The Syme Papers (9 page)

Of course, I could not hide from myself, even then, a certain – what shall I call it? – tendency to
flinch
from good fortune; or perhaps, more precisely considered, a Failure Drive, if I may coin the term. Time and again he seemed to turn, at the last instant, from the light and find himself a comfortable shadow. Embarked on his studies at Yale (studies particularly congenial to the bent of his genius), he fled after a single year for what? The obscurity of a soldier’s life. And even then, just as the fortunes of war offered him the chance to make a name (which he took – it must be remembered that Syme was a man who
took
his chances before he
neglected them), he fled again, after his discharge, not to Philadelphia or Boston or New York, the hub of his geological ambitions, but to Pactaw, Virginia, a day’s drive from Baltimore, to survey a vein of bituminous coal for the Virginia Mining Corporation (the man had to live, after all) and impress, from time to time, the ignorance of the locals.

Perhaps the clue to Syme’s character lies in my own bosom. For I began to suspect that the curious flinching that afflicted Syme afflicts
myself;
and I read into his prevarications and procrastinations (and there were more to come, always more to come, for success dogged Syme, nipping at his heels, and he escaped, again and again, before I closed upon him) the history of my own self-neglect. For have I not turned and turned again, at the last moment, from triumph? Declined the scholarship to Harvard, a boy of seventeen, to linger in the sunshine of San Diego and the terminal shadow of my mother’s sickbed, to which my father displayed a peculiar aversion undiminished by his disappointment at my ‘going to State’ and eased only in the end by her eventual death at the age of fifty-five from cancer, during the spring of my junior year. Of course, I had right on my side, and kindness, and fealty; but I lack both the generosity of spirit
not
to regret such chances missed and the greatness of spirit to
grasp
them.

The true artist will trample on his mother, his wife, his children, his friends, to pursue the path of his art; well, I am no true artist, though I have done my share of
trampling
in my time, and been trampled upon. Yet there is always the rebound; and I finagled my way to Oxford after Mother’s death on a Rotary Fellowship to wander at last among the ancient halls of learning and put on airs. (I confess myself guilty of a cricket jersey at the time; and even, in a weak moment, a boater.) But after every recovery, there is a fresh evasion; and a year before completing my D.Phil., I chased a girl to New York and never caught her and never went back, and ended up teaching Freshman Bio to a collection of the pleasantest and richest teenage Jews (the rich are always
so
pleasant) from the Upper East Side of Manhattan for
five long years of easy, uncounted life,
confronted at every turn by a
host of bustling mothers, who could only regret that ‘such a nice young man was a
goy’.

But after every evasion there is a fresh recovery; and I married the pick of the History Department, a plump and pretty Jewess (my eternal
Miss Susie),
built something along my own lines; and dropped out. So we accumulated (there is no other word) ourselves in a two-bedroom railroad apartment on East 89th Street, while she tutored after hours and taught summer school, to support the wriggly young boy on the way, and the wrigglier old boy turning again to his doctorate, starting from scratch, at NYU, for another five long, penniless years until at last I could
make good.

And here I sit, and I haven’t made good yet; hoping to make good that long-ago no-goodnik, Samuel Highgate Syme, whom even the staunchest mother might be forgiven for giving up on. And Mrs Pitt sweats away through a Texan summer, alone with the two boys, suspecting, doubting hopefully, knowing in her heart, that once again there has been an
evasion,
and that Douglas Pitt, up at last for tenure, unpublished, unsupported by the Dean, betrayed even by his own hands (in stiff rebellion, the channels of communication blocked, the workers striking), has not written a word (for all his Fulbrights) on the Inspiration of Error, while he chases, once again, another lost cause, another evader, hoping that he proves of a different mettle from his own.

I said that I had begun to grasp the fabric of Syme, feel the
texture
of the man beneath my thumb. There was strength there, sure; a certain roughness, a willingness to
make do,
even with failure (I guessed then, and have since been proven wrong). He could work, there was no doubt of that, had an appetite for exertion, a taste for his own sweat, displayed again and again, in his early reports from college, his courage in war; even the books of the Virginia Mining Corporation proved above all that he could
bend
himself to the task at hand. In his first year with the company he covered an almost impossible stretch of ground, from the Potomac to the Mississippi, by himself; while producing at the same time that astonishing piece of scientific illusionism ‘The Theory of
Concentric Spheres’, and developing the ‘ingenious Force’ that powered the piston for his experiments in the compression of water. No doubt he hoped to secure enough funds to open a free space for his own investigations; and this he appears to have accomplished, for after the initial burst his outings with the VMC grow fewer and further between.

But there is something else – and I struggle for the phrase – suggested by these intermittent fragments of his life, powerful and irregular as the illuminations of lightning in a dark landscape. A certain
lack of principle.
There, I have said it; the words sit plump and glowing on the screen and my single banging finger poises above the button for ‘delete’ to remove all trace of such a questionable libel, and … forbears. Syme lacked
principle;
he seemed as willing to delight the ignorance of a handful of farmers as to persuade the comprehension of the finest scientists in the young republic, from Professor Silliman on down. He buried himself in obscurity
either
in the belief that a candle glows brightest in a dark corner
or
in the fear that he could not survive the winds of public dispute. I could see no alternative at the time. Satisfied at last that he was no simple charlatan, I could not dissuade myself
either
of the pettiness of his ambition (the rabble’s applause, and a rather tiny rabble at that)
or
of the still less palatable notion
that he
was a coward.
(And, by extension, from one personality to the next, that my own failures lay in this very weakness – the fear of exposure, of a final reckoning, the devotion of a life to ‘something evermore about to be’ and never at hand.)

The next piece of evidence I stumbled upon puzzled me still further. I had returned to the house of Sam’s grandfather, the white-chocolate elegance of the eighteenth century and the poky little room looking over the garden and the edge of Highgate Ponds. Rummaging through the chest of papers, I discovered the following curious pair of letters, bound in red ribbon and carefully folded, one within the other. I gently disentangled them, softening their edges with a tender thumb before I unbent them. The shorter letter, composed in a fine if elderly hand, was also the more recent and ran as follows:

This then was ‘the tenor of the following’, a single folded sheet of paper in the characteristic untidiness of Sam Syme himself, odd words smudged with the heavy fist of their composer.

Whatever else might be said of this curious piece of professional suicide, it did not strike me as the work of a
coward
– at least, no coward in the ordinary sense. By this wonderful outburst of sheer arrogance – the ‘stuff’ in Larkin’s phrase ‘that dreams are made on’ (for I am nothing if not literary, the leading light of our little Blue-stocking Society in Austin, a poetry … workshop, I believe is the preferred term, for professors of a literary turn of mind) – Syme brushed aside his only ‘friend in high places’, the spider at the heart of the web of the new American Science, the great Ben Silliman, the Toymaker of his day. Perched on the little fridge in the Curator’s office, my feet on tiptoes, the letter resting lightly on my upturned hands, I stared at the brittle, untidy words
lost in admiration. A
long, slow growl of rain muttered among the trees outside and the sun cast only a grey shadow of light into the cluttered study, but across two centuries of obscurity and neglect, Syme’s complete indifference to earthly powers shone undimmed. Here was a man who ventured everything on the coin-toss of his own inspiration, and stood so sure of the
gamble that he could neglect almost to look at the result. I, who have scrounged and scratched my way, humbled and begged, stood
breathless
now at the pure
indifference
of this forgotten genius to his earthly fortune. I knew then, tremblingly, as the blood tickled my thin veins on its delicate passage from my heart, that I HAD FOUND MY MAN.

What I had
not
found, however, was my evidence. Where was this ‘article on Geognosy’, the ‘finest’ he ever wrote? If only Sober Ben had published the damn thing, I could trace my source, the mouth of the river that flowed at last into Alfred Wegener. But Ben had not, and Wegener (I had no doubt now) had come by his inspiration after a more circuitous journey. Was this article in Geognosy
the
New Platonist
that lodged at last in the library in Berlin, where the young boy could feed his parched curiosity? Did it carry on its current those all-important ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’, which found their way to Wegener at last and formed the first bricks of his new world? That would make my name and fortune?

Alas, Sam’s father had tenderly hoarded all the tokens of his late son’s
life
and neglected all the monuments of his
thought
he might have left behind him. But at last I stumbled upon some proof that others in his time had held him in the same esteem to which I meant to raise him in our own. Another clipping fluttered from the clutter of Edward’s collection, and, after a great and slow manoeuvring of strapped thumbs, I managed to lift it to the wooden desk pushed up against the window. My blunt nose almost twitched with expectation, for I realized, after the first word or two, that I was hot on the scent. The date is 1824; the paper once more the
Norfolk Weekly Intelligencer;
and the extract drawn again from the
Southern Courier.