A Beautiful Mind - But An Ugly Life: A Biography of John Forbes Nash Jr.

A Beautiful Mind is the story of John Nash a most brilliant mathematician. I saw the movie a number of years ago but had heard a comment that the movie did not give a true picture of John Nash. I noticed the other day that the library had the audio-book available so I checked it out.

The book and the movie follow the same plot line: Nash is an eccentric young mathematical genius. His eccentricity grows and he goes mad. He spends time in a mental health facility. In latter life he reclaims control of his senses enough to rejoin the world. He is awarded the Nobel prize in economics.

However the difference is in the details. The movie makes Nash seem like a nice guy who is too smart for his own good and actually polishes all the rough edges, showing a very sympathetic character. The book tells a rather different story. John Forbes Nash was clearly not a “people” person. He was arrogant, obnoxious, and smart enough to get away with it. In the same way that everyone has problems relating to people they feel are clueless - John Nash saw most other people.

On the personal side John Nash acts as if everything is about himself. He takes a mistress (for there is no better term even though he is not married), fathers a child by her, and then refuses to support the child (but still wants to keep the mother as his mistress). According to the author a likely reason Nash would not marry her was Nash’s snobbery. Eleanor was from a lower social class and was not highly educated.

But his relationship with men was even more twisted. According to the book, “Nash was always forming intense friendships with men that had a romantic quality… Some were inclined to see Nash’s infatuations as “experiments,” or simple expressions of his immaturity, a view that he may have held himself. … Mostly he just kissed.”

But the depth to which Nash had fallen is revealed by his 1954 arrest for ‘indecent exposure’ and ‘making a come-on to another man’ in a public bathroom. This incident resulted in the loss of his security clearance and being expelled from the RAND Corp. think tank, where he worked as a researcher, because homosexuality was considered a security risk.

Regarding his schizophrenia, the movie portrays Nash imagining himself as a heroic undercover agent breaking Russian codes whereas the book shows he believed he was receiving extraterrestrial messages hidden in newspapers by aliens who had “recruited” him to save the world. Asked latter why he entertained such thoughts, Nash replied that his mathematical inspiration had come to him in the same way as the alien messages.

His mental recovery was truly amazing even though the movie again fictionalizes the whole thing by inventing the pen ‘thing’ at Princeton and the fabrication of his Nobel acceptance speech which he was not even invited to give.

As biographies go the book was well written. It gives an account of a man’s rise, fall, and redemption. And it definitely shows the movie to be a nice work of Hollywood fiction.