Early in 1981 I received an invitation to give a lecture at a writers’ conference that was being held someplace on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, just across from New Jersey. I don’t remember the exact location, but a study of the map convinces me that it was probably New Hope. My first inclination was to say no. There were several reasons. I was living in New York City and teaching full time. My weekends were precious and the idea of getting up before dawn on a Saturday, renting a car, and driving across the entire state of New Jersey to deliver a lecture was repellent. As I recall, the honorarium offered would have barely covered the expense. Furthermore, a subject had been suggested for my lecture that, in truth, no longer interested me. Since I both wrote and did physics, I had often been asked to discuss the connection, if any, between these two activities. When this first came up, I felt obligated to say something, but after twenty years, about the only thing that I felt like saying was that both physics and writing, especially if one wanted to do them well, were extremely difficult.

The conference seemed to be centered on poetry, and one of the things that came to mind was an anecdote that Robert Oppenheimer used to tell about himself. Since Oppenheimer will play a significant role in what follows, I will elaborate. After Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, he was awarded a fellowship to study in Europe. Following a very unhappy time in England, where he seems to have had a sort of nervous breakdown, he went to Germany to get his Ph.D.

He studied with the distinguished German theoretical physicist Max Born in Gottingen and took his degree there in 1927 at the age of twenty-three. Born’s recollections of Oppenheimer, which were published posthumously in 1975, were not sympathetic. Oppenheimer, he wrote, “was a man of great talent and I was conscious of his superiority in a way which was embarrassing and led to trouble. In my ordinary seminar on quantum mechanics, he used to interrupt the speaker, whoever it was, not excluding myself, and to step to the blackboard, taking the chalk and declaring: ‘this can be done much better in the following manner.’” In fact, it got so bad that Oppenheimer’s fellow students in the seminar petitioned Born to put a stop to it.

Quantum mechanics had been invented the year before by Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg and Paul A. M. Dirac. The next year, Dirac came as a visitor to Gottingen and, as it happened, roomed in the large house of a physician named Cario where Oppenheimer also had a room. Dirac was twenty-five. The two young men became friends—insofar as one could have a friendship with Dirac. As young as he was, Dirac was already a great physicist, and I am sure he knew it. He probably just took it for granted. However, he was, and remained, an enigma. He rarely spoke, but when he did, it was always with extraordinary precision and often with devastating effect. This must have had a profound effect on Oppenheimer. While Oppenheimer was interrupting Born’s seminars, announcing that he could do calculations better in the quantum theory, Dirac, only two years older, had invented the subject.

In any case, in the course of things the two of them often went for walks. In the version of the story that I heard Oppenheimer tell, they were walking one evening on the walls that surrounded Gottingen and got to discussing Oppenheimer’s poetry. I would imagine that the “discussion” was more like an Oppenheimer monologue, which was abruptly interrupted by Dirac, who asked, “How can you do both poetry and physics? In physics we try to give people an understanding of something that nobody knew before, whereas in poetry…’ Oppenheimer allowed one to fill in the rest of the sentence. As interesting as it might have been to hear the responses, this did not seem to be the sort of anecdote that would go over especially well at a conference devoted to poetry.

Pitted against these excellent reasons for my not going to the conference were two others that finally carried the day. In the first place, I was in the beginning stages of a love affair with a young woman who wanted very much to write. She wanted to write so much that she had resigned a lucrative job with an advertising agency and was giving herself a year in which, living on her savings, she was going to do nothing but write. It was a gutsy thing to do, but like many people who try it, she was finding it pretty rough going. In fact, she was rather discouraged. So, to cheer her up, I suggested attending this conference, where she might have a chance to talk with other people who were in the same boat. This aside, I had read in the tentative program of the conference that one of the other tutors was to be Stephen Spender. This, for reasons I will now explain, was decisive.
I should begin by saying right off that I am not a great admirer of Spender’s poetry. He is, for me, one of those people whose writing about their writing is more interesting than their writing itself. But I had read with great interest Spender’s autobiography— World Within World—especially for what it revealed about the poet who did mean the most to me—namely, W. H. Auden. Auden’s Dirac-like lucidity, the sheer wonder of the language, and the sense of fun about serious things—”At least my modem pieces shall be cheery / Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory”—were to me irresistible. I became fascinated by Spender’s obsession with Auden. Auden must have been to Spender what Dirac was for Oppenheimer, a constant reminder of the difference between being “great” and being “merely” very good. I was also struck by the fact that, like Oppenheimer, Spender seemed “unfocused.” Partly Jewish, partly homosexual, partly a British establishment figure, one wondered when he got time to write poetry. By being profoundly eccentric, both Auden and Dirac, probably not by accident, insulated themselves. They focused like laser beams. What I did not know in 1981—I learned it only after Spender’s journals were published in 1986—was that Spender had paid a brief visit to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in November of 1956, the year before I got there and two years before Dirac came on one of his perennial visits.

Spender’s journal entry on his visit is fascinating both for what it says and for what it does not say. He begins by noting that “Oppenheimer lives in a beautiful house, the interior of which is painted almost entirely white.”

This was the director’s mansion. Spender did not notice that, because of Oppenheimer’s western connections, there was also the odd horse on the grounds. He continues: “He has beautiful paintings. As soon as we came in, he said: ‘Now is the time to look at the van Gogh.’ We went into his sitting room and saw a very fine van Gogh of a sun above a field almost entirely enclosed in shadows.” At the end of my first interview with Oppenheimer, immediately after I had driven cross-country from Los Alamos in a convertible with a large hole in the roof and had been summoned to the interview while still covered in grime, he said to me that he and his wife had some pictures I might like to look at sometime. I wondered what he was talking about. Some months later I was invited to a party at the Oppenheimers, and realized that he was talking about a van Gogh. Some years later, I learned that this was part of a small collection he had inherited from his father to which he had never added.

In his journal entry, Spender describes Oppenheimer’s physical appearance: “Robert Oppenheimer is one of the most extraordinary-looking men I have ever seen. He has a head like that of a very small intelligent boy, with a long back to it, reminding one of those skulls which were specially elongated by the Egyptians. His skull gives an almost eggshell impression of fragility, and is supported by a very thin neck. His expression is radiant and at the same time ascetic.,” Much of this description seems right to me except that it leaves out the fact that Oppenheimer did have the sunwrinkled look of someone who had spent a great deal of time outdoors, which he had.

Spender also does not seem to have remarked on Oppenheimer’s eyes, which had a kind of wary luminescence. Siamese cats make a similar impression. But more important, Oppenheimer appears in Spender’s journal as a disembodied figure with no contextual relevance to Spender’s own life.

There is no comment about the fact that, three years earlier, Oppenheimer had been “tried” for disloyalty to this country and that his clearance had been taken away. One of the charges brought against him was that his wife, Katherine Puening Oppenheimer, was the former wife of Joseph Dallet, who had been a member of the Communist Party and who had been killed in 1937 fighting for the Spanish Republican Army. In 1937, Spender was also a member of the Communist Party in Britain and had also spent time in Spain. Did Oppenheimer know this? He usually knew most things about the people who interested him. Did “Kitty” Oppenheimer know it? Did this have anything to do with the fact that, during Spender’s visit, she was upstairs “ill”? Spender offers no comment. What was he thinking? There were so many things the two of them might have said to each other, but didn’t. They talked about the invasion of the Suez Canal.

In the fall of my second year at the institute, Dirac came for a visit. We all knew that he was coming, but no one had actually encountered him, despite rumored sightings. By this time, Dirac, who was in his mid-fifties, had a somewhat curious role in physics. Unlike Einstein, he had kept up with many of the developments and indeed from time to time commented on them.

But, like Einstein, he had no school or following and had produced very few students. He had essentially no collaborators. Once, when asked about this, he remarked that “the really good ideas in physics are had by only one person. That seems to apply to poetry as well. He taught his classes in the quantum theory at Cambridge University, where he held Newton’s Lucasian chair, by, literally, reading in his precise, clipped way from his great text on the subject. When this was remarked on, he replied that he had given the subject a good deal of thought and that there was no better way to present it.

At the institute we had a weekly physics seminar over which Oppenheimer presided, often interrupting the speaker. Early in the fall we were in the midst of one of these—there were about forty people in attendance in a rather small room—when the door opened. In walked Dirac. I had never seen him before, but I had often seen pictures of him. The real thing was much better. He wore much of a blue suit—trousers, shirt, tie, and, as I recall, a sweater——but what made an indelible impression were the thigh-length muddy rubber boots. It turned out that he was spending a good deal of time in the woods near the institute with an ax, chopping a path in the general direction of Trenton. Some years later, when I had begun writing for The New Yorker and attempted a profile of Dirac, he suggested that we might conduct some of the sessions while clearing this path. He was apparently still working on it.

Now it is some twenty-five years later. The sun has not yet come up, and I am driving across the state of New Jersey with my companion. We have left New York at about 5 A.M. so that I will arrive in time for a midmorning lecture.

I have cobbled something together about physics and writing. Neither of us has had a proper breakfast. As we go through the Lincoln Tunnel I recall an anecdote my Nobelist colleague T. D. Lee once told me about Dirac. He was driving him from New York to Princeton through this same tunnel. Sometime after they had passed it, Dirac interrupted his silence to remark that, on the average, about as much money would be collected in tolls if they doubled the toll and had tollbooths only at one end. A few years later the Port Authority seems to have made the same analysis and halved the number of tollbooths. We pass the turnoff that would have taken us to Princeton. It is tempting to pay a visit. But Oppenheimer is by then dead and Dirac living in Florida with his wife, the sister of fellow physicist Eugene Wigner. Dirac used to introduce her to people as Wigner’s sister, as in “I would like you to meet Wigner’s sister.” Dirac died in Florida in 1984.

We arrived at the conference center a few minutes before my lecture was scheduled to begin. There was no one, or almost no one, in the lecture room. However, in midroom, there was Spender. I recognized him at once from his pictures. Christopher Isherwood once described Spender’s eyes as having the “violent color of blue-bells.” Spender was wearing a dark blue suit and one of those striped British shirts—Turnbull and Asser?—the mere wearing of which makes one feel instantly better. He had on a club tie of some sort. He said nothing during my lecture and left as soon as it was over, along with the minuscule audience that I had traveled five hours by car to address.

My companion and I then had a mediocre lunch in one of the local coffee shops. There seemed to be no official lunch. I was now thoroughly out of sorts and was ready to return to New York, but she wanted very much to stay for at least part of Spender’s poetry workshop, and so we did.

I had never been to a poetry workshop and couldn’t imagine what one would consist of. I had been to plenty of physics workshops and knew only too well what they consisted of: six physicists in a room with a blackboard shouting at one another. The room where Spender was to conduct his workshop was full, containing perhaps thirty people. One probably should not read too much into appearances, but these people—mostly women—looked to me as if they were clinging to poetry as if it were some sort of life raft. If I had had access to Spender’s journals (they came out a few years later), I would have realized that he was very used to all of this. In fact, he had been earning his living since his retirement from University College in London a decade earlier by doing lectures and classes for groups like this. I would also have realized that by 1981 he was pretty tired of it, and pretty tired of being an avatar for his now dead friends—Auden, C. Day Lewis, and the rest. He had outlived them all, but was still under their shadow, especially that of Auden, whom he had first met at Oxford at about the same age and same time that Oppenheimer had met Dirac.

Spender walked in with a stack of poems written by the workshop members. He gave no opening statement, but began reading student poems. I was surprised by how awful they were. Most seemed to be lists: “sky, sex, sea, earth, red, green, blue,” and so forth.

Spender gave no clue about what he thought of them. Every once in a while he would interrupt his reading and seek out the author and ask such a question as, “Why did you choose red there rather than green? What does red mean to you?” He seemed to be on autopilot.

It is a pity that there are no entries in Spender’s journals for this precise period. But it is clear that he was leading a rich social life at the time: dinner with Jacqueline Onassis one day, the Rothschilds’ at Mouton a week later— the works. My feeling was that whatever he was thinking of had little to do with this workshop. Somehow, I was getting increasingly annoyed. It was none of my business, I guess, but I had put in a long day, and I felt that Spender owed us more. I didn’t know what—but more.

My companion must have sensed that I was about to do something because she began writing furiously in a large notebook that she had brought along. Finally, after one particularly egregious “list,” I raised my hand. Spender looked surprised, but he called on me. “Why was that a poem?” I asked. In reading his journals years later, I saw that this was a question that he had been asked by students several times and had never come up with an answer that really satisfied him. In 1935, Auden wrote an introduction for an anthology of poetry for schoolchildren in which he defined poetry as “memorable speech.” That sounds good until one asks, Memorable to whom? Doesn’t it matter? If not, why a workshop?

I can’t remember what Spender answered, but I then told him that, when I was a student, I had heard T. S. Eliot lecture.

After the lecture one of the students in the audience asked Eliot what he thought the most beautiful line in the English language was—an insane question, really, like asking for the largest number. Much to my amazement Eliot answered without the slightest hesitation, “But look, the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.” I asked Spender what he thought the most beautiful line in the English language was. He got up from his chair and in a firm hand wrote a line of Auden’s on the blackboard. He looked at it with an expression that I have never forgotten—sadness, wonder, regret, perhaps envy. He recited it slowly and then sat back down. There was total silence in the room. I thanked him, and my companion and I left the class.

I had not thought of all of this for many years, but recently, for some reason, it all came back to me, nearly. I remembered everything except the line that Spender wrote on the blackboard. All that I could remember for certain was that it had to do with the moon—somehow the moon. My companion of fifteen years ago is my companion no longer: so I could not ask her. I am a compulsive collector of data from my past, mostly in the form of items that were once useful for tax preparation. Perhaps I had saved the program of the conference with the line written down on it. I looked in the envelopes for 1981 and could find no trace of this trip.

Then I had an idea—lunatic, lunar, perhaps. I would look through Auden’s collected poems and seek out every line having to do with the moon; to see if it jogged my memory. One thing that struck me, once I started this task, was that there are surprisingly few references to the moon in these poems. In a collection of eight hundred and ninety-seven pages, I doubt if there are twenty. From Moon Landing, there is “Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens as she ebbs and fulls…” or from The Age of Anxiety, Mild, unmilitant, as the moon rose / And reeds rustled…” or from “Nocturne,” “Appearing unannounced, the moon / Avoids a mountain’s jagged prongs / And seeps into the open sky / Like one who knows where she belongs” —all wonderful lines, but not what I remembered. The closest was “White hangs the waning moon / A scruple in the sky…” also from The Age of Anxiety. This still didn’t seem right.

Then I got an idea. I would reread Spender’s journals to see if he mentions a line in Auden’s poetry that refers to the moon. In the entry for the sixth of February 1975, I found this: “It would not be very difficult to imitate the late Auden. [He had died in 1973.] For in his late poetry there is a rather crotchety persona into whose carpet slippers some ambitious young man with a technique as accomplished could slip.

But it would be very difficult to imitate the early Auden, ‘this lunar beauty / has no history, / Is complete and early…’” This, I am sure of it now, is the line that Spender wrote on the blackboard that afternoon in 1981.

Poor Stephen Spender, poor Robert Oppenheimer, each limited, if not relegated, to the category of the merely very good, and each inevitably saddened by his knowledge of what was truly superior. “Being a minor poet is like being a minor royalty,” Spender wrote in his journals, “and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.” As for Oppenheimer, I recall Isidor Rabi once telling me that “if he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he [Oppenheimer] would have been a much greater physicist. I never ran into anyone who was brighter than he was. But to be more original and profound I think you have to be more focused.”

As Spender says, W. H. Auden’s poetry cannot be imitated, any more than Paul Dirac’s physics can be. That is what great poetry and great physics have in common: Both are swept along by the tide of unanticipated genius as it rushes past the merely very good.