The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

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 Grantches-ter 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 be 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.”

  Scratching his head, Mercer went off, not having drunk his coffee and carrying with him a book written in a language he barely understood. From the window I watched him stumble over a paving stone, reading even as he walked. It was a good sign.

  Then I felt a warm hand on my shoulder; shut my eyes.

  “How lovely it must be to be the rescuer,” Gaye said.

  “So you've been listening in?”

  “What choice did I have? Can I help it that Hermione nudged open the door? And then that bawling. It dragged me from Aristotle. I had to make sure everything was all right.”

  “It was nothing I couldn't manage.”

  “Certainly an expressive young man.”

  “He's suffering. He needs my help.”

  “Fine, and what about what you need, Harold? Your own work?” Gaye picked up Mercer's cup from the table, and drank down the cold coffee in a single gulp. “Coaching an undergraduate for the tripos. The tripos, of all things! And after all the screeds I've heard you deliver against the damned—”

  “He won't make it otherwise.”

  “Is it your job to save him?”

  “Someone saved me.”

  “But Love didn't coach you. He just sent you back to Webb.” Gaye put the cup down. “Now if he was ugly—”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course not. Yours is a more specialized erotic thrill, that of rescuing the fair damsel from the jaws of the dragon. Or do you imagine him doing what you couldn't?”

  “What?”

  “Taking his place as senior wrangler and then, while standing atop the carcass of the beast, denouncing the hunt.”

  “You sound jealous.”

  “I am—of the original work that will be lost by virtue of your coaching this—”r />
  “How selfless of you.”

  Gaye picked up Hermione and stroked her neck. “It's your decision, of course. Don't think I'd dream of interfering.”

  Wriggling out of his grip, Hermione slipped back through the door that she (or Gaye) had earlier opened, the door that led to his part of the suite. A few seconds later, Gaye followed her.

  Half an hour later, he popped his head out. “Shall we have supper in tonight?” he asked, then took it back immediately. “But of course not. It's Saturday. Your Saturdays are spoken for.”

  “You know that, Russell.”

  “Gosh, I wonder what they do all those Thaturday nightth, thothe very thmart young men?”

  “I can't talk about this.”

  “No, of course not. Of course you can't.”

  Now I ask myself: why didn't I ever propose him for membership? At the time, I told myself that it was to spare him being made a laughing stock, another Madam Taylor. Or perhaps the truth was that I wanted to spare myself being looked upon as another Sheppard. In thrall.

  The one possibility I never allowed myself to consider was that, unlike Taylor, Gaye might be considered worthy of membership in his own right. And if he had been inducted into the Society—would it have made a difference later on? I don't know. I don't know.

  And where was Ramanujan then? In 1904, he had just graduated from the high school, and won a scholarship to Government College. Still in Kumbakonam; I doubt he'd even been to Madras at this stage. Later, in one of his laughing moods—this must have been during the first year of the war, for I recall that there were soldiers lying on stretchers in Nevile's Court—he told me that back then, Government College was called “the Cambridge of South India.”

  Things started off well enough. He took courses in physiology, in English, in Greek and Roman history. But then he got hold of a copy of Carr's Synopsis of Pure Mathematics, the book that he would later say meant as much to him as Jordan's Cours d'analyse had meant to me. As he explained, his parents, to supplement their small income, sometimes took in students as boarders, and one of the students had left the book behind. Astonishing to think that from this book he got his start. A few weeks ago, before boarding the ship that has carried me to your good country, I borrowed it from the Trinity Library, the one copy there, dusty from disuse. The Synopsis is more than nine hundred pages long. It was published in 1886, and no one had charged it since 1902.

  What was it about this book? Food for a starving man. I can see Ramanujan sitting on the pial, that porch in front of his mother's house about which he so often waxed nostalgic; sitting in the shade while the parade of street life passed before him, and reading through pages and pages of equations, each one numbered. He told me later that he had that book memorized. Had there been a Carr tripos, he would have been prepared to recite each equation chapter and verse, merely upon being given its number. 954: “The Nine-point circle is the circle described through D, E, F, the feet of the perpendiculars on the sides of the triangle ABC.” 5,849: “The product pd has the same value for all geodesics which touch the same line of curvature.” In total 6,165 equations. And he memsuorized them all.

  He became neglectful of his other subjects. Ignoring history, he entertained his friends by making what he called “magic squares”:

  1 2 -3

  -4 0 4

  3 -2 -1

  Or:

  9 10 5

  4 8 12

  11 6 7

  Child's play. Each column adds up to the same number—vertically, horizontally, diagonally. The astonishing thing was that Ramanujan could construct his magic squares in a matter of seconds. During his Greek history class he would sit at his desk, apparently taking notes, when actually he was making magic squares. (He had, needless to say, got hold of a more general theorem without even realizing it.) Or he would list the prime numbers in sequence. Trying even then to find order in them.

  And of course, the more he lost himself in mathematics, the less attention he paid to his other subjects. Physiology, he said, was his worst subject because he had a horror of dissections. I think the truth was that, like most mathematicians, he had a horror of the physical. (After watching his teacher chloroform some sea-frogs for dissection, he asked the teacher, “Sir, have you chosen these sea-frogs because we are all pond-frogs?” That was typical of his wit. He knew even then that Kumbakonam was a small pond.) And then he also did poorly at English, which surprises me, because when I knew him his spoken English was flawless, while his written English, if not the stuff of Shakespeare, was certainly passable. Nevertheless, at the end of the first year, he failed his English composition examination. Notwithstanding his obvious talent for mathematics, his scholarship was taken away. Policy was policy. Now he would have to pay for his schooling—or rather, his parents would have to pay for it. And his parents were poor. His father was some sort of accounts clerk, his mother took in sewing and sang at the local temple to make ends meet. Sometimes there was no food and he had to eat at the houses of his school friends.

  This was the first of several times he ran away. What he did while he was gone he would not tell me—only that he went to another town, north of Madras. Visakhapatnam. Within a month he was home again.

  I think I can imagine how he felt: as angry at himself as at the system—pitiless, unyielding—on which his success depended. Government College had booted him out because he would not play by the rules, and while it enraged him that he was expected to play by the rules—as Littlewood would observe, even then he knew himself to be great—he also despised himself for his own inability (or was it unwillingness?) to be the good boy he was expected to be. For who was there to assure him that his faith in his own greatness was not vanity or illusion?

  And meanwhile, back in Cambridge, Mercer was coming to see me every day. I'd hold the stopwatch. I'd call out the numbers of the Newtonian lemmas, and he'd recite them. Then we'd work through the Cours d'analyse.

  At first, those afternoons, Gaye lingered in his part of the suite. Sometimes he'd leave the door open. Then—after I got up once in the middle of a coaching session and shut it—he stopped leaving it open.

  I was there for the reading of the honors list that year, standing inside the Senate House at nine in the morning, part of a vast crowd in the murk of which I could make out O. B. with Sheppard, who must have had money riding on the favorite. The gallery was reserved for ladies. Newnham and Girton girls were piled three or four deep against the rails. No doubt they were hoping, as they hoped every year, for a repeat of 1890, when Philippa Fawcett had beaten the senior wrangler and her sisters had gone into a frenzy. Since then, no woman had even come close.

  Everyone was talking at once. I should mention that the likely candidates for senior wrangler weren't there. By long tradition, they stayed in their rooms during the reading of the honors list, waiting for their friends to bring them the good or bad news. Still, you could hear their names on the lips of the crowd, and in this way they were more present than they would have been had they actually been there in the flesh.

  The clock of Great St. Mary's Church began to strike nine, and Dodds, the moderator, took his position at the front of the gallery. Instantly the crowd quieted. Dodds was dressed in the full regalia of his college, and clutched in his right hand the bundled honors list, the untying of which he timed to coincide exactly with the sounding of the ninth chord. With religious dignity he intoned: “Results of the mathematical tripos, Part I, 1905.” A beat of silence. “Senior wrangler, J. E. Littlewood, Trinity—”

  Before Dodds could finish, applause erupted from the crowd. So Littlewood had beaten Mercer! A stab of disappointment passed through me, which I tried to dull by reminding myself how much I loathed the tripos. I looked at Sheppard, who was frowning. No doubt he'd put his money on Mercer out of loyalty to me. Then Dodds said, “Please, please, silence! If I may be allowed to continue—Senior wrangler: J. E. Littlewood, Trinity, bracketed with J. Mercer, Trinity.”

  Sheppard's face, dark
with dread moments before, brightened. “Bracketed” meant that Littlewood and Mercer had scored exactly the same number of points. They were tied.

  In spite of myself I let out a cheer. O. B. cast at me a bemused and contemptuous glance. I shut up and listened as the rest of the wranglers and optimes were named, right down to the wooden spoon. By then most of the crowd had gone outside to watch the senior wranglers paraded about in all their glory. I followed. Not far off I saw Littlewood borne aloft by his friends. Was he ecstatic? I doubted it.

  Although, at this point, I hardly knew him, I could guess that he would be phlegmatic about such a victory. Mercer I didn't see at all.

  The odd thing was, from the beginning, everyone behaved as if Littlewood alone was victorious. Mercer might as well not have existed. A week or so later, for instance, I went out—rather surreptitiously, I will admit—to buy Littlewood's photograph, and discovered, much to my annoyance, that it was sold out. “But I've got plenty of Mr. Mercer, sir,” the newsagent said. “In fact, I'm having rather a fire sale on Mr. Mercer.”

  It made perfect sense. Mercer was frail, twenty-two, from Bootle, while Littlewood was nineteen, roaring with health, and had Cambridge connections going back more than a century. Philippa Fawcett was his cousin. His father had been, in his time, ninth wrangler, his grandfather thirty-fifth.

  O. B. had both photographs. “Look at the way he keeps his legs open,” he said of Littlewood's. “As if he doesn't have the slightest idea that he's being provocative. And of course, that's the delicious part— he doesn't.”

  “Quite a bulge, too,” mused Keynes, who happened to be visiting.

  I tried not to look at the bulge. Instead I concentrated on the cleanshaven, oblong face. The part that ran through Littlewood's hair might have been ruled with a straightedge. He kept his thin lips tightly closed, his heavy eyebrows raised in inquiry. All told, he radiated a kind of coiled strength, as if at any moment he might jump out of his chair and do a handstand.