crisis.” And then something strange happened. “One day,” Wyman recalled decades later, “when we’d almost finished our time in Corsica, we were staying in some little inn, the three of us—Edsall, Oppenheimer and I—and we were having dinner together.” The waiter approached Oppenheimer and told him when the next boat departed for France. Surprised, Edsall and Wyman asked Oppenheimer why he was rushing back earlier than planned. “I can’t bear to speak of it,” Robert replied, “but I’ve got to go.” Later in the evening, after they had drunk a little more wine, he relented and said, “Well, perhaps I can tell you why I have to go. I’ve done a terrible thing. I’ve put a poisoned apple on Blackett’s desk and I’ve got to go back and see what happened.” Edsall and Wyman were stunned. “I never knew,” Wyman recalled, “whether it was real or imaginary.” Robert didn’t elaborate, but he did mention that he had been diagnosed with dementia praecox. Unaware that the “poisoned apple” incident had actually occurred the previous autumn, Wyman and Edsall assumed that Robert, in a fit of “jealousy,” had done something to Blackett that spring, just before their trip to Corsica. Clearly, something had happened, but, as Edsall put it later, “he [Robert] spoke of it with a sense of reality that Jeffries and I both felt that this must be some kind of hallucination on his part.”
Over the decades, the truth of the poisoned-apple story has been mud-died by conflicting accounts. In his 1979 interview with Martin Sherwin, however, Fergusson made it quite plain that the incident occurred in the late autumn of 1925, and not in the spring of 1926: “All this happened during his [Robert’s] first term at Cambridge. And just before I met him in London, when he was going to the psychiatrist.” When Sherwin asked if he really believed the poisoned-apple story, Fergusson replied, “Yes, I do. I do. His father then had to engineer the authorities of Cambridge about Robert’s attempted murder.” Talking with Alice Kimball Smith in 1976, Fergusson referred to “the time when he [Robert] tried to poison one of his people. . . . He told me about it at the time, or shortly thereafter, in Paris. I always assumed that it was probably true. But I don’t know. He was doing all sorts of crazy things then.” Fergusson certainly appeared to Smith to be a reliable source. As she noted after interviewing him, “He doesn’t pretend to remember anything he doesn’t.”
OPPENHEIMER’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE was finally coming to an end. Sometime during his short stay in Corsica, something happened to him in the nature of an awakening. Whatever it was, Oppenheimer made sure that it remained a carefully cultivated mystery. Perhaps it was a fleeting love affair—but more likely not. Years later, he would respond to a query from the author Nuel Pharr Davis: “The psychiatrist was a prelude to what began for me in Corsica. You ask whether I will tell you the full story or whether you must dig it out. But it is known to few and they won’t tell. You can’t dig it out. What you need to know is that it was not a mere love affair, not a love affair at all, but love.” The encounter held some kind of mystical, transcendental meaning for Oppenheimer: “Geography was henceforth the only separation I recognized, but for me it was not a real separation.” It was, he told Davis, “a great thing in my life, a great and lasting part of it, more to me now, even more as I look back when my life is nearly over.”
So what actually happened in Corsica? Probably nothing. Oppenheimer deliberately answered Davis’ query about Corsica with an enigma sure to frustrate his biographers. He coyly called it “love” and not a “mere” love affair. Obviously, the distinction was important to him. In the company of his friends, he had no opportunity for a real affair. But he did read a book that appears to have resulted in an
Over the decades, the truth of the poisoned-apple story has been mud-died by conflicting accounts. In his 1979 interview with Martin Sherwin, however, Fergusson made it quite plain that the incident occurred in the late autumn of 1925, and not in the spring of 1926: “All this happened during his [Robert’s] first term at Cambridge. And just before I met him in London, when he was going to the psychiatrist.” When Sherwin asked if he really believed the poisoned-apple story, Fergusson replied, “Yes, I do. I do. His father then had to engineer the authorities of Cambridge about Robert’s attempted murder.” Talking with Alice Kimball Smith in 1976, Fergusson referred to “the time when he [Robert] tried to poison one of his people. . . . He told me about it at the time, or shortly thereafter, in Paris. I always assumed that it was probably true. But I don’t know. He was doing all sorts of crazy things then.” Fergusson certainly appeared to Smith to be a reliable source. As she noted after interviewing him, “He doesn’t pretend to remember anything he doesn’t.”
OPPENHEIMER’S PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE was finally coming to an end. Sometime during his short stay in Corsica, something happened to him in the nature of an awakening. Whatever it was, Oppenheimer made sure that it remained a carefully cultivated mystery. Perhaps it was a fleeting love affair—but more likely not. Years later, he would respond to a query from the author Nuel Pharr Davis: “The psychiatrist was a prelude to what began for me in Corsica. You ask whether I will tell you the full story or whether you must dig it out. But it is known to few and they won’t tell. You can’t dig it out. What you need to know is that it was not a mere love affair, not a love affair at all, but love.” The encounter held some kind of mystical, transcendental meaning for Oppenheimer: “Geography was henceforth the only separation I recognized, but for me it was not a real separation.” It was, he told Davis, “a great thing in my life, a great and lasting part of it, more to me now, even more as I look back when my life is nearly over.”
So what actually happened in Corsica? Probably nothing. Oppenheimer deliberately answered Davis’ query about Corsica with an enigma sure to frustrate his biographers. He coyly called it “love” and not a “mere” love affair. Obviously, the distinction was important to him. In the company of his friends, he had no opportunity for a real affair. But he did read a book that appears to have resulted in an
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