The Indian Clerk
by David Leavitt
Bloomsbury. 496 pages, $24.95
DAVID LEAVITT’S NEW NOVEL, The Indian Clerk, is his second historical novel. His first, While England Sleeps (1993), explored the troubled romance of two young men in World War II London. His latest is also set in wartime England, but it is the England of World War I, and his scope is much more ambitious. Leavitt uses a large cast of characters, almost all of them historical figures, to examine, not just romance, but also the complex tangle of friendship, sexuality, familial duty, vocation, and national identity that defines all human relationships.
The clerk of the title is Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian-born mathematical genius, widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. In 1913 Ramanujan, then an obscure functionary in the Indian government, wrote to G. H. Hardy, Britain’s foremost mathematician, then teaching at Cambridge. That letter set in motion one of the most fascinating friendships in the history of science.
In explicating this friendship, Leavitt has schooled himself in the mysterious and forbidding realm of pure mathematics. The casual reader paging through the novel will either be intrigued or intimidated by the many exotic-looking equations that appear throughout the text. This language of numbers is, in effect, the private language that Hardy, Ramanujan, and their colleagues employ for their most passionate and revealing conversations. (This theme of an obscure, shared language harks back to Leavitt’s first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes.)
Despite its title, The Indian Clerk is more Hardy’s story than Ramanujan’s. It begins in 1936, at a memorial lecture for Ramanujan that Hardy delivers at Harvard. As the novel progresses, Leavitt alternates between the events of Ramanujan’s five-year residence in England and Hardy’s 1936 reckoning of those years. Because of this alternating chronology, we hear of Ramanujan long before he appears on the scene, and we know his fate before we know what precedes it. What’s more, of all of Leavitt’s principal characters, Ramanujan is the only one whose interior life we are never shown. He exists more as a catalyst for Hardy, provoking Hardy to confront the doubts, vacillations, and fears that shadow his friendships, his professional life, and his attitudes toward his homosexuality.
Leavitt admits (in lengthy source notes) that he’s taken liberties with his fictionalization of history. Most of these involve Ramanujan’s effect on the men and women around him. The quiet but intense genius quickly arouses the interests of one of the novel’s main female characters, but what’s less clear is whether Hardy has sexual feelings for him as well. Before Ramanujan arrives in Cambridge, Hardy spends considerable energy trying to anticipate what he looks like, and he fills in the gap with the face of a handsome Indian cricket player he admires from afar. Ramanujan’s physical presence remains a source of almost morbid fascination for Hardy, but he is more concerned with delving into the mysterious light of Ramanujan’s mind.
While The Indian Clerk is an examination of the architecture of human love, both platonic and erotic, on a deeper level it is also an indictment of conventionality in all of its forms. Leavitt depicts numerous unconventional erotic relationships (gay and straight) in the novel, but he seems even more intent on highlighting the ossified conventions of institutions. Cambridge does not come off well in this regard. After all, Ramanujan is not only an unschooled genius arriving at the doorstep of one of the world’s greatest centers of learning, he is also, in the eyes of many, a “nigger,” a word that intrudes upon his existence soon after his arrival. Hardy and his colleagues despise, and admirably combat, these blatant displays of racism and xenophobia, but they have prejudices of their own to confront. Ramanujan is a purely original thinker, the likes of which Hardy and his colleagues have never seen. He challenges their mathematical systems; he also fails to live up to their ideals of what a mathematical genius should be. The war, of course, fractures their faith and certitude on an even grander scale.
Ramanujan’s character embodies an agnostic spirit that seems to haunt this novel. When the aged Hardy of 1936 reflects upon his brief friendship and collaboration with Ramanujan, he describes himself and his Cambridge circle as “distant planets” that “revolve around a star of which they can discern only the weakest penumbra.” The fact that Ramanujan ultimately remains mysterious, and that Leavitt opts to never take us into the genius’s complicated psyche, is in the end a disappointment. Perhaps this is the central point of the novel, that there will always be aspects of reality that elude our understanding. Leavitt is a masterful stylist, and The Indian Clerk is an admirably ambitious work.
