Is it kind or cruel of history that twenty years on the Prince who imprisoned him led the way and his grandson followed?
In 1842, Henri Castro (a French speculator) founded the Adelsverein (‘zum Schutze deutscher Einwanderer’ – also known as the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas) in Biebrich on the Rhine, and could convince nobody but our poor old Prince Carl of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen to serve as its titular head. Castro negotiated with the Texas government to set up a colony of six hundred families on a plot of land he had never seen (‘laid out along the Guadalupe River fifteen miles above Seguin’) and could scarcely imagine, and then he began to sell. The only trouble was that, unlike Phidy, Kreminghausen suffered on those shores no second spring. ‘He appeared’, as a fellow pioneer declared, ‘to be an amiable fool, aping among log cabins the nonsense of medieval courts. Our manners are a little rough here, but plain and just, and we get the measure of a man pretty quick.’ In the course of a year he was laughed out of the country. But he left behind Roland Müller.
Ruth, unsurprisingly, had been against her son’s venture from the start, out of personal, that is, and not principled reasons. She did not trust Prince Carl, for one thing; and she doted on her boy for another. She recognized the first as a fair, and the second as an unfair, ground for dissuasion; half-doubting herself, she could not dissuade. Roland, for his part, knew more of his grandfather’s politics than of his father; he was tired of life in a narrow principality, as his uncle had been before him; he was tired (it should be said) of his mother. He wished to get on with things; he liked a little grand talk for its own sake, but suspected all the nonsense of a liberal state ‘seeded from the best of Germany and potted in Texas soil’. He suspected even the promise of commercial prosperity, but guessed that for a fellow who could figure his way, Texas might be a good bet. So he made it.
Here’s an early record of Phidy’s nephew, from the diaries of the great pioneer Herman Seele, among the founders of New Braunfels, Texas:
Another, even slighter incident will serve to illustrate the air of good luck that seemed to follow Herr Müller around. While shifting the bulk of our goods across the river, we set sentries on either side, and alternated the duty of rowing the cargo between them in what proved to be a by-no-means water-tight ferry-boat. Young Roland (typically) had the tiller when a cask of wine, which had slipped and tumbled down the rocky incline, was being brought across the river. Some of the hoops had loosened or broken, and the wine (sherry or port) began to leak more and more rapidly into the bottom of the vessel. Roland spotted immediately how clouded the bilge had become, and stooped to taste the mixture; deciding it tasted good, he began to drink with a will. Never one to stint his friends, he beckoned the ferrymen to stop pulling, and the three of them buried their faces in the scarlet stream that slopped about their feet. The men waiting on the bank, seeing the boatsmen ply themselves with the strange libation, grew excited and shouted and urged them to come ashore. Which they did, at last, upon Roland’s insistence, whereupon everyone crowded into the boat, dipping with buckets and hats into the accidental punch, until all had wet their whistles and filled their bellies. The drunken feast that followed became known as Roland’s Toast; and he walked in all of our good graces ever after.
He did indeed seem to walk in grace – acquired a fortune in cattle, lost it and began again; won it back ten times over in railway speculations; had a bank named after him in New Braunfels (where he kept his money), and a school (where he sent his only son, born late to him, a child, as it happens, of the French mistress, who never survived his birth). He died, at the well-pickled old age of eighty-eight, just before Wilson sent the boys ‘over there’ to fight against his beloved homeland, a curious conclusion to his grandfather’s dream of establishing ‘a true, a German state [in North America] which shall itself become a model for the new Republic, and an inspiration to Europe’. (Pitt wonders how his own boys will suffer from Pitt’s ambitions. Or carry them forward?) Roland’s will was written in German. He bequeathed to his son his fortune (which was squandered), and his home, a relatively humble, white, weatherboard house, with a wind porch for the cool of summer evenings, off Seguin Street in New Braunfels. This remained, and was bequeathed in turn to a single granddaughter.
Why does Roland trouble Pitt and occupy his thoughts? What part, if any, does he play in the business of Samuel Highgate Syme? None, I suppose – except, Pitt says, rubbing the dry of his palms together, for this. Some time after the failed revolutions of ‘48 and the death of her brother Phidy, and some time before the collapse of her son’s first fortune, Ruth Müller left the family home in Fischersallee (in great disarray, taking what she thought of, including a handful of her brother’s journals and such letters as seemed to bear on the great question of a trip to the New World, including an edited version, as I discovered, of ‘The Syme Papers’, titled Amerikareise) to a cousin (grandfather of my old friend Benjamin Karding, many times great) and sailed partly (breathe, Pitt, breathe) and partly steamed to TEXAS. Where she lived with her son (and, briefly, her daughter-in-law) in the house between Seguin and Market in New Braunfels, which he saved from ruin while Ruth lived, and kept from affection when Ruth died; and where, to this day, a Fräulein by the name of Inge Muller runs a bookshop.
As I said, if I could begin my career from scratch, I would begin with immigrants (if only my wife would follow).
*
Pitt had decided to undertake that experiment known as ‘a family outing’. He was tired of the loneliness of his business, what business is dear, as huffy Henry would say, ‘a cornering’. (This despite the fact that loneliness had tempted him into it in the first place). He wanted company, pitched just right – like the buzz of television and assembled guests in the room next door, loud enough to remind the solitary Pitt of ordinary happiness, quiet enough to suggest they kept him in mind, and did not wish to disturb what they could not comprehend, his Great Work. He wanted, even, a little understanding. There can be too much understanding, and too little.
Pitt, without doubt, suffered from the latter.
The trick, he knew, was to get Susie on board. Then the boys would follow.
Pitt’s father was an enthusiastic man, full of schemes and theories, a great reader and rustler of newspapers (of the low kind), quoter of experts, pursuer of private notions, speculator. Despite his great, his natural, his abundant humility, Pitt Snr had projects. Of the ordinary American kind: to fix pipes, and tile bathrooms, and clear out garages, mend cars, plan yard sales, sweep gutters, etc. He undertook in the evenings (as they say, a wonderful phrase, suggestive of gas fires and quiet) a history of scaffolding, for which he prepared a series of notes, and wasted a great many hours in the San Diego Public Library. ‘I came to the business by chance,’ he used to say. ‘What counts, Son, is that I stuck to it by choice.’ He argued, for instance, as I believe I have mentioned, that scaffolding itself could do with an overhaul, and hoped to provide the theoretical scaffolding (as it were) from which to tinker with the practical. In the course of which he invented a number of curious devices, which he pressed upon his bosses, and then his co-workers, and at last, in an unhappy episode, attempted to sell to the local paper. ‘There is always more work to be done,’ he said; ‘that’s what I’ve learned. The hard part is … to do it.’ He possessed the kind of enthusiasm that charms where it does not persuade – and this in its way was the tragedy of his life.
Susie, however, like my father a creature of enthusiasms, persuades; eminently, easily persuades.
I have puzzled over this difference many times, and come to various conclusions. The first of which is this: that it helps, undoubtedly, to be pretty and pink in the face, rather than heavy and red; to wear skirts that swish, and shoes that click, instead of boots and trousers; to possess stockings, in addition to enthusiasms, which may be pulled up, above the knee; and hair-bands, of pale blue, tucked behind the ears. (I should say now that I do not believe my father would prosper any
better with such ploys.) But there is more. My father and I, Pitts both, approach our pleasures as if they were rare and out of the way. ‘A little known fact,’ he used to say, ‘want to hear it?’ We take just such delights as we trust have never been taken before, eclectic delights, abstruse, pernickety, uncommon, singular – lonely. A Pitt would shame himself to suffer ordinary joy.
While Susie has the gift of making the strangest pleasures seem common. Her joy is – I can think of no better word – plain. She never doubts that the world delights with her; and so it seems to, and delights in her. She presumes that her good luck is of the standard variety, and consequently enviable. (Pitt has never been envied.) What pleases her, she seems to suggest by her high spirits, would please anybody; and so, by the power of her conviction, tends to please everybody. Her enthusiasms move lightly from private to public. Projects seem never to originate in her; she has only taken them up in her way, and we all follow along in her way.
Pitt, then, must learn to interest his wife.
This proved easier in the event than I had supposed. It was simply a question of fellow-feeling among immigrants.
*
Hubert G.H. Wilhelm’s excellent treatise on ‘Organized German settlement and its effects on the frontier of south-central Texas’ offers this curious account of the first settlers’ attempt to make a home out of the dry country they discovered.
It must appear as something of a paradox to consider the fact that the German settler chose to expand primarily into the relatively inhospitable environment of the Edwards Plateau, while holding his spread into the coastal plain to a minimum. The psychological feet of preference for a hilly terrain probably was influential.
(‘Thank God, at least,’ said Susie, ‘or German paradoxes, that we live in the hill-country.’)
Ruth brought her piano when she came, uncertain of the rough world her son had made his home. It landed at Indianola among her other belongings, and was eventually hauled by oxen to New Braunfels, a hundred and fifty miles from the coast. She was not the first German lady to come bearing music. Valeska from Roeder arrived in Texas in 1833, with three brothers and her father, and a piano to come. She died, however, of starvation in Cat Spring before it got to her; and her sister Rosa Kleberg inherited the box of sheet music and the little upright that followed Valeska’s funeral. It proved to be a great, if short-lived, success. There are records of dances held at the Klebergs’ home in Harrisburg in 1835. But me instrument, alas, was burned to ashes a year later in the Texas Revolution.
Ruth’s survived a little longer. Her son had for some time been trying to set up a German press in New Braunfels, and had spun a number of schemes to raise the money for the printing press, including a concert, arranged by Dr Alfred Douia. (Roland did not believe in spending lightly, until he had tried everything else. A good thing, too – three years later he was bankrupt.) Nobody came, and the plans were dropped, until Ruth happened along and took the thing in hand. Roland proposed another musical programme, and advertised his mother, ‘The Wonderful Ruth Müller, Star of the Neuburg Concert Halls’, as the chief attraction. The concert was a great success, and not ten days later the first edition of the weekly Neu Braunfelser Zeitung appeared in the shops.
She had arrived; and had never been so lonely in her life – despite being in some respects (unwed, for one; a mother, for a second) an expert in the field of loneliness. The ‘enormous evenings’ terrified her, black skies that filled the great bowl of night, and leaked even to the horizon at the end of a road, or a turn in the liver. ‘I feel’, her quill whispered to the attentive ear of her journal parchment, ‘that I could step off the end of the world, at any moment, and nobody would know that I had gone. I know now what nowhere looks like: very dry, though the rains come hard when they come; there are occasional trees, which grow in no garden, and mark nothing; a river that passes in a great hurry to get away; a few poor huts, cobbled together from timber and dry stone, littered here and there, as if indeed, at a summer picnic, people had simply sat down when their feet were tired, and they could go no further, and begun to build. Nothing makes any sense, but nobody dares to admit this, so we all carry on, as if home were only a carriage ride away, sing songs, make bread, etc., in the old style.’
She had learned what her brother had discovered forty years before, the terror of landscape: ‘How vast the loneliness of an uninhabited country late at night, careless of the tiny creatures who travel through it! … In the open country there is no mistaking the scale of our pretensions, six feet high in a waste of empty miles.’ And indeed these words may have comforted her, if there is comfort in a dead brother’s fellow-feeling – as she sat in her bedroom and looked out of the back of her son’s house towards Market Street and the occasional lights, and turned over these papers from home.
But Pitt outruns himself. We are not there yet! Have only turned past the Safeways on to MoPac, with an ice-box knocking about in the back of the Volvo, and a wife beside him, and two boys clambering over each other in the rear. For Susie loves a day-trip, the fuss over maps and roads, the free local advertising pamphlets in unfamiliar gas stations, the bags of ice in metal bins on the pavement outside (only a dollar a pop, ‘So much for so little,’ she says, ‘isn’t it? So heavy and crackly and only a buck’), the constantly rebuffed anticipation of arrival. Even a day-trip to the heart of her husband’s content (his word) or madness (hers); yes, she’ll drive even there for an afternoon in high spirits, being sweeter by nature than Pitt, who has promised her a Texan Yorkville, an old German town, and a taste of immigrant loneliness at the end. Not to mention bratwurst and beer.
I should say now, Pitt had few great hopes for this expedition (as far as Syme was concerned), and in this (among other things) he was not … disappointed. He came out of curiosity; this was satisfied. He came to give his sons a glimpse of the business he was in, for they knew little of their father, and, in the case of Aaron, respected less. Susie once said to me, ‘You’re not his kind of dad’ – an absurdity all the more painful for being … true. Aaron glowed with brown and Texan health, brushed the sweat that clumped his cowlick to his forehead with the famous air of a boy to whom life comes easy. (Nothing comes easy to Pitt, or Ben.) He boasted long legs and quick hands, and the bony behind of athletic youth. He feared Pitt, I believe, as an image of the potential awkwardness and ugliness within him, just as he feared Ben for the imperfection of his brother’s arm. Clumsiness and shyness and inadequacy disgusted him, in the same way that prim old ladies are ‘put off’ by the ‘realism’ in TV. He lived in his imagination, and was seldom disappointed. The body of Pitt appalled him, the sweats and rolls of it, the broad hams, and splayed feet, and glistening face. When Pitt used the bathroom I saw him wait, until the lid on which his father had sat cooled down, before he dared to go in, no matter how urgent the demands of nature upon him. Aaron wished for no touch of his father’s heat.
This, in a fashion, is exactly what his father wished to give him. So he hauled the boys out of bed on a Saturday morning and set off, on one of those rinsed spring days only the end of a Texan winter can provide: cool enough that the noon sun battled no haze of heat to cut bright through the clear blue air. The highway sparkled as we drove through the ‘nowhere’ of the Texas hill-country, between the lines of the telephone wires and the low juniper hunched over the rocky soil.‘We followed’, Pitt murmured to himself, quoting his researches, ‘the fresh wagon tracks, civilization’s first imprint in this wind-beaten sea of grass. To our right, nothing but river and desolation’ – and, as it happens, a descendant of the railroad line on which Roland Müller built his second fortune.
Pitt had small hopes of a second beginning, however, and desired mainly an … interlude, such as belong to the best of life, never mind the misery between. A word, by the by, that signifies not only a gap, but the entrance, of Comedy and Love upon the stage, to break the heavy acts of a morality play. (I had forgotten that breakthroughs involve often the slightest of gaps or e
ntrances – half an opening through which the pent-up floods can burst, in wonderful, joyous violence, before they reach the next obstruction, and the waters level then rise again.)
*
‘Schlitterbahn,’ Aaron said, waking up. ‘I want to go to Schlitterbahn.’
We had passed one of those monuments to the American West, a billboard, a particularly prominent and revolting member of which species advertised just such a sluicing and sliding, and eruption of happiness upon the thrust of water, as I desired in its metaphorical sense. Among the scraps of old Germany remnant in the Texas hill-country, the most popular by far and generally known is the word to ‘schlitter’ – one of those onomatopoeias that signify nothing so much as the stupid jibber emitted by mind and tongue to match the natural and equivalent clumsiness of the body. The great-great-grandchildren of the Müllers and Klebergs and Ernsts who settled this wild country to ‘establish a true, a German state, which shall itself become a model for the new Republic, and an inspiration to Europe’ had retained little perhaps of their Wilhelm Meister, and their Beethoven, and their Biedermeier, but recalled an old word that meant nothing but ‘sliding about in the wet’, and put it to new and more elaborate uses.
All of which, by the by, I explained in rising tones to my elder son (who stared across the fleeting strip malls in deliberate, and, as it were, concentrated inattention) to indicate, No, we shall not go to Schlitterbahn.
And for once Susie supported my paternal resolve. ‘No,’ she repeated, frowning and leaning forward in that particular way that means she desires the end of a journey, and the beginning of arrival, ‘we are on a treasure hunt, at least according to your father. Tell them what it’s all about,’ she said, as if Pitt had talked of anything but since coming home.
The Syme Papers Page 38
