The Syme Papers (58 page)

In the first week of August we reached New York, bustling with the
traffic that poured in from the brand-new aqueous highway, the Erie
Canal. We sailed along the Sound at first dusk, that gentle hour
when the light calls no envious shadows from the ground. Out of
some kindness to me, perhaps, Tom engaged us to speak at the
German Club on Amsterdam Avenue. A coach took us to the door, a
grand dark building in the sombre Prussian style. I had come home,
after a fashion. Like most homecomings, the visit was a test of my
affections. Through Sam’s chicanery, I gave my ‘maiden’ speech
that night and took my place for ever, sealed by a crowd of witness
es, among the New Platonists.

Die
Zweivierziger, the club
was called
–
or the Two-forties,
in
English. It served as the refuge for German radicals and intellectuals,
who wished to breathe the heavy atmosphere of their native tongue
and thought, when the lighter, quicker air of their American home
failed to sustain them. Travellers, priests, soldiers, statesmen,
bankers, philosophers, artists, lecturers, some resident, some itiner
ant, all heavy-hearted, heavy-winged, heavy-featured, all German.
They brought their wives. The club was named after the recent
Prussian legislation that required all volumes under the length of
240 pages to be submitted to the knife of the censor, whereas all
works that swelled beyond that mystical margin could be published
and distributed freely. The name was typical of German radicalism,
as I saw it after a year of American vigour. We believed not in true
extremism, but in the intellectual daring of Balance. We poised on
the edge of the Permitted, neither so coarse as to venture into the
passionate Faith beyond it, nor so commonplace as to mix with the
middle-class respectability within. A perch from which we could
survey everything and claim nothing. The shock of familiarity and
then the tang of wilful estrangement drew me towards Tom and 
Sam with the force of a fresh decision, as we entered the grand
apartments of the wealthy club and began to assess their contents.

The rooms truly were gorgeous. Floor, ceiling and walls seemed
carved out of deep, subtly shining wood. Halls opened through arch
ways and via steps upon halls. Heavy, common paintings of com
mon-looking men hung over the marble mantles of fireplaces. I
noted their protruding or receding chins, pinched or protuberant
noses, flat eyes, awkward mouths, thinning hair. The air was thick
with the smoke of cigars
– I
could scarcely breathe the fat,
brown
 
atmosphere, silvered and shining with glassed reflections, from the
heavy, wide mirrors hung opposite the gold-framed portraits. Each
angle seemed to reveal another recess of room or image, of hall, or
the mirrored many-legged crowd. Tom and Sam, neither of whom
spoke more than a dozen words of my native tongue, walked arm in
arm together, happily mimicking what they perceived to be the ugly,
guttural accents of German speech.

‘Verstenken sie mit Kraeuterbrunken verkaufter Kinderwurst?’
Sam asked.

Tom shook his head gravely and answered,
‘Nebel und Dunstbecken kann man nur staunen.’

Perhaps you will not believe it of their dignity, but we were all
young men. Even Sam was little past his thirtieth year. It was easy
and rich to be light-hearted in that thick gloom.

This was my element, for once
–
and Tom and Sam had never
seen me in it. Suddenly, I seemed presented with a choice, not of
word or deed
–
though those accompanied it
–
but of loyalties. I
observed everything from a certain height. This came naturally to
me, who stood a tall head above them all, noting the amused faces of
Tom
Jenkyns
and Sam Syme
among my countrymen (milling and
muttering around me). I felt that both my German and my
American roots lay plucked and clean in my hand, and I must
choose which to plant and there abide. Of course, I baulked at the
easy mockery, the thoughtless high spirits of my fellow ‘pioneers’.
They were blind to these people as I could not be and I resented it
But I saw the faults of my countrymen as well, their heavy-winged,
weak-clawed intellects. Sam in Reason alone, in massive force, was 
worth the lot of them: the halls and rich mirrors, the dusty galleries
of painted men, the whole Zweivierziger.

I stood under an archway
–
talking to a man
who had known
Franklin in
Paris
–
and observed Sam at a distance, as he strolled
with Tom in prim, dainty steps, a German sniff to his nose. Ashes
scattered from the exaggerations of his pipe.
‘Und weltversmet-zung kann vogelhaftweise nurnoch exponieren, verstanden?’
My heart warmed to him for the first time as an equal, or, rather,
from my slightly higher vantage. And I joined them in their mock
ery. It was a choice of momentary sensibility, nothing else. But such
choices are often the flags of our deeper dispositions, and I came to
know mine clearly. I walked towards them.

Sam’s lecture was not the only occasion. Three papers were to be
given that night (in English for the nonce), after dinner in the great
low-roofed dining hall. Sam’s was the last. I scarcely ate or drank all
evening, though plates and drink vanished before me. A lady sat
opposite me, an old schoolgirlish dame with dull, iron-rimmed spec
tacles, and her long silver hair bound by a flowery cotton knot. She
talked incessantly of her ‘pilgrimages’ to Brunswick and the grave of
‘Gottie, as I knew him once, sir, when he was my mother’s lover. I
sat on his lap and he played the piano (Bach, as I grew to know and
dimly understand), while my mother wove a flower-crown from a
bunch of cut daisies lying in her broad dress. I turned to her and
said, piping in my shrill voice, “Mama, it sounds like that creaking
gate at the back of the garden!” Mother began to scold me for a
dullard, but Gotthold, dear lovely man, said without the least air of
condescension, “An honest ear is Nature’s noblest work,” and
shushed my mama quite silent. I have always treasured that remark.
You would know him as G.E. Lessing, and recall no doubt his beau
tiful Emilia. I trust I have not lost the virtue of my ears?’

How could I help but stare? Yet
I nodded, and she continued.
‘I
compose poems, or rather Rosenkränze,
woven out of Nature. Is not
the chime of words as natural as a creaking door!
I am a
gatherer,
sir, not an artist And every five years (I measure my life by that
season), I return across the sea and lay one at the foot of his dear
small tomb.’

She had married a banker, who was now involved in land specu
lations in the West. She was enormously rich and talked endlessly.
So when Sam, in a spirit of prank and pity, turned to me and whis
pered,
‘You may
parade as myself tonight
–
if you wish to flee
the
nymph,’ I
accepted greedily, before I could reckon the consequences.
He slipped a sheaf of notes to me under the table, and I excused
myself to prepare ‘my lecture’.

Public speaking was nothing new to me
–
especially before so
Teutonic an audience. I recalled morning lectures at the university
in Neuburg, and the handful of sleepy young men who glanced
longingly at the sun on the river whenever I checked my notes.
There is, of course, a little flutter in the fingers, a catch of breath, a
certain constriction about the throat and temples; but I felt my old
German self again as hundreds of white knuckles rapped the table
among dirty napkins and half-empty wineglasses to welcome me.
‘Let me begin with a detail,’ I announced, and so began. I knew
Sam’s lectures too well to falter, even when his notes were unclear,
and I occasionally rendered a knottier passage into its native
German.

An audience is a kind of cave. A voice reverberates in it. We can
tell by the tone sent back whether the matter is good. An interesting
and necessary experiment to test the truth of any proposition is to
speak it out loud, broadcast to a silent group. Indeed, one need not
wait for the echo. The virtue of one’s thoughts, their subtlety or
falsehood, grows clear as the very medium bends or baulks at the
message. If the supple air proves pliable to our speech, we sense the
life if not the truth of our words. Nothing can commend an idea that
dies, like a stillborn child, at the touch of air. Some thoughts bruise
themselves on Space. There I stood, addressing the glint
of wine-cups and men’s spectacles, the shine of dark wood, the
awkward bored legs of chairs, the angles of elbows rested on the
tables (for I could scarcely distinguish a face or feature in the mass
of listening men), and uttered the theories to which Sam had given
his life, and I
–
a
year. They soared.

At every sentence, Sam’s gallant voice ran through my head, as I
had heard it
–
ages
ago,
it seemed
–
on that cold,
sunny morning in 
the Apple Cart: ‘would you like, Phaedon, to hear the tale of cre
ation?’ That is the tale I told. Werner’s innovations and the drench
ing
in
which he gave birth to the world.
Hutton’s theory of fire that
dried up the German. The continual modification to which the
Scotsman subjected all earthly things
–
to which Syme posited an
end, a burning away, a cooling off, and a polishing. There was such
satisfaction in his every thought. The unanswerable quality of his
calculations, his dispute not of Newton’s laws but the precision of
their application; the glory of his Machinery, his glowing crowns,
vacuii, fluvia. The confidence with which he stepped from stars to
stones, and the delicate shimmering chains of cause and effect by
which he bound them. I could not tell you if I believed a word of it.
But the air filled and glowed with his thoughts like dust in sunlight,
and the applause that met me as I concluded seemed to drown me in
hands. It was a peculiar sensation. I felt like an actor given a part to
play, as distant to the role, in his way, as the audience. Like the
audience, I cheered.

The discussion that followed was warm and mostly laudatory.
The only exception came from a short, powerfully built man in his
early thirties, sitting beside a grey-haired woman in iron-rimmed
spectacles.
Sam
attacked his own theories with venom. He banged
his hand on the table, raised it in one exasperated motion. ‘If I may
be permitted to speak. Have you all taken leave of your senses? If the
lot
of you had risen as one man
–
to denounce the speculations of
this Mr
Soame
–
I
would willingly, indeed bravely, have added my
leaven of commendation
–
for
the undoubted ingenuity of his con
jectures.
But I will not sit
quiet while praise echoes praise
–
while
“still they cried and still the wonder grew, that one small head could
harbour all he knew”.’ Sam aped the tones of a ‘practical’ man, driv
en to outraged petulance by a series of absurdities.

‘I’m a reasonable man
‚’
he began again, ‘but hang
me if I see
how
you can weave a web
of such gossamer connections
–
and
call it a science. They look pretty, sir, I grant you that. They are
wonderfully symmetric and the dew
sits
brightly on them. But not
one of your reasons will survive the brush of simple COMMON
SENSE. Have you got anything to say?’

Trying to catch the tone of superior patience Sam adopted for
such occasions, I replied that I ‘awaited humbly the
substance
of
his remarks’.

It was an odd contest.

‘I
could begin where you please‚’
he said. ‘The crowns, for exam
ple. Have you conjured them out of thin air? Is this a boy’s tale or a
theory?’

‘It is a piece of both
–
a model. In other words, an explanation.
These crowns are not evident to the sense, no. We lack the sense to
observe them. I ask instead: what does my theory have to recom
mend it? Unlike previous models, it fits established laws: the laws of
gravitation (which I trust you will not dispute), according to which
the elliptical path of the earth’s orbit is the product of the attraction
of two balls of mass, the earth’s and the sun’s. The path is known.
The forces are known. The masses should follow. The
necessary mass of the earth cannot be accounted for without a
porous, if not actually hollow, interior. That is not speculation. It is
calculation. If I may be allowed to continue,’ I added, as Sam made
an impatient gesture.