The Syme Papers Read online

  Of course, Syme himself was interrupted in mid-thought and spent the rest of his life trying to reach the other side of it. I would like at some point to investigate a ‘history of the man from Porlock’, the history of interrupted inspiration, named after the insurance salesman who broke in on Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan. The history of suspended ideas (which so nearly included this research) and their eventual animation. ‘Tom’ (Jenkyns himself, in a rare fit of anger) broke upon the only reverie of Sam pure enough to retain in waking the lucidity of dreams – and for all his good works on Sam’s behalf, that must be his final legacy.

  By what privilege (you may well ask) have we been permitted this front-row seat at the framing of a thought, this keyhole on a room, the three men in it over a century dead, yet breathing still, chatting, the short, strong one at the desk, sleeves rolled up, butting the palm of his fist against his chin, to precipitate, in such violent fashion, the subtlest emanation of the human soul, a thought of such power and perplexity that it anticipated a hundred years of geology, of such frailty, that a word could dispel it, blow it away, till only the scent remained, and that scent fading fast? Who stood at Sam’s shoulder and laid his hand in Sam’s ‘soft hair’? Whose record is this?

  *

  To answer, I must return to Highgate and the white-chocolate house above the ponds – the poky room with the little fridge, revealing, upon inspection, the soured cream now drunk or drained away, the hotel mini-bottle of gin, sipped and discarded, replaced by a single jar of mustard, crusted at the rim, and half-empty, sitting at an angle in the egg rack. To the Records of My Son, collected by Sam’s father.

  It is a curious fact about the constitution of our minds that we know when we know, but we don’t know when we don’t. Flickers and echoes deceive us, suggest the full force of thunder and lightning. We forget the power of the Real Thing; for it fades, too, in our memories, decaying into half-truth and equivocation, until we believe there is nothing else but mitigated revelation. Until we believe that a faith in the pure article belongs among the illusions of youth, for our fading familiarity with revelation, or, rather, our growing familiarity with half-revelation blinds us to the sudden light of knowledge.

  So I scoured the bundles of letters spread over the cup-stained pine of the desk pushed up against the window, scoured them for – nothing in particular – for revelation. For the crack in the surface of Sam’s life that would lead me to the heart of it. I read the records of his many petitions; for Sam acquired a taste for petitioning, and did not rest after the absurdly near success of his first attempt at suckering, I should say, securing aid, I should say, earning succour from the American Congress. And Tom, drawn to Sam in the first place by the Senate’s interest in his theories, prompted him to a dozen fresh petitions.

  In December 1822, he forwarded a request to both houses of Congress for the funds necessary ‘to prosecute the Great Dig, a geognostic experiment of vital significance, both to the honor and to the commercial prosperity of the United States’. The request was ‘laid on the table’ and deferred for future consideration (which meant, essentially, until Syme had proved the experiment could pay for itself, through the interest of the mining corporations).

  In March 1823 (taking a step back), he petitioned the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, ‘praying that body to pass a resolution approbatory of his theory of concentric spheres; and to recommend him to Congress for an outfit suitable to the enterprise of the Great Dig’. This memorial was presented by Micajah T. Williams (a prosperous landowner whose holdings included a variety of mineral deposits), and succeeded in passing both houses of the Virginia legislature. However, on presentation to the national body in the fall of 1823, the Senate determined ‘on motion, that the further consideration thereof was indefinitely postponed’ – a great blow to Syme and Jenkyns, which essentially defeated any hope they might have nursed of national support. The fact that his petition was not denied outright lies in a curiosity of the law. As it stood, Congress could revive Syme’s petition, in the event that his enterprise seemed on the point of commercial viability, and through their tardy aid claim some share in his profits. As it turned out, they never had occasion to do so; and Syme and Jenkyns were forced to look further afield for their patron.

  In November 1824, Syme noted the following account in the Richmond Intelligencer, still preserved in a leaf of his father’s album, the paper blotched and browned, the ink itself fattening with age:

  Accounts, dated Oct 27th from Copenhagen, state that a violent shock of an Earthquake, which lasted ten minutes, was experienced in Iceland. It was attended with a noise under ground as of a dreadful Cracking, and immediately after there was an eruption from Hecla. The sea was in a state of dreadful commotion. The eruption was preceded by a very striking phenomenon. A noise was heard – the Earth gaped wide – meteors appeared in the direction of the Volcano – a flame soon followed with smoke, from which issued globes of liquid Fire, discharged to a great distance, accumulating at last and flowing out in torrents, hissing and congealing into the Sea.

  Syme applied through the American Minister at the Court of Copenhagen for permission to explore the aftermath (the site, Syme believed, of an eruption of internal gas, of fluvia) – a request readily granted by the Chancellor, Count Nichsotieff, who nevertheless refused Syme’s bid for a ‘proper outfit, of men & machinery’ to attempt the expedition; and the want of means prevented Sam in the end from setting forth. (I could not help but wonder – had he flinched again?)

  At this point, increasingly desperate, Tom turned his attention to even the slightest of the European states in the hope that an ambitious but insignificant young prince might support a rather ‘visionary’ expedition in order to make a name for himself and his little kingdom. I discovered among Sam’s papers an almost endless stream of denials, both equivocal and unequivocal; interested denials and uninterested denials; formal and informal denials, in pure and broken English; refusing funds, government cooperation, access to records, machinery, venues for lectures and demonstrations, employment, publication – all faithfully preserved by a father who seemed to consider even the proof of rejection as some evidence of the esteem in which his son was held, some indication of the circles in which he moved. I, on the other hand, could not repress a kind of frustration – not unmixed with pity and admiration – at the … stupidity, I wish to say, but soften it to insensitivity, of a man who beats his fist so long against an unanswered door.

  Of course, a slight tributary of partial triumphs ran into the stream of his failures: evidence of lectures held, demonstrations attended, fields surveyed. And within this trickle I discovered the following note, written in an elegant if somewhat elaborate hand, the loops of each ‘I’ and ‘S’ richly curled, the vertebrae of high-backed ‘d’s austerely straightened, the feet of ‘m’s and ‘n’s daintily propped upon the rigid, imagined line:

  Dear Dr Syme [it began, a common enough mistake]:

  We have received your petition regarding the exploration of the internal globe – the Great Dig as you quaintly call it – and read, with a particular of interest, your account of the nested spheres, a wonderful Invention of Providence, it appears, should the outer layer ever offer grounds for Dissolution. Naturally, we should require a modicum of Proof – a word, I know, to which the brotherhood of Geognosy have never attached much Signification – but to which poor Ministers of Finance must bend the knee, before they empty the Purse.

  I have broached the matter with our Prince, who professes a particular interest in the Compression Piston, by which you hope to effect the Scale of excavation proposed by your petition; and following its Steps (or, in the event of its possession of a single Foot or Spade, Step), to descend into a more intimate understanding of the Entrails of this Planet. And I write to you, pursuant of His desire, that we should explore the Matter further before concluding, This way or That, the merits of your Case. In accordance with which, we propose to send a gentleman of some geognostic
distinction, a student, at one point, of Werner himself, and a professor of Geognosy at our own university (in short, to speak plainly, my own son), to evaluate the claims you make on behalf of your Theory, and to judge the extent to which the Machinery of your Practice could eventuate a deeper Understanding of a question so prominent in all our thoughts – the nature of the Earth’s core – before committing ourselves to the Experiments you suggest.

  We await an answer; should it prove satisfactory, you may expect Dr Friedrich Müller, by the close of the year.

  Respectfully,

  Ferdinand Müller

  First Minister, Kolwitz-Kreminghausen

  Even after such long disuse, the letter agitated in me a slight tremor of the joy of acceptance, the quiet yes that, like a cracked bottle, inaugurates a voyage – a borrowed joy, it is true, but one I hoped to turn into my own. I guessed at once the importance of this letter, for not only did it suggest the eventual success of Syme’s petition, but it carried him across the waters, to Germany at last, or, rather, at first – a journey from which, I hoped to prove, so much resulted. Surely, I thought, it is reasonable to trace a line from the University of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen (a tiny, long-forgotten principality on the banks of the Elbe upriver from Hamburg) to the University of Marburg eighty years later, to which Wegener was appointed (on his first return from Greenland) as a lecturer in astronomy and meteorology – and at which, he maintained, the thought of continental drift first crossed his mind. I could not, however, guess then the windfall this letter would lead to. It is perhaps unsurprising that a memoir was written; it is only surprising that it was written by a young doctor from Kolwitz-Kreminghausen.

  The letter from the Finance Minister suggested a number of things, but an unqualified faith in Syme’s theories was not among them. It was a suspicious letter, deeply suspicious, in both senses of the word – proceeding from, and producing in turn, suspicion. Herr Ferdinand Müller implied rather a faith in possibility than a faith in Syme; the letter arches its eyebrows several times; it teases; it whispers, at best, only perhaps. Perhaps what? I thought, as Syme himself must have done; perhaps the earth is hollow, formed of nested concentric spheres and empty at the core? Or was there some other, more practical doubt (doubt, I mean, as a step towards, not away from, belief) that moved Herr Müller to answer the strange, fabulous, petition?

  The more I thought of Müller’s letter, the curiouser it became. I pressed my thumb to the thought-provoking divot between nose and brow. (My hands meanwhile felt easier than they had in months; each finger separate and alive, the thumb itself rearing freely upon its mound of flesh like a horse shedding its rider.) Why had the Finance Minister answered the petition? And deferred to his prince only towards the end, over the matter of the compression piston? How much could be read into the suggestive fact that the geologist sent to evaluate Syme’s theories was himself the son of the minister responsible for the expedition?

  I began to form a picture of the kind of interest Syme had attracted. There was the strong suggestion of what we call a ‘job for the boys’. Believe me, I have known such ‘boys’ in my day, their skin glowing with healthy bank accounts, their hair coiffed and delicate, in the faith, in the certainty, that no wind or cloud pertained to them; ineffectual men, on the whole, who spend the fortunes of their lives too easily. (Did I not declare, from the outset, that this seemed to me a story of fathers?) It would not have been the first time a young man was sent across the world on a government mission to investigate, chiefly, his own curiosity; but there was more to it than that. A minister overreaching himself, perhaps? A genuine concern for scientific progress, or, to put it another way, for the honour of a small German state hoping to make a name for itself? Something of each, I suppose, was at work; but the strongest consideration seemed to me, even then, the possibility that the compression piston might make somebody (and particularly the Finance Minister of a small state heavily veined with mineral deposits) rich.

  You know when you know; and I knew at once the scent was strong – like a curl of cigarette smoke in an empty room, drifting into a question, asking, who was here? Someone was coming to take a look at Syme and opening his wallet as he came. That night, in the ‘quiet roar’ of my studio flat in King’s Cross, the shackles came off my wrists, those blue wraps binding thumb and finger in an impotent clutch. Now the prisoned digits stretched free, walked tiptoe over tabletops and window panes, pattered the bubbles of a hot bath, popping like rain – two months of pent-up force released at last. And then the rains themselves came down over the city (outside the window over the tub). A cloud sagging low over the train station gave up the burden of itself at last, just as my hands had – forgetting the constriction of their own strength, easy in themselves again. Stepping out, dripping, on to the sudden cool of bathroom tiles, the air of an English summer evening cold as white wine through the window, a towel bound across rump and belly (distended somewhat by English ale) – I realized another shackle had burst, and it was time to write.

  You know when you know, I thought, lying down that night in the peculiar sleepiness that dreams already of the morning and the business of the next day. Love and truth declare themselves. I was on the trail at last. Only when the first fogs of sleep descended on me did a small thought, like the glow of a torchlight, disturb my peace – for Sam himself, among the clutter of his inspiration, when the single shining truth appeared before him, had not known.

  *

  In the morning I began to write, slowly at first, punching stubborn fingers against the keyboard, thick, heavy words like the first drops of rain; and then steadily; and then all at once, in a torrent of explanation. Words took me through the day like breaths, like ticks of the clock; I lived by the word; I stepped words and stumbled words; I inhaled them and sighed them; the slightest, least durable of my motions, the flutter of my fingers, trailed a history behind it. I ate words and swallowed them; saying ‘fish’ to myself as I placed a forkful on the palate, and whispering ‘chew’ as the teeth ground over the white flesh; and ‘digest’, as the dull lump squeezed and slid towards the stomach. I had lost the patience for academic prose; my fingers chased their fancies; the blood in them flowed rich through the veins, kicking with life, as it were, from a dose of sea air.

  And as I wrote, I read, living two lives, the beginning and the end at once. As the first dim forays of Sam’s genius stumbled beneath my pen, the curious history of the principality of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen unfolded before my eyes: a history as strange and wonderful, in its way, as the life of Syme himself, to my great good fortune. This was nearly the last of my strokes of luck – that Ferdinand Müller turned out to be such a character after all, involved in a history as remarkable as Sam’s, worthy in itself of historical investigation. But when you reckon the extent of my good fortune, consider the world of revelations I might have missed, walking blindly by, in the dark of history …

  Kolwitz-Kreminghausen had been restored to its rightful, if inconsiderable, place along the Elbe after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the Congress of Vienna – between Holstein (and Hamburg) to the west, and Brandenburg (and Berlin) to the east. The capital was Neuburg – a small market town built around the river, which enjoyed a brief period of prosperity in the Middle Ages, before the expansion of trade to the Indias and Americas rendered its own cosy little spot along the Elbe less advantageous than before. It refused to die out, however, neither growing nor fading; and eventually became the seat of one of the remoter branches of the Hohenzollern family, the Kreminghausens – a connection that probably accounts for the restoration of statehood at the end of the French Revolution, when the Congress reduced the number of German states to thirty-eight.

  Naturally, the territorial distribution of the Congress angered many. Aside from the conservative regimes that replaced the Napoleonic Code (which, despite its parasitical nature, had offered at least a taste of republican liberties), the Congress had prevented the formation of a united Germany, the dream of a new bre
ed of German patriot. The Burschenschaften – the student political societies begun in Jena in 1815 – were growing up, and the Burschen wished to play some part in German affairs. KK, however, had the advantage of returning to an established family. (Many of the new states had to fabricate a royal history to persuade their people of legitimacy.) Unfortunately, the old prince had died, not in the war, but during its protraction. The new prince had barely turned twelve when the state was restored.

  This left KK in the hands of a growing rank of bureaucrats, swelled, increasingly, by members of the nobility themselves. Napoleon had left his mark on Germany. The swiftness with which his armies had overrun the Holy Roman Empire taught the new nations a lesson in efficiency, never mind republicanism. Ambition turned now to the bureaucracy, which reflected a new meritocratic spirit. Which brings us to Kolwitz-Kreminghausen, governed by a young prince and a rising class of political officials. Which brings us, at last, to Ferdinand Müller, an intelligent and ambitious gentleman, of liberal and nationalistic tendencies, who discovered himself suddenly in a position of some (admittedly local) power.

  Syme must have caught Müller in a patch of princely sunshine. Müller successfully persuaded the young prince (now growing up quickly) that a scientist such as Syme, if proven correct, could do for Neuburg what Werner had done for Freiberg only twenty years before: put them on the map. The compression piston alone could pay for the experiment ten times over, if successfully adapted and applied to the veins of coal recently discovered south of the Elbe. The KK mines, Müller whispered in the princely ear, could yield enough to rival Britain itself (which currently controlled over 90 per cent of the market) in supplying Holstein and Brandenburg with coal. The little princedom would grow rich.