The Indian Clerk (54 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
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, 1871-1921
(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 Bekassy, 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 Bela Bollobas'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 Bollobas 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
&c
Co., i960).
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 Erdos,
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 Mathematician's
Apology"-,
and George Polya's "Some Mathematicians I Have Known."
Speaking of Polya, the entertaining
Polya Picture Album: Encounters
of a Mathematician
(Birkhauser, 1987) contains the largest selection of photographs I have found yet of the famously photophobic 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.
While Ramanujan's Indian friends at Cambridge included men named Chatterjee, Mahalanobis, and Ananda Rao, there is no reason
to suspect that they in any way resemble the fictional characters to whom I have given their names. And though Ramanujan did
run away from the dinner he gave in honor of Chatterjee and his fiancee, Ila Rudra, no source suggests that Hardy was present.
(Miss Chattopadhyaya was.)
"S. Ram" was, astonishingly enough, a real person. His monologues are derived from the long letters that he wrote to Ramanujan
and Hardy.
Although entirely a fiction, Anne Chase is based loosely on "Mrs. Streatfeild," a married resident of Treen with whom Littlewood
had a long affair and at least one child. However, the real Littlewood, from what I gather, did not meet Mrs. Streatfeild
until after Ramanujan's death.