A Beautiful Mind (59 page)

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While Nash was still in Paris, on July 2, his father-in-law died suddenly.
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Alicia attempted, through Milnor and Danskin, to contact Nash but was not successful. Carlos Larde was buried in the churchyard of St. Paul’s on Nassau Street.

Nash, meanwhile, went back to London. What drew him to London is not clear, since his original plan had been, presumably, to spend the summer, except for the congress in Stockholm, as well as the following academic year, in Paris. In any event, Nash was still in London on July 24 when he wrote to Martha from the Hotel Stefan on Talbot Square.
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He apparently still intended to travel on to Stockholm. Addressing her as E-me-line, Martha’s middle name, he wrote that he was merely passing the time, with little to do, until the mathematical congress in Stockholm and was considering seeing a psychologist or visiting some sort of clinic.

Danskin recalled that someone went looking for Nash and finally found him hanging around the Chinese embassy in London.
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The head of the MIT economics department took a group of business management people to London that summer. He suddenly saw John Nash and asked him, “Where are you now?” Puzzled, Nash replied, “Where are you?”
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The International Mathematical Congress took place in the third week of August in Stockholm.
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Among the plenary speakers were Armand Borel, John Milnor, and Louis Nirenberg. The Fields Medals were awarded to Milnor and Lars Hormander, both of whom had been notified in May and instructed to tell no one, leaving each to sit on his secret while others around them speculated on the year’s likely winners.

Nash, who felt that he should have been one of those honored, did not, however, go to Stockholm. He went to Geneva instead, returning to the Hotel Alba where he had spent his final week in December 1959 and writing in French to Martha “chez Charles L. Legg.”
⁴⁷
The letter made it clear that he was again thinking about the question of his identity! He drew an identity card with Chinese characters labeled “Des Secrets.” He wrote “Could you sign this carte d’identité … a man all alone in a strange world,” he wrote underneath. He sent Virginia another postcard with a picture of Geneva but mailed it from Paris.

When Nash returned to Princeton at the end of summer 1962, he was extremely ill. A postcard addressed to Mao Tse-tung c/o Fine Hall, Princeton, New Jersey, arrived in the mathematics department. Nash had written only a cryptic remark in French about triple tangent planes.
⁴⁸

Alicia let him move back in. He spent much of the fall at home with John Charles watching science-fiction programs on television, like Rod Serling’s
Twilight Zone.
⁴⁹
He was writing a great many letters and making many phone calls to mathematicians in Princeton and elsewhere.

He was still obsessed with the idea of asylum. A letter to Martha and Charlie, postmarked November 19, reads: “Maybe you will say that I’m mad … request to St. Paul’s in Princeton for sanctuary.”
⁵⁰
Nash apparently walked past St. Paul’s every day. The letter referred to the Ecumenical Council and previous letters he had written to the pastor of St. Paul’s earlier in the month. The letter ended with a reference to “past misfortunes, especially in the fall season.” In contrast to his letter to Martha from London, Nash no longer interpreted his difficulties as a sign of illness but rather as the results of machinations by the Ecumenical Council. By January, his letters to Martha and Charlie had become nearly incomprehensible, the thoughts skipping from Albanians to Stalin to “secrets can’t reveal” and “wood and nails of the true cross.”
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Exhausted and dispirited by three years of turmoil and convinced that Nash’s condition was more or less hopeless, Alicia consulted an attorney and instituted divorce proceedings. She had married someone who she thought could look after her but couldn’t, who resented her bitterly, and who accused her of having malevolent intentions. To Martha and Virginia she wrote that being married was helping to create Nash’s problems and that she felt that being freed from the marriage would be better for him as well.
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Alicia’s attorney, Frank L. Scott, a genial Princeton divorce lawyer with an office on Nassau Street, filed for a divorce the day after Christmas 1962.
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Alicia had given the formal go-ahead in a deposition a week earlier. According to the petition, Nash was still living with her at 137 Spruce Street. Alicia, meanwhile, temporarily rented a separate apartment on Vandeventer Street.
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Alicia’s formal complaint read:

On or about March 1959 it was necessary for the Plaintiff herein to cause the defendant to be committed to a mental institution from which the defendant was released on or about June 1959. Despite the fact that said committal was in the best interest of the defendant, the defendant became very resentful of the Plaintiff for causing his commitment, and declared he would no longer live with the Plaintiff as man and wife. Consistent with the defendant’s vow not to again live with the plaintiff as her husband, the defendant did in fact move into a separate room and refused to have marital relations with the plaintiff. In January 1961 defendant was caused to be committed to Trenton State Hospital by his mother from which he was released in June 1961. The defendant’s resentment of his wife and insistence that they no longer have marital relations continued after his release from the aforementioned commitment, as it had prior to said commitment, and has continued against the wishes of the plaintiff to the present date. The time during which defendant has thus deserted plaintiff and during which defendant was not confined to any institution but fully able to voluntarily resume marital relations, which he has not done, exceeds two years past and such desertion has been wilful, continuous and obstinate. Moreover defendant has failed to properly support plaintiff.
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Nash was served with a summons. Scott visited Nash the following day. On April 17, Scott once again talked to Nash, who, he said, had “no plans for changing either his residence or his occupational status.” The judgment was rendered without a trial, granting a divorce and awarding Alicia custody of John Charles on May 1, 1963.”
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Final judgment was rendered August 2, 1963.
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There is no evidence that Nash was opposed to the divorce. While the petition was a lawyer’s document and not necessarily true in its particulars — the Danskins, for example, maintained that Nash and Alicia never stopped sleeping together — Nash’s animosity toward Alicia was no doubt very real. He blamed Alicia for engineering his hospitalizations, he had threatened to divorce her while at McLean, and probably afterward as well, and he had made plans to live in France without her.

Nash’s increasingly disturbed state, and rumors of his impending divorce, prompted a number of mathematicians to rally around him that spring. That Nash desperately needed treatment was not a subject of controversy this time. Once again, Donald Spencer and Albert Tucker approached Robert Winters.
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James Miller, a friend of Winters from Harvard, was in the psychiatry department at the University of Michigan and was connected with a university-sponsored clinic run by Ray Waggoner.
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Through Miller, Winters succeeded in making a unique arrangement whereby Nash would be treated at the clinic and also have an opportunity to work as a statistician in the clinic’s research program.

Tucker at Princeton and Martin at MIT decided to set up a fund to make the Michigan plan feasible.
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Anatole Rappaport and Merrill Flood at the University of Michigan, Jürgen Moser at NYU, Alexander Ostrowski of Westinghouse, and others committed themselves to raise funds among mathematicians on Nash’s behalf.
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The Ann Arbor group felt that a stay of two years was necessary. The cost for out-of-state patients was $9,000 a year or $18,000 for the entire stay. Virginia Nash offered to guarantee $10,000 and the group of mathematicians arranged, through the American Mathematical Society, to set up a fund-raising drive for the remaining $8,000. “If we are successful probably most of it will have to come from mathematicians who have known Nash,” Martin wrote. “If anything can be done which will enable Nash to return to mathematics, even on a very limited scale, it would of course be very fine not only for him but also for mathematics.”
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Albert E. Meder, Jr., the society’s treasurer, was enthusiastic about the proposal, saying that “it would seem to me that it would be altogether appropriate for the AMS to receive contributions for the purposes set forth in [Martin’s] letter of March 25… . I would be inclined to go ahead.”
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Nash’s increasingly bizarre behavior was triggering complaints, including some at the Institute for Advanced Study. Mostly these had to do with Nash’s writing mysterious messages on the institute blackboards and making annoying telephone calls to various members. But one day the switchboard operators, who
sat in an office immediately as one entered Fuld Hall, were all abuzz because each person who was coming through the door was being doused with water. The institute’s dining hall was then on the fourth floor of Fuld, and it turned out, upon investigation, that Nash had been pouring water from the window above the main door.
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It was Donald Spencer, a man who could not stand to see anyone in trouble without intervening, who was elected to try to convince Nash to accept the Michigan offer and enter the clinic voluntarily.
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Spencer chose, as he usually did, a bar as his venue. He invited Nash for some beers in Nassau Tavern, where Nash had once celebrated passing his generals. They sat in the booth for hours, Spencer downing warm martinis, Nash nursing a single beer. Spencer talked and talked; Nash appeared to be listening but said very little except to remark, at various intervals, that he wasn’t interested in doing statistical work. It was no use. Nash didn’t believe that he was ill, and he wasn’t prepared to enter another hospital.

Years later, Winters wept when he recounted the story:

I thought I had worked out a perfect solution to a most unusual problem. I thought I could save a very worthwhile person. I’m very emotionally tied to this. I thought I was doing something really wonderful. Jim Miller told me
never
let Nash get shock treatments. It takes the edge of genius off. Somebody sent him to Carrier, where they gave him shock treatments [sic], and I think it turned him into a zombie for many years. I consider that one of the worst failures of my life. When I look at the human race all over the world I think there’s zero reason for humanity to survive. We’re destructive, uncaring, thoughtless, greedy, power hungry. But when I look at a few individuals, there seems every reason for humanity to survive. He was worth doing the very best for.
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Meanwhile, Alicia, Virginia, and Martha had agreed among themselves that Nash would have to be committed involuntarily. This time they chose a private clinic near Princeton. Martha wrote to Spencer:

The only reason it has not been done before now is that my mother and I are waiting to hear from Alicia when she has arrangements made… . We really-had thought we would do this in March.

We were very hopeful that we could persuade John to go to the University of Michigan and take advantage of the opportunities for research and treatment there. Unfortunately John will not agree that he needs treatment. Since we feel that something must be done for him, we have placed him in Carrier… .

He was simply not going to enter ANY hospital voluntarily. Once we were convinced of this we had no choice but to commit him to a hospital in New Jersey.
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42
The “Blowing Up” Problem
Princeton and Carrier Clinic, 1963–65

T
HE
C
ARRIER
C
LINIC,
formerly a sanatorium for the senile and retarded, was one of only two private mental hospitals in New Jersey. Located in the picturesque hamlet of Belle Meade, amidst rolling hills and lush farmland, Carrier was just five miles north of Princeton. Despite its easy proximity, however, it was generally avoided by Princetonians. As Robert Garber, a former president of the American Psychiatric Association who was Carrier’s medical director at the time, recalled: “They didn’t want to be in a psychiatric facility close to home. It was a disgrace, a terrible stigma, nothing like today. The idea was to get as far away as possible.”
¹

Princetonians regarded Carrier, which had the look of a slightly seedy boarding school, with some distaste for another reason as well. Carrier had none of the prestige of top-of-the-line institutions like McLean, Austin Riggs, or Chestnut Lodge, whose academic affiliations, psychoanalytical orientation, and long-term approaches based on the “talking cure” were regarded, especially by academics, as more humane and appropriate, especially for the well-educated. Popular views of psychiatry were being shaped by
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,
and the libertarian views of Thomas Szasz, who held that insanity was a social construct rather than a symptom of disease.
²
At the time when these views were gaining popularity, especially on campuses, Carrier had a reputation for the aggressive use of “chemical straitjackets” and electroshock, and short-term cookie-cutter approaches tailored to the time limits set by insurance policies.