The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online Page A

groping in a fog, feeling for a tug on the string. Somewhere high above you truth hovered—absolute, indisputable. When
     you felt the tug, it meant that you'd found the proof.
    God had nothing to do with it. Proof was what connected you to the truth.

    And what of the tripos?
    Halfway through his first year Hardy went to Butler, the master of Trinity, and announced that he was giving up mathematics.
     He would rather change over to history, he said, return to Harold and the Battle of Hastings, than waste another minute in
     the gloom of Webb's ugly house.
    Butler had a gift for quick thinking. He rotated his wedding ring a quarter turn (this was his habit) and sent Hardy off to
     talk to Love. Love, though an applied mathematician himself, recognized the source of Hardy's passion, and gave him a copy
     of Camille Jordan's three-volume Cours d'analyse de I'Ecole Poly technique. This was the book, he later said, that changed his life, that taught him what it really meant to be a mathematician. Love
     also persuaded Hardy that if he quit mathematics just to avoid the tripos, he would be submitting to its tyranny far more
     completely than if he simply buckled down and took the thing.
    The Cours d'analyse, Hardy told Littlewood, made the difference. The mere fact of knowing it awaited him on his shelf made it possible for him
     to endure Webb's coaching. So he resumed the protocol of memorization, practice, memorization, and when June came, he went
     to take the tripos with the first volume of the Cours d'analyse secreted in his coat pocket, as a talisman, and came out fourth wrangler.
    For years afterward, naysayers grumbled that Hardy's subsequent determination to destroy the tripos was sour grapes, that
     it owed entirely to his not being named senior wrangler. This he denied vociferously. Nor, he insisted, did his not being
     named senior wrangler have anything to do with his decision, a month or so later, to leave Cambridge for Oxford. Had he been
     named senior wrangler, or twenty-seventh wrangler, or wooden spoon, he would have done the same. For the grudge he bore was
     not against the men who had scored higher than he had: it was against the tripos itself, and more generally, Cambridge, the
     insularity of which the tripos embodied, and more generally still, England, its rigidity and smug, unquestioning belief in
     its own superiority. In the end it took Moore to persuade him to stay. England, Moore told him, he could not remake. But perhaps
     he could remake the tripos.
    From then on, tripos reform became his crusade. He waged a campaign that was passionate, intelligent, and unrelenting, and
     eventually, in 1910, he won: not only was the tripos modernized, the reading of the honors list was terminated. No longer
     would wranglers and optimes stroll the avenues of Cambridge in June. No longer would wooden spoons be handed down from the
     Senate House roof. Instead the tripos would be just another exam. None of which, he maintained, with just a hint of vexation
     in his voice, had anything to do with his having been named fourth wrangler. After all, Bertrand Russell had been seventh
     wrangler, and he was—well, Bertrand Russell. Had Hardy been senior wrangler, he would have felt the same way. Done the same
     thing. It was important to him that strangers understood and believed this.

5
    F OR A WEEK, Hardy and Littlewood study the math. They sit together, either in Hardy's rooms or Littlewood's, with the pages
     of the Indian's letter spread out before them, copying out the figures on a blackboard or on sheets of the expensive, creamy,
     eighty-pound paper that Hardy uses exclusively for what he calls "scribbling." As they work, they drink tea or whiskey—all
     this a deviation from their usual routine of postcards and letters, but one that the situation seems to demand.
    There are clashes, and when they occur, it seems to Hardy that they are the clashes of spouses, not collaborators. "You always
     have to finish the