“I'm fine,” I said.
“There, there,” the bobby said, “give the gentleman room, move on, move on.”
Then the bobby lifted me, in one motion, onto my feet.
“I think I'm fine,” I said. “Just had the wind knocked out of me.” No sooner had I said this, though, than my knees crumpled under me, and the bobby had to stop my fall.
A crowd had formed. “Step out of the way,” he ordered, and then he led me across the street, out of the rain, until we were standing under the arches of the Palladium.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You ought to look where you're going, sir,” he said, propping me up and dusting me off, as if I were a child.
“Yes, I ought to.”
“There you are.” He stepped back; took off his helmet. “It's Mr. Hardy, isn't it?”
“Yes,” I said. “How do you know me?”
“You don't remember me, do you, sir?”
“Should I?” And I looked at his face: the brown eyes, the thick mustache.
Then I did remember.
“Richards.”
His mouth broadened into a smile. “That's right, sir. It was me that was there when you came in to fetch Mr. Ramanujan—how long ago was it?”
“I can't think … twenty years?”
“A bit less. The autumn of 1917, before the war ended.”
“Yes. And what a happy coincidence. I'm glad to see you. I've often wished I'd looked you up, back then.”
“Did you now? I wish you had, too. A pity. Still, better late than never, my wife says.”
“You're married then?”
“Indeed I am, sir, with three daughters. Funny, though, I always knew I'd run into you one day. I just knew. And now look where we are.”
“Yes. Under the arches of the Palladium.”
He smiled. I smiled. Then suddenly his face grew stern. “A sad thing about Mr. Ramanujan, sir. Of course we could see back then he wasn't well. And then I read the obituaries, and I thought, well, now it all makes sense.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
“And to think that he wasn't made an F.R.S. until 1918.”
“1918, yes.”
“But when you came in, sir, you told us he was already an F.R.S., and that was 1917.”
“Oh, did I say that?” And I smiled again—less because I'd been caught out in a lie than because the lie in which I'd been caught out was one that, until that moment, I'd forgotten.
“Well, he was almost an F.R.S.”
“So you admit you lied.”
“I don't see why it matters.”
“Are you suggesting the law doesn't matter, sir?” Richards frowned. “It's a serious business, lying to Scotland Yard, sir. Perjury. I could have you sent up for it.”
“Oh, bosh. It was years ago! And besides”—I gestured vaguely toward Coventry Street—“I've just been hit by a motorcycle.”
Then Richards laughed. He laughed and laughed. “Had you there, didn't I?” he said.
“Yes, you did,” I said.
And then the most extraordinary thing happened. Perhaps it was a hallucination brought on by the shock of the accident—to this day I'm still not sure—but it seemed as if he pushed down on my shoulders. And whether it was because I wanted to, or because I was weak, I sank to my knees.
Suddenly all the noises of the street drained away. I could see the last rays of the sun broadening across a pool of puddled water. I could see, in the distance, umbrellas closing as the rain let up.
Very calmly he put his hands on my head, dug his nails into my scalp, and pulled my face deep into the woolly, animal blackness of his uniform trousers.
Only for a moment. Then he let me go.
“Come on, get up.” I stood, still wobbly on my feet. “You'll be wanting to get home now, sir,” he said, and, turning me around, he pointed me into the street, the claxons blaring, wet faces smudged in the dusk.
“Thank you,” I said. By way of reply, he gave me a gentle push, tipping me over the edge of the pavement onto Coventry Street, toward the stairs that led to the Underground.
5
HARDY STEPPED BACK from the podium. The applause that filled the room was like the sound of rain against the roofs of cars.
Suddenly he was surrounded. Hands shook his, mouths came intolerably close to his face, murmuring congratulations and asking questions. The questions he answered with the voice he had used to deliver the lecture, while inside him the other voice, the secret voice, recalled that night in Pimlico when Gaye's spirit, summoned or conjured from the ether, depending on one's point of view, sat on the edge of his bed and warned him to beware a man in black and the hour of twilight.
As it happened, it was the hour of twilight. Voices to which he could not attach names asked if he wished to rest before dinner, and he said that he would. Others offered to escort him to his hotel, and he waved them away. No, he would go on his own. The walk would do him good. And so, released at last into solitude, he hurried out of New Lecture Hall into the vesperal air; walked fast across commons and amid the shadows of red brick buildings, paying no attention to where he was going. For the point was not to arrive anywhere; it was to put as much distance between himself and the ghosts he had summoned as he could.
Soon he found himself in Harvard Yard. The sight of two undergraduates wearing leather gloves and throwing a ball back and forth arrested his attention. Ever since his first trip to “the States,” American baseball had fascinated him. Now he stood on the cement path that cut a diagonal swath across the yard and watched the young men play, his gaze transfixed by the bent posture each assumed as he reached back to throw the ball; the arc that the ball described over the green grass; the satisfying thump when the hard white leather of the ball's surface hit the soft brown leather of the glove. It did not matter that the sun would soon be setting; he knew these young men would play until the last light was drained from the sky, until the twilight was drunk down to its lees.
Why should it still surprise him that he knew so little of Ramanu-jan? He was too old to believe any longer that he had touched more than a fragment of that vast, infernal mind. None of them had—not Littlewood, not Eric or Alice. Ramanujan had come into their world, and for a time their lives had revolved around him, much as distant planets revolve around a star of which they can discern only the weakest penumbra. And yet that star, for all its remoteness, governs their orbits and regulates their gravity. Even now, dreams of Ramanujan pulled Hardy from sleep each morning. And when he went to bed, a darting radiance suffused his dreams, like the light reflected off a varnished cricket bat, or a Gurkha's raised sword.
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While researching and writing The Indian Clerk, I consulted hundreds of sources—and I owe a debt of gratitude to the many historians, archivists, mathematicians, and librarians whose patient work brought these sources to light.
That said, this is a novel based on real events, and—like most novels based on real events—it takes liberties with historical truth, mingles fact and invention, and transforms historical figures into fictional characters. What follows is a brief narrative account of some of the reading that I undertook and where it led.
It is my hope that, after finishing The Indian Clerk, some readers may want to learn more about the three remarkable men around whose lives the novel revolves. The best starting place is Robert Kanigel's masterful biography The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Crown, 1991), which provides not just a lucid and detailed account of Ramanujan's life but of Hardy's as well.
Fortunately for me, by the time I came to write The Indian Clerk, most of the primary sources I needed to consult—letters, reminiscences, photographs, documents—had already been brought together in a series of omnibus volumes. Of these, the earliest, published in 1967 (six years after India issued a stamp in Ramanujan's memory), were S. K. Ranganathan's Ramanujan: The Man and the Mathematician (Asia Publishing House) and P. K. Srinivasan's
two-volume Ramanujan Memorial Number (Muthialpet High School), consisting of Ramanujan: Letters and Reminiscences and Ramanujan: An Inspiration. In 1995 the authoritative Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary came out, followed in 2001 by Ramanujan: Essays and Surveys. Both were edited (superbly) by Bruce C. Berndt and Robert A. Rankin and published jointly by the London Mathematical Society and the American Mathematical Society.
My account of Ramanujan's illness takes into consideration the exhaustive research on the subject conducted by Robert A. Rankin and Dr. A. B. Young. Their articles—“Ramanujan as a Patient” and “Ramanujan's Illness”—can both be found in Ramanujan: Essays and Surveys. I hold with Dr. Young in suspecting that Ramanujan did not, in fact, suffer from tuberculosis, and have based my account of his suicide attempt and its aftermath, in part, on Dr. Young's very interesting detective work.
No lesser writer than Graham Greene praised Hardy's remarkable 1940 memoir, A Mathematician's Apology, which remains in print from Cambridge University Press. This volume also contains a moving recollection of Hardy by his friend the novelist C. P. Snow.
Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work—the text of the lectures that Hardy gave at Harvard in 1936— is available in a reprint edition from AMS Chelsea Publishing, as is Collected Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan, edited by G. H. Hardy, P. V. Seshu Aiyar, and B. M. Wilson. Hardy's collected papers (Oxford University Press, seven volumes) can be found at most university libraries. Of his mathematical texts, the most famous is probably A Course of Pure Mathematics, which Cambridge University Press has kept in print all these years.
The best account of the Bertrand Russell affair at Trinity College remains Hardy's own Bertrand Russell & Trinity, privately published but available in a reprint edition from Cambridge University Press. Three articles published in Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives deepened my understanding of the relationship between Russell and Hardy: Jack Pitt's “Russell and the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club” (New Series, vol. 1, no. 2, winter 1981-82); Paul Delaney's “Russell's Dismissal from Trinity: A Study in High Table Politics” (New Series, vol. 6, no. 1, summer 1986); and I. Grattan-Guinness's “Russell and G. H. Hardy: A Study of Their Relationship” (New Series, vol. 11, no. 2, winter 1991). In addition, I read letters culled from Russell's voluminous correspondence, some of them published by Routledge in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell (in two volumes, edited by Nicholas Griffin), others, including several from Hardy, made available to me through the generosity of the staff of the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University.
Not surprisingly, given Russell's penchant for wanting to control his intellectual legacy, his autobiography (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967) tells us less about his dismissal from Trinity than do Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (Free Press, 1996) and Ronald W. Clark's The Life of Bertrand Russell (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976).
In researching the Cambridge Apostles, I relied on Paul Levy's deeply considered Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford University Press, 1981) and, to a lesser extent, on Richard Deacon's informative but contentious and intermittently homophobic The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University's Elite Intellectual Secret Society (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). W. C. Lubenow's The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) also proved to be an invaluable resource. (I am grateful to Professor Lubenow personally for helping me to clarify the murk surrounding the question of whether Hardy did or did not “attest” during World War I.)
Through the letters of the Brethren—in particular Russell, Lytton Strachey, James Strachey, and Rupert Brooke—I gained a sense of what the Society's meetings felt and sounded and smelled like. Many of Lytton Strachey's letters about the Apostles are included in The Letters of Lytton Strachey, selected and edited by Paul Levy (Viking, 2005), while Brooke's correspondence with the younger Strachey can be found in Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914, edited by Keith Hale (Yale University Press, 1998). Paul Delaney's The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth (Free Press, 1987) sheds light not just on Brooke but on his Hungarian rival, Ference Békássy, while Michael Holroyd's magisterial Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (W. W. Norton, 2005) merits reading as much because it is an exemplar of the art of the biography as because it offers such a penetrating portrait of its subject. Finally, John Maynard Keynes's memoir “My Early Beliefs,” included in Two Memoirs (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), articulates with pathos and wit G. E. Moore's profound philosophical and moral influence on the Apostles.
In researching J. E. Littlewood, I turned to his own book of memoirs and essays, A Mathematician's Miscellany (Methuen, 1953), and Béla Bollobás's Littlewood's Miscellany (Cambridge University Press,
1986), which brings the contents of the first book together with other writings by Littlewood and a fascinating recollection of the man by Bollobás himself.
The account of Russell Kerr Gaye's suicide (and its effect on Hardy) derives from Lytton and James Strachey's letters on the subject and, to a lesser extent, from Gaye's obituary in the Times, while the story of their cat's illness and the circus lady who caught rats with her teeth comes from Leonard Woolf's memoir Sowing (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1960).
Gertrude Hardy's poem “Lines Written Under Provocation” was published in October 1933 (about thirty years after I attribute it to her in the novel) in St. Catherine's School Magazine. Robert Kanigel includes this remarkably spirited piece of satire in The Man Who Knew Infinity. Kanigel is also the source for a number of details from Hardy's life that I dramatize in the novel: among them, the “Indian bazaar,” the performance of Twelfth Night, the conversation with the vicar about the kite, and the tragic story behind Gertrude's glass eye. Kanigel also tracked down the exact puzzle from the Strand magazine that Ramanujan solved so quickly.
For those seeking a broad understanding of the world into which Hardy was born (and the war it gave rise to), I cannot recommend highly enough Samuel Hynes's The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton University Press, 1968); its lesser-known sequel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (Atheneum, 1990); and Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, 2000).
The attitudes that obtained toward homosexuality in the England of those years are shrewdly interrogated by Graham Robb in Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (W. W. Norton, 2004) and by Matt Houlbrook in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Yet it was from a sequence of novels—Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, all published by Plume)—that I got the most vivid sense of the ways in which homosexual love was expressed, exploited, and manipulated in England during the Great War.
Luckily for lay readers, four very good books on the Riemann hypothesis have come out in the last four years. Of these, the ones I would recommend most strongly are Marcus du Sautoy's The Music of the Primes (HarperCollins, 2003) and Dan Rockmore's Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis (Pantheon, 2005). Hardy and Ramanujan make appearances as well in Paul Hoffman's entertaining biography of the mathematician Paul Erdös, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Hyperion, 1998).
My research on the history of the mathematical tripos and Hardy's battle to abolish it focused on primary sources, including letters to the Times, items from that same paper's “University Intelligence” column, and obituaries. I also read—and learned much from—Jeremy Gray's “Mathematics in Cambridge and Beyond,” in Cambridge Minds, edited by Richard Mason (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and several of the personal essays collected in the three-volume omnibus Mathematics: People, Problems, Results, edited by Douglas M. Campbell and John C. Higgins (Wads-worth, 1984): A. R. Forsyth's “Old Tripos Days at Cambridge”; Leonard Roth's “Old Cambridge Days”; J. C. Burkill's “John Edensor Littlewood”; L. J. Mordell's “Hardy's A Mat
hematician's Apology”; and George Pólya's “Some Mathematicians I Have Known.”
Speaking of Pólya, the entertaining Pólya Picture Album: Encounters of a Mathematician (Birkhäuser, 1987) contains the largest selection of photographs I have found yet of the famously photo-phobic Hardy.
The story of Philippa Fawcett's victory in the mathematical tripos was mentioned only in passing in the Times of London but made much of by the New York Times. I am grateful to Jill Lamberton for sharing with me an 1890 letter in which Helen Gladstone described the event to Mary Gladstone Drew.
Much of what D. H. Lawrence says to Hardy in the novel derives from letters that he wrote to David Garnett and Bertrand Russell, before and after his disastrous visit to Cambridge. These can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, volume II, June 1913-1916, edited by George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1981). That Lawrence “had a long and friendly discussion” with Hardy during the visit, and that he appears to have liked Hardy uniquely among the many dons he met, is confirmed in a number of sources, including Edward Nehls's
D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-59).
Most of the vegetarian dishes to which I refer really could be found in vegetarian cookbooks of the period. For those interested in exploring this fascinating subject, I would strongly recommend Colin Spencer's Vegetarianism: A History (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002).
Now on to inventions and half-truths:
While my account of Ludwig Wittgenstein's induction into the Apostles is by and large accurate, I moved the event forward three months to accommodate the novel's chronology.
Eric Neville really did have a wife named Alice, whose kindness toward Ramanujan, and concern for his well-being, Ranganathan warmly recalled. That said, there is no reason to suspect that Alice Neville spoke Swedish, fell in love with Ramanujan, worked for Dorothy Buxton, sang Gilbert and Sullivan, or read Israfel.
Israfel did exist; the passages quoted are from her book Ivory Apes & Peacocks (At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1899). Dorothy Buxton existed too, and—after devoting the entirety of the First World War to publishing her “Notes from the Foreign Press” in the Cambridge Magazine—went on to found the Save the Children Fund with her sister, Eglantyne Jebb.
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