by Sylvia Nasar
35
In the Eye of the Storm Spring 1959
It was like a tornado. You want to hang on to what you have. You don’t want to see everything go.
— ALICIA NASH
DESPITE ALICIA’S apparent elation on New Year’s Eve, her state of mind in the preceding months had been anything but carefree. Since returning from their European holiday, her starry-eyed view of her new life had given way to a darker, more somber perspective. She and Nash had moved out to West Medford, a small industrial city north of Cambridge, and Alicia felt cut off and isolated. Her goal of establishing a career seemed more distant than ever. Her feelings about her pregnancy were ambivalent, and her initial hopes that it would draw her and Nash closer were disappointed. Her husband had become, if anything, more cold and distant. As the weather turned colder and the days shorter, she felt more and more dispirited, anxious, and alone — so much so that she was thinking of consulting a psychiatrist.1
That had been before Thanksgiving. Since then, Nash’s behavior, rather than her own low mood, had become her chief source of distress. Several times, Nash had cornered her with odd questions when they were alone, either at home or driving in the car. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” he asked in an angry, agitated tone, apropos of nothing. “Tell me what you know,” he demanded.2 He behaved as if she knew some secret but wouldn’t share it with him. The first time he said it, Alicia thought Nash suspected her of having an affair. When he repeated it, she wondered whether he might not be having an affair himself. That would account for his growing secretiveness and air of abstraction. Might he not be trying to deflect attention from himself by accusing her?
By New Year’s Day, the day she turned twenty-six, Alicia was sure that “something was wrong.”3 Nash’s behavior had become more and more peculiar. He was irritable and hypersensitive one minute, eerily withdrawn the next. He complained that he “knew something was going on” and that he was being “bugged.” And he was staying up nights writing strange letters to the United Nations. One night, after he had painted black spots all over their bedroom wall, Alicia made him sleep on the living-room couch.4
Alarmed, Alicia searched for explanations rooted in their day-to-day life. Her first thought was that Nash was unduly worried about the impending tenure decision. She suspected that the prospect of a baby, with all the new responsibilities that implied, was another source of pressure. And she wondered whether marriage to someone “different” like her wasn’t proving too much of a strain for a southern WASP.5
Alicia vainly tried to reassure Nash. She told him, over and over, that his worries about tenure were unfounded, that he was the department’s fair-haired boy, that Martin, after all, was confident that the decision would be favorable. She reasoned with him, pointing out that the letter writing “could undermine his professional credibility” and might even jeopardize his tenure. When that failed, she remonstrated with him. “You can’t act silly,” she would say. Then Nash did a number of things that frightened her — and made inescapable the conclusion that he was suffering some sort of mental breakdown.
He started to threaten to take all of his savings out of the bank and move to Europe.6 He had some idea, it seemed, of founding an international organization. And he began to stay up, night after night, long after she had gone to bed, writing. In the morning, his desk would be covered with sheets of paper covered in blue, green, red, and black ink. They were addressed not just to the U.N. but to various foreign ambassadors, the pope, even the FBI.
It was in mid-January, while classes were still in session, that Nash took off for Roanoke in the middle of the night after a wild scene. Seeing no alternative, Alicia broke her silence and telephoned Virginia to warn her. She told her mother-in-law very little, though, as Martha recalled, other than that Nash was suffering from stress and was behaving somewhat irrationally. When he arrived in Roanoke, Virginia and Martha were frightened by his agitated state. At one point, he struck Virginia on the arm.7
When Nash returned, he continued to badger Alicia in private. Once he threatened to hit her “if you don’t tell me.”8
Alicia was initially more worried about Nash and their future together than about any physical threats to herself. Her immediate, overwhelming instinct was to prevent the university from finding out about Nash’s difficulties. “I didn’t want the bad things to get out.”9
She quit her job at Technical Operations and took one at the Computer Center on campus. She began to watch Nash all the time, to stick very close to him, to keep him more to herself. She would stop by the mathematics department every afternoon after work and pick him up. She no longer invited others to join them when they ate out. She particularly tried to avoid Paul Cohen, although Nash’s insistence sometimes made this impossible. “Alicia wanted to save his career and preserve his intellect,” a friend of Alicia’s later recalled. “It was in her interest to keep Nash intact. She was extremely tough.”10
Until the Roanoke episode, Alicia had confided in no one. Now she consulted a psychiatrist from the MIT medical department, a Dr. Haskell Schell.11 She also asked Emma to have lunch with her alone a few times and, although reluctantly and holding much back, told her friend some of what had been happening.
At the beginning, it seemed to Alicia that her psychiatrist was more intent on asking her questions — about her upbringing, her marriage, her sex life — than on offering practical advice on how to cope. “At first Alicia trusted them because it was MIT,” Emma recalled. “But it was a very Freudian time. The psychiatry department was ultra-Freudian. They wanted to treat Alicia. She wanted practical help.” Emma continued:
They asked Alicia a lot of questions. She got very impatient. Nash was threatening to go off to Europe, to withdraw all their money, to start an international organization. She was looking into the laws. She found out that you could have somebody committed for a limited time with the signature of two psychiatrists. To keep them longer, you had to have a court hearing.12
Emma was working with Jerome Lettvin, a former psychiatrist who was now pursuing research in neurophysiology at MIT. She asked Lettvin what Alicia should do. The result was that Alicia got very conflicting advice. On the one hand, Lettvin was urging her, through Emma, to consider shock treatments. “Lettvin’s idea was that when somebody was delusional the sooner he was shocked out of it the better,” Emma recalled. On the other hand, Schell was recommending that Nash go to McLean Hospital, an ultra-Freudian institution that eschewed shock treatments in favor of psychoanalysis and new antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine. Alicia rejected the notion of shock treatment. “She was very concerned with preserving his genius,” Emma stated in 1997. “She wasn’t going to force anything on him. She also wanted there to be nothing that would interfere with his brain. N o drugs. No shock treatments.”13
In January, the department voted to give Nash tenure. A few weeks later, Martin, now aware that Nash was suffering some sort of “nervous breakdown,” decided to relieve Nash of his teaching duties for the coming semester.14 Although distressed that the university had found out about Nash’s problems, Alicia was greatly relieved. She hoped that this move would lift some of the pressures on Nash and that he would improve spontaneously.
Deciding what, if anything, to do was so difficult because Nash often seemed quite normal. The on-again, off-again nature of his symptoms also convinced some of his colleagues and graduate students in the department that nothing was seriously wrong. Gian-Carlo Rota recalled that Nash’s personality “didn’t seem very different,” although “his mathematics no longer made sense.”15 Some days everything looked just as it always had, and Alicia found herself wondering, until the next outburst of bizarre behavior, whether she had been exaggerating, unnecessarily alarmed, premature in her judgments.
In mid-March, two weeks after the disastrous New York trip when Nash had given his lecture on the Riemann Hypothesis, Nash was writing reassuring letters home. “My talk in New York went reasonably well,” he wrote Virginia o
n March 12, urging her to come up to Boston to visit him and Alicia.16 On the same day, he even wrote a long letter to Martha in which he complained of boredom. Nash wrote, “Since she has become pregnant Alicia does not like to go out. She enjoys TV and movie magazines. These things tend to bore me. The level is too low.”17
But these periods of lucidity and calm soon gave way to an eruption that Alicia later compared to a “tornado.”18 The episode that convinced Alicia that she had no choice but to seek treatment for Nash occurred around Easter. Nash took off for Washington, D.C., in his Mercedes. He was, it appeared, trying to deliver letters to foreign governments by dropping them into the mail slots of embassies.19 This time Alicia went with him. Before they left, she telephoned her friend Emma and asked her to contact the university psychiatrist if they did not return within a week or so. Emma recalled in 1997 that Alicia was afraid Nash might harm her. Curiously, her concern, at least in Emma’s recollection, was less for herself than for Nash: “She wanted the world to know that Nash was mad. She was worried about Nash. She worried that if she came to harm that he’d be treated like a common criminal, so she wanted to be sure that everyone knew that he was insane.”20
When Emma did call Schell he refused to come to the telephone and had a nurse tell her that “Dr. Schell doesn’t discuss his patients.” She added, “I was interviewed at Lincoln Labs about Alicia. I was asked whether she was afraid of her husband. But she wasn’t. He was just very sick.”21’
Emma’s impressions to the contrary, Alicia was afraid, though she managed to hide her fear from almost everyone. Paul Cohen, however, recalled that “she was afraid of him.”22 A few weeks later she would tell Gertrude Moser, who questioned her decision to have Nash hospitalized, that, in Gertrude’s words, “Something had happened in the middle of the night and she had to save herself and the child.”23 It was fear for her own safety, as well as her psychiatrist’s warning that Nash would continue to deteriorate unless he got treatment, that prompted her to seek commitment, at least for observation. She wished, however, to conceal what he would inevitably regard as an act of treachery. So she turned to her mother-in-law and asked her to come to Boston.
George Whitehead, one of Nash’s colleagues, had temporarily moved to Princeton with his wife, Kay. In mid-April, the Whiteheads drove up to Boston to have their car, which was still registered in Massachusetts, inspected. It was an annual ritual. That evening they went to a party at the home of Oscar Goldman in Concord. Most of the MIT mathematics department was there. Kay recalled in 1995: “The word was ‘Tomorrow, Alicia is having John committed.’ Obviously, there was a lot of talk about it.”24
36
Day Breaks in Bowditch Hall McLean Hospital, April-May 1959
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s.
— “Waking in the Blue,” Life Studies, ROBERT LOWELL
WHEN A STRANGER in a suit knocked on Paul Cohen’s office door to inquire whether he had seen Dr. Nash that afternoon, the man’s slightly unctuous, self-important manner made Cohen wonder whether this was the psychiatrist who was going to have Nash “locked up.”1 For days the younger people in the department had been speculating — based on hints dropped by Ambrose and some of the other senior faculty — that Nash’s wife was about to have him committed. Furious controversies had broken out over whether Nash was truly insane or merely eccentrie, and over whether, insane or not, anyone had the right to rob a genius like Nash of his freedom.2 Cohen, who felt that he had been somehow unfairly implicated in the whole affair, had pretty much steered clear of these debates, but he nonetheless felt a certain morbid fascination. To the stranger, however, he merely said no, he hadn’t seen Dr. Nash all day.
So when Nash showed up at Cohen’s door not very long afterward, seemingly oblivious to whatever machinations were under way, Cohen was more than a little surprised. Nash wanted to know if Cohen would like to go for a walk with him. Cohen agreed, and the two wandered around the MIT campus for an hour or more. As they walked, Nash spoke in a fitful monologue while Cohen listened, perplexed and uncomfortable. Occasionally Nash would stop, point at something, and whisper conspiratorially: “Look at that dog over there. He’s following us.”3 He frightened Cohen a bit by talking about Alicia in a way that made the younger man feel that she might be in danger. After they parted, Cohen learned later, Nash was picked up and taken to McLean Hospital.
• • •
It was not difficult to get someone into McLean even if they did not want to go. Nash’s involuntary commitment to a mental hospital for observation was likelv arranged by MIT’s psychiatric service, probably in consultation with the president of the university as well as Martin and Levinson.4 Given Nash’s acute paranoia, his bizarre letter writing, his inability to teach, and the potential that he might carry out his threats to harm Alicia, the pressure to intervene would have been great. One imagines that before taking the drastic measure of involuntary commitment, one of the psychiatrists in MIT’s employ attempted to convince Nash to obtain treatment voluntarily first. Merton J. Kahne, a professor of psychiatry at MIT who ran McLean’s admissions ward during the 1950s, said in 1996:
They would have tried to figure out how to get him into therapy without coercion. A lot of heads would have been put together to try to find a solution. In those days, there was an attempt to maintain some respect for the human being, whether they were crazy or not. They weren’t interested in peremptorily putting someone in the hospital against their will. The stigma was enormous.
The decision was an especially tricky one because of Nash’s prominent position at the university, and because, as is often the case, it was inherently controversial. As Kahne put it, “The more powerful or exceptional the individual, the more controversial the decision.”
The mechanics, however, were fairly straightforward. Any psychiatrist could apply to a mental hospital to have a patient taken for a ten-day observation period. A university psychiatrist would have signed a temporary care order — a so-called pink paper — asking McLean to take Nash on the grounds that he was a danger to himself or others (although a simple inability to care for oneself was sufficient grounds). The pink paper gave MIT the right to pick Nash up and transport him to McLean. Technically, it was the hospital that made the decision to hold a patient, initially for a ten-day period.
That April evening, some hours after Nash and Cohen parted company, two Cambridge policemen arrived at the Nash’s West Medford house. As Nash recalls, “they as if arrested me… .”5 The use of police officers was, by all accounts, an extreme measure; it suggested that the university psychiatrists were expecting trouble. Most cases of involuntary commitment involving university personnel were handled far more discreetly, in a manner designed to avoid scandal and humiliation, by out-of-uniform campus police driving a gray Chevrolet station wagon, marked only with maroon lettering, whose interior was equipped as an ambulance.6 As it happened, Nash refused to go and a scuffle ensued. “I actually struggled with them in resistance at first,” he recalled. Resistance was useless, however. Big and strong as he was, Nash was quickly overpowered and bundled into the back of the police cruiser. The drive from West Medford to Belmont took less than half an hour.
• • •
One Hundred Fifteen Mill Street, Belmont, Massachusetts, was, and still is, a verdant 240–acre expanse of rolling lawns and winding lanes and a scattering of buildings of old brick and ironwork nestled among majestic trees or perched airily on rises — a precise copy, that is to say, of a well-manicured New England college campus of late-nineteenth-century vintage.7 Many of its smaller buildings were designed to resemble the homes of wealthy Boston Brahmins — long the bulk of McLean’s clientele. A psychiatrist who reviewed the hospital for the American Psychiatric Association in the late 1940s recalled, “There were all these little two-story homes with suites — kitchen, living room, bedroom. They had suites for the cook, the maid, the chauffeur.”8 Upham House, a former medical resident recalled, had four corner sui
tes per floor and on one of its floors all four patients turned out to be members of the Harvard Club!
McLean was, as it still is, connected to Harvard Medical School. So many of the wealthy, intellectual, and famous came there — Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and Robert Lowell among them9 — that many people around Cambridge had come to think of it less as a mental hospital and more as a kind of sanatorium where high-strung poets, professors, and graduate students wound up for a special kind of R&R.
The resident on duty that evening urged Nash to sign a “voluntary paper.” Nash refused. There was a great movement for world peace, he said, and he was its leader. He called himself “the prince of peace.”10 He was informed of his legal rights, including mis right to file a petition for release. A tentative diagnosis was made, but this was not discussed with him. And a document applying to a judge for a ten-day commitment was filled out. He was then escorted to the admissions ward in Belnap One, a low brick building on the north side of McLean’s campus, just beyond the administration building.
Nash used the pay telephone in the lounge. He did not call a lawyer, but rang Fagi Levinson instead. “John wanted to know how he could get out of there,” she said. “He said he wanted a shower. ‘I stink,’ he said.”11
Virginia Nash traveled up from Roanoke to see her son. She was devastated. She wept and wept, Emma Duchane recalled, saying over and over that she could not “bear to see Johnny in this situation.”12 She seemed close to a breakdown herself. She did not offer Alicia any help, financial or otherwise. Alicia, who was very short of funds, about to give birth, and mad with worry, was bitterly disappointed. She had counted on Virginia for support, but it was obvious that Virginia needed even more help than she did.
