A Beautiful Mind (54 page)

In his own mind, Nash was now stateless, a man without a country; in the eyes of the authorities, he was a man without proper documents, which placed him in a vulnerable situation. Nash had, as he later wrote to Lars Hörmander, “requested refugee status. This produced difficulties.”’
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On October 11 he wrote to Virginia and Martha that he was no longer able to travel “because of certain legal formalities,” a reference, presumably, to his lack of a passport.
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In the same letter, he enclosed a long free-style poem about feeding the gulls on the shores of Lac Leman. He did, however, manage to visit nearby Liechtenstein, where he considered requesting citizenship, on account of the fact that Liechtenstein didn’t levy income taxes on foreign residents.
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During her Roman holiday, for a few short weeks, Alicia recaptured — for the last time, it turned out — a bit of her old lighthearted, girlish self. Odette recalled in 1995 that Alicia, once again, seemed “fun-loving.”
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’ These two exceptionally pretty, stylish young women had quite a holiday. They visited the Vatican, where they had an audience with Pope John XXIII. Odette fainted and had to be carried out of the chamber by two young Italian medics who afterward showed the two women around the city. They went to nightclubs, shopped, and were admired and pursued,
by Americans as well as Italians, wherever they went. After Rome, they visited Florence and Venice. In Venice, the two young women had a photograph taken of themselves, Odette looking like a young Audrey Hepburn, Alicia like a young Elizabeth Taylor, standing in their high heels and bouffant hairdos in the Piazza San Marco surrounded by pigeons.

At the end of August, Alicia returned to Paris and began making arrangements for her mother and baby to come to France. She may have gone to Geneva first, but if so, she stayed there only briefly. She wrote to Nash urging him to come to Paris and contacted the American embassy for help in getting Nash back from Switzerland. “Alicia is in Paris expecting ’e,’ ” Nash wrote in early November — “e,” of course, was John Charles, whom Nash called Baby Epsilon.
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(“Baby Epsilon” was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a well-known mathematical anecdote about a famous mathematician who believes that all infants are born knowing the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis and retain that knowledge until they are six months of age.)
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It was Nash’s first mention of the baby in his letters to Roanoke, yet he gave no indication that he intended to join them. While she waited for her mother and son to arrive, Alicia visited Odette in Grenoble. “We’d go to my room and eat pastries, baba au rhum,” Odette recalled. “We’d gossip about the other students. We went skiing.”
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Back in Washington, Baby Epsilon was finally christened with his grandparents and Martha in attendance.
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The baby, dressed in a little sweater on a bright fall day when leaves littered the ground, was named John Charles Martin Nash. The christening took place at St. John’s in Lafayette Square, the same church where Nash and Alicia had exchanged marriage vows. (It is not clear who settled on the name John. Nash’s first son, of course, was already called John. It was as if the Nashes and Lardes wished to obliterate, through replacement, the first child.)

In early December, when the frigid north wind called
le bise
swept across Lac Leman and made walking along its shores a misery, Nash’s mood was bleaker than ever. One can almost feel his “sense of helplessness in an ice-cold universe.”
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His efforts to renounce his citizenship and to obtain refugee status had been, for reasons baffling to him, frustrated. He spent most of his time indoors writing letters. His feeling of having chosen to escape from Cambridge was replaced by one of having been exiled. He wrote to Norbert Wiener:

I feel that writing to you there I am writing to the source of a ray of light from within a pit of semi-darkness… . It is a strange place where you live, where administration is heaped upon administration, and all tremble with fear or abhorrence (in spite of pious phrases) at symptoms of actual non-local thinking. Up the river [a reference to Harvard], slightly better, but still very strange in a certain area with which we are both familiar. And yet, to see this strangeness, the viewer must be strange.
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The letter was decorated with silver foil, a newspaper photograph of a Lenin-like character, a story about Nehru’s seventieth birthday containing a reference to Khrushchev, and ticket stubs from a trolley.

Even while he described himself as someone capable of inspiring fear in others on account of his “non-local thinking,” Nash’s reference to “administration … heaped upon administration” suggests a growing sense of vulnerability, a free-floating anxiety, and a belief that the authorities were toying with him. Shortly afterward, for reasons unknown, Nash changed hotels, moving now to a cheaper and more remote one — the Hotel Alba in the Rue de Mont Blanc.
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In this claustrophobic hotel room during what would turn out to be Nash’s final week in Geneva, the true dimensions of his tragedy would become clear. He was in Switzerland, free of Alicia, free of external restraint, but as thoroughly immobilized as the hero of another Kafka story, “The Metamorphosis,” who wakes up one morning to discover that he has become a cockroach lying helplessly on its back.
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Kafka never wrote the final chapter of
The Castle,
but confided to his friend and biographer, Max Brod, that he had envisioned a scene in which K is lying on his bed in the inn exhausted to the point of death. “K was not to relax his struggle, but was to die worn out by it.”
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Nash did not relax his struggle either, but he was defeated all the same.

James Glass, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied the delusions of schizophrenia, writes, “Delusion provides a certain, often unbreakable identity, and its absolute character can maneuver the self into an unyielding position. In this respect, it is the internal mirror of political authoritarianism, the tyrant inside the self… an internal domination as deadly as any external tyranny.”
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On December 11, Nash had been held for several hours by the police — apparently in an effort to convince him that “deportation was unavoidable” — and released “under surveillance,” requiring him to report to a police station two or three times every day.
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According to a telegram, dated December 16, from the American consul in Geneva, Henry S. Villard, to Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, the Swiss authorities had issued a deportation order naming Nash as an “undesirable alien” on December 11.
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Throughout, the Swiss authorities evidently were acting with the “full knowledge of Dr. Edward Cox, assistant science advisor” and presumably with tacit approval at higher levels of the State Department.

The final curtain came down on December 15. Nash was arrested, for the second time.
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He adamantly refused, as he had at the time of his first arrest, to return to the United States, and continued to demand to sign the oath of renunciation. On the morning of the fifteenth, Cox, a kindly, avuncular retired chemistry professor from Swarthmore College,
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now serving as assistant science attache in Paris, arrived in Geneva by overnight train. He was accompanying an exhausted and apprehensive Alicia Nash.
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Together they hoped to persuade Nash to return directly to the United States. Neither knew what to expect, and both, in their separate ways, feared the worst.

Secretary Herter was being apprised of the situation in daily cables, as was the State Department’s science adviser, Wallace Brode. On the fifteenth, a cable to Washington from Ambassador Amory Houghton in Paris informed them: “RECEIVED WORD FROM GENEVA TO EFFECT NASH DESPITE ALL EFFORTS TO DISSUADE HIM DETERMINED TO SIGN OATH OF CITIZENSHIP RENUNCIATION.”
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Even in jail, Nash refused to return to the United States, refused furthermore to cooperate in the issue of a new passport, and continued to demand that he be permitted to take the oath of renunciation.

At this point, Alicia agreed to take Nash back to Paris with her where they had, after all, an apartment. The consul general agreed to issue Alicia a new passport that included Nash. Nash protested it all. He did not wish to go even to Paris. It was useless. The police escorted Nash to the train station. He was hustled onto the train and, at 11:15
P.M.
, it pulled out of the covered station into the open air. The police inspectors reported that “at train time Nash [was] still reluctant [to] leave Geneva but no force [was] required.”
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Nash and Alicia celebrated Christmas at 49 Avenue de la République. It was, as Nash was to write to Virginia, “interesting.”
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Alicia’s mother was there and so was the eight-month-old John Charles. There was a Christmas tree, perhaps the first one that the Nashes had ever had, decorated in the German manner with tiny lady apples and red wax candles. When they lit them, it scared Alicia’s mother terribly. “We kept a bucket of water nearby,” Odette, who had come to Paris for the holidays, recalled.
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Alicia, who had occupied herself that fall with learning to cook, sewed French hors d’oeuvres. There were presents for the baby, Nash jealously noted, adding in a letter to Virginia and Martha that “he seems a little attention spoiled now.”

On St. Etienne’s Day, the day after Christmas, Alicia gave a party attended by several mathematicians, American as well as French. Shiing-shen Chern, a mathematician who had met Nash at the University of Chicago and was in Paris for the semester, came. He recalled “an interesting idea” that Nash had then, namely that four cities in Europe constituted the vertices of a square.
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The most striking visitor at 49 Avenue de la République, however, was Alexandre Grothendieck, a brilliant, charismatic, highly eccentric young algebraic geometer who wore his head shaved, affected traditional Russian peasant dress, and held strong pacifist views.
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Grothendieck had just taken a chair at the new Parisian mathematics center, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (modeled after Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study), and would win a Fields Medal in 1966. In the early 1970s, he founded a survivalist organization, dropped out of academia altogether, and became a virtual recluse in an undisclosed location in the Pyrenees.
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In 1960, however, he was dynamic, voluble, and immensely attractive. Whether he was mainly interested in the beautiful Alicia or felt an affinity for Nash’s anti-American sentiments is not clear; in any case, Grothendieck was a frequent visitor at the
Nashes’ apartment and on a number of occasions attempted to help Nash obtain a visiting position at the IHES.

That January, Odette and Alicia would sit around the apartment smoking and gossiping about Odette’s boyfriends, including thirty-four-year-old John Danskin, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study who had met the entrancing Odette at the Nashes’ wedding party in New York. He wooed Odette by letter, ultimately proposing to her by telegram in Russian. Nash would sit in the corner of the living room poring over a Paris telephone directory, saying little except to occasionally object to the smoke, which he abhorred, or to ask a question. Odette recalled:

We were having a wonderful time. We just laughed and gossiped, tried French cooking and met the people who Alicia invited into her apartment. We’d be chattering. We’d talk about boys. John Nash wouldn’t even notice. Alicia used to smoke. He used to complain about it. He couldn’t bear it. Occasionally he would interrupt with a question: “Do you know what Kennedy and Khrushchev have in common? No. Both their names start with a K.”
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Odette soon returned to Grenoble and Alicia’s mother left Paris as well, leaving her daughter and grandson behind. Alicia struggled to care for the baby and to cope with her husband, finding both overwhelming.
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She desperately wanted to return to the United States and continued, as best she could, to obtain the help of the American authorities.

A concerted effort was, in fact, under way, led by the State Department’s Brode, who dispatched his deputy, Larkin Farinholt, to Paris.
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Farinholt, a chemist who would subsequently become the director of the Sloan Foundation’s fellowship program, vainly tried to convince Nash to return to America voluntarily. The effort was inspired not just by the government’s desire to avoid embarrassment, but by a genuine wish that Nash not be lost to the scientific community nor suffer the consequences of his own seemingly irrational behavior.

Nash’s legal situation was increasingly tenuous. After his deportation from Switzerland, he had been issued a three-month temporary residency permit by the French. His status in France, as he explained to Hormander in a letter in late January, was “of Swiss resident or domicilee.”
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As Nash explained in his Madrid lecture, he had wanted to be declared a refugee from all NATO countries, but since he found himself in France he had —“so as not to be inconsistent” — to settle for declaring himself “only a refugee from the USA.”
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Once again, he applied for asylum. When it became clear that the French were not going to grant it, Nash attempted to obtain a Swedish visa. This, too, was refused. He then turned to Hormander, who in turn consulted the Swedish foreign ministry and was told that without an American passport Nash had no hope of obtaining a visa. Hormander, now impatient, wrote back: “Personally I would strongly advise you to reconsider your views concerning NATO and other countries.”
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