NASH MET JACK BRICKER in the fall of 1952 in the MIT common room. Bricker, a first-year graduate student from New York, knew Newman and some of the others from City College’s math table and quickly became one of the regulars in the common room.1
Just two years Nash’s junior, Bricker was immediately dazzled by Nash. He was “mesmerized,” “hypnotized,” and “enamored,” a few of the words contemporaries used to describe his reaction to Nash. Bricker “was overwhelmed by Nash’s smartness,” Mattuck said in 1997. “Nash was the smartest person he’d ever met. He worshiped Nash’s intellect.”2 It wasn’t only Nash’s intellect, though. It was everything else too: the southern breeding, Princeton pedigree, good looks, and self-confidence.
Bricker, by contrast, was short, skinny, full of angst.3 He had grown up poor in Brooklyn; he still dressed badly, was often broke, and fretted over his lack of experience with girls. Although he was undeniably bright — the logician Emil Post considered him the best mathematician in his class at City — his self-doubt bordered on the pathological. “There’s no hope” and “It’s useless” were his most-often-used expressions. Yet he was endearing in his own way. His sense of humor — dark, self-deprecating, very New York — was always on tap even when he was depressed, which was much of the time. People liked talking to him because he was interested, acute, and responsive. Awkward as he was, he had a way of putting others at their ease. He was, as Gus Solomon once described him, “the world’s greatest audience.”
Perhaps for this reason, Bricker caught Nash’s eye. Nash, usually so disdainful of lesser minds, made a point of getting Bricker off by himself. Bricker liked to play Lasker — a board game named after a chess champion that became popular in the late 1940s — and Nash started playing with him. “We became Lasker partners,” said Bricker in 1997. “That’s how we got to know each other.”4 Soon they were taking long, aimless rides in Nash’s Studebaker, with Nash behind the wheel, playing with the back of Bricker’s neck as he drove.5 They became friends — and then more than friends.
Donald Newman and the rest of the MIT crowd watched Nash and Bricker with amused tolerance and concluded that the two were having a romance.6 “They were importantly interested in each other,” Newman said; they made no secret of their affection, kissing in front of other people.7 “Bricker hero-worshiped John,” Eleanor recalled. “He was always hanging around. They were always patting each other.”8 Nash himself, in his 1965 letter, described his relationship with Bricker as one of three “special friendships” in his life.9 The special friendship with Bricker lasted, on and off, for nearly five years until Nash married.
Once Nash had told Herta Newman, Donald’s wife, that he realized “there was something that happened between people that he didn’t experience.”10 What was missing from Nash’s life, to a singular degree, was what the biographer of another genius called “the strong force that binds people together.”11 Now he knew what that was.
It was this sense of vital connection that Nash referred to in his letter to Martha when it dawned on him that away from special sorts of individuals, the Brickers in his life, young men who were “colorful,” “amusing,” and “attractive,” he was “lost, lost, lost completely in the wilderness . . . condemned to a hard hard hard life in many ways.”12
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The experience of loving and being loved subtly altered Nash’s perception of himself and the possibilities open to him. He was no longer an observer in the game of life, but an active participant. He was no longer a thinking machine whose sole joys were cerebral. Yet his was not a passionate nature. Love, though thrilling, did not suddenly banish detachment, irony, and the desire for autonomy, but merely served to modulate them. Nor did it banish other compelling imperatives such as his desire for fatherhood and family. Nash did not think of himself as a homosexual. Alfred Kinsey’s report on the sexual behavior of white American men was published, amid great publicity, in 1948 when Nash was a graduate student at Princeton, and Nash was no doubt aware of its conclusion that a large fraction of heterosexual men had, at one time or another, same-sex relationships.13 Besides, he was ambitious, and he wished to succeed on society’s terms. He carried on as before. Even as his emotional involvement with Bricker grew, he continued to see Eleanor and continued to weigh the pros and cons of marrying her.
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The relationship between Nash and Bricker was not an especially happy one. Nash revealed more of his private self to Bricker than he had to any human being. But each act of self-exposure stimulated a defensive, self-protective reaction. Nash wrapped himself, as he later wrote to Martha with considerable regret, in the mantle of his own superiority to Bricker, the mantle of “the great mathematician.”14 He took to belittling Bricker just as he belittled Eleanor. “He was beautifully sweet one moment and very bitter the next,” Bricker recalled in 1997.15
For most of that first year, Bricker was completely unaware of Eleanor’s existence, like everyone else at MIT. At the end of the spring term, Nash finally let Bricker in on his secret, telling him in somewhat melodramatic tones, “I have a mistress.” Nash even engineered a meeting between the two, Bricker recalled, just weeks before Eleanor was due to give birth.
The revelation of a competitor for Nash’s affections produced more strains. Among other things, Bricker grew increasingly disturbed by, and critical of, Nash’s treatment of Eleanor, he later said. He, Eleanor, and Nash would have dinner together in Nash’s apartment, and Bricker became a frequent witness to what he later called Nash’s “mean streak” and temper tantrums. When Bricker tried to intervene, Nash would lash out at him. To make things even more difficult, Eleanor began turning to Bricker for sympathy and advice. She would call him to complain about Nash’s treatment of her.
Nash could indulge in jealousy himself. Jerome Neuwirth had dinner with Nash and Bricker and some other mathematicians in Boston in early August 1956. Neuwirth, a graduate student, had arrived at MIT that day and was particularly pleased to see Bricker, whom he knew from City. He recalled the evening vividly: “They weren’t embracing, but they were always looking at each other. Nash was very hostile. He kept throwing angry looks at me. He couldn’t stand anyone talking to Bricker.”16
The relationship with Nash “was a very disturbing thing” to Bricker, said Neuwirth. “Bricker didn’t know what to do. He was having a terrible time.” Mrs. Neuwirth advised him to see a psychiatrist.
And the very thing that had attracted him so powerfully in the first place, Nash’s genius, only heightened Bricker’s sense of inadequacy. That first year, Bricker managed to perform reasonably well in his courses. But later he was hardly able to work.17 He dropped courses. He finally managed to pass his preliminary exams in November 1954, but his ability to concentrate on his courses had all but evaporated at that point. However, he waited until February 1957, by which time Nash was away on sabbatical, before dropping out of graduate school and relinquishing his dream of becoming an academic. Nash’s game was just too painful to play any longer.
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They saw each other for the last time in 1967 in Los Angeles, where Bricker was working in private industry. By that time Bricker was married, and Nash was terribly ill. “He was very wild,” recalled Bricker in 1997. “He sent me a lot of letters. They were pretty disturbing.”18
Only one postcard, unsigned and dated August 3, 1967, survived.19 The only message is “No to No” and presumably came after Bricker had told Nash “No.” After that, Nash’s constant references to Bricker suggest both Bricker’s importance — Bricker is always B to some power, 2 or 22 — and Nash’s resentment. “Dear Mattuckine, It has obviously been Mr. B who has caused me the largest personal injury,” he wrote to Mattuck in 1968.20 But even then, there are sad notes of regret. “All along since 1967 I’ve been afraid to write to Bricker except in an indirect fashion. As yet this trouble persists however the reasons why change. There is a feeling of impropriety, etc.”
Traces of past affection, however, remained. In 1997, by which time Bricker himself was ill and in virtual isolation, his first questions were “How is Nash? Is he better?”21 But he was unwilling to talk much about his past relationship with Nash. “I don’t want to discuss it further,” he said.22