Labatut's 'Frankenstein'

'The MANIAC' reveals more about the author than about von Neumann

To remove any possibility of misunderstanding, this is not a review of Benjamin Labatut’s book. The MANIAC is an excellent novel and anyone that has not got their hands on a copy should do so because I can assure them that they will devour it in a couple of nights, just like I did.

Since the book is, however, ostensibly about John von Neumann, a mathematician whose life and work I could reasonably be expected to know something about, people have, equally reasonably, asked me if I had any thoughts about Labatut’s portrayal of him. And the very fact that this question arises, reveals that part of what makes The MANIAC so wonderfully spine-tinglingly chilling is also what makes the author’s approach somewhat problematic.

For the von Neumann in Labatut’s novel is not one that I really recognise.

As Adam Kirsch notes in his excellent, and positive, review of The Maniac in the Atlantic:

Labatut is intent on casting von Neumann as a Faustian figure, a man who transgressed the limits of knowledge to become something more and less than human. This idea may be Labatut’s greatest departure from biographical fact. In reality, the “maniac” seems to have impressed people with his cheerfulness and zest for life. In Ananyo Bhattacharya’s 2022 biography, The Man From the Future, von Neumann is described by his friend and fellow physicist Eugene Wigner as “a cheerful man, an optimist who loved money and believed firmly in human progress.” By contrast, the Wigner who narrates several sections of The MANIAC speaks of von Neumann as a “luciferin” figure who “ranged beyond what was reasonable, until he finally lost himself.”

At this point, I suppose I should warn anyone who has not read The MANIAC that there will inevitably be ‘spoilers’ ahead though since Labatut’s novel is a work of literature and not a murder mystery, I doubt that what follows will diminish your enjoyment of it by one iota. Still, please consider yourselves warned.

First, some background. I read When We Cease to Understand the World late last year after several people told me I would love it. I did, though like many science writers with some grounding in the history of quantum mechanics, I was mildly annoyed by the cunning segues from fact to fiction. Since endless googling or flicking through history books was doing nothing for my enjoyment of the book, I quickly accepted When We Cease to Understand the World for what it is — a work of fiction — and stopped holding it to the standards of biography or history. At the same time, Labatut seems to have enormous respect for science throughout and is careful to describe any technical elements with impressive accuracy. I have no doubt that he could produce scintillating narrative non-fiction if he wanted to and science writers should probably be grateful that he prefers the freedom that fabrication provides.

I got my first inkling that Labatut might be working on a book featuring von Neumann in December, 2022, a hunch confirmed in March the following year, when I was lucky enough to receive uncorrected proofs of The MANIAC. I was delighted.

We seem to have both stumbled upon von Neumann independently. At first sight, this might appear to be a remarkable coincidence. Nothing much had been written about him for popular consumption for nearly a decade and his name elicited blank looks from nearly everyone I spoke to outside a small circle of economists and computer scientists.

This is how Labatut described what he was working on in an interview with Physics Today nearly two years ago:

In abstract terms, I’m writing about the person I consider to be the smartest human being of the 20th century—his life, his death, and his inevitable 21st-century resurrection, because I can feel him coming back in many ways…

It’s all about physics and mathematics, and it also deals with artificial intelligence. There are three main characters. One’s a mathematician, who touched on everything. He’s allowed me to touch on everything that I’m interested in—nuclear physics, chaos theory, computation, biology. The big thing is trying to cram as many of the things that I find fascinating into something that people will read. It’s very hard.

I sympathise! And here’s an excerpt from The Man from the Future.

The mathematical contributions von Neumann made in the mid-twentieth century now appear more eerily prescient with every passing year. To fully understand the intellectual currents running through our century—from politics to economics, technology to psychology—one has to understand von Neumann’s life and work in the last. His thinking is so pertinent to the challenges we face today that it is tempting to wonder if he was a time traveller, quietly seeding ideas that he knew would be needed to shape the Earth’s future

Our mutual fascination with him seems to stem, in part, from some shared influences—I adore, as he does, W. G. Sebald, H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Literary critics have havered about trying to classify Labatut, inventing new labels to describe what he does. But to my mind, Labatut’s work falls squarely within a genre that already exists. Isaac Asimov defined science fiction as “that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology”. Without wishing to queer his pitch for a well-deserved Booker next year, Labatut is a writer of literary science fiction with a dystopian edge, startlingly original but close intellectual kin to the likes of Huxley, Orwell, Wells, Le Guin, Carter and Atwood (that the latter two writers distanced themselves from the genre is of course de rigueur).

I have no idea if Labatut has read The Man from the Future. At the end of The Maniac, he cites George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral, Norman Macrae’s biography and Marina von Neumann’s memoir, The Martian’s Daughter, as important sources. My book on von Neumann was published in October, 2021 in the UK and February, 2022 in the US by which time Labatut was probably deep into his research (“I walked around 24 hours a day for a couple of years listening to these people,” he says in a recent profile). Labatut does not seem like the sort of asshole¹ who would studiously ignore the only new book in a decade about his principal subject so I can only surmise that either he has genuinely not heard of The Man from the Future or he thought it irrelevant to his project. Canny reviewers have compared the von Neumanns in the two books though and since Labatut’s book is decidedly framed as being about a real person, it is interesting to explore how his picture of the mathematician differs from what is known about him to see if that reveals anything about the author’s intent.

Will the real von Neumann please stand up?

The MANIAC is a choral work that builds up an impression of von Neumann through the testimony of others—a very effective strategy that also neatly sidesteps the fact that the mathematician kept no journals and wrote very little about himself at all. Labatut, for his part, says he denies von Neumann a voice because “Monsters and gods should not be given a voice.” And he leaves little doubt that von Neumann is more monster than god.

The von Neumann of Labatut’s novel is a charming obsessive, possesed of a demoniac energy, bent on shaping the future of humanity with logic and mathematics. So far, so true. Von Neumann was, to some extent, all those things. He enjoyed parties, thought about mathematics during nearly every waking hour of his life and, later, simultaneously consulted for RAND, various branches of the US military, and a number of different companies. On his first visit to Los Alamos, von Neumann almost instantly hit upon the arrangement of explosives required to compress the implosion bomb’s plutonium core evenly from all sides.² He continued to work on bomb design while also finishing the foundational text of modern game theory with economist Oskar Morgenstern. No slouch himself, Morgenstern called the time he spent on the book a ‘period of the most intensive work I’ve ever known’. For von Neumann, it was just a hobby.

Of this frenetic activity, Labatut says that, “In the United States, von Neumann became a renegade mathematician, a mind for hire, increasingly seduced by power and by those who could wield it. He would charge exorbitant fees to sit with people from IBM, RCA, the CIA, or the RAND Corporation, sometimes for no longer than a couple of minutes”, forgetting perhaps that not even von Neumann could effortlessly extract money from such organisations unless they had reason to believe they were getting something extraordinary in return—which of course they did (in the case of IBM, what they got was the programmable computer). And while this charge—that von Neumann was an immoral mercenary—was levelled at von Neumann by some colleagues and at least one rather jaundiced biography, their distaste for all that money-making was sometimes tinged with envy.

What often gets overlooked is why von Neumann chose to consult for the military and the private sector when he was under no obligation to do so. In The Maniac this is ascribed purely to von Neumann’s greed and an all-consuming instinct to mathematize the world, an unfair characterisation of a man who was both worried about the future of humanity after his brushes with left- and right-wing totalitarianism and profoundly cognisant of the fact that technology is a double-edged sword. Rather, von Neumann’s primary motivation was a deeply-felt sense of duty and loyalty to his adoptive home and a conviction that computers would contribute in unimaginable ways to the advance of science and the betterment of humanity. Remember: it was von Neumann who baked the principles of the open source movement into computing from its birth.

As for von Neumann’s impulse to over-logicize, his daughter Marina notes that he was certainly possessed of a ‘lifelong desire to impose order and rationality on an inherently disorderly and irrational world’. But Labatut, who clearly believes that too much reason is a dangerous thing, turns von Neumann into a man terribly warped by this compulsion and totally in its grip. And this leads Labatut to make some of the greatest deviations from what we know of von Neumann’s character.

Take for example The MANIAC’s Morgenstern, who accuses von Neumann of coining the acronym M.A.D. for the nuclear strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction. Despite what some poorly researched web pages will tell you, however, von Neumann had nothing at all to do with M.A.D. The strategy was first mooted by Robert McNamara in 1965, with the acronym being devised years later by Donald Brennan of the Hudson Institute, a critic of the policy. Later in the novel, Morgenstern is so overwhelmed with guilt, he recants his part in birthing game theory and appeals to our irrational, emotional, contradictory natures to save us from ‘the mad dreams of reason’—as embodied of course by von Neumann! Here, Labatut has again taken a jarringly unlikely leap away from fact since the real Morgenstern also consulted for the RAND Corporation and, unlike his friend Johnny, wrote a whole book on nuclear strategy that was published in 1959, two years after von Neuman’s death.

According to one contemporary review of Morgenstern’s book:

It is the author's basic image of war circumscribing these suggestions that arrests attention. The image is one dominated by a strategic thermonuclear exchange of short duration on the part of two "players." Almost all of the problems of war are but ramifications of an all-out exchange. War is a "game" controlled by an optimal strategy" which, presumably, is little short of self-evident; likewise, particular combat situations have their most obvious strategy. War reduces itself to a manageable enterprise to the extent that information (preferably complete) be quantified through the more or less sophisticated procedures of game theory and programming.

Sound familiar? Von Neumann never thought about nuclear war in explicitly reductive terms like this. In contrast to Morgenstern, his interest in nuclear strategy and in game theory (and remember that von Neumann had tried to develop a cooperative version of it and objected to Nash’s more useful approach because he did not think a single solution was realistic) was already waning by the late-forties and early-fifties—as evidenced by von Neumann’s response when an old friend, Gleb Wataghin, asked him if it was true that he was not thinking about mathematics at all anymore—only about bombs…

“I am thinking about something much more important than bombs,” von Neumann replied. “I am thinking about computers.”

Omissions and embellishments

This otherworldly capacity to see into the heart of things, or—if viewed from its opposing angle—this characteristic shortsightedness, which allowed him to think in nothing but fundamentals, was not merely the key to his particular genius, but also the explanation for his almost childlike moral blindness.

—Theodore von Kármán, The MANIAC

What he could do. It was so rare and beautiful that to watch him was to weep. Yes, I saw that, but I also saw something else. A sinister, machinelike intelligence that lacked the restraints that bind the rest of us.

—Gábor Szegő, The MANIAC

To give von Neumann a Mephistophelian air requires careful ommission and embellishment. Von Neumann was not morally bankrupt, as these passages, put into the mouths of two key figures from his childhood, imply. Neither was he devoid of human feeling, as anyone who has read his letters to his second wife, Klára Dán, will attest.³

Here are a couple of samples from those letters, as quoted in the excellent Lost Women of Science podcast, which devoted its second series to Dán.

A billion thanks for the letter. It is lovelier than anything I could imagine, warmer than anything I ever hoped, it’s all together the sweetest thing – it’s almost like yourself….

…​​Is this evil world bothering you all night? The world that does not give you what you should have deserved long ago, happiness. My heart breaks to think of you being worried, and restless in a long dark night.

The latter excerpt is from a letter which Katie Hafner, the series presenter, dubbed ‘The Long Dark Letter’. About ten pages long, von Neumann wrote it during a stopover in Milan in August, 1938. “Their impassioned letters are a blizzard of emotional outpouring,” Hafner says. “They suggest a couple who were constantly reaffirming their connection. These are two people who weren’t simply infatuated—they were well matched—Johnny, the fiery but jovial scientist with a mind in perpetual motion, and the equally fiery quick-witted, fun-loving Klari.”

I agree and while von Neumann certainly did become more cynical in later life, like most cynics, this was a flaw caused by a surfeit of feeling rather than a lack of it.

By the time von Neumann visited Europe again in 1949, his belief in people had evaporated away altogether. ‘I feel the opposite of nostalgia for Europe,’ he wrote to Klári, ‘because every corner reminds me . . . of the world which is gone, and the ruins of which is no solace. My second reason for disliking Europe is the memory of my total disillusionment in human decency between 1933 and September 1938.

—The Man from the Future

It is difficult to take the rather inhuman von Neumann of The MANIAC seriously when, by all accounts, ‘human decency’ was something that he possessed a good deal of.

Benoît Mandelbrot, whose stay at the IAS had been sponsored by von Neumann, got himself in difficulties years after von Neumann’s death and found that his way had been smoothed by the Hungarian-American years earlier. When a Hungarian-speaking factory worker in Tennessee wrote to von Neumann in 1939 asking how he could learn secondary school mathematics, von Neumann asked a friend to send school books from Hungary. African-American statistician David Blackwell found von Neumann to be a model mentor at a time when Princeton, to its shame, would not allow Blackwell to attend lectures or conduct research at the university. And it was not just Kurt Gödel that he helped to rescue from ‘the wreck of Europe’.

At one point in the novel, Feynman reveals that von Neumann told him, “You don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in”. But this was said to Feynman in the context of the younger man feeling guilty when he hit a fallow period in his research. Von Neumann was in all likelihood consoling him—not giving him moral carte blanche.

“For Johnny von Neumann I have the highest admiration in all regards,” said neurophysiologist Ralph Gerard, a contemporary. “He was always gentle, always kind, always penetrating and always magnificently lucid.” This is not the von Neumann you read about in The MANIAC at all!

Instead, Labatut turns von Neumann into a smoker of thick cigars (von Neumann did not smoke) and a womaniser who avoids his former tutor Szegő’s probing questions by flirting with “three tall blond ladies who had sat down at the table next to us”.

I doubt von Neumann had such conventional tastes. His actual interactions with the opposite sex are probably more accurately described by his friend, the Polish-American mathematician Stanisław Ulam:

Some people, especially women, found him lacking in curiosity about subjective or personal feelings and perhaps deficient in emotional development. But in his conversations with me, I felt that only a certain shyness prevented him from having more explicit discussions along these lines. Such seeming diffidence is not uncommon among mathematicians. Nonmathematicians often reproach us for this and may resent this apparent emotional insensitivity and excessive quantitative and rational bent, especially in attitudes towards mundane matters outside science. Von Neumann was so busy with mathematics, physics, and with academic affairs, not to mention increasingly innumerable activities later on as a consultant to many projects and Government advisory work, he probably could not be a very attentive, “normal” husband. This might account in part for his not too smooth home life.

To be sure, he was interested in women, outwardly, in a peculiar way. He would always look at legs and the figure of a woman. Whenever a skirt passed by he would turn and stare—so much so that it was noticed by everyone. Yet this was absentmindedly mechanical and almost automatic. About women in general he once said to me, “They don't do anything very much.” He meant, of course, nothing much of importance...

—Adventures of a Mathematician

This is a little harsh on von Neumann, who collaborated with a number of women and, as far as I can tell, accorded them the same respect as he did to men. Accounts of von Neumann written by women, including Ulam’s own wife, Françoise, are much kinder, but the impression I formed was that he could be socially awkward. And not just with women. His well known propensity to recite dirty limericks could be the hallmark of a non-stop party animal—or a coping mechanism for someone who found interactions with others painful.

Von Neumann also probably had OCD. “A drawer could not be opened unless it was pushed in and out seven times,” Dán says of her husband in her unfinished memoirs, “the same with a light-switch, which also had to be flipped seven times before you could let it stay. He would not walk past a mirror without looking into [it] and making a grimace, and you could not go alongside a building without touching it with your elbow.”⁴

“For progress there is no cure,” von Neumann writes to Wigner in The MANIAC. But Labatut neglects to add what von Neumann said next in the essay he’s quoting in this passage:

“Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.” There is, as he puts it, no ‘complete recipe’—no panacea—for avoiding extinction at the hands of technology. “We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.”

For all our hand-wringing about runaway technology, in the nearly seventy years that have passed since ‘Can We Survive Technology’ was published, I doubt anyone has come up with a better summary than that.

Is reason ethical?

Labatut’s characters say von Neumann suffers from a “childlike moral blindness” that is the result of his mathematically reductive worldview. In short, he’s too rational.

Despite loving the book, I strongly disagree with this premise, common as it is in literary circles. Perhaps Labatut’s religious experience (he says he “suffered a brief period of intense, all-consuming faith when I was young”) makes him more likely to worry that people will try to fill the ‘god-shaped hole’ left by religion with science. Though brought up vaguely Hindu, I’ve been a non-believer for as long as I can remember.

Moreover, I tend to feel that far greater evil has been unleashed on the world by those acting irrationally. One would struggle to blame higher mathematics for religious extremism, nativism and race-based hatreds, misogyny and totaliarianism, all of which, not uncoincidentally, were alien to von Neumann’s psyche.

Von Neumann could sometimes view ethical questions with a degree of detachment. “A mind of von Neumann’s inexorable logic,” Wigner wrote, “had to understand and accept much that most of us do not want to accept and do not even wish to understand.” Most famously, von Neumann argued (along with many other intellectuals at the time) for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union before the country amassed a nuclear aresenal itself (though even this seems to me due to an absolute dread of a Third World War, which he was thankfully wrongly convinced Stalin would precipitate, rather than cold calculation).

But appalling as it seems, thinking awful thoughts is often necessary in life and before wagging a finger at rationalists, it is worth acknowledging that, for example, universal healthcare without limitless money is possible only if we are also prepared to gauge the financial worth of saving a human life (approximately £30,000 per quality-adjusted life year gained in the UK). Ignoring these unpleasant trade offs (and as we all discovered during the recent pandemic, we can ignore them but we can’t escape them) is, to me “childlike moral blindness”. The real von Neumann seemed physiologically incapable of ignoring them.

In The MANIAC, then, von Neumann is a walking metaphor rather than a real man. But does it matter? While to be fair, Labatut goes to great pains to remind readers that he deals with fiction, not fact, part of the attraction of what Sebald and Labatut do is that readers can and do imagine that it is true. And even people who should know better appear to struggle with this.

“‘The Maniac’ does, by and large, assume the guise of fiction,” says the New York Times review, “but I did find myself wondering what it gained from this that a (minor and essentially rhetorical) tweak into long-form journalism would retract.’

What it would retract is the entire engine of the novel, the whole journey into science and technology’s heart of darkness. None of that works if von Neumann is rendered truthfully. Real people’s stories are rarely neat and do not come with an existential lesson wrapped up for us with a bow.

The mixing of fact and fiction in this manner can be a dangerous game. Years after Sebald’s death, his lies were roundly criticised. Labatut argues that sometimes you have to be willing to pervert and distort your raw materials to reach the heart of something.

And that is a great freedom because if you only stick to facts, there are levels of the human experience that you’re not going to touch…

But whose experience?

You have to be willing to pervert and distort your raw materials, because you’re trying to reach a truth that is very particular to fiction, that is concerned with what is mysterious, incomprehensible, and dark.

But whose truth?

The MANIAC brilliantly conveys our shared angst over AI. But I wonder… these worries about a superintelligent agent some day lumbering away, unshackled from the limits imposed on it… aren’t they something of a distraction from the problems we face right now? As wealth accrues into an ever smaller number of hands, and mums skip meals so their kids can eat, and we are told AI will be a magic genie that will bring about a universal high income or destroy us completely, I can’t help but think what AI will most probably do, most effectively, is funnel even more money into those exact same hands.

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1. Labatut has said he thinks physics needs more swear words which suggests to me that he has never set foot inside an actual physics lab.

2. Ironically, given von Neumann’s absence from Nolan’s film, this is the bomb featured in posters for Oppenheimer.

3. Labatut’s depiction of Klára Dán is also rather cruel. In the novel, she characterises Eugene Wigner as “an envious little creature who could never take his slobbering eyes off me”. For various reasons, including the fact that Wigner had lost the love of his life to illness, this seems an astoundingly unlikely thing for her to think. It is implied that Dán miscarried because von Neumann would not help her with a garage door. Dán did indeed blame him but von Neumann was almost certainly away when the incident occurred, not at home as is the case in the novel. His near-continual absences were understandably a source of unhappiness for her.

4. Labatut departs from known facts many times, of course, in The MANIAC. There are minor changes such as the fact that von Neumann studied chemistry and not mathematics at the University of Berlin, or that Demis Hassabis went to a grammar school. More seriously, Labatut’s insinuation that von Neumann stole Barricelli’s ideas or that they hated each other is, as far as I know, completely fictitious.