eighteen, it seems, Oppenheimer had finally found a group of people his own age to which he felt he
belonged
, and to whom he did not seem strange and alien.
That Oppenheimer could find this sense of belonging only among gentiles in the South-west is indicative not only of his sense of
not
belonging to the community within which he had been brought up, but also of his desire to actively distance himself from that community and to become a different person with a different social milieu. Before they set out for the South-west, Oppenheimer startled Herbert Smith by asking him if they could both travel under the name ‘Smith’, passing Oppenheimer off as Smith’s younger brother. Smith would have nothing to do with this plan, which he saw as one among many signs of discomfort on Oppenheimer’s part with his Jewishness. This discomfort, Smith believed, also lay at the heart of Oppenheimer’s illnesses, both his dysentery and his colitis, which, he thought, had more likely psychological than biological origins. After all, Smith wondered, how could Oppenheimer have contracted dysentery when his family were so scrupulous in avoiding all contact with the outside world and drank nothing but bottled water? As for Oppenheimer’s colitis, Smith noted that it disappeared very suddenly as soon as they arrived in the South-west, but reappeared whenever ‘someone disparaged the Jews’. One telling recollection of Smith’s concerns an occasion when, in a hurry to get his clothes packed, he asked Oppenheimer for help in folding a jacket. ‘He looked at me sharply,’ Smith remembered, ‘and said, “Oh yes, the tailor’s son would know how to do that, wouldn’t he?”’
In New Mexico, among the ‘great troika’ of himself, Fergusson andHorgan, fn4 Oppenheimer could, at least temporarily, escape from being the Jewish ‘tailor’s son’ from New York City and be part of a culture that defined itself in opposition to trade and business, that saw itself rooted in the mountains, rivers and valleys of the South-western countryside and the noble and courageous adventurousness of the pioneers that had tamed it. As Erna Fergusson puts it in her book,
Our South West
:
The Southwest can never be made into a land that produces bread and butter. But it is infinitely productive of the imponderables so much needed by a world weary of getting and spending. It is a wilderness where a man may get back to the essentials of being a man. It is magnificence forever rewarding to a man courageous enough to seek to renew his soul.
This emphasis on the role of the South-west in ‘renewing’ the soul pervades much of the work of Horgan and the Fergussons. In the same book, for example, Erna writes:
Such a country, inscrutable, unconquerable and like nothing his kind had ever seen, naturally affected the man who dared to face it. It made, in fact, a new type of man who may renew himself in other challenging conditions or who may prove to be only a passing phase due to submerge in the babbittry that has come with the trains.
The conquering of the West as a metaphor for conquering the self was one that Horgan was very fond of. For example, in an essay he wrote in the 1940s, he suggested: ‘Maybe everyone has a kind of early West within himself that has to be discovered, and pioneered, and settled. We did it as a country once. I think plenty of people have done it for themselves as individuals.’
That Oppenheimer had, to some extent, ‘found himself’ during his trip to the South-west, that it enabled him to blossom in ways that had been impossible in New York, is attested to by the way his new friends remembered him during this summer. ‘He was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known,’ Paul Horgan said. ‘And with this, in that period of his life, he combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits . . . He had a great superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity at that time.’ He also noted Oppenheimer’s
belonged
, and to whom he did not seem strange and alien.
That Oppenheimer could find this sense of belonging only among gentiles in the South-west is indicative not only of his sense of
not
belonging to the community within which he had been brought up, but also of his desire to actively distance himself from that community and to become a different person with a different social milieu. Before they set out for the South-west, Oppenheimer startled Herbert Smith by asking him if they could both travel under the name ‘Smith’, passing Oppenheimer off as Smith’s younger brother. Smith would have nothing to do with this plan, which he saw as one among many signs of discomfort on Oppenheimer’s part with his Jewishness. This discomfort, Smith believed, also lay at the heart of Oppenheimer’s illnesses, both his dysentery and his colitis, which, he thought, had more likely psychological than biological origins. After all, Smith wondered, how could Oppenheimer have contracted dysentery when his family were so scrupulous in avoiding all contact with the outside world and drank nothing but bottled water? As for Oppenheimer’s colitis, Smith noted that it disappeared very suddenly as soon as they arrived in the South-west, but reappeared whenever ‘someone disparaged the Jews’. One telling recollection of Smith’s concerns an occasion when, in a hurry to get his clothes packed, he asked Oppenheimer for help in folding a jacket. ‘He looked at me sharply,’ Smith remembered, ‘and said, “Oh yes, the tailor’s son would know how to do that, wouldn’t he?”’
In New Mexico, among the ‘great troika’ of himself, Fergusson andHorgan, fn4 Oppenheimer could, at least temporarily, escape from being the Jewish ‘tailor’s son’ from New York City and be part of a culture that defined itself in opposition to trade and business, that saw itself rooted in the mountains, rivers and valleys of the South-western countryside and the noble and courageous adventurousness of the pioneers that had tamed it. As Erna Fergusson puts it in her book,
Our South West
:
The Southwest can never be made into a land that produces bread and butter. But it is infinitely productive of the imponderables so much needed by a world weary of getting and spending. It is a wilderness where a man may get back to the essentials of being a man. It is magnificence forever rewarding to a man courageous enough to seek to renew his soul.
This emphasis on the role of the South-west in ‘renewing’ the soul pervades much of the work of Horgan and the Fergussons. In the same book, for example, Erna writes:
Such a country, inscrutable, unconquerable and like nothing his kind had ever seen, naturally affected the man who dared to face it. It made, in fact, a new type of man who may renew himself in other challenging conditions or who may prove to be only a passing phase due to submerge in the babbittry that has come with the trains.
The conquering of the West as a metaphor for conquering the self was one that Horgan was very fond of. For example, in an essay he wrote in the 1940s, he suggested: ‘Maybe everyone has a kind of early West within himself that has to be discovered, and pioneered, and settled. We did it as a country once. I think plenty of people have done it for themselves as individuals.’
That Oppenheimer had, to some extent, ‘found himself’ during his trip to the South-west, that it enabled him to blossom in ways that had been impossible in New York, is attested to by the way his new friends remembered him during this summer. ‘He was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known,’ Paul Horgan said. ‘And with this, in that period of his life, he combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits . . . He had a great superiority but great charm with it, and great simplicity at that time.’ He also noted Oppenheimer’s
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