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

entirely false impression that he was mixing well with the other boys, told his parents that he was glad to be at the camp because he was learning a great deal from his fellow campers, especially about sex. This brought his enraged parents hurriedly to the camp, where his father demanded that the camp director do something about the spread of smut among the boys. When the camp director duly announced that disciplinary measures would be taken against those caught telling dirty stories, the boys sought their revenge on the telltale who had betrayed them. One evening, while taking a walk, Oppenheimer was captured and dragged to the icehouse, where he was stripped, his buttocks and genitals were painted green and he was tied up and left alone. As Fred Koenig later put it: ‘They, as it were, crucified him.’
    Despite this attack, Oppenheimer remained at the camp for the rest of the summer. ‘I don’t know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks,’ Koenig said. ‘Not many boys would have – or could have – but Robert did. It must have been hell for him.’ Afterwards, Oppenheimer mentioned the incident just once, when, at the age of twenty, he confided in Herbert Smith, who had by then become his closest friend. Both Smith and Fred Koenig (the only two friends of Oppenheimer’s who knew what he had endured on Grindstone Island) were convinced that it was a – perhaps the – defining moment of his life.
    One very interesting detail that Koenig mentioned in his recollections of Oppenheimer at summer camp in 1918 concerns their many walks together:
    We talked as we walked. I remember Robert quoting passage after passage of George Eliot. He found her conviction that there is acause and effect relationship in human behaviour, as well as in nature – her awareness of fate – to be fascinating. We discussed this at length.
    What particular passages Oppenheimer knew by heart is not known, though it is known that he was reading
Middlemarch
that summer and was greatly impressed by it. The theme of causal relations in human behaviour is highlighted in that book through its central character, Tertius Lydgate, who is himself fascinated by the application of causal explanations to nature (as Eliot puts it, he ‘longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure and help to define men’s thoughts more accurately after the true order’), but who, ironically, is undone precisely because of his failure to understand human nature, particularly his own and that of his wife.
    The character of Lydgate parallels Oppenheimer to an extraordinarily close extent. First and foremost, Lydgate is an outsider, the only character in the book who does not actually come from Middlemarch. We first see him as a young, newly qualified doctor, who, full of optimism and idealism, arrives in the town to establish himself as a family physician. As a boy, Eliot tells us, Lydgate had been a quick learner, who loved books and to whom acquiring knowledge was exceptionally easy: ‘It was said of him that Lydgate could do anything he liked.’ However, though he read widely and amassed at least a superficial knowledge and understanding of a vast range of subjects, ‘no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion’. This changed one rainy day when, out of boredom, he took down a volume of an old encyclopaedia and began reading the entry on ‘Anatomy’. ‘From that hour,’ Eliot writes, ‘Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.’
    Inspired by this passion, Lydgate studies medicine, fired not only by an enthusiasm for achieving a scientific understanding of the human body, but also by an idealistic desire to reform the medical profession and to do some social good. He wants both to be an outstanding practitioner of medicine and to make a significant and lasting theoretical contribution to medical science. He has the natural ability, the training and the circumstances to achieve this demanding dual ambition, but