Free Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk Page A

faith that had previously compelled its acceptance has to be rejected. The most obvious interpretation of the image of the sinking sun that occurs both at the beginning and at the end of the poem is that it is a metaphor for death – not only the deaths of the buried soldiers, but also of the faith that had guided them to their graves. This would include their faith in God, but also their faith in all those people and institutions that had perpetuated the ‘damning lie’: the priests, the governments – and the leaders of the Ethical Culture Society, together with the teachers and pupils at the Ethical Culture School.
    The poem perhaps provides a clue as to what lies behind Rabi’s remark about Oppenheimer’s relationship with his school and the Ethical Culture movement: ‘From conversations with him I have the impression that his own regard for the school was not affectionate. Too great a dose of Ethical Culture can often sour the budding intellectual who would prefer a more profound approach to human relations and man’s place in the universe.’ As Julius was so closely associated with the Ethical Culture movement, Oppenheimer, in distancing himself from Ethical Culture, was also distancing himself from his father – a process that, perhaps inevitably, was accompanied by feelings of guilt.
    If his first year at high school, 1917–18, was the year in which he broke free, to some extent, of the influence of Ethical Culture and his father, it was also the year in which Oppenheimer acquired a new father-figure, and possibly someone who could help him find the ‘more profound approach to human relations’ that Rabi mentions him needing. That man was Herbert Winslow Smith, a Harvard graduate who came to the Ethical Culture School in 1917 to teach English. He was at that time still intending to finish a PhD at Harvard, but enjoyed teaching at the Ethical Culture School so much that he stayed there, his PhD unfinished and forgotten, for the rest of his life.
    Clearly in his element at the Ethical Culture School, Smith became known as a teacher willing and able to form close relationships with his pupils. He formed an especially deep interest in Oppenheimer, his later recollections of whom reveal a predilection for psychoanalysis and an assumption that he understood the young Oppenheimer as well as, if not better than, Oppenheimer’s own family. One of Smith’s repeated themes is the uneasiness of Oppenheimer’s relationship with his father. Julius Oppenheimer, Smith said, had a touch of ‘business vulgarity which acutely embarrassed Robert, although he would never mention it’. Many of Robert’s problems, according to Smith, were due to a ‘pronounced oedipal attitude’ towards his father.
    It was in the summer after Smith’s first year at the school – the summerof 1918, as the First World War was coming to an end – that Oppenheimer, then fourteen years old, underwent an experience that Smith was convinced was one of the most important of his life, and which was for Smith the paradigm example of the ways in which Oppenheimer blamed his father for his suffering.
    The incident took place during Oppenheimer’s stay at Camp Koenig, a boys’ summer camp on Grindstone Island in Lake Ontario. The camp was run by Dr Otto Koenig, the principal of the Sachs Collegiate Institute, a Jewish boys’ school in the Upper West Side of New York City. Koenig’s son, Fred, later professor of chemistry at Stanford University, became Oppenheimer’s only friend at the camp. ‘I often felt,’ Fred Koenig said years later, ‘that what happened to Robert in camp that summer could easily account for much of his behaviour – his actions – that people found so baffling.’
    At the camp Oppenheimer became the victim of increasingly vicious bullying. The other boys called him ‘Cutie’ and mocked him for writing to his parents every day and for reading poetry. In one of his letters home Oppenheimer, perhaps trying to give the