Robert wrote Horgan a satirical letter in which he wrote about himself in the third person: “[Oppenheimer] has grown to be quite a man now you have no idea how Harvard has changed him. I am afraid it is not for the good of his soul to study so hard. He says the most terrible things. Only the other night I was arguing with him and I said but you believe in God don’t you? And he said I believe in the second law of thermodynamics, in Hamilton’s Principle, in Bertrand Russell, and would you believe it Siegfried [ sic ] Freud.”
Horgan thought Robert enthralling and charming. Horgan was himself a brilliant young man, and in the course of his long life he would eventually write seventeen novels and twenty works of history, winning the Pulitzer Prize twice. But he would always regard Oppenheimer as a rare and invaluable polymath. “Leonardos and Oppenheimers are scarce,” Horgan wrote in 1988, “but their wonderful love and projection of understanding as both private connoisseurs and historical achievers offer us at least an ideal to consider and measure by.”
THROUGHOUT HIS YEARS AT HARVARD, Robert kept up a frequent correspondence with his Ethical Culture School teacher and New Mexico guide, Herbert Smith. In the winter of 1923, he tried to convey with elaborate irony what his life was like at Harvard: “Generously, you ask what I do,” Oppenheimer wrote Smith. “Aside from the activities exposed in last week’s disgusting note, I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk; I go to math lib[rary] and read and to the Phil[osophy] lib and divide my time between Minherr [Bertrand] Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza—charmingly ironic, at that, don’t you think?; I make stenches in three different labs, listen to [Professor Louis] Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.”
Dark wit aside, Robert still suffered periodic bouts of depression. Some of these episodes were brought on by his family’s visits to Cambridge. Fergusson remembers going out to dinner with Robert and some of his relatives—not his parents—and watching as his friend turned visibly green from the strain of being polite. Afterwards, Robert would drag Fergusson with him as he pounded the pavement for miles, talking all the while in his quiet, even voice about some physics problem. Walking was his only therapy. Fred Bernheim recalled hiking one winter night until 3:00 a.m. On one of these cold winter walks, someone dared the boys to jump in the river. Robert and at least one of his friends stripped and plunged into the icy water.
In retrospect, all of his friends noted that he seemed to be wrestling in these years with inner demons. “My feeling about myself,” Oppenheimer later said of this period in his life, “was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world.”
Unfulfilled sexual desires certainly lay behind some of Robert’s troubles. At the age of twenty, he was not alone, of course. Few of his friends had a social life that included women. And none of them remember Robert ever taking a woman on a date. Wyman recalled that he and Robert were “too much in love” with intellectual life “to be thinking about girls. . . . We were all going through a series of love affairs [with ideas] . . . but perhaps we lacked some of the more mundane forms of love affairs that make life easier.” Robert certainly felt a welter of sensuous desires, as evidenced by some of the decidedly erotic poetry he wrote during this period:
Tonight she wears a sealskin cape
glistening black diamonds where the water swathes her thighs
and noxious glints conspire to surprise
a
Horgan thought Robert enthralling and charming. Horgan was himself a brilliant young man, and in the course of his long life he would eventually write seventeen novels and twenty works of history, winning the Pulitzer Prize twice. But he would always regard Oppenheimer as a rare and invaluable polymath. “Leonardos and Oppenheimers are scarce,” Horgan wrote in 1988, “but their wonderful love and projection of understanding as both private connoisseurs and historical achievers offer us at least an ideal to consider and measure by.”
THROUGHOUT HIS YEARS AT HARVARD, Robert kept up a frequent correspondence with his Ethical Culture School teacher and New Mexico guide, Herbert Smith. In the winter of 1923, he tried to convey with elaborate irony what his life was like at Harvard: “Generously, you ask what I do,” Oppenheimer wrote Smith. “Aside from the activities exposed in last week’s disgusting note, I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk; I go to math lib[rary] and read and to the Phil[osophy] lib and divide my time between Minherr [Bertrand] Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza—charmingly ironic, at that, don’t you think?; I make stenches in three different labs, listen to [Professor Louis] Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.”
Dark wit aside, Robert still suffered periodic bouts of depression. Some of these episodes were brought on by his family’s visits to Cambridge. Fergusson remembers going out to dinner with Robert and some of his relatives—not his parents—and watching as his friend turned visibly green from the strain of being polite. Afterwards, Robert would drag Fergusson with him as he pounded the pavement for miles, talking all the while in his quiet, even voice about some physics problem. Walking was his only therapy. Fred Bernheim recalled hiking one winter night until 3:00 a.m. On one of these cold winter walks, someone dared the boys to jump in the river. Robert and at least one of his friends stripped and plunged into the icy water.
In retrospect, all of his friends noted that he seemed to be wrestling in these years with inner demons. “My feeling about myself,” Oppenheimer later said of this period in his life, “was always one of extreme discontent. I had very little sensitiveness to human beings, very little humility before the realities of this world.”
Unfulfilled sexual desires certainly lay behind some of Robert’s troubles. At the age of twenty, he was not alone, of course. Few of his friends had a social life that included women. And none of them remember Robert ever taking a woman on a date. Wyman recalled that he and Robert were “too much in love” with intellectual life “to be thinking about girls. . . . We were all going through a series of love affairs [with ideas] . . . but perhaps we lacked some of the more mundane forms of love affairs that make life easier.” Robert certainly felt a welter of sensuous desires, as evidenced by some of the decidedly erotic poetry he wrote during this period:
Tonight she wears a sealskin cape
glistening black diamonds where the water swathes her thighs
and noxious glints conspire to surprise
a
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