A Beautiful Mind (55 page)

Nash then managed a rather extraordinary feat. In early March, he traveled, alone and without passport, to East Germany.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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He referred to an “autorisation de séjour” for April 21 and said that he was planning to leave soon for Sweden.
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On April 21, Virginia received a telegram from the State Department requesting funds to bring Nash back to the United States.
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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.
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Nash would later tell Vasquez that he had been brought back from Europe, “on a ship and in chains, like a slave,”
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but Alicia recalled quite definitely that they came back on a plane.
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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.
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39
Absolute Zero
Princeton, 1960

T
HE OLIVE-GREEN
M
ERCEDES
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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Odette urged Alicia to move to Princeton.
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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.
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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.
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The Danskins held frequent parties at which the Milnors, Ed Nelson and his wife, and Georg Kreisel, a logician, were also frequent visitors.
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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.
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Alicia was learning to drive. Danskin and Milnor were both giving her lessons, with haphazard success.
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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.
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“She was very pretty, very quiet. I remember her pulling out a photograph of a cute little boy,” said Elvira Leader.
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Her husband, Sol, danced with Alicia: “She was weightless,” he recalled.
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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.
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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.”
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The university balked, “fearing that the appointment might be based on human kindness, rather than on realistic, technical needs.”
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It was decided to review Nash’s performance after two months. The contract was dated October 21, 1960.
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Nash, however, was talking about returning to France. He contacted Jean Leray, who was visiting at the Institute for Advanced Study, asking Leray to invite him once more to the College de France.
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This time Alicia, much alarmed, intervened. She asked Donald Spencer — the mathematician at Princeton who had helped Nash work out the final version of his paper on algebraic varieties in 1950 and 1951 — to write to Leray to ask that Leray discourage Nash from going to France again so soon. “Her advice is not to invite John to France at the present time since she feels it will only stir him up again… . If this job [with Oskar Morgenstern materializes it will have a quieting effect on her husband. She feels that remaining in Princeton for a time might possibly bring him back to mathematical work.”
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By now, Nash had been in the grip of unremitting psychotic illness for nearly two years. It had transformed him. The change in Nash’s appearance and manner made it surprising that his old friends from the mathematics department recognized him at all. The man who walked up and down the main street of Princeton in the stifling summer of 1960 was clearly disturbed. He would go into restaurants with bare feet. With dark hair to his shoulders and a bushy black beard, he had a fixed expression, a dead gaze. Women, especially, found him frightening. He looked no one in the eye.

Nash spent most of his time hanging around the university, including Fine Hall. Most days he wore a smocklike Russian peasant garment.
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He seemed, as one graduate student at the time remembered, to “talk to the squirrels.” He carried around a notebook, a scrapbook entitled ABSOLUTE ZERO in which he pasted all sorts of things, presumably a reference to the rock-bottom temperature at which all activity ceases.
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He was fascinated by bright colors.

He was often in the common room where he “liked to spectate, to watch people playing Kriegspiel, and to make cryptic little remarks.”
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On one occasion, when William Feller was standing nearby, for example, Nash said, to no one in particular: “What would we do with an overweight Hungarian?”
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^ On another, “What do Spain and the Sinai have in common?” (This was after Israel’s takeover of the Sinai.) He answered his own question, “They both start with S.”
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