A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  As early as the beginning of February, Nash had an idea for a second paper, but two weeks later he wrote to Martha that he was “sad because part of my new math idea fell apart.”32 He was able, however, to take the disappointment in stride, and by early April he was already working on another paper on the “canonical resolution of singularities.” Many years later he would call this effort “more interesting” than his 1966 Annals paper. In May he gave a seminar on the subject at Brandeis, and by the end of the month he had completed a draft that he showed to Brieskorn for comments.33 Nash quite likely submitted this paper to the Annals as well, but it was never published.34 A copy finally wound up in Fine Hall Library at Princeton in September 1968. It was regularly cited in the succeeding years and was ultimately published in the Duke Journal of Mathematics in 1995 in a special issue in honor of Nash.

  The quality of these two papers — the first of which geometer Mikhail Gromov calls “amazing”35 — constitutes the single strongest reason for questioning Nash’s diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.36 Producing papers that broke new ground was a remarkable feat for someone who had, by 1965, been psychotic for most of six years and suffered substantial memory impairment.37 Unlike manic depression, paranoid schizophrenia rarely allows sufferers to return, even for a limited period, to their pre-morbid level of achievement, or so it is believed.’38 However, at least one other mathematician with chronic schizophrenia was able, during a brief remission, to produce excellent work,39 and Nash’s papers, though superb, were not as ambitious as those that he had planned to write before he became ill.

  At the end of June, Nash moved into Joe Kohn’s apartment at 38 Parker Street in a two-family house not far from Harvard Square.40 Kohn was off for a year’s sabbatical in Ecuador. The sublet was arranged by Fagi Levinson, who recalled: “Everybody wanted to help Nash. His was a mind too good to waste.”41

  Nash enrolled in Operation Match, a Cambridge computer dating service. He was going on blind dates, acutely aware that “I’ll need to learn how to behave properly and be polite etc.” He wrote that he was “hopeful and optimistic”: “I think I’ll develop some good friends and I’ll get remarried if not to Alicia and then I’ll have a happy family life.”42 He had an appointment at MIT lined up for the fall: Ted Martin had offered to let him teach a senior seminar in game theory. In May Nash wrote to Kuhn saying that he wanted to “collect appropriate materials and learn about the more recent developments” in game theory and asking Kuhn for suggestions.43

  Something, however, was no longer quite right. Some of his colleagues at Brandeis recalled an abrupt change sometime in the late spring. Palais recalled: “He sort of lost his balance completely. He went completely haywire.”44 Vasquez remembers a more gradual unraveling: “He went right past normal and became hyper. At some point, he wouldn’t stop talking and he didn’t make any sense. By the summer, he wasn’t able to interact any more.”45 It’s hard to say what triggered his relapse. Possibly, Nash had become overconfident and had stopped taking his medication.

  He evidently spent the summer in Cambridge. By September, his letters to Martha were distinctly delusional. In one he referred to “the Indian wheel of life… . If a person is always correct and right… there is good reason to hope.”46 Alarmed, Martha wrote to Esmiol saying that her brother sounded “optimistic but not well.”47 She quoted him saying that “I have put my delusions aside” but she was sure that the delusions were now back in full force.48 Esmiol wrote back in early October saying that he had seen Nash and that “he was about the same as last time.” He urged her to express her concern directly to her brother.49 A day later, Nash wrote to Martha reassuring her that his optimism was well-founded but admitting there “are always dangers to worry about.” But in the next breath, he went on to say that he’d had an “interesting” letter from Alicia about “a large gift of money.”50 Martha later recalled that Nash, in his delusional periods, was always hinting that “something great was about to happen.”51

  By November, the tone of his letters had become paranoid, as in one to Virginia: “I’m very disillusioned in the past… hoping also that my future relations with all the relatives and especially you and Martha will be much better.”52 At Thanksgiving he wrote: “I didn’t have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.” He planned to go to Roanoke for Christmas and to spend New Year’s — Alicia’s birthday — in Princeton.53

  Vasquez, who had an apartment near Nash’s, was running into Nash wandering around Harvard Square the way he later wandered around Princeton:

  He was concerned with the politics of Mao Tse-tung, that sort of thing. In Harvard Square, he was talking about a committee that was communicating with foreign governments who manipulated the news in The New York Times in order to send messages to him. He had this idea that with this information he could find out how negotiations between various powers were going.54

  Nash was still attending the Harvard math colloquium on Thursdays. “He was very peculiar,” Vasquez recalled. “He believed that there were magic numbers, dangerous numbers. He was saving the world.”

  Soon Kohn was getting letters from his neighbors, the landlords of the house, complaining that Nash wasn’t taking out the garbage and that his apartment was full of piles of newspapers.55 Fagi recalled feeling horribly embarrassed and responsible. “Joe wanted to give up the apartment. He tried to reach Norman. He couldn’t, so he called me. So I called Nash every hour on the hour. I was worried. I got this crazy idea to call up this minister he had been seeing. The minister told me Nash was out of town.”56

  Just after the New Year, Nash left Boston for the West Coast. He traveled first to San Francisco where he spent several days visiting his cousin Richard Nash. He called his cousin first, who, in turn, called Martha. “He blamed Martha for hospitalizing him,” recalled Richard Nash. “It was very hard for her to take.”

  He came to my office. He was good-looking, very muscular. He was soft-spoken but his voice was much stronger than now. He was a lot of fun to talk to. He liked to talk a lot late into the night. Sometimes he spoke rationally, almost poetically. He was very concerned about not being able to contribute. “I started out so well,” he said. “I think of myself as a valuable person. But I’m not contributing.” Other times he made no sense. He had these things he was concerned about. He went to see a Catholic priest in San Francisco. I said, “I thought you were an atheist.”57

  Richard Nash, a broker, would drive to work in San Franciso and take Nash with him. Once there, “He’d get on the bus and go all around.” Dick Nash expressed astonishment that Nash mastered complex schedules, went all over, but always managed to meet Dick at the appointed place for the return trip at exactly the right time.

  After that, Dick Nash recalled, “John called me at odd hours. He had no awareness of time. I told him to stop calling me after bedtime. Then I’d get calls with just breathing. I was rude. I wish I’d been nicer.”

  After leaving San Francisco, Nash went next to Seattle, arriving there on February 3.58 He almost certainly went there to visit Amasa Forrester, the only person he knew in Seattle. He seems to have spent nearly a month with Forrester, because he did not arrive in Santa Monica, his next destination, until Easter, which fell in mid-March that year.59 There, apparently, Shapley and other acquaintances from RAND refused to see him. Nash visited Jacob Bricker in Los Angeles as well. Bricker recalled that Nash “was acting really wild.”60

  Nash apparently called Esmiol from time to time, although he disregarded Esmiol’s pleas that he return to Boston and resume his treatment. Martha also called Esmiol a number of times that month. Esmiol’s idea was to use the promise of a job at MIT as a lever to get Nash back into treatment.61

  Martin was talking about letting Nash teach a section of linear algebra the following fall.62 Levinson, still hopeful, was planning on Nash’s being at MIT. He solicited a letter of recommendation from Armand Borel at the Institute. Borel’s letter, dated May 17, was a strong endorsement:

 
; In the last eight years or so, he has been very much hampered by his health problems. Even then, he has managed to produce some interesting work… . Nash is clearly one of the most individualistic among the presently active mathematicians. He does not work systematically at long range programs, whose progress along more or less foreseen lines can be rather confidently expected but is more the pioneer type who proceeds along new paths. He is thus rather unpredictable; but in a way it makes it appear more likely that he might score new successes in spite of his ups and downs in health. Any contribution in mathematics on the level of his past work would be extremely valuable, and so I feel strongly that he should be supported.63

  It’s not clear exactly when Nash returned to Cambridge. But when he did, he was extremely ill. After a terrible scene, John David locked him out on the porch on a freezing night.64 Nash told Palais at some point that he’d stopped taking medication. “Why, when they were making you well, did you stop taking drugs?” He answered, “If I take drugs I stop hearing the voices.”65

  A letter from Nash to Moser captures something of Nash’s state of mind when he returned to Cambridge in late May. Nash gives his return address as Heilwig-klang University, Harbin, Manchuria.

  The Oblast in Russia, on the Manchurian border … there’s the city of Birbidzhan… . If all the atomic powers of the security council of the United Nations did an action, and they were numbered 0, 1,2,3,4 then one would be able to say nobody did it, everybody did it, all did it …

  The letter was signed “Chiang Hsin (New River).”66

  Fagi ran into John on the subway. His manner was slippery, shady, shy, almost ashamed, a peculiar smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. She asked where he was going. He answered: “Home to Roanoke to stay with my mother for a while.”67 Nash left Cambridge on June 26, leaving his apartment in a shambles. He drove to Princeton, stayed in a hotel “for propriety” rather than with Alicia and John Charles, and proceeded to Roanoke a few days later.68

  Fagi called Joe Kohn and said she’d get a moving van and send Nash his furniture. “I felt so guilty that I said to myself, I’ll get his stuff moved out. I did, too, everything except the bathroom scale. I never even went into the bathroom.”69 Anna Rosa, Kohn’s wife, went into the Parker Street apartment: “There were folded bags, one upon another, and cereal boxes. Not awful, but signs of compulsion.”70 A few days later, Norman Levinson wrote to Martha:

  For the past two years John has been employed as a research associate on my contract. John doesn’t want to live here and I couldn’t convince him to stay. A few days ago John left 38 Parker Street. There were piles of rubbish. Hints of bank accounts. Also other accounts here and abroad. John was very disturbed this past year. But in 1965–1966 he functioned very well and did fine work.71

  44

  A Man All Alone in a Strange World Roanoke, 1967–70

  And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down — And hit a World, at every plunge… . — EMILY DICKINSON, Number 280

  THE SUMMER NASH TURNED forty, in 1968, he looked into the mirror in the bathroom of his mother’s apartment and saw what he later called “a cadaver, almost.”1 Hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, gray-haired, with his shoulders hunched forward, he looked more like an old man than one just entering middle age. He wrote to a friend: “You should pity me … aging and drying processes have taken their toll.”2 Images of death-in-life crowded his mind: in a letter to another friend he invoked the images of the Parsee “Towers of Silence” in Bombay, where followers of Zoroaster leave their dead to be devoured by vultures.3

  He had been living in Roanoke for nearly a year. He still had his Rambler and some savings, but eight years of illness had exhausted his former wife and friends and ruined much of his credit with the world. He had nowhere else to go. For him, Roanoke — a pretty little city at the foot of the Appalachians and the headquarters of the Norfolk & Western Railroad — was the end of the line.

  He lived with Virginia in a small garden apartment on Grandin Road.4 Martha and Charlie lived a few streets away. No one knew him there. The existence of someone with schizophrenia has been compared to that of the person living in a glass prison pounding on the walls, unable to be heard, yet very visible.5 Martha recalled in 1994: “Roanoke was not a good place to be. There were no intellectuals there. He’d be too much alone. He would wander around town whistling.”6

  On many days, he simply paced round and round the apartment, his long fingers curled around one of Virginia’s delicate Japanese teacups (a souvenir of her long-ago summer in Berkeley), sipping Formosa oolong, whistling Bach.7 The sleepwalker’s gait and fixed, faraway expression gave few hints of the vast and unending dramas unfolding in his mind. “Apparently I am simply passing time visiting my mother,” he wrote, “but actually I’ve been under persecutions which I’m hoping will ease.”8

  His daily rounds extended no farther than the library or the shops at the end of Grandin Road, but in his own mind, he traveled to the remotest reaches of the globe: Cairo, Zebak, Kabul, Bangui, Thebes, Guyana, Mongolia. In these faraway places, he lived in refugee camps, foreign embassies, prisons, bomb shelters. At other times, he felt that he was inhabiting an Inferno, a purgatory, or a polluted heaven (“a decayed rotting house infested by rats and termites and other vermin”). His identities, like the return addresses on his letters, were like the skins of an onion. Underneath each one lurked another: He was C.O.R.P.S.E. (a Palestinian Arab refugee), a great Japanese shogun, C1423, Esau, L’homme d’Or, Chin Hsiang, Job, Jorap Castro, Janos Norses, even, at times, a mouse. His companions were samurai, devils, prophets, Nazis, priests, and judges. Baleful deities — Napoleon, Ibli’s, Mora, Satan, Platinum Man, Titan, Nahipotleeron, Napoleon Shickelgruber — threatened him. He lived in constant fear of annihilation, both of the world (genocide, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, Final Day of Judgment, Day of Resolution of Singularities) and of himself (death and bankruptcy). Certain dates struck him as ominous, among them May 29.

  Persistent, complex, and compelling delusions are among the defining symptoms of schizophrenia.9 Delusions are false beliefs, beliefs that constitute a dramatic rejection of consensual reality. Often, they involve misinterpretations of perceptions or experiences. They are thought, nowadays, to arise primarily because of the gross distortions in sensory data and the way thought and emotion are processed deep in the brain. Thus, their convoluted and mysterious logic is sometimes seen as the product of the mind’s solitary struggle to make sense of the strange and uncanny. E. Fuller Torrey, a researcher at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., and author of Surviving Schizophrenia, calls them “logical outgrowths of what the brain is experiencing” as well as “heroic efforts to maintain some sort of mental equilibrium.”10

  The syndrome we now call schizophrenia was once called “dementia praecox,” but, in fact, the delusional states typical of schizophrenia often have little in common with the dementia associated with, for example, Alzheimer’s disease.11 Rather than cloudiness, confusion, and meaninglessness, there is hyperawareness, over-acuity, and an uncanny wakefulness. Urgent preoccupations, elaborate rationales, and ingenious theories dominate. However literal, tangential, or self-contradictory, thought is not random but adheres to obscure and hard-to-understand rules. And the ability accurately to apprehend certain aspects of everyday reality remains curiously intact. Had anyone asked Nash what year it was or who was in the White House or where he was living, he could no doubt have answered perfect!}’ accurately, had he wished to. Indeed, even as he entertained the most surreal notions, Nash displayed an ironic awareness that his insights were essentially private, unique to himself, and bound to seem strange or unbelievable to others. “This concept that I want to describe … will perhaps sound absurd,” is the sort of preface of which he was quite capable.12 His sentences were filled with phrases like “consider,” “as if,” “may be thought of as,” as if he were conducting a thought experiment or realizing that someone reading what he wrote would have to translate it
into another language.

  Like all other manifestations of the syndrome, delusions are not unique to schizophrenia; they can be present in a variety of mental disorders, including mania, depression, and a variety of somatic illnesses. But the types of delusions that Nash suffered from are particularly characteristic of schizophrenia, specifically of paranoid schizophrenia, the variant of the syndrome from which Nash apparently suffered.13 Their content was, as it often is, both grandiose and persecutory, often shifting from one to the other in the space of moments or even including both at the same time. At different times, as we know, Nash thought of himself as uniquely powerful, as a prince or an emperor; at other times he thought of himself as extraordinarily weak and vulnerable, as a refugee or a defendant in a trial. As is quite typical, his beliefs were what is called referential, in that he believed that a host of environmental clues — from newspaper passages to particular numbers — were specifically directed at him and that he alone was capable of appreciating their true meaning. And his delusions were multiple, a particularly common feature of paranoid schizophrenia, although all were organized, in subtle ways, around coherent themes.

  Bizarreness is thought to be especially characteristic of schizophrenic delusions. Nash’s delusions were clearly implausible, difficult to penetrate, and not obviously derived from life experiences. Yet they were less bizarre, on the whole, than many delusions reported by other people with schizophrenia, and their connections to Nash’s life history and his immediate circumstances, though indirect, were often discernible (or would have been had anyone who knew him well been willing to study in the same spirit as the loyal wife of Balzac’s Louis Lambert). Many people with schizophrenia believe that their thoughts have been captured by outside forces, or that outside forces have inserted thoughts into their minds, but such beliefs did not seem to play a predominant role in Nash’s thinking. Occasionally, as in Rome, he might think that thoughts were being inserted directly into his mind via machines, or, as in Cambridge in early 1959, that his actions were being directed by God. But, by and large, Nash maintained a sense of himself, or selves, as the primary actor. And many of his beliefs — such as that he was a conscientious objector in danger of being drafted; that he was stateless; that mathematicians belonging to the American Mathematical Society were ruining his career; that various persons, posing as sympathizers, were conspiring, with malevolent intent, to have him incarcerated in a mental institution — were no more implausible than, say, a belief that one is being spied on by the police or the CIA. Thus, in a sense, the breakdown of reality and boundaries between self and outside world had limits for him, even in Roanoke.