The Syme Papers (6 page)
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
There were letters, of course, tied in ribbon, and wedged into the pocket of the heavy book. Among them, little Samuel’s earliest experiment in penmanship, 7 July 1799. ‘Pleas to receiv me, Annie says, and my Mother particklerly begs you for a dozzen Eggs – I can bring them long myself – for a great Cake, in honour of my sister’s birthday, being one. Excus this, Aunt Bethy, seeing its my first.’ The long-ago summer day returns to me; the boy, proud and perplexed over his great creation (a three-line letter), refusing to speak, lest it dim the effect, taps his foot impatiently on the porch, while Aunt Bethy reads it, commends it, flits inside to fetch what’s required. And for the space of a minute the boy stands alone, in sudden terror at the path he sees before him now, manhood upon him (the trial of penmanship being past), the inevitable progress towards honour and accomplishment weighing on his heart, tearing him from these familiar scenes – the space of garden in front of his grandfather’s farmhouse, the dust rising from the road. And then his aunt returns, with the delicate burden muffled in cloth in a basket, and Sam races back into the anonymous summer day towards the prospect of a ‘great Cake’.
Sam’s sister, baby Barbara (soon nicknamed Bubbles in all the family chatter), was born in the small house on Terence Lane to which the young schoolmaster, Edward, had brought his bride after a year of marriage and parsimony in her father’s house. There Sam grew up. The window above his bed opened on to a thick high field, sloping downhill to the beck that trickled at the bottom, through mud and dead leaf in winter and in sudden breakneck burst after a summer rain. This was Sam’s haven, his consolation from the stormy scenes of his parents’ curious union, as another letter, this time in Annie’s hand, revealed.
Dear Beth, – I write in haste only to relieve you; the silly boy is found – please assure our Father – he is sound and fit and only very sleepy, and moreover, that I myself am happy and easy, now we have recovered him. It was an awful night, as you know, full of rain and crash (though thankfully for my
boy, quite warm and thick). Sam overheard some foolish dispute between his father and myself, raised by necessity over the clamour of the storm, and took fright at the violence of the
voices,
never mind the mildness of the
words.
We heard the clatter of his window, and never thought twice, till I ventured in to kiss him at last, and found the empty bed.
All is past now and over, thank God. Bubbles discovered him at last, sound asleep at the foot of the stream that runs along the bottom of the field in wet months; indeed, if anything, the boy was cross and perplexed to be shaken from a very soothing dream, occasioned no doubt by the babble of water, and though Bubbles wept to find him safe, he proceeded to recompose himself and attempt a second slumber, despite the glow of sunrise then piercing through the trees. But Bubbles, brave girl, would not have it, and pulled the poor truant to his distressed mother, who now writes to assure her sister that all is well …
There was another curious account in Annie’s hand, addressed to a Mr Thomas Jenkyns, of the
Southern Courier,
many years later (we shall meet this Mr Jenkyns again). He appeared to have requested information regarding her son’s ‘sports and curiosities and other youthful presages of geologic genius’, to which Annie made the following reply:
Dear Mr Jenkyns – I have never had a great head for my son’s pursuits, and as far as ‘youthful sports’ and such and presages of ‘geologic genius’ are concerned, I cannot deny he was a very muddy child and forever falling into things and requiring a great scrub. More than that is perhaps beyond me to say. Our house sits square on the slope of a field, and Sam used to wriggle out of the window above his bed when work wanted doing, and me clamouring up and down the house for help. As far as that went, I consider he displayed a love of nature, and would sneak past us and into the woods at the bottom. Once I recall we found him sleeping at the foot of a low stream which used to spring up now and then when the rains came. He
spent all night wriggling under the stars – it was a thick, close evening – and he woke in a perfectly vicious temper at the interruption of a dream, but the sun coming up already, he was forced to retire to his bed; and, recollecting properly, that affair had less to do with presages and more with an untimely matter that doesn’t pertain. I never recall in him a great affection for schooling; but again, that could lie in the awkward circumstance for a young boy, of learning under the eyes of his father and grandfather; enough, I believe, to turn any child from his books, and set him loose among the trees. If a mother may have her say, I always reckoned my son more than anything distinguished for a
brave heart.
That, Mr Jenkyns, is my son.
A curious account from a curious mother. Anne seemed a jealous creature, close with her son and husband – the two often blent in her accounts, a single example of masculine pig-headedness and vital force, indifferent to circumstance and particularity, though Sam occasionally distinguished himself for his faith and attachment to her. Perhaps she envied Edward’s power over their son; for the father directed Sam’s schooling from an early age and appears to have impressed the young boy with considerable awe – at least at first. A handful of brisk notes fluttered to the desk and stuck in the thick, close summer air, unrelieved by the window opened over the garden.
I read over these old school reports, surprised into a familiar tingle of apprehension, as if I myself, at the age of eight or ten, stood open to my father’s evaluation – so closely had I identified my task of discovery with Samuel himself and his fortunes. “The boy possesses’, I read, in Edward’s quaint, left-handed script, the letters sloping against the grain, ‘a keen memory, and the capacity to Improve, upon Application. I believe that much of the haste and Confusion in his work, lies not [only] in a native indolence – a restless Desire to turn his thoughts to everything BUT the task at hand, an Eye drawn to the slightest sign of life without the window, from blue-jay to Maid, a Temper as happy to destroy as to
construct – but also in a natural lightness of the Intellect, which steps as easily from First Causes to Conclusions, where a more muddling Mind might plod over the intervening Arguments. Yet for all that he is a careless child and often o’erleaps himself.’
In a later report, Edward offers a more particular account of his son’s studies.
Acquaintance with the Grammar, including prosody, of both the Greek
&
Latin tongues: middling to indifferent. Knowledge of Caesar’s commentaries, Sallust, selected parts of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses:
extensive, owing to a natural inclination. Interest in and facility for Virgil, Horace, Catullus: dull and dull and dull, the boy shies from Poetry like a kitten from the Bath. Aptitude for the Orations of Cicero (contained in the volume in Usum delphini): considerable; he takes naturally to Speeches, and from an early age has always cast about him for an Audience; most of these he has gotten by heart and will recite ’em to all and any who dare approach him in the Vein. In general, the boy takes well to what
strikes
him, and not at all to what
don’t;
but moreover, I discern a kind of Pernicious Element in him, which, even where his interest lies, seeks to up-end and Disfigure the very Learning on which he has set his Thoughts. The boy knows that two and two make four – and will prove it too if required – but if by any sort of process he can convert 2
&
2
into five
it gives him much greater pleasure.
Edward maintained to the end of his days a great respect for the arts and culture he had neglected at university and a stubborn indifference to the advancing sciences. His American father-in-law, though a stiff-hearted, pious Puritan, was a great believer in the manly and American application of
hand
and
head
to any task. He disliked ‘literary affectations’. The Agropolis, the visionary scheme that brought his future son-in-law to Virginia, had he known of it, must have aroused in him the deepest contempt. And the old farmer and schoolmaster took a keen interest in the new
geological work being done in the young country. In the end, the grandfather seems to have won the contest over the direction of the young man’s genius.
Besides which, 1809 saw the publication of William Maclure’s
Observations on the Geology of the United States.
Maclure, a Scotsman and disciple via Jameson of the theories of Werner, had come to America on business and never left, choosing instead to pursue Wernerian theories across the new continent, ‘hammer in hand’ (Fulton and Thompson). His book proved a sensation, and young Sam, then fifteen years old, was caught in its spell. (It is perhaps worthy of note that Syme’s introduction to the new science was Neptunist in origin.) Exercising a connection to the Silliman family, Willard Barnes secured his grandson a place on the new course in Geology at Yale College, being taught by ‘Sober Ben’.
Accordingly, Samuel set off by coach for New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of seventeen, with a ‘chest of clothes, chemical devices, etc. a writing box, and his portmanteau filled to bursting with my own Shortbread’, as Anne described his departure in a letter to her sister.
He seemed quite affected by the Separation – more than myself, in fact, to our great amusement – though he recovered his spirits in the efforts to shake Bubbles from his leg, who clung there, like a dog with its teeth around a precious bone, it would not part with for its life. Only that evening was I struck for the first time by the great path rolling out before my Son, and the lengths to which his Prospects might remove him from his Home. Our house seemed lonelier than before, less for his Absence than the echoes of his Presence. Bubbles would speak to no one, burying her red eyes in a novel; and even Edward seemed strangely affected and cast-down. No doubt apple-dumplings will cheer them both – I have never known a soul unaffected by apple-dumplings …
A strange mother, loving no doubt, but curiously removed, by the miseries of her family, from her own reflections. She could
not guess then how quickly her son would return, nor how much of Sam’s career would be spent within a day’s journey of Baltimore.
I’d wager Barnes had not accounted for the ‘visionary’ purposes to which Sam would eventually put his education (in the manner of his father, after all), nor how brief that education would be. Yet in his own volcanic fashion, Sam deployed his new learning to instant and profitable use. America had just caught the craze for ‘natural waters’ that swept Europe at the turn of the century. Priestley had demonstrated as early as 1772 that the ‘blinking bubbles’ in a spring’s gush were nothing other than ‘fixed air’, and manufacturers had struggled to duplicate the effects of mineral water, which had become a fashionable addition to many drinks. Syme perfected his own process, and by the end of his first semester marketed the results in a private way. We find this early letter to his father.
Sir, – I recall that you and Grandfather were in the habit of retaining the bottles, jars, etc. consumed at the schoolhouse; and wondered if I might avail myself of a portion of them. I seem to have acquired a little business in the manufacture of soda water, much sought-after by thirsty scholars, and cannot procure any glass bottles which will not burst, nor any stone ones impervious to the fixed air. After succeeding perfectly in the construction of a complicated, difficult and delicate apparatus for the production of mineral gases, I have been thus far
completely foiled
by the very defective bottles supplied by the potters hitherto. They will not hold the fluid under such a pressure but weep copiously – and I am bound to join them, in competing Streams. Recollecting however the store of excellent vessels in the backroom of the school, and reflecting on the superiority of Southern manufacture, I resolved to apply to you, as I do now, for a Shipment of them.
Your faithful, etc. son,
Sam
His studies, as a rule, were more ‘“honoured in the breach than the observance”; he was forever pursuing some fresh impossible scheme, which, impossibly,
came off
– and his nights he spent sleeping crooked in the hall-way at the foot of the stairs in a kind of divan he had erected for the purpose, ready on all occasions, to satisfy any sleepless desire for a game at Cards, at which he lost greatly and consistently and with great good Humour, determined, by some faith in the “Mathematics of Fortune”, that his
luck
would turn …’
Edward Syme also retained his own strange letter to his son at college, which may give another indication of how Sam’s time was spent, if we are to believe the insinuations of a father.
We are all anticipating your return – Bubbles particularly clamours for her brother. I am afraid your Mother and I offer dreary company to a lively girl and I myself have been much occupied of late, by the Schoolhouse & sundry considerations. We expect you to instruct us all this Summer on the composition of the ‘philosopher’s stone’ &c. or rather, where it might
he found.
For my own part, I am so grossly ignorant respecting Chemistry and such like, that I hardly know what it
cannot
effect, and should not be surprised to find you Descend upon us from the Moon, after a relatively simple Operation involving no doubt a great many Explanations …
As for this business, of
Analysing,
I hear it sometimes makes Bad Work. If you confine yourself to the laboratory at College, you will do well, avoiding at all cost the
Laboratories
of some Connecticut
ladies.
But I fear the
particles
of which you are composed, and those of some fine Lasses there, are sufficiently
homogeneous
to possess in a great degree the attraction of
affini
ty.
(Is that how you speak it?) If so, I am convinced that on near approach they would cause such a
Fermentation
as would produce a
Composition
… ‘Conception is a fine thing no doubt, but as their daughters may conceive, look to it …’
Your loving Father, Sam, who misses you,
E.
