The Syme Papers Read online

  Here a long and excessively dull afternoon of rummaging at length yielded its prize. Again and again, I had to combat the strange faith of the historical researcher (at least, of this researcher) in some fate involved in his discoveries, whose hand will reveal what has been lost, whose inexorability (I know no better word) will suffer no relevant stone to remain unturned. It is a strange conviction, I confess it, yet perhaps a necessary one, for scholars who, like Newton, stand only on the sea-side of what may be known, and must persuade themselves that no buried, undiscovered fact will disprove the scanty world they have constructed from the few remains. Yet a world of facts stretches wide and deep beyond the corners of our gaze. No assiduity could discover the whole; and so we work by faith, that the part explains the sum, that the pattern holds true – and that the necessary facts will reveal themselves to us, by some agency, and that when nothing is revealed, no revelation is at hand. And so on long, dry, fruitless days we battle the conviction, as much as anything else, that there is nothing to find; because an important truth would, by now, have declared itself.

  At last, as the sun set against the side of the house and a few stray beams shimmered on the mottled glass, the long-sought clue did reveal itself to me. (You see how insidious this strange faith is, how persuasive, that the clue revealed is the one that matters, and not that other clue, the undiscovered one, the shadow at the end of the light, endlessly retreating and mysterious.) Stuck, by some dampness acting upon the ink, to the back of a coloured sketch (an accomplished piece of work, depicting Sam himself, ‘the delicate temples and too big eyes, the face sad, inward, except for the butting, jutting chin, stubborn and strong above the white cravat; the hair thinning over the large forehead’), a letter peeled off, somewhat blotted by its previous adhesion.

  The letter was addressed to Sam himself and signed by none other than Thomas Jenkyns, in a curiously feminine hand, clear and distinct, with a hint of flourish here and there. It followed a peculiar tradition of the nineteenth century, of the fan-letter, peculiar less for the letter itself than the warmth that often greeted its reception. This was a century in which an act of admiring homage produced a condescension that often led to friendship, and I guessed at once that some friendship had followed this particular display of admiration, remarkable for its practicality (despite a kind of blushing effusion), and the faint air, almost of irony, running throughout it:

  Dear Sir – I have hesitated some time to approach a gentleman of your eminence upon such slight acquaintance, with a proposition that may prove especially uncongenial to your particular genius, that walks ‘with inward glory crowned’ and requires it seems no other title. I should deeply regret the air of a fortune-seeker, hoping to wed his name to a bright meteor and follow its rise, attend what may upon its descent. Were it not that I believe the Honor of our country the true partner of your ambitions, and the benefit of society, both intellectual and domestic, its Aim, I should have forborne altogether this chance at a – dare I hope it – friendship that would afford me such remarkable pleasure. In short, I believe I can be of use to you; and through you, of use to the World.

  I should begin by speaking a little of myself. I am the son of a Minister, and grew up perhaps too much under the shadow of seriousness, in its Groves. My father, however, is a liberal Clergyman, a keen astronomer, and a faithful amateur of the new sciences. I had been brought up to believe that God had made a World for us to discover, not a tablet of Laws for us to con. Upon coming of age, I hoped to pursue a profession that would satisfy (alas, I knew not what I hoped) a long-pent Desire to See the World; and apprenticed myself to one of the flurry of newspapers, which in the modern era have fallen upon the cities of our Republic.

  If nothing else, I have my Trade to thank for my Introduction to you, and a knowledge of the Means by which I hope to make myself useful in your Cause. I had been familiar with your Experiments for some time, and broadcast to Virginia your advances in that ingenious matter of the Compression of Water; but I had not till recently grasped the full extent of the scientific Revolution you intended.

  When at last my editor summoned me to his desk upon the publication of your estimable book, the Remarkable Journeys of Mr Seaborn, and revealed to me the breadth of your ambitions. A radical man, he had said, of tendencies, with certain leanings, he added, leaning his own head to the side knowingly, had recently published, and despite considerations demonstrated – this was emphasized – a brilliant scientific theory, a theory that proved the earth was hollow to the bone, formed of concentered metallic spheres a fathom thick, which could be traveled with nothing more sophisticated than a carriage from one end of the globe to the other, if only the points of entry were known.

  ‘Despite considerations,’ reaffirmed my chief. The consequences were enormous, and the Doctores Universita – he said the latter phrase with relish – were only beginning to sniff the possibilities. The Odor had blown even unto our very Congress, which was then considering your appeal for Funds. My editor glowed, he was luminous, his face shone. The application had attracted considerable attention, and the disputes in the senate and church were becoming a Matter of Controversy – a holy phrase.

  It is only upon the denial of that Application that I venture to place myself at the Services of a Cause that has grown so dear to my Heart. Rumors had reached me of the extent to which you were dependent on practical researches of a purely commercial nature for the prosecution of your Theories. The Virginia Mining Company is not worthy of you; nor am I, though I make bold to believe that your Theories are worthy of every, even the slightest, Help. There is no Shame I believe attached to this offer of Assistance. A man on his own may Discover the World; but he cannot Conquer it. For that he requires a Legion of lesser men; at whose head I hope you will grant me the role of Lieutenant.

  Your humble and obedient servant,

  Thomas Jenkyns

  What was Tom’s cause? – a question that puzzled more than Sam in his day and leads to no satisfactory conclusions. Tom, like Jacob, seems a smooth man; his brother-in-science, Sam, a hairy one. I confess an inclination to the latter; despite my own shiny pate, I support a harvest of black and golden hairs upon back and breast and leg and forearm, casting a muffled glow over the swell of the muscle and suggesting, by luxuriance of growth, the vitality of the man within, the earthly fertility, the richness in life and love and projects, that particular outcrop of the academic soul. A smooth skin offers no purchase to the eye, no rough grip; we glance off them like sunshine off a window and cannot fix them in our sight. They flicker – Tom flickers, shaven, odourless, clean, the paradigm of men, the quintessence of dust, scrubbed till the stench of man, the goodness and badness of him, the lust and love, give off only the faintest and sweetest of scents. Tom had that ease of character, happy enough in its own goodness and its harmony with the world, that he need never lie or cheat to promote his own interests – the truth, by its nature he seemed to believe, would be agreeable to an agreeable man. He saw no need to battle it. Sam, on the other hand, battled and battled and battled – a bulldog, a pit bull, a man after my own heart, like Esau robbed of his inheritance. It took a far different man from Tom to rescue Syme from obscurity in the end (though Tom, to be fair, played his part); a man both more faithful than Tom – at least, hungrier for faith, and in consequence more full of doubt; but I overstep myself, and Phidy’s time will come.

  Yet Tom was a ‘liked guy’, as the fellow said to Holly Golightly; more than that, a much-loved gentleman, famous among his friends for his kindness and the grace of his affections. In short, a cipher of a man, whose interest in Syme’s projects seems the most puzzling thing of all. Yet that he was interested is clear; that he promoted Sam’s interests is also clear, and worked extremely hard to do so; and that he had some moderate, even great, triumphs in Sam’s cause cannot be doubted; nor that he remained faithful to him and kind long after Sam could serve his own or anyone’s purpose. The testament to this fact takes me to my next discovery, the d
eath of my object, the funeral scene – the moment from which Syme’s history began, at which all speculation takes wing, for its perch in living fact had snapped, and no resting-place remained.

  Another bell had rung and I returned to the strange Reverend Jenkyns and the uproar over his ‘heretical eulogy on the death of Mr Seaborn’, the same name to which Thomas Jenkyns attributed the account of the ‘Remarkable Journeys’ that first drew him to Syme. This was perhaps my second piece of great good fortune, after the cache of Sam’s memorabilia discovered in the house in Highgate. As the latter had been preserved owing to the smoothness of the stream of time – an attic unrummaged, a house allowed gently to decay – the former caught my attention owing to a ruffle of turbulence as the flow of history adjusted itself to a slight awkwardness in its path.

  The great prize, of course, in Tom Jenkyns’s letter was the fact that Sam had written a book, The Remarkable Journey of Mr Seaborn, which seemed to bear, at least obliquely, on his scientific work. I could not guess then the casual mistake that had kept this book secret from me for so long, a clerical error, the careless duplication of a letter and a slight slipping into the plural, but I had no doubt of my ability to rustle up the precious tome. Indeed, this certainty, or rather the prospect of it, occasioned my delay, as a boy will keep the fattest sausage for the final forkful; and I scraped around the edges of my prize to draw out the delight of its eventual discovery.

  Consequently, I turned to explore the strange coincidence of names between the object of Reverend Jenkyns’s controversial grief and the protagonist of Syme’s literary explorations, with only half my heart – the shore lay ahead, I was certain; I had stopped only to explore a piece of driftwood caught up in the outbound tide. (I could not guess then the disappointment of my actual landing.) But I soon recognized the error of my inattention, or rather the second clerical error, that had blinded the library’s computer to the connection between the great scientific failure and the ecclesiastical storm surrounding the elegy of a dead man in Virginia in 1850. (If I could begin my academic career from scratch, I should focus my interest in error on the minutiae of mistakes, the history of the misprint, rather than the grander miscalculations that occupy me here and elsewhere.) For the dead man lying quietly in the middle of all the fuss was none other than Sam Syme himself – mistaken, by some ecclesiastical printman, for the narrator of his novel, The Remarkable Journey of Mr Seaborn, which had caused all the uproar in the first place. I had stumbled by accident upon his funeral.

  Most of The Exchange of Correspondence, first published in the Norfolk Gazette, upon the Charges of Heresy, levied against Mr Jenkyns, on his Elegy at the death of Mr Seaborn, 1850 makes for dry reading. The offended clergy were inspired by the occasion to a long-wind-edness of biblical proportions. They seemed less anxious to persuade their readers than to exhaust them, to batter them into submission by the unanswerable logic of sleep. Jenkyns’s defenders, of whom there were far fewer, while more elegant on the whole, tied their arguments into such knots that the fingers of the brain grew blunt and chafed attempting to undo them, and preferred at last the soothing tedium of his detractors. The reason for this state of affairs was simple and common enough: the stupid ones were right, as far as the argument went; the clever ones were right, as soon as it ended, but couldn’t let the argument go.

  But the argument itself offers a fascinating glimpse of a world whose answers were changing, a shift of templates as powerful as Wegener’s tectonic plates, the latter literally earth-shattering, the former figuratively. Sam himself was only the occasion; the dispute was both more public than the event of his death, and indeed more private than the Reverend Jenkyns’s elegy upon it. The question at the heart of it was this: whether the Bible could be reconciled to the new sciences. Our own age has answered so vehemently in the negative that perhaps we cannot imagine the urgency of the question in its time; but we must remember that the debate was carried out for the most part not between atheist and believer but between Christian and Christian. Another way of putting the question, more relevant to the terms of the original debate, might be: did God understand the world He had made? To answer no required an act of intellectual courage far greater than simple atheism.

  Sober Ben Silliman himself fervently believed that geology required no breach with the Church to pursue an understanding of the globe. A pious curiosity bound the intellect to faith in a loving marriage. He made sure his journal honoured no adulterous liaisons, investigations outside the wedlock of Church and science. No doubt his faith, as much as his common sense, persuaded him of the ‘madness of Syme’s methods’: Syme’s hollow world suggested both scientifically and emblematically that at the heart of things lay an ‘appalling gap’. Such prejudice may have played its part in Silliman’s rejection of the missing essay on Geognosy, so costly to Sam’s career and to the development, I hoped to prove, of geologic theory. How often in my researches have I come across fantastical errors dismissed by ‘common sense’, where common sense itself stood rooted in fantastical errors.

  We come now to Reverend Jenkyns’s eulogy of Syme, remarkable not only for the bristles of prejudice it raised in the hackles of the Church but for the story it told of a much more private faith. Printed in pride of place at the front of the Exchange of Correspondence, the sermon explains more perhaps of the man who wrote it than of its ostensible object: the life of Sam Syme, whose body lay before him as he spoke. Over eighty years old, possessed of a spare, somewhat hungry figure, a young man’s leanness enduring into age, Reverend Jenkyns declared, with ‘cheerful inefficiency’ as he rose to the pulpit, that ‘before us lies a man, whose lightest thought bore the marks of a greater Faith than my own; who shall go to his God more hopefully than I to mine’. I imagine the church packed with a crowd of curiosity-seekers, come to see ‘the old wizard Syme stove in at last’; I imagine the buzz of Schadenfreude, as the common Christians rejoiced in the safety of their own numbers, and the solitude of Sam’s belief; I can almost see Tom Jenkyns himself, the Reverend’s son, sat at the front by the body of his dead friend Syme, who will descend quite soon into the hollows of the earth at last, on a much longer journey than he hoped for to a far smaller place. And I imagine the sudden hush that followed the Reverend Jenkyns’s declaration of the richness of Sam’s faith and the poverty of his own. The Reverend continued, as I read over the crinkled lines, the document mottled, the words themselves blotched and peeling like old skin, suggesting, by the age of the paper, how even thoughts and sentiments grow old:

  ‘Nothing in his Life became him like the leaving of it’ has been said too often of the vain and the capricious, too rarely of the steadfast and the good; nor do I hope much it shall be said of me. I have my vanities, I confess, but that is not among ’em. But I had rather go hard and bitter to my Lord, than fade as Samuel Syme has faded, in the loving care of my own son, a half-man, and a third-man, and a quarter-man, dying gently as a shadow slips by degrees into a general dimness when a cloud passes before the sun; though in his day he burned as bright as any star. Perhaps in time, a generation among us shall ask, how could we let him fade so easily? I was never curious concerning the questions that occupied Mr Syme and his companions, among them my son; I trusted my doubts far more than my faiths, I’m afraid, a fault of which Mr Syme was never guilty; and perhaps I shall have my reckoning for it in the end, as Syme has suffered for a broken faith if not a broken heart …

  A rambling speech, from the querulous tongue of a very old man, unfussed by sequence and connection, when all his life spreads before him, year and year, sagging, somewhat loose at the seams.

  I might have done more, and questioned more, for we live in a time, I believe – and this is the answer I give to that coming generation, wherever it is – when we have newly acquired the courage of our questions, and not yet learned the courage of our convictions. Of which failing, I confess myself guilty, always believing, as I have, that Mr Syme, before us, has served the Lord more by the example of his doubts
, than I by a steady indifference to my own.

  I read Mr Seaborn’s account of those Remarkable Journeys [no doubt the untidy reference that gave rise to the printer’s error] with amusement, and a pleasing modicum of instruction. And the Great Dig, my own son’s particular Holy Grail, and on which Syme himself spent the best of his life and indeed a portion of the last and worst, summoning a lost enthusiasm for the project only a month before his death, in the pursuit of which, as I had warned him before, he forgot to keep his eye on the dinner-plate, and died of a general weakness and agitation – the attempt to burrow one’s way into the heart of the matter, or rather, the matter of the earth’s heart, with great drenching and plowing, and tunneling, and occasional Explosions – the great dig, as I say, has a noble ring to it, though I have always thought of it as the Big Dig, which, I cannot deny, sounds less well …

  A rambling, harmless speech, you would have thought, to have occasioned such an uproar; somewhat doubtful, of course, and disrespectful, but hardly the teacup in which to brew a great storm. Yet the Church had been seeking their occasion for some time, and fastened upon Syme and Jenkyns’s eulogy of him as their chance to win back the ground of debate from their scientific cousins – believing no doubt that the madness of Syme and the meander of Jenkyns could only serve their cause. The first letter opened: ‘I have been sometime considering with myself, whether to return an Answer to those many dis-ingenuous Reflections, and unhandsome Insinuations, against the present Church, which I find in a sermon preached by Mr Jenkyns upon occasion of Mr Syme’s death.’ Almost six hundred pages of correspondence follow this initial hesitant consideration. And, of course, in the end, the churchmen were right: the pursuit of science could not be reconciled with religious faith, and the advancement of the former could be won only at the expense of the latter, at the expense of God. A difficult single battle for the clergy to fight, in that the proof of their victory was the loss of the war. And yet they fought it, stubbornly and faithfully, to the end.