A Beautiful Mind

Stella Daily writes: "The unlikely subject of Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind , based on the 1998 Sylvia Nasar book of the same name, is John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose doctoral thesis earned him a Nobel Prize -- and a schizophrenia patient whose illness kept him out of the academic community for decades. The John Nash of the film is a brilliant young man who doesn't quite fit in, ignores his classes, is gawky with women and, above all, is consumed with a desire for an original idea. It is easy to like this Nash, with his Southern drawl and his earnest demeanor, and to sympathize with him as he fights his way back from insanity." Stella explains below why things aren't quite that simple. A Beautiful Mind author Sylvia Nasar pages 464 publisher Simon & Schuster rating 9 reviewer Stella Daily ISBN 0684819066 summary A beautifully written biography, more complex and troublesome than the film it inspired.

The John Nash of Nasar's biography, while less likable, is far more fascinating and multidimensional than his cinematic counterpart; he is a draft dodger, a vicious prankster (one practical joke of Nash's involved filling a light fixture with water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light), and an arrogant braggart.

Hollywood has whitewashed much from Nash's life; besides working to dodge the Korean War draft out of fears that it would hurt his career, Nash fathered an illegitimate son whom he refused to help care for, despite the fact that his own circumstances were far better than those of the child's mother. The woman he married, Alicia Larde, is portrayed in the film as the one and only love of Nash's life; no mention is made of their 1963 divorce. (Nearly forty years later, the couple remarried.) To read Nasar's biography is to discover fascinating episodes like Nash's stint in Europe, when he attempted several times to renounce his American citizenship and obtain political asylum, and his encounters with fellow patient and Pulitzer prizewinning poet Robert Lowell in a Massachusetts mental hospital.

The book is as absorbing a history lesson as it is a story; Nasar sets Nash's life beautifully in the context of his time. Nash's bisexuality, for example, was much more of an issue then than it would be now; while today many areas have laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation, in 1954 not only was it legal for employers to dismiss a homosexual employee, but any evidence of homosexuality was sufficient grounds to deprive a government employee of security clearance. Later, the reader learns of many once-credited treatments for mental illness, like insulin injections (thought to deprive the brain of sugar and thus kill off defective brain cells), colonic irrigation, and even "fever therapy," given by inoculating patients with malaria or typhoid. Nasar's description of the politics by which Nobel prizes are awarded, a process purposely shrouded in mystery by the various committees involved, is a particularly fascinating read. Her inclusion of these and other details paints a rich historical picture that's a pleasure to read.

The one thing missing from A Beautiful Mind is, of course, the voice of John Nash himself. Where possible, Nasar plucked quotes from his writings and the recollections of friends and colleagues, but Nash himself maintained, as he put it to a New York Times reporter, "a position of Swiss neutrality" toward his biographer. Throughout the extraordinary story of Nash's life -- his rapid rise to fame, his loves, his illness, his disappearance for decades from the academic community, and his recognition at last as a Nobel laureate, one wants to ask him, "What were you thinking?" Unfortunately, it's a question Nasar was unable to answer.

One true merit of the movie, so highly altered from Nash's real story (and, considered apart from the facts, it is both moving and interesting), is that it will undoubtedly inspire many to pick up Nasar's beautifully written biography. It's time to meet the real John Nash.

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Comments

Re:Autobiography

[JabberWokky]

He's got a short (but interesting) online autobiography here [nobel.se], although he skips over his schizophrenic years and focuses on his academic work.

There was an interview with Sylvia Nasar on NPR yesterday (I think it was Fresh Air, meaning it should be online right now), and she seems to approve of the movie. As she puts it - when you write about a while person's life, you have to pick facets. When you compress it into a book, you have to pick and choose what to focus on. In the movie, they only had two hours, and chose to focus on the relationship Nash and his wife had. She also adds that she was at their second wedding last June (John Nash is 74 and very much alive), and that the wedding was merely a reaffirmation of a relationship that has always been a marriage. She said (and I'm badly quoting from memory: "John [Nash] called it a 'retraction of a mistake'. Something you would expect a mathematician to say". Apparantly they have been together these 40 years, with all the ups and downs that a long relationship with serious stress would be expected to have.

It's important to remember that the focus of the movie needs to be tighter (less room to explore), but that the book *also* has to focus on certain aspects, and that it should not be taken as a 'more factual' account - in the HBO 'behind the scenes' piece "Inside A Beautiful Mind", they interview Crowe, but in the background of a few scenes, you can see an elderly couple in two chairs watching from near the director and camera - I wonder if that was Nash and his wife?

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Evan