So I returned to the luxurious quiet of the British Library, blissfully free of winged ants, and called my wife, on the prepaid strength of a calling card. ‘Miss,’ I said, appealing to the tenderness of a nickname, ‘it’s over. I give up. I go home,’
‘Oh dear,’ she said. (She had acquired, vicariously, a delight in English understatement by my presence in England. She felt free at last to practise the porcelain primness she had seen in the movies. At the least opportunity, she begged me to keep my upper lip stiff, not to fret, old chap, and a thousand other felicities none of which had ever struck my ear on this ‘dear little island’.) ‘Well,’ she added, in case I had missed the accent she had affected – a kind of Georgia peach genetically modified by indelible strains of New York Jewess – ‘steady on, old man, and we’ll soon see you home and dry,’
‘I could use some money in the meanwhile,’ I said. ‘I’m skint,’
‘Oh Jesus, Doug,’ she sighed, breaking character. ‘Tell me at least you’ve written something.’
‘Not a word,’ I answered, ‘not a drop.’ (Though I would soon go in search of the latter, bubbling and cold, and faithful as Syme had never been.)
The humour of disaster had struck me at last, and in romantic desperation I roamed the alleys of green lockers beside the elevators in the hope that some careless scholar (or, rather, some careful scholar and careless gentleman) had forgotten to reclaim the ‘returnable’ pound coin from its little slot under the key. The lockers ranged in three tiers, and so I walked in a kind of evolution of the species, knuckle-dragging ape to upright man, along the green rows, checking all at once for the glint of a forgotten coin; which I discovered at last, a single pound, rolling in its plastic slot as I pushed past the door at the end of the middle row, to the faint sound of an egg loose upon a table. With some difficulty, I manoeuvred this treasure into the palm of my clutched hand, and strode forth from the cold, luxurious silence of the library into the roar of homeward traffic at King’s Cross, down a side-street to a pub I knew, where, during happy hour (named, I trusted, after the state it induced rather than the state that induced it), a single quid could claim the flowing reward of a pint of London Pride. I tipped my glass to carelessness, to the serendipity of error, to the scholar who forgot his returnable pound, and buried my nose, at last, alas, in the warm beer.
*
I awoke the next morning in a muffled glow of happiness; another hot day, somewhat overcast, though the sun suffused the white morning and snuck through the bent slats of the blinds by my bed to illuminate the eyelids over my sleeping eyes. Pieces of the night before floated to the surface of my mind, like driftwood after an explosion at sea. The single pound coin had proved insufficient, despite the romance of its discovery. A half-empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin, blue as the Mediterranean though sweeter to the taste, awaited my return that night, on top of the little fridge at my elbow – for the British, by some strange pride of race, believe their refrigerators should never outgrow their people; an extension, I suppose, of the desire to keep all servants in their place. The bottle lay empty now, tipped over, against the wood-style floor of the studio flat, a slight runny nose the only remnant of its busy night. I remember cracking the ice-tray against the counter, and brushing the precious cold shards into my glass (the tray lay dripping now against the lino); I remember pouring; I remember – to an extent – a certain amount of dancing (solo, a bear’s dance, as if to the flame of its own warmth on a cold day); of singing also, a modicum. Of drinking, I remember none, not at all, no, not a drop, sir.
And yet, as I awoke, despite the cotton in my head, I sensed a low warm glow – like the sunshine in the heart of a cloud – of happiness. I saw no cause for happiness; in a sober, sensible fashion, I could not have called myself happy, not as a rational animal. I remembered clearly the disillusion of the day before; I could not avert my eyes from the disarray of the morning after. My head ached, a faint chiming pain – like the echo of a bell, against, not the wall of a church, but the wall of memory after that echo has ceased. A slight ache, no more. And yet I could not deny, as one cannot help the sense of having forgotten something going out of the door, despite the slap of pockets and the clutch of brow – I could not deny that I was happy; secure in happiness, anticipating happiness to come, certain, in some strange fashion, that I had misplaced it somewhere and would soon discover it.
I raised the blinds with a clatter – a mistake, for the glare of the looming morning snuck through some crack in my eyes to the back of my tender brain and pinched me. I staggered to my feet and gathered my sea-legs. I stumbled to the bathroom and ran the tap, heard it squeal as it left the pipes, fall flush against the porcelain sink, and flow in a steady, hushing stream, hushing and steady, flowing and gushing, a thick wrist of water, dribbling and clanking down the drain; before the dream broke and I stooped and buried my face in the cold wet. I brushed my teeth, meticulously, until the white enamel squeaked with cleanliness and shivered the back of my neck. I padded into the kitchen corner (that is, the corner that was a kitchen, not a corner of the kitchen), and filled the kettle and clicked it on and waited until I could hear the catch of steam in its throat. Then I walked, slapping from lino to wood-style with bare feet, to bed again, and sat down, heavily, and rummaged my glasses from the sill, and put them on. And discovered, on a scrap of paper torn from the front of my novel – Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse – the cause, the fount, of my flow of happiness.
Two words, scribbled in the dark by a clenched fist loosened somewhat by gin, almost illegible, spreading over the scrap as though the letters were weeds, entangled in each other: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. That is the reflection that woke me scrabbling for a pen in the watches of the night. Hitchcock is said to have awoken with a similar inspiration, the vision of a perfect plot, and found in the morning only the words: ‘Boy Meets Girl’. He was right, of course, in his sleepless certainty, just as I was right in mine: Gulliver’s Travels held the clue to the disaster of Symmesonia, or a Voyage of Discovery. Gulliver’s Travels would rescue my reputation.
Gulliver’s Travels, published in London in 1726 (almost a century before Symmesonia), described the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, an innocent in a fool’s world. Its author, Jonathan Swift, hoped to expose the particular follies of the time in a series of fantastical adventures: ‘to expose the fool and lash the knave’. A storm of protest greeted its publication. The punters (that delightful English version of the consumer) were appalled, less by the exaggeration of Gulliver’s faults than by their belief in the reality of his adventures. Swift was forced in all subsequent editions to proclaim not the genius of his fiction (as he delighted in doing), but the fictions of his genius. No one believed him; he had written for a world of Gullivers, of gullibles, of soft touches.
Oh Syme, I thought – even I lacked faith. ‘Have you ever tracked a dead man’s thought down the gloomy corridors of the mind, your comprehension lit by the same shower of synapses that illuminated the passages of his brain almost two centuries before, spark for spark?’ In sheer vanity I believed to have done this. Of course, I had forgotten the vagary of words, those blunt hammers on the anvil of the brain; rarely do they strike the same blow twice, yield the same shower of synapses, the same fury of sparks. I had missed not the shape of the iron but the gleam of his irony; after two hundred years Syme had not lost the power to make a fool of me. I returned, weak but clear-headed, to the cool of the library and once more summoned the small leather tome from the depth of its stacks.
Symmesonia was not a ‘Voyage of Discovery’, but a satire of it. In one swift stroke he had sent up the entire academy of geologic science, from Werner to Silliman to himself, and all geognostic pretenders in between. I read Syme’s ‘touching’ introduction to the book again, this time with tongue pressed firmly in the pocket of the cheek. ‘The resources of the known World’, Sam declared in a pen heavy with irony, ‘have been exhausted by research, its wealth monopolized, its Wo
nders of Curiosity explored, its every Thing investigated and understood!’ And he went on: ‘The state of the civilized world, and the growing evidences of the Perfectibility of the human Mind, seemed to indicate the necessity of a more extended sphere of action.’ Nowhere could you find a more complete picture of the limits of nineteenth-century American science than in the satire of these lines: its tireless surveys, the poverty of its speculative theory, its persuasion that Baconianism (the philosophy of practical science) offered the prospect of scientific perfectibility, whose pinnacle was the list (that monument to geological mediocrity).
Nor does Syme spare the Church and its influence over even the best geologic minds of his day (including that of his old enemy, Ben Silliman), an influence that survived Syme by almost a century, and dogged those, like Reverend Jenkyns, who sought to praise him in the grave. Syme writes:
I reasoned with myself as follows: A bountiful Providence provides Food for the Appetite which it creates; therefore the desire of Mankind for a greater world to bustle in, manifested by their Dissatisfaction with the one which they possess, is sufficient evidence that the Means of gratification are provided. As we cannot (yet) fly to the moon, Providence must have granted us ‘fresh Pastures’ in the very heart of the Earth.
Syme was gentle enough, and just enough, to tease himself, and his own ambitions, in the general censure.
Naturally much of the satire, like all good satire, is lost to the ear of posterity. But certain stock figures stand out. ‘Seaborn’ himself, the supposed author of the piece and captain of the expedition, clearly represents the Neptunian philosophy, which argued, after the teachings of Werner, that the earth was ‘borne out of the sea’. ‘Wherever we stopped,’ Seaborn observes, ‘we were visited by great Numbers of People, many of whom, to my extreme Mortification, looked upon me with evident Pity, if not Disgust.’ The Best Man, ruler of Symmesonia (again, the touch of humility in Syme’s satire, the caricature of his own ambitions), appears to be a picture of Sober Ben Silliman himself, ruler, in the external world, of American geology. Seaborn considers the proper etiquette for addressing so divine a Being:
Whether I must uncover my head as in Europe, or my feet after the manner of the Asiatics? whether I must bow my head to the ground, making a right Angle of my body, and walk backwards on retiring, as in the court of Great Britain, or flounder in flat on my Belly, after the fashion of the Siamese? whether I was to stand or sit? if to sit, whether on the ground, or cross-legged, or on my haunches like a Monkey?
Other figures in American geology come in for their share of abuse, from Mr Slippery, a picture I believe of Amos Eaton, the great practical geologist, imprisoned for fraud; to Mr Slim, always interrupted in the act of reciting some worthless list, a picture of F.E. Loomis, whose endlessly revised magnetic surveys of Virginia played such an important part in the development of Syme’s theory.
Gulliver’s Travels leaves the reader with little hope for mankind; Symmesonia, after a careful study, leaves one with little hope for American geology – an absence of faith that presents too faithful a picture of the century of American geology to come. (Unless, of course, I could rescue Syme himself from his obscurity.) De Tocqueville’s remark about the poverty of American science appeared almost two decades after the publication of Symmesonia: ‘it must be acknowledged that in few of the civilized nations of our time have the sciences made less progress than in the United States’. Syme’s attempt to ‘lash the knave’ into reformation had been unsuccessful, unsurprisingly. In its essence, all satire relies on despair. A more hopeful view would busy itself, full of energy and empty of humour, about practical improvements – the satirists, once they have reached the age of satire, have mostly lost faith.
And yet, and yet … I felt at last that I was beginning to get the measure of the man. Syme repeatedly displayed a nimbleness of sincerity that never quite crossed into hypocrisy. I know no other phrase to capture his enormous facility for transforming nonsense into sense and sense into nonsense, and building vast palaces of vision, constructed of truth and dare endlessly intermixed. Syme was the classic straight man, who could deal in the sublime and the absurd with equal aplomb.
For not only did he write Symmesonia, that monument to scientific absurdity, but he applied, on the strength of its fabrications, for a national grant to explore the book’s geological implications. And he almost got it. Sam played his hand as high as he could, bluffing until even he must have blushed, shamed at last by the nonsense of it. And yet, in its way, I discovered no single act more emblematic of the man himself; for he turned everything that fell into his hands to some purpose, either of pleasure or persuasion, and most often both. He was a journeyman tailor, who patched the rags of his idlest moment with the silks of his richest fancy. Everything had its use and he never shied from the clash between faith and folly. He spent all he had.
I had returned to Colindale, on the hottest, bluest day of the year, in which the mass of English faces in the street faded somewhat, like old upholstery, in the unaccustomed light. I sat in the stifling top floor, by the fan in the window-crack blowing hot air, among the high desks, and could not help but feel the obscurity of my mission. On my left a homeless man, enormously tall and fat, like a bathtub on its hind legs, reeked of his unwashed three-piece suit: grey wool tweeds, gratefully broken at the knee to allow a breeze; a grey waistcoat plumed by a dirty handkerchief in the front pocket; a grey jacket, thin with age, sporting a plastic rose, pinched no doubt from the table of some Italian café. He read deeply in The Times of 1901, year of Victoria’s death, and marked occasional notes in the flap of his tobacco pouch. I wondered if Syme had spent his last days in such mock dignity, such threadbare respectability, such unabated curiosity.
My old friend, the Charon of newspapers, gentleman of the tweaked sniffling nose, the hay-fever sufferer, wheeled at last his aged fare, a heavy black collection of the Richmond Intelligencer to my desk; from which I hoped to discover some reaction to Syme’s magnificent spoof, that ‘Voyage of Discovery’. I discovered not a reaction, but a declaration, of such hubris that I laughed aloud, as a man will laugh in a great wind, at the silly power of it:
PETITION
Light gives light to light discover – ad infinitum.
Pactaw, Virginia, North America
November 10, A.D. 1821
To the United States Congress
I declare, after the courageous demonstration of Mr Seaborn, lately published, that the Earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric Spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the Poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the Hollow, if the Congress of this great Republic will support and aid me in the undertaking.
Sam Highgate Syme,
Of Virginia, late Lieutenant of Infantry
N.B. – I have ready for the Press a Treatise on the principles of Matter, wherein I show proofs of the above positions, and account for various phenomena.
My terms are the patronage of THIS and the NEW WORLDS, for my issue and my issue’s issue.
I select Dr Abraham Gottlob Werner, Sir H. Davy, and Baron Alexander Von Humboldt as my protectors.
– On March 7th, 1822, the above petition was presented to the Senate by Colonel Richard M. Johnson, from Virginia. After a heated discussion on both sides, the petition, owing to its purely scientific nature, was laid on the table.
Oh Sam, I thought, in some wonder; you press the joke too far. You lack respect for the common yet powerful men in whose hands your future lies. You are careless of … you are careless of … and at last the answer came to me. You are careless of your posterity. You sow the tares and the wheat side by side, secure that you can distinguish your best from your worst and indifferent to the fact that someone else must gather the harvest. You had the courage, the very great courage, of obscurity; for you had no wish to be sifted, content, as you were, in your own variety. And such a task you have left
behind for me, who mean well by you now; such a burden you offered those who meant well by you then.
And yet, in its way, the petition had its effect. It drew the attention of a young newspaperman, Thomas Jenkyns, who, from motives of the purest ignorance, allied himself to your cause; and such prosperity as you enjoyed in life, you owed to him. This was your curious conclusion to Symmesonia (I will no longer dare to apply the word ‘touching’ to any among the protean shifts of your sincerity):
And now, kind Reader, having transcribed thus much of my Journal, in a manner which, I hope, will not be thought too derogatory to the Importance and Dignity of the Subject, I submit it to your Inspection, with an intimation that I am ready to undertake a second voyage to Seaborn’s Land, at the edge of the great Gulf; or to war-like Belzubia and the Place of Exile; or, by chance and fortune, to gentle Symmesonia, the pleasantest of Pastures, by a different route; and greatly daring, by an aerial excursion thence to the Inner Spheres, even of my own Mind – as soon as I am furnished with the Funds necessary to my Escape from my present uncomfortable situation on the Liberties, in the garret of that lofty House, where, it being about the middle of dog-days, the Sun exerts its utmost power upon the roof, within eighteen inches of my Head.
A curious conclusion, I say again; and one that played its part, disturbing the next in the series of dominoes, and overtoppling it at last on their great chain through the years to Wegener and to me. The great courage of obscurity I attributed to you; and yet, to see your name beside Wegener’s, I am reminded of a very different and, yes, still greater courage – not of conviction, but of half-conviction – the courage that demands proof of itself. For Wegener, too, has left behind him the journal of a ‘Voyage of Discovery’, his attempt to prove beyond doubt the shift of Greenland in its ocean bed: a much slimmer volume, recording a heavier purpose, and a humourless, unironized adventure, as he attempted to set up an observation outpost in the teeth of the polar ice. I offer the following selection, shining against the foil of Syme’s ironic reserve:
The Syme Papers Page 10
