Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

The Indian Clerk

The short life and hard times of a mathematical genius

David Leavitt
Bloomsbury, 485pp, £16.99,

Alexander Masters

Wednesday, 12th March 2008

Alexander Masters on David Leavitt's latest novel

Any proof pleases me: if I could prove by logic that you would be dead in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but the sorrow would be very much mitigated by my pleasure in the proof.

G. H. Hardy, one of the finest mathematicians of the 20th century and author of the best popular book about mathematical life, A Mathematician’s Apology, was a wistful and ascetic don at Trinity College, Cambridge. His lifelong collaborator was J. E. Littlewood. Though their rooms were only a corridor apart, they communicated almost entirely by postcard. But it is Hardy’s association with Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian clerk of David Leavitt’s new novel, that has kept him famous. An uneducated, superstitious, plump little fellow from a dust-and-temple village outside Madras, Ramanujan was among the greatest mathematical geniuses the world has ever seen.

The Indian Clerk is a fictional extrapolation of Hardy’s own spare account of his intense, exclusively intellectual partnership with Ramanujan, and Leavitt’s descriptions of the excitement of mathematical chase, the tussles with proofs, inspiration, the frustrations of algebraic rigour and the thrill of revelation are better than in any other novel involving mathematics that I’ve read.

But oooh … the sex.

After Ramanujan’s arrival in Cambridge in 1914, Leavitt has the wife of his host, the minor mathematician Eric Neville, fall in love with him. She begins by making Ramanujan something revolting for his supper, a ‘vegetable goose’, and ends by trying to snog him in his rooms — snog Ramanujan! — then she flees to London (the symbol of all failed rectitude in The Indian Clerk) and turns into a Swedish translator. Then Hardy — Hardy, the ascetic! He has a fantasy about a battlefield — two officers, tattered uniform etc. Then, a few chapters later — splutter — an erection. Was that a typo? To fans of the true Hardy, this is like talking about suspect bulges in pictures of the Pope. By Part Nine (this is a long book) there are two graphic pages of Hardy — Hardy, remember! — buggering a grumpy bit of rough called Thayer. ‘I am solely responsible for any lapses, ornamentations or imaginative swoons,’ you will see that Leavitt has acknowledged sweetly at the end of The Indian Clerk, as you wipe the shock off your spectacles.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Brave new writing

Richard Bradford

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how.