The Indian Clerk (37 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
On the other hand, I very much doubt that he expected the Trinity Council actually to dismiss him. I certainly didn't expect
it. After all, it is one thing to refuse a pacifist group permission to meet on the college grounds; it is another to rescind
the fellowship of a man as eminent, respected, and famous as Bertrand Russell. And though the college bylaws gave the Council
the
right
to dismiss any fellow convicted of a crime, it did not
oblige
them to do so. There was a choice to be made, and in making it, the Council revealed itself to be despotic and cowardly, undermining—perhaps
permanently—the very foundations of intellectual freedom on which the college was built, and drawing ire from both inside
and outside Cambridge.
Yet it was worse than that. Of the eleven members of the Council who voted against Russell, five were Apostles—McTaggart and
Jackson among them. That ghastly shit McTaggart, I still believe, should have been cursed and roby-ized for what he did, for
roby had merely decided that the society was not worth his time, while McTaggart turned against a brother who had once regarded
him as a mentor. That year, every time I saw McTaggart creeping along a wall, or riding by on his decrepit tricycle, I would
walk the other way, for fear that, should we encounter each other, I might lose my temper and kick him. Finally I understood
why, in his school days, other boys had found kicking him such an irresistible temptation.
Of course, if Russell was shaken, he seemed to get over it quickly enough. Indeed, within a few days, he was telling me that
the dismissal was the best thing that could have happened to him because, as he put it, it "decided the issue." Now he would
be free of Trinity once and for all, and could travel around the country offering "intellectual food" to working men, miners
and the like. Whether he really believed this or had merely struck a bargain with his pride I cannot say. But he did go off,
to Wales and other places, and give lectures. Nor did he appear, when on occasion I saw him in London, to miss Trinity in
the slightest. I cannot blame him. I loathed Trinity myself.
Yes, I loathed Trinity. I say this today without regret or embarrassment, even though, in the interval, I have left for Oxford
and returned again. In dismissing Russell, we all agreed, the Council had at last gone too far. And yet we were divided as
to how we should respond, some (myself included) feeling that militant action was called for, others believing that we should
lie low until the war was over. And in the end, we compromised. Instead of a strongly worded statement published in the
Cambridge Magazine,
we settled for a weakly worded petition circulated only within the college:
The undersigned Fellows of the College, while not proposing to take any action in the matter during the war, desire to place
on the record that they are not satisfied with the action of the College Council in depriving Mr. Russell of his Lectureship.
What astounds me, in retrospect, is that even with this diluted language we collected only twenty-two signatures. It was mostly
the enlisted fellows, the ones whose signatures would have carried the most weight, who refused to sign. Nor did Russell make
the job any easier for us when he wrote to the Trinity porter and asked that his name be struck from the college books. That
such a gesture should be considered provocative may strike you as puzzling, but in the Trinity of those years, any action
that could be interpreted as expressing contempt for tradition was taken very seriously indeed. Because of it, we very nearly
gave up on the whole effort, reasoning that if Russell had no desire to be helped, we ought not to risk our futures to help
him. For he was having a fine old time right then, drinking beer with his new Welsh miner mates and sleeping with three women
at once, though how they could withstand his breath I cannot imagine.
What did Ramanujan make of it all? Was he even aware that it was happening? I wish I knew. I wish I had asked him. But I didn't.
No doubt the most absurd moment in the affair, and the one in which Russell took the greatest satisfaction, was the auctioning
off of his goods. This was necessitated, you will recall, by his refusal to pay the fine. Yet from the beginning he maintained
an underhanded control of the proceedings. Remember, he had two domiciles. In addition to his rooms at Trinity, he kept a
flat in London. Somehow he had managed to persuade the court to leave the London flat alone, and impound only what was at
Trinity. I suspect that, from his vantage point, auctioning off the stuff at Trinity would be doubly beneficial: not only
would the spectacle of the auction secure his public reputation, it would relieve him of the necessity of returning to Trinity
to clear out his rooms, which he would be vacating anyway. Now his Welsh lecture tour need not be interrupted. And of course—at
least this is what he said at first—he didn't really care about any of the stuff at Trinity. The truth was, it didn't have
much value. Under ordinary circumstances it would never have fetched the £110 (a £100 fine plus £10 in costs) that Russell
was required to pay if he was to avoid prison. For it was hideous stuff, chosen deliberately, or so Norton and I believed,
to suggest the sort of studied indifference to environment that Russell considered befitting an intellectual.
Now, when I look over the advertisement for the sale (the immemorial secretary has kindly preserved it), I am really quite
astonished at its brutality. The auctioneers, Messrs. Catling and Son, were experts at the use of a certain kind of language
the sole intention of which is to whet the appetites of antique dealers and predatory collectors. For you must understand,
most of the stuff was tasteless and worthless, which was why it made Norton and me laugh to see a particularly ugly little
table described as a "Coromandel Wood Tea Caddy, mounted with 10 plated medallions," or Russell's battered desk transformed
into a "Walnut Kneehole Writing Table," or the stained rugs described as "Superior Turkey Carpets." Indeed, of all Russell's
furniture, only one piece—a six-legged Chippendale sofa—was any good, and this, in the end, I bought myself.
Any mirth that this advertisement might have aroused, however, ceased with the first paragraph. For immediately after listing
"upwards of 100 ozs. of plate, Plated Articles, Gentleman's Gold Watch and Chain," Messrs. Catling and Son skipped a line
and announced—the text here is centered and in capital letters—the piece de resistance: "COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BUTLER GOLD MEDAL,
awarded to Bertrand Russell, 1915." And then the books:
Royal Society Proceedings and
Transactions, London Mathematical Society Proceedings-,
the complete works of Blake, Bentham, Hobbes;
Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy
and Psychology-, Cambridge Modern History.
To sell a man's medal! And his books! Even Russell must have felt enough of a spasm at the prospect of these losses to reconsider
his desire to see
everything
sold off, for a few days before the auction took place he was writing that, though he did not mind giving up the philosophy
and mathematics books, he should not like to lose the literature books. And then—a further refinement—while it was true that
he did not mind giving up the philosophy and mathematics books, he did think that he should like to keep the complete sets
of the great philosophers, as these had belonged to his father. And then there was the tea table for which he seemed to feel
a disproportionate attachment. But the medal could go. It would make good copy, this emblem of his fame overseas melted down
and put on the market as raw gold. He could not resist that.
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 dejouy.
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.