walkways. After the sweet, soft air of Cranleigh, Winchester was like a work farm. The amiable wife of Hardy’s mathematics teacher, Sarah Richardson, known by everyone as “Mrs. Dick,” who held open house on Sunday with cakes and back issues of the Illustrated London News, could scarcely do much to ease the grayness. Neither could Fearon’s humanizing little trips to London. Neither, amazingly, could cricket.
• • •
Back when Hardy was eight, even then the budding writer, he put out his own little newspaper, complete with editorial, advertisements, a speech by Prime Minister Gladstone—and a full report of a cricket match.
As a child growing up in Cranleigh, all through his Winchester years, and beyond, Hardy’s world resonated to the sound of cricket bats and the whirl of white flannel under the summer sun. In Britain’s more gentlemanly circles, cricket was as ubiquitous and important as basketball is in American inner-city neighborhoods, or as baseball once was in Brooklyn. It was the golden age of county cricket in Surrey, and as a youth Hardy would go to the Kennington Oval in London to see cricket greats Richardson and Abel, then in their prime. Back at school, practices were sacrosanct; even detention didn’t interfere. The school magazine was heavy with accounts of matches—like this one between school and village in 1888, when Hardy was eleven:
Played at Cranleigh, July 21st, on a very slow wicket. The village batted first, and were opposed by Robinson and Blaker. Robinson bowled extremely well, and no one but Street could offer any resistance, the whole of the side being dismissed for 53. In the School’s innings, Douglas was bowled in the first over and this was only the commencement of a series of disasters, our total only reaching 45, Warner being the only one to obtain double figures. In the 2nd innings, the village did much better… .
In cricket, one man hurls a ball, another bats it, and fielders rush to catch it. Sounds like baseball, as does its penchant for statistics. But cricket is a more leisurely game, one inspired by quite a different spirit. The ball is delivered—“bowled”—with a straight arm, at the end of a curious loping run, normally first striking the ground in front of the batter. The “batsman,” as he is properly called, uses a paddlelike wooden implement to “defend” the “wicket,” a two-foot-high tridentlike affair, stuck in the ground, atop which lie lightly balanced rods. If the bowler dislodges these rods or induces the batsman to do so, the wicket is lost. The batsman’s object is to get as many runs as possible before he is “dismissed.”
Such an account scarcely does justice to a game whose roots, by Hardy’s time, went back six hundred years, that in organized form had dominated English summers for two hundred, that had its own rich lore, its own etiquette, its own arcane language. (A “sticky wicket,” for example, means that the ground in front of the batsman is wet, making the ball’s bounce more difficult to estimate.) Cricket, one connoisseur of the game, Neville Cardus, once wrote, “is a thing of personal art and skill; it depends not mainly on results, but on the amount of genius and character which is put into it.” Genius and character: the English took the game seriously.
And no Englishman more so than Hardy, to whose days cricket gave almost as much meaning as did mathematics. He devotedly studied his Wisden, the cricket annual crammed with bowling averages, test-match results, and other arcania of the game. In 1910, the minutes of a Cambridge club would alliteratively cite his command of “the University Constitution, the methods of Canvassing, Clarendon type, and professional cricket.” As a young Fellow of Trinity College, he’d play a bastardized form o
f it in his rooms, with walking stick and tennis ball. He’d play it more seriously into his sixties. He reveled in the batsman’s backswing, in tactical nuance, in the logic behind changing bowlers or positioning fielders …
But now at Winchester, even cricket gave him little pleasure. Winchester was as obsessed by the game as Cranleigh. Indeed, some had grown alarmed by the rampant athleticism embodied in cricket’s hold on students. Come summer, one writer for the school paper lamented in June 1893, three years into Hardy’s tenure, “we proceed as if life were one long game of cricket.”
But though Hardy was a natural athlete, his cricket skills atrophied at Winchester. He was, as someone later described him, “small, taut, and wiry,” and played other sports well, especially soccer. “Hardy made an excellent rush … Hardy moved neatly … Hardy was magnificent,” accounts from the period record. But as for cricket, he never played on the team, and left Winchester feeling slighted. Denied the coaching to which he felt his talents entitled him, Snow remembers him grumbling, his defects as a batsman persisted—thus frustrating, at least in his imaginings, a brilliant cricket career.
That was one grudge Hardy bore against Winchester; given his fixation with the game, that was probably enough for him to forever hate the place. But there were others. Poor teaching crushed any artistic ability he inherited from his father. He was shy and sometimes sickly, in a setting with scant tolerance for such frailties. One winter he got so sick he almost died. Later he would feel a shock of envy for the happier experience of a friend who attended school from home, as a day student. After Hardy left Winchester, he couldn’t eat mutton, which was served there, by statute, five days a week. He never returned to visit. He never attended a reunion.
At Winchester, in those days, the classics were still lopsidedly represented. Of twenty-six class hours each week, five each went to Greek, Latin, and history, three to French, two to divinity, two to science, and four to mathematics. But Hardy probably never attended mathematics classes as such, instead working alone with the second master, George (“Dick”) Richardson. Something of an anomaly at Winchester, Richardson had attended Cambridge, ranking high in the mathematical Tripos exam there, but was not himself a public school graduate. He was no model teacher, hardly bothering with any but the better students. These, of course, included Hardy, who in 1893 walked off with the school’s Duncan Prize in mathematics.
But Hardy was not just interested in mathematics. He studied physics on his own, read Tyndall and Huxley, was a devotee of Ruskin, enjoyed headmaster Fearon’s brand of history. So midway through his six years at Winchester, it was not yet clear where his future lay.
• • •
During later life, Hardy had a weakness for detective stories, and over the course of one boring London weekend reputedly consumed several dozen of them; so while he enjoyed good literature, he was not above escapist fare. One day when he was about fifteen, he came upon a book written a few years before under the name Alan St. Aubyn, a pseudonym for a certain Mrs. Frances Marshall who, displaying able judgment, chose not to associate her name with it. The book was called A Fellow of Trinity. It was about university life at Trinity College, Cambridge. And it was awful, its characters silly, its prose insipid. Yet, somehow, it touched a chord in young Hardy, especially its concluding scene, which shows Herbert Flowers, the earnest hero, rejoicing in academic victory.
Herbert was back again at Trinity. He wore a long B.A. gown now, with ribbons on it, that he made no attempt to hide, and a fur hood over his surplice, and sat in great dignity in the Bachelors’ seats in chapel and at the Fellows’ table in Hall.
He was a Fellow of Trinity!
He sat at the high table now, and the grave portraits of the founders and the illustrious dead looked down upon him approvingly.
The ardours, the sorrows, the struggles of the race, were all over; only the brilliant achievement remained. The great cloud of witnesses that looked down from those old rafters overhead upon those who feasted there had never approved a more nobly earned success in the rich intellectual history of the past of Trinity.
He wore his honours as he had worn his misfortunes, with becoming modesty, and was warmly welcomed by the grave, scholarly old Fellows who sat around the great horseshoe table in the Combination Room.
Perhaps he never quite realized until he sat there, on that first night of his Fellowship after Hall, mute and wondering, enjoying the walnuts and the wine—and all that the walnuts and the wine round that horseshoe table represented of scholarly and philosophical learning and culture—how great had been his success!
Hardy was bewitched. “Flowers was a decent enough fellow (so far as ‘Alan St. Aubyn’ could draw one),” Hardy reminisced later, “but even my unsophisticated mind refused to accept him as clever. If he could do these things, why not I?” He, Hardy, would become a Fellow of Trinity, and mathematics would be his ticket to it.
Omitted from Hardy’s account was that Trinity was, after all, Cambridge’s crown jewel, enjoying the richest mathematical tradition of any Cambridge or Oxford college. Still, for a Wykehamist, as Winchester men were known, New College, Oxford, was the more orthodox choice. Both Winchester and New College had been founded by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester and twice lord chancellor, who conceived the two institutions as one, encompassing all the years of school and university. So of the two great universities, Wykehamists normally picked Oxford, in particular New College. In Hardy’s year, 1896, forty-six Wykehamists went to various Oxford colleges, fifteen of them to New College. Only eight went to all the Cambridge colleges combined.
Hardy was one of them, and on a scholarship to boot. “Congratulations are due to Smyth and Hardy for their brilliant success,” noted The Wykehamist, the school newspaper, with uncharacteristic fervor. “It is an unique honor to gain two of the four best scholarships of the year; Winchester has certainly never accomplished it before, and we doubt if any other school can boast such a performance.”
Back in Cranleigh, it was a fine time to be a Hardy. Isaac Hardy’s students had done so well in the big art examination, gushed headmaster Rev. G. C. Allen at the school’s annual Speech Day, that the examiner had compared them favorably to the best in the country. Hear hear, and warm applause erupted from the audience. And now, Allen went on, Mr. Hardy’s son had won a Major Scholarship to Trinity—an achievement which, the local paper wrote, “was one of the highest things even Winchester could expect to get.”
4. A FELLOW OF TRINITY
It would be impossible to exaggerate the role in British life of Cambridge and Oxford. When Havelock Ellis in 1904 prepared his Study of British Genius, based on a thousand or so eminent Britons, of the half who had been to university, 74 percent had been to one or the other of them.
Cambridge, like Oxford eighty miles to the southwest, was first a town—a midsized trading settlement that grew out of a Roman encampment on a hill north of the River Cam. Beginning in the thirteenth century, scholars congregated there and formed colleges. What ultimately emerged was a federation of colleges more like America under the Articles of Confederation—states unto themselves exercising a jealous grip on their rights and powers—than America under the strong central government of the Constitution; you were first a student of your college, only then of the university. Until the Senate House was built in 1720, the university had no central meeting place.
Each college had its own history, its own endowment, its own faculty with its own academic strengths, its own predominant architectural style. Each attracted its own mix of students, who wore their own distinctive undergraduate gowns. Each had its own roster of distinguished graduates. There was Peterhouse, oldest of the Cambridge colleges, established in 1282. And King’s College, with its storied chapel—Wordsworth’s “immense and glorious work of fine intelligence!” And Magdalene, pronounced “maudlin,” at the north end of town across the River Cam, founded by Benedictine monks in 1428 and whose Samuel Pepys Library contained his famous Diary. There were St. Jo
hn’s, Jesus, Gonville and Caius, Pembroke … by Hardy’s time close to twenty in all. Some had just one or two hundred undergraduates and fellows; some, like Trinity, closer to a thousand.
Architecturally, the colleges could be imagined as variations on a powerful and persistent theme: facing the street was a more or less continuous wall of two-or three-story buildings in stone or brick. Entering the college through a great arched gate, you found yourself in a dark passage, to one side of which stood the Porter’s Lodge. There a man in a bowler hat, whose accent instantly marked him as porter and not student, saw to the daily workings of the college—admitting visitors, delivering messages, keeping track of keys. Past the Porter’s Lodge was the enclosed court of the college, whose smartly coiffed grass plot would, even on the grayest of English days, leap at you with green. Around the court, typically on all four sides, were walls of buildings. These included the chapel, the library, and the dining hall, typically a grand, high-ceilinged affair, richly paneled in wood, and studded with framed portraits of college luminaries.
A student might attend university lectures, but he mostly learned through “supervisions,” at the elbow of a college tutor, in his rooms within the college, two or three students at a time. He also had a tutor who watched over his “moral” development, and a director of studies, who monitored his scholarly progress; these, too, were members of the college, not drawn from the university at large. Likely as not, the undergraduate lived “in college”—in a set of rooms off a court of the college reached through one of the staircases spaced every dozen or so paces around it.
The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 16
