The Syme Papers (2 page)

But his great leap of faith and fact, from rock to rock, as it were, or floe to floe, begged and beggared explanation: a thought so plain a child could grasp it, clicking the pieces in place like the cut edges of a puzzle.
Of course,
the shoulder of South America once nestled in the nook of Africa, lovingly land-locked. Look at them thus, a heart broken on the map, the split halves drifting,
of course.
Some terrible divorce had taken place, driven by the enormous powers of separation. And yet, this was a thought so strange no soul had uttered it in a thousand generations of speculative men; a thought as tremendous as the notion that the earth turned into its own dawn and away at twilight, that the sun did not rise above the lip of the horizon simply to please us. (And yet it moves, Galileo muttered, as he left the court; and so it does, WEGENER answered him, the continents on which we stand as shockingly dislodged from their centre as Galileo’s spinning planet.) Memory, I reasoned, must have played its part in such a bridge of the imagination – but memory of what, of whom?

I overreach myself. Let me begin at the beginning; which in my business so often means the end, the last leaf remaining, stuck in gutter or garden, from a forgotten Fall. We shall see if we can trace to their bed the slender roots of Inspiration. As Wegener himself declared of his task in 1915:

Let us begin with the circumstantial evidence, then, and judge the truth as we may. For Wegener, our honourable defendant, has long been dead, frozen in his sleeping sack between the upright sticks of his skis thrust in the ice of Greenland to mark his resting-place. A last venture, to prove beyond doubt that the continents shift beneath us, measured in the drift of Greenland,
proved
only fatal in the end. A miscalculation, common as a neglected gas-tank, forced the adventurer to turn back – too late in the event. He cannot answer us now. And who can say, if he stood before us, that even he could account for the accumulation of fact and theory, history and observation, precedents and prescience, that erupted at last in so powerful a revolution of ideas? As William Swainson remarked in 1834, ‘the revolutions of science are almost as frequent, and often more extraordinary, than those of political institutions’ (though our story will touch on those as well before the end).

These are the circumstances. ALFRED LOTHAR WEGENER was born on 1 November 1880, the fifth child of the theologian and linguist Franz Richard Wegener, whose brother Peter, inventor and magician (the black sheep of a family of priests), plays some role in this story (as we shall see) and bequeathed, among other things, a sense of adventure to his nephew. Alfred grew up in a tall, squeezed house on Friedrichsgracht in Berlin, overlooking the canal. The small boy must have grown used to the illusion, looking out of his bedroom window, of the world shifting by him, quite unfussed, through the still waters.

The Wegener family was well known in its way. Alfred’s great-grandfather had been a companion of Alexander von Humboldt (the famous explorer) at the University of Frankfurt a century before. An older cousin starred on the stages of Berlin – making a
particular sensation in an adaptation of
Werther,
whose yellow-trousered costume found its way into the Wegener household, to be trotted out in the amateur theatricals performed by Alfred and his brother Kurt. It was above all an
intellectual
household and bore the character of Alfred’s father: a pious, yet liberal and curious man, consultant to the Kaiser on religious matters, and a keen botanist and gentleman scientist on the side. He cultivated an extensive library, in which the young Alfred used to while away the wet days after school.

Unfortunately, the Wegener home was bombed during Allied raids in 1942. The windows and walls collapsed into the canals, and most of the books that were not drowned with them perished in the fires that followed. We can now no longer wander through the leathery gloom that excited the young scientist, nor trace the infant steps of his education. But one book did survive the fire and water (an interesting escape, between Pluto and Neptune!): a heavy, copper-bound ledger, recording in the father’s meticulous hand the date and entry of every volume in his prized collection.

This book was retrieved by the scientist’s nephew (Dr Erich Wegener), who occupied the family home during the war. He carried it with him after ‘the tumult and the shouting died’ – a strange, a heavy burden, a reminder of the gentility of his grandfather’s house. The book travelled with Erich to England in 1949, upon his marriage to a young English nurse who served with the Allied forces in the clear-up of Berlin. The family adopted her name, Bilston, to mediate anti-German feeling; and a Dr Eric Bilston maintained a small but prosperous family practice in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells until his death in 1972. Thereupon his puzzled English children donated the heavy tome to the British Library, a record of their famous great-uncle Alfred, mostly unintelligible: lists of foreign titles and strange names and long-ago dates.

And this I turned to, one hot, desperate day last June, clutching the heavy volume between the palms of my strapped fists,
for Pitt
is a digger, you know; a roll-up-the-sleeves fellow, a thorough scholar, in
his way.

If I could begin my career from scratch, with a fresh slate, I should return as a
bibliographer,
a historian of the collections of books. What stories might not be told through the libraries of this world? Records of childhood and old age, of generations, of the cloudy atmosphere of solitude and words in which our mind grows tall. What better bed in which to trace the roots of our slightest thoughts than the libraries, the books, we burrowed in as children? And here before me, spread out in page after page, in the thin, knuckly hand of his father, marking title and date, I read through the circumstances surrounding the birth of Alfred’s genius. ‘I hereby commence’, he wrote, ‘this inventory of the library on Friedrichsgracht, this new year, 1880. May all future acquisitions be recorded herein.’

The catalogue was arranged according to shelves. I could dimly picture the dark galleries above the canal by the lists of scribbled titles,
feel
the comfortable solitude at a corner, where one row finished and another began,
see
the young Wegener propping his back against a handful of volumes, pushing them flush with the board; just as here or there a run of scribbled book-names leans against the margin of the page, as his father’s hand grew weary or the room grew dark in that long-ago new year. Then there is the first thrill of recognition, a title familiar, perhaps even the contents contained within: Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers;
Tales of my Landlord,
1st Series, 2nd Series;
Headlong Hall,
Die
Leiden
des
Jungen
Werthers
…

The moment of discovery is often a gap between two other things. ‘Most ideas’, Syme once said, ‘begin as the answer to an unimportant problem, soon forgotten, a stone washed away once the stream is crossed … So true it is that we are at the mercy of our own … inspiration – that is too grand a word, which means nothing more than the ability to begin in idleness and end in faith.’ And out of an idle, dozy day I stumbled upon my faith.

I believe the first name to wake my attention in the heavy volume was that of Robert Jameson, a prolific geognosist and noted Neptunian, a follower of WERNER (not Wegener, Alfred, his
descendant, but
Werner,
Gottlob, an older, even stranger fish in the kettle of German geology). I had come at last to the very corner of the library I sought. I pictured a row of books squeezed into a bottom shelf, away from the window and the door, a dark, crouching, peaceful nook – but we shall never know, for all such nooks were tumbled into the canal below. Here the geologists and geognosists lived in their leather neighbourhood, a familiar company.

In that dark corner, where the young, breathing Alfred might have slept to escape some distasteful chore, the dead and dusty Werner himself lay ensconced, both his early
On the External
Characters of Minerals
(entered into the library in June 1884) and
A
New Theory on the Birth of Veins
(also June 1884). Werner rubbed elbows with
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
(entered September 1884), containing in the first volume as I knew James Hutton’s
Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable
in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe
(we live in a world of breathless titles, no?). Between them, Werner (elegant and slender) and Hutton (thick and obscure, supported by a mass of royal correspondence) divided the field into their camps, the NEPTUNISTS and PLUTONISTS (more of
them
later). Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
(February 1885) danced cheek by jowl with Richard Owen’s
Key to the Geology of the Globe
(January 1886, a surprising inclusion). And there, between Richard Owen of Indiana, and the Reverend Osmond Fisher, Rector of Harleton, England, and author of
Physics of the Earth’s Crust
(entered December 1881), I discovered Syme.

The name of SAMUEL HIGHGATE SYME was a puzzle, of course, for a number of reasons. The first being that his was the only unfamiliar book along the shelf; the remainder belonged to more or less eminent geologists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even the title annexed to the name rang oddly beside the others: the
New Platonist,
a brisk appellation beside its windy fellows, and one that smacked little of their earthy company.

And yet it was a strangeness still slighter that made the greatest impression upon me at the time. Most of the books entered the library between the years of 1884 and 1886, when the botanical
interests of Alfred’s clerical father drew him briefly into questions of mineralogy. Alfred had just entered boyhood at the time. And he recalled much later, in the diaries he kept on the last and fatal Greenland expedition, how he and his father used to hunt for quartz and shale on the long northern summer days in the nearby Grunewald, following dark veins of rock off the forest paths and charting their progress through the overlay of vegetation.

Alfred’s father, however, came to suspect the
geognosists
of tampering with biblical fact to reach their conclusions. Though in typical German fashion he kept their blasphemies in good order on his library shelf, he admitted no geological entry after 1886 – except for Syme’s
New Platonist,
which found its way to the library nearly a decade later (November 1895), when young Alfred had just turned fifteen. As Alfred’s wife Else faithfully recorded in an account of her husband (‘a world-altering explorer, and good-natured, humorous man’): ‘young Alfred did not like going to the local Gymnasium, as the resources of his own home offered greater scope for a curious mind’.

Perhaps, I considered, the
New Platonist
was a birthday gift from a relenting father.

I spent the next week trawling through Richard Owen’s
Key to
the Geology of the Globe,
looking for a clue. But Syme’s name caught in my thoughts, a teasing
puzzle,
what the Germans have so delightfully nicknamed an
ear-worm,
pestering its way to the front of my consciousness. If only because I wondered who the hell he was. What was the
New Platonist,
who were the New Platonists? And when at last Owen had exhausted my patience, I turned, almost as an afterthought, to the man who will make my name, as I
his.

Some of the facts discovered themselves quickly enough. Samuel Highgate Syme was the son, born in Baltimore in 1794, of one Edward Syme, an Englishman, himself the younger son of Theophilus, a manufacturer of
jimbles
(the sturdy anti-corrosive bolts used in the wooden hulls of ships) and prominent MP, predictably, you have guessed it, in the neighbourhood of Highgate,
then a village outside London.
Edward,
Sam’s father, attended Harrow and Oxford, graduating Master of Arts ‘as Hells and Clubs proclaim’, in 1788; deeply in debt and quite unprepared for the assumption of anything like what his father would call a profession.

Unfortunately for Edward, 1788 was the year in which
Bonnie
Prince Charlie
sank under full sail in a five-knot breeze at a royal display off the Isle of Wight. A parliamentary inquiry was launched, the manufacturers accused, corruption discovered, and public disgrace followed for Theophilus, who soon had no funds to set his son on his feet, nor influence to launch him on a career. (This much could be traced in records of the parliamentary minutes.) Shortly after, Edward joined the Agropolis, a society of young Oxford men determined to establish an idyllic community of Nature on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia. Their plan, much ridiculed in the daily press, was
to farm.
‘A mere two hours a day in the field’, their leader, young Benedict Smythe, declared, ‘would provide for their Earthly necessities!’

The society was funded by the purse of Smythe, or rather, Smythe’s father, Lord Burkehead, who offered to clear all debts of the young gentlemen of good standing willing to pursue his son’s Utopian scheme. (Young Benedict being a noble thorn in his side, and the good Lord willing to support anyone accompanying its removal.) Edward enlisted at once and set sail for the New World.

News of the Syme family, within a great stash of papers, came easily to hand by a stroke of rare good fortune. Before his
annus
horribilis
in 1788, Theophilus, Sam’s grandfather, had built a house on a plot of land just above what we now call Highgate Ponds. Coverdale Place, named after the farmer who sold his field on what was becoming an increasingly crowded patch, survived the proceedings against Theophilus. Edward’s older brother inherited the estate, and upon
his
death Edward returned home from the New World in which he had spent his manhood and buried both his son (the great Sam Syme, the proper business of my study) and his wife. He brought with him a sea-chest full of papers – the title,
‘American Notes, &c.’ etched in the oak lid – including old love letters, bearers of bad tidings, fatherly advice, and newspaper clippings, of his Utopian venture and his son’s fame, each tenderly preserved in a separate album.