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PARTISAN REVIEW
tions, but neither seeing them yet with clarity, nor having the ability to
cope without deep anguish with the disappointment of remaining on
the periphery. A few years later, in one of his beautiful letters to his
brother Frank, he hinted at the eventual internal resolution : "I know
very well, surely, that physics has a beauty which no other science can
match, a rigor, an austerity and depth; " its study induces , and de–
mands, a kind of mental discipline that at its best helps one "achieve
serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the
accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which
preserves the world which it renounces .... We come a little to see the
world without the gross distortion of personal desire.. . ."
Smith had warned an American friend in Cambridge that Robert,
on leaving his earlier, pampered life at college, might find " frigid
England hellish, socially and climatically," and that if allowed to be
overawed, "he'd merely cease to think his own life worth living. " That
evidently diagnosed part of the problem, but not the fundamental part.
Rather, it was first Robert's bad luck, and later his rescue, that this
labile, vulnerable, and brilliant young person passed through a per–
sonal crisis in the mid-1920s, at the very time when physics itself was
going through its own great transformation, the discovery of Quantum
Mechanics-a period which older scientists, from Niels Bohr to Werner
Heisenberg, were calling frankly a time of "despair." The difficulty
and the breakneck pace of the science, together with the tantalizing
glimpses of the great work waiting to be done, clearly exacerbated in
Young Man Oppenheimer what can be called euphemistically a
serious problem of temperament; and at the same time, it was to put to
a test what one of his friends termed Robert's "ability to bring himself
up, to figure out what his trouble was and to dea l with it."
Even at the best of times, becoming a competent scientist is a hard
test-as Oppenheimer himself once counseled, it is " like climbing a
mountain in a tunnel: you wouldn't know whether you were coming
out above the valley or whether you were ever coming out at all." But
as it happened, for Robert the turbulences of the history of physics and
of his own psychohistory had come together in a most frustrating way,
and it culminated during a Christmas holiday trip to Paris in an
episode that showed the severity of the psychological crisis. The ed itors
of the letters say that, apparently without warning, " Robert suddenly
leapt upon [Francis] Ferguson [a friend and fellow studen t from
Harvard days] with the clear intention of strangling him .... The
uncharacteristic display of violence, combined with Robert's des pair
over his inept performance in the laboratory, and confidences about
