Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  Chloe felt that she’d “had a prodigy dropped into my lap.” Lacking resources, she had worried constantly about how best to meet such a “big responsibility.” At this point, she had no idea where the story was headed. Marc right now was glad, at last, not to be thinking, and talking, about long-term goals. “I feel deprived of being able to grow up and have fun like other kids,” he said bluntly. “But I also feel very privileged to have had all the experiences I had that other people never get to,” he added more gently, especially “traveling to different places.” Having found his way to that typical, and rarely trouble-free, place—middle school—he was getting his bearings. Lang Lang wrote that he had needed a mere month, at the age of seventeen, to discover that piano “isn’t the only beautiful thing.” Marc, who was getting a comparative head start on a whole new track, already knew it was a lot more complicated. But some things hadn’t changed—for now. Given a five-page writing assignment, Marc produced twenty pages. “I like homework,” he said. “I just do.”

  Epilogue

  Prodigies, being rarities, by definition belong to the realm of anecdote rather than data. For precisely that reason, they invite fascinated scrutiny—and dismissal, too. Write them off as freakish geniuses or phenomenal rote-learners embarked on peculiar life courses, and you can gloat over their failures and treat their feats as irrelevant to the rest of us. An anti-elitist impulse to do just that can be bracing. Yet the stories in these pages are proof of a different kind of egalitarian urge as well: to view prodigies as off the charts in a more inclusive sense—not as children beyond the normal in either a miraculous or a readily measurable way, but as children whose off-the-beaten-track experience may help expand the cultural map of human potential and achievement. The effort to push those boundaries is still very much a work in progress, and prodigies deserve credit for doing their best to keep us humble. However their stories unfold, they vividly remind us of what we so easily forget: that every child is a remarkable anomaly, poised to subvert the best-laid plans and surprise us. Even a devoted number-cruncher like Julian Stanley, who set great store by case studies too, heralded the view that “each child is a complex and conscious organism, not a mere unit in a statistical sample.”

  The stories gathered here highlight what children do ineluctably, and quickly—they change. The accounts, taken together, also raise a question about continuity: How much have perspectives on prodigies really evolved since Norbert Wiener and William Sidis set off for Harvard? A century after Leo Wiener and Boris Sidis riled Americans by touting their pedagogical secrets and phenomenal sons, Amy Chua at Yale offered a reprise, featuring her more conventional superdaughters. The tiger mother’s guiding tenets echoed the Russian émigré fathers’. Start the talent-building process very early; assume the child is sturdy and full of energy; expect feats of mastery; value family loyalty above youthful autonomy or popularity with peers. The immigrant striver’s credo retains its power, as alarming as it is inspiring, for outsiders and insiders alike in America. Yet the whole package doesn’t apply neatly to all the prodigies down the decades by any means. In these stories, continuity goes hand in hand with constant, and fruitful, controversy.

  The stark nurture-over-nature faith at the heart of the credo has been tested again and again, beginning with Henry Cowell and his supporter Lewis Terman. More important, the parent-knows-best confidence that drove it has been tested, too, first by remarkable girls in the interwar years. And as America’s meritocracy shifted into high gear after World War II, the prodigies in these pages started wielding clout more overtly.

  It’s worth noting the unintended consequences at work. A national system for the early sorting and streamlining of talent was of course Terman’s dream come true—yet one result, on display in these stories, was new interest in prodigies as balky and lopsided outliers, just what Terman had aimed to prove young wonders were not. Bobby Fischer, defiant at every turn, was followed by upstart computer geeks who didn’t just drop out of college against their parents’ wishes. Well before that, they surged ahead of adults, mastering tools and preparing to shape a future their elders hadn’t even imagined. Autistic savants were still further beyond others’ ken. Incongruous talents like Matt Savage’s and Jake Barnett’s—a reminder of how hidden gifts can be—have inspired an incongruous response. The competitive-race paradigm so familiar to ambitious parents doesn’t really apply. Instead, the quest is to nurture fierce interests in hopes of opening up otherwise obstructed childhoods—a crucial first step, whatever the future might hold.

  Meanwhile, the different tenets of the credo, which have kept arising in various forms in these stories, have also kept raising questions that shift over time but never get settled. How impressionable, for good and ill, are very young children as they discover and pursue their talents? Barbara Follett and Nathalia Crane entranced and disturbed their elders to an unusual degree, and concern about tainted innocence persists. How much toil does fast-paced mastery actually demand, and what price might it exact? Philippa Schuyler and Shirley Temple gave the lie to claims of stress-free early achievement, and by the time Marc Yu emphasized his tireless practicing, the blurry line between passion and obsession (in child and adult) couldn’t be ignored. When precocious children get anointed as exceptional, what benefits and burdens ensue? For Julian Stanley, as for Terman before him, early winnowing promised a brisk and well-guided path to future distinction. Yet for Jonathan Edwards, as for Henry—and even more strikingly, for Matt and Jake—obstacles and waywardness proved crucial. Where does a child’s motivation come from, and what sustains it? Lang Lang and Marc offered disconcerting answers, and they were hardly the first to do so.

  Not far from the surface of all these debates lie key questions about children’s autonomy. They go hand in hand with confusion about the role that peers play, or don’t, in young lives devoted to extraordinary achievement. Adults in the earlier stories didn’t worry much about social mingling. From Norbert through Shirley, the children scrounged for whatever company they could get, which included older nonparental accomplices. Isolation spelled trouble, as it did for children from midcentury onward, too. Think of William, Barbara, and Philippa, stranded with two overinvested parents who brooked few intermediaries. And then think of Bobby in his filthy apartment and Jonathan on his own at Hopkins, as well as Marc, whose bond with Lang Lang proved fleeting.

  The same adults who were inclined to dismiss peers as distractions also downplayed the prospect of independence. In stories that unfold in the earlier decades, the notion that a “midlife crisis” awaits nearly every prodigy at or near puberty didn’t really occur to grown-ups. They were focused on precocious leaps, not on an inevitable turning point when children become acutely conscious of their distinct identity. Parents and mentors presumed that momentum would propel a young marvel onward through adolescence. They tended to gloss over the fact that immature absorption in a pursuit has to give way to newly committed, self-aware exploration—or else to some sort of break or scaling back. But for Gertrude Temple, with a daughter in a child-star industry fixated on baby-faced appeal, the arrival of a crossroads was too conspicuous to ignore.

  She stepped forth with a version of what is by now conventional developmental wisdom. Demoralized by new career pressures on her almost-twelve-year-old, she prepared a well-timed retreat for Shirley to an exclusive California private school. In her public statement, Gertrude cited her daughter’s need for a “life with other girls and boys of her own age, in school and during recreation hours, so that she will not develop an isolated viewpoint, which often brings on an unhappy outlook on life.” For Shirley, of course, the transition wasn’t nearly as pain-free as her mother suggested—and hoped. Hanging out with teenage peers presents its own difficulties (not to mention risky opportunities); relinquishing the arduous, yet also ego-gratifying, work of honing gifts isn’t easy either. For all the children in these pages, whether they scaled back or stepped up the already intense dedication to their remarkable talents w
hen adolescence arrived, the inevitable swerve into ex-prodigyhood was a struggle.

  —

  Seventy years after Gertrude made her move, Chloe Hui—demoralized by ever-rising career pressures as she and Marc shuttled to and from Shanghai—had found a place at an exclusive California private school for her eleven-and-a-half-year-old in 2010. Buffeted by relief mixed with regret, she lacked Gertrude’s I’m-in-charge-here confidence. Meanwhile, Marc, unlike Shirley, could feel that he had been a full partner in the decision to veer onto a nonvirtuoso path. (Gertrude hadn’t consulted her daughter about the plans.) With a century of prodigy stories in mind, I was primed to see welcome change. Marc fit the most old-fashioned of prodigy profiles—the frail-necked musical performer apprenticed to his instrument when he was tiny and soon taken on the road. Yet both he and his mother also stood out for trying to make the most of cumulative talent development insights. Chloe knew better than to count on seamless adjustment. As for Marc, who among his predecessors in these pages would have been so sure, while still so young, that he would prevail if he pushed back—in need of a chance to try being, of all things, less rather than more unusual?

  On the brink of adolescence in 2011, he had appeared to be headed in a promising direction after missing out on “normal school” as a little boy. To be sure, the sociable and flexible Nueva School experience was, for Marc, totally unfamiliar. Landing in America’s now thriving proto-prodigy culture—even in its progressive, rather than full pressure-cooker, form—guaranteed its own share of challenges. But he had been eagerly finding his place. So half a decade later, the news that Chloe and Marc, who was now seventeen, were both struggling with depression and anxiety pulled me up short. That their relations were rocky went with the teenage territory. But I had let myself anticipate a story of productive push and pull, of high-spirited versatility—not the bleak update I heard. “So much has happened that is so intense, so extreme, I never expected it,” Chloe told me in the spring of 2016.

  Her unease was acute as we sat together. At the same time, her willingness to be open about their misery seemed in keeping with what I remembered. So did Marc’s readiness to take his separate turn to think aloud. And two themes familiar from prodigy stories before theirs were, it was clear, here to stay. The first is that lessons and predictions about unusual lives—whether the extrapolations are grandiose or cautious—almost never pan out as expected. The second is that pretending otherwise has become ever less tenable: facing up to jolts—from brief upsets to big shocks—is all but unavoidable, as prodigies seize chances to speak up and parents become readier to voice doubts. “I was following my heart, wanted to do everything I could to help him. I had no idea it would end up like this,” Chloe said. She hoped the latest developments in their lives might shed light for others: “There are lots of Marcs out there, getting pushed. There are lots of Chloes.”

  More than half of Marc’s lifetime ago, the two of them had resisted the prodigy-tale tradition of airbrushing a child’s goal-directed race toward a pinnacle of exceptional fulfillment, fame, or fortune (or all three). Progress, they frankly admitted, entailed strenuous labor—and a boy might decide to slow down. Now their sad updates didn’t simply conform to the cautionary conventions of the genre either. Grist for Schadenfreude wasn’t the point. Setbacks and conflicts, as every story before theirs also reveals upon close inspection, are all but inevitable and complicated. Precocious paths, even those studded with thrilling achievements, are rarely free of worried second-guessing by grown-up and child.

  Ambivalence has a way of mounting rather than subsiding as the youthful years go by: Why the hurry, starting so early, to nurture future-oriented consistency and promote narrow proficiency in children? What makes prodigy stories useful parables about childhood is their power to remind us, with unsettling vividness, that the same children whose signature traits may seem so fixed are also constantly in flux. And no parents, anxious though they tend to be about imparting an influence, should worry about leaving an imprint. All parents make some dent. But even (or especially) the most assiduous talent developers among them can’t begin to guess what the mark will be, given the vagaries of life and luck.

  Chloe was wrestling with that conundrum. Marc “had such a gift, and I just wanted to help him to focus. I never thought that such intensity would surface in other things.” But now it “plays itself out in very difficult ways with friends and family,” she said. At school, she reported, Marc’s social blundering invited bullying and spelled girl trouble. Feeling isolated, the boy who used to fixate on a musical problem now obsessed over what he considered total failure. He could see only dire extremes, Chloe worried. He was falling way behind in his work while his classmates in eleventh grade began the college scramble. At home, Chloe, who had remarried, described an unhappy (and convoluted) blended-family scene, with Marc declaring himself an outcast. As for the past, he would tell her he had “one hundred percent bad memories” of his upbringing. It was a struggle for him, she felt, to summon good ones—certainly in talking with her. Her own view of those years, she noted, grew darker and darker the more the two of them suffered in the present. Now she looked back and indicted herself as “a very pushy, obsessive person.” (“He doesn’t fall far from the tree,” she remarked.) If only she had seen the perils, as well as the potential, in the zeal they shared.

  I had second thoughts about having asked Marc to meet with me and imagined that he might well change his mind. But he didn’t, seeming to welcome a reprise of one part of his former life: an adult asking him to talk about the challenges he faced—and not expecting him to give just the burnished version. Chloe had prepared me to encounter a teenager miserably trapped in black-and-white thinking. Marc, still boyishly slight and now wearing cool dorky glasses, conveyed the opposite. What he said suggested a deeply conflicted view of his trajectory. However difficult he found grappling with his past to be, he also conveyed a desire not to reject it. Was he downplaying his real despondency in order to offer a perspective that he knew others would want to hear? Or was he articulating mixed feelings that he didn’t share with his mother because he needed to punish her?

  If Marc wasn’t sure himself, that was perhaps because both were true. “I would choose the same path, if I had it to do again, looking back now, aware of the impact, both negative and positive,” he said right off—just the kind of gray-toned picture Chloe would have loved to get from him. The assessment also had a for-the-record ring, and I couldn’t tell how heartfelt the positive side of Marc’s ledger was. Thanks to his musical career, he said, he was good at talking with adults, not least teachers. Piano was still a “big passion,” as he put it, but practicing and performing had become “pretty relaxed, when and what I want.” At school, Marc said he liked showing off at the keyboard, and his prowess was an entrée to working with other musicians in the jazz and rock bands. Marc had begun composing and mentioned a scene he had written for a possible musical about—“this is going to sound very autobiographical,” he noted with a wry smile—“a kid who’s having trouble with bad situations.” He had also taught himself to transcribe (aided by his perfect pitch), aware that it could be a social asset. “All the popular kids can sing and play the guitar,” he observed wistfully. Occasionally transcribing songs for them was the closest he came to connecting with that realm.

  Marc sounded dutiful as he professed that his past had given him “a great appreciation of things” he felt his peers took for granted, like the opportunity to go to such an unusual school. What he really wanted to talk about were the painful legacies, in particular the corrosive feeling that he hadn’t measured up. By that, he didn’t mean regret at having dashed the high hopes—his and others’—that he would return to Carnegie Hall. In his view, he had failed in a quest that seemed far more important, and that he had been ill prepared for: to carve out a place for himself beyond the virtuoso track, while still feeling special and powerful, as every kid yearns to. “I always expected things to go my way. If I wanted
it, I worked hard enough, I got it, and people loved me,” he said. “That’s no longer true, and I feel I exist in the shadow of popular kids.”

  In retrospect, the expectations that guided his childhood looked almost enviably simple, Marc reflected. Excelling at the piano had been the aim, and all-consuming though the challenge was, “I was so excited about performing that I didn’t really grasp the reality of the struggle.” The pressure to practice was intense, but “for what I was trying to do, it was what’s needed,” he remarked, “…and back then half of the time I didn’t think it was too intense.” Marc wanted to emphasize how invested he had been, how swept up. He didn’t realize his mother was anxiously counting on him as the source of their income. He wasn’t focused on feeling unmoored by their constant travel, and he didn’t dwell at first on the loss of his relationship with his idol. Lang Lang had faded out of their lives around the time that his foundation geared up, which was also when Marc’s Shanghai lessons, recommended by Lang Lang, began to sour.

  By comparison, Marc said, the many pressures of his subsequent life felt overwhelming. Being normal, in its way, turned out to take as high a toll as being exceptional. He was expected to do well in his classes, and also to find time for the piano. He was supposed to be a good sibling after being “an only child around whom everything revolved,” and to handle difficult family dynamics after such an intense bond with his mother. Navigating middle school social challenges had mostly confounded him, and the sense that “no one at school really gets me” left him feeling stranded in high school.

  But Marc didn’t want merely to wallow. His unusual path, he thought, had given him “a wider perspective than other kids have”—not that he had arrived at a balanced view of himself or of what he had been through. Of course he hadn’t; the work of shaping an identity has its own mysterious pace. “All this focus on the piano,” Marc felt as he looked back, had eclipsed chances for forging a stable family and close friendships. A dire verdict was tempting: To sum up his past as an ordeal engineered by others had a dark simplicity. But Marc rarely settled for what comes easily. He wasn’t about to write off a childhood full of fervor and remarkable feats. Desolate though he often felt, and sounded to Chloe, he seemed to understand how helpful it would be to claim his musical odyssey as his own—and as a singular accomplishment. Tapping into that sense of agency was likely to take lots of practice.