The Syme Papers Read online

  Lt Syme has undertaken this experiment, in the hopes of proving the effect of compression, not on Water at last, but upon Air, believing that sufficient force could liquefy even our own exhalations, reducing them, as it were, to no more than a trickle of Tears. Such liquefaction is vital to a theory of the internal Earth upon which Lt Syme, lately of Yale College, is engaged, following the suggestions of no less than Benjamin Franklin upon the subject of a compressed gas, as the natural Lubricant of the mechanism of the Planet.

  Lt Syme expects so to improve and perfect his Apparatus as to be able to apply a pressure equal to that of 100 atmospheres, the result of which, should he succeed, of which we have little doubt, we shall be curious to know, and prompt to announce to the public.

  My hands shivered as I read, both from the extreme refrigeration of the Microfilm Chamber, and from a kind of relief, inseparable from excitement. Syme was no simple charlatan, no village trickster, I was sure. Here at last was proof of the weight of his convictions – the laborious machinery of his theories, each wheel meticulously constructed, patiently articulated into the grand design.

  Slowly, I felt, I had begun to grasp the fabric of the man. The quality I had mistaken for lightness was in fact a profound restlessness, an excess, of energy and intellect, a fresh itch continuously scratched. He turned for relief of this innate discomfort – a kind of tightness of his own skin, from which he sought to burst free – to the easy applause of a parochial ignorance, to flatterers and flattery, to the warmth of simple admiration. But only for relief. I felt I knew my man. The time had come when, with a delicate finger, I could feel his pulse as my own. How often had I myself wasted an idle hour bullying and persuading ignorant company, simply to preen my own feathers? But beneath his bright vanities lay a far weightier ambition, a heavy sense of purpose, that drove him on, regardless of obscurity, a deep patience. At times, I flattered myself that his patience had found its reward, at last, in my attentions, my rescue, from the sea of time, in which he had almost drowned.

  Of course, I could not hide from myself, even then, a certain – what shall I call it? – tendency to flinch from good fortune; or perhaps, more precisely considered, a Failure Drive, if I may coin the term. Time and again he seemed to turn, at the last instant, from the light and find himself a comfortable shadow. Embarked on his studies at Yale (studies particularly congenial to the bent of his genius), he fled after a single year for what? The obscurity of a soldier’s life. And even then, just as the fortunes of war offered him the chance to make a name (which he took – it must be remembered that Syme was a man who took his chances before he neglected them), he fled again, after his discharge, not to Philadelphia or Boston or New York, the hub of his geological ambitions, but to Pactaw, Virginia, a day’s drive from Baltimore, to survey a vein of bituminous coal for the Virginia Mining Corporation (the man had to live, after all) and impress, from time to time, the ignorance of the locals.

  Perhaps the clue to Syme’s character lies in my own bosom. For I began to suspect that the curious flinching that afflicted Syme afflicts myself; and I read into his prevarications and procrastinations (and there were more to come, always more to come, for success dogged Syme, nipping at his heels, and he escaped, again and again, before I closed upon him) the history of my own self-neglect. For have I not turned and turned again, at the last moment, from triumph? Declined the scholarship to Harvard, a boy of seventeen, to linger in the sunshine of San Diego and the terminal shadow of my mother’s sickbed, to which my father displayed a peculiar aversion undiminished by his disappointment at my ‘going to State’ and eased only in the end by her eventual death at the age of fifty-five from cancer, during the spring of my junior year. Of course, I had right on my side, and kindness, and fealty; but I lack both the generosity of spirit not to regret such chances missed and the greatness of spirit to grasp them.

  The true artist will trample on his mother, his wife, his children, his friends, to pursue the path of his art; well, I am no true artist, though I have done my share of trampling in my time, and been trampled upon. Yet there is always the rebound; and I finagled my way to Oxford after Mother’s death on a Rotary Fellowship to wander at last among the ancient halls of learning and put on airs. (I confess myself guilty of a cricket jersey at the time; and even, in a weak moment, a boater.) But after every recovery, there is a fresh evasion; and a year before completing my D.Phil., I chased a girl to New York and never caught her and never went back, and ended up teaching Freshman Bio to a collection of the pleasantest and richest teenage Jews (the rich are always so pleasant) from the Upper East Side of Manhattan for five long years of easy, uncounted life, confronted at every turn by a host of bustling mothers, who could only regret that ‘such a nice young man was a goy’.

  But after every evasion there is a fresh recovery; and I married the pick of the History Department, a plump and pretty Jewess (my eternal Miss Susie), built something along my own lines; and dropped out. So we accumulated (there is no other word) ourselves in a two-bedroom railroad apartment on East 89th Street, while she tutored after hours and taught summer school, to support the wriggly young boy on the way, and the wrigglier old boy turning again to his doctorate, starting from scratch, at NYU, for another five long, penniless years until at last I could make good.

  And here I sit, and I haven’t made good yet; hoping to make good that long-ago no-goodnik, Samuel Highgate Syme, whom even the staunchest mother might be forgiven for giving up on. And Mrs Pitt sweats away through a Texan summer, alone with the two boys, suspecting, doubting hopefully, knowing in her heart, that once again there has been an evasion, and that Douglas Pitt, up at last for tenure, unpublished, unsupported by the Dean, betrayed even by his own hands (in stiff rebellion, the channels of communication blocked, the workers striking), has not written a word (for all his Fulbrights) on the Inspiration of Error, while he chases, once again, another lost cause, another evader, hoping that he proves of a different mettle from his own.

  *

  I said that I had begun to grasp the fabric of Syme, feel the texture of the man beneath my thumb. There was strength there, sure; a certain roughness, a willingness to make do, even with failure (I guessed then, and have since been proven wrong). He could work, there was no doubt of that, had an appetite for exertion, a taste for his own sweat, displayed again and again, in his early reports from college, his courage in war; even the books of the Virginia Mining Corporation proved above all that he could bend himself to the task at hand. In his first year with the company he covered an almost impossible stretch of ground, from the Potomac to the Mississippi, by himself; while producing at the same time that astonishing piece of scientific illusionism ‘The Theory of Concentric Spheres’, and developing the ‘ingenious Force’ that powered the piston for his experiments in the compression of water. No doubt he hoped to secure enough funds to open a free space for his own investigations; and this he appears to have accomplished, for after the initial burst his outings with the VMC grow fewer and further between.

  But there is something else – and I struggle for the phrase – suggested by these intermittent fragments of his life, powerful and irregular as the illuminations of lightning in a dark landscape. A certain lack of principle. There, I have said it; the words sit plump and glowing on the screen and my single banging finger poises above the button for ‘delete’ to remove all trace of such a questionable libel, and … forbears. Syme lacked principle; he seemed as willing to delight the ignorance of a handful of farmers as to persuade the comprehension of the finest scientists in the young republic, from Professor Silliman on down. He buried himself in obscurity either in the belief that a candle glows brightest in a dark corner or in the fear that he could not survive the winds of public dispute. I could see no alternative at the time. Satisfied at last that he was no simple charlatan, I could not dissuade myself either of the pettiness of his ambition (the rabble’s applause, and a rather tiny rabble at that) or of the still less palatable notion that he wa
s a coward. (And, by extension, from one personality to the next, that my own failures lay in this very weakness – the fear of exposure, of a final reckoning, the devotion of a life to ‘something evermore about to be’ and never at hand.)

  The next piece of evidence I stumbled upon puzzled me still further. I had returned to the house of Sam’s grandfather, the white-chocolate elegance of the eighteenth century and the poky little room looking over the garden and the edge of Highgate Ponds. Rummaging through the chest of papers, I discovered the following curious pair of letters, bound in red ribbon and carefully folded, one within the other. I gently disentangled them, softening their edges with a tender thumb before I unbent them. The shorter letter, composed in a fine if elderly hand, was also the more recent and ran as follows:

  Sir – you requested, in memory of your late Son, a copy of his correspondence with me, with which I have obliged you. Lately, clearing away a somewhat rotted Case of Books, a Leaf fluttered out, which I had doubtless laid between two pages in some careless Hurry of the moment. I discovered it to be from your Son, and moreover, marked the last correspondence we ever held (though I saw him after, in person, in Philadelphia, and exchanged a Kindness). I now enclose it to you.

  I regret to say, that though I knew him long I knew him lightly. He withdrew from the College after a single year. He fell out of my Ken for a time, until he obliged me with his essay on the Theory of Spheres, which I chose to publish, believing at the time there was some Method to his Madness that wanted encouragement. I fear however that the Madness outran the Method; and when I declined a second essay (being somewhat opaque even to the learned Eye) and recommended that he bend his Talents to some more practical branch of our Philosophy (in which he might have shone, and in which I should have published him), he closed all communication with myself and our enterprise in the Letter that follows. I could have wished our acquaintance deepened, trusting that had he been ‘put on, he would have proved most royal’, though the Bar before him, I am afraid, he fixed himself.

  Yours faithfully,

  Ben. Silliman

  P.S. Rest assured, I bear him no ill will now for the tenor of the following.

  This then was ‘the tenor of the following’, a single folded sheet of paper in the characteristic untidiness of Sam Syme himself, odd words smudged with the heavy fist of their composer.

  Sir – I could write frequently to your Lyceum on the practical Arts of our Philosophy (which you praise so highly), but I see no Object in it. My pieces are all necessarily Speculative, owing to what I consider the shameful Ignorance of even our most lauded Geologists of any System of Thought according to which they might arrange their no doubt laborious Observations. Such a System is of the first Importance if our present rapid progress in the Natural Sciences is to be maintained. Well, you publish nothing of such Matter, excepting now and then a piece, entirely for the benefit of the Author’s Vanity … To be emphatically serious, your Journal of the American Sciences has admitted such puerile wretched Trash, that I am heartily sick of Periodical Fame and prefer to bend my bow at an obscurer Distance. In short, you study to please fools.

  I have sent you the finest article on Geognosy I ever wrote, which, properly understood, might set the World on its Ears and guide our science to unguessed-of Shores. You have declined, preferring no doubt a long dull mess of trash about Music, or William’s toad. I will not write it, Sir.

  Believe me, etc.

  Samuel Syme

  Whatever else might be said of this curious piece of professional suicide, it did not strike me as the work of a coward – at least, no coward in the ordinary sense. By this wonderful outburst of sheer arrogance – the ‘stuff’ in Larkin’s phrase ‘that dreams are made on’ (for I am nothing if not literary, the leading light of our little Blue-stocking Society in Austin, a poetry … workshop, I believe is the preferred term, for professors of a literary turn of mind) – Syme brushed aside his only ‘friend in high places’, the spider at the heart of the web of the new American Science, the great Ben Silliman, the Toymaker of his day. Perched on the little fridge in the Curator’s office, my feet on tiptoes, the letter resting lightly on my upturned hands, I stared at the brittle, untidy words lost in admiration. A long, slow growl of rain muttered among the trees outside and the sun cast only a grey shadow of light into the cluttered study, but across two centuries of obscurity and neglect, Syme’s complete indifference to earthly powers shone undimmed. Here was a man who ventured everything on the coin-toss of his own inspiration, and stood so sure of the gamble that he could neglect almost to look at the result. I, who have scrounged and scratched my way, humbled and begged, stood breathless now at the pure indifference of this forgotten genius to his earthly fortune. I knew then, tremblingly, as the blood tickled my thin veins on its delicate passage from my heart, that I HAD FOUND MY MAN.

  What I had not found, however, was my evidence. Where was this ‘article on Geognosy’, the ‘finest’ he ever wrote? If only Sober Ben had published the damn thing, I could trace my source, the mouth of the river that flowed at last into Alfred Wegener. But Ben had not, and Wegener (I had no doubt now) had come by his inspiration after a more circuitous journey. Was this article in Geognosy the New Platonist that lodged at last in the library in Berlin, where the young boy could feed his parched curiosity? Did it carry on its current those all-important ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’, which found their way to Wegener at last and formed the first bricks of his new world? That would make my name and fortune?

  Alas, Sam’s father had tenderly hoarded all the tokens of his late son’s life and neglected all the monuments of his thought he might have left behind him. But at last I stumbled upon some proof that others in his time had held him in the same esteem to which I meant to raise him in our own. Another clipping fluttered from the clutter of Edward’s collection, and, after a great and slow manoeuvring of strapped thumbs, I managed to lift it to the wooden desk pushed up against the window. My blunt nose almost twitched with expectation, for I realized, after the first word or two, that I was hot on the scent. The date is 1824; the paper once more the Norfolk Weekly Intelligencer; and the extract drawn again from the Southern Courier.

  We offer the following invitation to a Lecture, delivered by Thomas Jenkyns, esq., the son of Reverend Jenkyns of Richmond, Virginia.

  Pactaw – We have amongst us, in the very humblest of our towns, a Divine, a Poet, a Rhetorician, a Scholar, and a high-bred Gentleman, who, when physical Science did not sway the universal mind as it now promises to do, still saw with a telescopic View both its intrinsic importance and its possible advantages towards the Honour of our Country and the progress of human society.

  Mr Syme, lately of Yale College, will address the question of The Future of Science? and reveal his own researches into the Nature of the Poles at the Town Hall in Richmond, the Friday of the 23rd of this Month, at 6 o’clock, for a charge of 50 cents, payable upon entrance. This is not a Chance to be Missed.

  Something about this teasing account froze my attention, quite aside from the evidence of Syme’s spreading influence that it suggested. I read it repeatedly for a clue, until at last I realized that the faint chime of recognition ringing at my temples originated in the bell of a name, Thomas Jenkyns, the correspondent from the Southern Courier. Trawling through my previous researches, I discovered that his had been the name to which Sam’s mother had addressed her recollections of the ‘presages of geologic genius’; his had been the eye that witnessed the ‘ingenious’ compression of water attempted by Lt Syme. The question remained, who was he? And what part did he play in the rise and fall of the Divine, the Poet, the Rhetorician, the Scholar, and the high-bred Gentleman who occupied my researches?

  So I returned to the supermarket grandeur of the British Library, butting through the dusty traffic of King’s Cross from my lonely studio flat, and entering the cool, distilled air of a space where books are kept, hoping against hope that Thomas Jenkyns ha
d left some trace of a spent life behind him.

  In this, at first, I was disappointed. I discovered a variety of Jenkynses – authors, sailors, clergymen, historians, divines – but, by some honest quirk of fate, not a single Thomas among them – as if, though she would deny me my prize, Fate would not tease me with a twin of history, an insignificant Thomas Jenkyns, a Thomas Jenkyns untroubled by the matter at hand. After all, there was no particular reason my special Thomas Jenkyns should have left his name to posterity, seeing that the man he trumpeted so grandly to the skies had been dispersed till nothing but scraps remained.

  It was the word ‘clergyman’ that stuck in my throat, and suggested another avenue to my researches. ‘Thomas Jenkyns, esq., the son of Reverend Jenkyns, of Richmond, Virginia,’ the clipping read, and of Reverends Jenkyns I had found a windfall. Jenkynses, it seemed, by some disposition of their last name, some suggestion of benignity perhaps, or a hint of the absurd, had been drawn to the Church like bees to a jam-pot, and I wondered if the good father of my obscure Thomas (my predecessor in the art of puffing Syme) had left his mark on the world. (More and more this seemed to me, and the deeper I went, a tale of fathers.)

  Of Reverends Jenkyns there was one curious instance, a certain William Jenkyns, whose funeral sermon upon the death of a Mr Seaborn caused a great stir, it seemed, among the American clergy in 1850, occasioning a flurry of correspondence and a distinctly chilly ecclesiastical air. The charge levied at this divine Jenkyns was one of heresy, prompted by his eulogy of the said Seaborn, and seemed to have little to do with my own, increasingly dear, Samuel Syme, except for a strange coincidence of dates; for 1850, I recalled, was the year of Sam’s death. But this coincidence seemed too remote to require a deeper investigation, and I returned to Mackintosh Place and the Hampstead & Highgate Preservation Trust, the birthplace of Sam’s father Edward and the scene of his death, and the storehouse of his effects.