IN THE SUMMER OF 1924, fourteen-year-old Kitty Puening was preparing to enter high school in Aspinwall. Having arrived in the United States at age three, Kitty's first language was German. Although she spoke English without a trace of an accent, she also spoke perfect German. Kitty's mother had been taking her to Germany for the summers; their last trip was in 1913, a year before World War I erupted in Europe. The Puenings were whispered to have important, possibly royal, connections, but it seems likely that it was Kitty's mother, the handsome and imperious Kaethe, who originated the whispering. Over the next few years, though, Franz Puening would caution his wife not to speak of their family in Germany, especially after the sinking of the Lusitania and the American declaration of war on Germany in 1917.
Franz was determined to become an American citizen, so he did his work at the company and suffered the slurs sometimes spoken behind his back. Being labeled an "enemy alien" must have been especially grating to Kaethe, who was inordinately proud of her German heritage and had a brother and cousins fighting for the Kaiser. When the war was over, Kaethe would resume her summer holidays to Europe so young Kitty could grow up knowing her Vissering relatives, including Kaethe's aunt Apollinaire Keitel. In Germany, Kitty became acquainted with the world her mother loved, and perhaps she also met her mother's cousin, Wilhelm Keitel. As an officer attached to the Ministry of Defense, he was secretly working to triple the size of the German army.42 And he would become a devoted follower of the man being proclaimed a new German messiah, Adolph Hitler.
Like other immigrants of the period, Kitty's father might have imagined America as a classless society without prejudice. The anti-German propaganda during the war would have disabused him of that notion. And even if the Puenings didn't socialize with the Carnegies, Fricks, or Mellons in Pittsburgh, Kaethe would see to it that her only child would know how to navigate in their world. Kitty learned to do all those things expected of a young woman from a well-to-do family. Typically, these girls learned to ride and jump, often competing at horse shows and riding to the hounds. It is no surprise that Kitty, small, lithe, and without fear, would become an excellent horsewoman.
In America, the lively Kitty learned to behave like a good little German girl: to sit quietly, hands folded, no fidgeting. To speak only when spoken to. To work hard and obey the rules. (In her twenties, a childless Kitty would write: "I often think that when the time comes I will turn into one of those stern German ogre-parents whose children are so well trained that they seem more like little monsters than like children. Only of course I won't.")43
4
1926: AFTER CORSICA, ROBERT WOULD WRITE HIS YOUNGER BROTHER, "I FEEL ABOUT AS MANLY AS A TADPOLE OR A CAULIFLOWER."
Along with the usual detritus accumulated by students on holiday, their packs were weighted with books—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust. The three friends gathered on the island of Corsica that spring; the plan was to hike for ten days, explore the wild island in the Ligurian Sea south of France, then go on to Sardinia.
The three young Americans selected Corsica for its peaks, high enough to produce snow; for its ancient isolation and rugged splendor; its hiking trails, beaches and mild Mediterranean climate. Its Napoleonic connection might have tempted them as well, the little French emperor having been born in the town of Ajaccio a century and a half earlier.
They were young men on the cusp. Weighted by expectations from without and within, they were beginning to settle into paths, both professional and personal, expected of the gifted and privileged, a description that fit all three. Jeffries Wyman and John Edsall—both from old Boston families and exceedingly bright—had become close friends at Harvard and would remain so all of their lives. Initially, Wyman had read philosophy while Edsall studied chemistry; by their postgraduate year, both had declared for science. Wyman took advanced courses in mathematics, thermodynamics and organic chemistry while Edsall was a first-year medical student. During their last year at Harvard, they had become friends with an undergraduate named Robert Oppenheimer. Edsall found the younger man to be "a phenomenal person, with immense intellectual power and intense interest in literature, philosophy and other subjects that went far beyond science." Wyman found Robert to be "a little precious and perhaps a little arrogant but very interesting, full of ideas."44
The young men were of that subset of students who find romance in science, wonder in ideas gleaned from books, delight in study. Consequently—this was true especially of Oppenheimer, easily accepted as the most intelligent of the three—they had a certain ineptness in matters social and emotional.
Almost two years earlier, in the summer of 1924, Wyman and Edsall had made their way to England together on a slow steamer also carrying 700 cattle—a crossing they would not forget. A year later, Oppenheimer arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, to work in the new field of quantum physics. The three found each other, as well as another Harvard friend, Francis Fergusson, who was studying at Oxford and had known Robert since the Ethical Culture School and their boyhood summers in New Mexico.
Not long after his arrival in England, Robert found himself navigating a series of terrifying shoals between late adolescence and manhood. For the first time, his great advantage—his intellectual superiority—was no longer enough. At Cavendish, the emphasis was on experimental physics; he needed to be able to manipulate complicated laboratory equipment. But he was not good at it. Neither were his social skills up to British standards. It didn't help that Francis Fergusson talked about invitations to the salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom Robert described in a letter to a mutual friend as "the high priestess of civilized society and the patrons of Eliot and Berty." (T. S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes.)45 Robert was intensely jealous of his old friend's social status, and his old friend seems not to have made any attempt to alleviate Robert's envy, or for that matter to include him. Increasingly miserable in life as well as in his science, Robert for the first time felt his future to be in jeopardy. Reason enough for his emotions to become unstable, his behavior bizarre, and for his parents to come steaming across the Atlantic to the rescue. To complicate matters, Robert had left what has ever after been referred to as "a poison apple" on his tutor's desk. Exactly what that was has never been fully explained.46
Robert's breakdown coincided with the rise of psychoanalysis; it was the age of Freud and Jung. Although he was to read widely in the field of psychology, which would become one of the enduring passions of his life, at this time Robert was not convinced of the value of analysis. His mental condition continued to deteriorate: one psychiatrist delivered a diagnosis of dementia praecox (schizophrenia). For the holidays, Robert's parents whisked their troubled son away to Brittany, a landscape they must have felt would calm him. It did not; his mood darkened and he contemplated suicide.47
Fergusson joined the family in Paris, where Robert became increasingly troubled, and especially when Fergusson announced he was contemplating marriage. Fergusson described how Robert attempted to strangle him one afternoon without warning.48 After the initial surprise, Fergusson easily held Robert off, then comforted him when he broke down in tears. Another day Robert locked his mother in her hotel room, which was enough reason to be sent to yet another analyst in France. (The move was not original. On an earlier Oppenheimer family holiday in Paris, Frank had locked Robert in their shared bathroom, then blithely told their parents that his brother had decided not to join them for that day's outing.) This time, according to Fergusson, the French psychiatrist attributed Robert's troubles to a "crise morale" and recommended aphrodisiacs and "une femme." Robert attempted to act on the advice, with humiliating consequences. Many years later—long after Robert's status had eclipsed his friend's—Fergusson would say that Robert "went to bed with several whores, but without being able to raise the slightest enthusiasm."49
After returning to Cambridge, Robert wrote a conciliatory note to Fergusson, promising to make it up to him
someday (which he did). Then he saw his third psychoanalyst in four months. This seems, according to some versions, to have been a requirement for being allowed to stay on at Cambridge. In the midst of his turmoil, Robert had still been able to apply himself. Edsall noted that he was joining the right science clubs and was beginning to understand the kind of physics he wanted to pursue. He was, in fact, beginning to position himself to be in the right place at the right time, and to play a central role in one of the most exciting scientific upheavals in history.
BY SPRING, WHEN ROBERT JOINED Wyman and Edsall on a ten-day walking vacation in Corsica, he was already getting a grasp on his science and his life. Edsall had earlier noticed in Robert a "tremendous inner turmoil, in spite of which he kept on doing a tremendous amount of work; thinking, reading, discussing things, but obviously with a great sense of inner anxiety and alarm."50 It was Wyman—a veteran hiker—who thought a walking vacation on Corsica and Sardinia would do all three of them good.
The young men shouldered their packs and began their walk around the narrow, rock-strewn pathways of the island, stopping now and again to study the beauty of the ancient landscape. They endured drenching rainstorms and fleainfested inns with the tolerance of the young and hardy. Sometimes they slept in the open, under a cork oak tree or alongside one of the tafoni rock formations that mark the island landscape.
Robert's anguish did not stop them from enjoying the good wines of the region, the food, the fresh air and their debates over the relative merits of poets and novelists. Dostoyevsky is superior to Tolstoy, Robert insisted: "He gets to the soul and torment of man."51 At night, by flashlight, he tore through Marcel Proust's A La Recherché du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The words spilled off the page, in long and lingering sentences that seemed to speak to him.
At a time when Oppenheimer's friends began to vanish into marriage, he read in Proust about a kind of love that "possesses one's soul before love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a friend."52
Long years later, Robert Oppenheimer would be able to recite from memory another passage—in which a lesbian laments the cruel words said to her father: "Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever other names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty."53 For the rest of his life, he would consider evil to be an unavoidable part of the human experience.
Robert had immersed himself in the contemporary works of Freud and Jung. In Corsica he would combine those two disciplines with Proust; the three would provide him with a new vision of his universe. Robert's contemporary, the critic Edmund Wilson, would say that In Search of Lost Time was the literary equivalent of Einstein's theory, insisting: "Proust has re-created the novel from the point of view of relativity; he has supplied for the first time in literature an equivalent on the full scale for the new theory of physics."54 Proust's relentless probing of personality, his fascination with detail, his close analysis of the human condition had, in some profound way, provided answers the young Robert was seeking, and lifted his spirits above the pall of his depression.
As their Corsican holiday was drawing to a close, the group was having dinner at an inn when the waiter approached to tell Robert when the next boat for France was departing. Surprised, the others asked him why he was leaving early. His answer was that he had done "a terrible thing." He told them that he had left a poison apple on the desk of his tutor, Patrick Blackett, and said he was going back to Cambridge to face his fate.55
This could not have been the same "poison apple" he had mentioned some months earlier, when his emotional torments had threatened his Cambridge career. Edsall and Wyman decided the apple must be a metaphor, a hallucination.56 Neither thought to ask. It was one of Robert's obfuscations, a shimmer of a mystery, but with Blackett at the heart of it.
Nonetheless, the gray fog that had descended on Robert's mind and heart indeed seemed to have dissipated. After Corsica, he felt lighter, more content, "much kinder and more tolerant," as he would say. He was ready to face his future. Back in Cambridge later that same spring, Robert would write to Frank, his fourteen-year-old brother, at home in New York, "Some day you must come with me to Corsica. It's a great place, with every virtue from wine to glaciers, and from langouste to brigantines."57
As the years passed and Robert's fame grew, the story of an epiphany on Corsica would be added to the literature of his legend, with variations on the theme of a woman and a life-changing love affair. When an early biographer asked Robert to explain what had happened to him in Corsica in that spring of 1926, he reportedly said: "It was a great thing in my life, a great and lasting part of it." And then: "What you need to know is that it was not a mere love affair, not a love affair at all, but love."58
5
RUTH WEIGHS HER FUTURE AND ENCOUNTERS THE OPPENHEIMER BROTHERS, AND BOTH KITTY AND JEAN GO TO EUROPE FOR THE SUMMER
By April 1930, Ruth and Richard Tolman had been married for more than five years. She would be thirty-seven in October. She knew Richard must be disappointed, the women in his family having produced so many children. "Oh Darling, I want to be able to give you babies. I am so sorry that I am no good," she had written when he was on one of his frequent trips. Each new month held the promise of pregnancy; each month, tears came easily. She called Richard her "darling lamb."59 Yet she had not been brought up to be a lady of leisure. If children weren't to be part of their lives, she had no time to lose in considering her future. What she needed was meaningful work.
Ruth's husband made a good living, and there were plenty of volunteer jobs she could take. She chose instead a half-time job, paying $900 a year—a substantial salary for the time—as an assistant in the clinic at Los Angeles' Juvenile Hall.60 Her main responsibility was to give psychological tests to the young wards of the court—delinquents—and to report the test conclusions to the court referee. Day after day she found herself facing angry, tough, disturbed young people, almost all from poor families in areas of Los Angeles that she had never encountered. But as a minister's daughter, she had seen her share of families in crisis and she did not shrink from the harsh realities of life.
Two years later she moved to another half-time position—for $1,200 a year—at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her experience at Juvenile Hall qualified her to do research and counsel students. Her title, associate in psychology, allowed her to audit courses. Though not for credit, the courses would help her decide if she wanted to pursue a graduate degree, which in turn would qualify her for more responsible positions. Ruth eventually enrolled at Occidental College, some 10 miles from the Tolman home, to begin work on a master's degree. A young friend, Natalie Raymond, was around when Ruth was writing her master's thesis and helped with the details: "Nat and I have been working like horses. . ."61 But even with Nat's company and her own career in the making, Ruth missed Richard intensely when he traveled. She would write in more than one letter, "Darling, the house is empty and seems all wrong with you away, and I so lonely for you."62
While Ruth developed her own future, she applied her considerable charm to Richard's university obligations, including the recruitment of bright young physicists to the select faculty at the California Institute of Technology. Robert Oppenheimer, who had completed his Ph.D. at Göttingen, was high on the list. His reputation preceded him: intellectually brilliant but tightly wound. Tense. He excelled in what could be learned. He fancied himself a connoisseur of food and wine. His manners were immaculate. Most of all, he was one of that small band of bright young men newly returned from the continent, ready to spread the gospel of nuclear physics to America.
Every major college in the country want
ed him. Robert was known to love the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, which gave Caltech a geographic advantage; more important, the school had the only strong theoretical-physics department on the West Coast, thanks in large part to Richard. Four hundred miles to the north, at Berkeley, the University of California had Ernest Lawrence doing groundbreaking work in experimental physics, but the school had no theoreticalphysics department. Helping to coax Robert to Caltech was an unwritten part of Ruth's job description.
ROBERT AND HIS SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD brother Frank had breezed into Pasadena that August of 1928, driving an eight-cylinder Chrysler roadster, new but battered, its cloth top in shreds. Robert, twenty-four, sported a broken arm, which he carried rather tenderly in a bright red sling, a color chosen, he said, to cheer up his brother. Frank was wearing a suit that threatened to come apart at the seams—it had been sprayed with battery acid when the two had flipped the roadster on a high mountain pass between Colorado and California. The roads indicated on the map were, they had discovered, mostly wishful thinking, and the roadster and its occupants were dusty but somehow elegant after the brave but futile effort.
Robert's manners were strangely old-fashioned. Frank was perfectly natural and easy, as if to balance his brother. Despite the difference in their ages, it was clear that the two were friends as well as brothers, each deferring to the other. It was Frank who told the story of the road trip west. Ruth would have listened carefully to the story he told.63
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