A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  In this claustrophobic hotel room during what would turn out to be Nash’s final week in Geneva, the true dimensions of his tragedy would become clear. He was in Switzerland, free of Alicia, free of external restraint, but as thoroughly immobilized as the hero of another Kafka story, “The Metamorphosis,” who wakes up one morning to discover that he has become a cockroach lying helplessly on its back.61 Kafka never wrote the final chapter of The Castle, but confided to his friend and biographer, Max Brod, that he had envisioned a scene in which K is lying on his bed in the inn exhausted to the point of death. “K was not to relax his struggle, but was to die worn out by it.”62 Nash did not relax his struggle either, but he was defeated all the same.

  James Glass, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied the delusions of schizophrenia, writes, “Delusion provides a certain, often unbreakable identity, and its absolute character can maneuver the self into an unyielding position. In this respect, it is the internal mirror of political authoritarianism, the tyrant inside the self… an internal domination as deadly as any external tyranny.”63

  On December 11, Nash had been held for several hours by the police — apparently in an effort to convince him that “deportation was unavoidable” — and released “under surveillance,” requiring him to report to a police station two or three times every day.64 According to a telegram, dated December 16, from the American consul in Geneva, Henry S. Villard, to Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, the Swiss authorities had issued a deportation order naming Nash as an “undesirable alien” on December 11.65 Throughout, the Swiss authorities evidently were acting with the “full knowledge of Dr. Edward Cox, assistant science advisor” and presumably with tacit approval at higher levels of the State Department.

  The final curtain came down on December 15. Nash was arrested, for the second time.66 He adamantly refused, as he had at the time of his first arrest, to return to the United States, and continued to demand to sign the oath of renunciation. On the morning of the fifteenth, Cox, a kindly, avuncular retired chemistry professor from Swarthmore College,67 now serving as assistant science attache in Paris, arrived in Geneva by overnight train. He was accompanying an exhausted and apprehensive Alicia Nash.68 Together they hoped to persuade Nash to return directly to the United States. Neither knew what to expect, and both, in their separate ways, feared the worst.

  Secretary Herter was being apprised of the situation in daily cables, as was the State Department’s science adviser, Wallace Brode. On the fifteenth, a cable to Washington from Ambassador Amory Houghton in Paris informed them: “RECEIVED WORD FROM GENEVA TO EFFECT NASH DESPITE ALL EFFORTS TO DISSUADE HIM DETERMINED TO SIGN OATH OF CITIZENSHIP RENUNCIATION.”69

  Even in jail, Nash refused to return to the United States, refused furthermore to cooperate in the issue of a new passport, and continued to demand that he be permitted to take the oath of renunciation.

  At this point, Alicia agreed to take Nash back to Paris with her where they had, after all, an apartment. The consul general agreed to issue Alicia a new passport that included Nash. Nash protested it all. He did not wish to go even to Paris. It was useless. The police escorted Nash to the train station. He was hustled onto the train and, at 11:15 P.M., it pulled out of the covered station into the open air. The police inspectors reported that “at train time Nash [was] still reluctant [to] leave Geneva but no force [was] required.”70

  Nash and Alicia celebrated Christmas at 49 Avenue de la République. It was, as Nash was to write to Virginia, “interesting.”71 Alicia’s mother was there and so was the eight-month-old John Charles. There was a Christmas tree, perhaps the first one that the Nashes had ever had, decorated in the German manner with tiny lady apples and red wax candles. When they lit them, it scared Alicia’s mother terribly. “We kept a bucket of water nearby,” Odette, who had come to Paris for the holidays, recalled.72 Alicia, who had occupied herself that fall with learning to cook, sewed French hors d’oeuvres. There were presents for the baby, Nash jealously noted, adding in a letter to Virginia and Martha that “he seems a little attention spoiled now.”

  On St. Etienne’s Day, the day after Christmas, Alicia gave a party attended by several mathematicians, American as well as French. Shiing-shen Chern, a mathematician who had met Nash at the University of Chicago and was in Paris for the semester, came. He recalled “an interesting idea” that Nash had then, namely that four cities in Europe constituted the vertices of a square.73 The most striking visitor at 49 Avenue de la République, however, was Alexandre Grothendieck, a brilliant, charismatic, highly eccentric young algebraic geometer who wore his head shaved, affected traditional Russian peasant dress, and held strong pacifist views.74 Grothendieck had just taken a chair at the new Parisian mathematics center, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (modeled after Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study), and would win a Fields Medal in 1966. In the early 1970s, he founded a survivalist organization, dropped out of academia altogether, and became a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location in the Pyrenees.75 In 1960, however, he was dynamic, voluble, and immensely attractive. Whether he was mainly interested in the beautiful Alicia or felt an affinity for Nash’s anti-American sentiments is not clear; in any case, Grothendieck was a frequent visitor at the Nashes’ apartment and on a number of occasions attempted to help Nash obtain a visiting position at the IHES.

  That January, Odette and Alicia would sit around the apartment smoking and gossiping about Odette’s boyfriends, including thirty-four-year-old John Danskin, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study who had met the entrancing Odette at the Nashes’ wedding party in New York. He wooed Odette by letter, ultimately proposing to her by telegram in Russian. Nash would sit in the corner of the living room poring over a Paris telephone directory, saying little except to occasionally object to the smoke, which he abhorred, or to ask a question. Odette recalled:

  We were having a wonderful time. We just laughed and gossiped, tried French cooking and met the people who Alicia invited into her apartment. We’d be chattering. We’d talk about boys. John Nash wouldn’t even notice. Alicia used to smoke. He used to complain about it. He couldn’t bear it. Occasionally he would interrupt with a question: “Do you know what Kennedy and Khrushchev have in common? No. Both their names start with a K.”76

  Odette soon returned to Grenoble and Alicia’s mother left Paris as well, leaving her daughter and grandson behind. Alicia struggled to care for the baby and to cope with her husband, finding both overwhelming.77 She desperately wanted to return to the United States and continued, as best she could, to obtain the help of the American authorities.

  A concerted effort was, in fact, under way, led by the State Department’s Brode, who dispatched his deputy, Larkin Farinholt, to Paris.78 Farinholt, a chemist who would subsequently become the director of the Sloan Foundation’s fellowship program, vainly tried to convince Nash to return to America voluntarily. The effort was inspired not just by the government’s desire to avoid embarrassment, but by a genuine wish that Nash not be lost to the scientific community nor suffer the consequences of his own seemingly irrational behavior.

  Nash’s legal situation was increasingly tenuous. After his deportation from Switzerland, he had been issued a three-month temporary residency permit by the French. His status in France, as he explained to Hormander in a letter in late January, was “of Swiss resident or domicilee.”79 As Nash explained in his Madrid lecture, he had wanted to be declared a refugee from all NATO countries, but since he found himself in France he had —“so as not to be inconsistent” — to settle for declaring himself “only a refugee from the USA.”80 Once again, he applied for asylum. When it became clear that the French were not going to grant it, Nash attempted to obtain a Swedish visa. This, too, was refused. He then turned to Hormander, who in turn consulted the Swedish foreign ministry and was told that without an American passport Nash had no hope of obtaining a visa. Hormander, now impatient, wrote back: “Personally I would
strongly advise you to reconsider your views concerning NATO and other countries.”81

  Nash then managed a rather extraordinary feat. In early March, he traveled, alone and without passport, to East Germany.82 Hard as it is to believe that an American without documents could get into the DDR in 1960, Nash confirmed in 1995 that he had indeed traveled there, explaining that in his “time of irrational thinking” he had gone “places where you didn’t need an American passport.”83 What actually must have happened, given the tremendously tight security at the border at that time, was that Nash applied to the DDR for asylum and was then permitted by the authorities to enter the country until the request was decided. In any case, he went to Leipzig and stayed with a family named Thurmer for several days. According to a card he sent Martha and Virginia, he was able — presumably as a guest of the government — to attend a famous propaganda event that happened to be taking place at the time, the Leipzig industrial world fair, which was the Iron Curtain’s answer to the Brussels world fair. Later, mathematicians in America would hear from Farinholt that “Nash tried to defect to the Russians” but that the Russians had refused to have anything to do with him.84 That story, repeated by Felix Browder, is very probably based on Nash’s Leipzig adventure. At least no evidence has turned up that Nash ever approached the Soviets. By that point, everyone involved — the Americans, the French, and presumably the DDR — was aware that Nash’s actions were those of a very sick man. Apparently, however, the incident would prompt the FBI to raise questions about Alicia’s security clearance in the early 1960s when she was working at RCA.85 In any case, Nash was eventually asked to leave East Germany — or quite possibly Farinholt got him out — and returned to Paris where he wrote to Martha and Virginia that he was “thinking of returning to Roanoke” but was worried about coming back to the United States when he had no guarantee that he would be able to leave again.86

  As in Geneva, Nash spent much of his time sitting in the apartment writing letters. Michael Artin, the son of Princeton’s Emil Artin, found a letter from Nash, after the death of his father, in his father’s files. “It started out plausibly about mathematics,” Artin recalled. “But it was stamped all over, with [Metro] tickets and tax stamps pasted on it. By the end of the letter it was obvious that it was completely fantastic. It was about Kochel’s numbers for Mozart symphonies. Kochel had catalogued all of Mozart’s works, more than five hundred. It was very graphic. It must have affected my father very much because he had kept it for all those years.”87 Al Vasquez, the MIT undergraduate Nash had gotten to know in his final year in Cambridge, recalled: “His letters were filled with numerology. I didn’t keep them. They weren’t just letters. They were collages, pastiches. Full of newspaper clippings. Very clever. I was always showing them to people. They contained some insights. Little patterns, puns.”88 Cathleen Morawetz recalled that her father, John Synge, who had taught Nash tensor calculus at Carnegie, received postcards from Nash at this time and was frightened by them. They reminded him, he told her, of his brilliant brother Hutchie, who suffered from schizophrenia and had quit Trinity College in order to settle in the bohemian enclaves of Paris before the First World War. Morawetz said, “The letters were about things like Milnor’s differential structure of spheres. Nash would quote a theorem. Then he’d derive a political meaning for it.”89

  Money was a growing worry. The Nashes’ lodgings were cheap by American standards, but living, particularly food, was not. Nash was greatly preoccupied with trying to sell his Mercedes, still in the Institute for Advanced Study’s parking lot. The mathematician with whom he had left his car, Hassler Whitney, had called John Danskin and asked him to deal with it.90 John Abbat, a Frenchman who had invented a kind of bowling pin and was married to Odette’s older sister Muyu, got involved as well. The book value, Danskin recalled, was $2,300, but Nash was determined to get $2,400 or $2,500. “He was absolutely unreasonable,” Danskin recalled. “I didn’t sell it. It was still there when he got back.” From time to time, Nash asked Martha to send Eleanor money.91 He also asked Warren Ambrose to visit John David, or perhaps Ambrose offered. Eleanor recalled that John David, now nearly seven, was frightened of Ambrose.92

  Nash’s hair had by now grown long, and he had a full beard. In early April, he sent Martha a photograph of himself, taken in a Chinese restaurant, which he asked her to return to him, labeling it “Picture of Dorian Gray.”93 He referred to an “autorisation de séjour” for April 21 and said that he was planning to leave soon for Sweden.94 On April 21, Virginia received a telegram from the State Department requesting funds to bring Nash back to the United States.95 She wired the money. Nash was taken from the apartment on Avenue Rue de la République by the French police, who escorted him, under guard, all the way to Orly.96 Nash would later tell Vasquez that he had been brought back from Europe, “on a ship and in chains, like a slave,”97 but Alicia recalled quite definitely that they came back on a plane.98 While the departure repeated the trauma of Geneva, it was also a mirror image of their journey to France the previous summer. This time it was Nash who was the unwilling one. Ironically, in this, too, he was walking in Davis’s path, for Davis, too, was once forcibly placed on the Queen Mary and sent back to America confined in first-class quarters.99

  39

  Absolute Zero Princeton, 1960

  THE OLIVE-GREEN MERCEDES 180 was still in the institute parking lot in Princeton. Nash had come straight there while Alicia and the baby went to Washington to stay with the Lardes.1 He hung around Princeton. In June, having heard that his sister had had a baby, Nash drove down to Roanoke to visit Martha in the hospital. She remembered being frightened by his appearance and concealing from him her son’s due date, June 13. “I was worried that he would put some meaning in it,” she recalled in 1995.2 Her recollection is that Nash stayed in Roanoke with Virginia for several weeks.

  Alicia, meanwhile, was looking for work and had enlisted, among others, John Danskin — now married to Odette — to help her.3 Danskin was now teaching at Rutgers, and the newlyweds lived on the outskirts of Princeton. Alicia was apparently considering staying in Washington, presumably so that her parents could help with the baby. She was also thinking of moving back to New York. During the summer, Alicia stayed with her old MIT friend, Joyce Davis, by now living in Greenwich Village and working in the city, and interviewed for various computer programming jobs. As she told Joyce in a note she left at her apartment on the day that she returned to Washington, she got offers from IB M and also from Univac but was undecided over whether to accept them, saying, “Now I’ve got a real problem, work in NY or Wash?”4

  Odette urged Alicia to move to Princeton.5 Nash was also in favor. Alicia thought that her husband would benefit from being around other mathematicians again and hoped that he would be able to find work in Princeton. The upshot was that Alicia turned down the offers to work in New York City and instead took a position with the Astro-Electronics Division of the Radio Corporation of America, which had a big research facility on Hightstown Road between Princeton and Hightstown.6 Alicia left John Charles in her mother’s care once more and rented a small apartment at 58 Spruce Street, on the corner of Walnut, about a mile from Palmer Square. Nash joined her there at the end of the summer.

  • • •

  Initially, at least, Princeton seemed to offer a respite after the anxious final months in Paris. Alicia and Nash were very much part of a crowd that had gathered around John Danskin and Odette in the charming enclave near the Delaware-Raritan Canal. Griggstown consisted at that time of Tornquist’s, a general store, and a few picturesque houses, including the former cider mill where the Danskins lived. It was especially beautiful in the summer, the air heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. Napthali Afriat, a game theorist who worked with Morgenstern at the time, lived there, as did Jean-Pierre Cauvin, a graduate student in French at Princeton, and a couple that worked at Rutgers, Agnes and Michael Sherman.7 The Danskins held frequent parties at which the Milnors, Ed Nelson and his wife, an
d Georg Kreisel, a logician, were also frequent visitors.8 The parties lasted long into the night, with Beethoven sonatas, a great deal of wine, barbecued steaks and shish kebab, nighttime swims in the canal, and bright conversation led by the convivial, cultivated, mercurial Danskin. Cauvin remembered John Nash very vividly.

  He had a kind of childlike air and disposition, a gentleness, this very vulnerable quality, a kind of helplessness. It blew my mind that someone who gave this appearance of being so simple could be a genius. He was subdued and rather passive. He always spoke very softly and in a monotone. I don’t recall him ever initiating a conversation. He would respond to a question or remark after a little momentary hesitation. Alicia was very attentive to him.9

  Alicia was learning to drive. Danskin and Milnor were both giving her lessons, with haphazard success.10 They invited her along to a Thursday-night folk dance group at Miss Fines’s School on Route 206 that Danskin and Milnor belonged to.11 “She was very pretty, very quiet. I remember her pulling out a photograph of a cute little boy,” said Elvira Leader.12 Her husband, Sol, danced with Alicia: “She was weightless,” he recalled.13

  Danskin would bring the dancers home afterward. He remembered talking with Nash about mathematics. They’d been drinking by then. Danskin was trying to prove a theorem:

  He immediately hit you with the hardest point. He was still very sharp. He understood what I was doing. I wanted to avoid the hard way and he caught me. Who in the hell would ask that? You would if you were proving it yourself, but he was just listening. And understanding.14

  Danskin spearheaded an effort to find Nash a job. Danskin was doing some consulting work for Oskar Morgenstern and Morgenstern, it seemed, was willing to hire Nash as a consultant. That fall, Nash was given a one-year consulting contract, with a ceiling of two thousand dollars. Morgenstern indicated to the university that he was making the offer under “a small charitable pressure” but that he felt “Nash could contribute strongly to his program if he was able to pull out of his present mental depression and utilizes his faculties to their greatest extent.”15The university balked, “fearing that the appointment might be based on human kindness, rather than on realistic, technical needs.”16 It was decided to review Nash’s performance after two months. The contract was dated October 21, 1960.17