The Prodigy's Cousin (11 page)

Eventually, scientific research, particularly twin studies, swept the nurture conception of autism aside.
In the first of these, a 1977 study, the psychiatrists Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter found that among sets of twins in which at least one of each pair was autistic, the second twin was far more likely to have autism if the twins were identical than if they were fraternal. Their finding suggested a strong genetic component to autism because the identical twins had more DNA in common with each other than the fraternal twins (nature), but all the twins shared a prenatal environment and a home environment (nurture).
These findings were buttressed by other twin studies and by
studies that identified a higher prevalence of autism-related traits in autists' family members—a finding that suggested a genetic basis for such traits. It has since become conventional wisdom that autism has a large genetic component. In most parts of the world, the idea that parents are to blame for their children's autism has been tarnished and cast aside.

But what about child prodigies? Are their behaviors, too, largely the product of genetics? After spending more than a decade investigating prodigies, David Feldman thought there was an innate core to prodigious skill. He and Lynn Goldsmith concluded in
Nature's Gambit
that all six of their subjects had “
striking and extreme” talents—abilities with which they were born. “If these children themselves were not truly gifted,” they wrote, “they would not emerge as prodigies.”

There are occasionally cases in which a child's story can serve as an almost undeniable example of such extreme innate talent.
Kelvin Doe, for example, grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone, with few resources; he's the youngest of five children and was raised by a single mother in a community that had electricity only once a week. At eleven, he began rooting through trash heaps for scrap electronic
parts. He used what he found to create a battery to power the lights in his house. The self-taught inventor later assembled a generator and an FM radio transmitter. He's since been invited to visit MIT, given a TEDxTeen talk, and signed a $100,000 contract to develop solar panel technology in Sierra Leone.

It's easy to imagine, though, that other prodigious children never fully develop their talents. According to Feldman and Goldsmith, while innate talent was the engine for the achievements of the children they studied, most prodigies could never reach their potential without catching a few breaks. They explained that even children endowed with magnificent abilities benefit from significant familial support and superb teachers and from choosing a field both valued by society and conducive to the rapid development of expert ability. Only when all of these factors work in unison, in “
a beautifully choreographed co-incidence of forces,” can a child's full potential be revealed.

It's an insightful conclusion; it illuminates the circumstances under which the abilities of a prodigiously talented child might fully develop. It suggests that even if prodigies have a baseline innate capability that can't be taught, most still need a certain environment to maximize their talent. But providing that environment, figuring out how to raise children who, as one reporter put it, “
stand out like Gulliver among the Lilliputians,” is a challenging parental task.

These families find themselves unexpectedly confronted with a child's ravenous need for new information. They scramble to find materials or teachers to satisfy and engage a mind with a seemingly endless capacity to learn. It's an urgency-infused struggle; the kids often seem to
need
to develop their skills in the same way that they need to breathe (
the music prodigy Jay Greenberg once told his mother that if he wasn't composing, he would be dead).

So how
do
you raise a prodigy? It's not an easy question to answer. Among the prodigies' families, there's relatively little consensus on some of the toughest questions.

How, for example, should you educate a prodigy? Lauren and Jonathan followed similar, and relatively traditional, education tracks—Lauren graduated from a public school, Jonathan from Manhattan's Professional Children's School—and both followed a normal grade-level progression. Two of the music prodigies, on the other hand, rely on homeschooling, an option that gives them schedule flexibility, lets them set the pace, and allows for a deep dive into interesting subjects.

William did a few years of mainstream education at grade level while pursuing his “
real learning” at home, but this turned out to be a short-term solution. At six, he got fed up with what was, for him, a simple and tedious multiplication test, and he refused to complete it. Instead, he handed in a test he made himself in which he calculated the square roots of the numbers 1 through 10. For the more difficult numbers, he wrote out the answer to the sixth decimal place. “
He then put his pencil down and said ‘I'm NOT doing this anymore!'” Lucie recalled. The school promoted him to sixth-grade math, and his teachers gave him seventh- and eighth-grade math exercises to keep him busy.

There's a media question, too. The press loves a child prodigy, but how to handle the interview requests? Partly due to the way in which Joanne selected the first batch of prodigies—searching news stories for reports of children with preternatural abilities—many of the kids were media savvy. They gave interviews freely and had their own Web sites; they eventually had Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.

Some of the coverage resulting from prodigy interviews is warm and fuzzy and a way to further the career of a child whose inner engine has been shifted into high gear since birth. But there are risks to media exposure, too. There's always the chance that an interview will lead to a less-than-favorable piece. Even if the initial coverage is kind, once the information is out there, it can be rehashed, recut, and reconsidered by people to whom the family never entrusted their story. For the more prominently featured children, there is also the prospect of being forever followed, forever documented—even if they no longer want any part of the limelight.

It was only later in Joanne's career, once her research began attracting journalists' attention, that she heard from media-shy prodigy families, people who wanted to help advance her research but didn't want a reporter anywhere near their home. Alex and William's parents, for example, shielded their boys and their family from the press. “
I think we'll just avoid all that and leave it as so,” Lucie said of interview opportunities. “We love our quiet lives that are undisrupted.”

These parents often face unexpected financial burdens (who budgets for professional art courses for a teenager?) and social struggles (what does a kid who studies theoretical physics talk to other eight-year-olds about?). There are as many answers to these questions as there are prodigy families. On the social front, for example, some seek out potential common ground the children may share with their age-mates; others focus on nurturing relationships with siblings; still others try to help ease their children into environments that offer common ground with intellectual (but far older) peers. Often the same family will try out different approaches as time and circumstances change. There is, for better and for worse, no single way to raise a child, even if that child is a prodigy.

While parental capabilities and resources and the home environment in which the kids are raised may impact the prodigies' ultimate level of achievement, these factors don't explain the
source
of what Feldman and Goldsmith described as the prodigies' “striking and extreme” talent.

Despite their parents' differing levels of expertise in their fields, Jonathan and Lauren share a couple of traits that seem essential to their abilities. Both walloped the working memory section of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, just like the other prodigies. And once they discovered their areas of specialty, both Jonathan and Lauren demonstrated a dizzying need to pursue that interest.

It's this passion that seems to drive the prodigies. It's a
popularized principle of psychology that it takes ten thousand hours to become a world-class expert in something, and the prodigies' insatiable passion explains how they might manage to get their ten thousand hours in by such a young age. In Lauren, the source of that passion was clearly internal. For most of her teenage years, her parents didn't think an art career was realistic; they were happy to provide Lauren with supplies, but they wanted her to focus on school. Jonathan's case looks somewhat different. His mother knew the ins and outs of a music career. Eve encouraged Jonathan, though for a time she could only cajole him into practicing a couple of hours a day. But when Jonathan discovered film scoring, the area in which he is truly prodigious, he demonstrated an
internal
“
rage to master.”

Every parent Joanne met similarly insisted that the determination to paint, play, compose, or study originated with the child. Most of the parents recount their children seeking out endless information, music practice, or time at the easel
despite
their parents' pleas that they go outside, run, climb, dance, or play soccer. Terre Grossman worries about Greg's falling asleep with his cell phone in hand and waking up to answer business e-mails. Lucie gets William out of the house by baiting him with chalk; if he is going to write equations, at least he'll do it outside.

So where do the prodigies get their relentless drive? The answer may be a connection with autism. Just like extraordinary memory, this tendency toward obsessive, almost all-consuming interests is another trait the prodigies share with autists and autistic savants.

When Richard Wawro was young, it would have been absurd to think that he might become an artist.

He was born in Newport-on-Tay, Scotland, in 1952, with cataracts in both eyes. He had them surgically removed when he was only a few months old; even afterward, Richard could see very little.

His vision problems were in some ways the easiest to handle. Richard rarely slept; his father, Ted, a former Polish army officer, would later recall that Richard never slept more than two hours at a stretch as a young child. He was prone to violent tantrums: he threw himself on the floor, where he floundered, kicked, and let off high-pitched screams. He walked in tight circles and spun objects for long periods of time. He could tap a single piano key for hours. “
It was enough to drive you mad,” his father later told a reporter. Ted eventually dismantled the piano; he used the wood to build two coffee tables.

When Richard was three, his parents took him to a nearby hospital for testing and were told that their son was moderately to severely retarded. The doctor advised them to institutionalize Richard and forget about him, just as he had done with his own son. “My mother was a fierce mother, a very protective mother. She would never put Richard in a home,” Richard's younger brother, Mike, a technology consultant in Edinburgh, recalled. Richard's parents kept him at home. Ted worked as a commercial librarian, and Olive, his mother, returned to teaching.

Richard spent his days at the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Jean Currie, where he discovered her chalk and blackboard. Mrs. Currie never expected Richard to use it, but one day Richard drew a fireplace that resembled the one in the Curries' home. When Mrs. Currie told Ted what Richard had done—that Richard had
seen
the fireplace in her home and drawn it—Ted dismissed it as wishful thinking. But Richard continued filling the chalkboard with images; his ability to distill what he saw into drawings became undeniable.

As Richard got older, Olive tried to enroll him in school, but she struggled to find one that would accept him. Eventually, she contacted Molly Leishman, a special education teacher who agreed to work with the golden-haired six-year-old on a trial basis.

It wasn't easy. Richard was restless. He screamed loudly; he spun wildly. Richard loved music—he often drummed on desks and chairs—but he grew hysterical if a teacher played a record he disliked. As Molly later recalled, Richard “
was never still, unable to see properly or to speak, and always I felt he suffered.”

At some point, Molly noticed that flickering light entranced Richard. It had done so since infancy. As soon as he could lift his head, he had turned to look at the sun. As a toddler, he had stared incessantly at a pool of water reflecting light. Even in photographs, his face was often tilted toward the light. Drawing on this interest, Molly covered mobiles, building bricks, and other toys in iridescent paper. Richard happily sat at his desk and watched the shiny paper glisten.

As Richard began to settle down at school, Molly tried something new. She pinned paper to his desk, kneeled down next to him, and scribbled a few lines with a large red wax crayon. Richard was interested. He refused to hold the crayon himself, but Molly placed the crayon in his hand and guided him through making a few marks. He quickly began scribbling on his own, keeping his eyes close to the paper.

It became his favorite activity. He scribbled away, happy and content, producing pictures on par with those of his classmates. It was
great therapy for him, Molly thought. She hung his pictures alongside those of the other students.

Then, without warning, Richard's drawings changed: Molly found Richard not just scribbling but creating an impressionist picture. “
It wasn't the usual picture, you know, with a bowl for the head and a bowl for the body and the four little matchsticks for legs that you sometimes get, and you think it's wonderful if you get from a handicapped child. It wasn't anything like that
at all,
” Molly recalled in a documentary about Richard. “He was doing something that even a normal child of his age, a child that wasn't handicapped at all, couldn't have done.”

Richard and his crayons became inseparable. He used them to draw almost everything he saw: his breakfast, the school bus, boats, trains, buses, and the cartoons on TV. He devoured the paper his family provided to him. He filled sketchbooks full of blank pages in a day or two. When he ran out of paper, he drew on the wallpaper, punctuating it with images of Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound. “He was exploding art out of his fingertips
every
day,” Mike said.

These early drawings already radiate a sense of motion: Richard captured boats mid-sail; the roiling of a turbulent sea; a kangaroo hurtling forward. Unlike the flat, two-dimensional images usually generated by young children, his drawings have a sense of depth and perspective. The cartoons Richard drew for Mike—lively, vibrant, colorful depictions of the black-and-white shows that were on TV—jump off the page.

Richard still loved repetition. As an adolescent, he sometimes woke in the middle of the night and turned on the radio to listen to the test signals—pulse-like beeps that repeated every minute. If Mike turned it off, Richard would switch it back on. He still craved consistency; he became inconsolable when his favorite cereal bowl was lost during a car trip. He remained transfixed by light and could gaze at the colors cast off by a spinning prism for long stretches.

But the more Richard drew, the more he relaxed. Over the next
few years, he steadily built his library of pictures to include depictions of animals (
A Crocodile;
Bees Swarming;
Cats at Play
), fairy tales (
The Witch from Snow White;
Robin Hood 2
), and transportation (
Tractor;
Train Through the Hills;
A Plane at Sunset
), and those were only the tip of the iceberg. The screaming fits, the sleepless nights, and the extreme withdrawal dissipated.

Richard had begun speaking late; even then, he could form only a few words, he struggled to articulate clearly, and his words came out as a whisper. But when Richard was eleven or twelve, he had a breakthrough. He transitioned, suddenly and inexplicably, from whispering to speaking at a more typical volume. His pronunciation and vocabulary, along with his ability to string words into full sentences, were still fairly poor, but from that point on at least other people could hear him.

When Richard was twelve, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, a Polish artist and art instructor, visited the Wawros to examine Richard's artwork. Bohusz-Szyszko looked through Richard's collection, which already included hundreds of drawings and paintings, and watched as Richard banged out eight new drawings in forty-five minutes.

“He was gesticulating and gasping. He was really theatrical,” Mike said of the professor. “He was almost breathless at some of the stuff.” Bohusz-Szyszko was particularly intrigued by Richard's bold, broad stroke outlines and the way he applied layers upon layers of crayon to his pictures. He urged Ted and Olive to help Richard develop his talent. When he later wrote up Richard and his artwork in a Polish-language newspaper, he said that Richard's work left him “
thunderstruck.” His drawings of machinery—cranes, ships, motorcars—were rendered “with the precision of a mechanic and the vision of a poet.”

As word of the nearly blind artist spread, Richard's art, which had been a family matter, became a public phenomenon. People began showing up at the Wawro home to test Richard and to try to figure out how he was creating his spectacular drawings. The experts tagged Richard with an IQ of 20 or 30.

“I thought, that's complete BS. That's just not Richard. I was twelve at the time, and I could tell you that you're wrong,” Mike recalled. “Well, what it means is your tests aren't right for him. It doesn't mean that Richard's stupid. The tests gave the wrong results. They were of no relevance or interest to him.”

Mike and his parents saw what the tests could not. They knew that despite the difficulty Richard had communicating, he showed occasional flashes of insight—he grew upset over the Vietnam War; he was very thoughtful about death—that hinted at his depth of understanding. There was a lot going on in his head, his family felt; he just couldn't articulate it.

A few years after the visit from the Polish art professor, Richard was “discovered” for the second time.
Richard Demarco, “the Edinburgh impresario,” a Scottish artist and art promoter, visited the Wawro house and examined Richard's drawings. He, too, was amazed at what he saw, and he set up an exhibition of Richard's drawings at his Edinburgh gallery. “This is them really being properly framed for the first time, properly lit in a gallery, people going around with glasses of wine saying, ‘Oh this is fabulous,' and all the rest of it. From that point on, there was self-recognition that he was an artist,” Mike said.

It was eye-opening for Richard's parents, too. Ted and Olive had given away a handful of Richard's drawings before, the odd cartoon or animal drawing, to friends or neighbors; they had sold a few of his pictures to raise money at church fund-raisers and bake-offs, but this was the first time that Richard's works were sold in a professional setting. “
On the first evening Michael ran up to me and said, ‘Dad, a picture was sold!'” Ted later told a reporter. “Someone had paid £16 for a drawing done by my mentally retarded son. I felt like crying.”

Afterward, Ted organized a flurry of exhibitions. Before the end of the year, he arranged events at a YMCA in London, Gallery K in Cupar, Scotland, and the Polish Invalids' Club in Edinburgh. At some events, they displayed around three hundred of Richard's drawings; at
the exhibit at the YMCA, Richard's pictures were stacked three rows high with a mere inch or so of space between them. “My dad was not fussy at all; any exhibition was good,” Mike said. “His strategy was to show everything that Richard drew, and he would show it anywhere, at any time.” By his family's count, Richard drew 131 pictures that year. The next year, he produced 220 pictures; the year after that, he drew 224.

The vast majority of Richard's pictures were in color, but he experimented with black and white, especially when depicting a historical subject, as he did in
Winston Churchill, 1939,
a strikingly detailed portrayal of the British leader peering over a wall, his country similarly poised on the brink of war. He stuck to the same limited color palette for
Austin in the 1930s,
a head-on street scene in which Richard has blurred the edges of the picture, evoking a faded photograph or soft focus.

Many of his pictures were landscapes, often luminous depictions of light on water. These landscapes were reflections of images Richard had seen in real life or in books, but he rearranged the composition, adding or removing things as he saw fit. He also occasionally flirted with the wacky and the absurd: he drew a steaming mug floating on the cloud line in
Japanese Tea Ceremony
and musical stuffed animals in
Teddy Bear Pop Group
.

At times, the workers at the adult day center Richard attended suggested that he was
too
obsessed with drawing. They urged his family to put more emphasis on helping him learn life skills.

Richard did other things—he loved going to the bookshop and staring at the images in the books (he would select books with pictures and, as one reporter observed, “
hold them up within an inch of his face, staring at every flower and every detail of the pictures, sometimes for more than an hour”), he enjoyed playing basketball—but he was always eager to return to drawing. It was what he wanted to do.

As Richard's catalog expanded, so did his reputation. Ted, who had a knack for publicity, never hesitated to invite big names to open one
of Richard's events. In 1973, when Richard was twenty, Margaret Thatcher, then the secretary of state for education and science, opened his exhibition at the Polish YMCA Gallery in London. Richard grinned as his father showed the future prime minister his drawings.

At some of his exhibitions, Richard demonstrated his technique. He began each picture by peering closely into his tin and finding a black Caran d'Ache crayon. With his head tilted and his face (and thick glasses) inches from the paper, Richard outlined the subject of his drawing in black, often shaping large figures with a single, confident stroke.

He drew with his left hand, coloring his paper with short, rapid-fire bursts of movement—he jolted his hand back and forth in a frenzy of creative energy while clutching several other crayons in his right hand. To fine-tune the shading and perspective, he applied layers of crayon—often half a dozen or so. He never sharpened his crayons; he used the edges to create fine lines. He colored every speck of paper, and he completed every drawing he began. At the end, he buffed the picture with a cloth to give it a sheen.

Richard showed his parents every picture he completed, and over the years they developed a celebratory ritual. After Richard finished a picture of an Australian resort, a glistening depiction of a series of huts on the beach, he clasped one of his hands with his father's, his fluffy brown hair reaching an inch or two above his father's head. The two held their joined hands over their heads and swung their arms back and forth in a series of big, exuberant gestures—Richard sometimes jumped a bit as their arms reached their highest point—while Ted cheered in Polish. At the end, Richard pointed to the recently completed picture. “London to Greenland,” he said, substituting “Greenland” for “Australia” in the excitement of the moment. Ted repeated his words back to him, and then father and son embraced. “Clever boy,” Ted said, beaming as he patted Richard's back.

Once the ritual was completed, Richard showed no possessiveness
toward his pictures. He was eager to move on to the next one; he was happy to give them away.