Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (19 page)

That Fergusson moved in such grand literary and intellectual circles was daunting enough, but even more dispiriting was what Fergusson later described as the ‘rather Russian account’ he gave Oppenheimer of what it was like to be an American student in Europe – an account that seems to have left Oppenheimer with the conviction that he would forever be
shut out from whatever was best in Cambridge life. After their walking tour, Oppenheimer wrote to Fergusson, telling him: ‘I do not think that Cambridge can be quite so bad as Oxford. But its excellencies are just as fantastically inaccessible, and there are vast, sloppy strata where there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to be found.’ He had not entirely given up hope, however. ‘By next term,’ he told Fergusson, ‘I think I may have some people to show you.’

Whether Oppenheimer ever did find any people at Cambridge he thought impressive enough to introduce to Fergusson is doubtful. As it had been at Harvard, his social circle was small. In fact, to begin with, it consisted of some of the very same people he had mixed with at Harvard, many of whom were now at Cambridge. Jeffries Wyman and John Edsall had arrived there the previous year, although, after a month or so, Wyman decided to transfer to University College London in order to work with the physiologist Archibald Vivian Hill, famous (as Wyman himself would later be) for his research on haemoglobin. Edsall decided to stay at Cambridge, living in St John’s College and working at the Cambridge Biochemistry Laboratory under the supervision of the eminent biochemist F. Gowland Hopkins. Though Wyman was in London, he and Edsall saw much of each other and both thrived in England, socially and intellectually.

Oppenheimer might have expected his closest companion to have been Fred Bernheim, who arrived in Cambridge at the same time as him, in order, like Edsall and Wyman, to study biochemistry. Bernheim, however, was determined to liberate himself from what he had often felt was the overbearing and suffocating atmosphere of his friendship with Oppenheimer. Having settled into King’s College, Bernheim made the Biochemistry Laboratory the centre of his personal as well as his scholarly life. It was there that he met his future wife, Mary L.C. Hare, who would herself become a biochemist of some eminence. In a letter to Fergusson of 15 November 1925, Oppenheimer mentions ‘some terrible complications with Fred, and an awful evening, two weeks ago, in the moon’. The Moon was presumably a pub in Cambridge, and the complications were no doubt connected with the fact that Bernheim seemed content to accept that the friendship he and Oppenheimer had shared at Harvard had not survived the move to Cambridge. ‘I have not seen him since,’ Oppenheimer told Fergusson, ‘and blush when I think of him.’

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:

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 nitrogen 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’: