American Prometheus (9 page)

Neither was it any comfort that some of his closest friends were headed toward early domesticity. His Harvard roommate, Fred Bernheim, was also in Cambridge and had met a woman who would soon become his wife. Robert could see that his friendship with Bernheim was, predictably, petering out. “There are some terrible complications with Fred,” Oppenheimer explained to Fergusson, “and an awful evening, two weeks ago, in the Moon. I have not seen him since, and blush when I think of him. And a Dostoievskian confession from him.”

Robert demanded much of his friends and sometimes his demands were just too much. “In a way,” Bernheim recalled, “it was a relief. . . . His intensity and his drive always made me feel slightly uncomfortable.” Bernheim felt drained in Robert’s presence. Robert stubbornly tried to revive the friendship, but Bernheim finally told him that he was going to marry and that “we couldn’t re-establish what we’d had at Harvard.” Robert was not so much offended as perplexed that someone he had known so well could decide to spin out of his orbit. Similarly, he was astonished to learn of the early marriage of Jane Didisheim, another classmate from the Ethical Culture School. Robert had always been fond of Jane and seemed taken aback that a woman his own age could already be married (to a Frenchman) and with child.

By the end of that autumn term, Fergusson concluded that Robert had a “first class case of depression.” His parents also had some inkling that their son was in crisis. According to Fergusson, Robert’s depression “was further increased and made specific by the struggle he was carrying on with his mother.” Ella and Julius now insisted on rushing across the Atlantic to be with their troubled son. “He wanted her,” Fergusson wrote in his diary, “but felt he ought to discourage her coming. . . . So that when he got on the train for Southampton where he was to meet her, he was exploding with every kind of wild revolution.”

Fergusson was a witness to only some of the extraordinary events that followed that winter. But clearly many of the details that Fergusson recorded could only have come from Robert—and it is quite possible, indeed, it is almost certain, that in recounting his experiences, Robert allowed his vivid imagination to color his stories. Fergusson’s “Account of the Adventures of Robert Oppenheimer in Europe” is dated simply “February 26,” and the context suggests that it was written contemporaneously in February 1926. In any case, Fergusson did not reveal his friend’s confidences until many years after Robert’s death.

According to Fergusson’s account, an episode occurred aboard the train that indicated that Robert was losing control emotionally. “He found himself in a third-class carriage with a man and woman who were making love [kissing and perhaps fondling each other, we assume], and though he tried to read thermodynamics he could not concentrate. When the man left he [Robert] kissed the woman. She did not seem unduly surprised. . . . But he was at once overcome with remorse, fell on his knees, his feet sprawling, and with many tears, begged her pardon.” Hastily gathering up his luggage, Robert then fled the compartment. “His reflections were so bitter that, on the way out of the station, when they were going downstairs, and he saw the woman below him, he was inspired to drop his suitcase on her head. Fortunately, he missed.” Assuming that Fergusson accurately reported the story he was told, it seems clear that Robert was caught up in a fantasy. He wanted to kiss the woman. He did kiss her? He didn’t? What happened exactly in that train compartment is uncertain. But what is reported to have occurred exiting the station surely did not happen, although Robert needed to tell Fergusson that it did. He was in trouble; he was losing control, and his fantastic tale was an expression of his distress.

In this agitated state, Robert proceeded on to the port where he was scheduled to greet his parents. The first person he saw on the gangplank was not his mother or father, but Inez Pollak, a classmate from the Ethical Culture School. Robert had corresponded with Inez while she attended Vassar, and he had seen her on occasion in New York during vacations. In an interview decades later, Fergusson said he thought that Ella “saw to it that there came with them [to England] a young woman that he [Robert] had seen in New York, and she tried to put them together and it didn’t work.”

In his “diary,” Fergusson writes that upon seeing Inez on the gangplank, Robert’s first impulse had been to turn and run. “Now it would have been difficult,” Fergusson wrote, “to say who was the more terrified, Inez or Robert.” For her part, Inez apparently saw in Robert an escape from her life in New York, where her mother had grown intolerable to her. Ella had agreed to escort her to England, thinking that Inez might help to distract Robert from his depression. But at the same time, according to Fergusson, Ella regarded Inez as “ridiculously unworthy” of her son, and as soon as she saw that Robert was actually showing an interest in the girl, she took Robert aside and spoke of how “tiresome it was for Inez to have come over.”

Inez nevertheless accompanied the Oppenheimers to Cambridge. Robert busied himself with his physics, but in the afternoons he began taking Inez on long walks about town. According to Fergusson, Robert went through the motions of courting her. He “did a very good, and chiefly rhetorical, imitation of being in love with her. She responded in kind.” For a short time, the couple were at least informally engaged. And then one evening they went to Inez’s room and crawled into bed together. “There they lay, tremulous with cold, afraid to do anything. And Inez began to sob. Then Robert began to sob.” After a time there was a knock at the door, and they heard Mrs. Oppenheimer’s voice saying, “Let me in, Inez, why won’t you let me in? I know Robert is in there.” Ella finally stomped off in a huff, and Robert emerged, miserable and thoroughly humiliated.

Pollak left almost immediately for Italy, taking with her a copy of Dostoyevsky’s
The Possessed
as a gift from Robert. Naturally, the collapse of this relationship only deepened Robert’s melancholy. Just before classes broke for Christmas, he wrote Herbert Smith a sad, wistful letter. Apologizing for his silence, he explained that “Really I have been engaged in the far more difficult business of making myself for a career. . . . And I have not written, simply because I have lacked the comfortable conviction & assurance which are necessary to an adequately splendid letter.” Referring to Francis, he wrote, “He has changed a great deal. Exempli gratia, he is happy. . . . He knows everyone at Oxford; he goes to tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell, the high priestess of civilized society, & the patroness of [T. S.] Eliot & Berty [Bertrand Russell]. . . .”

To the concern of his friends and family, Robert’s emotional state continued to deteriorate. He seemed oddly unsure of himself and stubbornly morose. Among other complaints, he talked about his troubled relationship with his head tutor, Patrick Blackett. Robert liked Blackett and eagerly sought his approval, but Blackett, being a hands-on, experimental physicist, hounded Robert to do more of what he wasn’t good at—laboratory work. Blackett probably thought nothing of it, but in Oppenheimer’s agitated state, the relationship became a source of intense anxiety.

Late that autumn of 1925, Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him. Consumed by feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he “poisoned” an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk. Jeffries Wyman later said, “Whether or not this was an imaginary apple, or a real apple, whatever it was, it was an act of jealousy.” Fortunately, Blackett did not eat the apple; but university officials somehow were informed of the incident. As Robert himself confessed to Fergusson two months later, “He had kind of poisoned the head steward. It seemed incredible, but that was what he said. And he had actually used cyanide or something somewhere. And fortunately the tutor discovered it. Of course there was hell to pay with Cambridge.” If the alleged “poison” was potentially lethal, what Robert had done amounted to attempted murder. But this seems improbable, given what happened next. More likely, Robert had laced the apple with something that merely would have made Blackett sick; but this was still a serious matter—and grounds for expulsion.

As Robert’s parents were still visiting Cambridge, the university authorities immediately informed them of what had happened. Julius Oppenheimer frantically—and successfully—lobbied the university not to press criminal charges. After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London. As Robert’s old Ethical Culture School mentor, Herbert Smith, put it, “He was retained at Cambridge for a while only on condition that he had periodic interviews with a psychiatrist.”

Robert traveled to London for regularly scheduled sessions, but it was not a good experience. A Freudian psychoanalyst diagnosed dementia praecox, a now archaic label for symptoms associated with schizophrenia. He concluded that Oppenheimer was a hopeless case and that “further analysis would do more harm than good.”

Fergusson went to meet Oppenheimer one day just after Robert had finished a session with the psychiatrist. “He looked crazy at that time. . . . I saw him standing on the corner, waiting for me, with his hat on one side of his head, looking absolutely weird. . . . He was sort of standing around, looking like he might run or do something drastic.” The two old friends took off together at a more than brisk pace, Robert walking his peculiar walk with his feet turned out at a severe angle. “I asked him how it had been. He said that the guy was too stupid to follow him and that he knew more about his troubles than the doctor did, which was probably true.” At the time, Fergusson was still unaware of the “poisoned apple” incident, so he did not understand what had precipitated the psychiatric visits. And though he could see that Robert was in considerable distress, he nevertheless had confidence that his friend had the “ability to bring himself up, to figure out what his trouble was, and to deal with it.”

The crisis, however, had not passed. During the Christmas holidays, Robert found himself walking along the Brittany coast near the village of Cancale, where his parents had taken him for the holiday. It was a rainy, dreary winter day and years later Oppenheimer said he had a vivid realization: “I was on the point of bumping myself off. This was chronic.”

Sometime shortly after New Year’s 1926, Fergusson arranged to meet Oppenheimer in Paris, where Robert’s parents had taken him for the remainder of the six-week-long winter break. On one of their long walks through the streets of Paris, Robert finally confided in his friend, explaining what had precipitated his visits to the London psychiatrist. At this point, Robert thought the Cambridge authorities might not even let him return. “My reaction was dismay,” Fergusson recalled. “But then, when he talked about it, I thought he had sort of gone beyond it, and that he was having trouble with his father.” Robert acknowledged that his parents were very worried, that they were trying to help him, but that “they were not succeeding.”

Robert was getting very little sleep and, according to Fergusson, he “began to get very queer.” One morning he locked his mother in her hotel room and left. Ella was furious. After this incident, Ella insisted that he see a French psychoanalyst. After several sessions this doctor announced that Robert was suffering a “
crise morale
” associated with sexual frustration. He prescribed “
une femme
” and “a course of aphrodisiacs.” Years later, Fergusson observed of that time: “He [Robert] was completely at a loss about his sex life.”

Soon, Robert’s emotional crisis took another violent turn. Sitting in his Paris hotel room with Robert, Fergusson sensed that his friend was in “one of his ambiguous moods.” Perhaps in an attempt to divert him from his depression, Fergusson showed him some poetry written by his girlfriend, Frances Keeley, and then announced that he had proposed to Keeley and she had accepted. Robert was stunned at this news, and he snapped. “I leaned over to pick up a book,” Fergusson recalled, “and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck. I was quite scared for a little while. We must have made some noise. And then I managed to pull aside and he fell on the ground weeping.”

Robert may have been provoked by simple jealousy over his friend’s love affair. He had already lost one friend, Fred Bernheim, to a woman; perhaps the thought of losing another under the same circumstances was just too much for him at that point. Fergusson himself noted the “deep glares that Robert kept darting theatrically at her [Frances Keeley]. How easy it was for him to act the violent lover; how I know the feeling from experience!”

Despite the choking incident, Fergusson stood by his friend. Indeed, he may even have felt some guilt, since he had been forewarned in a letter by none other than Herbert Smith, who knew Robert’s vulnerabilities all too well: “I’ve a notion, by the way, that your ability to show him [Robert] about should be exercised with great tact, rather than in royal profusion. Your [two] years start and social adaptivity are likely to make him despair.
And instead of flying at your throat—as I remember your being ready to do
for George What’s-his-name . . . when you were similarly awed by him
(italics added)
—
I’m afraid he’d merely cease to think his own life worth living.” Smith’s letter raises the question of whether Fergusson, an aspiring writer, may have conflated his own experience with “George” and Oppenheimer’s behavior. But Robert would apologize in a manner that makes Fergusson’s story credible.

Fergusson understood that his friend had a “neurotic” streak, but he also thought he could see Robert growing out of it. “He knew that I knew that this was a momentary spasm. . . . I think that I would have been more worried if I hadn’t realized how rapidly he was changing. . . . I liked him very much.” The two men would remain lifelong friends. All the same, for some months after the assault, Fergusson felt it prudent to be on his guard. He moved out of the hotel, and he hesitated when Robert insisted that he visit him in Cambridge that spring. Robert was no doubt as perplexed by his own behavior as was Francis. He wrote his friend a few weeks after the incident that “You should have, not a letter, but a pilgrimage to Oxford, made in a hair shirt, with much fasting and snow and prayer. But I will keep my remorse and gratitude, and the shame I feel for my inadequacy to you, until I can do something rather less useless for you. I do not understand your forbearance nor your charity, but you must know that I will not forget them.”
⁴
Through all this turmoil, Robert had become something of his own psychoanalyst, consciously trying to confront his emotional fragility. In a letter to Fergusson on January 23, 1926, he suggested that his mental state had something to do with the “
awful fact of excellence . . .
it is that fact now, combined with my inability to solder two copper wires together, which is probably succeeding in getting me crazy.” He then confessed, “I am not well, and I am afraid to come to see you now for fear something melodramatic might happen.”