Oppenheimer: fact and fiction

‘Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible,’ Virginia Woolf once wrote. She was deploring the decision of her friend, Lytton Strachey, to combine fact and fiction in his book, Elizabeth and Essex, in which, in order to fill in the gaps in the historical record, Strachey used his imagination to invent details of the relationship between the Virgin Queen and her favourite earl. The result, according to Woolf, was neither an honest piece of biography, nor a satisfying work of fiction, but something that was caught in between the conflicting demands of the two genres.

Elizabeth and Essex was published as a work of non-fiction. America’s Children is published as a novel, and yet, being in essence a (not very) fictionalised biography of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, it occupies the same ambiguous territory as Strachey’s book and is subject to the conflicting demands that Virginia Woolf identified. It recalls very strongly (and is, I suspect, rather heavily indebted to) the 1968 book, Lawrence and Oppenheimer by the American professor of English literature, Nuel Pharr Davis, which, though written like a novel, was presented as a contribution to political and intellectual history.