by Ann Hulbert
In the Des Moines public library, Henry quickly outgrew the children’s section. Suspecting him of skimming, Clarissa tested him and found he could give eloquent summaries of the books he claimed to have read. An outing to Il Trovatore inspired him to learn the stories of twenty other operas. Loaned a piano, Henry began playing and sent his father a song he had written and set to music. Harry didn’t think much of the melody but admired the clever words. Clarissa, still dreaming of a literary career for herself, decided they would head for New York, where she somehow soon finagled grand Greenwich Village lodgings in exchange for caretaking while the place was being renovated. Henry’s bleaker memory was of huddling in bed, cold and hungry, some of the time.
In a letter to Harry, Clarissa clung to her hopes of “getting fitted into my own place, if life holds one for me, and I still believe it does.” And she gave an upbeat account of their son, now eleven. “Henry likes New York, of course. He belongs where life is stirring and full, though he is capable of filling it himself with small resources.” The absence of peers went unmentioned, but Henry was indeed good at keeping himself eclectically occupied, and she was grateful. While Clarissa finished writing a curious novel about a young girl and her best friend, which was published to next to no notice, Henry had his own creative projects. He reported to his father that he was composing music for a Longfellow poem and reading Greek poets—and still playing with his blocks, enjoying them “like a baby.”
In his mother’s descriptions, which mixed Rousseauism and realism, Henry was curiously ageless and unspoiled.
He loves a land of art galleries and libraries, and big grand opera advertisements—even if he can’t go in and pay for a seat. He is absorbed in his stamp collection and really does learn a surprising lot of geography and history, and the political status of all nations from this source. I am growing rather tired of the subject. I suppose it is a sort of measles that he has to go through.
Henry’s own report at twelve confirms the impression. “I have had enough of New York,” he wrote to Harry in the spring of 1909, but he wasn’t complaining. “I have learned much by coming here. I know what it feels like to live in the largest literary centre of the U.S. I have the history of the ancient world on the tip of my tongue. The city libraries are a help but now I wish to go back.” Harry, though still floundering himself, wrote to his ex-wife to say he found Henry inspiring. But, alluding to Thomas Carlyle’s definition of genius, Harry also couldn’t help feeling his son was a little slapdash: “I wish that he had had an infinite capacity for taking pains with his music commensurate with his genius. But alas!”
Clarissa and Henry arrived back in Menlo Park in the fall of 1910, after another pause to work on her sister’s farm in Kansas, where Henry took pains instead with flowers. They had become his passion. “Sweet peas, phlox, petunia, portulaca, eschscholtzia and scarlet flax are all blooming,” he wrote his father of his garden, but “I am not as much interested in any of these things as I am how to get to California.” There they found their old cabin overrun by nature in their absence. With neighborly help, they reclaimed it. Henry also found time for a new collecting obsession, not stamps or flowers but—if only William Sidis had known—pre-earthquake San Francisco streetcar transfers!
Clarissa’s meager freelance income had dried up, and the two of them were scrounging, so Henry at thirteen turned his mind to making the family living. He did janitorial work at the local elementary school. He also launched a fern- and flower-gathering enterprise, showing a new persistence as he headed into the hills and then sold what he picked to Stanford faculty members. “The plant business was never worse because most wild things have died down and people won’t buy what isn’t there!” he reported to Harry in the summer, having urged his father to be his salesman in San Francisco. “Am making some rustic hanging baskets.”At the same time, Henry stumbled onto an incongruous pair of mentors, one scientific and the other artistic. Lewis Terman, recently hired as an assistant professor in Stanford’s new education department, wasn’t alone in being smitten with Henry. So was Ellen Veblen, the estranged wife of the economist Thorstein Veblen. Unlike Henry’s free-spirited and impractical parents, they were poised to help him find and pursue his true focus.
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At roughly the stage that William and Norbert were coping with overweening fathers and a merciless spotlight focused on their every misstep after their precocious starts, Henry experienced the opposite. After years in isolated obscurity, he suddenly had admirers, and they were especially taken with his untutored idiosyncrasies. For the bohemian Ellen Veblen, childless and wealthy after a divorce from her womanizing husband, Henry was the ideal surrogate son-cum-protégé. Clarissa was in turn infatuated with Veblen, welcoming her practical and inspirational contributions. Soon after Henry told his mother that he couldn’t live without a piano, Veblen paid to replace the decrepit one that had been all he and his mother could afford. “Hour by hour she listened carefully, patiently to new compositions,” Clarissa wrote, “pointing out weakness and strength with rare taste and fine appreciation.” As important, Veblen introduced the boy to an array of mystically inclined artists—writers, photographers, painters, playwrights—who had gathered in and around Carmel on the Monterey Peninsula. As one of the company later put it, “She is a big soul with queer Karma on.”
For Lewis Terman, Henry offered a rare case of what he took to be potential all but untainted by formal tutelage—an ideal specimen for a hereditarian obsessed with inborn gifts. The thirty-four-year-old psychologist met him, fittingly enough, in the fields near the Termans’ garden and was struck by his departure from anything resembling a norm. Terman lingered with fascination over his anomalies:
As a boy of a dozen years, Henry’s appearance was odd and interesting in the extreme. His speech was quaint, and rather drawled and stilted; his face was childish, but he looked at you with eyes that seemed utterly void of self-consciousness; his clothes were often ragged and always ill-fitting; his hair hid his ears and straggled down to his shoulders; his face and shoulders twitched occasionally with choreic spasms.
It was a portrait of a creature who wasn’t quite feral but wasn’t an ordinary terrestrial either—much less a celestial Mozart. “Everybody considered Henry as queer, not to say freakish,” Terman summed up. “If employed to weed a lawn he was likely to forget what he was doing while trying to compose and whistle a tune. His janitor work was hardly more successful.”
Enchanted by Henry’s primitive waywardness, Terman seemed unconcerned that he was hardly a poster boy for the physically vigorous, socially well-adjusted, intellectually well-rounded profile of genius he had in mind. Nor did he dwell on any possible tension between the unschooled, budding artist and an IQ enterprise that enshrined “schoolhouse gifts,” the verbal and mathematical skills the test assesses. Terman was entranced. What was one to make of a boy like this? What would a boy like this make of himself, and how?
In 1911, when Henry was fourteen and a half, Terman was extremely pleased to add him to the early round of children he was examining as he worked on a tentative first revision of Binet’s test. He couldn’t have found a better antidote to the precocity on display at Harvard, or a better example of natural originality. Henry’s notable success on parts of the test clinched Terman’s belief that his measures truly did tap into powers of intelligence independent of schooling. He was evidently so excited that a boy without anything close to a regular education performed so well that he sometimes couldn’t resist inflating the results. Clarissa, leery though she was of pouring children into molds, was thrilled to have the glowing imprimatur of a high score on a standardized appraisal. Henry was “the brightest child to whom he had ever given the tests,” she exulted, taking it as confirmation of her hands-off approach. Even Henry boasted to his father about how well he stacked up. In fact, Terman assessed his IQ at 131, not close to the highest in his survey—but also, as he acknowledged some years later, not a very relevant or revealing measur
e for a boy like this one: “Although the IQ is satisfactory, it is matched by scores of others among our records; but there is only one Henry.”
Terman probed well beyond the test items for insight into a specimen whom he considered in a class of his own, with scientific and artistic gifts developed in quirkily impressive ways. He jotted down notes on Henry’s descriptions of improvising music in his head. He explored the boy’s own sense of himself and his vocation (“only two things considered—1) A hybridizer of flowers—florist 2) Music composer”). He even coaxed a messily written obituary-style biographical entry out of Henry, who took a mocking tone as he complied with the exercise in imaginative projection:
Henry Cowell was a very Ordinary man, who cultivated flowers extensively and successfully, and whom some records say, made feeble attempts to compose music, which was rotten, but I, personally, do not believe this. the only thing for which he might be at all noted was the reproducing of a new and slightly better kind of garden beet but as this is all I can find about this person I will come to an end.
Basking in the newfound attentions of adults more expert than his adored mother, Henry quickly outgrew his humility. By 1913, now sixteen, he had acquired a sense of himself as a not very ordinary youth. A year earlier he had stirred interest at the Pacific Musical Society’s anniversary celebration in San Francisco when, all unplanned, he got to play a piece of his for the large audience. His intermittent efforts at composing music had given way to fervor—first on his own piano in their cabin, soon in Ellen Veblen’s cabin in the Carmel colony, where he mingled with artistic adults and their families. Within the year, he had produced some sixty pieces, skimpy on structure and development but full of restless motion and striking melodies. One night as he babysat, he produced a gorgeous setting for a poem, “St. Agnes Morning,” in which the future playwright Maxwell Anderson, then a young M.A. student in English at Stanford, evoked sleepless turmoil during the calm between dawn and sunrise. Teenage Henry found inspiration in the contrast.
He was in his element. As Clarissa noted, Henry was highly receptive without being unduly impressionable. “Always he has worked mostly alone,” she observed, “browsing for information, when he felt need of it, wherever a door opened.” Henry’s youthful isolation hadn’t made him a social recluse. Instead, it had given him the habit of independence and nonconformity—and infrequent bathing, “the dirtiest little shrimp you ever ran into,” a teacher later said. (Henry was barely over five feet tall.) It was a recipe for fitting right in with the Monterey Bay scene. A lack of formal musical training wasn’t a liability in an ethos that emphasized attunement with nature and exploratory energy over rigor. Naturally ingratiating, Henry dedicated his little pieces to area artists, and then to resident children. At the same time, he impressed the open-minded spirits of the Carmel realm with an experimental boldness that he got a chance to display in recitals.
In the summer of 1913, Henry’s most ambitious piece so far, “Adventures in Harmony,” featured the first use of his signature “tone clusters”—adjacent notes played with the forearm, or fist. It was, literally, a striking performance. He was asked to speedily produce music for a vatic play called Creation Dawn by one of Carmel’s creative stars, Takeshi Kanno, whose meditative quest had brought him from Japan to commune with the sea on the American West Coast. Henry employed his new technique to evoke the “hungry ocean in the human soul,” as he scrawled on the score. Performed later that summer in the Forest Theater, an outdoor amphitheater, the result reportedly won Henry acclaim that echoed through the woods. A music critic offered an assessment that verged on the oxymoronic: “a total presentation of chaos which is excellent in conception.”
Beyond the woods, Henry’s conceptual clarity, or lack of it, came under greater scrutiny as he approached college age and gave more concerts. In Stanford’s well-tended precincts and in the San Francisco area, he was acquiring a broader circle of admirers drawn in by Terman’s interest and mounting press attention. Samuel Seward, a Stanford English professor, had already stepped in to work with him on his writing. Known for his devotion to his students, Seward tailored his lessons in craft to the unusually expressive mind he discovered in Henry. He also sounded out music teachers and contacts, aware that guidance for Henry was tricky. What was the next step? For precociously trained William and Norbert, after their post-Harvard doses of more academia, that inevitable question about the maturing prodigy had a daunting answer: a dose of independent real life. For Henry by 1914, the opposite course seemed reassuringly obvious. The untutored marvel would benefit, Terman was sure and reviewers agreed, from “the steadying hand of instruction.”
The adjective was key—steadying. Strictness was not the goal in handling this “turbulent” genius, except in the blunt view of the San Francisco Examiner’s critic, writing about his San Francisco debut in March 1914. Impressed by Henry’s talent, he was impatient with compositions that he judged “very lawless; they do not show much melodic originality. They are dithyrhambic impressionizing without so much as a hint of counterpoint.” He prescribed “a thorough schooling…several years drill in a conservatory”: that was just the antidote Henry needed, surrounded as he had been by “idolizing womenfolk who mistake anarchistic rhapsodizing for inspiration.” Clarissa, who had recently had a mastectomy, missed his concert at the San Francisco Musical Club but bridled at the verdict. Rules were “useful to modest talent,” she felt, but “they hamper genius, which learns them in order to break them with larger wisdom.”
Other critics split the difference, calling for not harsh “but reasonable discipline” and confident no influence could squelch Henry. “Whether anybody can teach this lad how to compose, I very much doubt,” one reviewer judged. “All that can be done for him is to instruct him in the value of rules which he now breaks with the charming simplicity of a Wagner-in-the-making.” Reared on resistance to “received wisdom,” Henry himself was primed, thanks to Seward’s attentive efforts, for some more formal pedagogy.
Terman had been prodding his test subject, too. His mission went beyond quantifying exceptional youthful potential. In Henry, he found an ideal occasion to pursue his quest to prove that early genius, far from burning out, would be borne out in an illustrious future, given the right educational guidance. He served as a conduit to other Stanford faculty, and with Henry’s 1914 success, interested supporters established an education fund that enabled Henry to go to Berkeley. It was among the first of many interventions for his gifted testing subjects that Terman continued to provide down the decades—blithely stacking the deck in favor of his optimistic predictions for his “Termites,” as they came to be called. For Henry, the three and a half years as a special student were certainly well timed.
Musical iconoclasm in the decade after the tumultuous debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris opened up unusual room for an untrained talent like Henry’s to flower. The faculty wasn’t about to frown on a young composer who had already “gone…far along his own lines,” as one teacher described Henry. He was exposed to traditional theory and also had a chance to explore new approaches. In Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., whose “dissonant counterpoint” foreshadowed twelve-tone writing, Henry found a teacher congenially ambivalent about the idea of academic musical training. Henry hardly mingled with students, especially not girls (several of whom complained about his grungy appearance—and actually got him to take a bath). Among other things, his mother’s bizarrely adamant view that sexual relations were wicked scared Henry off. What time he had for a social life, he mostly devoted to a theosophical community led by John Varian, whose Temple of the People was based farther south, in Halcyon, but had an active Palo Alto branch. The eccentric Irish poet and father substitute was a man given to such pronouncements as “There is a new race birthing here in the West. We are the germic embryonic seed of future majesties of growth.”
But mostly Henry was tending to his music and above all to his by now ailing mother. Since surgery in 1913, Clarissa’s
condition had been anything but steady. He kept in solicitous touch even when he was away, caught up in the new associations that she encouraged. “You know how well and Dearly I love you, though it embarrises me to speak of it,” Henry wrote at sixteen from Carmel. “Oh, but he was a splendid comrade!” Clarissa was writing in her diary at roughly the same time, reflecting on their itinerant years together and feeling proud that her teenager was making a name for himself. “More like a man than a child, he was my friend and close, sympathetic companion through dark days or bright. Never a word of complaint passed his lips.” He was a loyal caretaker during the Berkeley years, too, commuting to campus from Menlo Park as she got sicker. At a Palo Alto concert in early 1916 to showcase the results of his college experience to his assembled patrons, the audience wanted to hear Henry’s setting of one of her poems again as an encore. By mid-May, his mother was dead.