A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  Nash’s announcement was greeted as one might expect. An embassy official — not the ambassador! — made a number of strongly worded arguments to convince Nash that what he wished to do was unwise. Somewhat surprisingly, given the strength of Nash’s conviction at that moment, the diplomat convinced Nash to take back his passport. It was a sign, perhaps, of a vacillation and indecisiveness that would become more pronounced with time.

  The official’s argument made sense to him. As Nash said in his 1996 Madrid lecture: “I wouldn’t have been able to leave Luxembourg and return to Paris because I no longer had a passport. They allowed me to retract my action as irrational and insane.”19

  When the news of his first attempt to give up his American citizenship reached Virginia and Martha in Roanoke and his former colleagues at MIT, it proved to them that the confinement at McLean had done little to halt the galloping illness. Virginia, who had been deeply depressed on her return from Boston, had been drinking heavily and was headed for a breakdown herself. (She would be hospitalized in September.)20 When Armand Borel got back to Princeton from Switzerland at the end of the summer and inquired about Nash, one of his colleagues told him simply: “There is trouble.”21

  The plan’s having been aborted did little to suppress Nash’s high spirits when he returned to Paris two days later. The mere fact of having attempted to act sufficed to make him feel that he was, as he wrote on a postcard to Virginia, mailed July 31, well “on the way to becoming a world citizen.”22 His mind was full of other aspects of his intended transformation. He was visiting the “Bibliotek,” that is, the Bibliothèque Nationale, which is the French equivalent of the Library of Congress, he wrote to Virginia, and was working on learning French (“part of the plan,” as he had written to Tucker nearly a year earlier).23 He also confided in his mother that he wished “to take up painting.”

  Before long, however, Nash was afire with a new plan. His objectives, somewhat obscure even to himself until now, were suddenly much clearer. As Paris emptied for the August vacation, Nash decided that he preferred to be in Switzerland, a country he associated with neutrality, world citizenship, and Einstein.24 Einstein, who liked to refer to himself as a world citizen, had adopted Swiss citizenship. Possibly the fact that several European nations had been conducting the longest summit on record that summer in Geneva influenced his thinking.25 But it appears that the Nashes did not leave Paris as soon as Nash intended. The actual departure was delayed by protests on Alicia’s part over the sudden move after having just rented an apartment.

  Nash’s desire to go to Geneva was based, he later said, on his having heard that Geneva was “the city of refugees.”26 This was absolutely true, in both a historical and a contemporary sense. Hugging the southern shore of the crescent-shaped Lac Leman, set against a panorama of glaciers, the snowy ridges of Mont Blanc visible on all but the foggiest days, Geneva had once been the beacon of the Protestant Reformation and the refuge of French Protestants as well as freethinking intellectuals, including Voltaire and Rousseau.27 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had spent the summer of 1816 in the suburb of Cologny writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.28 In the twentieth century, Geneva had become the site of the ill-fated League of Nations and was a major international banking center. The European headquarters of the United Nations and other international enterprises such as the Red Cross were located there.

  In 1959, Geneva was an overnight train trip from Paris. When the Nashes arrived, they took a room at the Hôtel Athenée in the Rue Malganou.29 Alicia, however, did not stay long. She left almost immediately for Italy where she met Odette and remained for several weeks.

  Alone for the first time in his life, Nash was “without parents, home, wife, child, commitment or appetite … and the pride that might be taken in these,”30 and thus completely free to dedicate himself single-mindedly to his quest. His objectives, as suggested by his choice of venue, were shifting. He now wished not only to shed his American citizenship, but to obtain official refugee status — to be declared a refugee from “all NATO, Warsaw, Middle East and SEATO pact countries.”31 Presumably, these alliances were now fused in his mind with threats to world peace, but the desire for refugee status also reflected an expanding feeling of alienation, a sense of persecution, and fear of incarceration. He saw himself as a conscientious objector in danger of being drafted and as an opponent of the kinds of military research American mathematicians were expected to do.32

  He spent most of his evenings in that loneliest of places, a small blank hotel room in a distant and nondescript part of the city, writing letters that would never be answered, filling out endless forms, applications, and petitions that would be filed away. His days were spent haunting various anterooms and offices.

  For five solitary months, Nash’s ambiguous and self-annulling efforts resembled nothing so much as the anti-quest of the land surveyor in Kafka’s novel The Castle, probably the most compelling rendering of the schizophrenic consciousness in all of literature. Known only as K, Kafka’s hero’s sole object in life is to penetrate “the shadowy heart of the Castle” which looms high over a mazelike village K reaches but cannot get beyond.33 In Kafka’s novel, K, a man whose job it is to measure and estimate, seeks to enter a clouded locus of authority, not because he desires “to lead an honored and comfortable life,” but in order to “gain acceptance by the higher perhaps celestial powers and thereby to discover the reason of things.”34

  Nash’s lifelong quest for meaning, control, and recognition in the context of a continuing struggle, not just in society, but in the warring impulses of his paradoxical self, was now reduced to a caricature. Just as the overconcreteness of a dream is related to the intangible themes of waking life, Nash’s search for a piece of paper, a carte d’identité, mirrored his former pursuit of mathematical insights. Yet the gulf between the two recognizably related Nashes was as great as that between Kafka, the controlling creative genius, struggling between the demands of his self-chosen vocation and ordinary life, and K, a caricature of Kafka, the helpless seeker of a piece of paper that will validate his existence, rights, and duties. Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion. Survival, both of the self and the world, appears to be at stake. Where once he had ordered his thoughts and modulated them, he was now subject to their peremptory and insistent commands.

  Like K, Nash found himself trapped in a “farce of endless paper shuffling … a vast soulless mechanism for the circulation of papers... a world cluttered with paper, the white blood of bureaucracy … doomed by forces beyond his control (’they’re playing with me), yet also distracted through an inner confusion of desires.”35

  Nash appealed to many authorities. Yet he seemed unable to make much progress. The American consulate, he discovered, was not prepared to accept his passport or to allow him to take the oath of renunciation.36 Smiling, kindly, but seemingly obtuse diplomats dissuaded and deflected him, offering him excuses and rationales. Confused and weakened by their lengthy explanations, Nash would go away again, only to return the next day.

  The U.N. High Commission for Refugees, on which he pinned his hopes, sent him away. It appeared that the commission, its promising name notwithstanding, had rules that precluded cases like his. One could claim refugee status only in connection with “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951” and “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, [and only if one] is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of the country.”37 The officials of the commission suggested he contact the Swiss police.

  At that time, the Swiss federal police handled all requests for asylum, of which there were perhaps a dozen a year that fell into the category of “unusual” in the sense that they involved individuals from countries that typically produced no refugees. Since Nash claimed to be a conscientious objector who Was fleeing the draft, the po
lice referred him to the military authorities. These authorities cautiously turned to Berne for advice, and Berne, in turn, consulted Washington.38 In September, the Geneva military authority sent a letter to Berne saying of Nash that “en renoncant à son passeporte américain, et cela pour la seule raison qu’il ne desire pas être appelé à faire service dans les forces armées des U.S.A., ni même prêter aux organisations officielles de son pays sons concours en qualité de mathematicien, craignant que sa collaboration puisse aider les autorités de son pays à maintenir la guerre froide ou preparer la guerre” (he is renouncing his American passport, for the sole reason that he doesn’t want to be drafted into the United States Army, nor lend to official organizations his services as a mathematician, fearing that his collaboration might aid the authorities of his nation in maintaining the Cold War or in preparing for war).39

  In November, the Geneva authorities were informed that Nash was, for all practical purposes, far beyond the American draft age and that he was in no way obligated to do defense-related research. Moreover, Nash had committed none of the acts that would provoke the American government to strip him of his citizenship: “Au surplus, la simple declaration de renonciation au passeport américain n’a en soi pas d’effet juridique.”40 In other words, since he had not signed the oath of renunciation, he was still technically an American citizen. At that point, the police began threatening Nash with deportation.

  His sense of himself was now full of the starkest contradictions. On the one hand, Nash’s most intimate thoughts and actions seemed to be those of another, controlling psyche —“I am the left foot of God on earth.” On the other, he felt himself to be at the epicenter of the universe, with outer reality simply a projection of his mind. At times his posture was that of an abject petitioner, at other times that of a “religious figure of great, but secret, importance.”41 He spent a great deal of time opening various bank accounts — usually under false names, including one that he later said was “mystical,” and wiring money to various countries. “I shifted money from one bank to another,” Nash recalled in his Madrid lecture in 1996. “I opened an account at a Swiss bank. It was Credit Andorra. The account was in Swiss francs. But I didn’t have very much money.”42 Many years later, in a limousine going to the center of Stockholm where he would attend the Nobel ceremonies, Nash pointed out a bank in passing to Harold and Estelle Kuhn, saying that he had wired money there as part of an effort to organize a defense against “an invasion of aliens.”43

  Such self-contradiction is also characteristic of schizophrenia, every symptom being matched by a “countersymptom.” John Haslam — in what is widely regarded as the first psychiatric description of schizophrenic thinking — focused, early in the nineteenth century, on this peculiar combination of omnipotence and impotence: The person is “sometimes an automaton moved by the agency of persons … at others, the Emperor of the whole world,” the tendency toward megalomania mixed with feelings of persecution, powerlessness, inferiority.44

  He maintained both positions at the same moment, often, it seems, apparently untroubled by the apparent inconsistency — a flouting of what Aristotle considered the fundamental rule of reason: “The identity principle or law of contradiction that states the impossibility of affirming both p and not p.”45 It was a cruel, cosmic joke. The man who produced a compelling theory of rational behavior no longer thought in terms of either/or.

  It is not true, however, that Nash had lost all contact with reality. The clearest evidence that reality in fact pressed heavily and unpleasantly on him is that the frustrations of his situation were beginning to oppress him. His expectant mood turned slowly and inexorably into one of deep disappointment and depression. Nash spent long hours walking around the city, mostly in the parks and along the lake, waiting, endlessly waiting. At the end of September, he wrote to Virginia and Martha: “My life is not exciting at present… . Waiting for favorable developments. I’m somewhat disillusioned with a great many of my former associates, colleagues, friends, etc.”46

  His dark mood may have reflected more than his difficult current situation. Martha had written that Virginia had had “a nervous breakdown and spent two weeks in the hospital.”47 Nash found the news virtually unbelievable. He simply could not imagine his forceful mother ill in this fashion, but he must have sensed, from the tone of Martha’s letter, that his mother’s distress was linked, in some way, to his own.

  Finally, in September or October, in a fit of desperation, Nash destroyed or threw away his passport. Alicia later recalled that he had merely “lost” it and while that is certainly possible, later events suggest otherwise.48 When the consulate became aware of this action, an effort was made to persuade Nash to apply for a new one.49 This he refused to do.

  In his own mind, Nash was now stateless, a man without a country; in the eyes of the authorities, he was a man without proper documents, which placed him in a vulnerable situation. Nash had, as he later wrote to Lars Hörmander, “requested refugee status. This produced difficulties.”’50 On October 11 he wrote to Virginia and Martha that he was no longer able to travel “because of certain legal formalities,” a reference, presumably, to his lack of a passport.51 In the same letter, he enclosed a long free-style poem about feeding the gulls on the shores of Lac Leman. He did, however, manage to visit nearby Liechtenstein, where he considered requesting citizenship, on account of the fact that Liechtenstein didn’t levy income taxes on foreign residents.52

  During her Roman holiday, for a few short weeks, Alicia recaptured — for the last time, it turned out — a bit of her old lighthearted, girlish self. Odette recalled in 1995 that Alicia, once again, seemed “fun-loving.”53’ These two exceptionally pretty, stylish young women had quite a holiday. They visited the Vatican, where they had an audience with Pope John XXIII. Odette fainted and had to be carried out of the chamber by two young Italian medics who afterward showed the two women around the city. They went to nightclubs, shopped, and were admired and pursued, by Americans as well as Italians, wherever they went. After Rome, they visited Florence and Venice. In Venice, the two young women had a photograph taken of themselves, Odette looking like a young Audrey Hepburn, Alicia like a young Elizabeth Taylor, standing in their high heels and bouffant hairdos in the Piazza San Marco surrounded by pigeons.

  At the end of August, Alicia returned to Paris and began making arrangements for her mother and baby to come to France. She may have gone to Geneva first, but if so, she stayed there only briefly. She wrote to Nash urging him to come to Paris and contacted the American embassy for help in getting Nash back from Switzerland. “Alicia is in Paris expecting ’e,’ ” Nash wrote in early November — “e,” of course, was John Charles, whom Nash called Baby Epsilon.54 (“Baby Epsilon” was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a well-known mathematical anecdote about a famous mathematician who believes that all infants are born knowing the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis and retain that knowledge until they are six months of age.)55

  It was Nash’s first mention of the baby in his letters to Roanoke, yet he gave no indication that he intended to join them. While she waited for her mother and son to arrive, Alicia visited Odette in Grenoble. “We’d go to my room and eat pastries, baba au rhum,” Odette recalled. “We’d gossip about the other students. We went skiing.”56

  Back in Washington, Baby Epsilon was finally christened with his grandparents and Martha in attendance.57 The baby, dressed in a little sweater on a bright fall day when leaves littered the ground, was named John Charles Martin Nash. The christening took place at St. John’s in Lafayette Square, the same church where Nash and Alicia had exchanged marriage vows. (It is not clear who settled on the name John. Nash’s first son, of course, was already called John. It was as if the Nashes and Lardes wished to obliterate, through replacement, the first child.)

  In early December, when the frigid north wind called le bise swept across Lac Leman and made walking along its shores a misery, Nash’s mood was bleaker than ever. One can almost feel hi
s “sense of helplessness in an ice-cold universe.”58 His efforts to renounce his citizenship and to obtain refugee status had been, for reasons baffling to him, frustrated. He spent most of his time indoors writing letters. His feeling of having chosen to escape from Cambridge was replaced by one of having been exiled. He wrote to Norbert Wiener:

  I feel that writing to you there I am writing to the source of a ray of light from within a pit of semi-darkness… . It is a strange place where you live, where administration is heaped upon administration, and all tremble with fear or abhorrence (in spite of pious phrases) at symptoms of actual non-local thinking. Up the river [a reference to Harvard], slightly better, but still very strange in a certain area with which we are both familiar. And yet, to see this strangeness, the viewer must be strange.59

  The letter was decorated with silver foil, a newspaper photograph of a Lenin-like character, a story about Nehru’s seventieth birthday containing a reference to Khrushchev, and ticket stubs from a trolley.

  Even while he described himself as someone capable of inspiring fear in others on account of his “non-local thinking,” Nash’s reference to “administration … heaped upon administration” suggests a growing sense of vulnerability, a free-floating anxiety, and a belief that the authorities were toying with him. Shortly afterward, for reasons unknown, Nash changed hotels, moving now to a cheaper and more remote one — the Hotel Alba in the Rue de Mont Blanc.60