A Beautiful Mind (61 page)

Mele felt that Nash’s recovery was permanent and that he could handle one or two courses without difficulty during the next academic year. He went on to say: “I cannot guarantee his future mental health (any more than I could my own or that of anyone else), but I do feel strongly that a recurrence is unlikely in his case.”
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Dean of Faculty Douglas Brown wrote to President Goheen, saying, “This is a special situation,” adding that Nash “is now recovered… . He needs a chance to get back into teaching gradually and to re-establish his status.”
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Brown said that the mathematics department unanimously supported the proposal. “I am strongly inclined to go along. It is a part of our job, I feel, in putting one of our most brilliant Ph.D.s back into top productivity.” The appointment was made officially on May 1.
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Sadly, just when things looked brightest, and despite all of Nash’s hard work, Mele’s support, and the outpouring of goodwill on the part of colleagues and the university, another storm was gathering. As early as February, Nash began complaining of sleeplessness and of his “mind [being] filled with the thought of performing imaginary computations of a meaningless sort.”
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A comment, made in early March, that he had “avoided falling back into delusions” suggests that Nash was already being besieged by such thoughts.
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And by the end of that month, Nash, who said he still hoped for a reconciliation with Alicia, mentioned that he felt he might have to leave Princeton.
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By the time the Princeton job was offered, Nash was already convinced that he ought to return to France, clear evidence that he was nowhere near as well as his behavior suggested.
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His letters home were sufficiently strange to alarm Martha, who contacted Mele.
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Mele was at first reassuring; he wrote back that Nash was no longer taking medication, but that Nash was still in therapy and that the therapy seemed to be working well.
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Nash also wrote reassuringly, apparently in reply to questions from an anxious Virginia, that he was still seeing Mele.
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But around that time, Nash paid an unexpected call on his former French professor Karl Uitti. He appeared “rather anxious,” Uitti recalled. “He said, ‘I’m interested in getting the addresses of Jean Cocteau and André Gide. I have to write them letters.’ I gently informed him that both Gide and Cocteau were dead and
that writing letters to them would be impossible. Nash was very, very disappointed.”
⁵⁰

By May, Nash was complaining that he was having trouble working: “I have some ideas but many of them don’t seem to work out.”
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Nash had apparently been in touch with Grothendieck once more. Grothendieck evidently responded with an invitation to the IHES for the following year. At the beginning of the summer, Nash wrote to a colleague in Europe, saying that he wished to spend the following year in France rather than stay in Princeton and accept the university’s offer.”
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Nash complained of finding himself in a “troubled situation,” saying that he had difficulty when he tried to work on mathematics, and also that his relations with various faculty and students at the university were troubled as well. It is not clear to whom or what he was referring — the job offer from the mathematics department had been supported unanimously by Milnor and the rest of the faculty and Nash’s contacts with students were presumably limited to the Fine Hall common room. He wrote that he expected something to change by June 1, but that he wasn’t certain of that, adding: “Si ma situation reste essentiellément la même comme c’est de maintenant” (If my situation remains essentially the same as it is now), drawing a circle in the middle of the page accompanied by the parenthetical remark, “(Ici-compris ma situation de famille, etc., etc.)” (Including my family situation). He went on, “Et si je peux travailler effectivement aux mathématiques par le temps de l’automne, je pense que je devrais accepter l’offre de Grothendieck plutôt que l’offre de l’Université, s’il pourra encore me donner cet offre d’emploi” (And if I can work effectively at mathematics by the fall, I think I should accept Grothendieck’s offer over the offer from the university, if he will still extend me this offer of employment).

As far as the institute knew, Nash was planning to spend the entire summer at Fuld Hall, with the exception of about three weeks, before going to France in the fall. On May 24, in response to a note from Oppenheimer granting him funds for the summer “with the understanding that you will remain at the Institute during the summer,” Nash wrote that he planned to be away from June 22 through July 19 at a conference in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, organized by John Tate, on the theory of singularities, classifications of surfaces and modules, Grothendieck cohomology, zeta-functions, and arithmetic of Abelian varieties.
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According to Tate and other participants, Nash never went to the conference.
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Instead, he went to Europe.

He sailed on the
Queen Mary,
stopped briefly in London, and went to Paris.
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There he tried to get in touch with Grothendieck, who evidently wasn’t in town.
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After hanging around a few more days, Nash flew to Rome. He was, as he later said, thinking of himself as a “great but secret religious figure.”
⁵⁷
This may have
accounted for his desire to be in Rome, where, as he later said, he visited “the Forum and the catacombs but avoided the Vatican.”
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The Pope was, in any case, not in Rome at the time.

He was standing in front of the Forum when he began to hear voices “like telepathic phone calls from private individuals.”
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They seemed to him, at the time, he said in Madrid in 1996, to be the voices of “mathematicians opposed to my ideas.” He wrote in a letter later in the 1960s: “I observed the local Romans show a considerable interest in getting into telephone booths and talking on the telephone and one of their favorite words was pronto. So it’s like ping-pong, pinging back again the bell pinged to me.”
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Something odd was happening, he concluded. Harold Kuhn later said, “The stream of words was obviously being fed into a central machine where they were translated into English. The machine inserted the words, now in English, into his brain.”
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Nash, however, did send a postcard from Rome, dated September 1, saying that he was returning to Paris and that he had attempted to contact Grothendieck and other mathematicians.
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He said he would be staying at the Grand Hotel de Mont Blanc, where he and Alicia had stayed five years earlier. Two days later, he was back in Paris, but had not yet managed to see Grothendieck, who was apparently away.
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The staff at the IHES “suggested contacting Jean-Pierre Serre,” but Serre does not remember Nash’s ever getting in touch with him.
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Nash’s next postcard home was a collage: a card devoid of any writing, with a Parisian scene and a French coin and a long number for a return address.
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Meanwhile, Nash had not informed the mathematics department at Princeton that he was not intending to take their offer. Finally, on September 15, Tucker sent a terse note to Dean Brown, canceling the appointment and saying that Nash had gone to the University of Paris.
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Nash hung around Paris a few more weeks until he finally gave up. In mid-September, he wrote to Virginia from Paris that he would be returning on the
Queen Mary
on the twenty-fourth, adding a postscript: “Situation looks dismal.”
⁶⁷

Back in Princeton, Nash took to calling people again and turning up at the Institute to write strange messages on the blackboards of various seminar rooms. Atle Selberg recalled one such message involving several Social Security numbers. “He tried to find mysterious patterns,” Selberg recalled. “He claimed that he was born in a county named Mercer that had a town named Princeton. He seemed to find this a mysterious sign.”
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By mid-December, Nash was back in Carrier. Once again, it was Alicia who had to make the painful decision. A letter written to John Milnor shows how fast Nash’s thoughts were racing and how one association prompted another — even as Nash was conscious that Milnor would find the letter mad. Labeled “crazy letter for your entertainment,” it was a fantastic monologue, skipping from slave calendars and lunar eclipses to advertising jingles and equations from Milnor’s papers.
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Mele once again took over Nash’s care and Nash once again responded
quickly and dramatically to antipsychotic drugs. He was well enough in early April 1965 to leave Carrier for the day to attend a banquet with John Danskin at another game-theory conference in Princeton.
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As Danskin recalled, “Nash’s name was being mentioned a lot at the meeting. I thought it would be nice to produce him.”
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Once Nash learned that he would be going, he telephoned Harold Kuhn and asked him to bring a couple of game-theory books to Carrier, which Kuhn did, recalling that “it was a barracks-like place, not much privacy.”
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Nash stayed on at Carrier until midsummer, his departure delayed until Mele was confident that both a job and a psychiatrist were waiting for his patient.

In April Richard Palais, a mathematician at Brandeis, drove down to the institute to turn in a manuscript. “That day Borel said why not have lunch with Jack Milnor and me. We had lunch,” he recalled.
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Halfway through they started talking about Nash. Milnor and Borel thought Nash was much better now. They thought it would be a good thing for him to gradually get back to academic life. They believed Boston would be a good place. MIT and Harvard would be too difficult after he had insisted on resigning from MIT and threatened to sue the university. The Harvard department was too small. There was no way they were going to hire him. The Institute in those days didn’t have five-year memberships, and it was almost unheard of to have someone more than two years.
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Norman Levinson, who had been in contact with Mele, Milnor, and Borel, offered to support Nash with his ONR and NSF grants. He felt that it was too soon for Nash to have an office at MIT Palais recalled:

I had a feeling they were on the level in helping him get back to the mainstream and that it would be better for him to be in Cambridge, away from Princeton. It was very late. I’m surprised we were able to do anything. But the [Brandeis] administration really liked the math department and Joe [Kohn, then chairman] would go and get what we wanted.

There was a lot of that feeling [about Nash]. People were expecting an awful lot from this guy. In any four- or five-year span, there are one or two young bright people who are recognized as special. Everybody tries to get them. He was coming into that category. He was very special.
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When Nash got out of Carrier this time, in mid-July, he spent a couple of nights at John Milnor’s house and then took a train to Boston.
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He was, once again, hopeful and, in contrast to a year earlier, accepted the likelihood that he might have to start a new life without Alicia.

43
Solitude
Boston, 1965–67

I
T WAS STRANGE
to be back in Boston alone and after an absence of half a dozen years. The city had changed almost as much as Nash himself. Sundays were the bleakest. Nash’s “traditional Sunday[s]” as he called them, were spent alone, sitting in one of the libraries trying to work, or, more often, walking for hours at a time, and then stopping to watch the ice skaters and hockey players in the Public Garden.
¹
The evenings were given over, more often than not, to writing letters, one to Alicia, one to Virginia, and one to Martha, with whom Nash had lately developed a warmer, more confidential relationship.
²
Mailing the letters provided an excuse for a final nighttime stroll.

Weekdays, when he commuted to Waltham in a ratty old Nash Rambler convertible purchased on his arrival in Boston, were better. He was almost enjoying being at Brandeis. The place was undeniably lively, full of former students and acquaintances from the old days in Cambridge, former MIT undergraduates like Joseph Kohn, now chairman of the math department, and Al Vasquez, now an assistant professor. He liked having an office again, going to seminars, eating lunch with other mathematicians, tossing around ideas and mathematical gossip.

But he was terribly lonely. He missed Alicia and John Charles. He felt his new, humbler status in the mathematical hierarchy most acutely. But he also could see, perhaps for the first time since the onset of his illness, that there was, after all, a future for him, and he entertained hopes of reestablishing himself as an academic and even of finding someone new to share life with.

He had left Princeton almost immediately after being released from Carrier on July 29, traveling to Boston by train and staying in a Cambridge hotel while he found an apartment and a car.
³
He had seen Norman Levinson, who, in his gruff, taciturn, immensely tactful way, had let Nash know that he would be paying Nash’s salary with National Science Foundation and Navy grants, and that he hoped Nash would be able to pursue his own research ideas, as before. He would have no teaching responsibilities, at least in the fall, which was a relief.
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