The Syme Papers (11 page)

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
per
suade
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:

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.

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.

In the event, the
levity
of Reverend Jenkyns’s tone – whose sermons had grown increasingly famous for that quality, and the almost complete absence of religious faith it seemed to suggest – prepared me in some part for the shocking nonsense of that amusing and instructive book,
The Remarkable journeys of Mr Seaborn,
Syme’s first and only novel.

I strode on a bright, clear morning in July through the clutter of construction and traffic at King’s Cross – the sunshine catching the dust beaten up in its very fine net – full, I confess, of a pleasant, almost overpowering sense of anticipation. The
New
Platonist,
the Holy Grail of my quest, still lay beyond my reach; but a
novel,
a
scientific
novel, hundreds of pages of Syme’s thought, unmediated, the breath of his mind caught on the page, the very scent of his imagination folded in the flower of a book. The buses came thundering past me from Euston, great red canvases for advertisement – declaring the virtues of Beers and Movies and Shampoos – the heads on the second tier peering out on their way to work, tiny beside the great flat faces slapped on the side of the bus, seen sipping or showering or shouting and beginning to peel. I thought again of the brittleness of bone and paper; the virtue of paper lying in its almost endless powers of rejuvenation, reprinting, translation, rediscovery – for I am, in a sense, a doctor of books, who breathes life in dead ones and mends them as I go, setting bones and patching scars and allowing the fractures to knit, with a freedom and power impossible to practise on the human body. Perhaps, I thought, today, I shall discover the root of Wegener’s insight, tiny as the curled thread at the end of a carrot’s nose; perhaps, I thought, today, I shall make my name.

The book itself had been easily discovered, under its title, of course, and not the name of its author. The phrase ‘remarkable journeys’ produced a number of …
hits,
I believe, is the term commonly used to count the doses of the biblio addict – but none of them belonged to Mr Syme, nor anything like him. Mr ‘Seaborn’ proved luckier, and there, fifth in the column, humming in the delicate green jargon of the computer screen, stood Syme himself, misspelled, the ‘m’ mirrored, the word pluralized, following a curiously compounded word in the title of his book:
Symmesonia,
or the Voyage of Discovery,
by Samuel Highgate Symmes
(sic).
The word, I believe, to be pronounced ‘Sym’ (after its author) – ‘meso’ (after Mesopotamia, an original kingdom) – ‘nia’, a common enough suffix to give a sonorous round to the edge of a word. I
called the book in for the following morning, which I have already described, the sun shining, beating up the dust, my own steps brisk, regular, metronomic, the kind of stride instinctively sidestepped by the passer-by, and avoided even by the rags of paper blown from the rush of air under the rumbling buses.

Under the vaulted roof of the Rare Books & Music Room of the British Library, among my fellow moles (the old men in ties and sneakers, the ladies draped in yellow cardigans, occasional students sniffling beside me, all looking forward to their packed lunches, their week-old bananas and pots of yoghurt, their brown-bread sandwiches locked in tiny Tupperware, their cartons of Ribena, their Thermoses of sweet tea), I carried the precious volume to my desk. The book itself, a slim brown volume, left nothing to be desired. The title almost obscured by time, leather roughened at the spine to the colour of split wood, a fringe of gold leaf lining the edges and bursting into delicate flower at the rim. The pages – marbled in green and pink, a peacock’s
tale,
dormant – fluttered into life as I opened the book, tumbling in rainbow array. I pressed the stippled leather to my square nose, and breathed in the wonderful odour of books: the sweetness of leather; the must of old paper slightly damp with time; a slight edge, almost sharp, as of tobacco. And turned the cover.

After the marbled inside and a few blank pages (smudged at one edge by a thumb overfamiliar with the tip of a pencil), I came upon the title:
Symmesonia, or the Voyage of Discovery,
by (so the pseudonym ran) Captain Adam Seaborn, New York: printed by J. Seymour, 49 John Street; 1820. On the following page, the Southern District of New York approved the copyright and admitted the tome into its office – sealed accordingly by a red crown, stamped by the clerk, a certain, or rather an uncertain, Gilbert Livingston Thompson (thus briefly recalled from the shades of death by his connection to the great man). And then, at the delicate turn of a page, proudly displayed – in pale black lines of ink, stained by the red of old Gilbert’s stamp seeping through – appeared a ‘Sectional View of the Earth’, a map of the interior planet, the Holy Grail of my investigation, Syme’s world itself.

Let me describe it. A succession of circles, widening from the centre, interrupted by irregular gaps that allowed free passage from the core to the crust, according to their rotation; two such caesuras conspicuous at the Poles, to which the diagram directed our particular attention by dotted lines. Inside each Pole stood a series of numbers, indicating various stops along the interior of the crust. Just inside the Northern Pole lay a ‘place of exile’. Working westward along the interior globe, one ‘sailed’ upon the ‘supposed place of Belzubia’; and thence, to the Southern Pole, the site of Token Island
within
the globe, and Seaborn’s Land
without.
It took me perhaps a full minute, counted slowly, breath after hushed breath, to realize that I had stumbled upon the work of a madman.

This realization was only confirmed by the
ADVERTISEMENT
that followed, a piece of such bravura insanity that almost rekindled, even as it doused, the ashes of my respect for this ‘forgotten genius’:

A wonderful piece, no doubt, of practical lunacy, of humility and arrogance intermixed, but hardly a testimony to the scientific genius of the man who inspired the great Alfred Wegener – a connection whose existence I had greatly begun to doubt.

Have you ever stood in the dust of a dead man’s house, opened creaking the closet of his clothes – racked neatly still, the jackets settled loosely over the thin shoulders of the wire hangers, the trousers pressed and dangling in even rows; explored the larder, the tins of uneaten soup, the packets of spaghetti, the undrunk wine; and
then,
slipped on the jacket, and eaten the soup, and drunk the wine, alone, in the quiet of his absence? Have you ever tracked a dead man’s thought down the gloomy corridors of the mind, your comprehension lit by the same shower of synapses that illuminated the passages of his brain almost two centuries before, spark for spark? Have you ever done all this, and then
tidied up
what you found?

Our gods have been replaced by our interpreters, our critics, our biographers, our
computer records,
the caretakers of our posterity. We trust not in fifteen minutes of fame, but in the
possibility
that the mass of our recorded lives might be re-edited, rebound, reissued, and some sense made of it all. If only a patient eye could sift through the endless stream of our life, the ore would glitter free, slighter, no doubt, but simpler and shining. And in this faith, we live by
quantities
– quantities of thought and talk, of actions and reactions, of meals eaten and jobs finished and loves exchanged and anger vented and kindness done; and lies told, and hunches followed, and lust pursued, and laziness tolerated, collecting and spreading like pools of rain. All in the faith that a good sieve will sort out the best of it, the shimmer of gold from the
mess of grit; all in the hope that if you live long and large enough, the gold will be there. All in the hope of a
good editor.

And in this faith I had pursued Syme. But what was I to make of this nonsense! Where was the gold in this grit?

The madness of it all, best forgotten! A stench of shame rose up from the grave of Syme’s ideas, rotten at birth and festering from two centuries of neglect. Such natural gifts abused over these laboured fantasies, which, like a bad
lie,
stretched on and on, growing where they could not persuade, as though, by overbearing all interruption, they might stimulate, if not belief, then the silence that usually attends it. This was the
thirteenth chime of the
clock,
as an old professor once said to me – not only ridiculous in itself, but calling into question the validity of the other twelve. A selection of the chapter summaries alone gives a taste of the nonsense I had stumbled upon.

All this from a man who had never been to sea; and never further south than Savannah. Oh, Pitt, Pitt, I thought, what hole have you dug yourself now? What mad fool have you chased to his lair? I closed the book before me with a sudden sense of the
inevitability
of posterity. What is good will survive, Pitt, I thought; no use tinkering with memory; this man has been forgotten for a reason. The horror of that line struck me, like a sharp knock against the bone.
We are all forgotten for a reason.
The passage of time
alone
does not obscure us, cover our gravestones, hide us away in old chests and preservation trusts and the vagaries of libraries – but some internal flaw widens with the years, splits us and we burn like cracked wood. We are forgotten because there is no virtue in us to survive the fire of time, no hard truth incorruptible by age and
heat; except in the
best
of us, the ones that count, who shine in history, like a diamond polished by a flame, growing clearer and sharper with the years. Wegener had such stuff in him; death revealed him, tore away the clutter of false life till the rock gleamed through. Syme did not; death left no virtue in him, no matter how I pecked and sniffed at his ashes.

And I had no virtue left in me. The summer was half-done; the days shortening – how I hate that inexorable door of day closing into winter! The fellowship had had a dying fall; not a word written, not a fact proved. Wegener still defied all precedent; the
New
Platonist
had burned in the fire of his father’s house and no one now could regret its loss; Syme himself was burning up. The last fragments of his life caught fire briefly and sparkled in my eyes, until they too puffed away in smoke. Another year of teaching loomed; the question of tenure loomed; and I had nothing to show for myself. Some grinding streak in me demanded failure, pushed me to the ground, like a boat whose sail is drawn too tight and drives it to a standstill. I had the wind behind me and I fought it, like Syme, and failed.

I turned a final time to Syme’s little book and read the almost touching introduction.

In the year 2000 (I ruminated) I won a Fulbright for a voyage of recovery, in the hope of finding a passage to an old and neglected genius. I flattered myself that I should open a new way to an old field, and present another frontier for the enterprise of my fellow academics, supply new sources of footnotes, fresh food
for lectures and symposia, and additional means of employment; objects of vast importance, since, as I have come to believe, the resources of the known world have been exhausted by research, its wealth used up, its wonders of curiosity expired, its every thing investigated and understood! And so I shut the book, returned it patiently to the young lady in a sari and boot-cut jeans at the desk, and walked out (ignorant, at the time, that the seeds of fresh hope had already blown into my thoughts and wriggled in the earth of my subconscious).

All nature seemed in symphony against me – I could almost feel the beat of the conductor’s baton. For that afternoon the flying ants descended on King’s Cross, ugly brutes like fistfuls of raisins, scattering and dropping down trousers and crawling up sleeves. I could smack them only with the full fist of my strapped hand, which left the bones tingling like struck tuning-forks, up the cords of my wrist into my elbow.

I could only laugh, therefore, when the cash point, as this whimsical nation insists on calling ATMs, refused not my card but my credit. My account had run dry, or nearly so. Five pounds and sixty-seven pence still trickled through the system, accumulating approximately eleven pence ha’penny interest a year, at which rate I could buy a decent pizza for my supper by the year 2023. In fact, as I soon discovered, I could not even buy one
then,
as the cash point, owing to some laziness of its mechanical spirit, refused to dispense sums under ten pounds. It felt, somehow, that it had not reached its elevated station in life only to dole pennies to paupers; and though I knew,
knew
in my heart of hearts, that somewhere in its electric bowels it contained a ‘fiver’ and could have coughed it up, had it chosen to, the blinking machine insisted again and again that it
preferred
not to.
I had fifteen pence in my pockets.

So I returned to the luxurious quiet of the British Library, blissfully free of winged ants, and called my wife, on the prepaid strength of a calling card. ‘Miss,’ I said, appealing to the tenderness of a nickname, ‘it’s over. I give up. I go home,’

‘Oh dear,’ she said. (She had acquired, vicariously, a delight in
English understatement by my presence in England. She felt free at last to practise the porcelain primness she had seen in the movies. At the least opportunity, she begged me to keep my upper lip stiff, not to fret, old chap, and a thousand other felicities none of which had ever struck my ear on this ‘dear little island’.) ‘Well,’ she added, in case I had missed the accent she had affected – a kind of Georgia peach genetically modified by indelible strains of New York Jewess – ‘steady on, old man, and we’ll soon see you home and dry,’