by Ann Hulbert
By the time Norbert started at Harvard, he was armed with social awareness that he saw poor William could have used—but it brought a burden, too: acute self-consciousness about his status as a misfit in a setting where, as he put it in his memoir, “a gentlemanly indifference, a studious coldness, an intellectual imperturbability joined with the graces of society [to make] the ideal Harvard man.” In a maladroit hurry in the lab (he shifted from zoology to biology), Norbert was always breaking glass and messing up procedures, to his embarrassment. He later remembered his chagrin when some classmates bought him a watch: he’d had no idea he was bothering them by constantly asking for the time. Norbert went ahead and threw himself, as he always had, into more than his studies. He dared to join in pick-up basketball games in the gym basement but quickly realized his glasses couldn’t take the rough games even if he could. A commuter, he mingled happily in the library of the Harvard Union between classes. That was where the intellectual, unclubbable sort hung out—generating murmurs of disapproval as anti-Semitism became more overt under President Lowell. Norbert’s mother had primly disparaged Jews throughout his childhood, and somehow the topic of the family’s own heritage never arose in the household. Now she urged him to spend less time in the Union. Norbert, who allied himself with his father in boldly pursuing truth and overcoming bigotry, was distressed.
Leo meanwhile had decided he wasn’t particularly pleased with his son’s prospects in biology, so in the fall of 1910 he dispatched Norbert to Cornell on a scholarship to study philosophy, for which he had shown talent as a preteen at Tufts. Compared to William, whose parents sought out exposure and skimped on support, Norbert had a fiercely protective guide in coping with what now goes by the term multipotentiality—high abilities pointing in a confusing array of directions. Still, Leo’s bossy approach to the blundering was hard on Norbert, who welcomed some distance from the man who was hero and taskmaster in one. Nearly sixteen, he stumbled into what turned out to be a “black year of my life.” He faced a daunting endeavor his father did not direct: a struggle to claim an identity and the feelings of agency that go with it—just what prodigious children appear to have early but soon enough discover they need urgently. William was at a similar crossroads as he, also sixteen, left Harvard four years later.
The day his father dropped him off at his boardinghouse at Cornell, Norbert glimpsed just how disorienting his quest for perspective on himself was going to be. The two of them paid a visit to an old friend of Leo’s, a professor of ethics, who had agreed to keep an eye on Norbert during the year. In the course of conversation, the rumor that Maimonides was an ancestor of the Wieners somehow cropped up. Norbert promptly went off to investigate this unfamiliar philosopher who seemed to be a relative, only to be shocked to discover that the great Aristotelian had headed the Jewish community of Egypt. The implication hit him: his family was Jewish. Norbert gazed in the mirror at features he could now recognize as Semitic. He looked at his beloved sister’s photograph and saw she wasn’t just a pretty girl, but a pretty Jewish girl.
And suddenly his parents were exposed not just as social pariahs—if he was to credit the genteelly anti-Semitic Bertha Wiener’s views—but as, in essence, liars. Norbert found it next to impossible to forgive his mother’s prejudice; he went on to explore her forebears and realized that her maiden name, Kahn, was in fact Cohen. He struggled to excuse his assimilationist father, who had always conveyed respect for Jews; Norbert decided he must have wanted to spare his children the “consciousness of belonging to an undervalued group.” Norbert never mentioned what must have been the other revelation: he and William were now joined as double outliers.
He was miserable, he wrote in his memoir. A “confused mass of feelings of resentment, despair, and rejection” overwhelmed him. Just coping day to day felt like more than he could manage. For the first time, Norbert didn’t have his mother to hound him about cleanliness and his father to enforce disciplined study. He floundered in his one math course, and his philosophy papers were so crabbed that he was asked if German was his first language. In his letters home, Norbert staged no confrontation, betrayed no collapse. He kept saying things were “OK” and duly reported on his finances, which he had never handled on his own before. “My only want is some boy companion, but boys are scarce hereabouts,” he wrote his mother, and in a postscript asked his favorite sister, Constance, for news of “W.J.S.” (William) and the Berle children, and his non-Harvard friends.
But Norbert also began staking out new ground with his father as he wrote home. Leo, conscious of his status as a brilliant but marginal figure in his Slavic field, had often hashed out philological points in his son’s company. Now Norbert, struggling with his deepening sense of himself as an outlier, seemed to be pushing his father to be a bolder model. If he could see him not as an oppressive Pygmalion but as part of a tradition of unconventional thinkers that reached back to Maimonides, perhaps he could banish his own fearful expectations: Norbert didn’t put it this way, yet finding sustenance in social solidarity—not just looking for it within—had always been his instinct. Deeply confused, he never contemplated embracing the Jewish faith, but here was a broader context for his own prodigyhood. As he later noted of the Sidises, the emphasis on honing rabbinic learnedness in every generation was still fresh in Jewish émigrés. Perhaps Maimonides, a Jew steeped in Muslim tradition who left his mark on Western philosophy, offered a cosmopolitan ideal: a bold and resilient outsider receptive to new ideas from exotic sources.
Amid his Cornell woes, Norbert kept up with his father’s linguistic studies. He raised questions (“What is the Egyptian word for goose?”) and weighed in on Leo’s theories, one of which had lately been challenged by a scholar. “Give it to him!” Norbert urged, eager for “a good philological fight.” Here was a son/student trying to turn the tables. It was “devastating,” Norbert wrote later, to learn that Leo had spread the notion “that my failures were my own but my successes were my father’s.” Still, he wanted Leo to be an undaunted success himself. His mother was always urging her bristly menfolk to fit in—which, given what he now knew, perhaps made Norbert bridle more at her conformism. He seemed to be pushing for a combative, productive example as he foundered. Norbert wasn’t failing by any means, but a professor had informed him that his work wasn’t what had been expected—hardly the verdict a boy worried about fading promise needed. Nor was the news, as the term ended, that his fellowship wouldn’t be renewed. “How is your work?” he wrote his father in May, underscoring four times the demand that followed. “I want more concrete news!!!!!!!!”
For Jews, the way ahead was all uphill, which could serve as a kind of relief: it was an alternative to the downward flameout augured for a prodigy. An avid hiker like his father, Norbert knew the terrain. In fact, for Norbert, the steeper the path the better, to judge by drawings he sent as postscripts to his sister Constance in his letters from Ithaca. His pen and ink efforts showed the two of them heading nearly vertically up Mount Washington’s Boott Spur trail, and not falling off. Norbert’s fears and depression had fueled a sense of himself as “nervous” in temperament. But he also set great store by the stamina that had allowed him to weather Leo’s treatment.
The sense of “filial servitude” lingered as Norbert finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in June 1913, writing a dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. But now eighteen, he was on the brink of a much broader apprenticeship, with plenty of detours in it. As Norbert doubtless appreciated, his father was in no position to demand that he keep up the dizzying pace of superachievement. Indeed, Leo now emphasized to the press that there was no hurry. His son—“he is so young, only eighteen”—had “plenty of time….He has not begun to specialize yet” and would probably be heading abroad.
Leo himself, having set sail for America in 1882 at nineteen, was over thirty by the time he settled into his life and work. He had never regretted his picaresque journey from New Orleans to Kansas City, pic
king up odd jobs and curious acquaintances—and yet more languages (including Gaelic!). “Just Missed Becoming a Great Merchant,” read the headline of a profile of Wiener Sr. in The Boston Daily Globe in 1914, which went on to note, “Passion for Languages Finally Fitted Him Into His Life Work.” Fortuitous swerves plus zealous focus: for anybody heading into young adulthood, not merely a former prodigy, counting on both is to be recommended—but not, Norbert and William discovered, as anything like a surefire formula for success.
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As Norbert and William navigated their way amid wartime uneasiness, what made the difference was temperament, social circumstances, and luck, as much as paternal guidance or neglect—not that the factors could be readily disentangled, and not that their fathers ceased to be important. For William, a resolve to sabotage Boris’s enterprise unfolded not just tragically but ironically. In his effort to escape the public attention and expectations thrust upon him, he turned his back on achieving recognized greatness—only to end up very much his father’s son, feeling isolated and besieged. Further exposure to academia didn’t go well. As a seventeen-year-old math teacher at Rice, William was yet again mercilessly teased by undergraduates older than he was. Enrolled after that at Harvard Law School, he dropped out in his third year, not the collector of credentials his father had been. If his growing interest in radical politics encouraged any new bonding with Boris (the erstwhile tutor of Russian serfs), a bitter break with his parents was in store after William got arrested at a Boston May Day Socialist march in 1919 that dissolved into mayhem.
By now twenty-one, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison on charges of rioting and assaulting a police officer, though he had done neither. In William’s later version of events, his actual fate was worse. Before he could appeal the initial sentence, he was “kidnapped” by his parents and forcibly kept in the New Hampshire sanatorium for a year, after which they whisked him to California—eager to keep him not just out of court and prison but also out of touch with fellow Socialists in Boston. (Among them was an unrequited romantic interest: Martha Foley, who had marched alongside him and who went on to found Story magazine—a friend he courted ardently but without success.) Upon finally escaping to New York and low-level accounting work, he was spooked, in flight from his parents’ “protection,” press attention, his reputation (he promptly quit if officemates learned who he was), the legal charges. In 1923, when Boris died at fifty-six of a cerebral hemorrhage, William didn’t go to the funeral. But he did write to a Harvard Law School faculty member, eager to discover whether his case had been dropped. William got good news, though he was shielded from learning the grounds for the dismissal of charges: Sarah had testified that her son was “mentally abnormal.” Already determined to avoid his mother at all costs, William hardly needed to find that out in order to hate her, as he often said he did.
William’s sister, Helena, kept in fond touch—grateful for her big brother’s tutorial efforts as she grew up (their parents having decided she was too fragile for more than haphazard schooling) and gratified that he counted on her common sense. Not that her advice to try more challenging jobs made a dent. “I just want to work an adding machine, so I won’t have to use my mind on it,” he told her. “I want to use my mind for other things.” William, though mostly phobic about math, was as eclectic as ever in seeking happiness in his own intense and now anonymous way.
Writing under pseudonyms, he pursued a wide array of topics: the collection of streetcar transfers, the contributions various Indian tribes had made to American colonists’ notions of democracy, collisions on highways, trivia about his beloved city of Boston (for a magazine called What’s New in Town), and more. He put his name on his most ambitious endeavor, The Animate and the Inanimate, which was published (perhaps at his own expense) in 1925 to no notice. It set forth his ideas about the possible reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics, and was later judged by some—among them, Buckminster Fuller—to have anticipated versions of the big bang theory and black holes.
Be careful what you wish for seemed to be William’s belated message for Boris, who had never cared about conventional success or money and had fiercely championed the antiphilistine generalist. Not unlike his aggrieved father, William finally did erupt publicly, devastated by a reprise of the exposure that had begun with Boris and Sarah. In 1937, he was dragged back into the limelight in a cruelly patronizing New Yorker profile in the magazine’s “Where Are They Now?” series. It was written by James Thurber (under a pseudonym) and bore the title “April Fool!” Worse than a portrait of a burned-out recluse, the piece mercilessly mocked William’s still very busy mind. He broke his vow of seclusion to sue for invasion of privacy and malicious libel. The judge dismissed the case, which has become a classic in privacy law, and William, who worked on the briefs, lost the appeal. Once a public figure, always a public figure, the judge ruled, even as he lamented the ruthless intrusion. Once Boris Sidis’s son, always Boris Sidis’s son: that thought follows not far behind. William persisted with his various causes, especially active in defense of pacifism and of limited government, alienating allies again and again with his bullheadedness. In 1944, at forty-six, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Norbert, who vented his outrage at the New Yorker article in his memoir, risked sounding harsh in his assessment of William (by then dead): a “defeated—and honorably defeated—combatant in the battle for existence.” As for himself, Norbert’s verdict was stringent, too—that he was a near casualty, still struggling. In contrast to William, already at odds with his ill-attuned parents as he graduated from Harvard, Norbert left Cambridge with the opposite problem: a revered father who still couldn’t resist butting in, even if he was no longer bossing in the old way.
For Norbert, unable to overtly rebel against his hero, traveling a path beyond Leo’s ken proved crucial. Norbert surged onward academically, though not exactly smoothly. He won a prestigious Harvard postgraduate traveling fellowship and headed off to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, with Bertrand Russell, who had been assured (by Leo) that a sturdy specimen was on his way: “physically strong (weighing 170 lbs.), perfectly balanced morally and mentally, and shows no traits generally associated with early precocity. I mention all this to you that you may not assume that you are to deal with an exceptional or freakish boy, but with a normal student whose energies have not been misdirected.”
But Leo, of course, couldn’t guarantee good chemistry between them. Russell proved to be a ruthless mentor, and a homesick Norbert sent an unvarnished account to his father. Russell complained that Norbert’s views were a “horrible fog,” his exposition of them worse, and accused him of “too much confidence and cock-sureness.” Norbert had heard a lot worse in his day, and though wounded, he was hardly undone. Russell, he complained in turn, was “an iceberg. His mind impresses me as a keen, cold, narrow logical machine, that cuts the universe into neat little packets, that measure, as it were, just three inches each way.” His own mind, Norbert was discovering, was fertile—and more versatile in math than he had known. When things didn’t click the way they did in the brilliant G. H. Hardy’s math class at Cambridge, bearing down brought results. He was able to show dubious professors (and himself) that he could keep up with the rest of the class and feel gratified by his progress.
Norbert, not his father, was now maturely trying to decide where his real interests lay—in philosophy or math, perhaps applied math—and he was finding his place in a world of donnish collegiality and intense discussions. At the same time, he could sound like the college-age youth—or the still-precarious postprodigy—that he was. He harped on his work habits in his letters home, now assuring his parents that he had his nose to the grindstone, then assuring them that he wasn’t overtaxing himself. He was searching for the discipline he had depended on his father to provide, and complying as best he could with Leo’s counsel: “Do not work too hard, but do not become lazy at the same time.” (“I have occasionally taken a glass
of beer, as no other cheap liquid refreshment is available,” Norbert informed his parents, itemizing the amount and costs. “If you object to my doing as I have done, I shall not take any more.”)
If Norbert was “loafing,” as he admitted he was as the summer of 1914 arrived, he was pretty sure he wasn’t “idling.” The young man who had known depression recognized the importance of rest. He needed to fend off the feeling that his studies were “a dead drag” and to restore his “enthusiasm over my work.” It was very gratifying to have his father proudly salute several of his published projects as “fine, especially fine, since I do not understand a word in them.” Still, Norbert felt more under Leo’s thumb than he wanted to be when he returned to the United States in 1915 to figure out what he might do next. Now twenty-one, he began jumping among jobs (some lined up by Leo), happier the farther away he was from home. “It may seem a step down to follow years of precocity and early academic degrees by the somewhat routine tasks of a shopworker, a hackwriter, a computer, and a journalist,” Norbert noted in his memoir, but real-world immersion held glamour. His stint in 1918 at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground—he was summoned thanks to his mathematical talents, not paternal contacts—was especially rewarding. Mood swings continued. Yet busy doing invaluable work on antiaircraft targeting with fellow mathematicians, he found the camaraderie and independence he yearned for.
And soon, in a now-flourishing postwar academic market for the brainiacs needed in a science-guided era, Norbert found his niche. At MIT, down the road from increasingly anti-Semitic Harvard, social graces and pedigrees didn’t count for much, and wartime technical experience like his did. He got hired. The latest mathematical tools were much in demand as electronic communication technology took off in the 1920s. By then he was seeing the woman he finally married in 1926 and with whom he had two daughters. Norbert was also deep into the prescient endeavor of fathoming the endlessly elusive process at the heart of the computer age: the flow of information.