The Syme Papers (66 page)
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
Pitt, needless to say, enjoyed himself.
Joe enjoyed himself.
The
Fräulein Doktor
also, in her way, enjoyed herself.
We finished a draft of the design by Tuesday evening, and sat drinking Jose Cuervo on Joe’s porch while the rain dripped (astonishingly loud) from the eaves, into the fat of the dark green mulberry-hedge leaves. How Pitt loves a blueprint – the mere sketch intimately suggestive of the geometric intricacy that underlies our simplest shapes and acts. By Wednesday, the first awkward legs and arms of the ‘spinning wheel’ began to kick – clanking baby steps – while Joe, bare-armed in his apron and jeans, lay on his back against the cold cement, observing and greasing and adjusting. Pitt, needless to say, did not keep shtum, and began to suggest things – a great failing of his, as Susie has often pointed out. ‘When you know something‚’ she says, ‘you tell us what to do; and when you don’t, you suggest. Little niggling suggestions‚’ she adds in less charitable moods, ‘too stupid even to be disobeyed.’
Even
Fräulein Doktor
Bianca Baumgarten had the measure of her man. ‘For shit’s sake‚’ she declared at last. ‘It is bad enough that you make him build this crazy-thing. It is worse that you help him.’
By Thursday, the ‘legs’ gleamed under Joe’s loving hands; the ‘arms’ swung through the air with a slugger’s easy violence; and Pitt could perch upon the wooden seat, and pedal to his heart’s
content, flattering himself that his own squat, powerful figure at least faintly resembled the geognostic pioneer who rode that saddle before him:
[L]antern-jawed, with a brave and stubborn chin, slightly darkened
by a day’s growth of beard; a straight, strong, unhesitating nose; a
thin upper lip bitten between his teeth, above a plump, rosy lower
lip; sharp, broad cheeks crackling and shining with animal spirits
in the skin drawn tight across them; thick, liver-spotted forearms
bared to the elbow, trembling with his exertions; broad shoulders,
with a slight hunch like the growl of fur upon a tiger’s neck. In
short, a muscular creature, utterly at ease in his skin, well suited
to the constant struggle of the flesh against the hard inanity of the
world.
On Friday we sculpted, sloppy in excess of clay, that curious
colander,
split in halves and pricked on all sides, that would form the world (how strange to feel it
slippery
beneath our hands!); and set it to bake overnight, in a great oven Joe had built into the back of his garage for his experiments in pottery. Then, seeing as we’d nudged against week’s end, Joe rolled up what he called ‘a little bit of happiness’ and puffed and passed it round; and Bianca sampled and pinched her eyes at the strength of it, and Pitt himself partook, for once, being short of happiness these days in a general way, and not too proud to borrow a concoction of the stuff, from Joe’s private store.
By the time the rains gave over in a stink of heat on Saturday afternoon, the world was ready, and attached to its spinning wheel. We finished the last drop of the Laphroaig in its honour; but I dared not touch the miraculous machine as yet, so perfect it looked (as we all look, before the experiments begin): an elegant device that seemed to suggest, by a curious symbolism, it could fly to the moon and back. Pitt ran his hand over the smooth grey skull of the globe (so soft it seemed!), the wooden perch, oiled by the seat of our pants, the gleaming extensions of leg and arm,
herky-
jerky
even in their motionless silence, a presage of the violent force within them. Pitt’s palms had already begun to sweat.
He apologized to the
Fräulein Doktor
for his nervous needling all week. She ducked her head quickly, and smiled.
‘Da knickste sie
höflich den höflichsten Knicks‚’
she said, gently; and added, ‘nodding politely the politest of nods.’ Joe had probably told her anyway that on Monday evening (the Ides of March, as it happens), the Promotion and Tenure Committee sat in judgement upon Pitt’s professional future and the various futures that depended from it.
Pitt had his reasons, you see, for indulging himself in a spot of needling.
*
‘Tenure‚’ declared Howard Mumford Jones of Harvard University, ‘or the right, after a probationary period, to hold one’s professional post until the age of retirement, is the bulwark of academic freedom. It guarantees freedom of teaching, freedom of research, and freedom in extramural activities.’ Not to mention the fact that it props up a marriage something wonderful; and allows a good Symist to pursue the proper subject of his intellectual passion. The institution of tenure is one of the more remarkable privileges acquired in the course of American academic history – an acquisition, in its way,
not
unrelated to the liberal struggles that occupied the life, and occasioned the death, of our old friend Ferdinand Müller, the esteemed father of Phidy himself, Syme’s impassioned memoirist. ‘We have been told many times’, Mumford continues, ‘that the concept of academic freedom, although some of its components go far back in our history, owes much to the admiration of an intellecutal minority among us for nineteenth-century German liberalism, and its (often competing) concepts of
Lehrfreiheit
– the freedom to teach – and
Lernfreiheit
– the freedom to learn.’
Ferdinand had declared, at a rabbling convocation of the Parliamentary Society in 1819:
We must
gather
a community of people to establish the best of our youth in the New World, while at the same time providing for a large body of immigrants to follow us annually. And thus we may be able, at least in one of the
American territories, to establish a true, a
German
state, which shall itself become a model for the new Republic, and an inspiration to Europe.
Nearly a hundred years later, in 1915, a Joint Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure was convened among the frozen fields and falls of Ithaca, New York, upon the following remit:
RESOLVED, That a committee be constituted to examine and report on the present situation in American educational institutions as to liberty of thought, freedom of speech, and security of tenure, seeing that the aim of science is to discover new truth, but every new truth means the disappearance of old error and frequently involves a shock to existing opinion. The shock may be unwelcome but unless there be the fullest freedom in scientific investigation and in the proclaiming of its results, there can be no progress.
A great geognosist once addressed directly the ‘shock’ occasioned by ‘the disappearance of old error’ in the ‘discovery of truth’:
‘From what arrogance do you speak?’ they ask. ‘From what high arrogance do you preach – against the thousand-year-old traditions of your people – your universities – and your God? Have you alone seen the truth – where so many great men have been blind?’ And I answer them: ‘From the courage of my two eyes – my thoughts – and the hands He has given me for digging.’ I ask instead, ‘With what arrogance dare I refuse?’
In other words – and hear this, Bunyon – academic tenure had been established precisely in order to grant the Symist ‘room to look about him’, as Sam said elsewhere. It came too late, of course, for Sam, who suffered mightily from the dull conservatism of Sober Ben Silliman: ‘I could write frequently to your Lyceum on the practical Arts of our Philosophy (which you
praise so highly), but I see no Object in it.
My
pieces are all necessarily
Speculative
…
You
study to please fools.’ Pitt would soon discover if the system established in 1915 could benefit Syme’s disciple; if the present age was any kinder to the results of ‘speculative’ work. In short, if the world was kind to Symists.
*
That weekend – steamy, dispiriting, itchy, miasmal – I turned again to the break-up of that curious band of geognostic brothers, the New Platonists. Müller’s account stops short of the inevitable conclusions, their deaths; but there are other sources, a letter from Tom, a letter from Kitty, discovered by Karding among the family papers, which Friedrich brought with him from Paris when he came home to die. There is Phidy’s death, too, to be considered; the only experience he would not record, as Woolf says – though he anticipated even that in those final excited scratchings on the back of his youthful memoir, whose pages, drying before a tavern fire (O, the vagaries of tavern fires!) themselves occasioned the final twist of fate, which robbed Phidy (and Pitt!) of the last known copy of the
New Platonist,
which eventually burned in the fires of Friedrichsgracht or drowned among the rubble in the canal (we must always give the Neptunists their due). Pitt was in cloudy and muttering mood, as you see, and waiting for the storm to break. In just the kind of mood to read over other people’s bad news.
Phidy, Phidy [Tom wrote in 1850], how many lifetimes has it been since I took your hand? We have heard of your great triumphs, believe me, every one; we take all the German papers now, when we can get them, and, like as not, you’ve stirred up a bees’ nest in one or the other, no matter the bee. How it warms our hearts to hear you go at them! We had all quite mistook you, I’m sure, apart from Kitty, who knew you to be a grand fire-breather from the first, only a little uncertain of yourself, she thought, in a strange land.
Of course, we could not speak your name before Syme, even to the end. The shame of it is, when so many thousand things
fly by us heedless every day, which had best tarry for our life’s sake, that one thing should have caught his ear, which had best passed by. I mean, of course, that thing, ‘The Hole in the New World’, which you wrote, angry I am sure (for that I must own part of the blame), and such a young man still – we were all such young men. I must confess it took some time before the sting of it eased from my heart. And there was no talking to Sam after that about you.
I said, how many lifetimes have passed, but, in truth, so little has happened since you left, only the one life, the same life, slightly diminished. I believe Mrs Simmons has written you, from time to time, of our vicissitudes – there are so few. Sam has never left us since that bitter day you saw him last. He would stay, he said, until you were gone (the last time your name ever fell from his lips) – and after you sailed, he fell ill, a long, miserable, half-hearted sickness, that never raged openly into fever, and never quite left skulking in his bones. He has been the companion of our married life, a softened man, brother to Kitty, and a second father to our children – though I cannot say I never longed to hear his old royal bloody-mindedness break forth again.
He died yesterday morning, deep in the sleep from which he could never quite free himself any more. And if I open an old wound it is only to let the bad blood flow out. He had long forgiven you, I am sure, for anything there was to forgive. Indeed, we often caught him, Kitty and I, chuckling on the sly over some piece of yours we had left in the garden or tucked beneath a glass, for him to discover, accidentally of course. If he never mentioned you again, it is not because you had wronged him, but because you had seen him brought so low – a temper such as his could brook that worse than any evil. So often we resent not the slight itself, for which a friend might be blamed, but the revelation that follows it, for which he should not.
I knew of your doubts, Phidy, they were clear enough to me from the first, if not to Sam. I did not share them then and I do not now; for even as we laid the turf above him, this cold afternoon,
I thought, Some good will yet come of this, some chance stone will strike his fine metal and even now kindle to life and light. He was busy till the end, it may surprise you, revisiting those lost worlds of his imagination (‘engaged’ as usual ‘upon certain calculations, etc.’); and may rise up when we ourselves are buried with him and forgotten. Perhaps we may catch the after-glow from him even then.
I scribble and scribble and Kitty (now a fine, silver-haired grandmama) cries, ‘Come to the point, Tom, there will be time enough for all this nonsense when we see his face.’ So come to the point I will – come see us soon, Phidy, now that all is over though not forgotten. We have a bed laid out for you (his old bed!), and a good stout lock upon it to keep the grandchildren out. And you must meet our sons, who, from his long company, bear more than a touch about them of their sweet ‘uncle’, and, of course, your old friends,
Tom & Kitty
P.S. Come at once. Kitty
Well, he never did come; though he got as far as Paris, and scribbled that strange rant we discovered plastered to the eaves of Inge Muller’s bedroom wall. Before he got up the courage – with Phidy, as we know, a process involving years – Tom had died, too. I heard Susie calling me from the kitchen, once, twice; we danced the inevitable dance. I did not answer. Silence for a minute or so, and then the door pressed open, slurring the wall-to-wall; her head peered round it. She told me to eat, and I would not eat. Then she said, ‘At least come and sit with the boys while they have lunch‚’ and I said, ‘In a minute.’ She lingered a minute, looking on, without comment; then roughed the carpet as she shut the door behind her. And left me to pore over an account of Tom’s death, a copy of which Karding had sent me – that curious contrast of Xerox and fresh paper glossing the yellow brittleness of age; Kitty’s pretty missive pasted to a page of Phidy’s Parisian journal.
The letter came today, this first full morning of summer.
The trees shake the dew from their backs and sigh with the warm breath of returning life, and the girls, even before the flowers, smack the dust off their summer frocks, and, casting a hopeful eye above, parade in their fresh colours. Tom is dead, and my last link to the New World dies with him.
All these years I had been on the edge of returning, our sweet reconciliation on the tip of my tongue, like a word so plain and simple, the busy brain forgets to find it, trusting that it is understood. On Friday mornings I used to glance down the list of ships in the paper, note their destinations, the times of arrival and departure, their captains, their cargo, their quaint names – thinking, One of these will take me there, some day. I suppose it is more to be wondered at, not that I never returned, but that I ever set forth in the first place. But idleness, which at last pricks the young on to their feet and away, draws the old deeper and deeper within, until such time they have not the strength to go.
