Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  Cybernetics, “or control and communication in the animal and the machine,” as Norbert summed up his new pursuit, has been hailed as the catalyst of the first genuinely American scientific revolution. A notably hybrid undertaking, it was at once theoretical and practical, concerned with both mind and matter. Cybernetics laid crucial groundwork for modern automation and is back in the spotlight with recent cross-disciplinary developments in robotics, prosthetics, synthetic biology, and more. It “sired, inspired, or contributed to dozens of new technical and scientific fields,” Wiener’s biographers write, “from artificial intelligence and cognitive science to environmental science and modern economic theory.” That a pioneering modern prodigy had sired it seems particularly fitting. Norbert’s work helped usher in the computer, which one of his many successors, Seymour Papert, heralded as “the children’s machine” and the key to a newly youth-driven “age of learning.”

  Norbert, who died in 1964, surely would have been excited. But in a memoir haunted by the depression he suffered on and off throughout his life, he aimed to remind readers of the human challenges of growing up. Every child, however extraordinary his mastery of a skill may be, “struggles in a half-understood world” of adults as he strives for autonomy. William Sidis probably wasn’t far from his mind, nor was his own imposing father, when Norbert distilled a low-tech secret of success. Based on his experience, he concluded that the key wasn’t expert early tutelage, grateful though he said he was for the “rigorous discipline and training” he received (if “perhaps in rather excessive portions”). What counted most for a boy like him, he wrote in an article that he hoped might help others, was more modest: the hard-won “chance to develop a reasonably thick skin against the pressures which will certainly be made on him and a confidence that somewhere in the world he has his own function which he may reasonably hope to fulfill.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “A Very Free Child”

  · 1 ·

  Out in the foggy and untamed San Francisco Bay area, a golden-haired boy was born in 1897, a year before Billy Sidis and three after Norbert Wiener, to two bohemian-anarchist writers committed to giving him the fullest freedom to flower. Or to eat gravel, as happened one morning while Harry and Clarissa Dixon Cowell were busy inside their tiny Menlo Park cottage in the hills behind the brand-new Stanford University campus. Henry, roughly two, was happily playing outside. A young university student who had become friendly with the family was waiting nearby for the milkman to give her a lift to class. Turning to hug the strikingly beautiful boy, “I noticed his eyes were staring, his face was purple, he was gagging,” she recounted. She seized Henry, held him upside down, and forced his teeth apart. “His cheeks were packed with gravel,” and she struggled to clear his airway. Finally she heard a strangled cough. After soothing the sobbing child, she brought Henry in to his parents. Their response on hearing what had just happened was to ask, “You did not use violence?”

  It is a rare parent who doesn’t have at least one early close call seared in memory—that day when, say, your Lego fan decided to see how different colored bricks tasted. What if you hadn’t been in the next room (you were not hovering) and heard him choke? Years later, that thought can still make your heart pound. In Clarissa and Harry Cowell’s case, principle took precedence over panic. As the Stanford student commented with some awe, “There was never a deviation, never any momentary temptation on the part of Clara or Harry to bear down on the child…in any way.” One day not long after that morning, Henry decided to go walking on his own. He got far enough along the road that Clarissa, who was in her late forties, had trouble catching up, but she still didn’t dream of chiding him. Instead she asked him why he had taken off. “He says, ‘Choo-choo say, Run away, run away, run away,’ imitating with his voice the monotone of carwheels running over railendings.” Clarissa noted this in her diary, along with entries about—among many other things—all the humming he did in his high chair. Henry picked up whatever childhood songs his not particularly musical parents sang. Harry, who had emigrated from Ireland after what he liked to portray as a restless youth, favored Irish airs. Clarissa’s staple was Ozark mountain songs she learned growing up in a fundamentalist family in Iowa. And before Henry could really talk, his mother noticed, he was improvising his own melodies.

  “I find much in Henry which I am unable to account for on generally-accepted scientific principles. He seems to be part-angel and wise with inexplicable wisdom,” Clarissa wrote some fifteen years later. Sick with cancer in 1914, she was gathering her diary entries as potential “material for a biography” of her now teenage son. Henry had recently been hailed as “an artist of unusual talent” in a newspaper review of a piano recital in which he played his own compositions. The headlines echoed the East Coast tributes to the Harvard boys of several years earlier: “Lad Shows Signs of Real Genius,” announced the San Francisco Chronicle in March 1914. “Youthful Wonder Has Charm of Genius,” reported The Daily Palo Alto Times.

  But the story of the boy who became one of America’s preeminent modern composers could hardly have been more different. Almost everything about Henry’s trajectory would have driven the father-experts in Cambridge crazy. True to her hands-off philosophy, Clarissa steered clear of structured academics as she and her son charted an itinerant route across the country during his childhood. A fast track held no allure. And Henry acquired a mentor in a Stanford psychologist whose core conviction was precisely the view that Boris Sidis and Leo Wiener scoffed at. In a century surging with immigrants and new educational opportunities, Lewis Terman emphasized that youthful intelligence was distributed unevenly. It needed to be assessed and ranked, and then trained accordingly. A former brainy boy from an Indiana farming family with deep rural American roots, he was determined to prove that geniuses of all kinds were born, not bent, that way.

  For both Henry and Terman, the connection turned out to be formative. Terman was poised to revise the French psychologist Alfred Binet’s test of children’s mental abilities for wide American use. He needed evidence for his view that general intelligence was inherited, readily measurable in childhood, and stable throughout life. Not least, he was eager to prove that it was sure to be impressively high in talented individuals of all different stripes. Binet had focused on the bottom, intent on identifying children who might benefit from remedial help. Terman embraced the opposite goal, to single out those he considered natural superachievers. Here he agreed with the Bostonians: in a philistine country in a newly fast-paced era, it was high time that intellectual promise ceased to be associated with young misfits. The image of brainiacs as “especially prone to be puny, over-specialized in their abilities and interests, emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psychotic, and morally undependable” was in dire need of debunking. Where Boris and Leo focused on an enlightened citizenry, reared to resist the “mob spirit,” Lewis envisaged a leadership elite.

  For his starter sample, Terman had a son, Fred, who revealed an unusual mind well before starting school, which his father was in no hurry to have him do. At nine, when Fred first entered a regular classroom, he had already done lots of independent wandering and inventive tinkering; ham radio had become a specialty. (On a near par with the Sidises in sexist handling of a firstborn’s little sister, Terman didn’t pay much heed to his daughter, Helen, whom he considered “average.”) But America’s IQ-test crusader needed a pool of subjects to study. He was fascinated to learn from a colleague that “a very free child” with highly unusual musical gifts lived in the area. In Henry, Terman found an ideal outlier. In Terman, Henry found a kindly professor who offered attention and resources. He ended up being Terman’s most unforgettable subject.

  It was a curious partnership. Terman embodied the standardizing ethos the nonconformist Cowells prided themselves on shunning. Henry confounded many of Terman’s claims, exposing the narrowness of his testing tools. But each had something to learn from the other, about the limits of tidy measures of innate intelligen
ce and about the limits of fervent faith in freedom for raw talent. Together they could have knocked some humility into Boris and Leo, so obsessed with adult-style mastery and so heedless of children’s own distinctive powers of discovery. And as William and Norbert might have especially appreciated, Henry cast new light on youthful eccentricity.

  · 2 ·

  Plump-cheeked Henry, whose blue eyes are dazzlingly clear even in black-and-white photographs, was all the more prodigious for not being a prodigy in anything like a conventional sense. His mother recorded that he spoke three words at twenty months. That was two months older than Billy and Norbert were when they mastered the alphabet. Henry made swift progress after that, and at three—when the Boston boys were already reading—Clarissa noted that he recognized twenty-five words at sight. She half-apologized for that retrograde trick: “Both his father and I disapprove of beginning formal education when a child is very young; but when a baby points to a letter or a word and fairly demands to be told the name of it, what’s to be done?” By then, Henry had also moved on to humming original tunes in his high chair, but Clarissa didn’t pretend to be a knowledgeable judge of his improvisational talents. He wasn’t surrounded by music at home.

  What stands out in Clarissa’s jottings on Henry’s earliest years is not any remarkable achievement of his, much less any rigor in her experiments in child-driven nurture. Instead, the account conveys his angelic spirit and her highly unusual blend of fervor and flexibility. She pronounced that, as an older mother who had borne a first child at nineteen back in Iowa, she now had “strong convictions on many subjects bearing on child-life and the relation of the child to its parents and to society.” She invoked the “three great forces for happiness: love, wisdom, freedom.” But she also freely, and wisely, confessed that her “notions about methods of securing freedom for my child were exceedingly hazy.”

  She mocked herself for one of her efforts: to determine Henry’s favorite color, she presented him with an array, and “his eyes rested on pink.” Henceforth, she wrote, “I think I overdid the lavishing of his favorite color upon him.” Given lots of choices, big and small, Henry evidently didn’t fret the way children often do when overwhelmed by options. Clarissa wasn’t fazed either, even when the “castoff finery of ladies” turned out to be his fashion preference. Saying “he wished to be a girl and wear dresses because they were prettier than boys’ clothes,” Henry did just that until he was eight or so. Meanwhile, Clarissa and Harry (fifteen years her junior) were coping with more consequential domestic issues. They needed to put food on the table. When it was Harry’s week in their egalitarian domestic arrangement, meals tended to consist of crackers.

  Even when, at the age of four, Henry first displayed unmistakable signs of a musical gift, Clarissa and Harry’s response took a laid-back form. The family was now living in a tiny San Francisco apartment on the edge of Chinatown, and Henry’s singing inspired a friend to give him a mandolin harp (“like a zither with a keyboard,” he later described it) for his birthday. Soon he “played familiar airs and made original variations on them.” His parents were thrilled, and especially pleased to feel they had no proprietary role in this talent. That fit right in with their emphasis on “the development of initiative, intelligent choice, self-government, in the child.” Another admiring neighbor gave Henry a quarter-size violin, and Clarissa then bought him the even smaller one he needed. In her diary she marked the day of his first lesson—November 16, 1902. It was hardly the beginning of steady or spectacular tutelage, however.

  Before long, Henry was studying with the British violinist and composer Henry Holmes, a former prodigy himself, then in his seventies. (Holmes’s daughter, who got Henry off to a good start on the instrument, had to stop when she injured her hand.) Holmes took an old-school approach, dictating the repertoire (eighteenth-century music) and demanding deference and commitment, not the best match for a freedom-loving five-year-old. Assigned lots of Louis Spohr exercises, Henry learned them and improvised eagerly on his own. It quickly became clear he had absolute pitch, and Clarissa gushed that “not a single unpleasant sound ever issued from his tiny instrument.” But she also noticed that her usually cheerful son seemed irritable, his shoulder twitching after just a few minutes of practice.

  HENRY COWELL Credit 3

  The symptoms (of chorea, it later turned out, a nervous system disorder sometimes triggered by a strep infection or rheumatic fever) meant he had to ease up. She made a point of not reminding him about his lessons and ruled out any invitations for Henry to perform for friends. Harry showed no such compunction. Yearning after “the long deferred literary life,” he seems to have quietly nursed the notion that a performing child might be an entrée into the creative limelight. He liked having Henry in circulation and dragged him around late at night to visit one of the couple’s heroes, Jack London, and others—to Clarissa’s distress. But she also didn’t want to interfere in the father-son bonding, since she and Harry had recently separated.

  All in all, Henry had very intermittent lessons over the course of about two years—surely not under pressure from Clarissa, who wasn’t about to make him quit either. Henry called the shots, even when he didn’t quite mean to. One day, now eight and struggling to correct a mistake while Holmes kept finding fault, Henry retorted: “I cannot play because you put me out.” That was the end of regular lessons with Holmes. (Clarissa, who was present, felt Henry was simply explaining, not impertinently whining.) Henry seemed disinclined to work further on his own—though he had made good progress with what amounted to scant instruction, playing easy movements in Mozart and Haydn. “Henry showed no strong impulse toward working without a teacher,” Clarissa noted. “I made no step to get another…because I feared that his nerves would be shattered if he continued work.”

  But he was avidly listening to Asian music in nearby Chinatown. And what she didn’t know was that Henry had decided to be a composer and had devised his own invisible regimen. He wrote later that “all the children I played with went in from four to five in the afternoon, exactly, to practice the piano, and of course, everybody was out again at 5:01 to play. I didn’t want to be left out of such activity.” So he went in, too. “I sat down at the desk and practiced listening to sounds in my mind. I did this very methodically,” Henry recalled, eager to emphasize his own inner discipline. “…Although I lived among people who were very romantic about composition, I myself supplied a method, and this method was to cultivate my mind to hear sounds which became more and more complicated as time went on.”

  Clarissa, now a single mother, moved back to Menlo Park from San Francisco. She later inveighed against the public school habit of “crushing all children into a shapeless, pulpous mass and then pouring them into molds, like hot tallow” (a rare echo of Boris Sidis). But she sensibly decided that Henry needed “at least enough of it so that he could bear understandingly such parts of it as he could not love but could not evade.” She was being practical on her own behalf, too: Clarissa needed him steadily supervised and occupied so that she could write and earn some money. Henry arrived at the local elementary school with his long hair and was severely beaten by some bigger boys—Portuguese and some blend of Spanish, Mexican, and Indian, she noted, and evidently threatened by “the young god so manifestly different from them.” Henry recovered and went back, only to get another drubbing. He didn’t return.

  In her biographical notes, under the heading “Groping Among Educational Methods (I do the groping. The child leads.),” Clarissa did her best to portray the muddling that ensued as an approach made to order for Henry. He was a child who “loved successively, ardently, one subject at a time,” she wrote. “While the love lasted he mastered difficulties with readiness and insight that seemed little short of magical.” Like William and Norbert, he wasn’t obsessively given to one form of accomplishment, in music or elsewhere, yet he plainly could summon the sort of single-minded focus that often makes effort seem less effortful.

  “Re
serve energy,” Boris called it, promising that all children, given suitably playful instruction, could draw on it. Clarissa took a different view. She believed there were children “who feel no special voluntary interest in anything, and need to be prodded and pricked and roused to look about them and see what sort of world they live in.” But not Henry. All he needed was to be spared distractions. She was lyrical on the subject. “The child must be delighted with his work,” she wrote.

  He must study the thing he wants to know while he wants to know it….

  It is not the way of wisdom to hold Geometry before the face of a dreamer while he is at his dreams. First let him wake to the presence, if not the beauty, of angles in the world.

  One study at a time, and that the one utterly beloved—for the time.

  That became my cult.

  Her standards for mastery were not exactly punctilious. She judged Henry to have “learned” the violin in under four months. In three weeks of brief daily work, she boasted, her eight-year-old plowed through a “language lessons” textbook designed to consume hundreds of hours of classroom study. Not at all perturbed that his “careless habits” continued—his spelling and punctuation were hopeless several years later—Clarissa lauded her wonderful conversationalist.

  In what time she could spare for Henry’s studies at home—she acknowledged it wasn’t much—Clarissa read widely to him, and they discussed all kinds of things. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which closed Stanford and left Menlo Park a disaster area, introduced a new level of improvisatory adventure to his curriculum. He spent an “impassioned” six weeks absorbed in geology after it happened. And then Clarissa, seeing no good alternative to flight, took Henry’s education on the road. They headed east to Clarissa’s sister in Kansas, then to her first son and other relatives in Des Moines. Their cross-country journey sparked an interest in geography and a bout of eager stamp collecting. In Iowa, she made another stab at formal schooling for Henry. Finding the right class for him was a challenge—way ahead of the third graders in reading and arithmetic, he was a mess in writing—but after four months, it was sickness that sabotaged him. Tonsil and adenoid trouble were followed by measles, and finally he quit. Henry returned briefly for fourth grade, only to be pulled out upon being diagnosed with Saint Vitus’ dance (as chorea was then known). Clarissa concluded that school was most effective in spreading germs.