Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  A physics teacher at Brookline High showed special interest, but neither nurture nor, it seems, nature had predisposed Billy to endearing behavior. (Even his awed cousins found him odd and unapproachable—and their aunt Sarah domineering and heartless—recalled one of them, the critic and quiz show host Clifton Fadiman.) Billy interrupted the principal’s Bible-reading to declare his atheist opposition. He gave academic help to classmates, who nicknamed him “professor.” Let’s hope some meant it fondly. The same fall of 1906 that Norbert got the “remarkable boy” press treatment at Tufts, Billy’s high school foray elicited notably less favorable gawking in an article headlined “A Phenomenon in Kilts.” Its author had unobtrusively observed the scene as teenagers thundered past the small interloper on the stairs between classes. After making his way to an empty physics lab to finish assembling a clock, Billy began “skipping and dancing about the many-windowed room like a child in his nursery.” The reporter, unsettled rather than charmed, seized on Billy’s gaze as confirmation of dire prodigy lore: “There is something weird and ‘intense’ in his gray eye, and the way he looks out under his eyebrows.”

  · 4 ·

  Might everything have turned out differently—for both boys, but especially Billy—had the Sidises taken their cue from the Wieners’ post-high-school decision to shield Norbert from the Harvard limelight? It’s tempting to wonder. Instead, the Sidises aimed to pick up the pace. When Billy was only nine (he had soon left Brookline High and then sped through calculus and read Einstein on his own), they were already pressing for admission to Harvard. The thought of engaging high-powered tutors (Boris’s former line of work, after all) apparently never occurred to them. Possibly their motives were ones that latter-day meritocrats would recognize: to give their son an edge in the superchild spectacle, and his father’s reputation a boost. Doubtless Sarah was impatient to see Billy—who so revered and resembled Boris, she constantly said—become another brilliant outlier welcomed into the most prestigious ivory tower. (“Our undisciplinables,” William James once announced at a Harvard commencement dinner, “are our proudest product.”) How Billy viewed the plan, particularly after his misfit experiences in the Brookline schools, nobody evidently felt the need to ask. What the inevitable campus hoopla would be like, the Sidises either didn’t consider or didn’t care—though in theory, of course, Billy wasn’t supposed to become self-conscious about his specialness. Their nephew Clifton Fadiman later brutally diagnosed Boris and Sarah as lacking in “wisdom, even any common sense. They were, except intellectually, fools.”

  Social obtuseness seemed to be Billy’s style, too, which was a blessing of sorts, at least at the outset, when Harvard, overcoming its qualms about his lack of maturity, admitted him at eleven. The boy who had happily skipped around the Brookline High lab displayed a frisky imperviousness in Cambridge, too. “I was certainly no model of the social graces,” Norbert wrote of his sightings of William, “but it was clear to me that no other child of his age would have gone down Brattle Street wildly swinging a pigskin bag, without either order or cleanliness. He was an infant with a full share of the infractuosities of a grown-up Dr. Johnson.” William gave no sign of being fazed that he didn’t fit into a world of polished young gentlemen. Nor had awed adulation (and a rash of newspaper coverage) gone to his head, a big Sunday magazine profile in the fall was pleased to report. William was “utterly without self-conceit, but still with a broad grin for the humor of the situation: ‘It’s very strange,’ he remarked in his high, clear voice, ‘but you know, I was born on April Fool’s Day!’ ” A mind busy with vector analysis—he was enrolled in only one class the first term, advanced math—could tune out the fuss and the awkwardness.

  But of course the purpose of William’s being at Harvard wasn’t to remain off in his own orbit. And in fact, Sarah had seen to it that he had been hearing about his unusual feats for years. Whether or not William much liked it, she had made performing and pontificating a habit. Mixed in with his cluelessness was what could be taken for arrogance—and certainly was in his parents’ case. Their message, after all, not so subtly implied that those who didn’t match the Sidises’ pedagogical success (which was everybody) were mere slackers. Under the circumstances, the idea that Billy would deliver a lecture to the Mathematical Club in January 1910—an event arranged by a Harvard math professor whose father, a retired faculty member, was a family friend of the Sidises—was as loaded as it was alluring. Not least, another round in an ever more intense spotlight was guaranteed. Now the stakes had been raised, inviting stark questions no child should have to face and the public can rarely resist: Was he keeping up the pace, on the way to becoming a creative genius? Or was he a victim of parental ambition, headed for failure?

  The substance of William’s talk was impressively incomprehensible: that was the gist of accounts by reporters inclined to suggest that what was over their heads was beyond the rest of the audience, too. One informed listener was Norbert, who found the discussion original in the sense that William had consulted no sources in formulating a notably full account of the fourth dimension—a real achievement for anyone, never mind an eleven-year-old. It was William’s style that entertained the press. He had his professorial act down—introductory patter, gestures, arcane vocabulary, diagrams, even a closing glance at his watch. Not least, he was impatiently supercilious with the assembled professorial elite. Rapidly recapping a point for one questioner, William inquired, “Is that any plainer now?”

  The retired Harvard professor whose son had arranged the talk was on the alert for trouble, socially attuned as his old friend Boris clearly was not. At Harvard, if anywhere, “such a mind should find its home,” the professor wrote of William in a letter to the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, worried that the boy was becoming a mere freakish spectacle. The university, he urged, should “do its best for the preservation and protection of that new type.” William was a potential guiding light, not merely another phenomenal calculator. The Mathematical Club got a chance to make the comparison with another performer, a month after William’s talk, when “Marvelous Griffith,” a farmer, displayed his prowess in the same Sever Hall. Young Sidis probed concepts, but Griffith’s “system depended too much on his own inherent genius for mathematics to be of any general service in their instruction system,” a faculty member concluded.

  But by then, William had stirred a press backlash that revived an old-style type of prodigy—an exploited specimen, enfeebled by ill-advised precocity. On January 27, 1910, a front-page article in The New York Times reported that young William had been “weakened recently by overstudy” and had been felled by a cold after his lecture. A longer account inside the paper diagnosed a “breakdown” and blamed Boris. To say that Dr. Sidis’s “new and better system of education” had backfired, the Times duly noted, might be premature. But he had unquestionably failed to shield his sensitive son from “the morbid excitements and excessive attention to which he probably has been subjected” due to his feats, and which could be fatal. The article was a particularly unsavory instance of just such voyeurism, an irony that went unnoticed. It was also based on false rumors.

  Yet the story—in spirit, though not fact—was accurate. William, under stress, had been stranded. In addition to being fools, Clifton Fadiman judged in retrospect, his aunt and uncle, “though not cruel, had no truly paternal or maternal feeling: they could educate a child but not rear him, which is a different thing.” For William, happy when he could focus on his own interests, the Boris-emulation ceaselessly promoted by his mother seems to have been what passed for emotional intimacy in the household. Warmly insightful empathy, at any rate, wasn’t a family strong suit. William had in fact caught a cold after his talk. Though he apparently didn’t suffer a collapse of any sort, he did stay home for some time. But solicitous stocktaking wasn’t on the agenda.

  Boris was in the throes of opening a sanatorium for “nervous patients” up the coast in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on an estate bequeathed to him
by a wealthy benefactress. If the innuendoes had been truer—and the young genius had gotten at least a dose of concerned expert attention—perhaps William would have benefited. Boris’s announced specialty, curing “persons who are hobby ridden,” was at least pertinent. William, who hadn’t let classwork eclipse his various independent projects (he devised, for example, an elaborate constitution for a utopia he called Hesperia), had developed an obsession with trolley transfers. But Boris had new patients to worry about, and in any case, parental protective gestures, such as they were, tended to irk William. Sarah had made a point of taking the streetcar with him to and from Cambridge during the fall—never mind that he’d learned all about Boston’s growing public transportation system and yearned for a solitary commute between Harvard clamor and home. Now Sarah, with young Helena to tend to, was about to take on the management of the sanatorium as well. Like Boris, she had her hands full.

  William was on his own as he entered adolescence, and more of an outsider than ever on campus. Under suspicion now of being mentally unbalanced, he was prey to continued press hounding. An article noted that when he found his math class tedious, William indulged in distracting antics like twirling his hat despite requests that he stop. His lack of social awareness, no longer a shield, left him painfully exposed. With the family’s New Hampshire move, the plan was for him to try Harvard dorm life. But he was at sea with fellow students, the dupe of pranks that mostly turned on his awkward ignorance about girls. Bullying soon drove him to a rooming house on Brattle Street. There, approaching thirteen and not exactly practical, William had to cope alone all week—though at least he was spared a mother whose aggressive nagging had intensified under the stress of her added burdens at the Sidis Psychopathic Institute.

  Meanwhile, Boris, evidently feeling beleaguered too, erupted as a public scold, precisely the kind of parent no prodigy needs. In June 1911, Boris’s “Philistine and Genius” lecture appeared in updated form as a short book in which he pulled no punches. Extolling his remarkable son (though not by name), he excoriated a “drift into national degeneracy” and warned that war was imminent. Sidis was “bent on repelling, offending, and estranging,” remarked one reviewer. It was the screed of a man who had concluded that his message about America’s backward approach to education wasn’t getting across after all. “Poor old college owls, academic barn-yard-fowls and worn-out sickly school-bats” was just one litany of derision. Boris never paused to consider who would pay the price for his venom. Decades later Sarah recognized that her husband had “pulled down upon his stout head, and upon Billy who was so very young—the anger that comes from hurt pride. Educators, psychologists, editorial writers and newspaper readers were furious with him. And their fury was a factor in Billy’s life upon which we had not counted.”

  What she didn’t say, or see, was that Boris had also bequeathed plenty of his own fury directly to his son, which wasn’t part of the Sidis theory. That William was already feeling fiercely embattled became clear when, his college career at an end, the press cornered him once again. He graduated cum laude at sixteen in June 1914, with a wide array of courses (and a batch of Cs in junior year) under his belt. The Boston Herald was ready with salutes to his record-breaking prowess. He was “mentally…regarded by wise men as the most remarkable youth in the world” and was on his way to becoming “the youngest college professor in the world,” with an appointment to teach math at Rice Institute. As for William’s own thoughts about the path ahead, or about his Harvard ordeals, he at first seemed wisely determined to keep them to himself. He offered this brusque—or perhaps anxious—brush-off to the hovering reporters he hated: “I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds.”

  But William wasn’t going to get away so easily. What were his one-of-a-kind plans for his personal, never mind intellectual, future? Such an inquiry promised ideal grist for the press. It was also the stuff of adolescent crisis for William, who got sucked in by an insinuating reporter. He needed to talk, and the Boston Herald was ready to listen. The picture that accompanied the two-page spread showed a filled-out young man in a suit, complete with a small daisy tie-pin, looking very mature for his age. It was William’s graduation photo, in which he offered a reserved smile and a warm gaze. Two sidebars excerpted temperate statements of Boris’s core educational tenets. But the headline brimmed with mockery: “HARVARD’S BOY PRODIGY VOWS NEVER TO MARRY Sidis Pledges Celibacy Beneath Sturdy Oak, Has 154 Rules Which Govern His Life, ‘Women Do Not Appeal to Me,’ He Says; He Is 16.”

  William even let the reporter into his Brattle Street rooms. The interview began in the vein of a therapy session in which a patient describes dire pain while deep in denial of just that. With odd pride, William laid out his obsessive-compulsive rituals for steering clear of women, though he also seemed half-aware of how peculiarly self-entrapping they might appear. “Many of my rules are checks rather than hard and fast laws,” he explained. “They act as safety valves.” It sounded like advice from Boris-the-hobby-expert on keeping compulsions within bounds. But rules for tempering rigidly rule-based thinking are easier to cite than to apply, especially for a teenager faced with a huge transition.

  Readers didn’t need to know the family drama to detect an alienated son, though William was working hard to keep his fury under wraps. He was caught up in his own version of the struggle for balance and meaning that had sent a twenty-year-old John Stuart Mill into a depression. Where Mill, fearing he was merely a “manufactured man,” recognized a desperate need to reconnect with his feelings, a younger William grasped at equilibrium by denying them: “I had made up my mind that sentiment would make too much of an upset in my life,” he told the Herald reporter. It wasn’t just romance and sex but anger that he needed to keep at bay—anger that ran in the family. “I have a quick temper; ergo, I will not mingle a great deal with the fellows around me, then I shall not have occasion to lose my temper.”

  But the anger he barely suppressed seemed to be aimed above all at his parents. Without directly addressing his own past, he indicted the family as a prison for the young. William declared himself “not at all a believer in home life” or in “forcing children in the early stages of their education.” In one puzzling and poignant swipe, he all but abolished childhood: “No one should be dependent upon the good-will of others for support when too young to support himself.” He announced that he was “in a way…a Socialist,” perhaps not such a surprising allegiance for a prodigy who was feeling sabotaged by filial dependence, Harvard snobbery, and media prurience—and loneliness. His goal, he announced as he informed his interviewer that his earlier interest in the fourth dimension had entirely faded, was to “seek happiness in my own way.”

  · 5 ·

  When Norbert arrived at Harvard at fourteen, he quickly figured out that William wasn’t going to be a companion. But the unkempt boy swinging his pigskin bag seems to have inspired a fraught sense of fellowship in Norbert, who began his graduate studies in zoology already battling feelings of deep inadequacy, ostracism, and, worst of all, ill-fatedness. He did more than worry about William, who as the youngest oddity on campus was a magnet for the unwelcome glare that Norbert knew he was lucky to be mostly spared. (He knew better how to elude it, too, sometimes even fleeing down Cambridge alleyways to avoid reporters.) William was also a figure with whom he could readily identify—and wished he couldn’t. Norbert came to Harvard newly, and intensely, haunted by predictions of failure for a “freak of nature,” or nurture, of the sort the two of them were.

  He had spent the summer of 1909 in acute crisis after three years at Tufts. He had thrived there on the academic challenges, but four decades later in his memoir he described feeling off-balance, and not just in the lab, where he was hopelessly clumsy. Majoring in math while eagerly exploring biology and philosophy, he was “nearly completely a man for purposes of study.” Heading home each day to siblings and neighborhood buddies, he w
as “wholly a child for purposes of companionship.” Wherever he was, hormones left him feeling guilty and confused. And his father consistently kept him in his place. Leo, unlike the Sidises, zealously practiced what he preached about the dangers of singling a boy out for his brilliance—yet failed to consider the risks of eroding youthful confidence. His “Donkey!” explosions were bad. Perhaps worse was his refrain, in company and in the press, that Norbert was not just average but lazy. Leo surely didn’t believe it, especially once he had initiated his two bright daughters and younger son into his regimen, only to discover that they failed to make anything like Norbert’s progress—and were thoroughly intimidated. Still, Leo didn’t let up, even in his son’s presence.

  As the end of Norbert’s time at Tufts approached, he was an exhausted teenager with “severely lacerated self-esteem” who found himself preoccupied with death—calculating how many years he and everyone he knew might have left, and what he might accomplish. Self-doubt swamped him when he didn’t make Phi Beta Kappa and learned that the reason was “doubt as to whether the future of an infant prodigy would justify the honor.” Such a view stunned him. Votes of no confidence now seemed to be closing in. As the “prodigy comes to realize that the elders of the community are suspicious of him,” Norbert wrote later, “he begins to fear reflections of this suspicion in the attitude of his contemporaries.” He slipped into a real depression over the summer, with a lingering low fever and no sense of his future.