school, which vetoed the plan, whereupon it was proposed instead that Smith andOppenheimer should travel to the South-west during the summer holiday, a proposal that Smith (who had, it seems, performed a similar service earlier for Felix Adler’s nephew) was happy to accept.
It was a trip that was to have a deep and lasting influence on Oppenheimer’s life. In later life he was fond of saying that he had two loves: physics and the New Mexican desert. Of those, the first was New Mexico.
----
fn2 See here .
fn3 It is customary to remark on the elegance of Oppenheimer’s spoken and written language, but the curious awkwardness of the unidiomatic ‘themes that I did’ is a feature that recurs surprisingly often in his writing, particularly in his letters.
3
First Love: New Mexico
ONE REASON THAT Oppenheimer’s holiday in the South-west in the summer of 1922 was to have such deep and lasting effects on the course of his life was that it introduced him to people and places that would remain for him ideals by which others were measured. The South-west, as Emanie Sachs emphasises in
Red Damask
, was held in roughly equal measures of awe and contempt by members of the New York Jewish community, who regarded it, whether for good or ill, as the polar opposite of New York City. When her central character, Abby, discovers that her husband, Gilbert, has been offered a job in Texas, she urges him to accept it, on the grounds that, in the South-west, they could escape from the sense of being outsiders. After all, she reasons, ‘you can’t be an outsider when you’re a pioneer’. Gilbert, however, prefers to stay in New York, where life is more civilised. ‘Gilbert,’ Sachs writes, ‘had been brought up to value orderly living and art and music and philanthropy and friends who valued them.’ In drawing the contrast in this way, Sachs has, I think, provided important clues as to what Oppenheimer and Fergusson hoped to find in each other: where Oppenheimer looked to Fergusson and his family for the inspiration of the pioneer spirit and freedom from the sense of being an outsider, Fergusson, it seems likely, regarded Oppenheimer and his family as the very epitome of a life that valued ‘orderly living and art and music and philanthropy’.
In any case, Fergusson’s family home in Albuquerque, La Glorieta, was, naturally, the first port of call for Oppenheimer and Smith. There, Fergusson, back from Harvard for the summer, introduced Oppenheimer to his friend Paul Horgan. Horgan would later find fame as a novelist and a historian, especially renowned – like Fergusson’s siblings – for writing about the history, characters, landscape and mythology of the South-west. Born in Buffalo, New York, Horgan had lived in New Mexico since he was twelve, when his family moved to Albuquerque after his father, a vicepresident of a printing firm, contracted tuberculosis. At the time of meeting Oppenheimer, Horgan was a student at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, where he was to remain for another year before moving to Rochester, New York, in order to study stage production at the Eastman School of Music. His writing career took off a few years after he returned to Roswell in 1926 to take up a post as librarian at the Military Institute.
From their first meeting, Oppenheimer and Horgan took to each other warmly. Despite their differences in background and the fact that Horgan had little interest in science, they seemed to see in each other a kindred spirit. Indeed, among Oppenheimer, Fergusson and Horgan there quickly developed a shared sense of mutual admiration and liking, and, for the first time in his life, Oppenheimer found himself a member of a group of friends who shared interests, thoughts, confidences and experiences. They quickly began to think of themselves as a unit, a set of self-styled ‘polymaths’ that Horgan would later describe as ‘this pygmy triumvirate’ or ‘this great troika’. At the age of
It was a trip that was to have a deep and lasting influence on Oppenheimer’s life. In later life he was fond of saying that he had two loves: physics and the New Mexican desert. Of those, the first was New Mexico.
----
fn2 See here .
fn3 It is customary to remark on the elegance of Oppenheimer’s spoken and written language, but the curious awkwardness of the unidiomatic ‘themes that I did’ is a feature that recurs surprisingly often in his writing, particularly in his letters.
3
First Love: New Mexico
ONE REASON THAT Oppenheimer’s holiday in the South-west in the summer of 1922 was to have such deep and lasting effects on the course of his life was that it introduced him to people and places that would remain for him ideals by which others were measured. The South-west, as Emanie Sachs emphasises in
Red Damask
, was held in roughly equal measures of awe and contempt by members of the New York Jewish community, who regarded it, whether for good or ill, as the polar opposite of New York City. When her central character, Abby, discovers that her husband, Gilbert, has been offered a job in Texas, she urges him to accept it, on the grounds that, in the South-west, they could escape from the sense of being outsiders. After all, she reasons, ‘you can’t be an outsider when you’re a pioneer’. Gilbert, however, prefers to stay in New York, where life is more civilised. ‘Gilbert,’ Sachs writes, ‘had been brought up to value orderly living and art and music and philanthropy and friends who valued them.’ In drawing the contrast in this way, Sachs has, I think, provided important clues as to what Oppenheimer and Fergusson hoped to find in each other: where Oppenheimer looked to Fergusson and his family for the inspiration of the pioneer spirit and freedom from the sense of being an outsider, Fergusson, it seems likely, regarded Oppenheimer and his family as the very epitome of a life that valued ‘orderly living and art and music and philanthropy’.
In any case, Fergusson’s family home in Albuquerque, La Glorieta, was, naturally, the first port of call for Oppenheimer and Smith. There, Fergusson, back from Harvard for the summer, introduced Oppenheimer to his friend Paul Horgan. Horgan would later find fame as a novelist and a historian, especially renowned – like Fergusson’s siblings – for writing about the history, characters, landscape and mythology of the South-west. Born in Buffalo, New York, Horgan had lived in New Mexico since he was twelve, when his family moved to Albuquerque after his father, a vicepresident of a printing firm, contracted tuberculosis. At the time of meeting Oppenheimer, Horgan was a student at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, where he was to remain for another year before moving to Rochester, New York, in order to study stage production at the Eastman School of Music. His writing career took off a few years after he returned to Roswell in 1926 to take up a post as librarian at the Military Institute.
From their first meeting, Oppenheimer and Horgan took to each other warmly. Despite their differences in background and the fact that Horgan had little interest in science, they seemed to see in each other a kindred spirit. Indeed, among Oppenheimer, Fergusson and Horgan there quickly developed a shared sense of mutual admiration and liking, and, for the first time in his life, Oppenheimer found himself a member of a group of friends who shared interests, thoughts, confidences and experiences. They quickly began to think of themselves as a unit, a set of self-styled ‘polymaths’ that Horgan would later describe as ‘this pygmy triumvirate’ or ‘this great troika’. At the age of
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