Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (14 page)

A week or so later, Oppenheimer wrote to Smith with news of another effort: ‘I shall send you my story, which, at present, is complete but illegible . . . it is taken with scarcely any colitic revisions from an incident of my cousin with my uncle and my aunt.’ In March, he told Smith that on an expedition to Cape Ann (a rocky peninsula on the northernmost tip of Massachusetts Bay, about thirty miles north of Boston), he had ‘received another inspiration to write a story’, which he described as ‘very short, exceedingly bad, and only barely justified by the difficulty of the thing’. Two months later, he sent Smith some more stories: ‘Here are the masterpieces . . . Please don’t read
Conquest
until the last; I am certain you will
dislike it.’ He assured Smith that Fergusson had liked three of the stories and begged him not to say that
Conquest
was ‘sentimental drivel’, for then: ‘I shall seek death.’

None of these stories survives in any form. Oppenheimer was thorough – and thoroughly effective – in his determination to deny posterity the chance to judge his merits as a novelist and short-story writer. The reason for this is no doubt that he became convinced he had no particular talent in these areas. In his letters during his first year at Harvard, one can see his faith in himself as a writer draining away in the face of the criticisms that his work received from his correspondents. Smith seems to have been comparatively encouraging, while tempering his enthusiasm with what he no doubt thought was gentle and constructive criticism. The criticisms that survive in Oppenheimer’s side of the correspondence are that the writing suffered from being an ‘imitation of Katherine Mansfield’ and from an ‘artificiality of emotional situation’. Oppenheimer seemed initially undaunted by these criticisms, defending himself against the first by claiming that his imitation was not ‘conscious’ and against the second by remarking: ‘I should not have the hardihood to write a story that was not based upon a very real emotional experience.’

In the face of Fergusson’s criticisms, however, Oppenheimer’s short-lived faith in his literary gifts collapsed altogether. One can see this collapse take place in a long letter Oppenheimer wrote to Fergusson during the Christmas vacation of 1923, which he was spending at Bay Shore, while Fergusson was in Oxford, having just finished his first term as a Rhodes scholar. The main purpose of the letter was ostensibly to respond to the opening chapters of a novel that Fergusson was working on, a copy of which he had sent to Oppenheimer. To Smith, Oppenheimer had commented pithily on these chapters, comparing them to the work of Fergusson’s by now famous brother, Harvey. He had, he remarked, ‘nothing but admiration for the Harveyesque slickness and totally unHarveyesque perspicacity’ of the opening of the novel. He was, however, ‘dismayed and rendered hysterical by the notes for its continuation’.

To Fergusson himself, Oppenheimer was a good deal less pithy. ‘I am overwhelmed,’ he told him, ‘at the ease and directness and literary slickness of the thing’:

What he singled out for praise was Fergusson’s ‘skill with people’, with the notable exception of the central character of the story, who,
Oppenheimer assumed, was based on Fergusson himself. ‘I find it hard to swallow,’ Oppenheimer told Fergusson, ‘in the same person, such naiveté and such sophistication.’ This led Oppenheimer into a revealing comparison between himself and Fergusson, both as people and as writers:

Having by now left the evaluation of Fergusson’s novel far behind, Oppenheimer is compelled to explain why he persists in his ‘dilettante dawdling in literature’ even though, by his own judgement, what he produces is ‘junk’:

It was the last time Oppenheimer wrote to Fergusson for eighteen months and the very last time he mentioned his own attempts at writing fiction in correspondence with anyone. At the age of nineteen, he seems, after spending much of the preceding year and a half making a sustained attempt to prove otherwise to himself and to his friends, to have decided
that, whatever he was or might become, he was
not
, and could never be, a writer. That particular ‘charade’ was over.

The truth of Isidor Rabi’s observation that Oppenheimer ‘lived a charade’ is especially evident in his letters from Harvard, in which he seems to be trying on personalities, attitudes and manners of speech, much in the way that adolescents characteristically experiment with different signatures. The physicist Jeremy Bernstein, who knew Oppenheimer well towards the end of his life, has said of one of these letters (a typical example) that ‘the whole tone makes one’s flesh creep’. And one can see what he means: the letters are written in a horribly self-consciously ‘literary’ style and are often painfully artificial. The tone is that of a young man trying desperately to be someone that he is not. That ‘someone’ might be identified as Francis Fergusson, or the kind of person that Fergusson represented, the type prized at Lowell’s Harvard. Oppenheimer’s father had acquired the voice and the manners of this type, and Oppenheimer himself had developed some of the literary, intellectual and cultural interests characteristic of its members, but, despite this, Oppenheimer – as his experiences at Harvard would have made clear to him – would never have been accepted as, or mistaken for, this type of student.

Another thing Oppenheimer was not – and Fergusson would again be a constant reminder of this – is the rather different but related type of person that one finds exalted in the literature of the South-west, the literature that formed the cultural backdrop to the ‘troika’ into which Oppenheimer had been accepted in the summer of 1922. In the novels and essays of Paul Horgan, Erna and Harvey Fergusson and the writers they emulated and admired, one finds a kind of ideology, at the centre of which is a particular type of man. One might define this man positively in terms of his courage, his honesty, his horsemanship, his preference for the country over the city, his indifference to making money, and so on, but one might equally define him negatively as
not
a New York Jewish businessman. Horgan and the Fergussons were too liberal, too sophisticated and too ‘civilised’ to be openly and publicly anti-Semitic, but the novelist Willa Cather, whom both Horgan and Harvey Fergusson admired deeply, had no such inhibitions in spelling out the kind of person who might embody the
opposite
of their collective ideal.

In Cather’s 1919 short story, ‘Scandal’, the villain was given a name and a history that would have struck a deep and uncomfortable chord with Oppenheimer: he is a rich, Jewish garment manufacturer named Sigmund Stein (the name and occupation are so close to those of Oppenheimer’s uncle Sigmund that one can’t help wondering if Cather had him in mind), who arrives penniless in the United States, but gets a job at ‘Rosenthal’s garment factory’ (again, the surname seems designed
to echo the ‘Rothfeld’ of Oppenheimer’s uncles) and works his way up the firm. At this point, ‘Stein’ becomes less like Sigmund Rothfeld, but still more uncomfortably like Julius Oppenheimer:

In his endeavour to be accepted into the best society, Stein acquires a fine art collection, learns Spanish and cultivates the company of poets and writers: ‘His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patron of the arts, a credit to the garment trade.’ Determined to present an impressive figure in New York society, Stein appears in public arm-in-arm with a famous concert singer called Connie Ayrshire. Or so New York society is led to believe. In fact the woman is an employee of Stein’s, a factory girl called Ruby, chosen for her physical similarity to Connie Ayrshire and dressed in clothes identical to those habitually worn by the singer. When Stein marries an heiress from California, the married couple move into a grand house on Fifth Avenue ‘that used to belong to people of a very different sort’, and Stein has no further use for Ruby, whom he abandons to her fate as an impoverished drunk. The final irony is that the real Connie Ayrshire is hired to perform at the Steins’ house-warming party, prompting her, at the end of the story, to liken her fate to that of Ruby: ‘She and I are in the same boat. We are both the victims of circumstance, and in New York so many of the circumstances are Steins.’

In her portrayal of Sigmund Stein, Cather has provided an instructive example of the kind of anti-Semitism that formed a backdrop to Oppenheimer’s years at Harvard, if not to his entire life. It is an example that is especially unsettling, not only in the strikingly exact parallels between Stein and the Rothfeld/Oppenheimers, but also in the close associations between Cather and the group of writers Oppenheimer had befriended. Paul Horgan had an especially deep admiration for Cather. He had been taught at school by Cather’s sister, and had met Cather herself briefly in Santa Fe, when she was researching her novel about the city’s famous Archbishop Lamy,
Death Comes for the Archbishop
. Horgan
himself was to write a huge biography of Lamy and an essay about Cather called ‘Willa Cather’s Incalculable Distance’, in which he celebrated her as ‘a true artist of prose’.

Oppenheimer was evidently influenced by his friends’ admiration of Willa Cather, at least to the extent of reading her 1923 novel,
A Lost Lady
, almost as soon as it came out. Whether he shared Horgan’s high opinion of Cather’s prose, Oppenheimer never said. What seems to have struck him most forcibly was that the world described by her was the world into which he had been accepted in the summer of 1922. ‘Doesn’t A Lost Lady remind you,’ he wrote to Smith in November 1923, ‘vaguely and sentimentally, of Mrs Page?’

At the heart of
A Lost Lady
is an elegiac sense of loss for the Old West, represented by its heroine, Marian Forrester, a woman whose enormous charm seems tied to a society that is passing away – that is, the society the virtues of which are extolled in the works of Harvey Fergusson and Paul Horgan: the pioneering South-west. In the words of one commentator, Mrs Forrester ‘represents civilization in the West, for all the amenities of gracious living which can make life the agreeable and charming thing which at best it can be’. Her husband is a railroad-builder who ‘embodies all the virtues which Willa Cather has led us to expect in a pioneer: the imagination to see, the strength to achieve, and an absolutely incorruptible moral integrity’. Like Franz Huning, as portrayed by the Fergussons, Mr Forrester, though he has made a good deal of money, is represented not as a businessman, but as a ‘natural aristocrat’, a type Cather explicitly contrasts with bankers and businessmen. In
A Lost Lady
the story of Marian Forrester is told largely through the eyes of a young man called Niel Herbert, who, as a teenager, develops an infatuation for her, which over the years is threatened by the changes in her brought about by the death of her husband and the collapse of the values she represents and the culture to which she belongs. What Cather portrays as destroying and then replacing that culture is the world of commerce and money-making, the world she had previously personified in the figure of Sigmund Stein, but which here is represented by a young lawyer named Ivy Peters. When, late in the story, Niel Herbert returns to his home town to discover that, as the Forresters have declined, Ivy Peters has flourished, he reflects: