The Syme Papers (47 page)

Susie could not bear to stand aside and watch me muddle through them; and she could not bear to involve herself in the muddle. So she flitted and twitched, peered over Pitt’s shoulder, and fled to make coffee, then inched her way back into the room, upon some pretext, as Pitt recalled the particulars of the redraft that had been rejected, made a note of them, looked for an envelope or a paper clip, retrieved what he believed to be a superfluous paper clip from another bundle (which promptly disbanded), discovered he had lost his original note, despaired, and stuffed the two disparate rejections into a packet that split at the seams, and could be held together only by squeezing it tightly into a stuffed pigeon-hole for which it was never intended. Susie despaired.

And there was, to be fair, something ghastly in my scrupulous (and hopelessly unsuccessful) retention of failure (as Bunyon himself might have put it). But Pitt is fond of ghasts and ghouls and found some relish in the work, enjoyed in himself the
utterly
insignificant
bravery
of the crank and the outcast. (This, it occurred to me in my haphazard evolution of the term, is the true mark of a
Symist
– solitary courage, for it does indeed take courage, to fight a long battle against an enemy’s
indifference,
a battle that can only be lost, passionately lost.) Something about the brick-like cavities of the pigeon-holes suggested to my mind the awful conclusion of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’; and I fancied that Susie felt herself to be a witness to a macabre twist on the plot, in which Fortunato
bricked
himself
into
his grave among the catacombs – as if each fat rejection slotted into its cubicle was a brick laid in the growing wall around me. (A copy of Poe, needless to say, is never far from Pitt’s bedside table.)

Of course, in Pitt’s case – and this I believe is the more general phenomenon – the laugh is uttered by the observer
outside
the wall, and not the creature caught within it. It is she who says, ‘Let us be gone,’ and Tor the love of God’; and the man within who determines to remain, and complete his enclosure.

I should say now that Syme himself was not to blame for our marital impasse. I had been aware for some time of a certain tension between us (between Susie and me, that is, not Syme and Pitt) – a tension which perhaps can best be explained by what Captain Queeg refers to as ‘geometric logic’. As follows: Susie and I had discovered one day that we lived upon a single
line,
as it were, stretching away endlessly in either direction. (Pitt naturally conceives of Interstate-15, shall we say, running through the deserts of the West, towards heat and heat both ways. But any line will do: the pool shark will no doubt conjure up an image of his cue; and Phidy, a gentleman dandy, envisioned ‘brown string lost in a green ball … as the symbol of enchanted prospects’.)

The extent of the line induced a kind of intimacy; such dots as we were huddled together to set us apart from the horizons emptying out on either side. In fact, it was very hard for us to keep our places on the line, recall points of origin, distinguish
here
from
there,
or even
this
way from
that,
as the infinity both sides seemed to render such distinctions pointless, to say the least, and impossible, to say the most. Vaguely we knew that some days, some years, we travelled east (shall we say), some west – and for a time the direction did not matter, since the distances involved were negligible in the sweep of the great line itself, so slight indeed as to appear relative or, at the least, easily reversed.

So we never worried about it, much, Susie and I – despite the fact that we knew, quite well, we must turn towards opposed horizons in the end (in the
ends,
I should say) – despite the fact that we understood (from the first, I believe) that we travelled on the same path differently, and must in time (there seemed no hurry) return to our original courses, and part.

It occurs to me now that a ray (I think they call it, a severed line, infinite in only one direction) would be an apter image, for Susie had a fixed foot in mind, a final destination and a way of life: New York. Whereas Pitt travelled always and only outwards towards nowhere and nothing in particular and further still. This, Pitt declares grandly, tucking his thumb into the button-hole of his Harris tweed, is another mark of the Symist, who, as Dante beautifully observed, walks uphill with the fixed foot
behind
him: ‘my weary frame after short pause recomforted, again I journeyed on over that lonely steep, the hinder foot still firmer’. (Always walk,
crede
Pitt,
with the firmer foot behind you, believe me, friends.)

Pitt admits, however, Susie’s claim that it is easier to walk the other way, downhill, towards home.

After short pause recomforted, Pitt determined to begin – once more, from the beginning. (This itself is a mark of the Symist – most people begin again from middles, from ends, from tasks left off or pieces broken away; but the true Symist starts from scratch, and scratches away till he unearths the start again. Pitt is a true Symist; my father was a true Symist, and suffered so many beginnings he wore an air of hesitation many mistook for humility, but he was no humble man, my father at heart, only stuttered a little, naturally, at the start; and stopped again, and started again so often that the stutter appeared his characteristic accent, his native idiom, his way of life. It was not.)

Let me begin in faith: I knew then, as I know now, ‘in the thoughtless way one knows vast things, like one’s own death’, as Phidy put it, that Syme had left some further testament behind him, of the great conception which had moved Wegener a hundred years on, a tag or a strand of hair, to say the least, by which
we could know him again. I pored over Müller’s account, night after night, bent over the desk while Susie slept or tried to sleep unhappily. She said, come to bed, Pitt, the light is in my eyes; she said, in sleepy murmur, my mother said the trick of good painters is knowing when to stop, and the only way to face it, is admit, it means giving up on whatever it is, you haven’t gotten right yet, even though you still might, nevertheless, it is very important sometimes to stop stop stop and turn to something else as your father did didn’t he.

But he got nowhere, I said. I think I’ll stick. (There are the lessons we learn by imitation; and the lessons we learn by the fear of imitation. Of these, the latter are by far the most powerful, yet the most difficult to con.)

Come to bed.

I knew the clue was there, the final piece of the puzzle, the last brick in the slot – and strangely the two images merged in my head, the bricks of rejection Susie saw me lay atop one another, raising a narrow wall of failure around me, to shut out the world; and the ultimate proof of Syme’s greatness (the ‘single stone to be fitted and plastered in’), which lay, no doubt, in the heap of leftover bricks at the building site of the written word, where he worked, and where I kicked about.

Come to bed, she said again, asleep already, come to
bad,
through sleep-fat lips.

(And I thought then that the trouble with lessons was this: that they ran
contrary,
and left us to choose, not whether to learn or ignore the homily, but
which
to ignore. For my father, in fact, had shown me the way to the
country
of
one,
where he lived; and I had discovered my own country – such islands belonging to the family business,
what
business exactly remains to be seen.)

The breakthrough came at last from an old friend. One morning there fell on my feet a package (which Susie for once had misfiled, for it came
cold
from no press, but warm with incipient inspiration), bearing news from Neuburg to Austin, Texas – and not, as I soon found out,
for
the
first
time.
Dark and willowy Benjamin
Karding, the lengthened shadow of a man (who falls, it seems, across the breadth of my discovery), had stumbled upon a curious coincidence while digging into the history of his uncle (many times great) Ferdinand Müller and the failure of his republican ambitions. This set me off on an almost fresh and local trail: beginning at the university libraries (whose collection of nineteenth-century immigrant journals, pamphlets, letters, fliers, receipts, bills and playbills is an outpost of German barnacles in American waters) and ending somewhat further afield, as we shall see.

If I could begin my academic career from scratch, I believe I should devote myself to the history of
immigration
– a history in its way not unlike the history of
‘great
mistakes,
and the fruits of them, redeemed’ in time, upon which I have in fact spent my life. Of course, a history of immigration is nothing less than a history of the world (of the truth of which I have repeatedly failed to convince my wife), and this story is perfectly
autumnal
with those (almost) impossible coincidences of time and place from which the whole of our lives …
hang.
Syme grew up outside Baltimore, because his father Edward (a Symist in more than name) had set forth from bankrupt London to the New World ‘to establish an Ideal Community … of equal friends, in which all property, of life and love, was held in common’.

Declaring, ‘I had rather risk my soul upon a hundred absurdities than on such certainties as I live among now,’ Phidy discovered Edward’s
son
(the great, the geognostic, etc.) outside Baltimore, forty years on, while fleeing the influence of his own father (bent on ideals similar to Mr Syme’s, for which he paid rather more dearly). There Syme and Phidy were joined improbably by a third immigrant, Mrs Simmons, a widow carried from Germany to Pactaw by her husband’s interest in exploring the commercial possibilities of Virginia’s riverways – a woman, by the by, involved in
conjunctions
of time and place that played no small part in the outcome of this story.

This is only the beginning; or the beginnings.

After countless peregrinations, an ailing Phidy returned at last
to his childhood home (to shorten the journey between bed and burial), setting off the chain of theft and influence that inspired Wegener, sixty years on, to die between upright skis in a snowstorm, seeking evidence of the
movement
of
the
earth.

Wegener’s grandchildren emigrated to England after a second disastrous war, which destroyed, among other things, the sole recorded copy of Syme’s brilliance in fire and water, bombs and canals, but could not burn away the evidence of it in the great library catalogue from Friedrichsgracht. This turned up in the new British Library (a red-tiered supermarket imitation of the gallant St Pancras Station perched above its shoulder), where Pitt discovered it, journeying from America for the purpose.

Wars played their parts, too: the revolution that fixed the father of Syme in his adopted country (until a late and last migration to the family home in Highgate), and set up son Sam as an American, and a great American – the first genius of theoretical science (as Pitt hopes to prove) in the New World; the war of 1812 that offered him the prospects of a military career, in which he shone, briefly, before turning his talents as a surveyor to a more speculative terrain; the French Revolution that gave a scattered people a taste of republican life and suggested to a liberal German middle class the
dream
of
a
united
Deutschland;
the battle of Leipzig in 1813, at which the Emperor was defeated, and a country awoken, though only a memory of the dream survived in the patchwork nation the Vienna Congress stitched together – including a most insignificant rag, the Principality of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen, which sent its first ambassador of science, Friedrich Müller, across the water to investigate the commercial and theoretical possibilities of that mad genius, Professor Samuel Highgate Syme, of Pactaw, Virginia.

A dream (of German nationhood) which, by the by, had a habit of recurring in nightmarish variations, among them the first and second world wars; during the former of which a young Alfred Wegener was wounded, allowing him the convalescence to compose that ground-breaking treatise on the heart of the earth,
On
the
Origin
of
Continents
and
Oceans,
inspired by a copy of Syme’s
New 
Platonist,
which was destroyed in the Allied bombs brought on by the
latter.

A dream which, in the freshness of its youth, inspired the ambassador’s father, Ferdinand Müller, to attempt a rather foolish, insignificant and noble little coup, that briefly established a seventeen-day parliament in the Republic of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen, before the heavies from Berlin restored their silly cousin to his court (in its state of constructional dilapidation, among the unfinished fountains and battlements, looking over Neuburg and the Elbe).

A dream which, after a succession of unsuccessful revolutions through the heart of the nineteenth century, led a German liberal elite to seek their fortunes elsewhere in Europe and the Americas; among the pick of their destinations, the foci of their heavy migrations, being that ‘Italy of the New World’ –

Texas, of course.

Phidy, after all, had a sister, Ruth; and that sister had a son.

The trouble was natural enough, natural and predictable. Conception is a blessing, I have said, but as your daughter may conceive – Ferdinand, look to it. It seems to have been largely a question of … timing. Ruth and Hespe were engaged; father and prospective son-in-law had their little disputes, no doubt, but Ruth believed these to be customary in the circumstances, proof indeed of a kind of intimacy between them, an equivalence of character, that seemed to her, rather than anything else, to justify her choice. Yes, she thought, young Hespe and her father were only
too
much
alike.