Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  At the time that he and Oppenheimer were introduced by Black, Edsall had just been chosen by the Liberal Club to be the editor of its new journal, which did not yet have a name. It is an indication of the impact Oppenheimer made on Edsall that the title he chose was one suggested to him by Oppenheimer: The Gad-Fly. This was an allusion to Socrates’s description of himself in Plato’s Apology as a gadfly whose role in society was ‘to sting people, and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth’. Eagerly embracing this image, Edsall, in his editorial for the first issue, published in December 1922, announced: ‘Among the collegiate herd of sacred cows and their worshippers now buzzes the Gad-Fly.’

  Oppenheimer was persuaded by Edsall to serve as assistant editor and to write for the journal for the first issue and for the second, which came out in March 1923. In truth, however, Oppenheimer had no appetite for this, or, it seems, for any other role in Harvard student politics, and after that left the Liberal Club and wrote no more for its journal. His decision to leave the club at that particular time confirms the impression that he was determined to have nothing at all to do with the controversy at Harvard over the issue of Jewish students. For it was precisely at that time, with Lowell’s Committee on Methods of Sifting Candidates for Admissions about to submit its report, that the issue was coming to a head and that the Liberal Club got involved in it, taking a public stand against discriminatory admissions policies. Even while he was a member, Oppenheimer’s attitude to the Liberal Club was one of lofty alienation. ‘I don’t know what that was all about,’ he later said of his brief participation in it. ‘I felt like a fish out of water.’ In only his second letter to Smith from Harvard, written in November 1922, he seemed determined to distance himself from the club, referring disparagingly to its ‘assinine pomposity’.

  Whether he was aware of it or not (and it is hard to see how he could not be aware of it), Oppenheimer, by quitting the Liberal Club, was cutting off his most promising means of making new friends. He had, as far as one can tell, little more to do with Algernon Black and, it would appear, not much to do with Edsall either, until the two of them renewed their friendship at Cambridge, in England, in 1925. This left him with the ‘unit’ that he had formed with Fred Bernheim. The only other person Oppenheimer would allow to join this ‘unit’ – and, apart from Bernheim, the only close friend Oppenheimer had at Harvard – was another chemistry student, William Clouser Boyd. Boyd was a gentile from Missouri. He has recalled how he and Oppenheimer were classmates in Chemistry 3, which was a course in qualitative analysis.fn9 Recognising Boyd as the most advanced student in the class, Oppenheimer used to show him his work to check that it was right, much to the irritation of some of the other classmates. ‘Who is this guy Oppenheimer who keeps coming to you?’ Boyd remembers one of them saying. ‘I think he’s a pest.’ ‘I didn’t think he was a pest,’ Boyd insisted; it was obvious to him that Oppenheimer was ‘a very talented person, very able and very sensitive, and we had lots of interests in common aside from science. We both tried to write and we wrote poetry, sometimes in French, and we wrote stories in imitation of Chekhov.’ Here, Boyd and Bernheim differed. While Oppenheimer’s literary interests were part of what drew him and Boyd together, they threatened to drive him and Bernheim apart – Bernheim remarking that he found Oppenheimer ‘a little bit precious in the way he quoted French poetry, Verlaine, Baudelaire and so on. And I tended to resent it.’

  To Boyd’s surprise, the one art Oppenheimer had very little interest in, or understanding of, was music. ‘I was very fond of music,’ he remembers, ‘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. Totally amusical, I thought then.’ It was a trait that others have commented on as well. Herbert Smith, for example, once said to Oppenheimer: ‘You’re the only physicist I’ve ever known who wasn’t also musical, and I never heard you refer to music.’

  Like Bernheim, Boyd in later life became an eminent scientist; in his case a professor of immunology at Boston. In the 1950s he was famous for his work on the genetics of race, and, under the name Boyd Ellanby, also for his science-fiction writing, two of his best-known stories being ‘Category Phoenix’ and ‘Chain Reaction’. In a popular science book he wrote with Isaac Asimov called Races and People, Boyd used his research to undermine ideas about ‘races’ that were then prevalent, including the very ideas that had had such a baleful influence on Oppenheimer’s time at Harvard. There is, Boyd and Asimov argued, no such thing as the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race, nor, they insisted, is ‘Jew’ a racial category. Widespread adoption of these views in the 1920s would have utterly transformed Oppenheimer’s life.

  Boyd, Bernheim and Oppenheimer were, Boyd has said, ‘the closest friends any of us had’. The three of them formed a ‘troika’ that was a kind of counterpart to the troika that Oppenheimer had formed in the summer of 1922 with Paul Horgan and Francis Fergusson. Between the two ‘troikas’ there was remarkably little contact. With regard to Horgan, this is hardly suprising. During Oppenheimer’s first year at Harvard, Horgan was still in New Mexico, completing his final year as a ‘cadet’ at the Military Institute in Roswell. Then, in Oppenheimer’s remaining two years, Horgan was in Rochester. The two kept in touch with each other by letter, and, in the summer of 1923, Horgan spent some time at the Oppenheimer family summer house on Long Island, where he evidently met Bernheim. In his later letters to Horgan, Oppenheimer occasionally mentions Boyd and Bernheim, but there was never any real opportunity for Horgan to get to know Oppenheimer’s Harvard friends very well.

  On the other hand, as a fellow student at Harvard, Fergusson could very easily have become acquainted with Bernheim and Boyd. Fergusson, of course, had already been at Harvard for a year when Oppenheimer arrived, and during Oppenheimer’s freshman year was a sophomore majoring in biology and living in private accommodation in Prescott Street, a short walk from Standish Hall. Oppenheimer saw a good deal of Fergusson at Harvard, and yet Bernheim, when asked years later, was doubtful that he ever met Fergusson. Even more strangely, after Fergusson left, Oppenheimer’s letters to him from Harvard never once mention Bernheim.fn10 They mention Boyd occasionally, though not very often, and at least once in a tone that reveals Fergusson took a rather condescending attitude towards him, an attitude with which Oppenheimer seems willing to acquiesce (‘Boyd, as you charitably predicted, has improved,’ he wrote to Fergusson during the Christmas vacation of his second year). Still, between Bernheim and Fergusson there seems to have been absolutely no contact whatever.

  One might have thought that Oppenheimer’s insistence on compartmentalising his friends was based on a desire to separate them into literary and scientific groups, with no contact between the two, and that this is why Fergusson, while at Harvard, had little to do with Boyd and nothing at all to do with Bernheim. The problem with this is that Oppenheimer’s friends do not lend themselves to such rigid compartmentalisation. One might, roughly speaking, regard Bernheim, Boyd and Oppenheimer as a scientific group and Fergusson, Horgan and Oppenheimer as a literary one, and it is true that Bernheim had little interest in literature and Horgan no interest in science. But Fergusson and Boyd combined literary and scientific interests, and in both cases that intellectual breadth was one of the most important things that drew them to Oppenheimer, and him to them. For Oppenheimer, and for at least two of his closest friends, it was crucial that science and literature were not kept in strictly separate compartments.

  It is more likely, I think, that Oppenheimer kept Boyd and (especially) Bernheim away from Fergusson simply because he did not think they were good enough for Fergusson. Oppenheimer liked and respected Bernheim and Boyd, but he did not venerate them as he did Fergusson. From the available correspondence and the reminiscences of the people involved, one gets a strong sense of a ‘pecking order’ among Oppenheimer’s friends, with Bernheim and Boyd looking up to Oppenheimer, while Oppenheimer in turn looked up to Fergusson and (to a slightly
lesser extent) to Horgan. Fergusson, one feels, was not accustomed to looking up at people, preferring to look down on them. He could even, on occasion, sound condescending towards Oppenheimer himself, well aware of being an ideal to which Oppenheimer aspired. Soon after Oppenheimer arrived at Harvard, Fergusson wrote to Smith, saying that he had ‘seen something of Robert lately’ and reporting: ‘his conversation this year is a caricature of yours, ornamented with some of Paul’s and my more elaborate affectations’.

  In the same letter Fergusson told Smith about a club he had set up, which was, apart from the Liberal Club, the only club at Harvard that Oppenheimer joined. Its purpose was to discuss science and the philosophy of science at a deeper level than was possible in undergraduate courses. Oppenheimer later referred to it as ‘a little science club which was partly faculty but mostly graduate’. As Fergusson described it to Smith, the motivation in setting the club up was to ‘get professors to say interesting things’: ‘We meet Mondays in one of the members’ rooms – a big room, with a fireplace and deep chairs. We invite a professor to come and address us on anything he wants. When he has finished we discuss. Such at least is the plan.’ Among its members, Fergusson told Smith, were ‘an aberrant Cambridge Puritan, a boy from Atlanta, a New York German, learned in chemistry, a Minnesota exquisite, a Greek assistant in philosophy, a mathematics genius, and many other diverse and highly flavoured fishes’. Despite being both scientists and friends of Oppenheimer, Bernheim and Boyd were not, it seems, invited to join this club (the ‘New York German, learned in chemistry’ could not have been Bernheim, for surely then he would have remembered meeting Fergusson). Indeed, it seems very likely that Oppenheimer was the only freshman invited to join what was clearly intended to be a club primarily for graduate students and staff members.

  The diversity of academic disciplines from which the club’s members were drawn – philosophy, mathematics and chemistry, as well as, no doubt, others not mentioned by Fergusson – reflects what was for Oppenheimer one of the best things about his time at Harvard. Lowell’s emphasis on equipping his students with a broad education rather than encouraging them, or even allowing them, to become narrow specialists may have been inspired by a snobbish reverence for Oxford and Cambridge, but it produced a kind of higher education that was ideally suited to Oppenheimer’s abilities and tastes. For many science students at Harvard, the requirement to take freshman courses in humanities was regarded as an unwelcome distraction from ‘real work’, a barrier that had to be overcome as quickly and painlessly as possible. For Oppenheimer, on the other hand, it was an opportunity that he eagerly embraced. In his first year, in addition to two courses in chemistry (one on elementary organic chemistry and the other on qualitative analysis), he took two courses in mathematics (analytic geometry and an introduction to calculus), and three courses in the humanities: one on rhetoric and English composition, one on French prose and poetry and another on the history of philosophy. This last course, taught by the notable Harvard philosopher Ralph Eaton, was remembered by Oppenheimer with particular fondness in later life. Eaton, he said, was ‘a wonderful man’ and the course was ‘really very good . . . [I] had a nice time with it’.

  In a letter to Smith, Oppenheimer speaks with satisfaction and pride of the ‘quiet futility of most of the courses’ that he was taking at Harvard, which, he says, are ‘as amusing as Crome Yellow and are at least as delightful in a somewhat Pecosian way’. The joint allusion here to the worlds of Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington (as satirised by Aldous Huxley) and Katherine Page’s Pecos perhaps reveals what Oppenheimer really wanted from Harvard: membership of a cultural, literary and intellectual elite. And perhaps in this there is a further clue as to why he kept Bernheim and Fergusson apart. In his ignorance of, and disdain for, literary culture, in his concentration on chemistry and his readiness to become exactly the kind of narrow specialist looked down upon at Lowell’s Harvard (and perhaps also in his German Jewish New York background), Bernheim personified the kind of person that would not become – or even aspire to become – a member of the elites, whether based in Oxford, Pecos or Harvard.

  Fergusson, however, was already a member of two of those elites (Pecos and Harvard) and was about to become a member of the third. When Oppenheimer arrived at Harvard, he discovered that Fergusson did not expect to stay there very long. He had applied for, and (as it turned out, rightly) expected to receive, a Rhodes Scholarship to go to Oxford, which he planned to use to study not biology, but English literature. Fergusson, in fact, had decided that the milieu of Crome Yellow was precisely where he belonged. When, the previous year, during Oppenheimer’s enforced convalescence, Fergusson began his studies at Harvard, he had been somewhat disenchanted. Writing to Smith, he said that Harvard ‘is not an educational institution’:

  Instead of five thousand keen, intellectually alive, well-read young men who have come here to think out ideas and to learn the ideas of others, I find five thousand tawdry yokels, yanked from fat farms and snoring small towns, to bellow at ball games.

  Fergusson had, it seems, been teased by his fellow students for choosing to visit an art museum rather than watching the annual football game between Harvard and Yale, which made him feel that there was something of a gulf between his sensibilities and those of the typical Harvard student. ‘I did not come here to be made a 100 per cent American; I am not going to be a “bizzness” man,’ he told Smith. ‘I came here to acquire an education, and I hope to be a person of intelligence some day.’ Unlike Oppenheimer, Fergusson could make these kinds of criticisms, secure in the knowledge that he was regarded by the Harvard community as ‘100 per cent American’. In fact, in many ways he was the very embodiment of Lowell’s ideal student: he was ‘Anglo-Saxon’, a Protestant, an academic all-rounder and a member of America’s ruling class. And, despite his preference for art over football, he must have had at least some athletic or sporting prowess, for otherwise he would not have been even a candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship.fn11

  Established in 1902 under the terms of the will of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, these scholarships were expressly designed to create an Anglo-Saxon elite to govern the world. ‘I contend,’ Rhodes once said, ‘that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race’, and it was in pursuit of such a vision that he founded the scholarships that bear his name. The recipients of these scholarships, drawn from the British Empire, Germany and America, would spend two years at Oxford, after which, it was hoped, they would return to their part of the world, able and motivated to maintain and increase the global dominance of Anglo-Saxon civilisation and culture. The selection criteria for these scholarships were widely admired by the presidents of America’s Ivy League universities, especially Lowell, who saw in them a model for Harvard to adopt in its admissions procedures. Rhodes had said that he did not want mere ‘bookworms’ to benefit from his scholarship; rather, he was looking for competent scholars who demonstrated ‘fondness of and success in mainly outdoor sports’ and who also possessed ‘brutality’, ‘moral force of character and of instincts to lead’ and ‘manhood, truth, courage [and] devotion to duty’. Rhodes even came up with a formula that gave weights to these considerations: 40 per cent scholarship, 20 per cent athletics, 20 per cent leadership and 20 per cent ‘manhood . . .’ To be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship was a mark of academic distinction, but it was not only, or even primarily, that. It was primarily an indication that one was accepted as the sort of person Rhodes thought should rule the world and (therefore) the sort of person Lowell thought Harvard ought to be producing.

  Thus, while Oppenheimer at Harvard was reminded at every turn that, no matter what he did, he would never gain admittance to the highest strata of American society, Fergusson, in gaining a Rhodes Scholarship, was confirmed as being exactly the sort of person that particular elite wanted as a member. Though Oppenheimer was to move to England to pursue postgraduate studies, it never occurred to him to apply f
or a Rhodes Scholarship. Fergusson not only got the Rhodes Scholarship, but he got it to study literature, thus establishing himself in yet another way as a model to which Oppenheimer aspired, but could never reach. Though he had gone to Harvard to study chemistry, what dominates the letters Oppenheimer wrote during his first year and a half at Harvard is his determination to be seen – by Smith, Fergusson and Horgan – as a literary man. Again and again in his letters to those three, Oppenheimer mentions stories that he is writing and seeks from them critical reactions to drafts that he has sent them.

  For example, in January 1923, he tells Smith: ‘I am again in the toils of a short story. It is not to be as pretentious or subtle as the last, and so there is some chance of its not being as vile.’ As summarised by Oppenheimer for Smith, the plot of the story is as follows: a young mining engineer (Oppenheimer, at this time, thought he himself would become a mining engineer after graduating from Harvard), a sophisticated and introspective person, starts his career full of contempt for the miners he encounters, whose filth, poverty and baseness make him laugh. Soon, however, he is brought to realise his own vulnerabilities and to understand that he himself is likely to disintegrate, thus collapsing the gap between himself and the miners. Upon this realisation, his complacency vanishes and the story ends with the engineer listening, with respect and even reverence, to a person Oppenheimer describes as ‘a disgusting and doddering syphilitic, with whom, earlier in the day, he would have nothing to do’.

  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.’