by Oren Harman
The hope would be that other communes would spring up that similarly had permissive and flexible rules, with members holding jobs, some of which would have more social service emphasis. One desirable feature would be to have young people and old people living together. Some communes might include bedridden or blind people. Others might make a special effort to help alcoholics. And so on. It would depend upon what people were interested in doing. If the idea took hold and many communes were founded, a lot of problems could be alleviated, including the problem of giving homeless people in some cases homes, and in other cases a place to leave a suitcase, wash up, and change clothes.3
Back in Little Titchfield, he was learning lessons of love from his lodgers. In the living room he had built an altar, covered by a tablecloth and with a wooden cross standing atop it. It was rather simple, George thought, but he had plans for a more splendid one, with a skirt of black velvet and a top cloth of white velvet, surrounded on the sides and back by drapes of blue velvet. Then one day Bernardo asked for some Vaseline for his hair, and, apparently not noticing that it was an altar, wiped his greasy hands on its cloth, and—to George’s horror—hung his underpants on the cross. Just as he was about to give him a piece of his mind, George came to see that this was Jesus telling him—through Bernardo—that the rich velvet altar cloths were the wrong way, the old way, the Old Testament way, whereas giving good clothes that he himself wanted to needy strangers was the right way, the way of Jesus the Lord.4
As much as living with strange men was educating him, the lease came to an end on June 24, and, feeling utterly unworthy yet to follow Jesus’ true path of suffering, the least George could do was not to renew it. The peculiar American had been a godsend to the homeless of Euston Station and Soho Square for the past three months, but he had completely failed to plan ahead for his own sake. Now George was going to be homeless himself.
The first few nights he slept in his office at the Galton, but clearly this was no kind of solution. Ursula Mittwoch, a colleague at the department, offered that George stay with her family and do some tutoring for their teenage daughter who was just then preparing for an English exam. She remembered his stay with fondness. Her daughter loved George’s clarity and marveled at how he seemed to know all the poems she was supposed to learn. Everyone enjoyed his good humor at breakfast and dinner, his utter considerateness, tidiness, and gentle manner. Even George himself was making a good time of it. “Th us far I have enjoyed being homeless,” he wrote to his old family friend Dr. Gilfillan back in the United States on July 3. “It is a good way to get acquainted with people.”5
But the Mittwochs’ was only a short-term solution, as were fleeting stays at other friends’ houses from the Galton. He’d moved most of his books and papers to Wolfson House, the abode of the Department of Human Genetics and Biometry at 4 Stephenson Way. But soon George was beginning to see that this wasn’t going to be all that easy. Before he could create his “Jesus people” commune, he would need to find a place to sleep.
Having to abandon George’s apartment, too, Smoky was now once again behind bars. From Her Majesty’s Prison, Pentonville, on Caledonian Road, he wrote on lined prison notepaper to thank George for the radio he had sent him, but also to explain his own philosophy. George might think that Jesus intervenes in people’s lives, but Smoky was less salutary. “Lets be fair,” he wrote, “if we do wrong we have to take the consequences.” George’s noble generosity was admirable, but in the end the price might be too steep:
Come to think of it, you are better off keeping away from the square, those people there have no respect for you, all they want is money and cider off you, you have to consider yourself now and again, do they worry about you, when you are broke and hungry. I doubt it very much.…give them half the chance and they would squeeze you dry.6
Selfless friendship was difficult to come by.
Talking about friends, where are all the ones who are supposed to be friends of mine (YOU EXCEPTED OF COURSE!) I haven’t had even as much as a postcard off any of them. So I can assure you, I don’t miss any single one of them, FRIENDS, people call them? They are or were only drinking acquaintances, I miss my drink and the privilege of walking the streets admittedly who doesn’t in this place. In fact what purpose have these people got in LIFE? They live from one day to the next wondering where the next drink is coming from they hardly ever eat, have a bath, they won’t work, honestly I think some of them would be better off in here, for a while.
He was praying that George and Peg Leg Pete find a place to rest their heads again. George was a rarity: a true and honest altruist. He needed to watch out for himself. “It’s not very nice in the Bruce House,” Smoky warned him of the Centrepoint homeless hostel on the aptly onomatopoeic Drury Lane. “Pleased don’t sleep that low!” Then he added, “I would suggest that you post the cash to me in your next letter, if you can manage say £10 to £15.”7
Thinking little of his own problems, George had lately started to help old people around Myddleton Square near Saint Mark’s Church, nursing them or running errands during the day and sleeping over nights when family found it difficult to stay. Muriel Challenger, a congregation member, acted as the go-between. There was the frail octogenarian Mrs. Rose on Chadwell Street, who wasn’t doing all that well, and Mrs. Abercrombie, likewise, on Goswell Road. After explaining that he shouldn’t worry if the old ladies sometimes seemed “changeable,” Muriel wrote to George:
Mr. Eastop, 345 St. John Street, could do with someone to walk beside him for a very short walk. It would be good for him to go out and not sit all day but he has lost confidence since a severe illness. His little wife is housebound too & is not much of a companion as she finds her deafness difficult to cope with.8
George had seen Julia briefly when she visited in the beginning of August. She’d come over, she made clear, to buy some antique jewelry and small collectibles to sell at weekend antique markets back in Michigan. It was a sad coda to the hopeful days all those years ago, when World War II was ending and the future lay ahead. If there had been some miniscule, wild glimmer of hope that they should get back together despite all their history, it had to be put to rest now. With George homeless and making radical selflessness his life’s philosophy, it was clear to Julia that her relationship with that handsome man she had encountered at the Met Lab, the promising scientist who had become the father of her daughters twenty-five years before, was finally, irreversibly dead.9
George was staying at Bruce House now. Some nights a violent drunk would fight him over his cubicle, and always he would yield with a smile. During the day he’d walk to Euston Station and Piccadilly Circus to meet winos and beggars and see how he could help them. He was wearing a large aluminum cross against his chest, and twice already, he thought, it had come in handy. When he’d chanced upon two cases of police brutality to homeless men he confronted the coppers demanding that they stop. Each time he was told gruffly that it was none of his business, and each time he remarked that it was. Then, on both occasions, the policemen took a look at his cross and, silently if not entirely respectfully, retreated.10
He had testified at Smoky’s trial, but the testimony failed to shorten the sentence. Never mind, George wrote encouragingly, this would give Smoky time to make a true promise to Christ. “You asked me for suggestions about what to do when you get out,” he offered.
Well, Smoky, I may be totally wrong, but since you ask me for advice I’ll tell you what I believe. Your ideas, from what you’ve written to me, are about getting a good job, working regularly, going to church regularly, and abstaining from drink. Well, I don’t think you can manage it.11
Instead George thought that he should take one or two drinks soon after he got out, that he should right away, even now in prison, stop attending church services, and that he should abandon ideas of getting a proper job and try to help the homeless instead. The reasons for all this (“by the way,” George wrote, “this is very unconventional advice”) were first, that no
t drinking entirely would only inevitably lead to a powerful urge for the bottle; second, that going to church was much less important than serving Jesus by loving and helping others; and third, that since he knew the streets better than anybody, helping homeless down-and-outs like himself would be the job he could accomplish with greatest skill.
If you try to manage a conventional, in-between life I think you’ll quickly drift back to the way you were. So I think your only way out is to resolve that you’re going to go to the other extreme and give most of your time and efforts to helping others, especially alcoholics. It’s much the same way that some dangerous animals will attack a man if he tries to run away from them, but will run away from him if he goes directly toward them. So, in the same way, think of cider and wine, Soho Square and Bruce House and that whole way of life as a dangerous tiger that will hunt you down if you try to flee from it, but if you go directly toward it, armed with the “rifle” of intending to help people, it will flee from you.
Sealing the letter and addressing it to Pentonville, George might really have written the advice to himself.
Back in October when he’d expressed to Maynard Smith his joy over the outcome of their joint paper on the logic of animal conflict, he had paused to relate an embarrassing misgiving. “There is one matter that has to be brought up now and on which I need to hear from you before trying any re-writing,” he wrote. “This is a rather unhappy matter to mention. It involves Bill Hamilton.”12
What George was referring to was something Hamilton had once told him regarding the refereeing of his 1964 paper on the evolution of social behavior. Usually gentle and pacific, Hamilton felt that he’d been terribly wronged, and continued to harbor a burning grudge against Maynard Smith after all these years. For Maynard Smith had been the referee of his paper, Hamilton had learned, the one responsible for asking to split it into two separate papers—a request that eventually held up publication for close to nine months. This wouldn’t have been so terrible if Maynard Smith himself had not hurried in the interim to publish the paper in Nature contra Wynne-Edwards, in which he coined the term “kin selection” for the very first time. After all, “kin selection” was a pilfering of Hamilton’s idea of inclusive fitness; like King David with Uriah and Bathsheba, Maynard Smith had not only sent Hamilton away but absconded in the meantime with his beloved!
When George found out that Maynard Smith had been the Nature referee who read his own paper on antlers in 1968, he remembered Hamilton’s ire and jumped to similar conclusions. Once again, it seemed, John had held up a new idea and in the meantime somehow found himself interested in the very same topic. But then George met Maynard Smith and saw what a kind and gentle person he was. Hamilton’s anger, he now believed, had to be the result of some misunderstanding. This was the reason why, when Maynard Smith wrote to him in 1971 wanting to cite his antlers paper, George replied, “If one mentions an ‘unpublished manuscript’ then someone may wonder about whether it was used with permission, but if you speak of ‘discussion’ then no such suspicion arises.” Having seen for himself that John was a good man, he wanted to protect him from a possible second accusation.
Hamilton, though, had never gotten over it. This was tricky business, George wrote to John in October, since in the draft of “The Logic of Animal Conflict” that Maynard Smith had just sent him there was no reference to Hamilton on kin selection. Clearly this needed to be fixed before George would put his name on the paper.
But something else needed to be fixed as well. For, following his love conversion, George saw that the current drafts had to be revisited. “This requires choosing some words with more care,” he explained to John in February. “I think that I’ve found wordings that you won’t object to and that won’t shock Nature’s readers by making them suspect what I believe.”13
Maynard Smith replied that he was sorry about not citing Hamilton in the draft; oddly enough it was simply a glitch, and he’d fix it. He was sorry, too, about what had happened in 1964. In fact he’d quoted Hamilton’s short 1963 paper then but could have done better by citing the as-yet-unpublished paper that he had just reviewed. He felt terrible about it, and would try to find the next opportunity to “set the record straight” clearly, he wrote, “Bill certainly deserves any credit that is going.”14 As for the reworking of some of the language in their current joint paper, John would defer to George’s sensitivities. He had no problem that the word “Dove” from “Hawk v. Dove” be scrapped; instead they’d just call a nonviolent, nonretaliating actor by the less theologically laden “Mouse.”
“The Logic of Animal Conflict” made the cover of Nature in November 1973. “Game theory and computer analysis,” the authors concluded triumphantly, “show…that a ‘limited war’ strategy benefits individuals as well as the species.” With the newly introduced and formally defined concept of the ESS, it was a paper that would impact the study of the evolution of behavior dramatically.15 Down at Soho Square most days, searching for Aberdeen and Peg Leg Pete, George had other things on his mind.
“As I need hardly tell you,” Al wrote to him from Buffalo,
the moral and religious precepts of the Gospel reflect a profound understanding of human nature. I would think they are intended to identify goals toward which we should strive, given our frailties…to live up to them literally may be to attempt more than human nature can manage and, I suspect, more than we actually intended. Trying to live up completely by such principles might produce little in the way of peace of mind. And, it would seem to me, that where behavior based on religious precepts does not yield peace of mind, the eventual result will almost inevitably be the erosion of belief itself.16
But George was deep in the forest on the path he had set for himself. “I can’t remember whether I told you anything much about my way of life,” he wrote to his brother, Edison.
I have no home, so use my business address as a mail address…. Usually I wear brown Levis, sneakers, and a colorful shirt. Many times each month I find myself reduced to one penny, a half penny, or zero. Most of my possessions have been given away, including my watch and coat (but I’ll have to pick up a coat somewhere now with winter coming on). Everywhere I go I keep running into down-and-out alcoholics, to whom I give when I have anything, and with whom I sit and drink from their bottle if they offer me a drink. Increasingly I find myself on the opposite side from the police. Many of my friends have done time, and I’ve been in a house that was raided and had my things searched then, but I haven’t yet been busted…. I do a lot of smoking, and also smoke cigarettes, though I haven’t yet developed a fag habit. A substantial amount of my time is given to trying to help people in almost any way they ask me or seem to need help, whether it’s by giving them money, cleaning a filthy kitchen, talking to a landlord, shopping for a housebound person, or trying to solve some mathematical problem for somebody here at work. A lot of this helping is of old people, especially women in their eighties. I live very cheaply and have been reducing my debts (which are large) fairly rapidly since I became homeless…. In spite of vast amounts of time missed from work, plus eccentric behavior such as sleeping here often and doing my laundry in the men’s room and trying to borrow money from everyone in the department, my professor and the department chairman are friendly to me. (In fact, most people are friendly to me except the police, who seem to instinctively dislike me nowadays). I haven’t gone to church for six or eight weeks, but I visit and try to help old people in connection with a church that I have often attended. I usually wear a cross of some aluminum-appearing or pewter-like metal around my neck, except that people keep asking me for it (especially old, sick people and down-and-out alcoholics) and I’ve given away seven of them and don’t have any now and won’t be able to buy another until pay-day). I generally try to say “Yes.”17
Then he ended, “And now what’s up with you?”
It was an amazing transformation from the prim, short-haired, gangling IBM worker he had been just a short seven years ago. Even
Smoky was really starting to get worried about him, as was Paul Garvey, a homeless wreck serving time at Her Majesty’s Remand Centre in Richmond, Surrey.18
But George was happy, perhaps the happiest he had ever been. A kind of peaceful quiet had finally descended on his soul. Lately he’d met “a bloke named Keith who is a follower of the Guru Maharishi,” and the two enjoyed conversations on a park bench over chips and coffee.19
He was enclosing a picture of himself, he wrote to Kathleen, taken in his office by a photographer; the best faculty photo, people said, in all of the department. In it he is wearing a colorfully striped shirt and dark bow tie, sporting a wry smile above a scraggly red beard, counterbalanced by fine hair brushed back above a broad forehead. Only the eyes confuse an otherwise joyful portrait: Tucked behind dark-rimed glasses, one is small and kind, the other open wide and strangely empty.
He was feeling so good that he decided to send Kathleen a special surprise. His only likely source at the time was in Nottingham, where, he divulged to his daughter as if reading her a bedtime story, the sheriff who hunted Robin Hood had lived. But in the end he took out the quid’s worth of pot, pressed between the pages of a C. S. Lewis book stamped for California. He had just moved to a new squat, and ended up smoking it himself.