Prodigious Failure

Within two years after William James Sidis' father gave him alphabet blocks, he was writing French and English on a typewriter. He was then four. At five, employing a formula of his own devising, he could instantly name the day of the week on which any date in history fell. When he was six his mother surrendered him to a first-grade teacher. The teacher promptly surrendered to William. The most famous infant prodigy of his generation knew more about fractions than she did.

Intellectual Jack Rabbit. At nine, having attended high school for less than a year, William was ready for college. Harvard judged him too young, made him wait until he was eleven. That year he spellbound his professors with a discussion of four-dimensional bodies. The sandy-haired, blue-eyed prodigy seemed to have proved his father's theories.

Russian-born Harvard Professor Boris Sidis had always said that if you strongly encouraged a child's intellectual curiosity he would learn faster than a jack rabbit runs. Mother Sidis, also Russian-born, was a physician,/- A specialist in abnormal psychology, proud Father Sidis filled scientific journals with articles about his prodigious son, wrote a book (Philistine and Genius) urging other parents to adopt his own methods of intellectual forced feeding. "To delay is a mistake and wrong to the child," he declared. "We can at that early period awaken a love of knowledge which will persist through life."

In 1910 parents of bright boys throughout the world heard with mingled relief and alarm that Son William James (named for his father's great Harvard colleague) had suffered a nervous breakdown.

The Perfect Life. After a stay at his father's sanitorium in New Hampshire, young Sidis returned to Harvard. His lifelong physical awkwardness was already apparent. His "marked distrust of people" did not prevent him from graduating cum laude in 1914, aged 16. Reporters bypassed such classmates as Leverett Saltonstall and Sumner Welles in their eagerness to interview the prodigy. He told them: "I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds." But he stayed on to breeze through Harvard Law School. At 20 he was teaching mathematics in Texas' Rice Institute. He soon quit.

On May Day, 1919, a group of Socialist demonstrators was arrested in Roxbury. One of them was charged with having shouted: "To hell with the American flag." He denied it, but admitted in court that he thought the Russian Revolution had been a good idea. It was Sidis, now become a Marxist. Sentenced to 18 months in the House of Correction, he appealed and the case was dropped. Then, like a skyrocket, he sank out of sight.

Peridromophile. In 1924 Sidis was, discovered in New York City, punching an adding machine at $23 a week. He announced that he was tired of thinking. "All I want to do is run an adding machine," he said, "but they won't let me alone." Yet in four days of .supposedly clerical work for the National Industrial Conference Board he scribbled an office-organization plan which showed how to save 40 clerks three months' work.

During these years Sidis, fiercely resentful of his reputation as a freak, kept away from his family. The friend who told him of his father's death was berated for. wasting his time. His business associates shunned him, office girls sniffed that he needed more baths. In the mid-19305 he went back to Boston.

Sidis liked to call himself a peridromophile (lover of ways roundabout). At 14 he had written a mnemonic masterpiece on Boston transportation:

From subway trains at Central, a transfer get, and go To Allston or to Brighton, or to Somerville, you know.

On cars from Brighton transfer to Cambridge subway east, And get a train to Park Street, or

Kendall Square, at least. His adult intellectual passion was the collection of trolley transfers. In 1926 he wrote & published a book (Notes on the Collection of Transfers) describing its delights.

Ambition: Normalcy. By 1937, when The New Yorker picked him up and dusted him off, Sidis was almost forgotten. At 39, a bachelor clerk in a Boston office, he was described as "a large, heavy man, with a prominent jaw, a thickish neck, and . . . a mustache. . . . He seems to have difficulty in finding the right words to express himself, but when he does, he speaks rapidly, nodding his head jerkily to emphasize his points, gesturing with his left hand, uttering occasionally a curious, gasping laugh." He promptly sued The New Yorker for invading his privacy, lost. Then he sued for libel. The magazine had wrongly charged him with attending Tufts College and skipping his $5,000 bail in the Roxbury affair. More offensively, it had intimated that he was an eccentric genius. In deposition, Sidis attempted to prove that he was a perfectly normal human being. The New Yorker settled out of court.

Total Victory. Some who knew Sidis at this time thought that his mind was "burned out." But one observer considered him something of a success: he had achieved a total victory in his rebellion against his father's ambitions for him.

Two weeks ago his Boston landlady found him in his furnished room, lying in a coma. Last week, without regaining consciousness, he died of an inner cranial hemorrhage. He was a few months past 46.

At Stanford University, Psychologist Lewis Terman, who began studying a group of 1,400 precocious children in 1921 and has seen almost all of them grow up to much more than average success and happiness, pronounced his epitaph. Said he: "Sidis' case was a rare exception. I think the boy was very largely ruined by his father, giving him so much bad publicity. The Quiz Kids radio program has done a lot to dispel the popular notion that gifted children are queer."

/- Her sister became the mother of slightly prodigious Quizmaster Clifton Fadiman.

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