The Price of Altruism

by Oren Harman

  Walking home that day from UCL, as usual, George eyed the All Souls spire jutting up above the buildings. It was constructed of seventeen concave sides encircled by twelve Corinthian columns, the capitals Ionic in design, made from Coade stone, and the winged heads of the cherubs based on a design by Michelangelo. Three large clocks beneath the columns counted the minutes and hours with black and golden Hermle spade hands. The spire was a perfect cone, as sharp as it seemed foreboding, fearless in the way it pierced the overcast sky. As he turned from narrow Riding House Street into Little Titchfield, George began wondering about his luck, and, in particular, about coincidences.

  Later he would write that the “coincidences” that forced him to convert were on the order of 1/1030, odds so fleetingly miniscule that he simply had no choice but to “give in and admit that God existed.”3 “About the beginning of June,” he wrote to his brother, Edison, in the fall, trying to explain,

  I happened to notice one surprising coincidence in my life, and this started me searching back through my calendar books and letters and other material, and noticing a long succession of other improbabilities, until the improbability level became astronomical. I listed a long series of independent events having improbabilities of the order of 1/100 or 1/1000, that fitted together into a meaningful pattern, and when I multiplied these together the product was something like i over i followed by twenty or thirty zeros.4

  What had been the initial “surprising coincidence”? It was bizarre and absurd, maniacal and eerie. But it had George entirely transfixed.

  Back at Christmas, Bob and Margarite Sheffield, old Price family friends from New York City, had been visiting London with their two daughters, Anne and Sally. Almost immediately, though she was barely eighteen, George took a liking to Anne. Bob wasn’t particularly happy about it, and hinted to George to back off. But Anne was continuing with a friend on a trip through Europe, and after visiting Finland, Sweden, and Germany, wrote to George innocently that she was scheduled to return to London on May 15, this time alone. “Since your visit played a critical role in this,” he wrote to her later, explaining his conversion, “I know that you will be interested in hearing how this came about. Prepare yourself to hear some surprising things, for there are more things in heaven and earth than you, I presume, imagine.”5

  This is how it happened: When George first saw Anne over Christmas, he noticed her uncanny similarities to another Anne, the old girlfriend from the Midwest who had come to New York to see him just before his meeting with Emanuel Piore, director of research, on the twenty-third floor of the IBM Building in New York, on July 16, 1957. It was at that fateful meeting that George turned down Piore’s offer to join IBM as a senior researcher, based on the draft of his Design Machine published a few months earlier in Fortune magazine. And it had been on the previous day, the fifteenth, that he met Anne and instead of offering to marry her, told her he’d think about things. When he had wanted to marry her around the time he had contracted polio, Anne had broken off their relationship for another man. Now, still jealous, he figured he could take his time.

  Clearly, he came to believe, this had led to his downfall. For had he asked Anne, who was a Roman Catholic, to marry him that day, he would have been focused first and foremost on nailing down a stable job. And had he accepted Piore’s offer, he would never have found himself in the drug-infested predicament in the Village, selling himself short on technical manuals for GE and Sperry-Marine, and trying and failing to write No Easy Way. In fact, had he taken Piore’s offer, he would never have joined IBM on a lower rung, and might never have contracted thyroid cancer. If he hadn’t been sick, he’d never have come under “butcher” Ferguson’s knife, and his life might not have descended into misery.6

  July 15, 1957, had been a fateful day, all right, of this he was certain. And so, meeting Anne Sheffield now, thirteen years later, couldn’t just be a “coincidence.” She not only looked just like the earlier Anne, she had the very same name, the very same inflections. It didn’t seem to matter that he was forty-seven and she was eighteen and the daughter of close family friends. He wanted her, he wrote to her, “so very very much.” On everything important to him—choosing to become a chemist, choosing to marry Julia, choosing to go to Ferguson, choosing not to marry the first Anne—he had always taken the wrong path. This time he was determined not to make another mistake.7

  Innocent and spooked, Anne left London for home at the end of the week. Convinced that there must be more than just the hand of chance involved, alone again and lovestruck, George remembered a poem by Henry Constable that an old Harvard friend had once sent him. “To live in Hell, and Heaven to behold / To welcome life, and die a living death /…If this be love, if love in this be grounded…” He couldn’t quite remember the rest, and started searching for the poem in his papers. When he couldn’t find it, he ran over to the British Museum Library. Fingering through the index cards, he came upon another Henry Constable, not the sixteenth century poet but a twentieth century theologian and believer in conditional immortality whose titles—Hades: or the Intermediate State of Man; Restitution of All Things; The Duration and the Nature of Future Punishment—sent shivers down his spine. Once again—an identical name and a message!8

  Walking back to his flat on Little Titchfield beneath the spire, George contemplated his phone number. It was 580-2399, the last four digits signaling a minute before midnight. Of course 2359 was technically correct, but to him 2399 was meaningful, and that’s what really mattered. Was this another message? Could someone be signaling to him that the clock of doom was about to strike, that only a moment remained to make the right choice in life, finally, once and for all?9

  As he looked through his diaries and letters, he saw more and more “coincidences.” Names, numbers, dates—they aligned in such ways that a pattern couldn’t honestly be ruled out. Someone was speaking to him, of this he was sure. “It wasn’t that I wanted to believe,” he later wrote to Anne, “but there wasn’t any alternative.” Finally, forty-seven years old and a lifelong fanatical atheist, he gave in and bowed to the spire. On June 14, George Price walked out of his flat up the stairs and through the warm, honey-colored circular portico of All Souls Church.

  All Souls had been designed by John Nash, the favorite architect of King George IV, formerly the Prince Regent, and was consecrated by William Howell, the bishop of London, in 1824. A cartoon from those days depicting Nash impaled on its spire and referring to All Souls as “an extinguisher on a flat candlestick,” made clear that the peculiar combination of Gothic spire and classical rotunda was not at first universally admired. But criticism soon died down. Since 1870, a history of the church explained, “All Souls seems to have been simple in worship and vigorous in missionary effort. Apart from two short periods it has always been evangelical in tradition.”10

  By “coincidence” again, George happened to walk in on the one Sunday of the month when services were intended for guests and novices rather than regular parishioners. With a program in hand (they weren’t distributed on other Sundays), he took his seat on a spare wooden pew in the west gallery. In the handsome Spanish mahogany chancel above him, designed by Nash, the organ sang from newly gilded nonspeaking pipes restored after damage incurred in the war. It was a spacious hall, bright and airy. Behind the podium a large Richard Westall Ecce Homo painting of Christ in the hands of his enemies dominated. Reading the words above it, etched in gold in a half circle, George felt as though the whole service might have been planned especially for him: “God So Loved the World He Sacrificed His Only Begotten Son.”

  The next day, when he came to inquire about joining the Church of England, he was surprised to find that he had been baptized as an Episcopalian, which meant that he was effectively already a member. Since neither of his parents had had anything to do with Episcopalianism, and since it saved him a whole lot of hassle, this too seemed like another “coincidence.” Going through his records later at home, a £120 covenant for the year in ha
nd, he remembered that while living in Minneapolis, to assuage Julia, he had joined a Unitarian church whose minister was an agnostic and most of the congregation atheists. Now he really knew that nothing had happened by chance, that things had long ago been determined: The date, another “coincidence,” had been June 14, 1955—fifteen years to the day before his first visit to All Souls.11

  It was statistical evidence that had forced him to become a Christian, but now that it had happened new meanings soon arose. He had bought a secondhand Revised New Testament that Tuesday, and on Saturday came to listen to a sermon on “Christ on the Mount of Olives.” He began reading his Bible furiously, making notes to himself. In his appointment diary “Scripture Center” and “Buy Book of Common Prayer” appeared side by side with “need guidance” and “Dr. Hawes—thyroid.” In particular, he had begun intense conversations with John Stott, next to whose name in the diary appear the words, “Ask! Ask! Ask!”12 The son of an agnostic Harley Street physician, Stott as a boy at Rugby in 1938 heard a sermon, “What Then Shall I Do with Jesus, Who Is Called the Christ?” and never looked back. With a double First in French and Theology from Cambridge he was appointed curate at All Souls in 1945 and rector in 1950, and quickly rose to become the leader of the Evangelical Church in England.13

  George proved an opinionated novice. He was looking for hints in the Bible, a code. Stott told him to take things more slowly, to be less of a literalist.14 George claimed that it was crucial to discover precisely what God wanted of man, and had opinions about Church misinterpretations. Conversations with Stott soon became acrimonious. More than anything now, George was concerned with the question of determinism: How much of fate was up to chance and free will, and how much had already been fixed firmly from above?

  It was July 1970, a particularly warm summer. Earlier the previous year, short on cash, George had written to the old Harvard buddy who had sent him the Constable poem, Henry Noel, asking that he return half of a $62.70 shipping bill for furniture he had left in Henry’s New York apartment when he was leaving for England in 1967. Henry had been a handsome, idealistic son of East Andover, New Hampshire, who left Harvard in 1942 to join the American Field Service in India and Italy, winning the Burma Star and Italian Theater Ribbon. But returning to the United States after the war and according to his own account, “heedlessly diving into the welter of contemporary American bourgeois decadence,” he soon had a change of heart. Embarking as a purser on a Los Angeles Tanker Company ship, he sailed to France and voluntarily renounced his U.S. citizenship. “Harvard Alumnus Renounces U.S.,” the Boston Traveler’s shocking headline ran, as did almost every newspaper in America from the Plainfield Courier-News to the Dallas Times-Herald. But Henry had already chosen his path: He was to be a “citizen of the world,” never a national, and moved down to Kassel, Germany, to work as a bricklayer and “familiarize myself with the country and the people.”15

  Back in America now, having taken up residence as an alien immigrant admitted on the French immigration quota, Henry Noel was married with two children, a freelance editor of school textbooks working on the side on a book on UFOs as well as an autobiography. “I must say that I never thought of you as a likely convert,” he wrote after hearing George’s news.16 He was delighted. He, too, had had a conversion some years before. In fact, besides himself, George was the only person “in all history, literature, and personal acquaintance” of whom Henry had ever heard who was drawn to Jesus by “the apparent inoperativeness of the laws of probability.” His own experience in 1963 had involved the turning of the clock/thermometer on the Union Square Savings Bank:

  I was going to the Grand Central Station from our home on East 11th Street (where you once visited us) and one stage of my morning trip consisted in arriving at Union Square on an Avenue B bus which approached the square along a side street and reached its terminus, where I got out to take another bus just short of Park Avenue South. Every morning I would get out of the Avenue B bus and walk a few steps to the corner, where, in turning it, the first thing I would see would be the big turning clock, right by where I was to take my next bus. It quickly became my habit to check my watch against the turning clock, and to do so the instant I turned the corner and the clock came into view. But of course I could not do this if it was the thermometer side turned toward me in that instant that I turned the corner. It quickly developed that it was far more often the thermometer than the clock…. In the course of months—scores of times—of this refutation of the laws of probability (for surely there was no synchronization possible involving the arrival of the bus, the swinging of the clock, and the time it took me to reach the corner from the bus stop) I became progressively intrigued, then puzzled, then incredulous, then almost appalled.17

  Henry’s first son, Jack, had just been born, and he was feeling overwhelmingly grateful. But whom should he be grateful to? When he returned home one evening, flipped a penny that fell on heads nine times consecutively, called the next toss tails, and was right—he gave in and became a Roman Catholic right then and there. His old Harvard friend and George’s Chess Club mate, Lloyd Shapley, now senior mathematician at the RAND Corporation, told Henry that if he had turned the Union Square corner and experienced the same thing, he would naturally have assumed that someone was playing games with him. Alas, Henry thought secretly, Lloyd had mistaken someone for Someone.

  George was ecstatic. Could he show Henry’s letter to Christians “as well as heathens I am trying to convert”? Henry’s founding of the New York C. S. Lewis Society was a source of joy as well. Not yet familiar with all the writings of Britain’s highest-profile convert (a hero to many an initiate), George had read Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters and borrowed Miracles from the library. In fact, after Henry sent him the contact information of an interested London fan, Kenneth Demain of Forest Gate, George began the business of creating a British chapter, even recruiting Lewis’s own literary executor—his brother. Until a bigger space could be secured, meetings of the newly formed C. S. Lewis Society of Great Britain and Ireland would take place in George’s living room on Little Titchfield Street.18

  He was coming into his own as a Christian. He was “only 50 days old” he wrote to Henry, but he knew clearly, if he didn’t mind him saying so, God preferred that Henry concentrate on spreading His Gospel through C. S. Lewis Society activity rather than writing a book about UFOs. And if Henry had yet to succeed in securing the cash needed to move his family to France, obviously it was because God wanted them to stay in New York a little longer. “I am not sure that we can so easily penetrate God’s wishes by merely aligning them against the success or failure of our own pet projects,” Henry replied. “All we really know of His wishes for us is that we should return to Him, knowing Him for our Creator.”19

  “How could you say such things?” George replied, indignant.

  “You tell me that God was concerned about whether you should flip heads or tails with a penny, and you doubt that God is concerned about whether you produce a UFO book or a C.S. Lewis book!” God was concerned about everything, and he had a plan for everyone. Matthew 28:19, Luke 9:60, Acts 10:42, Timothy 4:2—all made clear that He wanted man to preach the Gospel. Clearly Henry had been chosen to do this via Lewis. What he needed to do was to admit that “Lord” means exactly what it says. In case he didn’t believe him, George wrote, he should go to a higher authority. “Henry, for God’s sake, please ask God.”20

  In fact George already understood that God was constantly testing us. “You remember the story of Moses and the burning bush?” he wrote to young Anne Sheffield back in the United States:

  It says there (Exodus 3), “And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!…’” Now the important point is that the bush that burned but was not consumed was something that Moses took notice of, that “he turned aside to see.” And it was only after G
od saw that he turned aside to see that God spoke. So Moses, my New York friend, and I each noticed and “turned aside to see” something strange. What we took notice of was quite different because we have different interests. We were each shown the sort of phenomena that we were interested in and that we would take notice of. Henry saw gentle intellectual “games” not because God is that sort but because that is what Henry would notice. And I saw especially coincidences involving girls because that was what I would especially notice. And, also, my coincidences included many involving names and dates because I tend to notice such things.21

  It was clear then that Anne had been scheduled to be in London when she was in order to be George’s “burning bush.” Not that everything is predetermined; being able “to turn aside and see,” was, after all, the key to every man and woman’s fate. And yet, George now wrote, “it is obvious to me that I was allowed practically no freedom about the events of late May and early June.” Christianity had been forced on him just as it had on Paul on the road to Damascus.22