The Syme Papers (30 page)

I missed Syme, I confess it. There is a kind of intimacy, of growing intimacy, in biographical research; we feel, because our subjects grow clearer to us, that we have advanced, in a similar way, into their hearts, that we are dear to them, become dearer, become – confidants, specially chosen to ‘give them to the world aright’. I have known a convocation of biographers – at a conference, in Lausanne, which we had all attended for the seven-course fair – positively
jealous
of one another, like lovers at a funeral, jostling to lay the brightest flower on the grave. (Never mind that the
lover
in question was an extremely corpulent, occasionaly gouty, generally rubicund chemist, who suffered, by the by, from the most apocalyptic indigestion, and who had grown, presumably, quite damp and musty in his grave over the last hundred years; still, we fussed over him as if he were Marilyn Monroe.) The trouble, of course, is that the end of knowledge is the end of intimacy; when the investigation is suspended, the friendship begins to die. Our subjects, unlike our romances (though perhaps there is an echo of such decline even in ordinary love), cast us off as soon as we cease to find out more about them. They seem almost to snub us.

Well, there was more work to be done with Syme, more trouble
to be had; and I awoke with an almost overwhelming sense of excitement, for – I do not wish to appear ridiculous, I do not wish to appear a fool, nevertheless, I will … explain myself. The day a biographer undrapes his subject (or rather plops a heap of papers upon his dean’s or editor’s desk) rivals in sweetness, in shy pride, in nervous fever, the occasion on which a lover confesses openly to the world for the first time his great love, takes her hand in the street. (Is she not beautiful, he cries, anxiously – do you not find her beautiful?)

In short, I had an appointment with Bunyon that morning.

I woke glad to the heart in the rich scent of the conjugal bed. Missy dozed, smudge-faced, beside me, her hot breath percolating through sleep-fat lips. I eyed her widely, and nosed her, until she blinked; whereupon she squeezed her eyes. “Sonly six‚’ she said, and shut them again. ‘I’m getting up‚’ she added, and fell asleep. (It is always a miracle to me how much of the patois of ordinary love and joy survives in the grand rhetoric of marital
Sturm
und
Drang.
)
I dressed, donned my Harris tweed and shuffled barefoot into a pair of well-oiled loafers, and stepped into the sitting room. A hot, white morning lurked outside, licking grass and tree, and from its damp maw I briefly retrieved the paper. Six-thirty. Jet-lag had propped my eyes wide with invisible pincers, an enormity of world seemed to tip into them, too much for my brain to unjumble. I couldn’t possibly go to work at six-thirty.

Glad to the heart, I said, and yet, I was conscious even then of the
gnaw
(I can find no other word for it) of a deeper hunger in my happy appetite for life, an ache of doubt – a worm blindly nudging through an apple, and leaving holes behind it wherever it ate. My palms grew damp at the thought of Bunyon, his magisterial forgetfulness, the bright flag of his attention flapping in a hundred winds at once, and falling as suddenly still. Bloody Bunyon, as the Brits would have it – just the man to look across the Red Sea parted, and observe (with a wonderfully mimicked air of naivety, of grey-headed boyish enthusiasm) an unusual and quite astonishing
shrub
on the sea-bottom to which he wishes to draw our particular attention. Just the man, in short, to miss a miracle in search of a curiosity.

Well, I could not sit still all morning and stew. So I withdrew from my suitcase (lying tumbled at the foot of the sofa, now happily strewn with newspapers, like a full mouth with crumbs after a meal) the precious sheaf, which I had titled, in staccato type, ‘the syme papers, a journal kept by dr friedrich müller, including an introduction and explanatory notes by dr douglas pitt’ – a good, fat brainchild that woke in me a flush of paternal pride, as if indeed I had given birth to a phonebook. This I slipped (if a phonebook may slip) into my briefcase, a much-battered antique satchel, the gift of my father.

I stepped into the boys’ loo, quickly, for I had grown increasingly uncertain with age of my
waterworks
(a Monopoly card for which I would gladly sacrifice several Mayfairs). I peed away happily in a fine gold stream, aiming for the fleck of fecal matter one son had left upon the bowl. The porcelain shone – and, toting my portmanteau, I set forth into the enormity of a Texas morning in September.

A thick, hot drapery of cloud hung over the sycamores and the live-oaks and drooped down, sticky as cobwebs, on to the parked cars and the plastic toymobiles tipped over in the front yards. The sharp prick of sweat opened the pin-holes in my skin, tickling my bald pate, my palms, and the bone along my forearms. I was home, in the heat again, in the intimate air of a tropical country, which always awakes in me a thousand desires and slackens at the same time every muscle needed to attain a single one. Susie, I knew, wanted the Volvo to take the boys to Robert E. Lee and get to McCallum High herself. So I decided to walk, to tire my buzzing nerves and draw out the sweet anticipation of arrival – while the sun burned away the clouds and began to shine off the wide asphalt. And I walked, through the wide and wealthy decay of Hyde Park, along Speedway, past the laundromat, where the bums drank from their paper bags against the kerb (how glorious the vicissitudes of their lives, dawn and sunset and the night stars!), across 30th Street and Dean Keeton, past the little booth (10 m.p.h.!) where the university traffic guard scratched himself in front of a fan, along the creek and under the stretch of trees where
the grackle-birds shat, to the tall limestone block in which the History Department roosted.

I confess (again!) that I had begun to … perspire by the time I arrived; my bare feet rubbed angry red against their leather heels, browned by old polish; my armpits grew pungent with sweat, little copses of damp (I could not, in all propriety, remove my Harris tweed, had I wished to); my forehead dripped with beads like a watermelon brought out of the fridge. But the great resource of an ivory tower is the … air conditioning; and as I stepped into the halls of academe – decorated by fake new-fangled lounges (red, vaguely French,
à
la
Jean-Luc Godard) and fake old-fashioned portraits (including a particularly gruesome replica of Dr Bunyon himself, stuffed into the pomposity of a bad suit, grinning broadly, his teeth, like brick-work in a New York apartment,
exposed,
I believe is the architectural term) – I began to chill, ever so slightly, and then shiver, as I strolled up the stairs to Bunyon’s office, top and corner, from which he could look over his little world.

Perhaps I should spend a moment on the battle of Bunyon and Pitt, and the great war of which we are only the soldiers. The study of science is a relatively recent twig on the branch of history; but Bunyon, our dean and leader, has made it his particular care to tend this twig and nurse it to a glowing, if insubstantial, foliage. Now you may be sure that in any discipline with a double-barrelled name the barrels are pointing firmly at each other – and the scientists and the historians engage in a kind of guerrilla warfare unrivalled in academe for the heat of its prosecution. You may suppose that the scientists among us would carry the honours, owing to (well, there is no harm in honest pride)
our
technical expertise – for the truth is often simpler than the varieties of error, and the wonderful convolutions of ancient thought require considerable untwisting. Yet the historians of science for their part consider themselves the proper equals of their brothers in the History Department – they practise, like the rest of them, an ancient craft, and preen themselves rather on the intricacy of their subject, which seems so much more difficult, more technical, more
serious,
than the intrigues of kings and queens,
the outcomes of wars, the evolutions of economies and societies. Worse still, they prance about in borrowed robes – white coats, I suppose – and ape the muddle-headed eccentricity of the scientists they suppose themselves sufficiently advanced to condescend to.

I regret to say, by contrast, that the more
scientific
historians suffer somewhat in our own esteem, less from the eminence of our historical than our scientific colleagues, who struggle at the frontiers, while we map the well-travelled roads that led them there. We stand at the elbow of genius, and glimpse only the legs and bottoms of the new men perched on the shoulders.

Of course, the great prize of any historical enquiry lies in
digging
up
a
buried
bone
and
barking
over
it.
But the trouble is this: the bones of scientists tend to decay rather quickly, splinter and open and crumble into the mud, while the bones of kings and statesmen and poets are picked clean by time and come up gleaming. True scientists, for their part, not only stand upon the shoulders of past giants, but kick them over when they’ve had a good look through the window, clamber in, and forget about them what brought ‘em to the dance. As George Sarton declared in an early specimen of scientific history, ‘From Homer to Omar Khayyám’: ‘The acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge is the only human activity which is truly progressive – which begins, in other words, in the negation of the past.’

Except. Except upon those rare and glorious occasions when the scientists, the modern fellows, looking for new worlds, lose themselves in the forest, stumble into an impenetrable thicket, an unexpected gate, chained fast, a chasm too broad for bridges, and realize, in the words of the gentleman from Maine, that ‘you can’t get there from here’. When they are forced to double back, tread old roads again, pore over maps that not so long ago appeared hopelessly out of date and which have long been out of print. Times when, as Wegener had discovered a century before, a dead man holds the lantern at the dark threshold of the future, and we creep behind him, follow his glowing shadows.

In the early nineties a gentleman by the name of Robinson Gould
made a name for himself in a small academic way by suggesting – as he had been suggesting for decades, in a dusty hall at Yale in his patrician, sleepy tone, in a voice that seemed to carry its own echoes along with it to spare the trouble of walls and ceilings – that Aristotle had much to teach that jumped-up new-fangled craze known as
modern
biology.
Mr Robinson Gould – for he lived in the days when a
mister
was plenty respectable enough for any college lectureship – was a classicist by trade and a scientist by hobby, and may indeed stake his claim to having founded our little subdivision of the Department of History by his unflagging – well, I would say zeal, but perhaps we had best leave it at ‘unflagging’. Nobody took much notice of him, except his wife, who seemed to like him, for he was a handsome fellow in an old Brahmin way, though he stooped somewhat with the years and bore a remarkably unhappy moustache.

Until Marcus Lipowitz, the hot young biology prof., overheard one of his classes (having been caught in a shower of rain on what the students loosely described as the Hill, and returned to the lecture hall, loath to descend in a downpour), and began to apply Aristotelian notions of causality to various problems in evolutionary theory. (It should be said that the bronchitis he developed from sitting drenched in a draughty pew by the door played its part in the breakthrough – genius, as is well known, being 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent prostration.) Aristotelian causality can be described briefly as the belief that the dog wags the tail, and not the other way round, as had been supposed, in one form or another, by several generations of Darwinians.

Lipowitz’s breakthrough brought a certain amount of reflected fame both on Mr Robinson Gould and the more technically inclined branch of the history of science. Mr Robinson Gould himself seemed not only
unperturbed
by the uproar surrounding the development and the generous credit accorded him by Dr Lipowitz, but – how shall I say it? –
unawoken.
The suggestion was even mooted, by those unacquainted with the fair Elm City and its rather more eccentric denizens, that Robinson Gould was a fiction invented by Lipowitz, partly as a joke, and partly as a
mechanism for describing the indescribable, the moment of inspiration itself.

Regardless, Lipowitz’s work ushered in a brief vogue for the kind of historical science I practised myself, during which Dr Bunyon, a dedicated follower of all fashions, hired me and assured me of tenure. Bunyon himself tried his hand at the game and published a much-cited monogram on ‘Trinitarian thought and quantum mechanics – on the ancient and modern faith in the inconceivable’. But the fad faded, as fads do (a fate written in their stars, in their
characters
at birth); Robinson Gould died, almost imperceptibly; and Lipowitz moved on to what he called ‘the new Social Darwinism’ and questions of species evolution (a tendency distinct from, often opposing, the survival of individual genetic codes), by which he accounted for divers phenomena ranging from the ‘necessity of homosexuality’ to ‘the evolutionary inevitability of the Human Genome Project’. He left us behind, and without him, all too soon, the old-fashioned accounts of defunct medical practices, exploded astrological myths and absurdist scientific traditions (alchemy, Mesmerism, phrenology) once more jammed the journals, and squeezed my own particular brand of scientific historical ‘revivalism’ (as Bunyon once described it, ‘affectionately’, he added) into the footnotes, then booted them out altogether.

I wish the matter ended there. I wish the trouble with Pitt were that he did not publish enough and beat a dead horse. (Dead horses, you see, are much better to beat than live deans.) With the benefit of hindsight, of course, I can see that the one piece I
did
publish I should have crumpled up and hidden away in old socks. In retrospect I can see that I should not have begun by making puns, I should not have concluded by making puns, and I should have taken all the puns out of the middle. I can see that now. With the benefit of hindsight. Which, as Byron once observed (speaking through the very wrinkled, very rouged lips of Dr Edith Karpenhammer, at a particularly heated meeting of the Bluestocking Society, convened upon the question of ‘Learning from Mistakes’): ‘Of all experience ‘tis the usual price – stocking a sort of income
tax laid on by fate.’ I have known more cruelty done in the simple cause of
paronomasia
than out of any passion or prejudice, Dr Friedrich Müller might have observed. To which I have nothing else to add, except – I could not help myself.