Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (10 page)

Fergusson was, as it were, the very opposite of a New York Jew: he was a gentile from the South-west, the product of pioneering frontier people who were the very epitome of Theodore Roosevelt’s conception of true ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Americans. Fergusson’s family (on his mother’s side German and on his father’s side Irish) had been in the United States for several generations and was, at the time Oppenheimer met him, one of the most established and prominent families in New Mexico. Francis’s father, H.B. Fergusson, had been a congressman for New Mexico, first in the 1890s when it was a mere territory and then, after it became a state in 1912, as its first representative in the House of Representatives. When Francis Fergusson came to the Ethical Culture School in 1920, his father had been dead for five years, but was still widely remembered, especially in the South-west, as the author of the Fergusson Act of 1898, which allocated four million acres of land in New Mexico for educational and other public purposes.

The Fergusson family was not as wealthy as many of the families who sent their children to the Ethical Culture School. They did not have the kind of money that the Goldmans, the Sachs or the Seligmans had. But they had things that Oppenheimer’s father, his mother and, above all, Oppenheimer himself, craved: they had literary culture, they had the kind of ‘class’ that comes from membership of America’s cultural, intellectual and political elite, and they had a place in the very creation of America. They lived in a grand, adobe-style house in Albuquerque called La Glorieta, which itself has a significant place in the history of the South-west. Widely regarded as the oldest house in Albuquerque, its origins lie in the seventeenth century, when it was built for, and inhabited by, members of the region’s ruling Spanish American elite. During the period (1821–48) when New Mexico was a province of Mexico rather than a territory of the United States, La Glorieta was the home of Manuel Armijo, the governor of the province. Fergusson’s family acquired the house in 1864, when his maternal grandfather, Franz Huning, bought it as a home for himself, his wife and their growing family.

As one of the most prominent characters of the old frontier days, Franz Huning is something of a legendary figure in New Mexico. The story of his life was told by him in his memoir,
Trader on the Sante Fe Trail
, and has been retold many times since, in histories of the South-west, in
biographies and in fiction. Arriving in the United States as a teenager in 1848, Huning went west and lived the adventurous and perilous life of a frontier trader, driving oxen along the Sante Fe Trail. When he settled in Albuquerque he opened a general store, which was extremely successful, allowing him to invest in a variety of other ventures, including a flour mill, a sawmill and various ranches and farms. In addition to La Glorieta, he had a very grand house built for himself and his family in a distinctly European style, which became famous locally as ‘Castle Huning’. Towards the end of his life Huning was losing rather than amassing wealth, and it was an important part of the Fergusson family mythology to regard him as a pioneer and a merchant-adventurer, rather than a businessman. He belonged, they insisted, to the ‘Old West’ and, as such, was uncomfortable and out of place with modern commercialism. When his daughter, Francis Fergusson’s mother, was interviewed in the 1930s about her famous father, she emphasised his cultural and scholarly achievements rather than his money-making skills, remarking: ‘I believe he always liked languages better than business.’ She was especially concerned to tell the interviewer about her father’s fluency in Spanish and his role as an interpreter during the American occupation of New Mexico.

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.

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 community, 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.