Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  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’:

  Your style is as simple and unstilted as your brother’s, but it is supple enough to keep it from seeming grotesque when you want to say something unusually neat, or when you are concerned with a little modest lyricism.

  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:

  I suppose it is never quite possible for us to understand each other’s layers of naiveté. And it is that which keeps [me] from agreeing entirely with what you say about the junk I sent you. I think all the snarkiest things you say – and, by the way, thank you for troubling – are perfectly true. Even to me it is obvious that my women are gargoyles and my lyricism either absent or buried. But what I can’t understand, for instance, is that you should think the Rain thing sophisticated, or the hero, in Litany, unnatural . . . What I meant, you see, was that the hero was prevented, being not very intelligent in the first place, from detecting his trouble, or doing anything but maunder about it, by his utterly frivolous and vain and complacent preconceptions which he had so diligently constructed in times of other stress. It may be perfectly true that no rational man would act that way, and that, to you, a knowledge of thermodynamics and a dilettante dawdling in literature implies a divine intelligence in all things. That’s not so. Always you used to insist that a person was either intelligent or not, and – perhaps I misunderstood – not that he might be intelligent here or there, and blind as a fool in everything else.

  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’:

  I find these awful people in me from time to time, and their expulsion is the sole excuse for my writing. I have none of that mere glee in narration, the conteur’s delight, which you and Chekhov and your brother seem to have. I write to get rid of an ideal and impossible system, and it is, as you so cleverly remark, not writing at all; and it is that which makes the things of so exclusively masturbatic character. I am sorry to have bored you.

  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:

  While he was still at the machine, a hideous, underfed little whippersnapper, he was already a youth of many-colored ambitions, deeply concerned about his dress, his associates, his recreations. He haunted the old Astor Library and the Metropolitan Museum, learned something about pictures and porcelains, took singing lessons, though he had a voice like a crow’
s. When he sat down to his baked apple and doughnut in a basement lunch-room, he would prop a book up before him and address his food with as much leisure and ceremony as if he were dining at his club. He held himself at a distance from his fellow-workmen and somehow always managed to impress them with his superiority.

  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:

  The Old West had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers, who were unpractical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in defence, who could conquer but could not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of men like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything. They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, root out the great brooding spirit of the space, the colour, the princely carelessness of the pioneer.

  What Marian Forrester was to Niel Herbert, Katherine Chaves Page was to Oppenheimer: the embodiment of a noble ideal, the representative of a way of life that was superior to, but threatened by, the culture within which Oppenheimer himself had grown up.

  As it happened, during Oppenheimer’s first year at Harvard, Mrs Page was living in New York City, having accepted a one-year position teaching Spanish at Finch Junior College. When he returned home for a few days in February 1923, Oppenheimer invited her, along with Herbert Smith and Jane Didisheim, to dinner at Riverside Drive with his parents. It was an uncomfortable evening. The contrast, as Oppenheimer felt it, between the ‘princely’ romance of the Old West, represented by Katherine, and the world of commerce, represented by his father and his Ethical Culture circle, was almost unbearable for him. After the dinner he wrote to Smith reassuring him that he, at least, had ‘scintillated more than any of that dismal gathering’, adding: ‘Mrs Page started bravely enough, but soon grew silent under the weight of paternal banalities and Ethical gossip and Jane’s sighs of happiness came disastrously near, I thought, to groans of despair, when someone asked her if she had ever been out west.’

  That evening was to be the last time Oppenheimer saw Katherine until he returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1925. In the meantime, whenever Smith, Fergusson or Horgan mentioned the South-west, Oppenheimer responded with effusive yearning for both the society of the Chaveses and the landscape of New Mexico. In January 1923, shortly before Katherine came to Riverside Drive for dinner, he wrote to Smith: ‘Are you again, O fortunate wretch, to spend a summer in New Mexico?’ When he heard from Fergusson that Smith was indeed planning to visit New Mexico that summer, and that Fergusson was planning to take him and his two companions to Hopi country, he declared himself to be ‘insanely jealous’:

  I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos ‘in September, when I’ll want my friends to comfort me, you know’, spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain; I see you vending the marvels of the upper Loch, of the upper amphitheatre at Ouray, of the waterfall at Telluride, the Punch Bowl at San Ysidro – even the prairies round Antonito – to philistine eyes. Do you remember that first evening in Denver when we scrambled our luggage?

  And when, in the summer of 1923, Fergusson was back in New Mexico, prior to leaving for Oxford, Oppenheimer wrote:

  But oh, beloved, how I envy you! Three hours sleep: witty, charming; the soul and supporter of Los Pinos; the all but gastronomic consoler to the Pecos’ host – successful; doing a little intellectual work on the side; blessed with enormous activity – Mon Dieu – Francis, you choke me with anguish and despair.

  And he ended: ‘Please, I almost whimper it, please write again.’

  After the following summer, when Smith had again been in New Mexico, Oppenheimer told him that he wanted to ‘hear about your adventures’:

  . . . and Los Pinos, and the desert, and Mrs Page, about all those things that gripe and make me notice how blue and sunny the sky is and what an exquisite filigree the chrome and coral leaves make, against it. And if, personatim, you should be able to come up for a day or two, and w
ould, out of that, grant me an hour at tea, I should be so happy that I should smile slobber on your photographs, and talk about Grass Mountain and Ouray.

  In the same letter Oppenheimer mentioned ‘the classic confectionery bearing the Chaves coat of arms’. This was a reference to a magnificent cake that Oppenheimer had sent to New Mexico for the seventieth birthday of Katherine’s father, Don Amado Chaves, having specially ordered it, at great expense, from a bakery in Manhattan. Smith, who went with him to the bakery to order it, remarked many years later that the gesture was characteristic of Oppenheimer’s thoughtfulness and an expression of how pleased he was to be accepted by the Chaves circle. But, however much he may have wished or aspired to have been from a non-Jewish, South-western family, preferably with ancestors that could be traced back to the conquistadors, or at least to the pioneers, the reality was that when the vacations came, Oppenheimer returned, not to Pecos, but to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and not to a family whose history in the United States spanned many generations, but to a nouveau-riche family who only a generation earlier had been (in Oppenheimer’s eyes) German ‘peasants’.