Parenting a prodigy entails being overshadowed, and being overshadowed comes more readily to some other parents than it does to Bunny Harvey. I did not ever feel that she begrudged Nico his gifts or success; she is obviously proud and delighted. But his success throws into sharp relief the shortcomings of an artistic vocation curtailed by the need to finance her son’s life. It’s a classic feminist bind: she could have had a richer career if she hadn’t been a mother, and might have been a better mother if she hadn’t had a career. Nico feels guilty, and therefore angry, about her having sacrificed for him, and she feels eclipsed by his independence. She intended to be a painter who had a child and ended up as a mother who also paints. Nico has carried the burden of her disappointment. They enact a kind of protracted Liebestod in which Nico has to keep murdering his mother to become her finest work of art. “I can’t listen anymore to how she sacrificed her ability to be an artist so that I could be one,” he said. “It sucks. Conversely, her joy in cooking has completely transferred. It is central to the way I think about everything.” Bunny stands at a slight remove from Nico’s triumphs. “People say, ‘Congratulations, Nico is such a success,’” she said. “I didn’t do any of it. But the task that Frank and I should be congratulated for is that he’s a person who knows how to be happy. He chooses a controlled melancholy, but he has alternatives.”
Nico is generous with his personal biography, but fiercely protective of his soul. It’s an ostentation of privacy. “In early English church music, there are many screens between you and the heart of the matter,” Nico said. “With Benjamin Britten’s music, even if it’s really exuberant, there’s always this kind of obliqueness. But you can see the beating heart, the relic.” The popular line on Nico Muhly is that he appears joyful but is actually sorrowful—that the beating heart is sad and the screens in front of it are lovely. That reduces him terribly. He has integrated the emotional spectrum so we can hear joy and sorrow both at once, but he never averages them. You may reach into his joy and pull out a surprising handful of sorrow, but when you examine that sorrow, you find it suffused with particles of joy.
• • •
Correcting a bias against genius is a social responsibility in part because most accomplishments are contingent on a social context: in some ways, this is the ultimate horizontal identity. A man with a natural aptitude for skiing who is born into poverty in Guatemala will most likely never discover it; someone whose primary talent is as a computer programmer would not have gone far in the fifteenth century. How would Leonardo have busied himself if he’d been born an Inuit? Would Galileo have advanced string theory if he’d been around in the 1990s? Ideally, a genius should have not only the necessary tools and conditions to realize his gifts, but also a receptive society of peers and admirers. As Alfred Kroeber noted in the 1940s, genius sparks genius. “If I have seen further,” Sir Isaac Newton acknowledged, “it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” Like sainthood, genius is a label that cannot properly be affixed until considerable time and a few miracles have ensued. We help the disabled in a quest to make a more humane and better world; we might approach brilliance in the same spirit. Pity impedes the dignity of disabled people; resentment is a parallel obstacle for people with enormous talent. The pity and the resentment alike are manifestations of our fear of people who are radically different.
Juilliard president Joseph Polisi observed that devotion to classical music is predicated on “an acquired way of listening.” As American pop culture became a global juggernaut in the late twentieth century, and multiculturalism became the key word on nonprofit grant applications, the perceived elitism of classical and experimental music eroded its audience at an alarming rate. It has been fashionable to dismiss classical and experimental music as exclusionary, which is a semantic argument. No one prevents the nonelite from entering classical music’s hallowed halls, but such music is an acquired taste based largely on European aristocratic and liturgical traditions, and more affluent people are more likely to be comfortable and familiar with those traditions. The profound question is whether it is worth the effort. Lucretius defined the sublime as the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures, and almost two thousand years later, Schopenhauer proclaimed that the opposite of suffering is boredom. Classical music, which may look dull to the uninitiated, contains complexities that can make it electrifying for those who study it. With a myriad of perceived flaws, people have learned to find meaning in difficulty, and while the challenges of deafness or Down syndrome may overshadow the rigors of learning to like Prokofiev, the quest for meaning via exertion is not altogether dissimilar. In both cases, earned pleasures supersede passive ones.
Better services for people with disabilities and disadvantages allow them to function better and thereby pay for themselves manifold. Educating the gifted is likewise in the public interest. If we credit scientific and cultural advances to this identity group, refusing them acknowledgment and support is costly to the population at large. We live in an anti-intellectual society in which people of extraordinary achievement are as likely to be considered freaks as to be lauded as heroes. Margaret Mead observed in 1954, “There is in America today an appalling waste of first-rate talents. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child’s peers will tolerate the wunderkind.” Voters want the president to be someone with whom they would feel comfortable having a beer rather than a singular leader with attributes they lack. Celebrities’ talent is minimized soon after it has brought them to prominence. This phenomenon, which serves no useful end, is part of what the social critic Rhonda Garelick has called the “crisis in admiration.”
I was struck by how many former prodigies who were critical of their own upbringings found themselves struggling with how to raise their own talented children. Candy Bawcombe’s daughter, almost sixteen when I interviewed Candy, has perfect pitch, plays the piano, and studies voice. “When Katie first started piano, at three, I wanted to be extremely regimented,” Candy said. “‘It has to be three thirty every day, and we’re going to do it this way.’ It caused tremendous friction. I had to just let all of that go.” I wondered why. Candy, who had been careful not to criticize her own mother, answered, “Because I didn’t want her to blame me, someday, for a life that she didn’t want.” Nic Hodges has found himself similarly conflicted. “It would be very ungrateful to say that being given piano lessons at six is really pressure,” he said. “I’m a musician, which wouldn’t have happened if my mother hadn’t been the way she was. I can’t imagine being or even wanting to be anyone or anything else.” Now he finds himself facing the quandaries of parenthood. “If you invest your whole life in a family business, you want your children to carry on investing in it,” Nic said. “You want them to be artists who know everything you know and can benefit from everything that you’ve experienced. All parents want that, and it never works.”
• • •
Jeffrey Kahane’s father grew up in immigrant poverty, nine people living in two rooms; he became a highly regarded psychologist and was determined that his son traverse a similar distance. Jeffrey was frequently expected to perform at home: “I found real solace and joy in the piano, but it was tainted. I didn’t want my love for music to be sucked up to feed my father’s incredible need.” Jeffrey met a girl named Martha at summer camp when they were ten; they wrote long letters, promising to marry young and have two kids—and they did. Martha was a music major at Berkeley and eventually became a psychotherapist; Jeffrey became a widely esteemed pianist and conductor.
Their son, Gabriel, was born in 1981. Martha noticed that he sang completely in tune at two; at four he asked her, “Do you hear the jazzy sound that train is making?” His talent, however, was not nourished with discipline, and his violin teacher eventually said there was no point going on. “My mom was the disciplinarian, and my dad, who was performing and gone a lot, stayed very much removed from my musical upbringing,” Gabriel recalled. “They both had the right approach, and they both
had the wrong approach.”
Gabriel’s musical influences were varied. He listened to rap CDs by Dr. Dre and Cypress Hill and House of Pain, but he also loved his parents’ music: Paul Simon’s Graceland, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the Beatles. He took up jazz piano, sang in a choir, became involved in musical theater. When he wanted to learn something, he learned it—“the speed with which he learned to play the piano in his teen years was mind-boggling,” Martha said—but schoolwork didn’t hold Gabriel’s interest, which worried Martha constantly and worried Jeffrey not at all. “I thought he should do his homework,” Martha said. “Jeff didn’t really believe in the educational system. I remember Jeff said to me, ‘Gabe is a huge talent.’ I sort of got it, but I didn’t get it like Jeff did.”
Gabriel flunked out of high school. “It was mortifying to have this brilliant kid not graduate,” Martha said. “Does the fact that I felt that make me a pushy parent?” Gabriel dropped in at the New England Conservatory of Music, took an ear-training test, and was accepted immediately; by the end of a year, though, he found it parochial. He was dating a young woman who went to Brown; he applied there and was accepted. “My hubris was helpful,” he said. “I wrote some persuasive essay about why I was a fuckup at school.” At Brown, he became attached to the idea of accomplishing something that would outlive him. “Being a creative rather than an interpretive artist was a way of dealing with the death drive,” he said. He began composing, and his first musical won a prize from the Kennedy Center.
When Gabriel graduated, he moved to New York and began what would become the Craigslistlieder, a song cycle that took online personal ads as a libretto, which he premiered in 2006. He would perform the songs “in a dirty bar on a banged-up piano for a bunch of hipster kids from Brooklyn who knew nothing about classical music,” he said, “and they would go crazy.” But his work also appealed to classical musicians. In 2007, Natasha Paremski commissioned his first sonata. In 2008, he released an eponymous album and received a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I attended Gabriel’s debut concert with Jazz at Lincoln Center. Even when the work was vaguely classical in mood and even when it was performed with a dozen other musicians, his centrality to it made it feel incredibly intimate.
He told me that he had to write his music to his own strengths because there was so much he couldn’t do. I asked whether he regretted those gaps in his musical education. He said, “In every instance that I have witnessed someone whose childhood involved the push, there’s arrested development, or there’s a poisoned relationship to the art, and I just don’t think it’s worth it. My father and I have a deeply unambivalent relationship—and if there’s any way in which I continue to try to be like him, it’s in his appetite for knowledge as the basis and the foundation of why we do what we do.”
His father wanted more than anything else not to replicate with his prodigious son the relationship he’d had with his own controlling parent. “I bent so far backwards to be disengaged from Gabe’s successes that I went overboard,” Jeff said. “Gabe said to me, ‘I wish you had made me practice more.’ I can’t help thinking, though, that being allowed to find his own path resulted in a very unusual artistic presence.” Martha said, “Gabe is such a kind person. And that’s in his music. He’s told me sometimes he thinks about the way I respond to music when he’s writing, and he’s thanked me for giving him that emotional honesty.”
Gabriel has recorded or performed with pop musicians Rufus Wainwright, My Brightest Diamond, and Sufjan Stevens, as well as with classical stars such as cellist Alisa Weilerstein and baritone Thomas Quasthoff. The New York Times called Gabriel “a highbrow polymath.” He told me that he “would like to reach a unified language.” He explained, “The idea of being a genre-bending performer is tired, but I feel increasingly oppressed at the concert hall. I hate the institution’s reactionary elitism, its lack of irony. In the classical world, people don’t understand that Lennon and McCartney had as savvy a sense of harmony and melody as Schubert.”
• • •
What few adults can do, even fewer children can do. In the grand scheme, however, genius is only marginally more astonishing than development itself. Small children go from nonverbal to verbal in two years, and to literate in five more. They can master several languages at the same time. They learn how the shapes of letters relate to both sound and meaning. They grasp the abstract idea of numbers and the means by which numbers characterize everything around us. They ace all this while they are learning to walk, chew, perhaps throw a ball, perhaps develop a sense of humor. Parents of prodigies are intimidated and awestruck at what their children can do—but so, fittingly, are parents of children who are not prodigies. Remembering that is the surest way to remain sane when parenting a child whose skills dramatically differ from or radically exceed one’s own.
All parents of prodigies are making an enormous investment in a dubious outcome with huge risks: forsaken social development, crippling disappointment, chronic relocation, even permanent family rifts—all in the hope of an elusive lifestyle that may not be what the grown-up version of the prodigy turns out to want. While some parents push their kids too hard and give them breakdowns, others fail to support a child’s passion for his own gift and deprive him of the only life that he would have enjoyed. You can err in either direction. The pushing error is more obvious and more present in our culture, but the other can be equally dire. Given the lack of consensus about how to raise ordinary children, it is unsurprising that none exists about how to raise remarkable children, and many parents of prodigies are flummoxed by children whose internal measure of happiness is radically alien.
Goethe’s mother described telling stories to him: “Air, fire, water and earth I presented to him as beautiful princesses, and everything in all nature took on a deeper meaning. We invented roads between stars, and what great minds we would encounter. He devoured me with his eyes; and if the fate of one of his favorites did not go as he wished, this I could see from the anger in his face, or his efforts not to break out in tears. Occasionally he interfered by saying: ‘Mother, the princess will not marry the miserable tailor, even if he slays the giant,’ at which I stopped and postponed the catastrophe until the next evening. So my imagination was often replaced by his; and when the following morning I arranged fate according to his suggestions and said, ‘You guessed it, that’s how it came out,’ he was all excited, and one could see his heart beating.”
That one phrase, “my imagination was often replaced by his,” bespeaks all that is most beautiful in the parenting of a remarkable child. In so replacing one’s own imagination, one facilitates the growth of the child’s. For the parents of prodigies, such wise self-effacement may exact a high price, but those who can set their own path by the light of their child’s brilliance may find great solace in the ways that child remakes the world.
IX
Rape
A child conceived in rape gets as rough a start as a child with dwarfism or Down syndrome. The pregnancy is usually greeted as a calamity, upending family life that may already be riddled with strife. The mother not only doubts her ability to meet the challenges of child-rearing but is also uncertain whether she will ever get over the very fact of the child’s existence. Rarely is a reliable partner on the scene to help. All new mothers are prone to ambivalence, but the hostility and revulsion often experienced by the mother of a rape-conceived child may be reinforced by her family. Society is likely to judge both mother and child unkindly.
With most disabilities, those who do not share a given condition struggle to find the humanity within it, while those who do share the condition gravitate toward one another for support, validation, and collective identity. With children of rape, however, the flaw is indiscernible to strangers, sometimes to family and friends, and often to the child, who must cope with its psychological shadow nonetheless. His horizontal identity is both profound and oblique. Often, his identity is a family secret, much as adoption can be, and who tells what, when
, and to whom becomes a loaded give-and-take. You can keep your child’s deafness or genius or autism secret only for a short time. Others are sure to notice; the child himself will usually notice. Children conceived in rape may go a lifetime without knowing their own identity. This means that who the mother is in the child’s eyes and who the child is in the mother’s are often in flux. Unlike adoption, however, which many experts believe should be shared with adopted children even before they can understand its full meaning, rape is too confusing and frightening to explain to a toddler; it’s terrifying for any child to envision his parent as vulnerable, much less to feel complicit in that vulnerability.
Horizontal identities usually originate in the child, then spill over to the parents. Children conceived in rape, however, acquire their horizontal identity by way of their mother’s trauma; here, the children are secondary, and they are much less likely to find others of similar exceptionality with whom to solidify that identity. The mother has the stronger horizontal identity, and the child has a resultant existential aloneness that follows from it. The mother of a schizophrenic may find herself in a club she never meant to join, but that association is defined by her child; the mother of a child conceived in rape has her own, separate, primary damage to negotiate. Her identity as a mother proceeds directly from her identity as a rape victim. Her child embodies the violence done against her and gives manifest permanence to what she may ache to forget. Instead of being unhinged by a startling discovery about her child, she knows what is wrong even before she learns that she’s pregnant. Soon thereafter, like many other mothers of exceptional children, she must figure out whether she can love a child who is antithetical to anything she imagined or wanted.
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