Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (38 page)

He reassured Frank that their father, who was by now sixty years old, ‘looks well, better than in months’. Julius, in fact, was enjoying himself at Pasadena, learning French, attending concerts, taking driving lessons and even joining in some academic seminars. Every morning, Oppenheimer reported, Julius and he were served breakfast by the Tolmans’ maid, Moline, who ‘after I am gone listens with enchanting patience to F[ather]’s reports on high finance’. On 18 January 1932, Julius himself wrote to Frank, telling him: ‘I am meeting lots of Robert’s friends and yet I believe that I have not interfered with his activities.’ Julius, impressed both with his son and with Caltech for having such distinguished connections, reported to Frank that Robert ‘has had a couple of short talks with Einstein’.

These talks would probably have taken place during the second of Einstein’s three visits to Caltech. During the first, in the New Year of 1930, he came to love Pasadena so much that he took to calling it ‘paradise’. In between discussing cosmic rays with Millikan and relativity with Tolman, Einstein had toured the movie studios of Hollywood, had dinner at Charlie Chaplin’s Beverly Hills home and attended a banquet in his honour, at which there had been 200 guests. So much in demand was he that a millionairess gave Caltech $10,000 for the privilege of meeting him. Evidently hoping to recruit him permanently, Millikan invited him back for the New Year of 1932 – a visit that, at Einstein’s request, was rather more low-key. Though he loved California, Einstein was less impressed with Millikan, whose political conservatism clashed with his own determination to speak out on behalf of the poor, the dispossessed and the persecuted.

More to Einstein’s taste was the educator Abraham Flexner, who, having secured funding of $5 million, was in the process of establishing an Institute for Advanced Study. During Einstein’s second visit to California, Flexner took the opportunity to sound him out about the possibility of joining his proposed new institute. The reply was encouraging enough
for Flexner to visit Einstein in Germany during the summer of 1932, where he told Einstein that the new institute would be based in Princeton and asked him to name his own price and conditions. Einstein initially declined, but the rapid growth in the power and influence of the Nazis in Germany forced him to reconsider. When he left Germany for his third visit to Caltech in December 1932, his ostensible plan was to return to Germany two months later before taking up his position at Flexner’s new institute, but in reality he probably knew that he would not be returning.

While Einstein was in Pasadena in January 1933, the news came that Hitler had been made Chancellor. He was still there on 5 March when he heard that the Nazi Party had received the most votes (44 per cent) of any party in Germany’s general election. Einstein returned to Europe at the end of March, but sensibly did not step foot in Germany, where his home had been seized, his books burned and his theories officially repudiated as ‘Jewish science’. Throughout the new ‘Reich’ scientists who were not, like the physicist Philipp Lenard, active Nazis or, like Max Planck or Werner Heisenberg, prepared to work under the Nazis, were making plans to leave Germany. The many Jewish scientists, of course, had no choice. Max Born, having been thrown out of Göttingen because he was Jewish, prepared to move to England, where Cambridge had offered to take him. Leo Szilard, meanwhile, left Germany with his life savings hidden in his shoes. After a few months in England, Einstein returned to the United States and, with much fanfare, took up his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study. He never once returned to Europe.

Of all this turmoil in Germany – the home of his ancestors and some of his not-very-distant relations, as well as of many of the scientists for whom he had the greatest regard – there is not a single word in Oppenheimer’s letters, even when he touches on subjects that relate to it. For example, in a letter to Frank written on 12 March 1932, he tells him that their father, his health having been restored by his time in California, is now returning to New York. ‘I have urged him very strongly not to go to Europe alone this summer,’ Oppenheimer writes. One might think this advice was prompted by Oppenheimer’s concern at his father placing himself at the mercy of the violent anti-Semitism that had erupted in Germany. The rest of the letter suggests, however, that his concern was not about the conditions in Germany, but merely about his father’s physical condition. ‘Only if things should break unexpectedly well,’ he writes, ‘e.g. should he find a very good person to travel with, ought he, or will he, go abroad.’ He adds: ‘I have said that next summer I should consider going myself, that in that case we could at least cross both ways together.’

Again, in October 1933, he wrote to his brother about Frank’s plans to study at Cambridge. ‘The theoretical physics should be awfully good
in Cambridge,’ he told him, ‘with Dirac there, and Born.’ But nowhere does he reflect on, or even mention,
why
Born was in Cambridge. In March 1934, he responded to an appeal for financial support for dismissed German physicists by pledging 3 per cent of his salary for two years. Apart from that, he remained silent until his interest in political and social questions was finally aroused in 1936. Until then, his attitude is summed up by a remark he once made to Leo Nedelsky: ‘Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?’

Oppenheimer’s concern with truth, goodness and beauty led him in the early 1930s to a serious study of ancient Hindu literature; so serious, indeed, that he took lessons in Sanskrit so that he could read the Hindu texts in their original language. The first mention of this comes in his letter to Frank of 10 August 1931, in which he writes: ‘I am learning Sanskrit, enjoying it very much, and enjoying again the sweet luxury of being taught.’

His teacher was Arthur Ryder, who was professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley. Harold Cherniss has described Ryder as ‘a friend half divine in his great humanity’. In his views on education, he was a curious mixture of the ultra-traditionalist and the iconoclast. He believed on the one hand that a university education ought to consist primarily of Latin, Greek and mathematics (with the other sciences and humanities given as a reward to good students and the social sciences ignored altogether). On the other hand, his approach to the teaching of Sanskrit was refreshingly free from the deadening hand of dry scholarship. He regarded the learning of Sanskrit as the opening of a door onto great literature, not as an academic discipline. Perhaps for that reason he was the ideal teacher for Oppenheimer, who held him in enormously high regard. ‘Ryder felt and thought and talked as a stoic,’ Oppenheimer once told a journalist, extolling him as ‘a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary.’

Oppenheimer gave few details of his learning of Sanskrit or of his reading of the Hindu classics. In a letter to Frank of January 1932, he alludes very briefly to the Hindu god Shiva; the following autumn he mentions that he is reading ‘the Cakuntala’ (more usually spelled Shakuntala, a verse play written by the great Sanskrit poet and dramatist Kalidasa) and promises Frank that at their next meeting he will afflict him ‘with clumsy translations of the superb poems’; and a year later that he is reading the Bhagavad Gita, which ‘is very easy and quite marvellous’. Then, in June 1934, he writes to Frank, thanking him for ‘the precious Meghaduta and rather too learned
Veda
’, which were
presumably birthday presents. ‘The Meghaduta I read with Ryder, with delight, some ease, and great enchantment,’ Oppenheimer told his brother. ‘The Veda lies on my shelf, a reproach to my indolence.’ Otherwise known as ‘The Cloud Messenger’, the Meghaduta is a poem by Kalidasa that tells how a cloud is used to take a message from an exiled subject of Kubera, the god of wealth, to his wife in the Himalayan Mountains. The
Vedas
are the most ancient of Hindu scriptures, consisting of hymns, poems and mantras.

Apart from these very brief mentions of Sanskrit literature, Oppenheimer’s only other allusion to Hinduism in his correspondence comes in yet another letter to Frank, in which he tells him that he has called his third and latest car ‘Garuda’, after, he says, ‘the mechanical bird which the carpenter made for his friend the weaver who loved a princess’ – a description that shows a knowledge of the collection of fables known as the
Panchatantra
, rather than of the
Upanishads
scriptures, or the epic poem the
Mahabharata
, in both of which Garuda is depicted quite differently as a minor deity who carries the supreme god, Vishnu.

Though detailed discussion of his reading is absent, one can see the influence of Hinduism in much of what Oppenheimer writes to his brother. For example, in a letter to Frank, undated but probably written in January 1932, he speaks of ‘that
delectatio contemplationis
which is the reward and reason of our way of life’ and says that, though such things are not to be expected, nevertheless ‘we try to do everything to invite them, cultivate a little leisure, and a certain detached solitariness, and a quiet discipline which uses but transcends the discipline of our duties’.

In some ways, these remarks carry echoes of some of Felix Adler’s maxims, but, in their emphasis on detachment, separateness and transcendence they seem closer to the Bhagavad Gita than to the Ethical Culture movement, with its encouragement to
engage
politically and socially so as to improve the lives of others. Even more clearly indebted to Hindu ideas is the extended disquisition on the notion of discipline that Oppenheimer included in a letter to Frank two months later. The view Oppenheimer puts forward there is that discipline is to be valued independently from, and more than, ‘its earthly fruit’. ‘Discipline is good for the soul’, as Oppenheimer puts it, and it is not good because it leads to good results, or because it enables us to
do
things. That discipline is good for the soul ‘is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness’. It is, as it were, good
in itself
. What Oppenheimer writes about discipline to Frank is worth quoting at length, because it offers, I think, some valuable clues about the way he looked at life, and how that enabled him to do the things he did.

These thoughts carry direct echoes of the Bhagavad Gita, which begins on the battlefield with the great warrior Prince Arjuna despairing at the suffering of war and coming to doubt that there is any glory in killing the ‘teachers, fathers and sons’ who face him. He therefore wants no more part in the ‘evil of destruction’. The god Krishna, however, tells him that his concern for the deaths of his kinsmen and enemies is misplaced, since the spirit does not perish with the body and it is the spirit alone that is of value. Arjuna must fight, Krishna urges, not because of what fighting will accomplish, but rather because it is his duty to fight. ‘Set thy heart upon thy work,’ Krishna says, ‘but never on its reward. Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work.’ Towards the end of the book Krishna preaches ‘freedom from the chains of attachment, even from a selfish attachment to one’s children, wife or home’, a freedom achievable by ‘retiring to solitary places, and avoiding the noisy multitude’, Krishna continues: ‘A constant yearning to know the inner Spirit, and a vision of Truth which gives liberation: this is true wisdom leading to vision.’ He then speaks of Sattva, Rajas and Tamas – light, fire and darkness – and says: ‘Any work when it is well done bears the pure harmony of Sattva’ and ‘From Sattva arises wisdom.’

According to Isidor Rabi, Oppenheimer ‘would have been a much better physicist if he had studied the Talmud rather than Sanskrit . . . it would have given him a greater sense of himself.’ Rabi was inclined to link Oppenheimer’s interest in Sanskrit texts with his expertise in French literature; both, he thought, were part of Oppenheimer’s attempt to persuade himself and others that he was not Jewish. If he had mastered
the literature of his own tradition, rather than those of others, Rabi thought, Oppenheimer would not have had the problems that come with denying one’s own background. ‘The Jewish tradition,’ Rabi thought, ‘even if you don’t know it in detail, is so strong that you renounce it at your own peril. Doesn’t mean you have to be orthodox, or even practise it, but if you turn your back on it, having been born into it, you’re in trouble.’

As we have seen, the sense in which Oppenheimer was ‘born into’ the Jewish tradition is elusive, perhaps
too
elusive for Rabi’s point to be persuasive, because there is no clear way in which we can see Oppenheimer turning his back on his own tradition. In his family, as in many of the German Jewish families that made up Oppenheimer’s cultural background, the back-turning had been done a generation or two earlier. In the introduction he wrote to the published collection of speeches given at Oppenheimer’s memorial, Rabi offered another reason for thinking that the influence of Hinduism on Oppenheimer’s physics had been for the worse, this time in an effort to explain ‘why men of Oppenheimer’s gifts do not discover everything worth discovering’. The answer, he suggests, is that ‘in some respects Oppenheimer was over-educated in those fields which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was.’