by Ray Monk
On his father’s side, too, Francis’s family had a quintessentially American kind of glamour, again derived from their membership of an elite that had helped to define America and Americans, though in their case the elite in question was part of the ‘Old South’ rather than the ‘Old West’. Francis’s grandfather, Sampson Noland Ferguson (the second s in the surname was added by Francis’s father for a reason that is lost to history), was a southern gentleman, an aristocratic plantation owner from Alabama, who served as a captain in the Confederate army under his friend, General Lee, and, owing to his commitment to the Confederate cause, lost everything in the Civil War (he, patriotically but unwisely, sold his land for Confederate money). After the family’s land and wealth were thus dissipated, his son, Harvey Butler Fergusson (Francis Fergusson’s father), came to New Mexico to work as a lawyer. After a few years in the gold-rush town of White Oaks (chiefly remembered now for its associations with Billy the Kid), H.B. Fergusson moved to Albuquerque, where he became a successful lawyer, married Franz Huning’s daughter (thus acquiring both La Glorieta and Castle Huning) and then embarked on his political career.
Growing up in Albuquerque and living in its oldest, most historically interesting house, Francis would repeatedly have been told the stories of the Old West, many of which would have involved members of his own family. Like Oppenheimer, he was born in 1904. Unlike Oppenheimer, he was the youngest of four siblings, two of whom – his elder sister, Erna, and his older brother, Harvey – became popular writers, famous most of all for writing about the history, the legends, the people and (in Erna’s case) the food of the South-west. Particularly well known are Erna’s Dancing Gods: Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona, Our South West and Mexican Cookbook and Harvey’s novel, Wolf Song, based on the life of Kit Carson, Rio Grande, his history of the South-west, and his memoir, Home in the West. By the time Fergusson met Oppenheimer, the literary careers of his soon-to-be-famous siblings had already been launched. Harvey had just published his first novel, The Blood of the Conquerors, set among the Spanish American community in New Mexico, and Erna had started writing articles on the history of New Mexico for the Albuquerque Herald. Just as Francis’s ancestors had played an important part in the making of the West, so his siblings were to become instrumental in shaping the perception of it. To be introduced, as Oppenheimer was soon after getting to know Francis, to the Fergusson family was thus to be introduced to the history and mythology of the South-west. Both introductions were to have large implications for the course of Oppenheimer’s life.
Like his siblings, Francis had aspirations of becoming a writer. Unlike them, he was not content to study either at the University of New Mexico, where Erna had been a student, or at Washington and Lee University, the alma mater of both his father and his brother. He wanted to go to Harvard and, to that end, had come east to attend a high school in the Bronx that would prepare him for Harvard entrance. For his senior year he transferred to the Ethical Culture School, having, presumably, learned of its excellent record of getting students into Harvard. Soon after joining the school he and Oppenheimer had become close friends. Characteristically, Oppenheimer, when he recalled meeting Fergusson, never mentioned the things that most obviously marked him out from his other classmates – that he was a gentile, that he came from a distinguished and prominent family from the South-west, that his father had been a congressman and that his siblings were famous writers – but rather remembered him as someone ‘who at that time had some interest in biology’, but whose ‘main interests were really a young man’s philosophic interests; he was preoccupied with the old difficulty that if everything is natural how can something be good, in the form [in] which the 19th century writers had sharpened this’.
Fergusson, like Oppenheimer, formed a close relationship with Herbert Smith at the Ethical Culture School, and the three of them were to establish an extremely important bond. Smith, Fergusson remembers, was ‘very, very kind to his students’; he ‘took on Robert and me and various other people . . . saw them through their troubles and advised them what to do next’. Smith’s contact with his students, at least his favourite ones, extended well beyond school hours. Oppenheimer, Fergusson and others would be invited to Smith’s home in New Jersey, where they would write and discuss literature; and, after they left school, Smith continued to act as their confidant and advisor through correspondence.
Oppenheimer and Fergusson graduated from the Ethical Culture School in 1921, Oppenheimer in February and Fergusson in June. They had both been accepted by Harvard and both expected to go there in October that year, Oppenheimer to study chemistry and Fergusson to study biology. Immediately after his graduation, Oppenheimer spent the spring of 1921 working on a special, advanced-science project at school with Augustus Klock. He then set off for a summer holiday in Europe with his parents and his younger brother, Frank. They went to Germany, from where Oppenheimer set off on his own on what he later called ‘a long prospecting trip into Bohemia’. More specifically, he went to the old mineral mines near what was then called Joachimsthal (now Jáchymov), on the Czech border, an area renowned in the nineteenth century for its silver, and a century later for its uranium. It was an ideal place for a rock collector, and Oppenheimer returned with a suitcase full of interesting specimens. Of more lasting importance to him, however, was that he also returned from the mines with a serious, almost fatal, case of dysentery. He arrived back in New York on a stretcher.
On his parents’ insistence, he postponed his admission to Harvard for a year and spent the autumn and winter of 1921–2 at home, recuperating from the dysentery and from colitis, which was to remain a recurring problem for the rest of his life. Seventeen years old and impatient to leave home and take up his place at Harvard, where Fergusson, as planned, started in the autumn of 1921, he was a bad patient. Indeed, these months of convalescence seem to have brought out a hitherto-unseen obnoxious side to his character; he was frequently irritable, and would sometimes lock himself into his room, ignoring his parents’ pleas to come out and to be reasonable.
By the spring of 1922, his beleaguered parents had formed a plan to occupy his time and thoughts more profitably, one that would have the additional advantage of getting him off their hands for a while. They approached Herbert Smith to ask him whether he would consider taking a term off work (during which the Oppenheimers would take over the payment of his salary from the school) in order to accompany their son on a trip to the South-west. The South-west was chosen partly in order for Oppenheimer to spend some time with Fergusson’s family before joining him at Harvard after the summer, and partly because the climate, the fresh air and the spectacular countryside would provide an obvious and beneficial change from New York. The idea that Smith should take an entire term off work, however, was too much for the school, which vetoed the plan, whereupon it was proposed instead that Smith and Oppenheimer should travel to the South-west during the summer holiday, a proposal that Smith (who had, it seems, performed a similar service earlier for Felix Adler’s nephew) was happy to accept.
It was a trip that was to have a deep and lasting influence on Oppenheimer’s life. In later life he was fond of saying that he had two loves: physics and the New Mexican desert. Of those, the first was New Mexico.
* * *
fn2 See here.
fn3 It is customary to remark on the elegance of Oppenheimer’s spoken and written language, but the curious awkwardness of the unidiomatic ‘themes that I did’ is a feature that recurs surprisingly often in his writing, particularly in his letters.
3
First Love: New Mexico
ONE REASON THAT Oppenheimer’s holiday in the South-west in the summer of 1922 was to have such deep and lasting effects on the course of his life was that it introduced him to people and places that would remain for him ideals by which others were measured. The South-west, as Emanie Sachs emphasises in Red Damask, was held in roughly equal measures of awe and contempt by members of the New York Jewish commun
ity, who regarded it, whether for good or ill, as the polar opposite of New York City. When her central character, Abby, discovers that her husband, Gilbert, has been offered a job in Texas, she urges him to accept it, on the grounds that, in the South-west, they could escape from the sense of being outsiders. After all, she reasons, ‘you can’t be an outsider when you’re a pioneer’. Gilbert, however, prefers to stay in New York, where life is more civilised. ‘Gilbert,’ Sachs writes, ‘had been brought up to value orderly living and art and music and philanthropy and friends who valued them.’ In drawing the contrast in this way, Sachs has, I think, provided important clues as to what Oppenheimer and Fergusson hoped to find in each other: where Oppenheimer looked to Fergusson and his family for the inspiration of the pioneer spirit and freedom from the sense of being an outsider, Fergusson, it seems likely, regarded Oppenheimer and his family as the very epitome of a life that valued ‘orderly living and art and music and philanthropy’.
In any case, Fergusson’s family home in Albuquerque, La Glorieta, was, naturally, the first port of call for Oppenheimer and Smith. There, Fergusson, back from Harvard for the summer, introduced Oppenheimer to his friend Paul Horgan. Horgan would later find fame as a novelist and a historian, especially renowned – like Fergusson’s siblings – for writing about the history, characters, landscape and mythology of the South-west. Born in Buffalo, New York, Horgan had lived in New Mexico since he was twelve, when his family moved to Albuquerque after his father, a vice president of a printing firm, contracted tuberculosis. At the time of meeting Oppenheimer, Horgan was a student at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, where he was to remain for another year before moving to Rochester, New York, in order to study stage production at the Eastman School of Music. His writing career took off a few years after he returned to Roswell in 1926 to take up a post as librarian at the Military Institute.
From their first meeting, Oppenheimer and Horgan took to each other warmly. Despite their differences in background and the fact that Horgan had little interest in science, they seemed to see in each other a kindred spirit. Indeed, among Oppenheimer, Fergusson and Horgan there quickly developed a shared sense of mutual admiration and liking, and, for the first time in his life, Oppenheimer found himself a member of a group of friends who shared interests, thoughts, confidences and experiences. They quickly began to think of themselves as a unit, a set of self-styled ‘polymaths’ that Horgan would later describe as ‘this pygmy triumvirate’ or ‘this great troika’. At the age of eighteen, it seems, Oppenheimer had finally found a group of people his own age to which he felt he belonged, and to whom he did not seem strange and alien.
That Oppenheimer could find this sense of belonging only among gentiles in the South-west is indicative not only of his sense of not belonging to the community within which he had been brought up, but also of his desire to actively distance himself from that community and to become a different person with a different social milieu. Before they set out for the South-west, Oppenheimer startled Herbert Smith by asking him if they could both travel under the name ‘Smith’, passing Oppenheimer off as Smith’s younger brother. Smith would have nothing to do with this plan, which he saw as one among many signs of discomfort on Oppenheimer’s part with his Jewishness. This discomfort, Smith believed, also lay at the heart of Oppenheimer’s illnesses, both his dysentery and his colitis, which, he thought, had more likely psychological than biological origins. After all, Smith wondered, how could Oppenheimer have contracted dysentery when his family were so scrupulous in avoiding all contact with the outside world and drank nothing but bottled water? As for Oppenheimer’s colitis, Smith noted that it disappeared very suddenly as soon as they arrived in the South-west, but reappeared whenever ‘someone disparaged the Jews’. One telling recollection of Smith’s concerns an occasion when, in a hurry to get his clothes packed, he asked Oppenheimer for help in folding a jacket. ‘He looked at me sharply,’ Smith remembered, ‘and said, “Oh yes, the tailor’s son would know how to do that, wouldn’t he?”’
In New Mexico, among the ‘great troika’ of himself, Fergusson and Horgan,fn4 Oppenheimer could, at least temporarily, escape from being the Jewish ‘tailor’s son’ from New York City and be part of a culture that defined itself in opposition to trade and business, that saw itself rooted in the mountains, rivers and valleys of the South-western countryside and the noble and courageous adventurousness of the pioneers that had tamed it. As Erna Fergusson puts it in her book, Our South West:
The Southwest can never be made into a land that produces bread and butter. But it is infinitely productive of the imponderables so much needed by a world weary of getting and spending. It is a wilderness where a man may get back to the essentials of being a man. It is magnificence forever rewarding to a man courageous enough to seek to renew his soul.
This emphasis on the role of the South-west in ‘renewing’ the soul pervades much of the work of Horgan and the Fergussons. In the same book, for example, Erna writes:
Such a country, inscrutable, unconquerable and like nothing his kind had ever seen, naturally affected the man who dared to face it. It made, in fact, a new type of man who may renew himself in other challenging conditions or who may prove to be only a passing phase due to submerge in the babbittry that has come with the trains.
The conquering of the West as a metaphor for conquering the self was one that Horgan was very fond of. For example, in an essay he wrote in the 1940s, he suggested: ‘Maybe everyone has a kind of early West within himself that has to be discovered, and pioneered, and settled. We did it as a country once. I think plenty of people have done it for themselves as individuals.’
That Oppenheimer had, to some extent, ‘found himself’ during his trip to the South-west, that it enabled him to blossom in ways that had been impossible in New York, is attested to by the way his new friends remembered him during this summer. ‘He was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known,’ Paul Horgan said. ‘And with this, in that period of his life, he combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits . . . He had a great superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity at that time.’ He also noted Oppenheimer’s ‘exquisite manners’, adding: ‘I’ve always been puzzled by later reports of his arrogance and his self-centredness . . . I can’t identify that in him at all.’ The man he describes seems barely recognisable as the awkward, arrogant, socially maladroit teenager remembered by Oppenheimer’s schoolmates during his time at the Ethical Culture School, to whom the words ‘charm’, ‘gaiety’ and ‘high spirits’ certainly would not have suggested themselves when attempting to describe his personality.
One of the many ways in which the summer of 1922 brought forward a newly invigorated Oppenheimer was with respect to his interest in, and attraction to, girls. He later confided to his brother Frank that he had become strongly attracted to Horgan’s sister, Rosemary, and, later on in the trip, he met a woman with whom it would probably not be too much to say he fell in love. Her name was Katherine Chaves Page and she was then twenty-eight years old and just married to a man twice her age, an ‘Anglo’fn5 businessman called Winthrop Page who lived in Chicago.
Katherine herself was a member of an aristocratic Spanish hidalgo family, who had lived in the South-west for many generations and had been in their day still more prominent than the Hunings and Fergussons. Their history was even more romantic and evocative of the ‘Old West’. Her grandfather, Manuel Chaves, had been a famous soldier, nicknamed ‘El Lioncito’ (‘the little lion’) because of his bravery. He was a cousin of the aforementioned governor of New Mexico, Manuel Armijo, and boasted that his lineage could be traced back to one of the original Spanish conquistadors. Having fought the Navajos and the Americans on behalf of the Mexicans, he swore an oath to the United States in 1848 after the American victory in the Mexican-American War and proceeded to fight Apaches and Mexicans on behalf on his newly adopted nation. In the Civil War he fought on the Union side and helped them to defeat an attempt to take N
ew Mexico for the Confederacy. After his famous last battle as an Indian-fighter in 1863, in which he led fifteen men against 100 Navajos, he established a home for himself in the San Mateo Mountains, west of Albuquerque, where he made a living ranching and where he built a family chapel, in which he, his wife and his children were buried.
Katherine’s father was Amado Chaves, the second son of Manuel Chaves, whose life story could hardly have been in sharper contrast to that of his Indian-, American- and Mexican-fighting father. After studying law and business in Washington DC, Amado Chaves returned to New Mexico and pursued a career as a lawyer and politician, becoming mayor of Santa Fe, and then speaker of the legislative assembly of New Mexico and superintendent of the state’s public education system. In both capacities he would no doubt have had much contact with H.B. Fergusson, which is presumably how the links between the two families – later cemented by the close friendship of Katherine and Erna Fergusson – began. In 1893, Amado Chaves married the ‘Anglo’ Kate Nichols Foster, the daughter of an English-born architect, and the following year Katherine was born.
As well as the ranch that Amado had inherited from his father in San Mateo, the Chaves family also had a house in Albuquerque that Kate Nichols Foster had designed. In addition they acquired some land in the Upper Pecos Valley, near the town of Cowles, some twenty miles or so north of Santa Fe, where they built a guest ranch (or ‘dude ranch’) called ‘Los Pinos’, high up on the hills with splendid views of the Pecos Valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It was here that Oppenheimer spent the most memorable part of his summer trip to the South-west, developing not only an attachment to Katherine, but also a deep affection for this part of New Mexico.