by Ann Hulbert
It was quite a bourgeois triumvirate, but a boy buffeted by a bohemian upbringing—and a man who had weathered further blows—had become an embodiment of them. Henry, who was more than a decade further along in life than the average Termite, had demonstrated remarkable assurance from very early on. The focus his mother had remarked on had served him well, despite all kinds of distractions. So had the discipline that romantic Clarissa tended to play down but that Henry emphasized in his own way. A theme might present “itself to me in a flash,” he later said. “But it must be given material form, and I may work long hours to get the scheme down in a form which adequately represents it.” And Henry’s ordeals seemed to have smoothed the rough edges of a nonconforming eccentric. In his composing work, he migrated from the radical fringe of new music to embrace a more inclusively panethnic vision of global music after his rehabilitation. He began representing American music at conferences around the world. “I was bristlingly modernistic when I was quite young,” was how Henry himself put it, “but I have become much simpler since.” Some avant-garde colleagues like Charles Seeger took a harsher view. Henry, once daring, was playing it safe. But his wide-ranging influence—as a pioneer who transcended boundaries in his explorations of sound, of performance technique, of non-Western musical traditions, and of homegrown talents—is now clearer than ever, even if his music is rarely performed.
Henry’s success was a bold fulfillment of dreams that the rest of Terman’s endeavor had not delivered on. In 1956, now seventy-nine, Terman was at work with an associate on the thirty-five-year update of “the gifted group at mid-life” while he nursed a bad back and struggled to recover from a stroke. In the latest survey of “my 1,400 gifted ‘children,’ ” as Terman fondly referred to them, the glow of early hopes for exceptional eminence had faded. As his colleague finalized the text for what turned out to be a posthumous volume, she worked hard to play down any disappointment. At the average age of forty-four, the male Termites as a group were highly educated for the time, professionally accomplished, and well adjusted. The female Termites’ less-than-illustrious fortunes elicited this strained assessment: “There are many intangible kinds of accomplishment and success open to the housewife, and it is debatable whether the fact that a majority of gifted women prefer housewifery to more intellectual pursuits represents a net waste of brainpower.”
Terman’s own son, Fred, a ham radio obsessive decades earlier, had just been named Stanford’s provost in 1955. He had proved a true standout among the Termites—and was about to outdo his father in the genius-incubating sweepstakes. In the decades since doing graduate work at MIT (some of it under Norbert Wiener), Fred had made Stanford an engineering hub and shown the foresight to encourage two students named William Hewlett and David Packard to found a Palo Alto company. Fred also lured William Shockley back to Stanford, and his father’s genius-study reject hit the jackpot. In November 1956, shortly before Terman suffered a second stroke that left him mostly unconscious for the last month of his life, Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing the transistor. Who knows, maybe that early rejection from the genius study served as a goad for a figure who went on to alienate many a colleague. Terman didn’t live to discover that Shockley’s eugenicist extremism—not so different from Terman’s own—made him a pariah during his final decades.
The last chapter of the midlife volume, published in 1959, concluded wistfully that “the group has produced no great musical composer and no great creative artist,” with an asterisk noting that “a man of rare creative genius was not included.” Henry, who went unnamed, had been spotted ten years too late, and his IQ “was not definitely established in childhood,” so he didn’t officially count. But the summer before his death in December 1956, Terman had gotten back in touch with Henry to let him know that he considered him the true star. “Two weeks ago today I happened to have my radio tuned on KNBC at 7:30 and heard the announcer say that Henry Cowell’s 4th Symphony was next on the program,” he wrote him in late July. “I was deeply moved by it and after it was over, kept thinking of the days so long ago when I lived near you and of the solid reputation you have built up since then. Hardly anything has given me more satisfaction. Of course I am no critic of music, but I enjoyed all four parts of your symphony and most of all, the third part.”
That “satisfaction” was Terman’s implicit way of taking some credit, which he surely was due—although not thanks to his test or his theories. Henry was indebted to Terman’s personal interest and his luckily timed interventions in a life that might otherwise have been as marginal as Harry and Clarissa Cowell’s careers were. And Henry knew it. He seems to have emerged well aware of how much he owed to his circumstances, the freedom and the “handicaps” of his youth as well as the helping hands just when he needed them. He promptly responded with a letter that has not surfaced but was evidently full of gratitude. He also slipped in some publicity material about himself, leaving the boasting to others. Terman wrote right back, by hand.
What he sent Cowell (who died nine years later) was the sort of humble tribute the Harvard boys never got from their fathers. He conveyed his awe at Henry’s efforts to shape a path he could call his own. Terman, who dropped all professional reserve, couldn’t resist liberally invoking the signature word of his career, genius. But he drew real inspiration from Henry’s astonishing resilience in the face of setbacks, something no intelligence test could ever measure:
I don’t know when I have received a letter that gave me as much joy as yours of 8/4. I have read it over and over and have read all of the pamphlet at least twice. I am moved beyond words to know that you are regarded by many musical critics as among the foremost composers in America, and by some as one of the most creative musical geniuses in the world. I am not surprised that you had and have the necessary genius, but only that you brought it to flower despite the paucity of formal education in the early years and despite the tragic experience that would have wrecked the career of all but the bravest soul. I recall “that day”…when you told me you would do your best to “pick up the pieces.” And how you have succeeded! You have built the pieces into a structure that may be as grand as anything you could have wrought if the tragedy had not occurred. Perhaps it only made you try the harder.
PART II
DAUGHTERS and DREAMS
CHAPTER 3
“A Renaissance of Creative Genius in Girlhood”
· 1 ·
Nathalia Crane didn’t just type when she sat down at her typewriter in the book-strewn Brooklyn apartment where she lived with her father, Clarence, a war veteran in his fifties, and her much younger mother, Nelda, who had married him straight out of high school. She beat time with her foot and sometimes took a hand off the keys to slap out a rhythm. Her usual good cheer disappeared, her father said of the frail, big-eyed child who at nine had begun to compose her poems this way. “When she is writing she becomes a different girl,” he told a reporter after her first book of startlingly accomplished poetry, The Janitor’s Boy, came out in 1924, the year she turned eleven. “She frowns and is concentrated and will not permit any one to interrupt her.”
Barbara Newhall Follett demanded freedom from intrusion, too. In January 1923 her family had moved temporarily from rural Connecticut to a New Haven apartment when her father, Wilson, having taught English at a number of elite New England colleges, became an editor at Yale University Press. The typed sign she posted on her bedroom door was mostly meant for her mother. Helen Thomas Follett, coauthor with her husband of various literary essays for The Atlantic Monthly, was a former high school teacher.
Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking. The person in the room if he agrees that one shall come in will say “come in,” or something like that and if he does not agree to it he will say “Not yet, please,” or something like that….
The sign went on: “Reason. If the door is shut tight and a person
is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone.” Barbara, who wore braids, was typing away on a very long story about a child who becomes a fairy. She hoped to finish in time for her ninth birthday. Her aim was to surprise her mother with it, a reverse present-giving tradition Barbara had invented. The notion that the story would end up as a published novel had not yet occurred to her, or to her father.
Most young bookworms—off in a corner, eyes glued to the page—don’t churn out pages themselves. But the small child who does is bound to pique curiosity. (Check out what she’s clicking away at on the computer, and who knows whether you’ll be greeted, right then, as an annoyance or a captive audience.) Both girls’ parents assumed they were blissfully unaware of it, but Nathalia and Barbara—who never met each other—belonged to what one critic called a “renaissance of creative genius in girlhood” as the 1920s arrived.
Many adults sat down at their typewriters to muse about this “epidemic,” the term that often surfaced in the press. All across war-weary Europe, the poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer noted as the decade began, prodigious child artists—working with paints or in clay, or with words on the page—were suddenly winning praise. He was especially excited to see that “America has rushed into the fast-filling breach” with young writers, mostly female. He was also pleased to note that scientists were perplexed by the phenomenon. (Betty Ford’s output certainly baffled Terman.) No “army of professional educators, statisticians, eugenists [sic], psychologists,” bent on early testing and accelerated training, could presume to chart this fresh form of genius. Child writers, then as now, came trailing clouds of imaginative spontaneity their elders could only envy. Untermeyer joined a chorus of calls to draw sustenance from these creators and their wonder-tinged creations. Communing with them was a cure for what ailed a disenchanted age.
The Harvard boys, more traditional math-minded prodigies, had inspired no such romantic fervor. Off the beaten track, a musical original among the mystical-souled in Carmel, Henry Cowell had been a precursor of sorts. But with the creative girl “craze” (another word that cropped up), the fascination with innocent insight went mainstream. The literary boomlet, which wasn’t as spontaneous as it seemed, had an obvious external catalyst. It was an unwittingly satiric British novella written by an obscure nine-year-old girl and published in 1919 to extraordinary acclaim. Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan got a boost from a preface by J. M. Barrie, whose stage version of Peter Pan had been drawing crowds of all ages since the turn of the century, the Harry Potter of its moment.
An American publisher signed up The Young Visiters, and the book and an exported stage version took off. Daisy, who was decidedly not “parshial” to proper spelling, brought naïveté to a sharp-eyed tale of social climbing and amorous pursuit. Sales surged further amid a controversy over whether Barrie was actually the author. He wasn’t. But he was the star in a newly thriving children’s literature market, and his imprimatur made him the godfather of a subgenre ready to take off, child authorship. Amid Jazz Age jitters about flappers and radical cultural ferment, girlishly wise voices promised a wholesome frisson. Modernist flux opened doors for immature experimenters in literary form (as Henry had found in music). Add in, too, a spectacular success like Daisy—plus the popularity of the front-strike typewriter, which even little fingers could operate. The ingredients were at hand for a vogue in precocious self-expression. Prodigies thrive on receptive culture, whatever impetus nature or concerted nurture may supply. “All the mother’s darlings in the country,” a newspaper reported in the arch tone the phenomenon tended to elicit, “began writing books.”
The inner catalysts that drove the young authors—writers named Hilda Conkling and Opal Whiteley opened the decade, ahead of Nathalia and Barbara—were much more of a mystery. That was an essential part of the romantic delight their work inspired. Untermeyer saw the child artist “drawing its substance directly from the unconscious…tapping that vast source of intuitive wisdom” no longer available to the adult, “lost among his own machines.” All children, in fact, were “embryonic” artists, their creative energy suppressed by a civilization intent on “efficient industry.” His friend the Imagist poet Amy Lowell joined in celebrating the unmediated vision of youth, a revelation to more occluded elders. “How beautiful! How natural! How true!”: that gut response to girl outpourings, she felt, signaled that “one has stumbled upon that flash of personality which we call genius.”
But the inner mystery also stirred up debate and doubt. There was a reason for the rumor that Daisy Ashford was really Barrie in disguise. She spelled like a child, yet how did a mere child acquire the familiarity with adult themes—most notably, sex and snobbery—that she displayed? These girls weren’t prodigies in the usual sense of eliciting awe primarily with their mature technical mastery, though Nathalia did that, too—and what vocabularies they had! Their gift lay in their immaturity. Yet that state was all too perishable. The flip side of imaginative purity, as a bookish tween may remind you if you’ve forgotten, is impressionability, which can be as unsettling as it is enchanting. Look at what’s there on the computer screen: she’s a sponge not for math facts, you may discover, but for grown-up manners and morals—which she absorbs, in her own way, more avidly than you realized.
The young writers were readers, not just fantasizers. They were also the daughters of parents who were book lovers themselves, with romantic ideas about children—and about communing with them, often over books. The same sentiments thrived among the creative girls’ literary admirers, writers like Untermeyer, Lowell, and Barrie. And the audience primed to appreciate their work was a generation reared on Peter Pan, whose biggest fans went on waving handkerchiefs and chanting their belief in fairies during performances. What if the child-writing wasn’t quite so spontaneously natural after all? What if adult-pleasing, imitative urges crept in? Were the creations then so beautiful and free—or true? Lock your library, pack your poetic daughter “off to Tahiti,” avoid college: so Untermeyer (who never graduated from high school himself) was known to preach semifacetiously even as he mentored the imaginative girls who so intrigued him. “The subconscious,” he warned, “is going to have a hard time of it if it remains too close to poets, professors, and publishers.”
And yet if the fleeting child visions and voices were to be shared, the attention of poets, professors, publishers—and parents—was surely required. The girls presented a new prodigy puzzle. The pressing question wasn’t whether to train young brains in a hurry or let heredity be the guide. The focus, likely to sound familiar, was on parent-child bonding—how much of it, and what kind, might help or hinder that youthful creative potential. Nathalia’s frown and Barbara’s sign suggested that it was not as easy to get the answer right as their mentors hoped. So did public debates over what to make of such unnervingly articulate young females.
· 2 ·
Straightening up the family’s Flatbush apartment one day in late 1922, Nathalia’s mother threw some stray typed pages into the trash she sent down the dumbwaiter—only to be met by wails from Nathalia, then nine, in search of her “songs.” The household did not come to a stop. Nelda Crane told her daughter, with an apology and a little impatience, to put away stuff she wanted to save. She had been aware that Nathalia was spending lots of time tap-tapping behind her bedroom door. Whatever she was up to seemed to make her feel better, so Nelda hadn’t paid much attention. This was her husband’s terrain, though his style of doting wasn’t finely attuned either.
Nathalia’s father had taught her to type before she entered first grade at seven, not long after he had returned from the Western front, where he had been wounded and gassed; that was the last in a long string of combat adventures that had begun with his enlistment in the Spanish-American War a decade or so out of high school. Along with the typing lessons, Nathalia got endless stories. Clarence Crane was an avid raconteur, and though his wife probably didn’t need to enco
urage father-worship in their only child, who would blame her if she did? Nelda, still in her twenties, was no doubt thrilled to cede her place as his rapt listener. In an ornate monotone, often by candlelight, Clarence regaled his daughter with tales of battle and aired an autodidact’s old-fashioned opinions on poetry and a generally dim view of the modern world, along with a fervent belief in the superiority of women. He also read poems aloud, rarely venturing past Kipling. And he answered the constant questions of an unusual child drawn to unusual books. Nathalia wasn’t an avid reader in general (and initially not much of a student), but she adored her two-volume Standard Dictionary of 1895. Her next favorite was Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia of that same year, missing two of its eight volumes, those covering F through Mos.
When Nathalia brought two new poems to her father a few days after her mother’s faux pas, he was very impressed, as he told it, but wanted a more expert view. He suggested she send them to an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Times whom he knew vaguely from his short stints at various copy desks before reenlisting when the United States entered the First World War. There was a flurry of attention at the Times, and Nelda started sending out more of Nathalia’s work, some of which was apparently published without further fuss. So a year later, when Edmund Leamy, the poetry editor of the New York Sun, accepted a poem that Nathalia was said to have sent on her own, he had never heard of her. He assumed the author was an adult. After all, in his experience, no “child would ever submit any work from his or her pen without adding the words ‘Aged __ years.’ ” And “The History of Honey,” rhythmical and ingeniously rhymed, bore no obvious literary mark of immaturity. Nor was there girlish handwriting to supply a clue. When Leamy invited this new contributor named Nathalia Crane to drop by to confer about another poem and have lunch, he mistook her mother for the poet. Flustered to learn that “Miss” Crane was the “little, long-legged, bright-eyed child,” he forgot about the promised meal, as Nathalia noted years later.
