THE PRODIGY
By Amy Wallace
Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
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Acknowledgments
I am especially grateful to the following people, whose unremitting encouragement and support made this book possible: Irving and Sylvia Wallace, Helena Sidis, Dan Mahony, Jannika Hurwitt, Joseph Kanon, and Ed Victor.
For their work researching, editing, typing, and photographing, I would like to thank: Helen Ginsburg, Elizabethe Kempthorne, Mark Malkas, Liz Vaughan, and Paul Duffy.
For granting me their time, memories and materials, thanks go to the following people and institutions (in alphabetical order): Muriel Burbank, Julius Eichel, Clifton Fadiman, William Fadiman, Ann Rab Feinzig, George Gloss, Dr. and Mrs. Jack Goldwyn, Harvard Univer-sity, Margaret McGill, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Mandell, Bill Rab, Isaac Rabinowitz, Rice University, B. C. Robison, David Sachs, Dr. and
Mrs. Elliot Saga11, Dr. Paul Saunders, Shirley Smith, Dr. Abraham
Sperling, Grace Spinelli, and the Swarthmore College Peace Collec-tion.
Copyright © 1986 by Amy Wallace
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following works:
The Hesperia Constitution by William J. Sidis. Reprinted by permission of the Harvard University Archives.
The Come As You Are Masquerade Party by Samuel Rosenberg, copyright © 1970 by Samuel Rosenberg. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Dedication
To my brother David, who not only inspired this book, but has been a loving inspiration all my life.
Acknowledgments
You know the old saying—"As the twig is bent the tree's inclined." Parents cannot too soon begin the work of bending the minds of their children in the right direction, of training them so that they shall grow up complete, efficient, really rational men and women.
BORIS SIDIS, 1909
The newspapers never missed a chance to try and prove that he was insane, or psychotic, or simply a freak. In truth, Billy was a completely normal child in every respect.
SARAH SIDIS, 1952
It is possible to construct figures of the Fourth Dimension with a hundred and twenty sides called hecatonicosihedrigons, or figures with six hundred sides called hexacosihedrigons. I attach great value in the working out of my theories to the help given by polyhedral angles of the dodesecahedron which enter into many of the problems. Some of the things that I have found out about the Fourth Dimension will aid in the solution of many of the problems of elliptical geometry.
WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS, age 11, 1909
I often tried to talk to him about the fourth dimension, mathematics. I was interested in mathematics myself at the time. I was about seventeen, he must have been about twenty-three. And he would turn upon me furiously, he scared me, saying, "I don't want to talk about that, I don't ever want to talk about that kind of thing!"
CLIFTON FADIMAN, 1983
1
The Little Father
Boris Sidis was born in 1867 in Berdichev, a town near Kiev in the Russian Ukraine. His lineage could be traced back eight hundred years, and it was the family legend that each generation produced one brilliant man. Boris Sidis, his kin said, was that man.
Boris was one of five children born to Moses and Mary Sidis. Moses was a well-off merchant, and an intellectual who read Darwin and Huxley. The boy showed intellectual promise early. At eight, he knew several languages, was well read in history, and composed poetry that was put to music by the townspeople of Berdichev. Boris's early years were pleasant, or as pleasant as life could be for any Jew growing up in the terrible climate of anti-Semitism that pervaded the Ukraine of the 1800s.
At the time of Boris's birth, Russia was under the severe, autocratic rule of Tsar Nicolas II. The Ukraine, a portion of southwestern Russia with a population of nearly twenty million, was part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, established by Catherine the Great in 1791. Nearly two million Jews inhabited this area, and few were allowed to move "beyond the Pale."
By the mid-1800s the prevailing attitude of Russians toward their large Jewish population was intensely hostile. A long history of persecution made the Jews easy prey for mass hysteria whipped up by the government; Jewish economic success and land ownership was a threat to many Russians, who claimed that the Christian population was being exploited. Rumors circulated that Jews used the blood of Christian babies in their religious ceremonies.
In 1881, under the rule of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III, the wave of hatred broke. The first of a vicious series of pogroms occurred in southern Russia. Jews were assaulted in the streets, robbed, raped, and murdered.
The pogroms spread, and in 1882 the Tsar ordered anti-Jewish tribunals, ultimately passing the notorious "temporary" May Laws. These forbade Jews within the Pale to leave their villages, and forced multitudes of other Jews into the dense, overcrowded cities. Existence for the average Jewish family was at best a struggle. The situation grew increasingly grim, with little hope of improvement. The Russian authorities were pressing Jews to emigrate, and Jews were anxious to leave. America was now the promised land.
It was in the midst of this tumult that Boris Sidis grew up, though his own town, Berdichev, had not suffered a pogrom. As a handsome, healthy, intense teenager, Boris had already developed the values that would guide his life—a hatred of ignorance and tyranny, a passion for learning and teaching. His friends nicknamed him "The Little Father."
Although it was strictly against the law, at sixteen Boris organized a small group of friends and embarked on his first mission—teaching peasants to read. Compared to the Russian population as a whole, the Jewish literacy rate was high, but not high enough for these idealistic boys, who were willing to assume a great risk in the service of their ideals. When Boris was seventeen he and his friends enrolled in a preparatory school—the equivalent of junior college—in Keshnev, south of their hometown. There they continued teaching peasants, trekking to the countryside every Sunday afternoon.
After only three weeks in school, their rooms were raided by Tsarist police. Their landlady, sympathetic to their work, heard of the raid in advance and burned all the books she could find in Boris's room, destroying anything else that might implicate him. To no avail. The twelve boys were arrested. Two were hanged as an example to the others. Nine were marched barefoot in the snow to Siberia. Boris, who was discovered to be the leader, was clapped in a dungeon.
The governor of Keshnev released Boris for one night, and wined and dined the fiery-eyed dissident in his own home. Offered freedom if he would confess the details of his "plot," Boris insisted that there was no plot to confess. He was returned to his shackles, to solitary confinement and torture.
His cell was body-sized, and he was unable to recline except with his knees pressed against the wall. He spent the next two years in this cell. He was allowed neither books nor paper and pencil—he lived in a total vacuum. This utter emptiness, which would have driven an ordinary man insane, had an extraordinary effect on Boris. These vile years gave him something precious. He owed to them, he said, his courage and his ability to reason. By concentrating on ideas, he left his bodily anguish behind. He later regarded it as one of his greatest creative periods. He could not be broken, because in his stinking, wretched cell he had learned to think.
For two years, Moses Sidis had fought desperately to get his son paroled. He finally struck a deal with the authorities: If Boris agreed never again to leave his hometown, to report regularly to parole officers, and to renounce all education as teacher or student, he would be freed. On these conditions, Boris was released from solitary confinement and returned to Berdichev.
The conditions of his release, primarily the edict against learning, were agony to Boris. He prevailed upon his father to help him escape from Russia. The arrangements were made, and two other boys who had been paroled and placed under house arrest made plans to leave with him. Many Russians believed the rumors that the streets of America were paved with gold. Young Boris was probably not so gullible. He believed, more likely, in other rumors: that in America, jobs were abundant; that all immigrants were welcomed with open arms; and that if one worked honestly and hard, a life of plenty was there for the taking.
In 1886, Boris and two friends took the usual immigrant route out of the Ukraine. They crossed the Austro-Hungarian border illegally, traveled by train to Vienna and from there to Hamburg. There they boarded a ship that would take them to New York City. Few immigrants had a clue to the horror of the voyage ahead. The sheer misery of the trip, with people herded together in filthy steerage compartments, could last anywhere from three to fourteen weeks.
Awaiting the frayed and weary immigrants was Castle Garden. A huge, circular fort on the lower tip of Manhattan, it had been built in 1811 and used as a theater in the 1850s—such greats as Jenny Lind and Lola Montez performed there. Now, in 1886, it served as the main port of entry for throngs of immigrants.
After passing the interrogations of customs officials, Boris and his friends were released into the maw of New York City. At that time, the Lower East Side had an estimated 522 inhabitants per acre. Some areas were more crowded than the worst parts of Bombay. Its tenements were infamous. The most profound shock to greet the immigrants was the noise, the chaos, the pushing and shoving, the hurry and intensity of the Lower East Side, where four thousand people lived in a single block. For a peasant who had never been in a busier spot than the market square of his village, it was a far cry from the America of his dreams.
Like most Jews, Boris found his way to the Lower East Side, where he rented a room for less than five dollars a week. In one respect at least, Boris was far more fortunate than the average immigrant: He and his two friends had several hundred dollars between them. Only a small percentage of immigrants entered with over twenty dollars—the average was eight dollars—and many had nothing at all. With no money, and not a word of English at their command, New York was a terrifying shock. The harshness of life on the Lower East Side was combined for most immigrants with a feeling of profound dismay that life in the land of the free was, in many ways, as difficult as life in Russia had been. Boris, at least, was able to get his bearings, free of the necessity to find work immediately.
His first job was with the Singer Sewing Machine Company at five dollars a week. The average working day in a sweatshop or factory was thirteen hours; for many it was more. Conditions were grim. Boris Sidis was poor at manual labor, and he kept his factory job for only a week. He stretched the money for two weeks, subsisting on a diet of herring (a herring could be bought for a penny or two) and stale black bread (two cents a pound). Boris escaped misery and despair by feeding his mind. He spent his every free moment in the public library. His wife later wrote, "This was Boris's idea of a good life." After a mere four months in America, he learned to speak and write English.
His next job was in a New Jersey hat-pressing factory. By now he had formulated a plan: Work one week, study for two weeks. After a few months of living by this plan, Boris made a crucial decision. He moved to Boston. The slums were nearly as bad, the jobs paid no better, but for Boris it had a kind of glamour. He had heard that Boston was the American city where the mind was most revered, the city where intellect thrived.
Boris Sidis arrived in winter and rented a room for one dollar a week, a room so frigid that a glass of water left out overnight turned to ice. But Boris was happy. "When I first set foot in the Boston Public Library," he said, "I felt as though the gates of heaven had opened to me."
Boris Sidis was enthralled with his life centered around the library. At first, he followed his "Work one week, study for two weeks" program, and found time to write, publishing his first article in the Boston Transcript. Then, once he had mastered English, Boris's landlord suggested he tutor young Russian immigrants. His students paid him for an hour in the evening, but usually they all talked late into the night, until the last streetcar had run, and then walked happily home with their brimming minds.
During that first freezing winter, Boris had only the light coat he'd brought from Russia. In desperate need of winter clothes, he entered a shop near his home run by a Russian tailor. The cheapest coat was too expensive for Boris, but the men fell to chatting. The tailor revealed his single burning ambition, which he thought impossible to achieve. He wanted to learn to read in order to study Spinoza. A bargain was struck: Boris taught the illiterate tailor to read Spinoza, and that winter he kept warm in a heavy coat.
Sarah Mandelbaum was born on October 2, 1874, in Stara Constantine, a small but prosperous village in the southern Ukraine. Her mother, Fannie Rich, had been the village beauty, and at fourteen she married a sixteen-year-old student, Bernard Mandelbaum. In keeping with Russian custom, Fannie and Bernard lived with their parents until Bernard finished school and started a business as a grain merchant. Bernard's business was moderately successful. Fannie had fifteen children and three miscarriages.
Sarah was the fifth child, and at the age of five was already helping her older sister, Ida, with household tasks. Her father built a footstool for Sarah to stand on while she made the beds and dusted. Worn down by childbearing, Fannie did no housework. She was, in Sarah's words, "a pet." And thus, by the age of eight, Sarah was doing all the housecleaning while Ida did the cooking. The two girls tended their younger siblings full-time, calling them "our babies." Then, as a present, Sarah's father gave her a sewing machine, and soon she was making all the family clothes. So she could help him with his accounts, he taught her to add, subtract, and multiply.
Sarah didn't seem to resent all the burdens placed upon her. Her parents never spoke a harsh word, nor did they punish their large brood in any way. And Sarah noticed that if she treated "her babies" gently and kindly, they obeyed her properly. The first seeds of a philosophy of child rearing were thus taking root.
Suddenly, when Sarah was thirteen, her orderly, busy life was turned topsy-turvy. Until then, her family had been spared the assaults of the vicious pogroms. But one ugly day in 1887, a band of thugs attacked the household.
Bernard Mandelbaum stood in his doorway wielding a pitchfork and shouting to his children, "Run! Escape! Fly!"
The robbers overpowered him, caving in his front teeth. Fannie was knocked unconscious, and the baby she held in her arms was picked up and dashed to the floor. It was killed instantly.
Sarah, Ida, and their brother Harry ran out the back door and into snow-covered fields. They found a nearby brickyard, crawled into the warm oven where bricks had been baking, and fell asleep.
The robbers stole everything, and partially razed the house. All that Bernard Mandelbaum had struggled so hard for had been destroyed. He drew his family around him and announced, "We must leave a country where such things can happen."
He could raise only enough money for two to go to America. According to Sarah's unpublished memoirs, Bernard said, "I will take Sarah with me, she is the brightest." It was left to Ida and her grandparents to take over the rest of the housekeeping chores and the care of her mother and six brothers and sisters.
Bernard and Sarah traveled to Germany, where they planned to board a ship for New York, but as they were about to embark, they discovered they had only enough money for a fare and a half. Sarah was too old to travel half fare.
Bernard saw no solution. "We must go back to Russia and wait until we can raise more money."
Sarah, not to be daunted, pleaded with the captain of an English ship, who finally let her board for half fare. Once on board, she was overcome with anticipation. "We are going to America, where I can learn everything!"
Had she remained in Russia, she reflected, her fate would have been to marry the jeweler's son who had courted her, and by the time she was twenty, "there would have been nothing for me for the rest of my life except an endless grind of chores, childbearing, housework, living in ignorance, and eventually a premature death. This was the lot of all Russian women." Certainly, she would escape her mother's lot in life.
It was on the boat that she made her momentous decision: "In America I will become a doctor.... The most outrageously improbable thing for me to become, the goal furthest from my reach in Russia."
When the boat landed at Castle Garden, Bernard had fifty cents in his pocket and two tickets for the Fall River Line to Boston. But to disembark, he would have to show sufficient money to prove that he and his daughter would not be destitute. Bernard borrowed the money from other immigrants on the vessel, returning it after he and Sarah had safely passed customs.
Armed with a letter of introduction to a friend of a friend, they took the overnight steamship to Boston. Their host took the weary travelers in, put them up for three weeks, and would not accept payment. This same benefactress bought Sarah a corset, made her throw away her peasant scarf, and replaced it with a hat. After this immigrant rite of passage was completed, Sarah got her first job, sewing buttons on jackets twelve hours a day, for three dollars a week. Working conditions in the sweatshops of Boston's North and West ends were somewhat less severe than in New York; nonetheless, Sarah was crammed into a small, filthy room without sunlight or fresh air with ten other laborers.
Sarah recalled her first year in America as the worst year of her life. Her father got a job as a garment presser. Eventually, their combined salaries grew to fifteen dollars a week. Saving every penny, they were able to bring Ida over in a year. The next year they struggled to bring the rest of the Mandelbaums to America.
Sarah next got a job with the Singer Sewing Machine Company, glad of her previous experience with her sewing machine. She worked a ten-hour day, going to customers' houses and teaching them to use their new machines. As a money-saving scheme, she made this rule for herself: If the distance between customers was under two miles, she would walk and save the three cents carfare, an economy measure employed by many immigrants.
Two years after her arrival in America, Sarah's whole family was reunited in Boston. Bernard opened a homemade candy and ice cream store, and everyone in the family (except, of course, Fanny) worked. Sarah now had a job as a seamstress in an expensive dress shop.
Sarah and Ida still did all the cooking and cleaning. But even with all this activity, their thirst for knowledge was unassuaged. For a small fee, they persuaded two Russian immigrant college students to tutor them in reading and math. Both tutors fell in love with Sarah. She did not reciprocate the boys' feelings, and dissolved the class. She was suspicious of marriage, and had had enough of raising children and cleaning house.
In 1891, when she was seventeen, she heard of a young man reputed to be a genius who made his living teaching English at one dollar for three lessons. "I cannot afford three lessons a week," thought Sarah, "but perhaps he will give me two for sixty-five cents."
And so Sarah began to study with Boris Sidis. She was awestruck by him. He seemed to her infinitely wise, learned, and kind. Two evenings a week they met and studied; afternoons they met on the Boston Commons and talked for hours about their plans and aspirations.
Under Boris's tutelage, Sarah nurtured her dream of becoming a doctor. Medical school was the favorite ambition of European immigrants, and the schools' tuition fees were payable in installments, bringing the dream within reach of a dedicated few. Still, in 1891, only a few dozen European immigrants had become doctors in New York, and none of them were women.
When Boris suggested Sarah go to college, it was all the impetus she needed to formulate a plan. She would take night classes for two years, get her high school diploma, and enter the Boston University School of Medicine. But when the perky, pigtailed seventeen-year-old approached the admissions director of a Boston high school she was met with an unexpected and stern rebuff. She was told, "You are being absurd. You have never been to primary school or high school, and you expect to graduate in two years! It is ridiculous, and we cannot admit you. Nobody has ever done it."
Cowed, Sarah told Boris of her humiliation. Boris replied, "Maybe it is better this way. You can take the New York state board examinations for high school students in three weeks. Pass them, and you won't have to go to high school."
Sarah, who knew little math, despaired of learning algebra and geometry in three weeks. But Boris remained confident. He asked her for twenty-five cents, and purchased a secondhand Euclid. He explained the first five theorems in geometry, then said, "Use your good mind to work out the rest of them just as Euclid did. Don't try to memorize. Just try to understand, and then you can't help remembering."
She propped Euclid up above the sink, and studied while she washed the dishes. Sarah was severely ridiculed by her family, with the exception of her sister Ida. They told her that if she took the exams she would look foolish and embarrass them. "Nobody," they said, "does such things. Who do you think you are?"
Sarah bore the insults, secure in the knowledge that Boris was her ally. She quit her job at Singer and went to New York on the same Fall River Line that had originally brought her to Boston. For one dollar a friend let her sleep on a cot in her room during the week of the tests.
When Sarah returned home, she was ridiculed further. But soon she received her test results—and she had passed with honors. Now more confident, she began to study Latin and physics for her Boston University School of Medicine exams.
Meanwhile, Sarah urged Boris to attend Harvard University. Boris refused, saying, "What can they teach me? They will enmesh me in scholastic red tape."
"What good is being the most brilliant man in the world," Sarah replied, "if you meet only the four walls?"
Sarah persisted. And soon Boris was enrolled in Harvard as a special student, taking physics, Latin, economics, and philosophy. While Boris never got over his hatred of "bureaucratic red tape," he fell in love with the rich intellectual life of Harvard, and in 1892, Harvard was a glorious place to be. It was the heyday of the long reign of President Charles William Eliot, a vigorous and controversial man of legendary accomplishments, including the appointment of a stellar group of intellectuals to his faculty—a group who would become Boris's teachers.
Foremost among these was the philosopher /psychologist / scientist William James, who was to figure heavily in the Sidises' lives. James, then fifty years old, was intense and energetic. He had overcome youthful years of severe depression and was in his prime as full professor of philosophy. His work was being read, and hotly debated, throughout America and Europe.
In addition to his philosophy course he offered a course in psychology. The birth of the American movement in psychology was taking place at Harvard in the eleven rooms of the Psychological Laboratory founded by James in 1891. It was the first of its kind in America. There was no psychology department as such—students drawn to this novel and experimental field came largely from the science and philosophy departments. Not all of James's students appreciated their mentor's psychological leanings. Morris Raphael Cohen, who went on to become a Harvard philosophy professor, wrote, "I could not. . . share James' psychologic approach to philosophy. His psychologic explanations of necessary truth did not seem to me to bear on their logical nature. . . . Our intellectual disagreements were often violent." Yet, like so many of James's students, Cohen found him "a never-failing source of warm inspiration" and "a trusted counselor in all my difficulties of health and finance."
The California-born philosopher Josiah Royce, recruited for Harvard by James, fit perfectly the stereotype of the philosopher. Pudgy, quiet, learned, and diligent, his disorderly appearance caused students to mistake him for the janitor of Sever Hall. Royce and James remained intimate associates for years, though their views were quite different and they argued frequently. Together these two formed the cornerstone of the Harvard psychology "department," drawing recognition of American philosophy from Europe.
While Boris took his first courses at Harvard, Sarah worked as a waitress in a resort hotel in the White Mountains. To her surprise, Boris appeared one day on her doorstep. He confessed that he had fallen in love with her at first sight, and had always suffered taking her money. "But," he said, "I thought that if I did not take it, you wouldn't come back, and I would never see you again. Please come home. I can't sleep. I can't go home without you." Sarah returned to Boston with Boris, and they decided to marry, but not immediately. Sarah's family disapproved of Boris, a poor student with no money and no interest in making any.
And when it came to money, Boris was adamant. He told his bride-to-be, "Making money and living the life I want to live don't go together. No man can read and study and think and write deeply and honestly, and think about making money. I promise you this, we won't have any."
"Don't ever worry about it," Sarah insisted. "I can live on very little. I can make you silk shirts out of cheap remnants. I can take care of myself. A lack of money will never bother us."
According to Sarah, her irate mother secretly approached Boris, saying, "Look, why don't you leave Sarah alone? Why do you bother her? What can you offer her, a penniless student like yourself? Leave her alone, for there are young men who want her in marriage who can bring her a nice, easy life." Without visible rancor, Boris replied, "Let's let Sarah decide that." To Sarah he said only, "Your mother does what she thinks is best for you."
Sarah entered Boston University School of Medicine in 1892. A skinny girl in pigtails (her friends nicknamed her "The Toothpick"), she barely looked eighteen—her parents had to go to the school and swear she was of age. Her first semester's tuition was forty dollars, which she had to borrow from a rabbi friend of Boris's; she couldn't raise the money for the second semester, so she went to the dean and requested a leave of absence until she had earned the necessary funds. The dean had heard of her industry and gave her a scholarship on the spot. She never paid tuition again.
But even without that expense, it still cost Sarah no small effort to support herself. She worked as a waitress in the school cafeteria in trade for her lunches, and as a nurse two nights a week. Her nursing shift was twelve hours straight, and after staying up all night she still managed to drag herself to classes the next day. In addition to her work and studies, she cleaned her parents' house every Sunday.
Never timid, Sarah pluckily approached Boris's philosophy professor, the revered Josiah Royce. She asked him to use his influence to get Boris to enroll in Harvard for a degree. Though Boris was enjoying life as a special student, and had received superb grades, he was reluctant to enter school officially—as Sarah put it, "attaching degrees to learning annoyed him."
But in the end he did enroll, and that pivotal year he studied psychology, ethics, and philosophy with a pantheon of stimulating minds. If Boris was pleasantly surprised by Harvard, Harvard's professors were astounded by the fiery young Russian.
Once again, Sarah pressured Boris, urging him to speak to his teachers to see if he could graduate Harvard in two years instead of the normal four. The faculty did her suggestion one better—Boris was graduated in one year, magna cum laude. As usual, he had received all A's.
That Christmas vacation Boris and Sarah slipped off quietly to Providence, Rhode Island, where they were married by a judge. After a week's honeymoon in Providence, they returned to Boston and to their life of learning.
The following year, Boris received a fellowship through the J. P. Morgan Fund. He was given $750, and this, combined with his teaching and Sarah's earnings, was just enough to support the young couple. They rented two cheap attic rooms. They bought day-old bread and drank black coffee, joked about whether they would ever be able to afford cream. And every Sunday afternoon the impoverished young couple entertained. They hosted scores of students and revered teachers who came to discuss philosophy and psychology. The most renowned of them all, William James, frequently climbed the many stairs to their attic.
"Pray tell me," James would gently ask Sarah, "how can two people who are so poor be so happy?"
At the turn of the century, the field of psychology was still in a primitive state. In Europe, Sigmund Freud was gaining a small reputation among scientists, but lay Americans had never heard of him. The French psychologist Pierre Janet then dominated the field. Janet, taking the banner from his own teacher, Jean-Martin Charcot, was making inroads in "mental medicine" that were read of and admired intensely by the Boston group. (In years to come, Boris Sidis would be dubbed "the Janet of America" for his pioneering studies in hypnosis and mental illness.) None of the eager Bostonians gathered in the Sidises' attic could have guessed that a bitter feud would soon split the budding American psychoanalytic community into angry factions.
Those Sunday afternoons in the Sidises' attic were more than stimulating to the participants—they were to lay the cornerstones of American psychology. The guests experimented on each other with cards, numbers, squares, and patterns to study the effects of suggestion.
And they hypnotized each other. One afternoon James and Boris hypnotized one of the students, and James gave the boy this command: "Behave as Mr. Sidis does." Immediately the hypnotized student jumped up, went to the tiny closet that was Sarah's kitchen, lit the kerosene stove, and put the kettle on. "You will have tea, won't you? Everybody wants tea, don't they?" he asked. The guests roared with laughter—the boy was Boris to perfection.
The aim of these studies and experiments was to understand the previously unexplored subconscious, or what Sidis and James called "the subwaking mind." Under what conditions is the mind most suggestible? Could long-lost memories be recovered? Did suggestions given to a patient in a hypnotic trance last? And could this hypnotic state—which Sidis called "the hypnoidal state"—be used in healing mental and physical ills?
Boris had gained sufficient reputation at this point for a representative of the Tsar who was visiting Boston and being entertained by James to offer the expatriate full permission to return to Russia with a college position, laboratories, and research facilities placed at his disposal. Boris refused angrily, preferring to be poor and free in America over returning to Russia under even the best of conditions.
He had lost the overcoat made by the tailor who loved Spinoza, and James and Harvard's philosophy professor Herbert Palmer were disturbed to see their prize student coming to classes without a proper coat in the freezing Boston winter. James told Boris, "Look, you know I have a little money of my own, and I don't spend all they pay me at Harvard, so that I have a small fund to help students. Let me loan you two hundred dollars and you can repay me without interest when you begin to make money. Get yourself an overcoat." Boris replied hotly, "I don't need any money, and there are students here who do. Also, there are other students who want to come to Harvard who don't because they can't pay the tuition. Loan your money to them. They need it. I don't."
James reported his lack of success to Palmer. Palmer, a master of discreet benevolence who had helped countless poor students through Harvard, replied, "Ha, you tried to loan him too much. I'll make it a smaller amount, and he'll take it." To Palmer's dismay, Boris refused his money too. Palmer later told Sarah he had never met a man so proudly independent and so little concerned by the lack of material things that most people consider necessities.
The years 1896 and 1897 were important years for the Sidises. Boris taught Aristotelian logic for Royce at Harvard and published his second article, "A Study of the Mob," in the Atlantic Monthly. His third, "The Study of Mental Epidemics," was published in Century Magazine, for which Boris was paid one hundred dollars, a good deal of money at the time.
As if this were not enough for a man who only a few years before had arrived as a political exile, something still more exciting occurred. Sarah recalled the incident fifty years later:
"Boris came up the stairs into the apartment. He seemed all excited. 'James called me into his office today,' he said. I knew that Boris and James were great friends and saw each other constantly, so this bit of news didn't impress me very much.
"'Well, go on,' I said. 'What did he say?'
"'He wants me to see Teddy Roosevelt. I walked into James's office. He made me sit down. He said he and Palmer and Royce had had a long talk about me. First, James asked me what my plans were after I got my degree. I told him that I had applied for several teaching positions in the West and the South. He said, "You don't want to teach. You'll get in a rut. Look at me—I'm in a rut. I have too little time to study, I'm not contributing anything to the world. We can't have this happen to you. I'm going to give you a letter to Teddy Roosevelt. He'll only be in New York for a short time before he goes to the White House." ' "
Roosevelt was then governor of New York, and neither Boris nor Sarah knew what to expect of the meeting, or what the possibilities were. Nevertheless, Boris soon left for Albany, and, presenting a letter from James, requested a fifteen-minute interview with the governor. The men talked for two hours, and Roosevelt, delighted with Boris, urged him to stay on in New York where he, Roosevelt, would find a position for him. Despite Boris's protests that he had work to attend to in Boston, Roosevelt persuaded him to remain.
The New York State legislature had just formed a novel department, a Pathological Institute that was intended as an annex to the state hospital system, providing "instruction in brain pathology and other subjects for the medical officers of the state hospitals." The institute experimented with patients from state hospitals for the insane, and later on treated private patients. An innovative, brilliant physician, Dr. Ira van Gieson, was appointed director. He selected Boris as one of his staff of specialists, and, in 1896, work at the institute began in earnest. An appropriation of fifty thousand dollars was made by the state, and a laboratory was set up on the top floor of New York's new Metropolitan Building—a far cry from the New York of slums and sweatshops Boris had known only a few years before.
Boris's appointment was greeted with some disdain by New York professionals, who thought that at twenty-nine he was too young. Furthermore, he had neither an M.D. nor a Ph.D. Boris had received his B.A. when he was twenty-three, a year after entering Harvard, and his M.A. when he was twenty-four, scoffing at both—he regarded them as meaningless, these pieces of paper so universally coveted and struggled for. To Boris Sidis, degrees were never the proper symbols of a man's accomplishments.
Then, while Boris was in New York, Harvard requested that he submit a thesis for his Ph.D. His professors suggested The Psychology of Suggestion, the brainchild over which he had been slaving. He refused vehemently—no school, not even Harvard, was going to get credit for his work. When they realized he was refusing to submit this or any other thesis, the university officials relented, asking him to come to Boston for an oral examination. Boris again declined. "Red tape! Red tape!" he ranted. "Letters! What do they mean!"
Again, Sarah appealed to Professor Royce. "I'll meet with the faculty and discuss it," Royce replied.
Harvard mailed Boris his Ph.D. in June, waiving all ordinary formalities. James told Sarah, "They wouldn't do this much for me.... If they call me a genius, what superlative have they saved for this husband of yours?"
Meanwhile, Sarah too had taken a degree: She was one of a handful of women to graduate from medical school before the turn of the century. As soon as she had graduated she joined Boris in New York. Though they missed their circle of friends in Boston, Boris kept in touch with James, and besides, his work at the institute was absorbing. He was perfecting his hypnosis for hysterical patients, putting the finishing touches on his first book, and evolving new theories of treatment. And Sarah was pregnant.
Certainly, it seemed, Boris was destined to be famous, to have a name that would make headlines. But it was their baby boy, born on April Fool's Day, 1898, who would completely eclipse his father both in fame and notoriety.
2
April Fool
Billy Sidis's birth, on April 1, 1898, was a perfectly normal one. He weighed seven pounds, six ounces, and according to his mother was "fat and happy and full of the devil." He was named after William James, who presented the baby with a silver cup bearing the inscription "To William James Sidis, from William James his godfather." Sarah Sidis, in her unpublished book How to Make Your Child a Genius, wrote in the third person about the restrictions her son's arrival placed on her:
"It was Sarah who first became a doctor and she encouraged her husband to get his degree. Her plan was to go along with him on cases to aid him in his studies. One of the incidents which restrained her somewhat in this capacity was the birth of their son, Billy."
Despite the sour note of disappointment in her remark, she insisted that Billy was a carefully planned baby, his arrival a welcome event. Of Boris's reaction, she wrote: "In all his brilliant life, you would have thought the most brilliant and marvelous thing he ever did was to have a son."
The couple was living on Central Park West, and when their first New York summer came, the oppressive heat would send them out of their apartment. At three in the morning they took Billy strolling in his carriage in Central Park, enjoying the cool hours until dawn. In the quiet morning they discussed their ideas for bringing up their boy. Sarah wrote, "The most important thing we agreed on was that we should always agree. We decided that we would always stand together in our decisions, and not pull and haul this infant between us in conflict. We agreed on discipline—the only discipline worth a thrip in building a worthwhile and upright person was the desire to please. If we brought Billy up to love us, by our love and gentleness, then he would want to please us. And if we were always pleased by good conduct, he would be a good boy.
"We decided from the start that we would treat Billy just like a grown-up. Children all want to be treated on equal footing with their elders. So many parents I've seen have been completely contradictory in their approach to their children. They treat them like babies, and then spank them for not behaving like grandfathers."
Boris told his wife, "Before a baby can talk, his mind is there, it is a tool that may be sharpened if his parents are always reasonable and truthful and logical with him. Minds are built with use. Muscles are not built by lying in bed. Encourage this baby of ours to think, to walk down every path his fancy dictates as long as he is interested. Answer all his questions as far as you can go and as long as he asks."
Besides their ideas about feeding Billy's mind and satisfying his intellectual curiosity at every turn, Sarah attempted to apply some of Boris's psychological principles to child rearing. Boris's studies of sleep indicated that the period just before falling asleep is a highly suggestible one, during which the mind is particularly receptive. This information bred in Sarah a concern about Billy's bedtime stories. "I always felt that it was very important not to tell him stories that were trite or commonplace or ugly. So much of the Grimm brothers' tales I found ugly, and Hans Christian Andersen seemed sad and melancholy, so I turned to the Greek myths for Billy's first bedtime stories."
In her early writings, Sarah claimed that in the beginning, she goo-goo'ed and ga-ga'ed as much as any mother, although both parents later declared that they disapproved of baby talk and always spoke to Billy as though he were an adult. Be that as it may, Boris showed an unexpected playful side. Sarah recalled coming home one day and hearing noise coming from the kitchen: the crash of a broken cup, "an extraordinarily happy laugh from Billy," and the crash of another cup. Sarah hurried in just in time to see Boris handing the baby a third cup.
"What do you do?!" demanded Sarah.
"But he laughs so marvelously when he breaks the cups," Boris replied shamefacedly.
When Billy was six months old his parents bought him a high chair. Boris insisted, "I don't care if the King of England comes to dinner. Billy will sit with us." Sarah wrote: "He had all his meals with us from the time he was six months old. He couldn't creep, and he couldn't walk and he couldn't talk, but he could observe." They gave him a spoon, and "for two months he hit his ear and his eye with the spoon, and sometimes his food landed on his head. And I would guide the spoon to his mouth. But after two months, lo, he hit his mouth. Such a crowing, such triumph! He crowed so that I thought at first he had burnt his mouth, but his face was radiant with success. After that he fed himself.
"'See,' said Boris, 'he has learned to coordinate those muscles. In the same way he can learn to think, by using his mind. Keep on feeding him like some mothers do, he will still be eating from your hand when he is three years old. A baby is never too young to start learning anything.'"
Sarah claimed she was happy to stay home and take care of Billy, saying, "At the time of Billy's birth the current fad was to practically desert your child, to refuse him any affection or love. We thought this whole idea was monstrous."
As the Sidises' second winter in New York approached, Boris insisted that Sarah buy herself a new winter coat with twenty dollars she had saved (winter coats were a consistent problem for the Sidises). Sarah, however, was longing to buy things for Billy to play with, and that twenty dollars was all the extra cash they had. Secretly, she went to a remnant shop in downtown New York and for sixty cents bought three pounds of cotton batting and a few dollars' worth of material and, using her old spring coat as the lining, sewed a winter coat for herself. She did it all on the sly, and the ruse worked—Boris didn't find out until years later. Sarah at last had money to spend on Billy. She bought blocks, books, maps, and a little globe. Boris couldn't figure out where she'd gotten the money, but she just said mysteriously, "I saved."
Education began. Boris took two alphabet blocks—"A" and "B" —first holding them up in turn over Billy's crib, then forming a syllable until the baby said his first "ba-ba." Then Boris reversed the order of the blocks, so his son learned to say "ab." Soon Boris was making words with the blocks and pointing to the objects they represented. Sarah and Billy too would play in this way by the hour, cluttering the floor with words.
At six months, he spoke his first word, "door."
A few months later, when he had increased his vocabulary enough to explain, Sarah asked, "Why do you like the door so much?" "Door moves. People come," was Billy's answer.
Billy was seven months old when he pointed to the moon and called it by name. That, Sarah later told a relative, was when she realized her son was a genius. She wrote, "The first thing my April Fool's boy wanted from the great outside world was the moon. We stood at the window of the apartment together in the evening, with Billy in Boris's arms, and admired the moon over Central Park. Billy chuckled and reached for it. The next night when he found that the moon was not in the same place, he seemed disturbed. Trips to the window became a nightly ritual, and he was always pleased when he could see the 'moon.'
"This led to Billy's mastering higher mathematics and planetary revolutions by the time he was eleven, and if that seems to be a ridiculous statement I can only say, 'Well, it did.' "
Billy played constantly with his maps and globe. He was not even a year old, but was learning to spell at a remarkable rate. Boris and Sarah named the letters to him for hours on end, and he grew proficient at combining and arranging them. He would toddle around carrying a red tin bucket filled with blocks, then plop himself down on his stomach to spell out "physiological psychology" or "effects of anesthesia" (titles on the lower shelf of his father's bookcase). At eighteen months he was reading The New York Times, and he could pluck from the bookshelf any book a visitor requested. At the same time that he was spelling, reading, and talking, Billy learned to count, also using blocks. He greeted visitors by telling them how many buttons they had on their dress or suit. When his parents pushed his carriage through Central Park, a crowd of children gathered round, asking him to count to one hundred, a feat he easily performed; the children were all older, but could not yet count.
Sarah bought Billy a child's encyclopedia, and when he encountered something he didn't know, they looked it up together. One day, after they had done this a few times, he asked Sarah a question, then told her, "But you will say, 'Let's look it up!' and I can look it up myself!" "That," wrote Sarah, "is the last lesson I gave Billy. During the day he would go occasionally to his room and close the door and read. He never studied."
By the time Billy turned three, his voracity for learning was in full swing, and it became apparent that he was not even an ordinarily precocious little boy. One day, as Sarah sat in her kitchen, she heard "the slow, purposeful thumping of the typewriter" from her husband's study. She recalled, "I didn't interrupt, and Billy brought me out a letter he had written. It was to Macy's, ordering toys. He addressed the envelope correctly and sealed the letter.
" 'Now I am very old, like Daddy, because I can typewrite. Maybe I am a hundred or two hundred years old.'
"He was delighted by my surprise, and proud to show me how he had pulled his high chair up to the typewriter when he found he couldn't reach it from his daddy's chair. 'Won't Daddy be surprised!' he crowed. His father's surprise was his greatest incentive."
Billy was always in the company of Boris and Sarah and their friends. Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus (they owned Macy's) were especially fond of little Billy, and Mrs. Straus often asked Sarah if she could "borrow" the boy, whom she took home to tea or for walks and drives around New York.
Mrs. Straus invited the Sidises and Billy to a costume ball. Billy, dressed in a little Russian costume Sarah had made, crawled under the magnificent dining room table and tickled the guests' toes during dinner. The amused adults picked him up and set him in the middle of the table. Mrs. Straus explained to the assemblage who Billy was and described his remarkable abilities. Billy held court, playing guessing games with the company, answering questions, and astonishing them by reciting railroad and bus timetables as if they were children's rhymes. It was the beginning of two decades of being onstage. From then on Billy was a regular at the Straus parties, holding the floor and entertaining the guests. One can only assume that, at the age of three, the blue-eyed, apple-cheeked boy reveled in the appreciative attention of so many enraptured adults.
Billy's proficiency in spelling was at that time his most extraordinary talent. Sarah and Boris stressed the roles of reason and logic to Billy—they never made him do any memorizing. He was a quick study when it came to learning prefixes and suffixes. There seemed to be no stopping him.
Once, as a test of Billy's powers, a friend of the family spelled out "Prince Maurocordatos, a friend of Byron," with alphabet blocks. Two weeks later she asked him, "What was the name of Byron's friend I spelled for you?" Billy immediately produced the phrase.
Billy's next coup occurred one evening when Boris had returned from a business trip to Chicago to celebrate his birthday, and the Sidises were entertaining company. Billy slipped into the room with a book hidden behind his back, waiting for a break in the conversation.
"Does anyone here happen to know Latin?" he asked innocently.
"Yes, I know a little," someone replied.
"Here," said Billy, thrusting a copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars into the visitor's hands. "I can read it, let me show you!"
Billy read the first page, then said, "Oh, Daddy, aren't you surprised?"
Billy had taught himself Latin as a birthday present for his father by studying his mother's old Latin primer and matching the English words with the Latin ones. A few months later, poking around in his father's books, he peeked into Plato and asked, "Daddy, why are these letters different from regular letters?" Following his philosophy of answering all Billy's questions, Boris taught his three-year-old the Greek alphabet. Then, with the aid of a Greek primer, Billy taught himself to read Homer. Boris, who was not a Greek scholar himself, was truly awestruck.
At four, Billy was typing proficiently and chattering away on difficult subjects. The following year, his abilities had so expanded that no one who encountered the child could fail to be astounded. Over the next few years, assisted by his father's own considerable knowledge of languages, Billy inhaled Russian, French, German, and Hebrew, and he soon added Turkish and Armenian to his repertoire.
When Billy was six, Boris gave his boy several calendars and explained them in detail. His affection for calendars and dates was so great that he quickly devised a game for himself, a game no adult was bright enough to match him in: He could calculate on what day of the week any given date would fall. Now at Mrs. Straus's dinner parties, he was able to amaze the guests by telling them what day of the week they had been born on, simply by being told the date and the year.
Sarah continued to insist on the normalcy of Billy's activities.
"The real secret was that at first when he learned he wanted to please and surprise the daddy he worshiped. And like all normal little fellows, he wanted often to be the center of attention. He found that learning new things made him the center, and this was his stimulant. Afterward he needed no stimulant, learning was in itself a pleasure."
Although Sarah later claimed that Billy played with other children, there is no evidence that this was so, and it is hard to imagine with whom he could have played. How many other toddlers like to discuss Caesar's Gallic Wars in the original Latin? With a possible rare exception, he was always in the company of adults.
The family spent the summers on Mount Hurricane in the Adirondacks. William James introduced them to the Davidson colony, a small, inexpensive summer resort. Intellectuals gathered there to go mountain climbing and to deliver informal lectures over tea. Boris's visits were brief, but Sarah and Billy stayed entire summers, relaxing with the James family and a variety of artists, professors, and scholars. Prominent members of the colony were John Dewey (then head of the Department of Education at the University of Chicago) and his family. Sarah was fascinated and appalled by Mrs. Dewey's approach to child rearing. Mrs. Dewey was a believer in "self-expression and complete freedom for her children," who were, Sarah decided, "nice honest children with no formal manners, but pleasant." Sarah was horrified to see them running barefoot near perilous ravines and getting scratched by briars. Certainly, little Billy never ran barefoot. Despite Dewey's vast influence in the field of child education, none of it rubbed off on the Sidises. Said Sarah, "I could not see how falling off a cliff could be educational, and since there are many cliffs in this world I did not go along with Mrs. Dewey's ideas." In any case, the five-year-old Billy had other amusements besides physical play. He was made mail clerk and allowed to distribute the letters each day.
One summer evening at the colony, Billy complained of a toothache, but there was no dentist within miles. To distract Billy from the pain, Boris took him for an after-dinner walk in the lush New England countryside and explained Aristotelian logic, since the boy had been expressing interest in his father's Harvard lectures on the subject.
After an hour, father and son returned. Radiant, Billy announced to his mother, "Now I know all about logic!" A few years later he told a friend, "I'm sorry I put off logic so long. If I had studied it sooner it would have helped me a great deal."
It was at Mount Hurricane that Billy had his first encounter with a journalist—the first of hundreds. This astute reporter jotted down his observations in a diary, publishing them two years later in the North American Review. It was the first reporter's-eye view of Billy, and it casts him in a slightly different light from his mother's reportage:
"At a hotel in the mountains, it was the custom of the infant prodigy to read the menu with infinite care, looking about the room to see if all the dishes mentioned were represented on the tables and to inquire anxiously for those he did not see. Once he chanced to be brought in early to breakfast, namely, at 7:45, when upon consulting the menu he found that breakfast was served from 8 to 9. He was seized by perfect panic when the waiter brought in the breakfast ahead of time; he required that it be taken back at once, and finally was borne shrieking from the room, calling out like an irate Hebrew prophet: 'It is from 8 to 9. It has been written.' "
The Review is the first publication to give testament to Billy's amazing memory:
A lady coming in with an armful of joe-pye, gathered along the road, proffered some slight data concerning the flower, only to rouse the eager little listener to a sudden contradiction. "It is not so; consult Mrs. Dana, page 252." It was quite true that he not only remembered all he read, but the numbers of the pages upon which he read given information.
It was his pleasing custom to speak of all the guests in the house, in which he spent his summers, by the numbers of the rooms they occupied. A lady and a little girl passing him, he would absentmindedly comment, "Two No. 33's," or a gentleman and a dog going by, he would comment, "No. 57, the dog from kennel 4."
His most notable trait was that he could not be turned aside from any purpose or diverted as other children are. He had very little interest in humanity, and the only way to see an exhibition of his unusual knowledge was to feign ignorance. He already, at five years old, knew something of English, Russian, French and German. If one asked him to count in German, one would be met by a stony gaze of abstraction, so detached, so distant, that it was truly humiliating. If however, one came to him in the spirit of thirst for knowledge, saying, "I suppose the Germans count just as we do," he was lavish with instruction.