Martin J. Sherwin

“You have to take the whole story,” Rabi insisted. “That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man, what made him act, what he did, and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here. You are writing a man’s life.”

Late that autumn of 1925, Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him. Consumed by feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he “poisoned” an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk. Jeffries Wyman later said, “Whether or not this was an imaginary apple, or a real apple, whatever it was, it was an act of jealousy.”

Robert was no doubt as perplexed by his own behavior as was Francis. He wrote his friend a few weeks after the incident that “You should have, not a letter, but a pilgrimage to Oxford, made in a hair shirt, with much fasting and snow and prayer. But I will keep my remorse and gratitude, and the shame I feel for my inadequacy to you, until I can do something rather less useless for you. I do not understand your forbearance nor your charity, but you must know that I will not forget them.”

Robert “gave the psychiatrist in Cambridge an outrageous song and dance. . . . The trouble is, you’ve got to have a psychiatrist who is abler than the person who’s being analyzed. They don’t have anybody.”

The book was Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a mystical and existential text that spoke to Oppenheimer’s troubled soul. Reading it in the evening by flashlight during his walking tour of Corsica, he later claimed to his Berkeley friend Haakon Chevalier, was one of the great experiences of his life. It snapped him out of his depression. Proust’s work is a classic novel of introspection, and it left a deep and lasting impression on Oppenheimer.

And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book—and not a psychiatrist—which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression.

Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle.”