Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin
Page 6
Oppenheimer’s approach to learning physics was eclectic, even haphazard. He focused on the most interesting, abstract problems in the field, bypassing the dreary basics. Years later, he confessed to feeling insecure about the gaps in his knowledge. “To this day,” he told an interviewer in 1963, “I get panicky when I think about a smoke ring or elastic vibrations. There’s nothing there—just a little skin over a hole. In the same way my mathematical formation was, even for those days, very primitive. . . . I took a course from [J. E.] Littlewood on number theory—well, that was nice, but that wasn’t really how to go about learning mathematics for the professional pursuit of physics.”
When Alfred North Whitehead arrived on campus, only Robert and one other undergraduate had the courage to sign up for a course with the philosopher and mathematician. They painstakingly worked their way through the three volumes of Principia Mathematica, coauthored by Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. “I had a very exciting time,” Oppenheimer recalled, “reading the Principia with Whitehead, who had forgotten it, so that he was both teacher and student.” Despite this experience, Oppenheimer always thought he was deficient in mathematics. “I never did learn very much. I probably learned a good deal by a method that is never given enough credit, that is, by being with people. . . . I should have learned more mathematics. I think I would have enjoyed it, but it was a part of my impatience that I was careless about it.”
But if there were gaps in his education, he could admit to his friend Paul Horgan that Harvard was good for him. In the autumn of 1923, Robert wrote Horgan a satirical letter in which he wrote about himself in the third person: “[Oppenheimer] has grown to be quite a man now you have no idea how Harvard has changed him. I am afraid it is not for the good of his soul to study so hard. He says the most terrible things. Only the other night I was arguing with him and I said but you believe in God don’t you? And he said I believe in the second law of thermodynamics, in Hamilton’s Principle, in Bertrand Russell, and would you believe it Siegfried [sic ] Freud.”
Horgan thought Robert enthralling and charming. Horgan was himself a brilliant young man, and in the course of his long life he would eventually write seventeen novels and twenty works of history, winning the Pulitzer Prize twice. But he would always regard Oppenheimer as a rare and invaluable polymath. “Leonardos and Oppenheimers are scarce,” Horgan wrote in 1988, “but their wonderful love and projection of understanding as both private connoisseurs and historical achievers offer us at least an ideal to consider and measure by.”
THROUGHOUT HIS YEARS AT HARVARD, Robert kept up a frequent correspondence with his Ethical Culture School teacher and New Mexico guide, Herbert Smith. In the winter of 1923, he tried to convey with elaborate irony what his life was like at Harvard: “Generously, you ask what I do,” Oppenheimer wrote Smith. “Aside from the activities exposed in last week’s disgusting note, I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk; I go to math lib[rary] and read and to the Phil[osophy] lib and divide my time between Minherr [Bertrand] Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza—charmingly ironic, at that, don’t you think?; I make stenches in three different labs, listen to [Professor Louis] Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.”
Dark wit aside, Robert still suffered periodic bouts of depression. Some of these episodes were brought on by his family’s visits to Cambridge. Fergusson remembers going out to dinner with Robert and some of his relatives—not his parents—and watching as his friend turned visibly green from the strain of being polite. Afterwards, Robert would drag Fergusson with him as he pounded the pavement for miles, talking all the while in his quiet, even voice about some physics problem. Walking was his only therapy. Fred Bernheim recalled hiking one winter night until 3:00 a.m. On one of these cold winter walks, someone dared the boys to jump in the river. Robert and at least one of his friends stripped and plunged into the icy water.
In retrospect, all of his friends noted that he seemed to be wrestling in these years with inner demons. “My feeling about myself,” Oppenheimer later said of this period in his life, “was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world.”
Unfulfilled sexual desires certainly lay behind some of Robert’s troubles. At the age of twenty, he was not alone, of course. Few of his friends had a social life that included women. And none of them remember Robert ever taking a woman on a date. Wyman recalled that he and Robert were “too much in love” with intellectual life “to be thinking about girls. . . . We were all going through a series of love affairs [with ideas] . . . but perhaps we lacked some of the more mundane forms of love affairs that make life easier.” Robert certainly felt a welter of sensuous desires, as evidenced by some of the decidedly erotic poetry he wrote during this period:
Tonight she wears a sealskin cape
glistening black diamonds where the water swathes her thighs
and noxious glints conspire to surprise
a pulse condoning eagerness with rape.
In the winter of 1923–24, he wrote what he called “my first love poem”—to honor that “most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza.” He contemplates this mystery woman from afar in the library but apparently never speaks to her.
No, I know that there have been others who have read Spinoza,
Even I;
Others who have crossed their white arms
Across the umber pages;
Others too pure to glance, even a second,
Beyond the sacred sphincter of their erudition.
But what is all that to me?
You must come, I say, and see the sea gulls,
Gold in the late sun;
You must come and talk to me and tell me why
In this same world, little white puffs of cloud-
Like cotton batting, if you will, or lingerie,
I have heard that before—
Little white puffs of cloud should float so quietly across the
Cleanly sky,
And you should sit, pale, in a black dress that would have graced
The stern ascetic conscience of a Benedict,
And read Spinoza, and let the wind blow the clouds by,
And let me drown myself in an ecstasy of dearth . . .
Well, what if I do forget,
Forget Spinoza and your constancy,
Forget everything, till there stays with me
Only a faint half hope and half regret
And the unnumbered stretches of the sea?
Unable to initiate a relationship, he remained aloof, hoping, as the poem says, that the young woman would make the first move: “You must come and talk to me . . .” He feels “a faint half hope and half regret.” Such a mix of powerful emotions is not, of course, unusual for a young man coming of age. But Robert had to be told that he was not alone.
Again and again, whenever he was in anguish, Robert turned to his old teacher for help. In the late winter of 1924, he wrote Smith in the great “distress” of some emotional crisis. That letter has not survived, but we have Robert’s reply to Smith’s letter of reassurance. “What has soothed me most, I think,” he told Smith, “is that you perceived in my distress a certain similarity to that from which you had suffered; it had never occurred to me that the situation of anyone who now appeared to me in all respects so impeccable and so enviable could be in any way comparable with my own. . . . Abstractly, I feel that it is a terrible pity that there should be so many good people I shall not know, so many joys missed. But you are right. At least for me the desire is not a need; it is an impertinence.”
After Robert finished his first year at Harvard, his father found him a summer job in a New Jersey laboratory. But he
was bored. “The job and people are bourgeois and lazy and dead,” he wrote Francis Fergusson, who was himself back in lovely Los Pinos. “There is little work and nothing to puzzle at . . . how I envy you! . . . Francis, you choke me with anguish and despair; all I can do is admit to my hierarchy of physico-chemical immutabilities the Chaucerian ‘Amour vincit omnia.’ ” Robert’s friends were used to this florid language. “Everything he takes up,” Francis later observed, “he exaggerates.” Paul Horgan too recalled Robert’s “baroque tendency to exaggerate.” But it was also true that he quit the lab job and spent the month of August back at Bay Shore, much of the time sailing with Horgan, who had agreed to spend his vacation with him.
IN JUNE 1925, after only three years of study, Robert was graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He made the dean’s list and was one of only thirty students to be selected for membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Tongue in cheek, he wrote Herbert Smith that year: “Even in the last stages of senile aphasia I will not say that education, in an academic sense, was only secondary when I was at college. I plow through about five or ten big scientific books a week, and pretend to research. Even if, in the end, I’ve got to satisfy myself with testing toothpaste, I don’t want to know it till it has happened.”
Testing toothpaste was hardly a likely future for a Harvard senior who that year had taken such courses as “Colloid Chemistry,” “History of England from 1688 to the Present Time,” “Introduction to the Theory of Potential Functions and LaPlace’s Equation,” “The Analytical Theory of Heat and Problems of Inelastic Vibrations” and “Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism.” But decades later, he would look back on his undergraduate years and confess: “Although I liked to work, I spread myself very thin and got by with murder; I got A’s in all these courses which I don’t think I should have.” He thought he had acquired a “very quick, superficial, eager familiarization with some parts of physics with tremendous lacunae and often with a tremendous lack of practice and discipline.”
Skipping the commencement ceremonies, Robert and two friends, William C. Boyd and Frederick Bernheim, celebrated privately with laboratory alcohol in a dorm room. “Boyd and I got plastered,” Bernheim recalled. “Robert, I think, only took one drink and retired.” Later that weekend, Robert took Boyd to the summer house in Bay Shore and sailed his beloved Trimethy to Fire Island. “We took off our clothes,” Boyd remembered, “and walked up and down the beach getting a sunburn.” Robert could have stayed at Harvard—he was offered a graduate fellowship—but he already had loftier ambitions. He had graduated as a chemistry major, but it was physics that called him, and he knew that in the world of physics Cambridge, England, was “more near the center.” Hoping that the eminent English physicist Ernest Rutherford, celebrated as the man who had first developed a model of the nuclear atom in 1911, would take him under his wing, Robert persuaded his physics teacher Percy Bridgman to write a letter of recommendation. In his letter, Bridgman wrote candidly that Oppenheimer had a “perfectly prodigious power of assimilation” but that “his weakness is on the experimental side. His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory. . . . It appears to me that it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I believe he will be a very unusual success.”
Bridgman then closed with remarks—not unusual for that time and place—on Oppenheimer’s Jewish background: “As appears from his name, Oppenheimer is a Jew, but entirely without the usual qualifications of his race. He is a tall, well set-up young man, with a rather engaging diffidence of manner, and I think you need have no hesitation whatever for any reason of this sort in considering his application.”
With the hope that Bridgman’s recommendation would gain him admittance to Rutherford’s laboratory, Robert spent the month of August in his beloved New Mexico. Significantly, he took his parents with him and introduced them to his few acres of heaven. The Oppenheimers boarded for a time at Bishop’s Lodge on the outskirts of Santa Fe, and then journeyed north to Katherine Page’s Los Pinos ranch. “The Parents are really quite pleased with the place,” Robert wrote with obvious pride to Herbert Smith, “and are starting to ride a little. Curiously enough they enjoy the frivolous courtesy of the place.”
Together with Paul Horgan, who was back from Harvard for the summer, and Robert’s brother, Frank, now age thirteen, the boys went for long horseback rides in the mountains. Horgan recalls renting horses in Santa Fe and riding with Robert on the Lake Peak trail across the Sangre de Cristo range and down to the village of Cowles: “We hit the divide at the very top of that mountain in a tremendous thunderstorm . . . immense, huge pounding rain. We sat under our horses for lunch and ate oranges, [and we] were drenched. . . . I was looking at Robert and all of a sudden I noticed his hair was standing straight up, responding to the static. Marvelous.” When they finally rode into Los Pinos that night after dark, Katy Page’s windows were lit. “It was a very welcome sight,” Horgan said. “She received us and we had a beautiful time for several days there. She referred to us always then and afterward as her slaves. ‘Here come my slaves.’ ”
While Mrs. Oppenheimer sat on the shaded, wraparound porch of the Los Pinos ranch house, Page and her “slaves” went out on day-long rides in the surrounding mountains. On one of these expeditions, Robert found a small, uncharted lake on the eastern slopes of the Santa Fe Baldy—which he named Lake Katherine.
It was probably on one of these long rides that he smoked his first tobacco. Page taught the boys to ride light, packing the bare minimum. One night on the trail Robert found himself out of food, and someone offered him a pipe to quell the pangs of hunger. Pipe tobacco and cigarettes quickly became thereafter a lifelong addiction.
Upon his return to New York, Robert opened his mail to learn that Ernest Rutherford had rejected him. “Rutherford wouldn’t have me,” Oppenheimer recalled. “He didn’t think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar.” In the event, however, Rutherford passed Robert’s application along to J. J. Thomson, Rutherford’s celebrated predecessor as director of Cavendish Laboratory. At sixty-nine years of age, Thomson, who had won the 1906 Nobel Prize in physics for his detection of the electron, was well past his prime as a working physicist. In 1919 he had resigned his administrative responsibilities, and by 1925 he came into the laboratory sporadically and tutored only the occasional student. Robert was nonetheless greatly relieved when he learned that Thomson had agreed to supervise his studies. He had chosen physics as his vocation, and he was confident that its future—and his—lay in Europe.
CHAPTER THREE
“I Am Having a Pretty Bad Time”
I am not well, and I am afraid to come to see you now for fear something melodramatic might happen.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, January 23, 1926
HARVARD HAD BEEN A MIXED EXPERIENCE for Robert. He had grown intellectually, but his social experiences had been such as to leave his emotional life taut and strained. The daily routines of structured undergraduate existence had provided him with a protective shield; once again, he had been a superstar in the classroom. Now the shield was gone, and he was about to undergo a series of nearly disastrous existential crises that would begin that autumn and stretch into the spring of 1926.
In mid-September 1925, he boarded a ship bound for England. He and Francis Fergusson had agreed that they would meet in the little village of Swanage in Dorsetshire, in southwest England. Fergusson had spent the entire summer traveling about Europe with his mother and was now eager for some male companionship. For ten days they walked along the coastal cliffs, confiding to each other their latest adventures. Though they had not seen each other for two years, they had kept in touch through correspondence and remained close.
“When I met him at the station,” Fergusson wrote afterwards, “he seemed more self-confident, strong and upstanding . . . he was fa
r less embarrassed with mother. This, I afterwards found out, was because he had nearly managed to fall in love with an attractive gentile in New Mexico.” Still, at the age of twenty-one, Robert, Fergusson sensed, “was completely at a loss about his sex life.” For his part, Fergusson “unfolded to him all the things that had pleased me, and that I had to keep quiet about.” In retrospect, however, Fergusson thought he had unburdened himself too much. “I was cruel and stupid enough,” he wrote, “to go over with Robert [these things] at length, finally completing what Jean [a friend] would have called a first-class mental rape.”
By then, Fergusson had spent two full years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Francis had always been more mature than Robert, who now found himself dazzled by his friend’s ease and social polish. To begin with, Francis had had a girlfriend for some three years—a young woman Robert had known from the Ethical Culture School named Frances Keeley. He was also impressed that Fergusson had demonstrated the self-confidence to abandon his major in biology for his first passion, literature and poetry. He was moving in elite social circles, visiting upper-class English families in their country houses. Robert found himself envious of his friend’s blossoming sophistication. They parted ways—one off to Oxford, the other to Cambridge—promising to meet again over Christmas break.