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Letter to the editor

Historical novel has unsolved variables

David Leavitt, who broke ground in gay coming-of-age stories, explores the hidden lifeof a mathematician in World War I-era England in the new novel The Indian Clerk.

By John Freeman, Special to the Times
Published September 23, 2007

  What you can and cannot say in an American magazine has gone through a small revolution since David Leavitt began publishing fiction. The New Yorker published its first coming-out story 25 years ago this summer, the tale of a young man taking his lover to meet his mother. The author was 21-year-old David Leavitt.

A quarter-century later, thanks in part to Leavitt's early example, gay coming-of-age tales are old hat in American fiction. So is gay sex; so is gay family life; so are accounts dealing with AIDS.

"There's a real sort of 'been there, done that' feeling," said Leavitt, 46, by phone from his home in Gainesville, "even if it is a very real experience for people still."

It's not surprising that for his latest book, The Indian Clerk, Leavitt has spun backward in time to just before World War I in England - when so many barriers remained firmly in place.

The novel revolves around G.H. Hardy, a real-life mathematician working in the claustrophobic fug of Cambridge University. One day Hardy receives a letter from an accounts clerk in Madras, India, who seems nearly to have solved a complex mathematical proof on his own.

As soon as Hardy signs on to bring Srinivasa Ramanujan to England, however, he realizes he has taken on something bigger than mathematics. Cambridge, at the time, is a pretzel of intellectual one-upmanship and clubby collegiality.

Hardy is a member of a secret society whose roster includes philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is also a closeted homosexual. Making Ramanujan fit is going to be more than difficult.

The last time Leavitt employed a real figure in a novel, in While England Sleeps in 1993, he aroused the ire of the poet Stephen Spender, whose life and work Leavitt had drawn on for his portrait of gay life in Europe during the Second World War. Spender sued him for infringement of copyright.

The matter eventually was settled out of court - after the first edition of While England Sleeps was pulped, with a requisite dustup in newspapers. Leavitt feels, looking back on it, that the argument was more generational and cultural than literary.

"His real motive was this somehow outed him," Leavitt says, "or it took away his control over how people perceived him. My argument was, this isn't him."

Leavitt realizes he could arouse similar concerns with his new history-based novel. He says that books about Hardy "tend to soft-pedal his homosexuality," and he believes he has every right to correct the story, albeit fictionally.

Some of the most influential texts in his research for The Indian Clerk were novels. "I was thinking about books like the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower - novels that take actual people and transform them into characters."

Reviews have praised The Indian Clerk. In the lead review in the Sept. 16 New York Times Book Review, Nell Freudenberger called it "richly imagined" and noted Leavitt's "passion to inhabit the past, a particular novelistic impulse that goes beyond simple 'animation' of history." Edmund White, the historical novelist and biographer, says Leavitt "seems to have perfectly mastered this rarefied world and brought it off with compassion and accuracy."

Many of the issues Ramanujan faces as he acclimatizes to Hardy's world are ones Leavitt has faced in academia, as a writer in what he has taken to calling a "postgay" publishing environment.

"Ramanujan is full of contradictions when it comes to the value of accomplishment, when it comes to the whole question of . . . winning the approval of larger bodies and institutions which can somehow confer worth on a human being," he says.

It will be interesting to see how the book fares. Since the acclaim for his groundbreaking early fiction, Leavitt has not been a contender for major literary awards like the National Book Award or citations from the National Book Critics Circle.

Leavitt is prepared to be practical about all this. Since 2000, he has taught in the University of Florida's creative writing program, of which he is co-director, and lived in Gainesville with his partner, writer Mark Mitchell.

He has plenty of time, enjoys his teaching and likes his distance from parts of the world to which he doesn't relate. "We're living in a really weird time," Leavitt says. "There isn't really, as far as I can tell, a gay literary scene in the way that there was even 10 years ago."

So in The Indian Clerk we wind up at Cambridge, with an Indian mathematician and a closeted member of the intellectual Bloomsbury circle. "I really am drawn back to England," Leavitt says, "in part because, frankly, I love British fiction. Americans kind of rule in terms of the short story; in the novel, it's the British writers I am driven to."

With The Indian Clerk, he sounds like one.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

[Last modified September 19, 2007, 15:55:20]