Boston, 1965–67
IT 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.4
He started to see a thirty-three-year-old psychiatrist, Pattison Esmiol. An affable Coloradan with a medical degree from Harvard, Esmiol had just left the Navy to open a private practice in Brookline. Esmiol prescribed an antipsychotic drug, Stelazine, similar to Thorazine. Nash didn’t like the drug and its side effects, worrying that they would prevent him from thinking clearly enough to resume mathematical work. But Esmiol, sympathetic to his client’s concerns, kept the doses as low as possible, and Nash was grateful for the dependable human contact of his weekly appointments.
• • •
Nash was seeing Eleanor and John David, now a tall, handsome boy of twelve, every week or so.5 Nash was glad for the dinners Eleanor cooked him and glad to have the company. The three of them spent Halloween together, he wrote to Virginia.6 However, the old tensions in his relationship with Eleanor quickly surfaced again, and there were new and unanticipated tensions between himself and John David. Nash described Halloween as a “sad” occasion, for example, although it was not clear whether the sadness stemmed from friction that arose during the evening, or simply from a realization that his long separation from his son had produced a gulf that he could see no obvious way of bridging. John David was a particularly beautiful boy, musical and obviously bright. But Nash found it difficult to hide his dismay over his son’s faulty grammar and indifferent performance in school — all John David had to do was to let a “you was” slip out and Nash would be all over him;7 this, of course led to flare-ups with Eleanor and a rekindling of all the old resentments. John Stier recalls his father’s visits as “frustrating.” “He was always humming,” Stier said. “He’d eat. He’d chill out. He’d leave. He never helped me with my homework or asked how I was doing. He was just very aloof.”8
Before he became a teenager and he and Eleanor began living in Hyde Park, John Stier lived in two dozen different places, with and without his mother.9 They included, between infancy and six, a series of foster homes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, an orphanage on the outskirts of Boston, and when finally reunited with Eleanor, the Charden Home for Women and Children, a home for the destitute (no boys over age nine allowed!). In some school years, he attended three new schools and was deemed a “behavior problem.” On one occasion, he was held back. The moves were prompted by the calamities that are regular events in the lives of poor families: lost jobs, ill health, lack of childcare, fear of crime. On one occasion, Eleanor recalled, “I had a woman taking care of him. She said John had been bad to her little boy. So she hit him and gave him a black eye. I didn’t work for a while. I was always on edge.”10
It was, as he said, “a miserable childhood, a shitty childhood.”11 His mother loved him, of course, but was herself desperately unhappy. Eleanor was often ill, suffering at times from severe anemia, frequently lost jobs, and when she was working often held two jobs. John David’s illegitimacy was a dirty secret; Eleanor concocted a tale to explain away his fatherlessness and the child was forced to tell it at the different schools and neighborhoods, while living in constant dread of discovery. “There was a real stigma,” John Stier said. “I had to lie.”
In John David’s eyes, however, his father’s sudden reappearance in his life was a fine thing. Being corrected for the way he spoke and being admonished to work harder in school conveyed not just criticism, but fatherly interest. Nash also promised to pay for John David’s college education, explaining that “his educational background will shape the whole future course of his life.” Nash sometimes took pains to please his son. On Saturdays, he would take John Stier and a friend bowling. Afterward, they’d go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. On John Stier’s thirteenth birthday, Nash surprised him by taking him to a neighborhood bicycle shop and buying him a ten-speed racer. The next year, perhaps partly inspired by his father’s interest in him, John Stier worked extremely hard in school, took a citywide examination, and got a place in one of Boston’s elite “exam” schools.
• • •
In January, Nash wrote that “I have less time for Eleanor,” hinting perhaps that he felt his early dependence on her company easing and feeling some relief on this account.12 This would have given Eleanor new grounds for grievance; she may well have felt that he was once again using her without much intention of giving her very much in return. But at the end of February, Eleanor and John David were “among my few social contacts.”13 There were repeated flare-ups. “Eleanor was not nice to me,” he wrote after they went to a restaurant together.14 In April when Eleanor moved to a new apartment, several days went by before she was willing to give him her new telephone number.15 In May there is another reference to Eleanor’s not being nice, which again made Nash feel rather “sad.”16 If Nash’s reappearance in Boston raised again the possibility of his marrying Eleanor — either in her mind or his — there is no hint of this in Nash’s letters to Martha. Nash still had not completely given up hope of a reconciliation with Alicia.
• • •
On that sad Halloween, he had been thinking a great deal of Alicia. “I was very fond of her,” he wrote to Virginia.17 His sadness on that night probably had a good deal to do with the fact that she was discouraging him from visiting her in Princeton, as he had hoped to do, on Thanksgiving. She apparently put him off with excuses, citing among other things “propriety.”18 Nash persisted and Alicia continued to discourage him, so that a week before the holiday Nash said that he still had no invitation. Alicia was now talking of his coming down at Christmas, but it is not clear that the visit took place. In and amongst it all, perhaps because he was now aware of John David’s discomfort around him, he expressed fear that his younger son, John Charles, was “forgetting his father.”19
It was not all that easy to renew his old acquaintanceships, though he saw a bit of Arthur Mattuck and his wife, Joan, as well as Marvin and Gloria Minsky.20 People were kind but busy. He was anxious for anything to fill his evenings and went to a great many movies, plays, and concerts by himself.21 Alicia, who continued gently to discourage any possibility of reconciliation, was encouraging him to find some female companionship. He wrote to Martha: “Alicia doesn’t leave much hope/’22 In January, Nash was making awkward inquiries about dating.23 He thought of inviting the Mattucks to his house for a meal and “making it a foursome.” Jean Mattuck reintroduced him, apparently, to Emma Duchane, who later could recall none of this.24 He pursued Emma for several weeks, saying to Martha, “She’s a good conversationalist, but she isn’t pretty really,” before discovering that Emma had a fiancé.
• • •
After seeing A Hard Day’s Night one Sunday afternoon in early November, he was seized by a terrible sense of regret that he poured into a poignant and introspective letter to Martha, full of references to the struggle between his “merciless superego” and “old simple me.” This is the letter in which Nash referred to the “special friendships” in his life and his realization, in 1959, of “how things had been.” He admits that “away from contact with a few special sorts of individuals I am lost, lost completely in the wilderness. . . . ”
• • •
Brandeis was lively. A post-Sputnik infusion of money and a commitment on the university’s part to building a serious graduate program in mathematics had attracted eight or nine young comers, all in their thirties. “We had lots of research money. We had plenty of money to pay for research associates and part-time instructors. We did everything together,” recalled Richard Palais.25 The atmosphere was friendly and informal, and Nash felt welcome there. “Everybody was well aware that he was a first-class mathematician,” said Palais, adding:
I ate with him most lunches. It was nice to see him more or less back. He was pretty sane. He was being treated with antipsychotic drugs. He was a much nicer person after he got sick than before. I kind of knew him when I was an instructor at Harvard, but not personally. I’d ask him a question. He’d be all snotty, proud of himself. You’d be afraid to ask him anything. He’d put you down without a thought. Typically, I’d say, “I have this problem,” and Nash would shoot back, “Oh my God, how can you ask me this question? How stupid are you? How come you don’t know this?” Afterward, he was nice, gentle, lots of fun to talk to. This old ego stuff was gone.
Vasquez has similar memories: “When Nash first showed up at Brandeis he was pretty zombielike. At the beginning, he said nothing. That changed over the course of the year. He got more and more normal. He started interacting with people. We mostly talked about mathematics. He never talked about his personal life.”26
• • •
Nash’s renewed appetite for life was most evident in the energy with which he was able to work that year. During that fall at Brandeis he wrote a long paper, “Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data,”27 that pursued to their natural conclusion his ideas about partial differential equations. He circulated his draft for comments and submitted the paper to the Annals of Mathematics in early January.28 Armand Borel, one of the editors, sent it to Jürgen Moser to referee. After a few telephone consultations between Borel and Nash, Nash quickly revised the paper and got a final acceptance from the Annals on February 15. Nash was thrilled, writing to Martha on Washington’s birthday that the Annals was “the most prestigious American mathematical journal.”29
His renewed productivity produced a rush of self-confidence. He went to see Oscar Zariski at Harvard to discuss some new ideas — and possibly to inquire about a visiting position. He made friends with a young German mathematician, Egbert Brieskorn, who was visiting at MIT that year. He showed Brieskorn his just-completed paper and talked over ideas for future work. Brieskorn was doing some interesting work in singularities. “Nash had interesting ideas,” Brieskorn recalled. “He was always making propositions about what one could do. But I always got the feeling that he either couldn’t or wouldn’t do them himself.”30 A touch of Nash’s old arrogance returned. There was some talk, apparently, of his teaching at Northeastern in the spring. “I’d rather be at a more famous place,” he confided to Martha. He thought he would apply for a position at MIT instead. He wrote Martha that he felt MIT ought to reinstate him, adding, “Of course, MIT isn’t the most distinguished . . . Harvard ranks much higher.”31 Throughout the spring he would fret about being forced to take a position at a second-rate institution: “I hope to avoid stepping down in social status because it may be difficult to come up again.”
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