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PARTISAN REVIEW
school graduation gift the boy was staked to a prospecting trip to
Czechoslovakia-indeed to the mining center in JoachimsLhal, famous
for its pitchblende from which uranium salt had long been extracted
for the manufacture of glass.
It
was from here that tons of pitchblende
residue had been obtained by Pierre and Marie Curie, who then
discovered in it the mysterious substance they called "radium. " The
same area was to be the main supply of uranium, many years later, for
the Nazi attempt to make an atomic bomb. Indeed, the German
embargo on the export of uranium ore from Joachimsthal was one of
the tell-tale signs noted by Einstein in his letter of 2 August 1939
to
Roosevelt, warning that the Germans were on their way.
Oppenheimer visited that mine at a time almost precisely halfway
between the Curies' labors and Einstein 's letter-one of the mysterious
symmetries in his life trajectory that normally are associated only with
staged plays. At that excursion, he contracted a nearly fatal case of
dysentery, which exacerbated a predisposition to bouts of colitis,
melancholia, and periods of deep depression . Again, a strange irony:
Having been forced to spend a year at home to recuperate and thereby
miss a year before entering college, young Roben was sent on a
refreshing trip to New Mf'xico and the West, Herbert W. Smith serving
as companion. The boy fell in love with the wild Southwest-and
incidentally came upon a beautiful mesa on which is located the Los
Alamos Ranch School. Indeed, the main events in Smith and Weiner's
book are balanced between Robert's boyhood visit and, twenty years
later, the return trip when Oppenheimer took General Groves to that
spot one November afternoon, to propose it as the site for the secret
laboratory.
I.
Once in college, Robert immerses himself in chemistry, mathemat–
ics, and physics. But it is not clear which of these will win out, and he
also stretches in many other directions, continuing his study of
languages (he knows Latin , Greek, French, Spanish, and German, and
later adds Dutch and serious study of Chinese and Sanskrit), and
discovering the Widener Library, literature, A. N. Whitehead 's philos–
ophy seminar, excursions to Cape Ann . To Smith he writes, "I labor
and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories, and junk; I go to
the math lib. and read and to the phil. lib. and divide my time between
Meinherr 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 Allard
gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly
to
a few lost souls, go
