The Elegant Variation

THE INDIAN CLERK WEEK ENDS: GIVEAWAY

You've been reading about it all week.  Now your chance to win a copy of David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk is upon you at last.  A signed copy no less, inscribed by the author to one lucky TEV reader. 

In the unlikely event you've been away all week and only came by for the giveaway, you can find out everything you need to know about this wonderful title right here.  So let's give away a book.

The first reader who can prove the Riemann Hypothesis ... no, no, no, we keed.  Everyone knows the rules.  Drop us an email please, subject line "PRIMED FOR LEAVITT."  We'll take all entries until 3 p.m. PST, at which time we'll turn to the Random Number Generator - especially apt this week - to anoint a winner.  As ever, please include your full mailing address and previous winners remain ineligible.  And if you don't win the book, please pop over to Powells and pre-order it.  Surely, we've convinced you by now.  (And feel free, in your emails, to let us know what you think about the whole one-book-a-week model.  We'd enjoy the input.)

UPDATE: Congratulations to Jerry Pace of Atlanta, GA.  And thanks to all who made this a memorable week around here, especially David Leavitt for his fine stint as guest blogger.  Have a great weekend, all.

THE INDIAN CLERK: FURTHER READING # 1

Throughout The Indian Clerk, we're reminded how different the world of hundred years ago was, especially in the area of communications.  Beginning with the first letter from Ramanujan, dozens of letters and postcards traverse continents at the large end of the scale, and buildings at the small end.  But one of the most interesting of these communications comes about two-thirds of the way through the book, when Hardy is fretting over the whereabouts of Thayer, a young man with whom he's had a fling that ended badly and who is now away at war.  Here's the setup:

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 lifespan. During wartime its lifespan is shorter still. At midnight on New Year's Eve, 1917, I raised my glass to the sky (I was alone in Cranleigh, Gertrude and Mother asleep) and declared valiantly that I had given up on Thayer. It was a new year, and I would move on.

Shortly after that, word does, in fact, show up in the form of a Field Service Post Card, an example of which is pictured below. 

I first became aware of these fascinating forms in Paul Fussell's landmark The Great War and Modern Memory (which Leavitt notes in his acknowledgements).  Here's what he has to say about them:

Infinite replication and utter uniformity - those are the ideas attached to the Field Service Post Card, the first wartime printing of which, in November, 1914, was one million copies.  As the first widely known example of dehumanized, automated communication, the post card popularized a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars. ... The perversion of a fully flexible human rhetoric betokened by the post card has seemed so typical not just of the conduct of later wars but of something like their  "causes" that satirists have made itone of their commonest targets.  In Heller's Catch-22 Colonel Cathcart writes form-letters of condolence implicity requiring the recipient to strike out "what does not apply":

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr and Mrs. Daneeka,
   Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

According to Fussell, parodies of the card were a staple of everyone from Siegfried Sassoon to Evelyn Waugh.   He further suspects that Edmund Wilson was "paying distant homage in the semi-facetious post cards" he would send that "listed a number of things which 'Mr. Edmund Wilson does not do,' like granting interviews, reading manuscripts, delivering commencement addresses, receiving honorary degrees, etc., each with a small box to be checked."

If you'd like a greater understanding of the world that Hardy and Ramanujan inhabited, one marked by "the unparalleled literariness of all ranks who fought the Great War," you'll want to read this indispensable book, winner of both the National Book Award and the NBCC Award.  You can also read the World War I correspondence between lovers Harold McGill and Emma Griffis, at Dear Miss Griffis, the site from which the image above is taken.

THE INDIAN CLERK: FURTHER READING # 2

Speaking of Siegfried Sassoon, another group of books that Leavitt notes his acknowledgements is Pat Barker's brilliant World War I trilogy - Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (which won the 1995 Booker Prize).  Here's what he has to say:

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.

In the novel, as in history, Sassoon finds himself at Craiglockhart, a war hospital for the treatment of "shell shock", as a consequence of his landmark "Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration."  In an early interview with Dr. William Rivers, Sassoon essentially outs himself by acknowledging the impact of The Intermediate Sex on his life.

"Yes.  I've had patients who swore their entire lives had been changed by it."

"Mine was.  At least I don't know about 'changed'.  'Saved', perhaps."

"As bad as that?"

"At one point, yes.  I'd got myself into quite a state."

By the interview's end, we're given a grim sense of what's to come.

Rivers began polishing his glasses on his handkerchief.  "You know, I realize Ross's caution probably seems excessive.  To you.  But I hope you won't be in too much of a hurry to dismiss it.  There's nothing more despicable than using a man's private life to discredit his views.  But it's very frequently done, even by people in my profession.  People you might think wouldn't resort to such tactics.  I wouldn't like to see it happen to you."

"I thought discrediting my views was what you were about?"

Rivers smiled wryly.  "Let's just say I'm fussy about the methods."

By the end of the first volume, Sassoon is on his way back to the front, unable to single-handedly turn the tide of the prejudices of the day.  He fades into the background in the subsequent volumes, in which Barker's fictional creation Billy Prior steps up to the center stage for an unforgettable, devastating denouement.

The Regeneration Trilogy is available in a single volume and constitutes Barker's crowning achievement - some of the strongest English language fiction of the past twenty years.  (It's exciting news to learn that Barker returns to the World War I setting for her new novel , due out next year in the US from FSG.)  We know we've recommended it before but we can't do so highly enough.

THE INDIAN CLERK: FURTHER READING # 3

If you're of a mind to delve more deeply into the maths of The Indian Clerk, you do well to read one of these four volumes devoted to The Riemann Hypothesis, and recommended by Leavitt himself, in his order of preference:

1. Marcus du Sautoy, The Music of the Primes.  You can read a fine article by du Sautoy in Plus Magazine, which serves as a fine introduction to Riemann.

Riemann had found one very special imaginary landscape, generated by something called the zeta function, which he discovered held the secret to prime numbers. In particular, the points at sea-level in the landscape could be used to produce these special harmonic waves which changed Gauss's graph into the genuine staircase of the primes. Riemann used the coordinates of each point at sea-level to create one of the prime number harmonics. The frequency of each harmonic was determined by how far north the corresponding point at sea-level was, and how loud each harmonic sounded was determined by the east-west frequency.

2. Dan Rockmore, Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis.  Rockmore and his book were favorably noted by The Washington Post, which observed that "math is hot."

To understand how someone can spend hours, days, years wrestling with an insoluble problem, you have to look at the world through a mathematician's eyes. That's where Rockmore comes in. He's not one of those fluky-flakey number nerds you read about. He's a hiker, a tennis player, a distance runner. He's got a loving family, a Manhattan pied-à-terre and patience enough to explain math to the unmathematical. He is an expositor who scored higher on his verbal SATs than on his math and he has agreed to spend the afternoon walking you through some of the toughest concepts in math -- literally.

3. Karl Sabbach, The Riemann Hypothesis.  About which we can find next to nothing.

4. John Derbyshire, Prime Obsession.  You can sort through a variety of reviews, including this one from the American Journal of Physics.

Presented in a conversational style, but with the meticulous attention to detail of a well-composed detective novel, Prime Obsession tells of the origin, evolution, and significance of a mathematical conjecture with deep ramifications throughout many fields of mathematics and surprising physical implications still to be explored fully. Seamlessly the author weaves together the "world lines" of Riemann and the eminent mathematicians who either motivated or followed up on his work, explaining carefully and readably the essential mathematical contributions made by each.

We were hoping to dig up a reasonably straightforward description of the Riemann Hypothesis but as Andrew Wiles noted, "The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis. But it's not a problem that can be simply stated."  This one seems to be the most accessible introduction we can found out there.

Riemann conjectured that all nontrivial zeros are at Re(z)=1/2. Although this has been shown to be true for more than the first billion nontrivial zeros, the conjecture remains open. A proof would establish new results in number theory, for example on the distribution of primes. The fact that Riemann Hypothesis holds for billions of nontrivial zeros does not guarantee anything. As noted by I. Good and R. Churchhouse in 1968, in the theories of zeta function and of primes distribution, one frequently meets terms like log log x, a function which increases extremely slow. The first nontrivial root not on Re(1/2) might have an imaginary part y such that log log y is of the order say 10. Then y would be 1010,000, a definitely unreachable number, computationally.

Which, to be honest, doesn't mean shit to us but has apparently been catnip to generations of mathematicians who struggle to prove it to this day.

(Personally, we think the best mathematical proof we've ever come across comes from Thomasina Coverly in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.  She's been given a copy of Fermat's Last Theorem by her tutor Septimus to keep her quiet for a few hours.  As you may know, Fermat was famous for having written in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica "To write the cube of a number as a sum of two cubes, or the fourth power as a sum of two fourth powers, or any power above 2 as a sum of two like powers, is impossible. I have a truly wonderful proof of this fact, but the margin is too narrow to contain it."  Thomasina's reply, prescient given the events of the play, follows:

THOMASINA: Oh!  I see now!  The answer is perfectly obvious.

SEPTIMUS:  This time you may have overreached yourself.

... THOMASINA: There is no proof, Septimus.  The thing that is perfectly obvious is that the note in the margin was a joke to make you all mad.)

Join us tomorrow when we'll be offering up a signed copy of The Indian Clerk for our Friday giveaway.

On Literary Envy

What writer--or reader--hasn't experienced it? That stab of alarm at seeing someone else praised, or that surge of schadenfreude at seeing someone else trashed. And afterwards, the faint stench of guilt rising like steam from the wound, with its odor of corroded metal. (Note to self: Stop trying to sound like John Banville.)

I confess it: I have been guilty of the cheapest sort of envy. For example, there is a writer--she shall remain nameless--whose success, both in terms of sales and reviews, baffles me. What, I wonder, is everyone seeing that I'm not? Am I blind? Or has she sold the world a bill of goods the cheeziness of which only I detect?

In any case, every time this writer publishes a book, I have a panic attack. When someone says how wonderful she is (this happens 99% of the time) I beat my fists. When, on rare occasions, someone criticizes her, I cheer.

I don't know her. I'm sure she's a perfectly nice person. I'm sure she works as hard as I do, and tries as hard as I do to believe in herself. She probably has betes noires of her own.

About a decade ago I wrote something on this subject. In "The Term Paper Artist," a novella in my collection Arkansas, I have my hero, a writer named David Leavitt, cogitate on the fact that potential Nobel prize winners are as likely to experience fits of envy as are unpublished poets: "we are speaking, here, of the emotions of vacancy, which scale neither enhances nor mitigates; for panic and emptiness (the words are Forster's) always feel like panic and emptiness, no matter the degree."

I hereby invite readers of TEV to share their tales of literary envy--their own envy or that of others. A call for confessions, or perhaps an opportunity for us to remind one another that we are all in this human dilemma together. And that's something we can't be reminded of often enough.

On Reading Books in the Cities in Which They Are Set

I cannot recommend this practice highly enough, even though I've only done it twice. The second book-and-city combination was Joanna Scott's Arrogance in Vienna. The first was George Eliot's Middlemarch in Rome.

Here is the passage that lingers in my memory. Dorothea, the novel's heroine, has just arrived in Rome with her much older husband, Mr. Casaubon, and is experiencing an unaccountable sense of desolation:

She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.

....The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.

As it happened, that same sensation of bewilderment, of being unequal to the glory and squalor of Rome, I experienced when, at twenty, I sat down in the Piazza Navona with my copy of Middlemarch. The novel helped me to understand myelf and to place myself in the larger contexts of history and evolving human experience. And if fiction can't do that, what's the use of it?

What Sells Books in 2007?

Not surprisingly, this question is much on my mind these days, as once again, full of trepidation, hope, and anxiety, I venture forth on the strange journey that is a novel's publication. Various possible answers come to mind. Ads. Reviews. TV appearances. Having your wife leave you for Ted Turner. In the end, however, it seems to me that what really sells books in 2007 is what has sold books all along: word of mouth.

A case in point: Jane Gardam's remarkable novel Old Filth, published in 2006 by Europa Editions. The first person to recommend Old Filth to me was Beena Kamlani, one of the editors with whom I worked on The Indian Clerk and a wonderful writer in her own right. Then I ran into Sharon Lintz, a student in our MFA program here at the University of Florida, carrying around a dog-eared copy of Old Filth. (Sharon is a devoted reader of books published by Europa Editions and, like me, a fan of the late Patrick Hamilton, whose novels both Europa and New York Review Books are reissuing.) It was Sharon who explained to me that the "Filth" of the title was an acronymic joke name for the hero. It stands for: "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong."

The hero of Old Filth is a "Raj orphan." Born in Malaya, where his father is a provincial officer of the British Empire, Edward Feathers leads an idyllic childhood in the care of his Malayan nanny until he is sent back to England to be educated. After a traumatic few months in Wales, Feathers enters the British educational system from which he will emerge a Hong Kong barrister and, eventually, an uneasy retiree living in Dorset. Yet what is compelling about Old Filth is not just the story itself: it's the fractured storytelling, the jumps back and forth from Filth's childhood to his prime to his crotchety old age. Like Joanna Scott, Gardam is a genius at fracturing narrative.

Gardam is in her seventies and lives in England. She has published fifteen works of fiction, along with several children's books. Now the creator of TEV tells me that Europa Editions has just reissued another of her novels, The Queen of the Tambourine . Perhaps a career renaissance is about to take place, akin to the huge reawakening of interest, a decade ago, in the work of Penelope Fitzgerald.

Speaking of Fitzgerald

Back in the eighties and nineties, the Annoying Question I Most Often Found Myself Obliged to Answer was the following: "Do you consider yourself a gay writer?" Now that I'm about to publish The Indian Clerk this question has given way to another one: "Do you consider yourself an historical novelist?"

In both cases the answer is, more or less, the same.

Answer to "gay" question: "No, I consider myself a writer who happens to write, often, about gay men and lesbians."

Answer to "historical" question: "No, I consider myself a novelist who happens to have written a novel based on real events and concerning real people who are now dead."

The term "historical novelist" carries unhappy connotations. To me it calls up yellowed paperbacks from the seventies, with pictures of high-bosomed ladies on the cover and first lines along the lines of: "It was a quarter to twelve in the Petit Trianon, and Marie Antoinette was in a huff." For a long time it seemed that most writers I knew shied away from the past, and from real people; indeed, that they shied away from history itself. Then, in the nineties, this started to change. I credit this change, mostly, to Penelope Fitzgerald.

As she recounts in her book The Knox Brothers, Fitzgerald's father was the editor of Punch. Her Uncle, Dilly Knox, worked with Alan Turing on the breaking of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park. She herself did not start publishing fiction until she was in her sixties, and then she published with alacrity until her death, in 2000, at the age of 83. All her novels are great, but the greatest are the trio that take place in the past: The Gate of Angels, set in Cambridge just before the Great War; The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow at the same moment; and The Blue Flower, which is set in Germany in the age of Goethe and tells the story of the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (known as Novalis) and his mysterious passion for a seemingly unremarkable twelve year-old girl named Sophie von Kühn. The Blue Flower gave me the courage to wrestle, in my own way, with the muse of history, and led me to read a number of other very good "novels based on real events and concerning real people who are now dead," among them Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Joanna Scott's Arrogance, which is about the life of the Viennese Secessionist artist Egon Schiele and which I had the good fortune to read in Vienna, much of it at the Konditorei Aida, while eating gugelhupf and drinking a melange.

More to come...

THE INDIAN CLERK WEEK CONTINUES: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID LEAVITT

David Leavitt graduated from Yale University in 1983 with a BA in English. He is the author of the short story collections Family Dancing (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award), A Place I’ve Never Been, Arkansas, and The Marble Quilt, as well as the novels The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, While England Sleeps (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize), The Page Turner, Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing, and The Body of Jonah Boyd.   A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute of Catalan Letters in Barcelona Spain, Leavitt was recently named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library.

TEV: How did you first become aware of the story of the relationship between G.H. Hardy and Ramanujan, and what made it seem like there was a novel in that story?

DL:  A few years ago Jim Atlas, publisher of Atlas Books, asked me to write a non-fiction book of Alan Turing and the invention of the computer for his series "Great Discoveries." In the course of researching Turing's life, I bumped up against the Riemann hypothesis, which is widely considered to be the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. Like many mathematicians, Turing was fascinated by the Riemann hypothesis, and, at one point, even designed a machine intended to test the zeros on the critical line. To understand what I mean when I say "test the zeros on the critical line," you need to know a little about the Riemann hypothesis, which, at the time, I didn't. Luckily four books explaining the hypothesis to lay readers happened to have been published the year that I was working on Turing. The first of these that I read was Marcus du Sautoy's superb The Music of the Primes, which included a chapter on Ramanujan and an account of his collaboration with G. H. Hardy, part of which touched on the Riemann hypothesis.

I admit that what first fascinated me about the story of Ramanujan's relationship with Hardy was the language that Hardy himself, years later, used to describe it. He called his "association" with Ramanujan "the one romantic incident in my life." Knowing already that Hardy was perceived—at least by his other principal collaborator, J. E. Littlewood—as a "non-practicing homosexual," I decided to investigate the history of this odd "association" between a devout but poor Hindu Brahmin from rural Tamil Nadu and a fixture of Trinity College in the years just before and during the First World War. In sharp contrast to Turing, who was socially awkward and a bit of a loner, Hardy—and this was unusual for a mathematician—traveled in sophisticated circles. He was one of the only scientists to be inducted into the Apostles, the elite and secret Cambridge society the other members of which, at the time, included Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He also had close ties to Bloomsbury and literary London.

TEV: Your lengthy acknowledgements testify to a considerable research period. Can you talk about those efforts, about where in the writing they came – for example, was it primarily conducted up front, or did continuing research inform the actual writing process and even necessitate change?

DL: Early on I realized that if I tried to do all the research before I started writing, I'd never start writing. There was simply too much to learn. As Hardy himself might have put it, research can become an "infinite regress." So I made what seems to me, in retrospect, to have been the audacious decision to write and research simultaneously. This was scary at first, in that it involved throwing prose down on the page when in many instances I didn't yet know what I was talking about or what I was describing. Later, as I got deeper into the book, both processes became easier.

Needless to say this approach involved a lot of backpedaling, as, time after time, the discovery of some new and irresistible nugget of historical information required me to revisit a chapter I thought I was done with. But this is not really all that different from the way that I usually write.

TEV: The book takes on everything from pre-WWI Cambridge to the Bloomsbury set to travels in India. How did you cope with the challenge of keeping all this material in balance and moving ahead? (I love the use of Hardy's "imagined" lecture as a framing device. How did that one come to you? Was it there from the beginning or did it come later?)

DL:  For me, the most crucial decision in writing fiction is point of view. I knew from the start that I would not attempt Ramanujan's point of view. (Correction: I do enter his head—twice, I believe—in the novel.) This was mostly because I didn't feel I had the right or the authority to make a guess as to whether Ramanujan was, as he himself claimed, religiously devout, or whether, as Hardy insisted, he went through the forms of religious piety in order not to offend his family. Also, from a narrative standpoint, I wanted Ramanujan to exist for the reader much as he existed for the men and women he encountered upon his arrival in Cambridge: as an enigma, an emissary from a mysterious and alien world.

Hardy's standpoint seemed the natural one to take. At the same time, I was reluctant to write the novel from Hardy's point of view in first person because Hardy himself was a very fine writer (Graham Greene, among others, praised his memoir, A Mathematician's Apology) and I didn't want to feel obligated to mimic his very distinct style. Lastly, I wanted to make it clear to the reader, from the start, that the voice telling the story was an American voice, a contemporary voice; in other words, my voice.

Third person present tense seemed the best route to take, especially as writing in present tense allowed me to invest the storytelling with a sense of immediacy that would work against the stultified, museum-ish tone that is the great danger in writing about the past. In other words, present tense would allow the reader to inhabit the world of the novel rather than regard it as an artifact of the past. Also, present tense fiction is a relatively new phenomenon. In Hardy's time, virtually no writers were writing fiction in the present tense.

So I dove in. And for the first fifty pages or so, everything went swimmingly, so far as point of view and tense were concerned. However, at some stage in the writing process I remember feeling frustrated by the limits I'd imposed on myself. I wanted to enter into Hardy's head, if for no other reason than to give the reader a more intimate sense of his thought process. The lectures at Harvard—which he really did give—provided me with a perfect device for interlarding the third-person narrative with warmer and more informal first-person passages.

Balancing all the different elements: isn't that the trick in any novel? It's all about balance. I like to think of writing as a process of layering, akin to the layering that the great interior designer Nancy Lancaster perceived as the most crucial part of her art. Keeping the different strands of a narrative balanced and in harmony is one of the only aspects of writing that seems to require an orderly brain. For me, therefore, it was a challenge.

TEV:  The comparisons to While England Sleeps are probably inevitable so it's best to get the question out of the way – Were you at all concerned, given the controversy around that book, of taking on real characters and melding them with fiction? Is there a difference in the way The Indian Clerk handles the fictionalizing or real characters, other than the obvious convenience of dealing with people who are dead?

DL:  While England Sleeps was far more remote from its source material than is The Indian Clerk. That is to say, I used the story of the relationship between Stephen Spender and Tony Hyndman as the basis for the story of Brian Botsford and Edward Phelan only in the loosest sense of the word "basis." The Indian Clerk hews much more closely to fact than did the earlier novel. Curiously enough, it was the divergences between While England Sleeps and Spender's memoir, even more than the points of commonality, that caused the trouble.

TEV: The book is something a departure for you, in scope, setting and tone. In some ways, it almost seems like a work of the period it's concerned with – vast, with a large cast of characters, spanning years and continents. How difficult was it to "ramp up" for this book that's so different from working in more domestic milieus?

DL: Part of what drove me to undertake The Indian Clerk was, frankly, boredom with myself and the world(s) I have tended to write about. I wanted to get away from America, to get away from domesticity, to get away from families vaguely or explicitly reminiscent of my own, to get away from the tsurris of gay men in the late nineties. I also wanted to get away from writing about writers and the literary world. Early on in the gestation process, when I hadn't even started writing the book, I ran into the then Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences here at the University of Florida, a New Zealand-born physicist named Neil Sullivan. When I mentioned to him that I was contemplating a novel about Ramanujan and Hardy, he leaned toward me and said, in his inimitable accent, "Mathematicians are different from other scientists. They're ah-tists." It was the realization—really, the revelation—that I could look at my protaganists as artists that provided me with the impetus I needed to write the novel.

TEV: And yet, for all the surface differences between The Indian Clerk and the rest of your oeuvre, it seems that the material still resonates with some of your Great Themes – identity, authenticity, and others? (It's probably something of a non-sequitur, but your depiction of Hardy's plight, his struggles with his homosexuality, put me in mind of A.E. Housman as portrayed in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love.)

DL: I suppose we cannot escape ourselves. The least autobiographical novels often end up revealing the most about their authors.

TEV:  How did you find working with so many points of view, and what challenges did that present?

DL:  Point of view is my obsession. I love the intimacy of first person, and I also love the scope and latitude of third person. (About second person I'm more ambivalent.) In The Indian Clerk it was great fun to be able to move freely among a variety of points of view. The idea was to suggest Ramanujan's complexity and also his elusiveness, by giving the reader a wide range of responses to his uncanny arrival in Cambridge. The various characters from whose points of view the story is told—Hardy, Littlewood, Alice Neville—try to make Ramanujan into what they need him to be. They also try to grasp hold of him. What's interesting is that he continually escapes their efforts at embrace.

TEV:  I think you handled the inclusion of complex mathematics with elegance, clarity and restraint but I'm also personally interested in high-level mathematics. Were you at all concerned about how the presence of complicated math in the narrative might affect your readers?

DL:  Mostly I was concerned about making mistakes. The Man Who Knew Too Much, my book on Turing, was littered with small errors, most of which I corrected for the paperback edition. In order to make The Indian Clerk as clean as possible I asked a mathematician, Prabhakar Ragde. Manil Suri, a fine novelist (The Death of Vishnu) who also happens to be a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, also read the manuscript. They both found mistakes that I was relieved to be able to correct before the book went to press.

My feeling is that higher mathematics is actually easier for ordinary people like me to understand than our educations have led to believe. The trouble is that mathematicians speak, among themselves, a private language. Once the story of mathematics is translated into a language that non-specialists can grasp, we're able to enter into the story—which is incredibly compelling . Marcus du Sautoy, Paul Hoffman, Martin Davis, Simon Singh and other recent writers on mathematical subjects have shown us that one need only employ the writer's usual arsenal of tools—metaphor, allusion, analogy—in order to make mathematics meaningful to the non-mathematician in much the same way that music can be meaningful to the non-musician.

A curious fact that I encountered in researching this book: most mathematicians despise computation as much as most of us did when we were in high school. There's a famous story about a group of extremely eminent mathematicians at a conference who decide to eat together at a Chinese restaurant. When the bill comes, they can't manage, for all their struggling, to divide it up.

TEV: Having just finished my own revisions, I'm intensely interested in tales of revising, and The Indian Clerk is such a complex tapestry that I can't imagine what must have been involved in the revision process. Can you talk a little to that side of things? (I know from our earlier discussions that one of my favorite passages in the book – the image of the German housekeeper, which singled out in yesterday's post – came in revisions.)

DL: I am a ceaseless, obsessive reviser. I keep revising until the last possible minute. And I save every draft. The passage about the German housekeeper I rewrote about fourteen times before deciding—in page proofs—to go back to the first version.

Generally speaking, I hate starting things. Writing a passage for the first time, I shrink from the ugly disorder of what lands on the page. I'm not one of those writers from whose pens prose flows effortlessly, and who rarely change a word. Instead I hurl something down, print it out, look at it, wince, try to clean it up, print it out again, look at it, see a vague possibility of something decent, work on it some more, print it out again, smile in pleasure, take a break to have a coffee, come back, read it again, cry out in horror that I could think something so hideous was any good, work on it some more, print it out yet again…and so on, until…well, until it's as good as I think I can get it. And even then I'm usually not satisfied. Often I'll pick up one of my earlier books, open it to a page at random, and start rewriting what I'm reading in my head. It's an endless process and it's an essential process. Again, what one is doing, whether one knows it or not, is layering: first you paint the walls, then you put up the curtains, then you lay the carpet, then you arrange the furniture, then you put up the paintings…and lo and behold, you have a room.

TEV:  You've singled out Pat Barker in your acknowledgements as an influence, specifically her wonderful WWI trilogy – Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road – which I think are absolute masterpieces. Can you talk a little bit about how they informed The Indian Clerk?

DL: In these novels Barker does an amazing job of bringing the reader into the panicked landscape of England during the Great War. She manages to weave into her narrative a host of complexities that have tended to leave historians stumped, including the culture of homosexuality that took hold during the war, despite official efforts to vilify homosexuals as spies and traitors. At the same time, she tells an incredibly involving story. I also appreciate the ease with which she brings invented characters together with real people.

TEV:  You head up the creative writing program at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Tell us about Subtropics.

DL:  Subtropics is the literary magazine that we launched last year out of the Creative Writing program here. Our mandate is, first, to publish writing that we love; second, to provide a home for work that might be difficult to place elsewhere: long stories, extremely short stories, translations, works of great merit from the past that have lapsed out of print.

So far so good. From the first issue alone we had stories taken both for the O. Henry anthology and Best American Short Stories, as well as poems in two different volumes of Best American Poetry. And we got some nice comments on blogs, including one from Moorish Girl.

Now that I find myself on the brink of bringing out the fourth issue of Subtropics, I realize that what pleases me most about the magazine is its eclecticism. I challenge anyone to find an ideological bias in the choice of prose or poetry. (Our poetry editor is the estimable Sidney Wade, whose new collection, Stroke, is due out this fall from Persea Books.) We have published the very famous (John Barth, Allan Gurganus, Billy Collins, Anne Carson, even Harold Bloom) alongside the unknown, the barely known, and the forgotten. The magazine strives to be fun, but it is intended to be a magazine for readers, eschewing, for better or worse, the graphic excesses that characterizes many new magazines in favor of old-fashioned black prose on white pages.

If we had a model in mind when we started Subtropics, it was Grand Street back in the days when Ben Sonnenberg edited it. Indeed, it was a conscious decision to open the first issue with a pair of short lyrics by Sonnenberg. Ironically there is a typo in the title of the second of these. No doubt some demiurge was having fun with us.

TEV:  And maybe you can settle the age-old debate. MFAs – good, bad, indifferent?

DL:  It all depends on how they're taught. Look for an upcoming essay on the subject in The New York Times Book Review.

Please join us tomorrow when David Leavitt guest blogs - you'll have the opportunity to ask any questions we might have missed.

THE INDIAN CLERK - AN EXCERPT

We gratefully acknowledge David Leavitt and Bloomsbury for the permission to run the following exclusive excerpt from The Indian Clerk.

The letter arrives the last Tuesday in January 1913. At thirty-five, Hardy is a man of habit. Every morning he eats his breakfast, then takes a walk through the Trinity grounds—a solitary walk, during which he kicks at the gravel on the paths as he tries to untangle the details of the proof he's working on. If the weather is fine, he thinks to himself, Dear God, please let it rain, because I don't really want sun pouring through my windows today; I want gloom and shadows so that I can work by lamplight. If the weather is bad, he thinks, Dear God, please don't bring back the sun as it will interfere with my ability to work, which requires gloom and shadow and lamplight.

The weather is fine. After half an hour, he goes back to his rooms, which are good ones, befitting his eminence. Built over one of the archways that lead into New Court, they have mullioned windows through which he can watch the undergraduates passing beneath him on their way to the backs. As always, his gyp has left his letters stacked on the little rosewood table by the front door. Not much of interest today, or so it appears: some bills, a note from his sister, Gertrude, a postcard from his collaborator, Littlewood, with whom he shares the odd habit of communicating almost exclusively by postcard, even though Littlewood lives just on the next court. And then—conspicuous amid this stack of discreet, even tedious correspondence, lumbering and outsize and none too clean, like an immigrant just stepped off the boat after a very long third-class journey—there is the letter. The envelope is brown, and covered with an array of unfamiliar stamps. At first he wonders if it has been misdelivered, but the name written across the front in a precise hand, the sort of hand that would please a schoolmistress, that would please his sister, is his own: G. H. Hardy, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Because he is a few minutes ahead of schedule—he has already read the newspapers at breakfast, checked the Australian cricket scores, shaken his fist at an article glorifying the advent of the automobile—Hardy sits down, opens the envelope, and removes the sheaf of papers that it contains. From some niche in which she has been hiding, Hermione, his white cat, emerges to settle on his lap. He strokes her neck, and she digs her claws into his legs.

"Dear Sir," he reads.

I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not trodden the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as "startling."

He skips to the end of the letter—"S. Ramanujan" is the author's name—then goes back and reads the rest. "Startling," he decides, does not begin to describe the claims the youth has made. For instance, he writes: "Very recently I came across a tract by you styled Orders of Infinity in page 36 of which I find a statement that no definite expression has been as yet found for the number of prime numbers less than any given number. I have found an expression which very nearly approximates to the real result, the error being negligible." Well, if that's the case, it means that the boy has done what none of the great mathematicians of the past sixty years has managed to do. It means that he's improved on the prime number theorem. Which would be startling.

I would request you to go through the enclosed papers. Being poor, if you are convinced that there is anything of value I would like to have my theorems published. I have not given the actual investigations nor the expressions that I get but I have indicated the lines on which I proceed. Being inexperienced I would very highly value any advice you give me. Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you.

The trouble I give you! Hardy shifts Hermione, much to her annoyance, off his lap, then gets up and moves to his windows. Beneath him, two gowned undergraduates stroll arm in arm toward the archway. Watching them, he thinks of asymptotes, values converging as they near a sum they will never reach: a half foot closer, then a quarter foot, then an eighth… One moment he can almost reach out and touch them, the next—whoosh—they're gone, sucked up by infinity. Now there's a divergent series for you. The envelope from India has left a curious smell on his fingers, of soot and what he thinks might be curry. The paper is cheap. In two places the ink has run.

This is not the first time that Hardy had received letters from strangers. For all its remoteness from the ordinary world, pure mathematics holds a mysterious attraction for cranks of all stripes. Some of the men who have written to Hardy are genuine lunatics, claiming to have in their hands formulae pointing to the location of the lost continent of Atlantis, or to have discovered cryptograms in the plays of Shakespeare indicating a Jewish conspiracy to defraud England. Most, though, are merely amateurs whom mathematics has fooled into believing that they have found solutions to the most famous unsolved problems. I have completed the long-sought proof to Goldbach's Conjecture—Goldbach's Conjecture, stating simply that any even number greater than two could be expressed as the sum of two primes. Needless to say I am loath to send my actual proof, lest it fall into the hands of one who might publish it as his own…Experience suggests that this Ramanujan falls into the latter category. Being poor—as if mathematics has ever made anyone rich! I have not given the actual investigations nor the expressions that I get—as if all the dons of Cambridge are waiting with baited breath to receive them!

Nine dense pages of mathematics accompany the letter. Sitting down again, Hardy looks them over. At first glance, the complex array of numbers, letters, and symbols suggests a passing familiarity with, if not a fluency in, the language of his discipline. Yet how strangely the Indian uses that language! What he is reading, Hardy thinks, is the equivalent of English spoken by a foreigner who has taught the tongue to himself.

He looks at the clock. Quarter past nine. He's fifteen minutes off schedule. So he puts the letter aside, answers another letter (this one from his friend Bohr in Copenhagen), reads the latest issue of Cricket, completes all the puzzles on the "Perplexities" page of the Strand (this takes him—he times it—four minutes), works on the draft of a paper he is writing with Littlewood, and at one precisely puts on his blue gown and walks over to Hall for lunch. God, as he hoped, has disregarded his prayer. The sun is glorious today, warming his face even as he must shove his hands into his pockets. (How he loves cold, bright days!) Then he steps inside Hall, and its gloom muffles the sun so thoroughly his eyes don't have time to adjust. Mounted on a platform above the roar of two-hundred undergraduates, watched over by portraits of Byron and Newton and other illustrious old Trinitarians, twenty or so dons sit at the high table, muttering to one another. A smell of soured wine and old meat hovers. There is an empty seat to Bertrand Russell's left, and Hardy takes it, Russell nodding at him in greeting. Then a prayer is read in Latin; benches scrape, waiters pour wine, the undergraduates begin to eat lustily. Littlewood, across the table from him and five places to the left, has become caught up in conversation with Jackson, an elderly classics don—a pity, as Hardy wants to talk with him about the letter. But perhaps it's just as well. Given some time to think, he might realize it's all nonsense, and spare himself coming off as an idiot.

Although the Trinity menu is written in French, the food is decidedly English: poached turbot, followed by a cutlet, turnips and cauliflower, and some sort of sponge cake in a glutinous sauce. Hardy eats little of it. He has very strong opinions about food, of which the strongest is a detestation of roast mutton that dates back to his days at Winchester, when it seemed that there was never anything else on the menu. And turbot, in his opinion, is the roast mutton of the fish world.

Russell seems to have no problem with the turbot. Although they are good friends, they don't much like each other—a condition of friendship Hardy finds to be much more usual than is usually supposed. For the first few years that he knew him, Russell wore a bushy mustache that, as Littlewood noted, lent to his face a deceptively dim and mild expression. Then he shaved it off, and his face, as it were, caught up with his personality. Now thick brows, darker than the hair on his head, shade eyes that are at once intensely focused and remote. The mouth is sharp and slightly dangerous looking, as if it might bite. Women adore him—in addition to a wife he has a clutch of mistresses—which surprises Hardy, as another of Russell's distinctive features is acute halitosis. The breadth of his intellect and its vigor—his determination not merely to be the greatest logician of his time, but to diagnose human nature, to write philosophy, to enter into politics—impresses and also irritates Hardy, for the voraciousness of such a mind can sometimes look like capriciousness. For instance, in addition to the third volume of his mammoth Principia Mathematica, he has just published a monograph entitled The Problems of Philosophy. And yet tonight it is neither the principles of mathematics nor the problems of philosophy of which he is speaking. Instead he is amusing himself (and not amusing Hardy) by laying out—complete with diagrams sketched on a pad—his translation into logical symbolism of the Deceased Wife's Sister Act, which legalizes the marriage of a widower to his wife's sister; Hardy all the while keeping his face averted so as not to have to take in Russell's acrid breath. When Russell finishes (at last!), Hardy changes the subject to cricket: off-spinners and short legs, hooking mechanisms, the injudicious strategies that, in his opinion, cost Oxford its last game against Cambridge. Russell, as bored by cricket as Hardy is by the Deceased Wife's Sister Act, helps himself to another cutlet. He asks if there are any new players for the university whom Hardy admires, and Hardy mentions an Indian, Chatterjee of Corpus Christi. The summer before, Hardy watched him play in the freshman's match and thought him very good. (Also very handsome—though he does not say this.) Russell eats his gateau avec crème anglaise. It is a considerable relief when at long last the proctor utters the final grace, freeing Hardy to escape logical symbolism and walk over to Grange Road for his daily game of indoor tennis. As it happens, his partner this afternoon is a geneticist called Punnett, with whom he also sometimes plays cricket. And what does Punnett think of Chatterjee? he asks. "Perfectly fine," Punnett says. "They take their cricket seriously over there, you know. When I was in Calcutta, I spent hours on the maidan. We'd watch the young men play and eat the strangest stuff—a sort of puffed rice with a sticky sauce poured over it."

Recollections of Calcutta distract Punnett, and Hardy beats him easily. They shake hands, and he returns to his rooms, wondering whether it's Chatterjee's playing or his handsomeness—a very European handsomeness that the contrasting dark skin only renders all the more unexpected—that has really drawn his attention. Meanwhile Hermione is yowling. The bedder has forgotten to feed her. He mixes tinned sardines, cold boiled rice, and milk in her dish, while she rubs her cheek against his leg. Glancing at the little rosewood table, he sees that the gyp has delivered another postcard from Littlewood, which he ignores as he did the last, not because he doesn't care to read it, but because one of the tenets that governs their partnership is that neither should ever feel obliged to postpone more pressing matters in order to answer the other's correspondence. By adhering to this rule, and others like it, they have established one of the only successful collaborations in the history of their solitary discipline, leading Bohr to quip, "Today, England can boast three great mathematicians: Hardy, Littlewood, and Hardy-Littlewood."

As for the letter, it sits where he had left it, on the table next to his battered rattan reading chair. Hardy picks it up. Is he wasting his time? Better, perhaps, just to toss it in the fire. No doubt others have done so. His is probably just one name on a list, possibly alphabetical, of famous British mathematicians to whom the Indian has sent the letter, one after the other. And if the others tossed the letter in the fire, why shouldn't he? He's a busy man. G. H. Hardy hardly (Hardy hardly) has time to examine the jottings of an obscure Indian clerk…as he finds himself doing now, rather against his will. Or so it feels.

No details. No proofs. Just formulae and sketches. Most of it loses him completely—that is to say, if it's wrong, he has no idea how to determine that it's wrong. It resembles no mathematics he'd ever seen. There are assertions that baffle him completely. What, for instance, is one to make of this?

Such a statement is pure lunacy. And yet, here and there amid the incomprehensible equations, the wild theorems unsupported by proof, there are also these bits that made sense; enough of them to keep him going. Some of the infinite series, for instance, he recognizes. Bauer published the first one, famous for its simplicity and beauty, in 1859.

But how likely is it that the uneducated clerk Ramanujan claims to be would ever have come across this series? Is it possible that he discovered it on his own? And then there is one series that Hardy has never seen before in his life. It reads to him like a kind of poetry:

What sort of imagination could come up with that? And the most miraculous thing—on his blackboard Hardy tests it, to the degree that he can test it—it appears to be correct.

Hardy lights his pipe and begins pacing. In a matter of moments his exasperation has given way to amazement, his amazement to enthusiasm. What miracle has the post brought to him today? Something he's never dreamed of seeing. Genius in the raw? A crude way of putting it. Still…

By his own admission, Hardy has been lucky. As he is perfectly happy to tell anyone, he comes from humble people. One of his grandfathers was a laborer and foundryman, the other the turnkey at Northampton County Gaol. (He lived on Fetter Street.) Later this grandfather, the maternal one, apprenticed as a baker. And Hardy—he really is perfectly happy to tell anyone this—would probably be a baker himself today, had his parents, Isaac and Sophia, not made the wise decision to become teachers. Around the time of his birth Isaac Hardy was named bursar at Cranleigh School in Surrey, and it was to Cranleigh that Hardy was sent. From Cranleigh he went on to Winchester, from Winchester to Trinity, slipped through doors that would normally have been shut to him because men and women like his parents held the keys. After that, nothing impeded his ascent to exactly the position he dreamed of occupying years ago, and which he should, by rights, occupy, because he is talented and has worked hard. And now here is a young man, living somewhere in the depths of a city the squalor and racket of which Hardy can scarcely imagine, who appears to have fostered his gift entirely on his own, in the absence of either schooling or encouragement. Genius Hardy has encountered before. Littlewood possesses it, he believes, as does Bohr. In both their cases, though, discipline and knowledge were provided from early on, giving genius a recognizable shape. Ramanujan's is wild and incoherent, like a climbing rose that should have been trained to wind up a trellis but instead runs riot.

A memory assails him. Years before, when he was a child, his school held a pageant, an "Indian bazaar," in which he played the role of a maiden draped in jewels and wrapped in some Cranleigh school version of a sari. A friend of his, Avery, was a knife-wielding ghurka, who threatened him…Odd, he hasn't thought of that pageant in ages, yet now, as he remembers it, he realizes that this paste and colored-paper facsimile of the exotic east, in which brave Englishmen battled natives for the cause of empire, is the image his mind summons up every time India is mentioned to him. He can't deny it: he has a terrible weakness for the gimcrack. A bad novel determined his career. In the ordinary course of things, Wykehamists (as Winchester men were called) went to New College, Oxford, with which Winchester had close alliances. But then Hardy read A Fellow of Trinity, the author of which, "Alan St. Aubyn" (really Mrs. Frances Marshall), described the careers of two friends, Flowers and Brown, both undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge. Together, they negotiate a host of tribulations, until, at the end of their tenure, the virtuous Flowers wins a fellowship, while the wastrel Brown, having succumbed to drink and ruined his parents, is banished from the academy and becomes a missionary. In the last chapter, Flowers thinks wistfully of Brown, out among the savages, as he drinks port and eats walnuts after supper in the senior combination room.

It was that moment in particular—the port and the walnuts—that Hardy relished. Yet even as told himself that he hoped to become Flowers, the one he dreamed of—the one who lay close to him in his bed in dreams—was Brown.

And of course, here is the joke: now that he lives at Trinity, the real Trinity, a Trinity that resembles not in the least "Alan St. Aubyn's" fantasy, he never goes after supper to the senior combination room. He never takes port and walnuts. He loathes port and walnuts. All that is much more Littlewood's thing. Reality has a way of erasing the idea of a place that the imagination musters in anticipation of seeing it—a truth that saddens Hardy, who knows that if ever he traveled to Madras, steeped himself in whatever brew the real Madras really is, then that pageant stage at Cranleigh, bedecked with pinks and blue banners and careful children's drawings of goddesses with waving multiple arms, would be erased. Avery, swaggering toward him with his paper sword, would be erased. And so for this moment only can he take pleasure in imagining Ramanujan, dressed rather as Avery was dressed, writing out his infinite series amidst Oriental splendors, even though he suspects that in fact the young man wastes his days sorting and stamping documents, probably in a windowless room in a building the English gloom of which not even the brilliant sun of the east can melt away.

There is nothing else to do. He must consult Littlewood. And not, this time, by postcard. No, he will go and see Littlewood. Carrying the envelope, he will make the walk—all forty paces of it—to D Staircase, Nevile's Court, and knock on Littlewood's door.

*

Every corner of Trinity has a story to tell. D staircase of Nevile's Court is where Lord Byron once resided, and kept his pet bear, Bruin, whom he walked on a lead in farcical protest of the college rule against keeping dogs.

Now Littlewood lives here—perhaps (Hardy isn't sure) in the very rooms where Bruin once romped. First floor. It is nine o'clock in the evening—after dinner, after soup and Dover sole and pheasant and cheese and port—and Hardy is sitting on a stiff settee before a guttering fire, watching as Littlewood pushes his wheeled wooden chair from his desk and rolls himself across the floor, without once averting his eyes from the Indian's manuscript. Will he crash into a wall? No: he comes to a halt at a spot near the front door and crosses his legs at the ankles. Socks, no shoes. His glasses are tipped low on his nose, from which little snorts of breath escape, stirring the hairs of a mustache that, in Hardy's view, does little for his face. (Little for Littlewood.) But he would never say so, even if asked, which he never would be. Although they have been collaborating for several years now, this is only the third time that Hardy has ever visited Littlewood in his rooms.

"'I have found a function which exactly represents the number of prime numbers less than x,'" Littlewood reads aloud. "Too bad he doesn't give it."

"I rather think he's hoping that by not giving it, he'll be able to entice me to write back to him. Dangling the carrot."

"And will you?"

"I'm inclined to, yes."

"I would." Littlewood puts down the letter. "Look, what's he asking for? Help in publishing his stuff. Well, if it turns out there's something there, we can—and should—help him. Providing he gives us more details."

"And some proofs."

"What do you think of the infinite series, by the way?"

"Either they came to him in a dream or he's keeping some much more general theorem up his sleeve."

With his stockinged foot, Littlewood rolls himself back to his desk. Outside the window, elm branches rustle. It's the hour when, even on a comparatively mild day like this, winter reasserts itself, sending little incursions of wind round the corners, up through the cracks in the floorboards, under the doors. Hardy wishes that Littlewood would get up and stoke the fire. Instead he keeps reading. He is twenty-seven years old, and though he is not tall, he gives an impression of bulk, of breadth; evidence of the years he spent doing gymnastics. Hardy, by contrast, is fine boned and thin, his athleticism more the wiry cricketer's than the agile gymnast's. Though many people, men as well as women, have told him that he is handsome, he considers himself hideous, which is why, in his rooms, there is not a single mirror. When he stays in hotels, he tells people, he covers the mirrors with cloth.

Littlewood is in his way a Byronic figure, Hardy thinks, or at least as Byronic as it is possible for a mathematician to be. For instance, every warm morning he strolls through New Court with only a towel wrapped around his waist to bathe in the Cam. This habit caused something of a scandal back in 1905, when he was nineteen, and newly arrived at Trinity. Soon word of his dishabille had spread as far as King's, with the result that Oscar Browning and Goldie Dickinson started coming round in the mornings—this though neither had a reputation for being an early riser. "Don't you love the springtime?" O. B. would ask Goldie, as Littlewood gave them a wave.

Both O. B. and Goldie, of course, are Apostles. So are Russell and Lytton Strachey. And John Maynard Keynes. And Hardy himself. Today the Society's secrecy is something of a joke, thanks mostly to the recent publication of a rather inaccurate history of its early years. Now anyone who cares to know knows that at their Saturday evening meetings, the "brethren"—each of whom has a number—eat "whales" (sardines on toast), and that one of them delivers a philosophical paper while standing on the "hearthrug," and that these papers are stored in an old cedar wood trunk called the "ark." It is also common knowledge that most of the members of "that" society are "that" way. The question is, does Littlewood know? And if so, does he care?

Now he stands from his chair and walks, in that determined way of his, to the fire. Flames rise from the coals as he stokes them. The cold has got to Hardy, who in any case feels ill at ease in this room, with its mirrors and the Broadwood piano and that smell that permeates the air, of cigars and blotting paper and, above all, Littlewood: a smell of clean linens and wood smoke and something else—something human, biological—that Hardy hesitates to identify. This is one of the reasons that they communicate by postcard. You can speak of Riemann's zeta function in terms of the "mountains" and "valleys" where its values, when charted on a graph, rise and fall, yet if you start actually imagining the climb, tasting the air, searching for water, you will be lost. Smell—of Littlewood, of the Indian's letter—interferes with the ability to navigate the mathematical landscape, which is why, quite suddenly, Hardy finds himself feeling ill, anxious to return to the safety of his own rooms. Indeed, he has already got up and is about to say goodbye when Littlewood rests his hot hand on his shoulder. "Don't go just yet," he says, sitting Hardy down again. "I want to play you something." And he puts a record on the gramophone.

Hardy does as he is told. Noise issues forth from the gramophone. That's all it is to him. He can ascertain rhythm and patterns, a succession of triplets and some sort of narrative, but it gives him no pleasure. He hears no beauty. Perhaps this is due to some deficiency in his brain. It frustrates him, his inability to appreciate an art in which his friend takes such satisfaction. Likewise dogs. Let others natter on about their sterling virtues, their intelligence and loyalty. To him they are smelly and annoying. Littlewood, on the other hand, loves dogs, as did Byron. He loves music. Indeed, as the stylus makes its screechy progress across the record, he seems to enter into a sort of concentrated rapture, closing his eyes, raising his hands, playing the air with his fingers.

At last the record finishes. "Do you know what that was?" he asks, lifting the needle.

Hardy shakes his head.

"Beethoven. First movement of the Moonlight Sonata."

"Lovely."

"I'm teaching myself to play, you know. Of course I'm no Mark Hambourg, and never will be." He sits down again, next to Hardy this time. "You know who it was who first introduced me to Beethoven, don't you? Old O. B. When I was an undergraduate, he was always inviting me to his rooms. Maybe it was the glamour of my being senior wrangler. He had a pianola, and he played me the Waldstein on it."

"Yes, I knew he was musical."

"Peculiar character, O. B. Did you hear about the time a party of ladies interrupted him after his bathe? All he had was a handkerchief, but instead of covering his privates, he covered his face. 'Anyone in Cambridge would recognize my face,' he said."

Hardy laughs. Even though he's heard the story a hundred times, he doesn't want to take away from Littlewood the pleasure of thinking that he is telling it to him for the first time. In fact, though, Cambridge is full of stories about O. B. that begin this way. "Did you hear about the time O. B. was dining with the King of Greece?" "Did you hear about the time O. B. went to Bayreuth?" "Did you hear about the time O. B. was on a corridor train with thirty Winchester boys?" (The last of these Hardy doubts that Littlewood has heard.)

"Anyway, ever since then, it's been Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart for me. Once I learn, they're the only composers I'll play."

He gets up again, removes the record from the gramophone and returns it to its sleeve.

Dear God, please let him take out another record and put it on the gramophone. I'm in the mood for music, hours and hours of music.

The ruse works. Littlewood looks at his watch. Maybe he wants to work, or write to Mrs. Chase.

Hardy is just reaching for Ramanujan's letter when Littlewood says, "Do you mind if I keep that tonight? I'd like to look it over more carefully."

"Of course."

"Then perhaps we can talk in the morning. Or I'll send you a note. I rather imagine I'll be up most of the night with it."

"As you please."

"Hardy—in all seriousness, maybe we should think about bringing him over. Make some enquiries, at least. I know I may sound as if I'm jumping the gun…"

"No, I was thinking the same thing. I could write to the India Office, see if they've got any money for this sort of thing."

"He may be the man to prove the Riemann hypothesis."

Hardy raises his eyebrows. "Really?"

"Who knows? Because if he's done all this on his own, it might mean he's free to move in directions we haven't thought of. Well, goodnight, Hardy."

"Goodnight."

They shakes hands. Shutting the door behind him, Hardy hurries down the steps of D Staircase, crosses Nevile's Court to New Court, ascends to his rooms. Forty-three paces. His gyp has kept up his fire, in front of which Hermione now lies curled atop her favorite ottoman, the buttoned blue velvet one. "Capitonné," Gaye—who knew about such things—called the buttoning. He even had a special cover made for the ottoman, so that Hermione could scratch at it without damaging the velvet. Gaye adored Hermione; spoke, in the days before he died, of commissioning her portrait: a feline Odalisque, nude but for an immense emerald hung round her neck on a satin ribbon. Now the cover itself is in tatters.

Should they bring the Indian to England? As he mulls over the idea, Hardy's heart starts to beat faster. He cannot deny that it excites him, the prospect of rescuing a young genius from poverty and obscurity and watching him flourish…Or perhaps what excites him is the vision he has conjured up, in spite of himself, of Ramanujan: a young ghurka, brandishing a sword. A young cricketer.

Outside his window, the moon rises. Soon, he knows, the gyp will arrive with his evening whiskey. He will drink it by himself tonight, with a book. Curious, the room feels emptier than usual—so whose presence is he missing? Gaye's? Littlewood's? An odd sensation, this loneliness that, so far as he can tell, has no object, at the other end of which no mirage of a face shimmers, no voice summons. And then he realizes what it is that he misses. It is the letter.