Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  So, with Bernheim keeping him at arm’s length, Edsall and Wyman sharing a bond that did not include him, and Fergusson established in a milieu that was not open to him (and into which Fergusson showed no sign of wanting to introduce him), Oppenheimer’s initial few months at Cambridge were isolated. Nor was he making any new friends. Christ’s was a smaller and less well-endowed college than either King’s (where Bernheim was) or St John’s (where Edsall was), but equally ancient, having been founded in 1505 by Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII’s grandmother. It was distinguished by a tradition of academic excellence in both science and poetry, being the college of England’s most famous scientist, Charles Darwin, and arguably her greatest poet, John Milton. Of the students who studied there who belonged to Oppenheimer’s generation, one of the most notable was C.P. Snow, the physicist and novelist, who, in his 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures’, famously lamented the gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals. Christ’s, evidently, was a college in which scientific and literary gifts could be nurtured side by side. Moreover, it was a college unusually friendly to students from America. The master of the college at the time Oppenheimer arrived was the zoologist Sir Arthur Shipley, who combined his academic work with writing popular and literary books and had spent some time in the United States as part of the British University Mission, one of whose aims was to promote postgraduate study by Americans at British universities. Such a college, one might have thought, would have been Oppenheimer’s natural home. And yet his time at Christ’s was brief, difficult and the most emotionally turbulent few months of his life.

  Surely one reason that Oppenheimer seems to have made no new friends at Christ’s is that, instead of living in college, he lodged in what he described as a ‘miserable hole’ somewhere in the city. He took all his meals in college, but, even so, seems not to have befriended – or been befriended by – any of his fellow students. Nor, to begin with, did he make any friends among his fellow physicists. This was no doubt partly because of his status. Not being a research postgraduate, he would not, initially at least, have mixed much with the famously brilliant young men who worked with Rutherford at this time. He would, rather, have been expected to attend undergraduate lectures and spend his time at the Cavendish, learning basic laboratory skills instead of pursuing original research. After just a month of this lonely and humiliating existence, Oppenheimer wrote to Fergusson, spelling out his situation in uncharacteristically direct language: ‘I am having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything . . . The lectures are vile. And you know the rest.’

  The most detailed record of Oppenheimer’s misery during his first term at Cambridge is contained in a curious document written by Fergusson dated ‘February 1926’ and entitled ‘Account of the Adventures of Robert Oppenheimer in Europe’. In chronicling (and, in later interviews, recollecting) Oppenheimer’s emotional upheavals during this period, Fergusson takes a resolutely psychoanalytical approach, emphasising Oppenheimer’s relations with his parents and his sexual frustration, the combination of which he evidently sees as the cause of the trouble. Oppenheimer, Fergusson records, ‘was completely at a loss about his sex life’. His initial impression on seeing Oppenheimer again, Fergusson remembered, was that he ‘seemed more self-confident, strong and upstanding’, which he attributed to Oppenheimer’s having ‘nearly managed to fall in love with an attractive gentile in New Mexico’. Within a few months of Oppenheimer’s time at Cambridge, however, Fergusson describes him as having a ‘first class case of depression’ – a depression that was ‘further increased and made specific by the struggle he was carrying on with his mother’.

  In the autumn of 1925, Oppenheimer’s parents, alarmed by the state of their son’s mind, insisted on travelling to Cambridge in order to be with him. Fergusson’s journal contains an extraordinary description, presumably based on what he had been told by Oppenheimer, of their arrival in England. Oppenheimer, having arranged to meet them from their ship, caught a train to Southampton and, according to Fergusson:

  He found himself in a third-class carriage with a man and a woman who were making love, and though he tried to read thermodynamics he could not concentrate. When the man left, he [Oppenheimer] kissed the woman. She did not seem unduly surprised. But he was at once overcome with remorse, fell on his knees, his feet sprawling, and with many tears, begged her pardon.

  After this, Oppenheimer fled the compartment. At Southampton, on his way out of the station, he saw the woman below him when he was on the stairs, and tried to drop his suitcase on her head. ‘Fortunately,’ writes Fergusson, ‘he missed.’fn18

  From Southampton train station, Oppenheimer proceeded to the port. Before he saw either his mother or father, however, he caught sight of Inez Pollak, his old classmate from Ethical Culture. Apparently, Inez had been invited by Oppenheimer’s mother, who, as Fergusson put it, ‘tried to put them together’ as a cure for Oppenheimer’s depression. One of the many complications concerning this arrangement was that, according to Fergusson, Ella Oppenheimer considered Inez to be ‘ridiculously unworthy’ of her son.

  So Oppenheimer returned to Cambridge with his mother, his father and the hapless Inez Pollak, whom he did his best to ‘court’. Fergusson writes that Oppenheimer ‘did a very good and chiefly rhetorical imitation of being in love with her’ and that she ‘responded in kind’. This led to them sharing a bed together, although this did not go according to plan: ‘There they lay, tremulous with cold, afraid to do anything. And Inez began to sob. Then Robert began to sob.’ At that moment they heard Ella Oppenheimer knocking on the door and shouting, ‘Let me in, Inez, why won’t you let me in? I know Robert is in there.’ Shortly after this Inez left for Italy, her parting gift from Oppenheimer being a copy of The Possessed by Dostoyevsky.

  At this point, with his parents still in Cambridge, Oppenheimer’s mental state was at its very worst. Fergusson’s emphasis on the importance of Oppenheimer’s sexual frustration as a cause of his emotional problems is entirely understandable, but there were other important causes, not least the fact that he felt, for the first time in his life, unequal to the academic demands made on him. ‘The academic standard here would depeople Harvard over night,’ he told Fergusson. All the scientists at Cambridge were ‘uncommonly skilful at blowing glass and solving differential equations’.

  To help him acquire some of the skills required of an experimental physicist, Oppenheimer had been assigned a tutor at the Cavendish. This was Patrick Blackett, who in later life would win the Nobel Prize in Physics, become ennobled as Baron Blackett and be awarded the Order of Merit. In the mid-1920s, Blackett was a dashing and glamorous figure, described by the literary critic I.A. Richards as ‘a young Oedipus. Tall, slim, beautifully balanced and always looking better dressed than anyone.’ Before coming to Cambridge he had served in the navy, seeing action during the First World War at the Battle of Jutland and winning promotion from midshipman to lieutenant. After the war he was sent by the admiralty to Magdalene College, where he studied mathematics and physics. His great ability was quickly recognised and, by the time Oppenheimer arrived at the Cavendish, Blackett (by then a Fellow of King’s) was regarded by Rutherford and his colleagues as one of the most valued members of their team. In March 1924, Blackett married Constanza Bayon, a beautiful and brilliant language student at Newnham, who, for some reason, was always known as ‘Pat’.

  In the summer of 1924, Blackett had made one of his most important contributions to physics when he managed to photograph a nuclear transformation process taking place. This was the culmination of a research project that he had been asked to undertake by Rutherford, exploring what happens when a nitrogen nucleus is hit by an alpha particle.fn19 Rutherford knew that a proton (a positively charged subatomic particle that forms part of the nucleus) would be emitted by the particle, but did not know whether, after the collision, the alpha particle would be deflected away from the nitroge
n nucleus or absorbed by it. Rutherford thought the former more likely, but Blackett’s photographs proved the latter. What Rutherford had imagined was a ‘disintegration process’ was actually an ‘integration’ process; the nitrogen nucleus absorbed the alpha particle (minus the emitted proton), thereby transmuting into an isotope of oxygen.fn20 Blackett’s remarkable photographs, reproduced many times since, showed this transmutation of one element into another, this ‘modern alchemy’, taking place.

  When the great German experimental physicist James Franck came to Cambridge in 1924 to give a paper, Blackett got to know him and arranged to spend the following academic year, 1924–5, at Franck’s own university, Göttingen, which was acquiring a reputation of being at the centre of the exciting developments then taking place in physics. Franck himself won the Nobel Prize in 1925 for the experiments he and his fellow Nobel laureate, Gustav Hertz, had performed, which provided experimental confirmation of the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom. At Göttingen, Franck worked closely with the leading theoretical physicist at the university, Max Born, and together they built up an internationally renowned centre for research in physics that was to rival and even surpass Cambridge, attracting to Göttingen some of the best students and researchers in physics throughout the world. Blackett thrived at Göttingen and returned to Cambridge brimming with excitement over the latest developments in quantum theory. He and his wife gained a reputation for being the ‘handsomest, gayest, happiest pair in Cambridge’ and their home in Bateman Street became ‘a favourite haunt of left-wing and Bohemian academics’.

  To Oppenheimer, Blackett was, like Francis Fergusson, a model of unattainable excellence and a reminder of his own failures and inadequacies. As a physicist, Blackett was especially proficient in the very aspects of research that Oppenheimer found difficult: namely, those involving laboratory skills. A glimpse of Blackett’s views on the importance of laboratory skills is provided in his contribution to a collection of essays that was published in the 1930s. The aim of the collection was to provide prospective Cambridge applicants with information about the various subjects studied at the university, each subject being introduced by a distinguished Cambridge practitioner of it (Richard Braithwaite on philosophy, C.P. Snow on chemistry, C.H. Waddington on biology, and so on). Blackett’s contribution was an essay on ‘The Craft of Experimental Physics’ that has since become one of his most-quoted pieces of writing and is revealing as an indication of the demands made upon Oppenheimer during his time as Blackett’s tutee.

  The experimental physicist, Blackett writes, ‘is a Jack-of-All-Trades, a versatile but amateur craftsman’:

  He must blow glass and turn metal, though he could not earn his living as a glass-blower nor ever be considered as a skilled mechanic; he must carpenter, photograph, wire electric circuits and be a master of gadgets of all kinds; he may find invaluable a training as an engineer and can profit always by utilising his gifts as a mathematician. In such activities will he be engaged for three-quarters of his working day.

  ‘The combination of these abilities in one individual with the right temperament to use them is rare,’ Blackett adds. ‘Many a theoretically gifted student may fail, while learning to be an experimenter, through clumsy fingers.’

  His confidence already severely dented by Rutherford’s rejection of him as a research student, Oppenheimer’s self-esteem took a further battering when he failed abjectly to live up to the demanding criteria spelled out by Blackett for being a successful experimental physicist. He simply did not have the practical abilities emphasised by Blackett, and his unsuccessful attempts to acquire such abilities brought him deep unhappiness. This, together with his other emotional problems, led him, within a few months of being at Cambridge, to the brink of mental, emotional and physical collapse.

  At Harvard, Oppenheimer might have behaved in ways that struck people as odd, affected or intense, but at Cambridge his behaviour was not just strange – it was indicative of severe mental instability. Sometimes, he later recalled, he would stand alone in front of a blackboard for hours, chalk in hand, waiting for inspiration to strike. On other occasions the silence would be broken by his own voice, repeating over and over again, ‘The point is, the point is . . . the point is.’ Once Rutherford himself was alarmed to see Oppenheimer fall fainting to the floor of the laboratory. In an interview he gave late in life, Jeffries Wyman recalled that Oppenheimer told him he ‘felt so miserable in Cambridge, so unhappy, that he used to get down on the floor and roll from side to side’.

  Most bizarre, though, was an event that occurred towards the end of Oppenheimer’s first term at Cambridge. In what looks like an attempt to murder his tutor, or at the very least to make him seriously ill, Oppenheimer left on Blackett’s desk an apple poisoned with toxic chemicals. The act seems charged with symbolism: Oppenheimer as the jealous queen leaving a poisoned apple for Snow White, the ‘fairest of them all’, whose beauty and goodness are admired by everybody. The incident was hushed up at the time, and none of his friends knew about it until they were told of it by Oppenheimer himself, usually in some more or less misleading version. That his feelings towards Blackett mixed fervent admiration with fierce jealousy, however, was obvious to those who knew him well. John Edsall, for example, noticed the jealousy and speculated plausibly about what had aroused it. It was, he suggested, due to Oppenheimer’s feeling that:

  Blackett was brilliant and handsome and a man of great social charm, and combining all this with great brilliance as a scientist – and I think he had a sense of his own comparative awkwardness and perhaps a personal sense of being physically unattractive compared to Blackett and so on.

  There has been some confusion (most of it created by Oppenheimer himself) as to whether he really did leave an apple on Blackett’s desk or whether his claim to have done so should be regarded as metaphorical. In his interview with Martin Sherwin, conducted in 1979, Francis Fergusson says that Openheimer told him that ‘he had actually used cyanide or something somewhere’, suggesting that the attempted poisoning had been very real indeed. Fergusson adds: ‘Fortunately the tutor discovered it. Of course there was hell to pay with Cambridge.’

  In fact, Cambridge seems to have reacted with extraordinary equanimity. They did not press criminal charges, nor did they expel Oppenheimer or even suspend him. The reason for this seems to be that his parents were still in Cambridge. His father negotiated an agreement with the university authorities, according to which Oppenheimer would be allowed to continue his studies and merely be put on probation, on condition that he agreed to undergo frequent treatment by a Harley Street psychiatrist.

  Fergusson describes meeting Oppenheimer in London after one of his psychiatric sessions. ‘I saw him standing on the corner,’ he recalls, ‘waiting for me, with his hat on one side of his head, looking absolutely weird.’ And he went on, ‘He looked crazy at that time . . . He was sort of standing around, looking like he might run or do something drastic.’ When he asked Oppenheimer how the session had gone, Oppenheimer ‘said that the guy was too stupid to follow him and that he knew more about his troubles than the doctor did’.

  As soon as this dreadful first term at Cambridge was over, Oppenheimer was taken by his parents to France for a recuperative holiday. He later remembered that on a cold, rainy day he was walking along the Brittany coast when, just as Smith had foreseen: ‘I was on the point of bumping myself off.’ A few days after Christmas 1925, Oppenheimer had arranged to meet Fergusson in Paris, where he told him about the poisoned-apple incident and confessed that there was some doubt as to whether he would be allowed to continue as a student at Cambridge. ‘My reaction was dismay,’ Fergusson later told Sherwin, adding, somewhat oddly: ‘But then, when he talked about it, I thought he had sort of gone beyond it, and that he was having trouble with his father.’

  In Paris, Fergusson said, Oppenheimer ‘began to get very queer’. Considering that, up to this point in his narrative Fergusson had described Oppenheimer as: (a) forcing himself upon
a woman in a train carriage, (b) attempting to injure that woman by dropping a suitcase on her, (c) sobbing at the prospect of sex with an old school friend, and (d) attempting to murder his university tutor by presenting him with a poisoned apple, the word ‘began’ seems a little out of place. But Oppenheimer’s behaviour in Paris, as described by Fergusson, was very odd indeed. After finding that her son had locked her into her hotel room, Ella insisted that he see a Parisian psychiatrist. The diagnosis was sexual frustration and the prescription, accordingly, sex with a prostitute.

  Soon after this, Fergusson went to see Oppenheimer in his Parisian hotel room and discovered him to be in ‘one of his ambiguous moods’. He showed Oppenheimer some poetry written by his girlfriend, Frances Keeley, and told him that she was now his fiancée. Then, Fergusson describes:

  I leaned over to pick up a book, and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck. I was quite scared for a little while. We must have made some noise. And then I managed to pull aside and he fell to the ground weeping.

  Having failed to kill one paragon of excellence, it seems, Oppenheimer was moved to attempt to kill the other.

  When Oppenheimer returned to Cambridge, he wrote to Fergusson:

  You should have, not a letter, but a pilgrimage to Oxford, made in a hair shirt, with much fasting and snow and prayer. But I will keep my remorse and gratitude, and the shame I feel for my inadequacy to you, until I can do something rather less useless for you. I do not understand your forbearance nor your charity, but you must know that I will not forget them.

  The nearest Oppenheimer came to explaining his odd behaviour was to highlight the importance of what he described in this letter to Fergusson as ‘the awful fact of excellence’: ‘As you know, it is that fact now, combined with my inability to solder two copper wires together, which is probably succeeding in getting me crazy.’