by Oren Harman
His fifty-second birthday came along on October 16. “I pray that you will permit your soul to be restored,” Joan wrote him, understanding finally that she would have to let go. “Dismiss your illusion…there are no such thoughts for you now.” All the way from Grand Rapids, Michigan, his mother’s cousin, Lewis Florman, wrote kindly, too, to wish him the very best of everything: “As Paul said ‘test the spirit—hold fast to that which is good.’ Dig up that talent of yours and put it to good use. The world is sorely in need of scientists who are not afraid of looking at new truths. I feel that you could be a ‘light unto the world’ if you choose to do so.”21
It was very good news, George wrote to Smoky, that the judge had decided to let his probation continue. But then, as kindly as he could, he changed his tone:
In regard to you and me, I have a feeling that we’re sort of brothers, with me being the brother who has gotten all the good breaks, and you the one who has had all the bad ones…. But for the immediate future, I’d rather that we sorted out our problems separately. I’m right now getting the “treatment” from Jesus…. Every day a number of things go wrong for me as a result of my own fault. Also I’m unemployed, in debt, living on borrowed money.22
He would need to take a break from helping him, he explained. Meanwhile he recommended that whenever he found himself in an escalating fight he back down, and, no less important, to absolutely make up his mind not to touch anything distilled.
He was living at 164 Drummond Street now, on the corner of Hampstead Road. Just two weeks earlier a couple of architecture students had broken into the building and changed the locks. It was a relatively new building, from the thirties or forties, and, though rather ugly and gray, as squats go not a particularly bad one. Behind the locked door there was an entrance hall and stairs up to the second floor with a kitchen and two rooms. A further set of narrow winding stairs led up to a third floor with a studio and a small adjacent room. There was electricity and, in the rooms, electric storage heaters. But there was no central heating, and as winter approached it was getting very cold.23
In the middle of November a pot of boiling water tipped over and burned his hands badly. He was finding it difficult to sleep at night, and couldn’t grasp a pen to write. Finally, when the burns began to ease, he wrote to thank his brother, Edison, for the money he had sent him. He was leaving genetics, George told him, and was hoping to get a computer programming job at UCL with a professor who worked on the economics of developing countries in order to reacquaint himself with the field before trying his luck again with Paul Samuelson.24 In the meantime he was contemplating writing up some genetics results from the past few years, and then perhaps returning to his work on the Passion schedule and the correct date of the death of Jesus. Earlier he had hoped to make a book of it, but now thought a pamphlet would do.
“In regard to religion,” he explained,
I’ve been heading back toward more conventional and conservative Christianity, and have given up much of the amateur “social work” I was doing. I’d like to get married again. Have about 4 kiddies, a dog and a cat, house in the hills somewhere, about a five year old car (to give a quick picture of the economic level I visualize), with lots of time to hike around, read, write, maybe paint.25
No doubt thinking of Sylvia, he envisioned “some small printing business on the side” and perhaps putting out a local community newspaper. But of course this was pretty long-range looking ahead. “Wouldn’t it be nice though?”
In reality George was in a much worse off state than he let on to his brother. Shmulik Atia was a young Israeli, a former paratrooper who had just gotten out of the army and come to join his artist friend Asher Dahan who was living in the small room on the third floor of the squat. Asher had turned the studio upstairs into his workroom, painting into the wee hours of the night under the neon lights and smoking a lot of pot. Once in a while George would come up with a cup of tea, and join him for a smoke. Both remembered him as a humble and reserved man, walking about like a ghost, down to skin and bones, reeking, gaze downcast, mumbling about Jesus.26
“The Hounds of Heaven are closing in on me,” he wrote Kathleen that month, referring to the English poet Francis Thompson’s work from 1907.27 Thompson had been born in Lancashire in November 1859, the very month that Darwin published The Origin of Species. Moving to London after college to pursue writing, he soon became addicted to opium and a street vagrant. Rescued years later by a couple who chanced upon his poetry, he became a published poet before dying, mentally unbalanced, of tuberculosis.28
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
“Like the hound follows the hare,” J. R. R. Tolkien had written of it, “never ceasing in its running, ever drawing nearer in the chase, with unhurrying and imperturbed pace, so does God follow the fleeing soul by His Divine grace. And though in sin or in human love, away from God it seeks to hide itself, Divine grace follows after, unwearyingly follows ever after, till the soul feels its pressure forcing it to turn to Him alone in that never ending pursuit.”29
George was beginning to tire of the chase.
His homeless friends were coming around looking for him. Bernardo and Chrissy arrived unannounced on Saturday night, November 30, only to find he wasn’t there. “Bernardo is very upset that he was rude to you. He had a blackout through drinking,” they wrote on the back of a torn Benson and Hedges Special Filter cigarette box, slipping it under the locked door. The next day they wrote a letter from their temporary abode on 40 Fitzroy Street. “We are very worried about you and we hope you are well…. We love you very much, Bernardo and Christina.”30
George was falling fast. He had contacted Dr. O. W. Hill at the Middlesex Department of Psychiatry, and Hill set up an appointment for January 9, 1975. But that was more than a month away! Would he make it that far? To Bill and Chris Hamilton he apologized now for his vacillating behavior and refusal to accept good advice. They had always been such generous hosts to him. He should have heeded their words of counsel to stay in genetics. Did they think he might still get a research job at Silwood?31
Hamilton had seen George toward the end of November in London and was worried. He implored him to come stay with his family, if only to get some rest and talk about a possible joint scientific venture. George continued to vacillate, paralyzed almost, unable to make up his mind. Finally, after many delays and reversals, he climbed on a train at Victoria and arrived, weak and disheveled, in Berkshire. He told Chris and Bill about his unrequited love for Sylvia, about his debts, about all his help to the homeless having been for naught, about his plans to turn to economics where he might actually do something useful for humanity. Bill tried to keep him focused: Why not embark together on a theoretical project on altruism? They could begin to work right away on a grant.32
The Hamiltons were going to Chris’s parents in Ireland for Christmas, so they couldn’t invite him for the holiday. But by the end of the week George seemed to have been won over. Bill showed him the draft of a paper he was working on that applied the covariance to individual and group, and George was pleased.33 He was determined to return to genetics, he told his hosts smiling, a flicker of clarity once again noticeable in his eye. After driving him back to the Maidenhead Station on the morning of December 19, Bill gave George a hug, watched him g
et on the train, and waved good-bye.
Then he rushed home, found a few sheets of lined computer paper, and hurriedly wrote out a letter by hand. It was addressed to a Dr. Kelly, the secretary of the British Teilhard Association, a non-sectarian educational society founded in 1963 to promote knowledge and understanding of the work of the French Jesuit evolutionist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Bill was sending a copy of George’s “Twelve Days of Easter,” and inquired if the society might be interested in publishing it. It would blow a welcome wind into George’s sails, he was certain, and, in truth, the paper really was fascinating and original. “When he had his flat in central London and was at work alternately on the theory of natural selection and biblical exegesis,” he explained,
he seemed to be an intellectual Sherlock Holmes in real life with a brilliant mind willing to work on any problem that appeared to him of being of permanent significance to man. Speaking of his achievements in my own field, I believe that his new presentation of natural selection effectively disposes of the problem dating back to Darwin of whether the individual or the group should be considered the unit of natural selection.34
This was a matter of the gravest urgency; George was down and out, sickly and starving. His survival was at stake. If they couldn’t print the Easter schedule, could they perhaps offer him a job as a janitor? Hamilton wasn’t a religious man, but he would be eternally grateful.
George Price’s unmarked grave, covered by brush, left of the tombstone, Saint Pancras Cemetery, London, 2009
Epilogue
George Price killed himself sometime between January 5 and the morning of January 6, 1975. Shmulik Atia had been about to leave the squat to go to work washing dishes in a Hampstead restaurant when he saw an envelope someone had slipped beneath the padlocked door. Unable to read English, and figuring that it might be the dreaded eviction notice, he ran upstairs to show it to George. It was 7:00 a.m.
When he knocked on George’s door, he felt it give in a little. Pushing it farther into the room, his eyes pointed downward, he saw a strange dark purple film, cracked like parched earth, coating the linoleum floor. A strong smell attacked his nostrils. He pushed the door still farther in, now feeling the weight behind it. When the aperture reached a certain angle, the full gruesomeness of the sight unfolded before him: A lone bare bulb lit the room from midceiling. The gray walls were peeling. Apart from a table, a chair, and an unmade bed, there were ammunition boxes serving as furniture. Hundreds of pages were scattered about. The entire floor was covered in blood. The window was cracked, and a cold wind was blowing through it.
There on the floor, with his back leaning against the slightly opened door, wearing black pants, a blue-and-white pinstriped shirt, and a worn-out black jacket—all too big for his skin-and-bones frame, was George. Shmulik looked down onto him: His legs were splayed, his arms fallen to his sides. His eyes were shut and his head slumped forward, leaning slightly to the left. His right hand clutched a pair of medium-size, sharp tailor’s scissors, and the blood surrounding the gaping puncture wound in his neck pointed clearly to the site of injury. Shmulik wasn’t sure when it had happened, but running up in a panic to wake Asher on the third floor, he screamed in his native Hebrew: “George is dead! He’s dead! George is dead!!”1
Three days later Shmulik and Asher were called in by Scotland Yard. It was clear that George had taken his own life by puncturing his carotid, but, per protocol, there had to be a coroner’s inquest. A professor named Hamilton stood up to speak, and someone whispered that he was considered one of the world’s great evolutionary biologists. Hamilton said that George had been a guest in his house just a fortnight before the tragedy, and that he was perhaps the most brilliant thinker he had ever met. A handsome, well-dressed lady sobbed uncontrollably. Introduced as a BBC worker and a friend, she spoke of George as the most wondrous lover. George? Shmulik and Asher looked incredulously at each other. Could these people really be talking about George?2
He had stopped taking his thyroid meds, the inquest concluded. Hamilton explained that in the past George had felt that this was the best way to find out in which direction God wanted him to turn; probably he’d been seeking His guidance again. But a psychiatrist, Dr. Christopher Lucas, had apparently seen him just days before; George had come in off the street sunken and depressed. Lucas explained that with George’s condition, erratic intake of thyroid medicine could have contributed to the despair. He was unsure, however, whether George might have suffered from the symptoms of schizophrenia.3
There had been a note, the inquest found, from January 1, at 4 a.m. “I came to England to a new part of the world,” it read, “before I decided to kill myself.” There was another, from January 2: “To Whom It May Concern: I guess I’ve had it. George.” A third, addressed to Sylvia, was about how “pure” and “white” she was, about bringing her “shame and sorrow,” about how he had mocked love by wanting her in a way that wasn’t approved by the Lord. And then there was a fourth letter, one addressed “To my friends.” George had felt himself to be a burden on them, he wrote, ever in debt, ever making the wrong decisions. “It seems the tim [sic] has come,” he ended, “for me to go and meet my maker.”4
On the day of the funeral at Saint Pancras Cemetery, the Sennet, London’s student paper, announced the news to the world: “A prominent genetics researcher at UC Hospital gave up everything, including his life, for his religious beliefs. Dr. George Price gave away all his money, clothes and possessions to homeless alcoholics and left his flat in Bloomsbury to live as a squatter in Drummond Street, Kentish Town. It was there that he was found dead. A respected scientific researcher, Dr. Price was convinced that he had a ‘hot line to Jesus.’”5 Otherwise his death passed almost completely unnoticed.
That same day, after George was interred, Hamilton decided to visit the squat on his way home from the cemetery. The people from the American Consulate had already been there to pick up George’s effects, but from a telephone discussion with a Mr. Cresty at the consulate he had a hunch that more papers were left behind. “I regard his ideas of such originality and such significance for evolutionary theory,” Hamilton wrote to Edison, “that I believe that sometime someone may think it worthwhile to find out something more about him and wish to go through letters and papers with some care.” Then he added, “and of course the strange life he has led for the past few years makes it quite a story.”6
As Hamilton approached, the atmosphere around Tolmers Square was electric. The pavement outside the building had been ripped up, and that very day the tenants of 164 Drummond Street had had an altercation with the men of Stock Conversion. There was shoving and cursing, and the police came around. Sympathy aside, every one knew that the clock was ticking and couldn’t be stopped. The building was due for demolition.
When he walked into George’s room, Bill could still feel the blood crackling on the linoleum floor beneath his shoes. The mattress was gone, and so too the electric heater. His hunch had been right. Eyeing the piles of unmarked newspapers, magazines, cuttings, and old computer programs, he collected what was left of the papers. He found “The Nature of Selection,” which had been rejected by Science, and some genetic polymorphism materials that CABS would soon help publish posthumously.7
A great sadness welled in his chest; in the silence of the room it was clear now that a friend “almost like a second self” was gone. “I felt a very great kinship with him,” he wrote to Edison, “indeed apart from his rather private nature a feeling of intellectual redundancy in each other’s presence may have been part of the reason we didn’t meet more often.” Racked by guilt for not being able to save him, he would later lower himself in comparison: “Where I had sympathized with flowers and bracken ferns partly because there wasn’t much that I could be expected to do for them, making my sympathy cheap, he gave himself wholeheartedly to the crying children and homeless humans wandering the same streets.” Bill was not sure whether any other evolutionary biologist in the world saw the interes
t in George’s covariance equation in the way he did, but he wanted to believe that recognition for his achievement would come someday, however belatedly.8
A few days later 164 Drummond Street was demolished. On March 11, 1975, eighty-one people living in twenty-six houses were handed summonses to appear at the High Court in ten days’ time. Stock Conversion’s threats were finally materializing.
With the help of Camden Council, the day in court was postponed to four weeks. Immediately the community galvanized. The printing press churned out leaflets, and Sylvia and Petal’s silk-printing studio churned out the posters: “Defend the Tolmers 81,” “Stop Levy Fight Eviction” there was even an invitation to a play at Leicester Square Theatre, beginning March 27: “Levy: He Will Tear Your Home Apart,” it said, promising “your senses will never be the same.”9