Pirsig on Sidis

 Back down in the plains, in a country motel one night with nothing to read, Phædrus had found a small dog-eared Yankee magazine, thumbed through it, and stopped on a brief account by Cathie Slater Spence entitled In Search of the April Fool.

It was about a child prodigy who had possibly the highest intelligence ever observed, and who in his later life went nowhere. Born on April 1, 1898, it said, William James Sidis could speak five languages and read Plato in the original Greek by the age of five. At eight he passed the entrance for Harvard but had to wait three years to be admitted. Even so he became Harvard’s youngest scholar and graduated cum Jaude in 1914 at the age of sixteen. Frequently featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Sidis made the front page of The New York Times nineteen times.

But after graduating from Harvard, the Boy Wonder pursued his own obscure and seemingly meaningless interests. The press that had lionized him turned on him. The most scathing example came in the New Yorker in 1937. Entitled April Fool, the magazine article ridiculed everything from Sidis’s hobbies to his physical characteristics. Sidis sued for libel and invasion of privacy. Though he won a small out-of-court settlement for libel, the invasion of privacy charge was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark decision. The article is merciless in its dissection of intimate details of its subject’s personal life, the court conceded, but Sidis was a public figure and thus could not claim protection from the interest of the press, which continued to hound him until his death in 1944. Obituaries called him a prodigious failure and a burnt-out genius who had never achieved anything of significance despite his talents.

Dan Mahony of Ipswich, Massachusetts, read about Sidis in 1976 and was puzzled. What was he really doing and thinking all that time? Mahony wondered. It’s true he held low-paying jobs, but Einstein came up with the theory of relativity while working in a patent office. I had a feeling Sidis was up to more than most people thought.

Mahony has spent the last ten years looking into Sidis’s work. In one dusty attic, he found a bulky manuscript called The Tribes and the States in which Sidis argues persuasively that the New England political system was profoundly influenced by the democratic federation of the Penacook Indians.

At this sentence, a kind of shock passed through Phædrus, but the article went on.

When Mahony sent Sidis’s book The Animate and Inanimate to another eccentric genius, Buckminster Fuller, Fuller found it a fine cosmological piece that astoundingly predicted the existence of black holes — in 1925!

Mahony has unearthed a science fiction novel, economic and political writings, and eighty-nine weekly newspaper columns about Boston that Sidis wrote under a pen name. The amazing thing is that we may only have tapped the surface of what Sidis produced, says Mahony. For instance, we’ve found just one page of a manuscript called The Peace Paths, and people who knew Sidis have said they saw many more manuscripts. I think Sidis may still have a few surprises in store for us.

Phædrus set down the magazine and felt as though someone had thrown a rock through the motel window. Then he read the article over and over again in a sort of daze, as the impact of what he was reading sank deeper and deeper. That night he could hardly sleep.

It looked as though way back in the thirties Sidis had been on exactly the same thesis about Indians. He was trying to tell people some of the most important things that could be said about their country and they were rewarding him by publicly calling him a fool and failing to publish what he had written. There didn’t even seem to be any way to find out what Sidis had said.

Phædrus tried to contact the Mahony mentioned in the article but couldn’t find him, partly, he supposed, because his effort was only half-hearted. He knew that even if he did get a look at Sidis’s material there wasn’t much he could do about it. The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t true. The problem was that nobody was interested.

(...)

Phædrus thought about William James Sidis, the prodigy who could read five languages when he was five years old. After discovering what Sidis had said about Indians, Phædrus had read a full biography of him and found that when Sidis was a teenager he announced he would refuse to have anything to do with sex for the rest of his life. It seemed as though in order to sustain a satisfactory intellectual life he felt he had to cut himself off from social and biological domination except where they were absolutely necessary. This vow of ancient priests and ascetics was once considered a high form of morality, but in the Roaring Twenties of the twentieth century a new standard of morals had arrived, and when journalists found out about this vow they ridiculed Sidis mercilessly. That coincided with the beginning of a pattern of seclusion that lasted the rest of his life.

Is it better to have wisdom or is it better to be attractive to the ladies? That was a question debated by Provengal poets way back in the thirteenth century. Sidis opted for wisdom ...

Lila. Inquiry Into Morals