The Syme Papers (14 page)

Tom Stoppard has said (I myself starred as the
Hermit
in an amateur production of
Arcadia,
performed by our little troupe of Austin Blue-stockings in front of a house filled, almost to the second row, with the remaining members of our little troupe of Austin Blue-stockings) that genius is the ability to open a door before the house is built. Syme had that very gift (as I hoped to prove), and opened the door, with the courtesy of the dead, to Alfred Wegener, who built his mansion around it. But genius, alas, is also the ability to fall
out of the window
before the house is built. And Syme took far too many such tumbles.

He spent his working life on
three
great ideas – so far as I could make out from a careful study of the letters in his father’s collection, the newspaper reports, and Syme’s own publications. One of them, fabulous; one of them, false; one of them, visionary. I will not include in this list the series of devices he invented along the way. These were only means to an end,
the fruits
of idle hours, on which he often wasted the
cream
of his energies: the fluvia, the compression piston and the early seismograph. Nor the various public projects through which he hoped to support his researches:
the lectures, the journey to the Pole (for which
Symmesonia
served as an advertisement), even the
New Platonist
itself began as a temporary solution to financial difficulties, rather than the conduit to his posterity it proved (
I
prove
) to be. No, the three ideas on which Syme spent his life were simply these:

The Great, or Big Dig, as Reverend Jenkyns delighted in calling it, involved the ‘compression piston’ Syme had developed for his experiments in the elasticity of water. Though Syme became broadly Huttonian or Plutonistic in his beliefs (after the early affair with Neptunism alluded to in
Symmesonia
)
,
he disliked the incomprehensible Scotsman’s suspicion of
practical proofs.
For all his speculative genius, Syme was an
American,
a great believer in the virtue of eye and hand. He proposed the simplest of solutions to the question of the nature of the earth’s core: dig for it. Of course, like most simple solutions, the practical
application
of the Great Dig proved to be far from simple. Syme tinkered with the compression piston to the end of his life; in those last dry years his faith in the scientific value of a massive excavation revived, and he died in the fever of renewed speculation,
on haw to dig himself a deeper hole.

Syme’s interest in the ‘Triple Eclipse’ could indeed be called a corollary of the Great Dig. Essentially, he hoped to let nature provide the hole for him (as she does for us all in the end). Syme believed that the internal spheres of the earth rotated, like a nest of balls, each providing a socket for the sphere within. Occasionally, the holes or cracks in these spheres aligned themselves into what Syme called an ‘internal eclipse’ – a gust of fluvia (the internal air) usually followed these alignments, the gas catching fire as it fled outwards, accounting for earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis in its progress. Syme constructed tables to calculate the ‘rising’ and ‘setting’ of these internal cracks; he believed he could predict natural disasters on the strength of them. And he hoped that a local
triple
eclipse, the alignment of cracks in three sequent internal
spheres, would provide the groundwork for the Great Dig, creating a fissure in the outer sphere along which he could quarry into the heart of the earth. There is no question that, of all his mad ideas, this one caused him the greatest, the most particular, unhappiness.

I have said that it is the privilege of the biographer to sift the mass of his subject’s work for gold. In the process we often find that the
weight
of his life falls away, while the slightest of his curiosities
sticks
in time. So it was with Syme. For the third idea on which he spent his life occupied the least portion of it. The notion of ‘Revolving Fragments’, which inspired Wegener a century on, almost died stillborn (as I eventually learned on the discovery of a most remarkable cache of Syme’s papers), and received in the end only a moment of his distracted attention. A glimpse into the falling of a thought, soft as dew: 

‘What he was about’, I would allege, was nothing short of scientific revolution. The
earth
itself, after the century of small discoveries precipitated by this sudden flash, would undergo a change of
heart
. For Syme, in that moment, had had
the
thought – the
shadow of a door fell on him from a house yet to be built. ‘Fragments’ drifted at last over the sea of his speculation into those famous ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’ to which Wegener himself alluded in that careful introduction to his ground-breaking work
On the Origin of
Continents and Oceans.
Syme for an instant suspected the truth: the
outside
sphere was the only one that mattered; it had cracked and pushed the continents with it.

Of course, Syme himself was interrupted in
mid-thought
and spent the rest of his life trying to reach the
other side
of it. I would like at some point to investigate a ‘history of the man from Porlock’, the history of
interrupted
inspiration, named after the insurance salesman who broke in on Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan. The history of
suspended
ideas (which so nearly included this research) and their eventual
animation.
‘Tom’ (Jenkyns himself, in a rare fit of anger) broke upon the only reverie of Sam pure enough to retain in waking the lucidity of dreams – and for all his good works on Sam’s behalf, that must be his final legacy.

By what privilege (you may well ask) have we been permitted this front-row seat at the
framing of a thought,
this keyhole on a room, the three men in it over a century dead, yet breathing still, chatting, the short, strong one at the desk, sleeves rolled up, butting the palm of his fist against his chin, to precipitate, in such violent fashion, the subtlest emanation of the human soul, a
thought
of such power and perplexity that it anticipated a hundred years of geology, of such frailty, that a word could dispel it, blow it away, till only the scent remained, and that scent fading fast? Who stood at Sam’s shoulder and laid his hand in Sam’s ‘soft hair’? Whose record is this?

To answer, I must return to Highgate and the white-chocolate house above the ponds – the poky room with the little fridge, revealing, upon inspection, the soured cream now drunk or drained away, the hotel mini-bottle of gin, sipped and discarded, replaced by a single jar of mustard, crusted at the rim, and
half-empty, sitting at an angle in the egg rack. To the
Records of My
Son,
collected by Sam’s father.

It is a curious fact about the constitution of our minds
that we
know when we know, but we don’t know when we don’t.
Flickers and echoes deceive us, suggest the full force of thunder and lightning. We forget the power of the
Real Thing;
for
it
fades, too, in our memories, decaying into half-truth and equivocation, until we believe there is nothing else but
mitigated revelation.
Until we believe that a faith in the
pure article
belongs among the illusions of youth, for our fading familiarity with
revelation,
or, rather, our growing familiarity with
half-revelation
blinds us to the sudden light of knowledge.

So I scoured the bundles of letters spread over the cup-stained pine of the desk pushed up against the window, scoured them for – nothing in particular – for
revelation.
For the crack in the surface of Sam’s life that would lead me to the heart of it. I read the records of his many petitions; for Sam acquired a taste for petitioning, and did not rest after the absurdly near success of his first attempt at suckering, I should say, securing aid, I should say, earning succour from the American Congress. And Tom, drawn to Sam in the first place by the Senate’s interest in his theories, prompted him to a dozen fresh petitions.

In December 1822, he forwarded a request to both houses of Congress for the funds necessary ‘to prosecute the Great Dig, a geognostic experiment of vital significance, both to the honor and to the commercial prosperity of the United States’. The request was ‘laid on the table’ and deferred for future consideration (which meant, essentially, until Syme had proved the experiment could pay for itself, through the interest of the mining corporations).

In March 1823 (taking a step back), he petitioned the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, ‘praying that body to pass a resolution approbatory of his theory of concentric spheres; and to recommend him to Congress for an outfit suitable to the enterprise of the Great Dig’. This memorial was presented by Micajah T. Williams (a prosperous landowner whose holdings included a variety of mineral deposits), and succeeded in passing both houses
of the Virginia legislature. However, on presentation to the national body in the fall of 1823, the Senate determined ‘on motion, that the further consideration thereof was indefinitely postponed’ – a great blow to Syme and Jenkyns, which essentially defeated any hope they might have nursed of national support. The fact that his petition was not denied
outright
lies in a curiosity of the law. As it stood, Congress could revive Syme’s petition, in the event that his enterprise seemed on the point of commercial viability, and through their tardy aid claim some share in his profits. As it turned out, they never had occasion to do so; and Syme and Jenkyns were forced to look further afield for their patron.

In November 1824, Syme noted the following account in the
Richmond Intelligencer,
still preserved in a leaf of his father’s album, the paper blotched and browned, the ink itself
fattening
with age: