Free American Prometheus by Kai Bird

pulse condoning eagerness with rape.
    In the winter of 1923–24, he wrote what he called “my first love poem”—to honor that “most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza.” He contemplates this mystery woman from afar in the library but apparently never speaks to her.
    No, I know that there have been others who have read Spinoza,
Even I;
Others who have crossed their white arms
Across the umber pages;
Others too pure to glance, even a second,
Beyond the sacred sphincter of their erudition.
But what is all that to me?
You must come, I say, and see the sea gulls,
Gold in the late sun;
You must come and talk to me and tell me why
In this same world, little white puffs of cloud-
Like cotton batting, if you will, or lingerie,
I have heard that before—
Little white puffs of cloud should float so quietly across the
Cleanly sky,
And you should sit, pale, in a black dress that would have graced
The stern ascetic conscience of a Benedict,
And read Spinoza, and let the wind blow the clouds by,
And let me drown myself in an ecstasy of dearth . . .
    Well, what if I do forget,
Forget Spinoza and your constancy,
Forget everything, till there stays with me
Only a faint half hope and half regret
And the unnumbered stretches of the sea?
    Unable to initiate a relationship, he remained aloof, hoping, as the poem says, that the young woman would make the first move: “You must come and talk to me . . .” He feels “a faint half hope and half regret.” Such a mix of powerful emotions is not, of course, unusual for a young man coming of age. But Robert had to be told that he was not alone.
    Again and again, whenever he was in anguish, Robert turned to his old teacher for help. In the late winter of 1924, he wrote Smith in the great “distress” of some emotional crisis. That letter has not survived, but we have Robert’s reply to Smith’s letter of reassurance. “What has soothed me most, I think,” he told Smith, “is that you perceived in my distress a certain similarity to that from which you had suffered; it had never occurred to me that the situation of anyone who now appeared to me in all respects so impeccable and so enviable could be in any way comparable with my own. . . . Abstractly, I feel that it is a terrible pity that there should be so many good people I shall not know, so many joys missed. But you are right. At least for me the desire is not a need; it is an impertinence.”
    After Robert finished his first year at Harvard, his father found him a summer job in a New Jersey laboratory. But he was bored. “The job and people are bourgeois and lazy and dead,” he wrote Francis Fergusson, who was himself back in lovely Los Pinos. “There is little work and nothing to puzzle at . . . how I envy you! . . . Francis, you choke me with anguish and despair; all I can do is admit to my hierarchy of physico-chemical immutabilities the Chaucerian ‘Amour vincit omnia.’ ” Robert’s friends were used to this florid language. “Everything he takes up,” Francis later observed, “he exaggerates.” Paul Horgan too recalled Robert’s “baroque tendency to exaggerate.” But it was also true that he quit the lab job and spent the month of August back at Bay Shore, much of the time sailing with Horgan, who had agreed to spend his vacation with him.
    IN JUNE 1925, after only three years of study, Robert was graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He made the dean’s list and was one of only thirty students to be selected for membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Tongue in cheek, he wrote Herbert Smith that year: “Even in the last stages of senile aphasia I will not say that education, in an academic sense, was only secondary when I was at college. I plow through about five or ten big scientific books a week, and pretend to research. Even if, in the end, I’ve got to satisfy myself with testing toothpaste, I don’t want to know it till it has