The Syme Papers (3 page)

My
good fortune lay, however, less in Edward’s
accumulating
habits than in the idleness and the durability of the man who purchased the estate on Edward’s death, a Mr Mackintosh James. He had made what came to be called ‘a killing’ in a refinement of steam locomotion that redirected the heat of the engine into the process by which the engine was fuelled. At the age of thirty-three, young James was ‘set for life’, another phrase just coming into vogue – and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with the surplus of years before him. He lived to the ripe old age of a hundred and three, and died childless, after one world war and before another, just in time to avoid the Great Crash.

James left a number of worthless shares, and the house itself, now known as Mackintosh Place, to the newly formed Hampstead & Highgate Preservation Trust. In the century and a half of its existence, two families had dwelt there – and none have followed since its conversion to a museum (of village life and changing times), as I found it. The box of ‘American Notes, &c.’ was discovered untouched by Mackintosh James, pushed against the brick wall of the chimney shaft in the attic. The oak was scorched and blackened, the papers curled with heat and thick with dust, but the ink remained dry and, above all, readable.

A brief account of the house, written by Edmund Blunden, no less (among his clutch of lyrical historical pastoral pieces), and published by the Trust, had found its way into the British Library; where I discovered it, and news of the cache of ‘old and cluttered papers, relating the dead and cluttered lives, of the Syme family’. To Mackintosh House, accordingly, I bent my steps – or rather the soot-caked wheels of the rackety Tube, burrowing its way along the Northern Line, to Highgate, still half a village, perched on its wooded hill.

And there I sat, in a side office of the museum reserved for the curator, cluttered with filing cases, a kettle caked in mineral
scum, and a tiny fridge (containing only a carton of old cream and a single hotel mini-bottle of gin). The windows looked over the front garden, so I bent a rustling slat of the French blinds to peer out on the milky sunny day. A slope of grass; then, half-hidden by willows, the quiet stretch of asphalt road poured down long after Mr Coverdale first sold this corner of his farm; and between the loose hair of the trees, the glitter of Highgate Ponds undimmed below. I put the album of the great (so I had determined to make him) Sam Syme to one side – a treat reserved – and forced my ham fists and sleepy brain to turn over the wrinkled letters and journals of his father, Edward, set forth for America over two hundred years before.

Edward’s Agropolis was
not
a success, though the travelling experiment docked at last in high spirits: ‘With what joy, my father,’ wrote Edward on his arrival, ‘did I leap to this shore of Liberty! I was weary of that great bore, the sea, a tedious fellow, forever and everywhere at my elbow; and the sight of trees, of towns, and even of Men!, offered delicious refreshment for fatigued eyes. I have flown a rotten country and entered upon a new land, busy with its own youth. How I enjoyed the activity of the merchants, the artisans, and the sailors, especially as it was not my own! It was not the noisy Vortex of London; it was not the unquiet, eager mien of my countrymen; it was the simple, dignified air of men, who were conscious of liberty, and who see in all men their brothers and their equals … though I dare say I am delirious with Terra Firma, and would praise the meanest Hovel simply for not swaying in that abominable manner …’

Thus they began in great good hope and some good faith; though Edward’s letters soon qualified his enthusiasm, ‘We get on tolerably,’ he wrote his beleaguered father. ‘The gentlemen
moan
somewhat at the delightful pleasures of our Idyll, and insist, with wonderful generosity, that each of the other Agropols enjoy his share of the blisses of Rural life. Our Hands, by this time, are well chapped, and we look like nothing else but what we are:
Farmers,
sound of limb, black with Sun, dreadfully occupied by seeding and improvements upon the Plough and the malignities of the
Weather. Yet even the
sorriest
among us delights in the glorious Scope this country offers, the cloud-like expansion of Valley and Hill, the profligate wastefulness of our Lord on these rude Shores. As I say, we
get on;
and trust, dear Father, you do no worse.’

Their downfall in the end lay not in hard work; as far as that went, Edward was right, the sorriest among them bent their backs to it and
got on.
Nor were the malignities of weather to blame, though they suffered a brutal first winter, in which three of their horses died and the first young son of the Agropolis, the child of Edward, entered the cold world white and out of breath. The true serpent of their paradise, as always, lay in the hearts of the men involved, and the accommodations they made for their sexual loves.

Benedict Smythe, Viscount Burkehead, was in his way a true original. Though his scheme preceded the Pantisocrats, his Utopian ambition surpassed theirs: among the pleasures of the natural life to be held in common by his fellows were the
joys of
family,
as their strangely coy deed of
township
dubbed them. There were to be none of the mealy-mouthed ‘brotherly’ betrothals to sister and sister, practised by Coleridge and Southey. A shared world for Benedict meant just that, and the Agropols, men and women, held one another in equal and often competing love. Eve had entered the garden.

Edward Syme had always been a gentleman of precocious appetite, as the records of his Oxford career attest; and no doubt Benedict’s liberal sexual philosophies at one point formed the chief attraction of his schemes. But when Benedict pursued the still-recovering mother of his dead child, Edward, a gentleman of some niceness, revolted. The rift in their small brotherhood – for, despite Benedict’s noblest aspirations for equality between the sexes, the Agropolis remained from first to last a
brotherhood 
– widened and deepened over the following year. Edward must have guessed from the first that in such a contest he was bound to suffer most. Benedict’s father held the purse strings of the venture, and unless he watched himself very closely indeed, Edward would be out in the considerable cold of a North American winter.

So he watched himself, displaying even then his talent for the
deflection of grief which he would pass so unhappily on to his son. There were rumblings in the little farmstead, as Edward’s allies (for, despite the noblest of communal intentions, when have we not separated ourselves, by choice, into pockets of men?) made some mischief for the Viscount – spoiling a field with stones on one memorable and pyrotechnical flare-up between the factions. But Edward calmed them, and the breach in his friendship with Benedict never broke into open war.

The following spring, Edward began to busy himself outside the Agropolis, lending a hand at the local schoolhouse near Baltimore. ‘I have decided’, Edward wrote in the consolation of his journal, ‘to break free of this Bubble, and set myself up, on two feet, as a Gentleman Scholar, among a people who cannot mark the Difference.’ The old schoolmaster, Willard Barnes, a veteran of the war and a great believer in the new country, found himself sadly short-handed in the education of its sons. So he took on a young English ‘gentleman’ fresh from Oxford, engaged on some business, some fanning speculation (Barnes never guessed what), who seemed to know his way around a book – not that there were many of them about to be getting on with, now that you mention it. Barnes had two daughters, including a young beauty, famous as far as Richmond and shy as a hedgehog – Anne.

Edward married her before the year was out, shifted his lodgings from the idyll of communal life, and lived in the attic of old Barnes’s farmhouse, a sprawled, lopsided, barn-like building beside the school, amid ten acres of its own pasturage.

The character of his new wife is difficult to determine. She wrote little, and the best record we have of the mother of the young geologist, who would set the world on its ears and was already kicking in her womb by the winter of 1793, comes from a rather extraordinary letter Edward wrote to her before their engagement. Willard Barnes appears to have been a strict master and a stricter father – only Edward’s connection to the business of the school seems to have permitted him the company of Willard’s daughter, and eventually won him her hand in marriage. And Anne must have embraced her new husband with something of
the blindness of a first passion, for this is what Edward wrote, and he kept no secrets from her, though he promised many to come.

(There I sat, looking over the gardens of Mackintosh House, the blinds pulled high and the window opened, after a considerable groan and a great scraping of paint, while a file of old papers stood at my side, breathing a dusty cloud into the sunshine; and these tempestuous lives fluttered beneath my hand.)

All that we know of Anne is that she accepted such a curious proposal. Perhaps she hoped to reform him – this has been known. From such a union, and such a father, within a year, came Samuel Highgate Syme, whose own airy schemes, after a century of neglect, would bubble up from the depths of his hollow earth, to fuel the fire of Alfred Wegener’s imagination.

Perhaps I have overreached myself again, and I must step back. Look around, Pitt, look around, and climb out of your hole for once and quit digging. Professor Bunyon would no doubt warn me to ‘take stock’ at this point, and so, for once, I shall. I shall begin at the beginning, if I can find it. (Of course, there are in fact no beginnings; only pauses and resumptions.)

In 1915, Alfred Wegener, shot in the neck during a raid in the Great War, returned home to convalesce. In that delicious idleness of a keen, healthy mind and a slack, recovering body, Wegener revisited some earlier speculations regarding what came to be called the
theory of continental drift
– the notion that a single body of land had split, wrenched apart by separate internal plates, to form the spread of continents familiar to us now. In that year he published a slim paperback on cheap paper titled
The
Origin of Continents and Oceans.
Wegener presented his idea, in the words of Ursula Marvin, ‘not for the first time perhaps but for the first time boldly’. It is this ‘perhaps’ that I had set out to investigate.

Wegener himself announced his discovery anxious of his influences. In the opening Historical Introduction, he takes pains to point out that the
‘first
concept of continental drift first came to me as far back as 1910, when considering the map of the world, under the direct impression produced by the congruence of the coastlines on either side of the Atlantic’. (We shall see Syme lost in that very consideration almost a century before him.) The following fall, a study offering palaeontological support for the idea of a land bridge between Brazil and Africa, convinced Wegener to pursue the matter further; and he first delivered his conclusions on 6 January 1912 (a date distinctly recorded) to the Geological Association in Frankfurt.

Wegener’s innovations were twofold and both easily named. In the first place, he posited the existence of an earlier, single body of land of which the continents were parts. Second, he named the internal force that split them apart. In
The Origin of Continents and
Oceans,
he carefully dissociates himself from his intellectual forebears, citing one by one those who could lay some claim to either of his discoveries and distancing himself in turn. Of the first innovation: ‘It was pointed out to me in correspondence that Coxworthy, in a book which appeared after 1890, put forward the hypothesis that today’s continents are the disrupted parts of a once-coherent mass. I have had no opportunity to examine the book.’ And of the second: ‘Rotation of the
whole
crust, whose components were supposed
not
to alter their relative positions – has already been assumed by several writers (beside many inanities), particularly among our American colleagues’ – and here he appends a footnote – ‘and found support closer to home in Loeffelholz von Colberg and Kreichgauer, among others.’