These are the circumstances. ALFRED LOTHAR WEGENER was born on 1 November 1880, the fifth child of the theologian and linguist Franz Richard Wegener, whose brother Peter, inventor and magician (the black sheep of a family of priests), plays some role in this story (as we shall see) and bequeathed, among other things, a sense of adventure to his nephew. Alfred grew up in a tall, squeezed house on Friedrichsgracht in Berlin, overlooking the canal. The small boy must have grown used to the illusion, looking out of his bedroom window, of the world shifting by him, quite unfussed, through the still waters.
The Wegener family was well known in its way. Alfred’s great-grandfather had been a companion of Alexander von Humboldt (the famous explorer) at the University of Frankfurt a century before. An older cousin starred on the stages of Berlin – making a particular sensation in an adaptation of Werther, whose yellow-trousered costume found its way into the Wegener household, to be trotted out in the amateur theatricals performed by Alfred and his brother Kurt. It was above all an intellectual household and bore the character of Alfred’s father: a pious, yet liberal and curious man, consultant to the Kaiser on religious matters, and a keen botanist and gentleman scientist on the side. He cultivated an extensive library, in which the young Alfred used to while away the wet days after school.
Unfortunately, the Wegener home was bombed during Allied raids in 1942. The windows and walls collapsed into the canals, and most of the books that were not drowned with them perished in the fires that followed. We can now no longer wander through the leathery gloom that excited the young scientist, nor trace the infant steps of his education. But one book did survive the fire and water (an interesting escape, between Pluto and Neptune!): a heavy, copper-bound ledger, recording in the father’s meticulous hand the date and entry of every volume in his prized collection.
This book was retrieved by the scientist’s nephew (Dr Erich Wegener), who occupied the family home during the war. He carried it with him after ‘the tumult and the shouting died’ – a strange, a heavy burden, a reminder of the gentility of his grandfather’s house. The book travelled with Erich to England in 1949, upon his marriage to a young English nurse who served with the Allied forces in the clear-up of Berlin. The family adopted her name, Bilston, to mediate anti-German feeling; and a Dr Eric Bilston maintained a small but prosperous family practice in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells until his death in 1972. Thereupon his puzzled English children donated the heavy tome to the British Library, a record of their famous great-uncle Alfred, mostly unintelligible: lists of foreign titles and strange names and long-ago dates.
And this I turned to, one hot, desperate day last June, clutching the heavy volume between the palms of my strapped fists, for Pitt is a digger, you know; a roll-up-the-sleeves fellow, a thorough scholar, in his way.
If I could begin my career from scratch, with a fresh slate, I should return as a bibliographer, a historian of the collections of books. What stories might not be told through the libraries of this world? Records of childhood and old age, of generations, of the cloudy atmosphere of solitude and words in which our mind grows tall. What better bed in which to trace the roots of our slightest thoughts than the libraries, the books, we burrowed in as children? And here before me, spread out in page after page, in the thin, knuckly hand of his father, marking title and date, I read through the circumstances surrounding the birth of Alfred’s genius. ‘I hereby commence’, he wrote, ‘this inventory of the library on Friedrichsgracht, this new year, 1880. May all future acquisitions be recorded herein.’
The catalogue was arranged according to shelves. I could dimly picture the dark galleries above the canal by the lists of scribbled titles, feel the comfortable solitude at a corner, where one row finished and another began, see the young Wegener propping his back against a handful of volumes, pushing them flush with the board; just as here or there a run of scribbled book-names leans against the margin of the page, as his father’s hand grew weary or the room grew dark in that long-ago new year. Then there is the first thrill of recognition, a title familiar, perhaps even the contents contained within: Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers; Tales of my Landlord, 1st Series, 2nd Series; Headlong Hall, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers …
*
The moment of discovery is often a gap between two other things. ‘Most ideas’, Syme once said, ‘begin as the answer to an unimportant problem, soon forgotten, a stone washed away once the stream is crossed … So true it is that we are at the mercy of our own … inspiration – that is too grand a word, which means nothing more than the ability to begin in idleness and end in faith.’ And out of an idle, dozy day I stumbled upon my faith.
I believe the first name to wake my attention in the heavy volume was that of Robert Jameson, a prolific geognosist and noted Neptunian, a follower of WERNER (not Wegener, Alfred, his descendant, but Werner, Gottlob, an older, even stranger fish in the kettle of German geology). I had come at last to the very corner of the library I sought. I pictured a row of books squeezed into a bottom shelf, away from the window and the door, a dark, crouching, peaceful nook – but we shall never know, for all such nooks were tumbled into the canal below. Here the geologists and geognosists lived in their leather neighbourhood, a familiar company.
In that dark corner, where the young, breathing Alfred might have slept to escape some distasteful chore, the dead and dusty Werner himself lay ensconced, both his early On the External Characters of Minerals (entered into the library in June 1884) and A New Theory on the Birth of Veins (also June 1884). Werner rubbed elbows with Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (entered September 1884), containing in the first volume as I knew James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe (we live in a world of breathless titles, no?). Between them, Werner (elegant and slender) and Hutton (thick and obscure, supported by a mass of royal correspondence) divided the field into their camps, the NEPTUNISTS and PLUTONISTS (more of them later). Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (February 1885) danced cheek by jowl with Richard Owen’s Key to the Geology of the Globe (January 1886, a surprising inclusion). And there, between Richard Owen of Indiana, and the Reverend Osmond Fisher, Rector of Harleton, England, and author of Physics of the Earth’s Crust (entered December 1881), I discovered Syme.
The name of SAMUEL HIGHGATE SYME was a puzzle, of course, for a number of reasons. The first being that his was the only unfamiliar book along the shelf; the remainder belonged to more or less eminent geologists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even the title annexed to the name rang oddly beside the others: the New Platonist, a brisk appellation beside its windy fellows, and one that smacked little of their earthy company.
And yet it was a strangeness still slighter that made the greatest impression upon me at the time. Most of the books entered the library between the years of 1884 and 1886, when the botanical interests of Alfred’s clerical father drew him briefly into questions of mineralogy. Alfred had just entered boyhood at the time. And he recalled much later, in the diaries he kept on the last and fatal Greenland expedition, how he and his father used to hunt for quartz and shale on the long northern summer days in the nearby Grunewald, following dark veins of rock off the forest paths and charting their progress through the overlay of vegetation.
Alfred’s father, however, came to suspect the geognosists of tampering with biblical fact to reach their conclusions. Though in typical German fashion he kept their blasphemies in good order on his library shelf, he admitted no geological entry after 1886 – except for Syme’s New Platonist, which found its way to the library nearly a decade later (November 1895), when young Alfred had just turned fifteen. As Alfred’s wife Else faithfully recorded in an account of her husband (‘a world-altering explorer, and good-natured, humorous man’): ‘young Alfred did not like going to the local Gymnasium, as the resources of his own home offered greater scope for a curious mind�
�.
Perhaps, I considered, the New Platonist was a birthday gift from a relenting father.
I spent the next week trawling through Richard Owen’s Key to the Geology of the Globe, looking for a clue. But Syme’s name caught in my thoughts, a teasing puzzle, what the Germans have so delightfully nicknamed an ear-worm, pestering its way to the front of my consciousness. If only because I wondered who the hell he was. What was the New Platonist, who were the New Platonists? And when at last Owen had exhausted my patience, I turned, almost as an afterthought, to the man who will make my name, as I his.
*
Some of the facts discovered themselves quickly enough. Samuel Highgate Syme was the son, born in Baltimore in 1794, of one Edward Syme, an Englishman, himself the younger son of Theophilus, a manufacturer of jimbles (the sturdy anti-corrosive bolts used in the wooden hulls of ships) and prominent MP, predictably, you have guessed it, in the neighbourhood of Highgate, then a village outside London. Edward, Sam’s father, attended Harrow and Oxford, graduating Master of Arts ‘as Hells and Clubs proclaim’, in 1788; deeply in debt and quite unprepared for the assumption of anything like what his father would call a profession.
Unfortunately for Edward, 1788 was the year in which Bonnie Prince Charlie sank under full sail in a five-knot breeze at a royal display off the Isle of Wight. A parliamentary inquiry was launched, the manufacturers accused, corruption discovered, and public disgrace followed for Theophilus, who soon had no funds to set his son on his feet, nor influence to launch him on a career. (This much could be traced in records of the parliamentary minutes.) Shortly after, Edward joined the Agropolis, a society of young Oxford men determined to establish an idyllic community of Nature on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia. Their plan, much ridiculed in the daily press, was to farm. ‘A mere two hours a day in the field’, their leader, young Benedict Smythe, declared, ‘would provide for their Earthly necessities!’
The society was funded by the purse of Smythe, or rather, Smythe’s father, Lord Burkehead, who offered to clear all debts of the young gentlemen of good standing willing to pursue his son’s Utopian scheme. (Young Benedict being a noble thorn in his side, and the good Lord willing to support anyone accompanying its removal.) Edward enlisted at once and set sail for the New World.
News of the Syme family, within a great stash of papers, came easily to hand by a stroke of rare good fortune. Before his annus horribilis in 1788, Theophilus, Sam’s grandfather, had built a house on a plot of land just above what we now call Highgate Ponds. Coverdale Place, named after the farmer who sold his field on what was becoming an increasingly crowded patch, survived the proceedings against Theophilus. Edward’s older brother inherited the estate, and upon his death Edward returned home from the New World in which he had spent his manhood and buried both his son (the great Sam Syme, the proper business of my study) and his wife. He brought with him a sea-chest full of papers – the title, ‘American Notes, &c.’ etched in the oak lid – including old love letters, bearers of bad tidings, fatherly advice, and newspaper clippings, of his Utopian venture and his son’s fame, each tenderly preserved in a separate album.
My good fortune lay, however, less in Edward’s accumulating habits than in the idleness and the durability of the man who purchased the estate on Edward’s death, a Mr Mackintosh James. He had made what came to be called ‘a killing’ in a refinement of steam locomotion that redirected the heat of the engine into the process by which the engine was fuelled. At the age of thirty-three, young James was ‘set for life’, another phrase just coming into vogue – and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with the surplus of years before him. He lived to the ripe old age of a hundred and three, and died childless, after one world war and before another, just in time to avoid the Great Crash.
James left a number of worthless shares, and the house itself, now known as Mackintosh Place, to the newly formed Hampstead & Highgate Preservation Trust. In the century and a half of its existence, two families had dwelt there – and none have followed since its conversion to a museum (of village life and changing times), as I found it. The box of ‘American Notes, &c.’ was discovered untouched by Mackintosh James, pushed against the brick wall of the chimney shaft in the attic. The oak was scorched and blackened, the papers curled with heat and thick with dust, but the ink remained dry and, above all, readable.
A brief account of the house, written by Edmund Blunden, no less (among his clutch of lyrical historical pastoral pieces), and published by the Trust, had found its way into the British Library; where I discovered it, and news of the cache of ‘old and cluttered papers, relating the dead and cluttered lives, of the Syme family’. To Mackintosh House, accordingly, I bent my steps – or rather the soot-caked wheels of the rackety Tube, burrowing its way along the Northern Line, to Highgate, still half a village, perched on its wooded hill.
And there I sat, in a side office of the museum reserved for the curator, cluttered with filing cases, a kettle caked in mineral scum, and a tiny fridge (containing only a carton of old cream and a single hotel mini-bottle of gin). The windows looked over the front garden, so I bent a rustling slat of the French blinds to peer out on the milky sunny day. A slope of grass; then, half-hidden by willows, the quiet stretch of asphalt road poured down long after Mr Coverdale first sold this corner of his farm; and between the loose hair of the trees, the glitter of Highgate Ponds undimmed below. I put the album of the great (so I had determined to make him) Sam Syme to one side – a treat reserved – and forced my ham fists and sleepy brain to turn over the wrinkled letters and journals of his father, Edward, set forth for America over two hundred years before.
Edward’s Agropolis was not a success, though the travelling experiment docked at last in high spirits: ‘With what joy, my father,’ wrote Edward on his arrival, ‘did I leap to this shore of Liberty! I was weary of that great bore, the sea, a tedious fellow, forever and everywhere at my elbow; and the sight of trees, of towns, and even of Men!, offered delicious refreshment for fatigued eyes. I have flown a rotten country and entered upon a new land, busy with its own youth. How I enjoyed the activity of the merchants, the artisans, and the sailors, especially as it was not my own! It was not the noisy Vortex of London; it was not the unquiet, eager mien of my countrymen; it was the simple, dignified air of men, who were conscious of liberty, and who see in all men their brothers and their equals … though I dare say I am delirious with Terra Firma, and would praise the meanest Hovel simply for not swaying in that abominable manner …’
Thus they began in great good hope and some good faith; though Edward’s letters soon qualified his enthusiasm, ‘We get on tolerably,’ he wrote his beleaguered father. ‘The gentlemen moan somewhat at the delightful pleasures of our Idyll, and insist, with wonderful generosity, that each of the other Agropols enjoy his share of the blisses of Rural life. Our Hands, by this time, are well chapped, and we look like nothing else but what we are: Farmers, sound of limb, black with Sun, dreadfully occupied by seeding and improvements upon the Plough and the malignities of the Weather. Yet even the sorriest among us delights in the glorious Scope this country offers, the cloud-like expansion of Valley and Hill, the profligate wastefulness of our Lord on these rude Shores. As I say, we get on; and trust, dear Father, you do no worse.’
Their downfall in the end lay not in hard work; as far as that went, Edward was right, the sorriest among them bent their backs to it and got on. Nor were the malignities of weather to blame, though they suffered a brutal first winter, in which three of their horses died and the first young son of the Agropolis, the child of Edward, entered the cold world white and out of breath. The true serpent of their paradise, as always, lay in the hearts of the men involved, and the accommodations they made for their sexual loves.
Benedict Smythe, Viscount Burkehead, was in his way a true original. Though his scheme preceded the Pantisocrats, his Utopian ambition surpassed theirs: among the pleasures of the natural life to be held in common by his fellows we
re the joys of family, as their strangely coy deed of township dubbed them. There were to be none of the mealy-mouthed ‘brotherly’ betrothals to sister and sister, practised by Coleridge and Southey. A shared world for Benedict meant just that, and the Agropols, men and women, held one another in equal and often competing love. Eve had entered the garden.
Edward Syme had always been a gentleman of precocious appetite, as the records of his Oxford career attest; and no doubt Benedict’s liberal sexual philosophies at one point formed the chief attraction of his schemes. But when Benedict pursued the still-recovering mother of his dead child, Edward, a gentleman of some niceness, revolted. The rift in their small brotherhood – for, despite Benedict’s noblest aspirations for equality between the sexes, the Agropolis remained from first to last a brotherhood – widened and deepened over the following year. Edward must have guessed from the first that in such a contest he was bound to suffer most. Benedict’s father held the purse strings of the venture, and unless he watched himself very closely indeed, Edward would be out in the considerable cold of a North American winter.
So he watched himself, displaying even then his talent for the deflection of grief which he would pass so unhappily on to his son. There were rumblings in the little farmstead, as Edward’s allies (for, despite the noblest of communal intentions, when have we not separated ourselves, by choice, into pockets of men?) made some mischief for the Viscount – spoiling a field with stones on one memorable and pyrotechnical flare-up between the factions. But Edward calmed them, and the breach in his friendship with Benedict never broke into open war.
The Syme Papers Page 2