Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (9 page)

Despite this attack, Oppenheimer remained at the camp for the rest of the summer. ‘I don’t know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks,’ Koenig said. ‘Not many boys would have – or could have – but Robert did. It must have been hell for him.’ Afterwards, Oppenheimer mentioned the incident just once, when, at the age of twenty, he confided in Herbert Smith, who had by then become his closest friend. Both Smith and Fred Koenig (the only two friends of Oppenheimer’s who knew what he had endured on Grindstone Island) were convinced that it was a – perhaps the – defining moment of his life.

One very interesting detail that Koenig mentioned in his recollections of Oppenheimer at summer camp in 1918 concerns their many walks together:

What particular passages Oppenheimer knew by heart is not known, though it is known that he was reading
Middlemarch
that summer and was greatly impressed by it. The theme of causal relations in human behaviour is highlighted in that book through its central character, Tertius Lydgate, who is himself fascinated by the application of causal explanations to nature (as Eliot puts it, he ‘longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure and help to define men’s thoughts more accurately after the true order’), but who, ironically, is undone precisely because of his failure to understand human nature, particularly his own and that of his wife.

The character of Lydgate parallels Oppenheimer to an extraordinarily close extent. First and foremost, Lydgate is an outsider, the only character in the book who does not actually come from Middlemarch. We first see him as a young, newly qualified doctor, who, full of optimism and idealism, arrives in the town to establish himself as a family physician. As a boy, Eliot tells us, Lydgate had been a quick learner, who loved books and to whom acquiring knowledge was exceptionally easy: ‘It was said of him that Lydgate could do anything he liked.’ However, though he read widely and amassed at least a superficial knowledge and understanding of a vast range of subjects, ‘no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion’. This changed one rainy day when, out of boredom, he took down a volume of an old encyclopaedia and began reading the entry on ‘Anatomy’. ‘From that hour,’ Eliot writes, ‘Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.’

Inspired by this passion, Lydgate studies medicine, fired not only by an enthusiasm for achieving a scientific understanding of the human body, but also by an idealistic desire to reform the medical profession and to do some social good. He wants both to be an outstanding practitioner of medicine and to make a significant and lasting theoretical contribution to medical science. He has the natural ability, the training and the circumstances to achieve this demanding dual ambition, but one thing stands in his way: his character. ‘Lydgate’s conceit’, Eliot tells us, is ‘of the arrogant sort, never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous’. Because of this character flaw, Lydgate, despite his good intentions, is not trusted by the people of Middlemarch, who are quick to think the worst of him when he becomes involved with a crooked financier. He ends up as an outwardly successful (that is, wealthy) medical practitioner, who is however inwardly unsuccessful, trapped as he is in a loveless marriage, surrounded by people with whom he feels no
sense of companionship and having abandoned all hope of making any serious contribution to the theory of medical science.

In many ways, Lydgate’s story parallels and anticipates Oppenheimer’s. Though Fred Koenig was sympathetic to Oppenheimer with respect to the treatment he received at the hands of the other boys at camp, he also acknowledged that ‘to some extent, he asked for it’. As Koenig remembers Oppenheimer that summer, he did not just stand out from the other boys, he did so
deliberately
. ‘Robert enjoyed being different,’ Koenig recalled. ‘He was an intellectual snob, a mental exhibitionist.’ He was ‘bright and sensitive, but very much in conflict with himself,’ and, of course, at odds with the people around him.

The inner conflict noted by Koenig was matched by a conflict between Oppenheimer and his father and perhaps, in Oppenheimer’s mind at least, between what was expected of him and what, in reality, he was. His later remarks that his childhood ‘did not prepare me in any way for the fact that there are cruel and bitter things’ and that it had offered him ‘no normal healthy way to be a bastard’ are symptomatic, perhaps, of a resentful feeling that his inability to fit in with people was to some extent his parents’, and particularly his father’s, fault. Smith remembers that, though he ‘never heard a murmur of criticism on Robert’s part of [his] mother’, Oppenheimer ‘was certainly critical enough of [his] father’. Indeed, said Smith, ‘the most important element I think in Robert’s life was his feeling that his own parents’, particularly his father’s, maladroitness had resulted in all sorts of humiliation to him’ – chief among which was his ‘crucifixion’ at Camp Koenig.

After the summer of 1918, Oppenheimer returned to school to resume the second of his four high-school grades. The way his schooling was organised was that he progressed from one grade to the next every February, which was the beginning of the school’s second term. Each high-school grade was named after a Greek letter, so that he began ‘alpha grade’ in February 1917 and ‘beta grade’ the following year. In February 1919, upon entry into ‘gamma grade’, he took part in a patriotic festival held at school, the centrepiece of which was an allegorical play called
The Light
, which recounted the battle against Brute Force by the combined forces of Peace, Justice and Civilisation, culminating in the uniting of nations into the ‘true brotherhood of man’. On the night of the play the school mounted an ‘Americanisation exhibit’, which contained, among other things, German helmets brought back from the Western Front by ‘some of our dough boys’. The exhibition might seem somewhat at odds with the theme of the play, but a link between the two might be seen in the Adlerian idea that, in defeating the Germans, the ‘dough boys’ had helped to bring about the realisation of the ‘American Ideal’ and thus the triumph of ‘true brotherhood’ over ‘brute force’.

The years 1919–20 and 1920–1, his junior and senior years of high school, were extremely important ones for Oppenheimer’s intellectual development. They were the years in which he, like Lydgate in
Middlemarch
, ‘felt the growth of an intellectual passion’. In his case, it was not anatomy that aroused this passion, but chemistry, and what inspired it was not a textbook, but a particularly gifted teacher called Augustus Klock. Known to his students as ‘Gus’, Klock was an extremely popular teacher, remembered affectionately for his fund of jokes, his infectious enthusiasm for his subject and the Herbert Hoover collars he wore. He was to stay at the Ethical Culture school until 1960 and was mentioned by several generations of students as an inspiring teacher, including some who, in various ways, followed in Oppenheimer’s footsteps. They include the brothers Hans and Ernest Courant, whose father was a friend of Oppenheimer’s and who both became professional physicists, and Robert Lazarus, a renowned theoretical physicist who founded the computing division at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. In the memories of all of them the inspirational influence of Klock is emphasised, just as it was by Oppenheimer himself. When Klock died in 1963, Oppenheimer wrote:

Klock was equally complimentary about Oppenheimer. When, in 1948, he was interviewed for a profile of Oppenheimer in
Time
magazine, Klock remarked: ‘He was so brilliant that no teacher would have been skilful enough to prevent him from getting an education.’

The way the science curriculum at the school was arranged was that physics was taught in the junior year, followed by chemistry in the senior year. In physics, Oppenheimer was introduced to atomic theory, which he described to the
Time
journalist as ‘A very exciting experience . . . beautiful, wonderful regularities!’ Seeing his son so inspired prompted Julius to arrange for Klock to give Robert a special individual intensive course during the summer of 1920. This summer was later recalled by Oppenheimer as an important turning point in his life, arousing in him a life-changing devotion to science:

For Robert’s sixteenth birthday, Julius had given him the twenty-seven-foot sloop mentioned earlier to sail around the Great South Bay during the family’s holidays at their home in Bay Shore. Oppenheimer chose for the boat the rather clever name
Trimethy
, after the chemical compound trimethylamine, a colourless liquid that is responsible for the characteristic smell of decomposing fish – a name that at one and the same time announces his love for chemistry and suggests one of the most evocative aspects of the seashore: its smell.

Until he acquired a boat, Oppenheimer had had neither aptitude nor interest in any physical activity. His PE scores at school were uniformly bad, he played as little sport as he could, and he even avoided using stairs whenever he could take a lift instead (his headmaster once wrote to his parents begging them to teach him how to use stairs, because his insistence on waiting for the lift was holding up classes). Once he got his own boat, however, he became adventurous to the point of recklessness. To the astonishment and dismay of Julius and, especially, Ella, Oppenheimer would sail his boat in all weathers, exploring every part of the Great South Bay and the Long Island Sound. Several times Julius had to come and rescue him and escort him home in a motor launch. Once, Oppenheimer and his younger brother Frank had to be rescued by the ‘Revenuers’, the coast-guard officers, because they had run aground on a mud bank. Another time, when trying to dock the boat at Cherry Grove on Fire Island, Robert misjudged the wind and slammed into the dock with such force that he knocked into the water a small girl who had come to watch him moor.

A description of what it was like to accompany the teenage Oppenheimer
on his sailing adventures has been left by Francis Fergusson, who has recalled a visit to the Oppenheimers’ Bay Shore home in 1921:

Fergusson was at this time Oppenheimer’s best friend. In fact, he was the only close friend Oppenheimer ever made while he was at the Ethical Culture School.

Oppenheimer’s friendship with Fergusson of course suggests that his claim to have been unable to remember the names of any of his classmates was almost certainly not true. Indeed, among his classmates were a few whose names it seems hard to believe he could not recall. There was Jane Didisheim, for example, who, in the early 1920s came often to the Oppenheimers’ flat on Riverside Drive, usually at the invitation of Mrs Oppenheimer, who evidently hoped to kindle a romance between Jane and her son. Exactly what Oppenheimer’s feelings for Jane were it is not possible to tell, but, whatever they were, they were sufficiently strong and sufficiently important to inspire him, when he was at Harvard, to write a story about her. (This story, like all Oppenheimer’s fiction, no longer exists.) Then there was Fred Bernheim, who was not strictly a classmate, being a year behind Oppenheimer at school, but was to become one of Oppenheimer’s closest friends at Harvard. Finally, there was Inez Pollak, who, together with her sister Kitty, visited Oppenheimer at Harvard, where her uncle, Paul Sachs (the son of Samuel Sachs, the co-founder of Goldman Sachs and an archetypal member of ‘Our Crowd’), was assistant director of the university’s Fogg Art Museum, to which he had made significant donations.

It is simply not possible that Oppenheimer could, at any time in his life after meeting him in 1920, have forgotten Francis Fergusson’s name. Towards the end of his life, he said of Fergusson: ‘He is to this day one of my closest friends and our paths have crossed often.’ What does seem likely, however, is that Oppenheimer might not have regarded this as an exception to his claim not to remember the names of any of his classmates, for the reason that he did not
really
regard Francis as having been one of them. Indeed, the fact that Fergusson was the single person at school with whom Oppenheimer became friends might be seen as a measure of
his distance from his classmates, rather than an exception to it. For, as opposed to Jane Didisheim, Fred Bernheim and Inez Pollak, Fergusson was not a product either of the Ethical Culture School or of the cultural milieu from which it had grown. He was only at the school for one year – his (and Oppenheimer’s) senior year, 1920–1 – and he was, as Oppenheimer evidently felt himself to be, an outsider, among both the Ethical Culture movement and the New York German Jewish community.