American Prometheus (7 page)

The one thing Boyd and Oppenheimer did not have in common was music. “I was very fond of music,” Boyd recalled, “but once a year he would go to an opera, with me and Bernheim usually, and he’d leave after the first act. He just couldn’t take any more.” Herbert Smith had also noticed this peculiarity, and once said to Robert, “You’re the only physicist I’ve ever known who wasn’t also musical.”

INITIALLY, ROBERT WAS NOT SURE which academic path he should choose. He took a variety of unrelated courses, including philosophy, French literature, English, introductory calculus, history and three chemistry courses (qualitative analysis, gas analysis and organic chemistry). He briefly considered architecture, but because he had loved Greek in high school he also toyed with the thought of becoming a classicist or even a poet or painter. “The notion that I was traveling down a clear track,” he recalled, “would be wrong.” But within months he settled on his first passion, chemistry, as a major. Determined to graduate in three years, he took the maximum number of allowed courses, six. But each semester he also managed to audit two or three others. With virtually no social life, he studied long hours—though he made an effort to hide the fact because somehow it was important to him that his brilliance appear effortless. He read all three thousand pages of Gibbon’s classic history,
The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire.
He also read widely in French literature and began writing poetry, a few examples of which appeared in
Hound and Horn,
a student journal. “When I am inspired,” he wrote Herbert Smith, “I jot down verses. As you so neatly remarked, they aren’t either meant or fit for anyone’s perusal, and to force their masturbatic excesses on others is a crime. But I shall stuff them in a drawer for a while and, if you want to see them, send them off.” That year, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published, and when Robert read it, he instantly identified with the poet’s sparse existentialism. His own poetry dwelt with themes of sadness and loneliness. Early in his tenure at Harvard, he wrote these lines:

The dawn invests our substance with desire
And the slow light betrays us, and our wistfulness:
When the celestial sa fron
Is faded and grown colourless,
And the sun
Gone sterile, and the growing fire
Stirs us to waken,
We find ourselves again
Each in his separate prison
Ready, hopeless
For negotiation
With other men.

Harvard’s political culture in the early 1920s was decidedly conservative. Soon after Robert’s arrival, the university imposed a quota to restrict the number of Jewish students. (By 1922, the Jewish student population had risen to twenty-one percent.) In 1924, the
Harvard Crimson
reported on its front page that the university’s former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it “unfortunate” that growing numbers of the “Jewish race” were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are “prepotent” the children of such marriages “will look like Jews only.” While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites.

Oppenheimer was not oblivious to these issues. Indeed, early that autumn of 1922 he joined the Student Liberal Club, founded three years earlier as a forum for students to discuss politics and current events. In its early years, the club attracted large audiences with such speakers as the liberal journalist Lincoln Steffens, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and the pacifist A. J. Muste. In March 1923, the club took a formal stand against the university’s discriminatory admissions policies. Though it cultivated a reputation for radical views, Robert was not impressed, and wrote to Smith of the “asinine pomposity of the Liberal Club.” In this, his first introduction to organized politics, he felt himself “very much a fish out of water.” Nevertheless, lunching one day at the club’s rooms at 66 Winthrop Street, he was introduced to a senior, John Edsall, who quickly convinced him to help edit a new student journal. Drawing on his Greek, he persuaded Edsall to call the journal
The Gad-fly;
the title page reproduced a quotation in Greek describing Socrates as the gadfly of the Athenians. The first issue of
The Gad-fly
came out in December 1922, and Robert was listed on its masthead as an associate editor. He remembered writing a few unsigned articles, but
The Gad-fly
did not become a permanent fixture on campus and only four issues survive. However, Robert’s friendship with Edsall continued.

By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Robert decided that he had made a mistake in selecting chemistry as his major. “I can’t recall how it came over me that what I liked in chemistry was very close to physics,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s obvious that if you were reading physical chemistry and you began to run into thermodynamical and statistical mechanical ideas you’d want to find out about them. . . . It’s a very odd picture; I never had an elementary course in physics.” Though committed to a chemistry major, that spring he petitioned the Physics Department for graduate standing, which would allow him to take upper-level physics courses. To demonstrate that he knew something about physics, he listed fifteen books he claimed to have read. Years later, he heard that when the faculty committee met to consider his petition, one professor, George Washington Pierce, quipped, “Obviously, if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles.”

His primary tutor in physics became Percy Bridgman (1882–1961), who later won a Nobel Prize. “I found Bridgman a wonderful teacher,” Oppenheimer remembered, “because he never really was quite reconciled to things being the way they were and he always thought them out.” “A very intelligent student,” Bridgman later said of Oppenheimer. “He knew enough to ask questions.” But when Bridgman assigned him a lab experiment that required making a copper-nickel alloy in a self-built furnace, Oppenheimer “didn’t know one end of the soldering iron from the other.” Oppenheimer was so clumsy with the lab’s galvanometer that its delicate suspensions had to be replaced every time he used the apparatus. Robert nevertheless showed persistence and Bridgman found the results interesting enough to publish them in a scientific journal. Robert was both precocious and, on occasion, irritatingly brash. One evening Bridgman invited him to his home for tea. In the course of the evening, the professor showed his student a photograph of a temple built, he said, about 400 B.C. in Segesta, Sicily. Oppenheimer quickly disagreed: “I judge from the capitals on the columns that it was built about fifty years earlier.”

When the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr gave two lectures at Harvard in October 1923, Robert made a point of attending both. Bohr had just won the Nobel the previous year for “his investigations of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them.” Oppenheimer would later say that “it would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr.” Even on this occasion, his first glimpse of the man, he was deeply moved. Afterwards, Professor Bridgman noted that “[t]he impression he [Bohr] made on everyone who met him was a singularly pleasant one personally. I have seldom met a man with such evident singleness of purpose and so apparently free from guile . . . he is now idolized as a scientific god through most of Europe.”

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 . . .