by Ann Hulbert
Boris also promoted the theory of “reserve energy.” He claimed co-credit with William James for discovering this idea of “second wind,” which Leo swore by, too. Hitherto unknown levels of energy were accessible to those with real focus, the psychologists had decided. For adults, the emphasis was on endurance, working through initial fatigue to draw on otherwise unused sources of mental strength. The application to children, who were naturally given to scattered interests, was breezier. The point was to inspire effortless, deep absorption, which fueled the kind of learning that late-starters never tapped into. Once bad habits set in and vulnerable young minds were clouded by superstitious nonsense and fears—the crass staples of American child-rearing—the moment had been missed.
Lessons, harnessing imaginations that might otherwise wander, needn’t be long or onerous. The ideal result, far from a frail-necked specialist, was an accomplished generalist who thrived on a varied curriculum. Though Boris made no mention of group activities, he picked up on the refrain of the contemporary kindergarten movement: purposeful play. “That is the key to the whole situation,” he liked to emphasize. “Get the child so interested in study that study will truly be play.” Leo stressed the anticram theme and the importance of following a child’s inclinations. His son Norbert didn’t “learn by [rote], as a parrot might, but by reasoning.” Leo took a swipe at a school system that rewarded not “the child who thinks best but the one who remembers most”—and that shut its doors for months each year. Summer breaks were “one of the absurdities of American life,” the Reverend Berle agreed, when children “absolutely forget that they [have] brains…which must be kept active in developing habits of observation, attention and self-control.”
Boris and Leo didn’t have brain scans to back up theories very similar to notions that now carry the imprimatur of the lab—about early brain plasticity, the benefits of exploratory play, the creative experience of “flow,” the problem of extended school vacations. Instead they lucked into extraordinarily curious and focused boys who supplied evidence that went to their fathers’ heads. Boris and Leo could generalize grandly as William and Norbert arrived at Harvard because they could point to amazing results in sons who were not narrow prodigies at all—although they were hardly average children either. The boys’ pre-Harvard feats, often jumbled by an initially awed press eager for anecdotes, merged into an updated version of John Stuart Mill’s trajectory. Which boy had accomplished what by when wasn’t the point: they were an amalgam of the wonder child hidden in every child.
The milestones began with mastery of the alphabet before two and full literacy by three or four. Norbert drew letters in the sand with a nursemaid; Billy had ABC blocks dangling in his crib and his parents played letter games with him. Avid reading ensued, mostly of nonfiction. The boys then speedily amassed languages (Latin, Greek, German, French, and Russian for both, and some Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian for Billy). Their intense scientific interests (anatomy and astronomy for Billy, chemistry and naturalist zeal for Norbert) inspired unusual strides before school age as well.
At which point—keeping up with Mill, who wrote a history of Rome at six—the wonder boys became eager knowledge producers as well as consumers. Between six and eight, Billy was especially busy. He invented his own language, Vendergood, and wrote a forty-page explication of it, in a style that veered from whimsical to pompous. He designed a grammar for teaching three languages at once and, according to his list of authorial accomplishments, also produced an astronomy textbook. Surely spurred on by Boris’s prolific psychological output, Billy turned a passion for calendars into a primer, too. At eleven, while his father was toiling away on a translation of the total Tolstoy oeuvre, Norbert wrote a paper on “The Theory of General Ignorance.” Carefully copied over in ink in a brown notebook, it represented his own step-by-step philosophizing, not a presentation of others’ views. Leo, understandably impressed by his son’s lucid argument for “the impossibility of man’s being certain of anything,” rewarded him with a special trip to Maine.
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Yet of course neither the men nor the boys—nor their families—were cut from the same cloth at all. That much was certain, a grown-up Norbert noted in his memoir. Their intellectual feats lumped them together as fascinating new Harvard outliers. But as Norbert appreciated in retrospect, and seems to have intuited even as a boy, what really mattered was how their social relations were, as he put it, “taken care of.” Or, more accurately, not taken care of. By the time they arrived on campus, the boys’ experiences had been strikingly different—each distinct from the other’s, and neither in line with the effortless harmony that Leo and Boris liked to advertise for their avid tutees. Look behind the scenes, and the recalcitrant details leap out, especially in—who would have guessed?—Norbert’s and Billy’s less-than-smooth mastery of math. For two singular children, both supersmart but otherwise a study in contrasts, temperaments and family dynamics counted far more than paternal theories or pedagogical tactics ever could. Which didn’t mean that their fathers (and, for Billy, his mother) were marginal. They were crucial, but in ways neither Boris nor Leo began to fathom.
Life in the Wiener household was a whirlwind, despite the best efforts of Leo’s wife, the very proper former Bertha Kahn of Missouri, reared in assimilationist gentility by her businessman father and southern belle mother. Norbert, contrary to his father’s claims, was anything but lazy. An insatiable learner who pored over books early, Nubbins—Norbert’s family nickname—had the freedom, and the inclination, to be as vigorous as he was intellectually curious. He had a model: Leo, a tireless scholar and farmer and mushroom hunter. (Leo had set out from Germany at nineteen on a quest to create a vegetarian utopia in Belize, and when that voyage was aborted, he embarked on a long and circuitous American journey as a jack-of-all-trades—pausing in Kansas City to get semidomesticated by the woman he courted—before his lucky landing at Harvard.)
As a small boy in Cambridge, Norbert eagerly sought out friends. Chunky and full of physical energy, he threw himself into neighborhood games, despite his bad eyesight and coordination—and more fearfulness than he cared to admit. From a young age he especially loved the outdoor “tramps” his father encouraged, and the “element of élan, of triumph, of glorious and effective effort, of drinking deep of life and the emotions thereof” that romantic Leo brought to them. Indoors, the Wieners’ “house of learning” overflowed with visitors, conversation, books, and emotional outbursts. A sister Constance, four years younger, was a baby to quarrel with before she became his beloved companion. Another sister and a brother followed. With a husband whose “shaggy unconformity” and temper she vainly tried to tame, Bertha Wiener had her hands full. That her zealous firstborn was a nub off the old block taxed her further.
By the time Norbert was seven, his father decided it was time for third grade at the local Peabody School in Cambridge. There the stellar reader was bumped up to fourth grade, only to run into math difficulties with a mean teacher. Norbert didn’t know his multiplication tables and didn’t take to rote learning, though he was speeding ahead in math reasoning through avid problem solving with his father. Leo, math-minded himself, pulled him out of school to offer “a greater challenge and stimulus to my imagination,” as Norbert put it in his memoir. There was plenty of that during two more years of home-based learning, much of it outsourced in wonderful ways—a lovely Radcliffe tutor for Latin and German, a chemistry student who helped set up a lab, and endless time in the Agassiz Museum at Harvard, not to mention roaming with friends.
NORBERT WIENER Credit 1
But math studies were another story. His father, whom he praised in his memoir as “a poet at heart, amid the frigid and repressed figures of an uninspiring and decadent Boston,” was also a fierce taskmaster. Norbert’s later bright-eyed photograph didn’t betray the behind-closed-doors reality that had come before. In public, Leo prided himself on setting store by “the blessedness of blundering.” Making children “work
out problems” gave them the chance to fumble, and to “acquire that sense of mastery, that joy of triumph, which is of itself an incentive to further effort.” So Leo explained his approach to his biggest journalist fan (whom Norbert later anointed H. “Addlehead” Bruce). In his memoir, Norbert put it rather differently: “No casual interest could satisfy my father’s demand for precise and ready knowledge.” Norbert’s description of algebra lessons with Leo reveal a habit of thundering.
He would begin the discussion in an easy, conversational tone. This lasted exactly until I made the first mathematical mistake. Then the gentle and loving father was replaced by the avenger of the blood. The first warning he gave me of my unconscious delinquency was a very sharp and aspirated “What!” and if I did not follow this by coming to heel at once, he would admonish me, “Now do this again!” By this time I was weeping and terrified. Almost inevitably I persisted in sin, or what was worse, corrected an admissible statement into a blunder. Then the last shreds of my father’s temper were torn, and he addressed me in a phraseology which seemed to me even more violent than it was because I was not aware that it was a free translation from the German.
Leo let loose with brute, ass, fool, donkey. The lessons being blessedly short, sturdy Norbert weathered the tirades. But they “often ended in a family scene. Father was raging, I was weeping, and my mother did her best to defend me”—only to watch Leo later belittle Nubbins in company. Another hurdle his father wasn’t about to publicize, because it suggested just what he denied—a boy under strain—left a more constructive mark: at eight, eye trouble for Norbert necessitated a half-year ban on reading or writing—doctor’s orders. Leo’s orders were to learn by ear. Those months spent working out algebra and geometry problems in his head introduced Norbert to a powerful ally: a highly unrote memory. In the bargain, he staked out a private inner sanctum and discovered his own unusual skill. “I relearned the world,” Norbert later told an MIT colleague. “My mind completely opened up. I could see things I never saw before.”
And then came another “unorthodox experiment,” as Norbert put it in his memoir. His father, now consumed by the herculean challenge of translating twenty-four volumes of Tolstoy in twenty-four months, decided to send his son to high school. The choice hardly seemed auspicious for a nine-year-old, especially a boy newly stranded by the family’s move to the rural Massachusetts town of Harvard. (Leo was in full Tolstoy mode, eager to farm.) But at nearby Ayer High, Norbert lucked into an ideal mentor. More accurately, Miss Laura Leavitt—a classics teacher whom Wiener later described as the “brains and conscience” of the school—was a maternal protector. She eased Norbert into kid-brother status among the students (even letting him sit on her lap at the intimidating start, before he learned “schoolroom behavior”). She made sure he connected with middle schoolers who shared the building. And her nephew became his best friend, just the company Norbert needed after homework recitations with a multitasking Leo, his eyes glued to Tolstoy—his ears alert as ever to any blunders.
Three years later, in the fall of 1906, Norbert graduated from Ayer High, fortified by “a sense of roots and security” (though recently buffeted, he also recalled in his memoir, by a severe case of “calf love”). Now almost twelve, he was a matriculant at Tufts College, in Medford, where the Wieners had moved for that purpose. The idea was to spare him the full glare of the spotlight that would have been his fate on the Harvard campus, which didn’t mean his college debut went unnoticed. He got an upbeat send-off for a prodigy. A Sunday magazine feature in the New York World pronounced Norbert “The Most Remarkable Boy in the World,” heralding his wholesomeness as much as his phenomenal progress. If his speech was a bit “prim and quaint”—“philosophy is a fairyland to me,” he told the reporter—his spirit was judged anything but. Norbert set off daily for campus with his dog at his heels, and he was a hit with the college guys. His eyes, “big and black and blazing [with]…something almost uncanny in their gaze,” conveyed the opposite of fragile precocity.
Billy’s home world was a calm idyll by comparison with the Wiener maelstrom. Officially at least, no family friction intruded on his mathematical awakening, or on anything, for that matter. “The most important thing we agreed on was that we should always agree,” Sarah wrote of the pact she and Boris had made about applying the Sidis approach to their son back at the moon-gazing start. Sarah Mandelbaum herself had missed out on the early learning that was purportedly so crucial. She had spent her childhood tending to siblings, but when she arrived in the United States at thirteen, unschooled, she was undeterred. So was her tutor, seven years her elder, who helped her ace her high school exams by eighteen and married her. By the time their baby was due six years later, her medical degree was behind her. Her focus was now the speedy progress of Boris (for whom clinical work with insane patients at New York’s recently established Pathological Institute was a prelude to his pursuit of yet another Harvard degree, an M.D.)—and of Billy.
Sarah, who later wrote it all up, said she ignored the latest American counsel against too much cuddling and swore by her husband’s principles, applying no fearsome discipline. Not that she was a laid-back mother. She appealed, she emphasized, only to Billy’s desire to please—her, for starters. As Boris had discovered in his role as her tutor-suitor, gratifying Sarah could be arduous but brought lots of plaudits for brilliance. She also imbued Billy with her own Boris-worship, eager to spur him on to efforts to awe his father, whom she described as besotted with his son. And “like all normal little fellows,” Billy loved being “the center of attention,” she claimed, which spurred him to feats of learning. Or did she love making him the center of attention? It was telling that Sarah proudly recounted how a wealthy neighbor in New York used to summon Billy to her apartment to show off for her guests.
At home, Billy at five months was joining his parents for meals, observing and listening to everything, learning to use a spoon by trial and error. Sarah described herself as omnipresent, joining Billy on the floor as she banished all baby talk and made learning a game, from alphabet blocks onward. Ever at hand (the Sidises’ second child, Helena, wasn’t born until a decade later), Sarah was ready to answer or help him research any question. Her account, though, suggested that the partnership was rather one-sided. Billy got swept up in whatever subject was introduced or captured his interest, and early on he let his mother know he could look things up on his own. At around three, he found her old Latin trot, for example. Sarah reported her surprise when one day he excitedly revealed his mastery to his stunned father and some visitors. Boris supplied Billy with calendars to familiarize him with days and numbers. By five, the hyperfocused little boy had figured out by himself how to calculate the day on which any date fell.
But Billy wasn’t simply a convivial bundle of curiosity; nor were his parents the models of progressive insight and flexibility they imagined. Outside the home cocoon, at the Adirondack resort where the Sidises spent summers among academic company during their New York years, the family style made an especially dramatic contrast to the free-range spirit of the philosopher John Dewey’s brood. Sarah watched bemused as the educational reformer’s children ran wild, confirmed in her own vigilance. Not that her son was clamoring to join in the unstructured peer chaos. (Sports held no interest for Billy, Sarah said, because Boris mocked them: so much for William James’s advice about motor activities.) At breakfast, served between eight and nine, Billy threw a fit when food arrived at seven-forty-five, according to the account of another guest who took notes and published them later. He inventoried every guest by his or her room number, and pets by their kennel numbers. Ask him to display his expertise, on that subject or any other, and he was stubbornly unresponsive; betray some bit of ignorance in his presence, and he was encyclopedic.
WILLIAM J. SIDIS Credit 2
When the family moved back to the Boston area so Boris could go to medical school, among Billy’s favorite pastimes was drilling his father on his anatomy studies. “Ah
a, you forgot the fifth cranial nerve,” his mother would hear him sing out. He also headed off, now six, to a Brookline primary school. There he was an impatient handful for teachers, according to a later press account, covering his ears when he was bored, irrepressible when he was interested. At recess Billy was a loner, avoiding all games and “expounding the nebular hypothesis” to less-than-attentive schoolmates. And he balked at math, even as he zoomed through seven grades in the half year he lasted in school.
At least that was Boris’s story, though Billy’s fascination with calendars and numbers suggests a different struggle at work: a boy absorbed by a rule-bound realm and eager not to be disturbed, and a father determined to prove that his methods could produce more than mere narrow calculating prowess. In any case, Billy’s math resistance gave his father a chance to make targeted use of his pet concept—the psychology of suggestion. Boris began the subtle strategy as homeschooling resumed. After sessions with dominoes and other math games, and staged conversations between Sarah and Boris about the many delights and uses of math, Billy at eight was busy inventing a new logarithmic table. No Leo-style eruptions were entailed—but no soul-bonding excursions transpired either. Mother-son trips to the hilltop behind the house to star-gaze in the evenings were not Billy’s idea of fun. “He soon told me,” Sarah noted, “he could see better and think more clearly when he was alone.”
Before long Billy was back in school—a real gamble, as his parents surely could have anticipated. In retrospect, some have reached for an Asperger’s diagnosis, but no label is, or was, required to appreciate that a loner so woefully lacking in practice with peers was in for trouble. Boris and Sarah may well have cited Norbert’s path as an example when they approached Brookline High about letting Billy, now eight, attend for several hours a day in the fall of 1906: the Wieners had just arrived in Medford, and their high school grad was making headlines at Tufts. But personable young Norbert, who had won over teachers and teenagers in out-of-the-way Ayer High, was not a helpful precedent at all.