The Making of Prodigies
Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood And Youth
By Norbert Wiener
Simon and Schuster. 309 pp. $3.95

One of the famous exhibits in the 19th century’s showcase of infant prodigies is the four-year-old Macaulay who, when asked how he was feeling after having been scalded, replied: “Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.” The average modern reader is probably more appalled than amused by this remark, torn between sentiments of incredulity and pity: incredulity that the boy did in fact speak in the well-rounded sentences of the cultivated gentleman, and pity for any child unhappy enough to speak in such sentences. For it is the modern conviction that refinement of mind is as unnatural as refinement of manners, and that both are symptomatic of a profound spiritual malaise (or psychic disturbance, as the argot has it). And when the rest of the evidence is introduced—a childhood voluntarily spent, from the age of three, in reading rather than playing; a tendency to talk, as the maid complained, “quite printed words”; an intellectual turn so pronounced that at the age of seven he could think of no more delightful occupation than writing a “compendium of universal history” or composing poetry in the epic manner at the rate of one hundred lines a day—it takes a person of strong and independent convictions not to have a sneaking suspicion that such a child is either something of a monster, as if mental excellence could only be acquired at the expense of moral soundness, or at least something of a neurotic, as if health is better served by mediocrity than by brilliance.

This distrust of the prodigy is so prevalent today that it is hard to realize how recent a prejudice it is. Nor is it only a consequence of our current preoccupation with psychology. with “mental health.” More important is the fact that the prodigy no longer appears to be simply an adult in child’s clothing, which would merely be a violation of convention, but a freak in child’s clothing, which is an outrage against nature. An adult gravely pronouncing the words, “The agony is abated,” would be almost as much of an anomaly today as a child voicing the same words. The child Macaulay was regarded by his seniors as an instance of extraordinary precocity—as the premature development of a manner of thought and mode of life that was, while by no means commonplace, at least not entirely uncommon. Today’s prodigy is looked upon less as precocious than as queer.

It is this suspicion of queerness and unnaturalness that plagued the youth of one of our contemporary prodigies, Norbert Wiener. Wiener is today best known as the creator of Cybernetics, a theory of communication that embraces both man and machine and that has had its most spectacular application in the development of the “thinking machine.” In his youth, however, he was known to the public as a curiosity who found his place in the Sunday supplement, as he himself remembers it, somewhere between the report of a two-headed calf and the account of a disreputable liaison. About his actual juvenile accomplishments, people cared little; it was enough for them that he had entered college before the age of twelve and was a graduate student at Harvard at fifteen. But while millions of newspaper readers gaped at yet another ten-day wonder, his intimates watched him suspiciously for the signs of inferiority and failure that must, they reasoned, be the fate of anyone who so boldly defied the laws of nature. Although he was graduated from college cum laude, for example, he was not elected to Phi Beta Kappa, because, he was given to understand, it was doubted that an infant prodigy could have a respectable future. “There is a tradition,” Wiener concludes in his autobiography, “that the child who makes an early start is intellectually drawing on his life capital of energy and is doomed to an early collapse and a permanent second-rateness, if not to the breadline and the madhouse.”

So pervasive was this conviction of doom that Wiener himself, once he realized that he was a prodigy—that not all children of the age of nine could produce commendable sight translations from the Latin, were widely read in biology and chemistry, or well advanced in algebra and geometry—came to share it. He shifted from field to field, from college to college and job to job, uncertain of his own talents, unappreciated by his teachers and employers, and isolated among his classmates and colleagues. Ultimately, however, each departure and arrival, each new exploration and apprenticeship, added to his fund of information, until the prodigy could rest confident in the knowledge that he was one of America’s leading scientists.

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Wiener’s father, a product of the Jewish Enlightenment and an autodidact philologist of extraordinary accomplishments, was among those who contributed to his son’s self-depreciation. While he sincerely tried to protect the boy from the knowledge of his precocity, he was himself not averse to giving interviews to the press—interviews the point of which was that his son was no more than an average boy who simply profited by superlative parental training. At the time the boy was completely convinced of the truth of this theory: he felt his virtues to be to his father’s credit, his vices to his own discredit. It took him many years to arrive at a sense of its injustice, and his autobiography is at least partly an effort to right the balance, as he now sees it, between his own superior faculties and his father’s earnest endeavors. He does not entirely hide his satisfaction when he reports the failure of his father’s second experiment—that crucial control—in the creation of genius, an experiment conducted upon the recalcitrant younger son of the family.

In a book that provides so many instructive parallels and conformities to the autobiography of another great prodigy, John Stuart Mill, this one divergence, in the estimate of the relative importance of education and genius, of father and son, stands out as its most interesting feature. In Mill’s description of the educational regimen laid down by his father are to be found many of the devices which the Wiener father, probably unknowingly, was to duplicate a century later: an early and intensive acquaintance with languages and the classics, the daily recitation of lessons to a father who managed at the same time to attend to his own writing and to his son’s errors, the extension of the educational process to include the teaching of younger brothers and sisters, an emphasis upon solitary physical activities such as walking and climbing to the exclusion of those requiring manual dexterity, and, most important, the deliberate cultivation of a sense of humility in the pupil. In passages that anticipate almost the words of Wiener, Mill describes the vigilance with which his father kept him from praise and even from awareness that his attainments were at all unusual. “[He told me that] whatever I knew more than others, could not be ascribed to any merit in me, but to the very unusual advantage which had fallen to my lot, of having a father who was able to teach me, and willing to give the necessary trouble and time; that it was no matter of praise to me, if I knew more than those who had not a similar advantage, but the deepest disgrace to me if I did not.” Of the propriety of this course in humility, Mill, unlike Wiener, professed himself to be entirely satisfied, and although a skeptical reader might find suggestions of ambivalence and hostility, Mill’s expressed conclusions, that whatever he could do “could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution,” must surely count for a good deal.

The disagreement between Mill and Wiener may be ascribed to the fact that one had in mind the social philosopher, the other the mathematician, and that while philosophers may be created by parental fiat, mathematicians are born. Wiener’s own account of the mental process by which he arrives at mathematical ideas makes of mathematics a creative art no less dependent upon the demiurge of genius than any other art. Yet even he would insist upon the vast stock of knowledge—knowledge hardly won, the product of discipline and labor—that goes into the making of the good mathematician or scientist. Moreover it is his experience that no natural facility of learning can substitute for discipline, that facility, in fact, because it encourages a laxness of mind, is often the fatal flaw in an otherwise promising student. And it is for this discipline that he has, after all, to thank his father.

In Wiener’s class at the Harvard graduate school in 1909-10, there were no fewer than five properly accredited prodigies, ranging from the age of eleven to Wiener’s mature fifteen. Of these five, at least three were the sons of aggressively ambitious fathers; the other two Wiener knew nothing about. Whether it is good or bad to be a prodigy remains a moot point. What seems to be undeniable is that it helps to have a parent intent upon making you one, and an early education as arduous as the juvenile nervous system can sustain.

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