A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  Alicia indulged in no tears, hysteria, or unnecessary confidences. She accepted what help she could get. She had very little faith that anyone would come to her aid. She was well aware that everyone, including close friends like Arthur Mattuck, considered Nash her responsibility. She defended herself against criticism of her decision to commit Nash, but only when pressed, as, for example, by Gertrude Moser, who, after visiting Nash at McLean, began to doubt that he was insane and demanded that Alicia justify her decision to have Nash locked up. For a young woman whose husband was in a lunatic asylum, threatening to hurt her, to divorce her, and to take their money and run off to Europe, she maintained a remarkable calm. The apparently flighty young woman who had, in the throes of lovesickness, sat in the science fiction section of the library, hoping her idol would come in, had reserves of strength that she would need to draw on the rest of her life.

  Another young woman might have thrown up her hands and gone home to her parents. But Alicia told herself that John’s mind and career could be saved. She focused on the crisis at hand as best she could and put herself in the capable hands of Emma and Fagi Levinson. Her ability to focus on her own agenda, her iron self-control, sense of entitlement, deep conviction that her own future depended on this man — and perhaps also the combined energy, optimism, and ignorance of youth — all came to her aid in this very dark hour. All her attention was focused on a single task — not the task of giving birth, but that of saving John Nash.

  “She never talked about the baby, only about Nash,” Emma recalled. “She regarded the pregnancy as a problem. Just a danger to Nash. She was worried that it would interfere with her ability to take care of [him].”

  There was no waiting nursery, no layette, no dog-eared copy of Dr. Spock’s new best-selling baby manual sitting on the night table. Alicia had no time or attention for such things. She wished for the pregnancy to end, but she had not looked beyond it. She had vaguely assumed that her mother would come and help her, but hadn’t bothered to make the arrangements. Nor had she asked Virginia to come again. She barely paid any attention at all, in fact. Even after the baby kept her awake nights with its vigorous kicks, she never talked about it.

  Emma recalled, “The observation period [with Nash at McLean] was coming to an end. The psychiatrists were telling Alicia that the crisis was precipitated by her pregnancy. She asked her doctor to induce her labor. He wouldn’t.”

  On May 20, when Alicia’s labor began, Nash was still in McLean and she was still living with Emma at 18½ Tremont Street. The pains began in her lower back. Eventually she crawled into bed. Emma was there. The two of them couldn’t decide whether the labor had started. Later when her sister was about to give birth, Emma would buy an obstetrics textbook and discover that back labor was in fact quite common. But at that moment, the two MIT women were in the dark about such things. Finally, when the pains became more insistent and closer together, either she or Alicia telephoned Fagi, who confirmed that, yes, indeed, it sounded like labor and said she would jump into her car right away and drive over. She did and, after taking one look at Alicia, who was by now looking quite scared, told her to get into the car and they’d drive to the hospital immediately.

  Alicia gave birth to a baby boy that night. He weighed nearly nine pounds and was 21.5 inches long. She did not give the baby a name. She felt that the naming would have to wait until his father was well enough to help choose one. As it happened, the baby remained nameless for nearly a year.

  Alicia had still to bear Nash’s anger. The day after the birth, Nash came to the Boston Lying-in Hospital to visit his wife and new son, having gotten permission to leave McLean for the evening. Although Fagi Levinson does not remember doing so, one imagines that it was she who arranged this. Another friend came to see Alicia halfway through Nash’s visit. Alicia was lying in bed, looking tiny and wan. Nash was sitting beside her. Her dinner tray was on the table next to the bed. At some point, Nash carefully took the napkin, stood up, and went over to a sign on the wall with the name of the hospital on it and covered up the “In” in the hospital’s name so that it read “Boston Lying Hospital.” The visitor recalled, “The implication was that it was Alicia who was lying. She observed what he was doing. I made no comment. I certainly didn’t want the situation to escalate into speech.”2

  Nash’s sense of humor had in no way deserted him. On the afternoon of his release one week later, Nash went directly to the mathematics common room. He strolled in, greeted everyone, and said he’d come straight from McLean. “It was a wonderful place,” he told the graduate students and professors who were sipping tea. “They had everything but one: freedom!”3

  A day or two later, Nash was back in the department. He carefully posted hand-printed notices in the hallways announcing a “coming out party.” The notices read: “All the people who are important in my life are invited! YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!” Over the following week, he went around to everyone’s office and asked each member of the department if he were coming. If the person said “Yes,” he asked them “Why?”4

  He referred to the party as a “Mad Hatter’s Tea,” and he asked people to dress up in costumes.5 Whether the event was his idea or Alicia’s isn’t clear. Fagi Levinson, Norman’s wife, thought that Alicia — who was home with a week-old baby — had organized it for the purpose of thanking all of those who had visited Nash in McLean.6 One graduate student, who said he went to New York that weekend to avoid it, remembered that it was held at Mattuck’s apartment. Mattuck doesn’t remember it at all. Very likely, it took place at 18½ Tremont Street. Fagi remembered it as a “big party.”

  The Nashes held at least one dinner party too. The mystified guest was Al Vasquez, who was about to graduate on June 12, and he remembers it as a sad and depressing event. In 1997, he recalled:

  It was one of the most bizarre evenings I’ve ever spent. I went there and there was Alicia, the baby, and Alicia’s mother. John was behaving very oddly. Whenever John got up, Alicia’s mother would get up and place herself between him and the baby. It was a pretty strange dance. It lasted a couple of hours. Alicia had no idea who I was. Everybody tried to act like everything was normal. The weirdness of this was overwhelming. Nash couldn’t sit still. He’d bolt up and as soon as he did; Alicia’s mother would jump up and fuss over this and that. But she wouldn’t let him get anywhere near the baby.7

  Nash was determined to leave for Europe as soon as possible. He wrote to Hormander on June 1 asking whether Hormander would be in Stockholm during the summer. He was thinking of traveling to Sweden that summer, he wrote, and was looking for “(nominal) mathematical associations” to justify the trip.8 And he wrote to Armand and Gaby Borel, who were in Switzerland at the time, to ask that they help him obtain Swiss citizenship.9

  Nash was also determined to resign his MIT professorship. Furious that MIT had connived in his involuntary hospitalization, Nash “dramatically” — as he later put it — submitted a letter of resignation10 and simultaneously demanded that MIT release a small pension fund that had accumulated from the time he joined the full-time faculty.11 Levinson was aghast. With Martin and others, he tried to persuade Nash that what he wished to do was mad. He told Nash that MIT would not accept his resignation. Levinson acted in the most altruistic fashion. He was well aware of the heavy expenses of medical treatment, and he was anxious for Nash to retain the insurance coverage that MIT provided its faculty members. “Norman tried to convince him not to do it,” Fagi said. “He felt responsible for him.”12

  Martin recalled, “It was a very difficult period. By the time he resigned, he couldn’t meet his classes and people felt that he had no hope of any recovery. We were on the spot. I couldn’t even talk to him. There was no having a coherent conversation with him. Levinson always backed Nash to the hilt. There was no pressure on me either [from the administration to accept Nash’s resignation].”13’

  But Nash was intransigent. At Levinson’s urging, the university administration tried to prevent Nash from
withdrawing his pension money, but here too Nash prevailed. On June 23, James Faulkner, a physician affiliated with MIT, telephoned Warren Stearns on behalf of MIT’s president, James Killian, to say that the university was extremely concerned about Nash’s future.14 According to Paul Samuelson, Stearns once again took the position that Nash was not insane and was fully competent, in a legal sense, to make such decisions.15 The amount was negligible, but once the check was issued, Nash’s last formal tie to MIT was cut.

  Shortly after his resignation, he ran into one of his former students from the game-theory course, Henry Wan, telling him that he was now engaged in a study of linguistics. When Wan expressed surprise, Nash said that mathematicians had a unique ability to “abstract the essence of a field. That is why we can move from one area to another.”16

  Nash said that he was sailing on the Queen Mary in early July. Alicia tried to dissuade him, but when it became clear to her that he would go, she made up her mind to accompany him and to leave their son behind in her mother’s care.

  Nash had an invitation to spend the year in Paris at the College de France, the leading French center of mathematics. Alicia hoped that a few months abroad, away from the pressures of Cambridge and among new faces, would let Nash forget his dreams of world peace, world government, and world citizenship; he might settle down to work again. To Nash, however, the journey seemed to promise a more permanent escape from his old life. He talked as if they were never to return.

  They drove down to New York and said their good-byes to Alicia’s cousins. The occasion was uneventful except that Nash had refused to eat facing the huge mirror opposite the dining table.17 They left their Mercedes, its trunk full of old issues of The New York Times, in the Institute parking lot in Princeton. Nash wished to bequeath both car and newspapers to Hassler Whitney, the mathematician whom he most admired.18 They left their baby — not yet named and therefore referred to as Baby Epsilon, a little mathematical joke — behind as well. Alicia’s mother had already taken the infant home with her to Washington.19 Mrs. Larde, they had agreed, would join them in Paris with the baby as soon as they were settled.

  PART FOUR

  The Lost Years

  38

  Citoyen du Monde Paris and Geneva, 1959–60

  I have a difficult task ahead of me and I have dedicated my whole life to it.

  — K, in The Castle, by FRANZ KAFKA

  I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate fantasy.

  — PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “Mont Blanc”

  SHORTLY AFTER Independence Day, Nash and Alicia left from New York harbor on the Queen Mary, standing by the rail with the rest of the throng. They watched the pier, then the skyline, then the Statue of Liberty move away from them as they sailed slowly toward the open sea. They looked very much as they had a year earlier when they’d embarked on their honeymoon voyage — he tall, well dressed, and handsome, she slender, small, and delicate — but less animated, more subdued. They were both lost in their own thoughts.

  The Nashes reached London on July 18 after a “restful” crossing.1 Two days later they were in Paris.2 The beauty of Paris overwhelmed them just as it had a year earlier, “verdure everywhere … with the giant blue Paris pigeons bolting above it, two by two.”3 For a few hours after they emerged from the Gare St-Lazare and made their way to a modest Left Bank hotel incongruously named the Grand Hotel de Mont Blanc, the leaden weight of the miserable months in Cambridge seemed to lift from their shoulders and they felt, briefly, as light as air again. They set out, that afternoon, for the American Express Office to buy francs and to inquire if they had any mail. As always during the summer, the Place de L’Opéra was crowded with American tourists. To their delight, they immediately spotted the familiar face of John Moore, a mathematician Nash knew from MIT, who would soon become co-chairman of the mathematics department at Princeton. Moore was sitting outside the Café de la Paix, reading, when he looked up and saw the Nashes. “I was surprised, but not surprised,” Moore recalled in 1995. “A lot of mathematicians come to Paris. We talked about Edinburgh. I noticed nothing unusual.”4

  What their real plans were at the time, Alicia was later unable to say. She had followed Nash to Europe, not because she hoped that Paris would provide a cure for his troubles, but because she had no way of stopping him, and, that being the case, she had not been able to bear seeing him go off to a strange land, alone, without someone to watch over him. But, in those first few days in Paris, the Nashes behaved as if this would be their new home for some time. Alicia enrolled in a French-language course at the Sorbonne and looked around for more permanent lodgings.5 Her twenty-year-old cousin Odette, who was planning to spend the year at the University of Grenoble, happened to be in Paris, too. The two young women went house hunting together until they found a pretty, clean, and spacious flat for the Nashes at 49 Avenue de la République, in a nondescript but perfectly respectable blue-collar neighborhood on the Right Bank.6

  Paris, indeed all of Europe, was sizzling hot that July. The newspapers were full of heat-wave stories, including one about a parked car that had burst into flames, a seemingly genuine case of spontaneous combustion. The rear windshield had apparently acted like a magnifying glass and some papers left on the rear dashboard had ignited.7 The mood of Paris, always a magnet for alienated and disaffected Americans and full of self-declared exiles of the Silent Generation, was hot as well. The war in Algeria raged on, with its right-wing terrorist bombings, its civilian massacres, its tortures. The city reverberated with mass demonstrations, strikes, and explosions. And the latest word on the nuclear arms race — the American announcement that it now could match Russia’s ICBMs, missile for missile — left open the question of whether the world wasn’t in for another, more deadly case of spontaneous combustion.

  If the heat and high political theater influenced Nash’s mood, they induced not torpor, but a heightened sense of purpose. Acting on “special” knowledge, Nash was animated by a desire to cut himself off from all vestiges of his former social self. In the Tightness of this he believed with absolute certainty, resisting any and all attempts by Alicia to persuade him to give up his “silly” notions. Having resigned his professorship, having left not only Cambridge but the United States, and having given up mathematics for politics, he wished, quite simply, to shed the layers of his old identity like so many outworn articles of clothing.

  Ideas of world government, and the related concept of world citizenship, were at their heyday during Nash’s Princeton graduate-school days and permeated the 1950s science fiction that Nash devoured as a student and afterward. Founded after the collapse of the League of Nations in the 1930s, the one-world movement exploded into the national consciousness within a few years of the end of World War II. Princeton was a center of that movement, largely because of the presence of physicists and mathematicians — notably Albert Einstein and John von Neumann — who acted as midwives to the nuclear age.8 One of Nash’s contemporaries in graduate school, John Kemeny — a brilliant young logician, the assistant to Einstein, and later the president of Dartmouth College — was a leader of the World Federalists.

  However, the one-worlder who fired Nash’s imagination was a loner like himself, the Abbie Hoffman of the one-world movement. In 1948, Garry Davis, a leather-jacketed World War II bomber pilot, Broadway actor, and son of society band leader Meyer Davis, had walked into the American embassy in Paris, turned in his U.S. passport, and renounced his American citizenship.9 He then tried to get the United Nations to declare him “the first citizen of the world.”10 Davis, “sick and tired of war and rumors of war,” wished to start a world government.11 “Every paper headlined the story,” the columnist Art Buchwald recalled in his Paris memoir.12 Albert Einstein, eighteen members of the British Parliament, and a slew of French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, had come out in support of Davis.13

  Nash intended to follow in Davis’s footsteps. In the overwrought, hyper-patriotic atmosp
here of the America he was leaving behind, Nash was choosing the “path of most resistance,” and one that captured his radical sense of alienation. Such “extreme contrariness” aimed at cultural norms has long been a hallmark of a developing schizophrenic consciousness.14 In ancestor-worshiping Japan the target may be the family, in Catholic Spain the Church. Motivated as much by antagonism to his former existence as by an urge for self-expression, Nash particularly desired to supersede the old laws that had governed his existence, and, quite literally, to substitute his own laws, and to escape, once and for all, from the jurisdiction under which he had once lived.

  While the motivation may have been highly abstract, the plan itself was strangely concrete. To effect his makeover, he wished to trade his American passport for some more universal identity card, one that declared him to be a citizen of the world.

  On July 29, a little over a week after his arrival in Paris, Nash went by train to Luxembourg.15 He chose Luxembourg as the site for the renunciation of his American citizenship for prudent reasons, possibly at the advice of the Paris-based World Citizen Registry, an organization founded by Davis. The smaller and more obscure the country, the less likely that turning in his American passport would result in immediate arrest and deportation. France was a notoriously bad site for protests of this sort. When Nash arrived at the Central Station in the city of Luxembourg, he walked to the American embassy at 22 Boulevard Emmanuel Servais, demanded to see the ambassador, and announced that he no longer wished to be an American citizen.

  Section 1481 of the 1941 Immigration Act contains a clause that permits American citizens to give up their citizenship.16 It was intended, of course, to allow citizens to resolve cases of dual citizenship. By 1959, some dozens of Americans, also inspired by Garry Davis, were making use of the provision for protest purposes.17The law is quite clear. It delineates an oath, which must be taken in a foreign country, right hand raised, in the presence of an American diplomat: “I desire to make a formal renunciation of my American nationality … and pursuant thereto I hereby absolutely and entirely renounce my nationality in the United States and all rights and privileges pertaining, and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to the United States of America.”18