The Price of Altruism (46 page)

The only genetics work he did which he thought of any value was figuring out the true meaning of Fisher’s fundamental theorem. Sure, the covariance was pretty, but he had yet to use it for any real evolutionary explanation, and in six years of work he really should have accomplished more. Now he was thinking about moving into economics, where he hoped to finally achieve some “really useful results.”

Lewontin’s reply from August 27, just as George was writing to the recruitment office, was warm and friendly; evidently John Maynard Smith had filled him in on some of the details of George’s life. He was sorry that genetics would be losing him, but was delighted that he was going into economics. “It is time that someone really original began to think about the important and relevant problems of economics,” he wrote. He had no doubt that George would accomplish great things there.
¹⁷

But it wasn’t going to happen. As much as he wanted to head “back upward,” George was finding it difficult. Back in late June he had written to his lover, Joan, that he could not be with her since it was necessary that he undergo some kind of “treatment” to learn to love properly—
really
love. Joan had come around to spend a night with him in the squat, and, not wanting to mix his two lives, George had ordered everyone out of his room. Now he felt terrible about it. He had been helping countless strangers, but to learn “real love, giving love, Jesus-style love” he would need to start again with just one person. It couldn’t be her since that person had to be more innocent, less strong willed. He was sorry. But Jesus said: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” and that was what George was doing. Really, despite appearances, the only marriage permitted to him was to Jesus. If that happened, perhaps they could be together some day.
¹⁸

Sylvia had woken up from tooth surgery at the dentist to find him sitting beside her, and she was beginning to get a little freaked out.
¹⁹
Clearly there was not going to be any relationship for a while. He was leaving Tolmers Square so as not to present any further problems. And the move down the road to 164 Drummond Street had gotten him thinking.

“I have indeed been serving the Devil most of my life,” he wrote Joan in October. Trying to help all the homeless and old people had not been led by true love and had only done them harm. As with her, with them, too, he had just created false hope, and it was time for him to stop. To do this he would need to follow the way of Matthew 7:14: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” The “strait gate,” George now believed, was honesty about one’s own self-recognition, “confession to one’s self of one’s deepest selfish desires.” Before anything one had to be true to oneself. Then the “narrow way” was to follow Jesus’ lead “along an easy, twisting, curved path of love”—love for others. George wasn’t doing too well so far, he admitted. But he had stopped going around to help an old lady, Mrs. Veneham, two or three weeks before, and no longer popped in to Elisabeth Mansell’s SOS House. He hadn’t communicated with Chrissy, who had been in the hospital, and didn’t even know if she was still there. His progress was slow, like that of the White Knight in
Through the Looking-Glass
, who kept falling off the chessboard to one side or the other. Still, it was a beginning. He was being more selfish and taking things easier. “Please return good for evil and pray for me,” he ended. “God helps those who help themselves.”
²⁰

His fifty-second birthday came along on October 16. “I pray that you will permit your soul to be restored,” Joan wrote him, understanding finally that she would have to let go. “Dismiss your illusion…there are no such thoughts for you now.” All the way from Grand Rapids, Michigan, his mother’s cousin, Lewis Florman, wrote kindly, too, to wish him the very best of everything: “As Paul said ‘test the spirit—hold fast to that which is good.’ Dig up that talent of yours and put it to good use. The world is sorely in need of scientists who are not afraid of looking at new truths. I feel that you could be a ‘light unto the world’ if you choose to do so.”
²¹

It was very good news, George wrote to Smoky, that the judge had decided to let his probation continue. But then, as kindly as he could, he changed his tone:

He would need to take a break from helping him, he explained. Meanwhile he recommended that whenever he found himself in an escalating fight he back down, and, no less important, to absolutely make up his mind not to touch anything distilled.

He was living at 164 Drummond Street now, on the corner of Hampstead Road. Just two weeks earlier a couple of architecture students had broken into the building and changed the locks. It was a relatively new building, from the thirties or forties, and, though rather ugly and gray, as squats go not a particularly bad one. Behind the locked door there was an entrance hall and stairs up to the second floor with a kitchen and two rooms. A further set of narrow winding stairs led up to a third floor with a studio and a small adjacent room. There was electricity and, in the rooms, electric storage heaters. But there was no central heating, and as winter approached it was getting very cold.
²³

In the middle of November a pot of boiling water tipped over and burned his hands badly. He was finding it difficult to sleep at night, and couldn’t grasp a pen to write. Finally, when the burns began to ease, he wrote to thank his brother, Edison, for the money he had sent him. He was leaving genetics, George told him, and was hoping to get a computer programming job at UCL with a professor who worked on the economics of developing countries in order to reacquaint himself with the field before trying his luck again with Paul Samuelson.
²⁴
In the meantime he was contemplating writing up some genetics results from the past few years, and then perhaps returning to his work on the Passion schedule and the correct date of the death of Jesus. Earlier he had hoped to make a book of it, but now thought a pamphlet would do.

“In regard to religion,” he explained,

No doubt thinking of Sylvia, he envisioned “some small printing business on the side” and perhaps putting out a local community newspaper. But of course this was pretty long-range looking ahead. “Wouldn’t it be nice though?”

In reality George was in a much worse off state than he let on to his brother. Shmulik Atia was a young Israeli, a former paratrooper who had just gotten out of the army and come to join his artist friend Asher Dahan who was living in the small room on the third floor of the squat. Asher had turned the studio upstairs into his workroom, painting into the wee hours of the night under the neon lights and smoking a lot of pot. Once in a while George would come up with a cup of tea, and join him for a smoke. Both remembered him as a humble and reserved man, walking about like a ghost, down to skin and bones, reeking, gaze downcast, mumbling about Jesus.
²⁶

“The Hounds of Heaven are closing in on me,” he wrote Kathleen that month, referring to the English poet Francis Thompson’s work from 1907.
²⁷
Thompson had been born in Lancashire in November 1859, the very month that Darwin published
The Origin of Species
. Moving to London after college to pursue writing, he soon became addicted to opium and a street vagrant. Rescued years later by a couple who chanced upon his poetry, he became a published poet before dying, mentally unbalanced, of tuberculosis.
²⁸

“Like the hound follows the hare,” J. R. R. Tolkien had written of it, “never ceasing in its running, ever drawing nearer in the chase, with unhurrying and imperturbed pace, so does God follow the fleeing soul by His Divine grace. And though in sin or in human love, away from God it seeks to hide itself, Divine grace follows after, unwearyingly follows ever after, till the soul feels its pressure forcing it to turn to Him alone in that never ending pursuit.”
²⁹

George was beginning to tire of the chase.

His homeless friends were coming around looking for him. Bernardo and Chrissy arrived unannounced on Saturday night, November 30, only to find he wasn’t there. “Bernardo is very upset that he was rude to you. He had a blackout through drinking,” they wrote on the back of a torn Benson and Hedges Special Filter cigarette box, slipping it under the locked door. The next day they wrote a letter from their temporary abode on 40 Fitzroy Street. “We are very worried about you and we hope you are well…. We love you very much, Bernardo and Christina.”
³⁰

George was falling fast. He had contacted Dr. O. W. Hill at the Middlesex Department of Psychiatry, and Hill set up an appointment for January 9, 1975. But that was more than a month away! Would he make it that far? To Bill and Chris Hamilton he apologized now for his vacillating behavior and refusal to accept good advice. They had always been such generous hosts to him. He should have heeded their words of counsel to stay in genetics. Did they think he might still get a research job at Silwood?
³¹

Hamilton had seen George toward the end of November in London and was worried. He implored him to come stay with his family, if only to get some rest and talk about a possible joint scientific venture. George continued to vacillate, paralyzed almost, unable to make up his mind. Finally, after many delays and reversals, he climbed on a train at Victoria and arrived, weak and disheveled, in Berkshire. He told Chris and Bill about his unrequited love for Sylvia, about his debts, about all his help to the homeless having been for naught, about his plans to turn to economics where he might actually do something useful for humanity. Bill tried to keep him focused: Why not embark together on a theoretical project on altruism? They could begin to work right away on a grant.
³²

The Hamiltons were going to Chris’s parents in Ireland for Christmas, so they couldn’t invite him for the holiday. But by the end of the week George seemed to have been won over. Bill showed him the draft of a paper he was working on that applied the covariance to individual and group, and George was pleased.
³³
He was determined to return to genetics, he told his hosts smiling, a flicker of clarity once again noticeable in his eye. After driving him back to the Maidenhead Station on the morning of December 19, Bill gave George a hug, watched him get on the train, and waved good-bye.

Then he rushed home, found a few sheets of lined computer paper, and hurriedly wrote out a letter by hand. It was addressed to a Dr. Kelly, the secretary of the British Teilhard Association, a non-sectarian educational society founded in 1963 to promote knowledge and understanding of the work of the French Jesuit evolutionist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Bill was sending a copy of George’s “Twelve Days of Easter,” and inquired if the society might be interested in publishing it. It would blow a welcome wind into George’s sails, he was certain, and, in truth, the paper really was fascinating and original. “When he had his flat in central London and was at work alternately on the theory of natural selection and biblical exegesis,” he explained,