The Monk in the Garden by Robin Marantz Henig

Author:Robin Marantz Henig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Interlude

12

The Silence

A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future.

—“A Shape of Water,” W. S. Merwin

MAIL CALL at the St. Thomas monastery was always an event. Every one of the dozen or so monks who made up the cloistered community was a learned man. Abbot Napp had seen to that, selecting the brethren as though forming a band of scholars at a mini-Chautauqua, in which each member was allowed the luxury of books, collegiality, and time to ruminate and dabble as the spirit moved him. In the 1860s, one of the best ways to feed this spirit was through written correspondence. Letters were the mechanism of discovery.

So twice a day, between New Year’s Day of 1867, when he sent out his first letters, and the end of February, when he received his first reply, Gregor Mendel must have experienced a tiny flutter of anticipation, the slow dawning of disappointment, and finally the heavy thump of despair—only to go through the cycle again at that day’s second mail call, or, after a long night of knowing that something was not quite right, at mail call the following morning. Nearly a hundred times the flutter and thump were repeated, becoming an almost familiar accompaniment to the passage of time through a season in which there were, finally, no new peas to count, no new puzzles to work out.

Of all the scientists to whom Mendel wrote in hopes of finding both help and validation, only Nägeli wrote back. And even he took almost two months to reply. With what excitement Mendel must have received that first letter on February 27, 1867. What visions must have danced in his head of a fruitful discourse with one of the most incisive minds in Europe. Nägeli, after all, had been the paragon of Mendel’s esteemed Professor Unger. How flattering that he should take the time to write to poor lowly Mendel. Now it hardly mattered that Mendel had been checking the mail with growing trepidation every morning and every afternoon for weeks. Forgotten were those hundred tiny disappointments, piling up as Mendel waited for acknowledgment that his eight years of labor had not been in vain.

The letter was handwritten, of course; the typewriter had just been invented and would not go on the market for another seven years. Nägeli took great care in composing it, going through several drafts to get the wording right. He revealed some “mistrustful caution” about the priest’s findings. He also enclosed reprints of five recent journal articles. Although his language was polite, it was skeptical—and even more skeptical were the earlier drafts, which are all that remain of what Nägeli actually wrote. In the notes he wrote to himself as he crafted his response, Nägeli wondered how Mendel knew that the hybrid he was calling Aa was a constant form. “I expect that (when inbred) they would sooner or later be found to vary once more,” he wrote.

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