The morning of the auction, I asked Ramanujan if he would like to go with me, and he said that he would. It was the sort of warm day in which I would have taken far greater pleasure in peacetime. For now I did not want sun and leaves and river. I wanted gloom that would at least approximate the gloom of the Somme. And I suppose others must have felt the same way, for when we got to the Corn Exchange, we saw that the auction had drawn only a small crowd. Norton, of course, was there, pad and pencil in hand, for he was keeping the accounts for the collection, and needed to write down the prices that the lots fetched. There were no representatives of the press, not even from the Cambridge Magazine. Even the auctioneer seemed to feel the paltriness of the affair, for his patter lacked conviction, and he lowered the gavel with neither enthusiasm nor force. Had Russell been present, I suspect he would have been hugely disappointed.
The first lot, the auctioneer said, was already sold. This consisted of the silver, the watch and chain, the medal, and that tea table to which Russell felt such an attachment, and had been paid for with the funds collected by Morrell and Norton through their subscription. By now most of the books had been withdrawn too, which left only the furniture, the linens, the carpets, and a few odds and ends fished out from the backs of drawers. These fetched, in total, a little over £25. I got the Chippendale settee for just over £2, the one gesture of subtle retaliation I allowed myself. Norton bought some Denmark tablecloths, while Ramanujan, much to my surprise, bid on a little picture of Leibniz that I remembered having seen on Russell's mantelpiece, propped up between two silver candlesticks. No one bid against him, and he got the picture for almost nothing.
Afterward, the three of us took a walk along the river. “Of course I'll give him back the tablecloths,” Norton said.
“Why?” I said. “Some tea-stained tablecloths. He probably doesn't even remember he owned them.”
“But it's a matter of principle,” Norton said. “You'll be giving him back the settee, I trust?”
“No, I think it will look much better in my rooms than it did in his,” I said. “I might even have it recovered. I was thinking a toile de Jouy. Blue on white. Wouldn't that make a nice change, Ramanujan, when we're working on the partitions formula?”
Ramanujan said nothing. Clearly he did not know what a toile de Jouy was.
“No doubt Mr. Ramanujan finds our British preoccupation with furnishings and decoration somewhat curious,” Norton said.
“That reminds me, why did you buy the Leibniz picture?”
“Leibniz was a great mathematician. But of course I shall return it to Mr. Russell if you feel that I should.”
“No, keep it. If he'd wanted it, he'd have let Norton know.”
We sat down on a bench. Some swans were stepping up out of the river onto the grass. “Vicious creatures,” Norton said, and began to tell a story about how a swan had attacked him and his mother when he was a child. Before he could finish, though, Ramanujan broke into a loud cough, stood, and said, “Excuse me, I'm afraid I must return to my rooms.” Then he left.
“That was odd,” I said, watching him stumble away. “I wonder if he isn't feeling well.”
“I should say so!” Norton said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Haven't you noticed?” he said. “These last weeks he's looked like death warmed up.”
I gazed at the swans. Their preening beauty, the careful attention they were paying to their own white down, belied fearlessness and brutality. They floated by, their apparent obliviousness to our presence, I knew, an illusion, the perpetual illusion perpetrated on creatures with eyes on the fronts of their heads by those with eyes on the sides. Our mistake, as always, was presuming that the other's perspective was our own; construing hostile surveillance as inattention. Yes, they were watching us.
We got up and walked back to the college. Perhaps one should be forgiven for failing to notice physical changes in the companion with whom one spends the bulk of one's time. Norton, who saw him less often, saw it more quickly.
“It's probably because he's working too hard,” I said. “Sometimes he's up all night. He forgets to eat.”
“Very likely,” Norton said. “Still, don't you think you should have him see a doctor?”
“Why?”
“Well—to be on the safe side.”
“Yes, but if I ask him if he's feeling ill, he'll deny that anything's the matter. He'll say he doesn't need a doctor. And even if he's ordered to he won't rest. He's obsessed with his work.”
“Obsession with work can lead to a breakdown,” Norton said, no doubt recalling his own experience.
We parted in New Court, and I went back to my rooms, where that evening I thought about Ramanujan in a way that I had not done for some time. It was true, a film of gloom seemed always to glaze his studied gentility. So was the trouble, as usual, the weather? The difficulty of finding food he could stomach? Had he not been Ramanujan, I would have asked him what was wrong. Being Ramanujan, however, he would have answered that nothing was wrong, when in fact much was wrong, though I would not learn the details until later.
As I have already mentioned, for many months, though he had received letters from his mother, he had received none from his wife, Janaki. Well, it seems that sometime during the course of that very summer he had, finally, got a letter from Janaki, a very disturbing letter, in which she informed him that she was no longer in Kumbakonam; she was now in Karachi, at the house of her brother. She and her brother would soon be returning to their village, for he was getting married, and could Ramanujan send her some money for a new sari to wear to the wedding ? And with what a strange mixture of bitterness and relief did he greet this letter! For finally, after two years, Janaki was acknowledging his existence. But she was acknowledging it only to ask for money. Not a word was said about the many letters he had written to her, and that he presumed her to have ignored, when the truth, as he learned later, was that his mother had intercepted them. The girl's reticence, which in fact owed to her being barely able to write, he interpreted as coldness. Accordingly he sent the money, but grudgingly. Komalatammal, of course, took full advantage of Janaki's flight to advance her case against the girl. The brother's wedding, she told Ramanujan, was merely an excuse. The unhappy truth was that Janaki was a bad girl, a bad daughter-in-law, a bad wife. Possibly Komalatammal implied that there was another man in the picture. Janaki's real motive for running away—to escape her mother-in-law's tyranny, which had driven her to the breaking point—Komalatammal kept hidden or did not see herself.
Oh, that woman! Would that Janaki had only explained all this to Ramanujan! But she did not, perhaps because she saw no necessity to do so; or she did not realize that Komalatammal would distort the facts to bolster her own position; or she assumed that Ramanujan would understand her motives implicitly. Nor did she help her case when, at the end of her “visit” to her brother, she elected to remain at her parents' house rather than return to her mother-in-law's. This “abandonment” gave Komalatammal the ammunition that she needed. Yet for all her supposed occult powers, she did not possess enough in the way of psychological insight to see that her subterfuge would threaten Ramanujan's relationship with herself more than with his wife. For he must have felt, even at such a distance, Komalatammal's clawing efforts to interpose herself between him and Janaki, and whereas before he had written to her every week, now he wrote to her only once a month, and then once every two months, and then not at all.
So you see, he had worries of which I was hardly cognizant. If I am to be honest, even if he had confided in me some of these worries, the likelihood is that I would have paid them scant heed. Like him, I had most of my attention focused on mathematics. What little remained the Russell affair consumed. Not that I forced work upon him. Ramanujan and I were united in our devotion to a task in the presence of which the need to eat, even the need to love, fell away. I'm tempted to say that our intimacy was all the stronger for the many emotions it disallowed, for
when we were working, the queer mixture of compassion and irritation and awe and perplexity that the idea of him stirred up in me grew fleecy and insubstantial and fell away. I suspect that whatever I was to him fell away, too. In such an atmosphere, anything that threatened to impinge upon the work I resented. And yet we worked together, at most, four hours a day. This left twenty during which we were apart.
Mrs. Neville was wrong to accuse me of ignoring, ultimately to his peril, Ramanujan's unhappiness. Were she more subtle or more intelligent, she might have made the proper accusation: namely, that I failed to respect his unhappiness. Of his disappearances, his bad moods, his periods of obstinacy, I was merely tolerant. I did not bother to think what lay behind them. Or if I did think what lay behind them, I did so in frustration, when his behavior interfered with our work.
For instance, that fall, at long last, he got his B.A. I wrote to Madras a glowing report of his progress. I even read one of his papers aloud to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, though he did not come to the meeting. Did I invite him? Probably not. Probably I assumed he would be too shy to want to attend.
And yet the B.A. did not, as I hoped it would, placate him or assuage his need for approbation. On the contrary, the attainment of this emblem of success—two letters that he could now put behind his name—only seemed to exacerbate his hunger for further trophies. And what was the next trophy to be sought? It seemed that Barnes, who had in the meantime left Cambridge, had, before his departure, told Ramanujan that he could count upon being elected to a Trinity fellowship in the fall of 1917. I was not so certain. His reputation was very much bound up with my own, and I was hardly in good odor right then at Trinity. On top of that, there had never before been an Indian fellow. None of this I felt like explaining to him, though. I did not want to give him cause for further worry. At the same time, I could hardly second the assurances that Barnes had given him, and as it was Ramanujan's habit, when faced with uncertainty, to pester, he began to bring up the matter of the fellowship on an almost daily basis, just as before he had brought up the Smith's Prize.
Please understand, his ambition in and of itself did not trouble me. I understood and appreciated that ambition, as I suffered from it myself. For in those days there was a sequence that guaranteed, as it were, a mathematician's authenticity: Smith's Prize led to fellow of Trinity, fellow of Trinity led to fellow of the Royal Society. Had I myself failed to obtain any of these honors—all of which, in my case, came in their due course, “on schedule”—I would have been thrown into a paroxysm of self-doubt and rage. So why did I begrudge Ramanujan the same need for affirmation? I suppose because I sensed that in his case no prize, no matter how grandiose, would be sufficient to quell the longing. But what exactly was it a longing for? Let us define it, then, reductio ad absurdum, by imagining that it did not exist. Could years of having doors shut in your face leave you a happy man? Or would those years necessarily leave as their legacy a hunger no quantity of medals would sate? No wonder I could not reconcile that hunger with Ramanujan's putative spirituality, that crucible in which, he claimed, his discoveries were kindled into life! There were two different questions: one had to do with origins and the other with consequences.
Now that I am older, I have a more dispassionate attitude toward these matters. At Cambridge we were taught to view our lives as train journeys along appointed routes, station following upon station until at last we arrived at some glorious last stop, the end of the line which was really the beginning of things. From then on we would bask in a glow of rest and ease, of comfort institutionally sanctioned. Or so we thought. For in truth, how many ways there are to go off the rails! How frequently the timetable is changed, and the guards go on strike! How easy it is to fall asleep and wake up only to discover that you have missed the station where you were supposed to change trains, or that you've been riding the wrong train all along! The worry it cost us … yet of course, all that worry is futile, because this is the cruelest secret of all: all the trains go to the same place. At some point Ramanujan must have begun to realize it.
In any case, the morning after the auction, he came to me as always. Now I looked him up and down, and was alarmed to see that, though his body had retained its stoutness, his cheeks were sunken. Fleshy half-moons, lighter than the dark skin around them, puffed out from under his eyes. Contradicting what I had told Norton, I asked him if he was feeling all right; if he needed a doctor. But as I guessed he might, he brushed off the question. “I have not been sleeping well,” he said. “I was thinking about…” Who knows what? Probably some detail in the partitions theorem. And then we were off.
I have never been a man inclined to dig deeply into motives and processes. Mathematics, for me, has always been like this: you are looking at a mountainous landscape. Peak A you can see clearly, peak B you can barely discern amid the clouds. Then you find the ridge that leads from peak A to peak B, at which point you can move on to further, more distant peaks. All very pretty, this analogy—I used it in a lecture I gave in 1928—and yet what it fails to address is whether, in making this exploration, you should rely only on your binoculars, or actually strike out on foot. In the latter case, you no longer regard the peaks from a distance; you delve into them. And this is a much more dangerous game. For now there are risks that you do not face standing safely at a distance, gazing through your binoculars: frostbite, weariness, losing your way. You may lose your footing, too, fall from the surface you are scaling into the abyss. Yes, the abyss is always there. We cope with the risk of falling in different ways. I coped with it by not looking, by pretending there was no abyss. But Ramanujan, I think, was always staring down into it. Guarding himself. Or preparing to jump.
And what is the abyss? This is where language starts to fail me. It is the place where all the pieces, all the symbols, all the Greek and German letters, fly about and meld and mate in the most preposterous, arbitrary ways. Sometimes miracles are born, more often grotesque-ries, creatures for a sideshow… Later, when he was sick, Ramanujan told me that during periods of fever he attributed a pain in his stomach to the spike where the zeta function, when drawn on a graph, takes the value of 1 and soars off into infinity. The spike, he said, was gouging his abdomen. By then, of course, he was living in the abyss.
Looking back, the only thing that surprises me about those years is that, with the exception of Thayer, no new players entered the scene. Instead the players were merely rearranged, repositioned. Russell, who should have been in Cambridge, was in Wales. Littlewood was in Woolwich. Alice Neville, strangest of all, was in my London flat. To these reconfigurations I adjusted with what seems to me, in retrospect, remarkable sangfroid. I got used to seeing Alice's hat on the coatrack in Pimlico, to receiving letters from Littlewood on military stationery. Nor did the letters from mothers, telling me that this or that former student was dead, stir up in me the shock that they once had. Hard as it is to say, I grew inured to them. And yet there was one from whom I longed to receive a letter, and did not.
Where was Thayer? Was he dead? I had no idea. Since that dreadful afternoon when he had arrived at the flat and I had turned him out, I had heard not a word from him. It would be unseemly, I think, to describe here the mortifications to which I subjected myself, the hours I spent reenacting the scene, this time treating Thayer, if only in my imagination, with the respect that he deserved, and that he rightly despised me for having withheld. I would have liked to put it in a letter, and yet I doubted some don's pornographic description of the orgies of self-flagellation in which, for purposes of atonement, he indulged in the private safety of his rooms, would mean much to a lad fighting at the front. I wrote him, of course, but they were inadequate letters: again I was the great-aunt expressing her hope that her nephew would call on her for tea the next time he was on leave. Somehow I could find no means of voicing, even in language sufficiently coded to confound the censors, my hope that he would forgive me. Nor, apparently, were my efforts to melt his outrage close to sufficient, for he nev
er replied. Either he was dead or he had concluded that I was not worth the trouble. And really, selfish and terrible as this may sound, I hoped that he was dead. For if he was dead, at least there was a possibility that before dying, if only in his own mind, he had forgiven me.
What I could not do, hard as I tried, was forget him. At least once a week I visited the hospital on the cricket grounds, ostensibly to offer words of support and reassurance to the injured soldiers, really to see if by some miracle Thayer might show up, once again, in one of the wards. Things had changed in the intervening year. In addition to the sisters, uniformed members of the Medical Unit of the Officers Training Corps paced among the beds. They were surgical dressers or clerks. As I moved through the vast expanse of the hospital, I would pretend to a purely academic interest, ask them to explain the treatment methods they were testing out, when in fact all I wanted was to find Thayer. But he was never there.
Occasionally I might strike up conversations with some of the other lads. With surprising frequency these took a flirtatious turn. But I could not muster enough enthusiasm to follow up on the leads I was offered. For Thayer had claimed me. I suppose I must have been in love with him. I wanted no one else.
Under the best of circumstances, hope has a short life span. During wartime its life span is shorter still. At midnight on New Year's Eve,
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