Creativity (23 page)

While creative adults often overcome the blow of being orphaned, Jean-Paul Sartre’s aphorism that the greatest gift a father can give his son is to die early is an exaggeration. There are just too many examples of a warm and stimulating family context to conclude that hardship or conflict is necessary to unleash the creative urge. In fact, creative individuals seem to have had either exceptionally supportive childhoods or very deprived and challenging ones. What appears to be missing is the vast middle ground.

Another aspect of the family background that shows the same pattern is the social class of parents. Many creative individuals came from quite poor origins and many from professional or upper-class ones; very few hailed from the great middle class. About 30 percent of the parents were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue-collar workers. However, they didn’t identify with their lower-class position and had high aspirations for their children’s academic advancement. The psychologist Bernice Neugarten’s father was a recent immigrant from Europe with little schooling who struggled to make ends m
eet during the depression. When she came home to Nebraska on a break from college, her father asked, “How do you like it?” Bernice explained that she was beginning to develop an inferiority complex because at the University of Chicago she was surrounded by so many Ph.D. students. “What is that?” her father asked. She answered, “If you just go to college and get a bachelor’s degree, Dad, that is not as far as you can go. People can go on and take something you call a master’s degree and something you call a doctor’s degree.” At which point her father waved a finger at her and said, “Th
en you should do that!”

Only about 10 percent of the families were middle-class. A majority of about 34 percent had fathers who held an intellectual occupation such as professor, writer, orchestra conductor, or research scientist. The remaining quarter were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen. These proportions are quite different from what one would expect from the frequency of such jobs in society as a whole. Clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility—but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class.

The Mirror of Retrospection

In looking back at childhood, it is inevitable that what we see is colored by what happened in the years in between, by present circumstances, and by future goals. A person who is relatively happy and content may remember more sunshine than there actually was, and someone wounded by life may project more misery into the past. We do know that adults who feel positively about themselves describe their childhoods in more favorable terms. What remains unclear is which is the cause and which is the effect? Do these adults have a positive self-concept because they had happier childhoods,
or do they remember their childhoods as happier because their adult self-concept is positive?

In some of the interviews with fine artists that I conducted on and off for over twenty years, I noticed an intriguing pattern. An extremely successful young artist in 1963 described his childhood as perfectly normal, even idyllic. He went out of his way to assure me that none of the conflicts and tensions one reads about in biographies of artists had been present in his case. Ten years later, the same artist was having trouble professionally: His paintings were no longer fashionable, critics and collectors seemed to avoid him, his sales had plummeted. Now he began to mention event
s in his childhood that were definitely less rosy. His father had been aloof and punishing, his mother pushy and possessive. Instead of talking about the lovely summer days spent in the orchard, as he had ten years earlier, now he dwelt on the fact that he had often wet his bed and on the resulting consternation this caused his parents.

Ten years later still, the artistic career of this no longer young man was pretty much washed up. His work was definitely in disfavor, and he had gone through two messy divorces, a severe drug habit, and
was trying to control his alcoholism. Now his description of childhood included alcoholic fathers and uncles, physical abuse, and emotional tyranny. No wonder the child had failed as an adult. Which version of his early years was closer to the truth? Did the therapy he underwent when things began to unravel help him see more clearly a past he had repressed? Or did the helpful therapist provide him with a script that explained and excused why he had failed? There is no way to choose among these alternatives with any assurance. It is possible that the early success had been a fluke,
and the later failure was ordained by a miserable childhood. Or it may have been that the artist failed through no fault of his own, punished by the fickle changes in taste and market. In any case, there is a powerful pressure to make the past consistent with the present. Yielding to this pressure provides a sense of subjective truth whether or not it conforms with objective events in the past.

So it is possible that the reason our successful creative adults remember their childhoods as basically warm is that they
are
successful. In order to be consistent with the present, their memory privileges positive past events. Biographers convinced that the early childhood of creative individuals must include suffering may indeed find much evidence of grief that was not mentioned in our interviews. Similarly, if biographers assume that a creative person must have had a happy childhood, they will presumably find quite a bit of evidence for that, too. The issue does not seem to be
what were the objective facts involved. What matters more is what the children make of these facts, how they interpret them, what meaning and strength they extract from them—and how they make sense of their memories in terms of the events they encounter later in life.

On to School

It is quite strange how little effect school—even high school—seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls. How much did schools contribute to the accomplishments of Einstein, or Picasso, or T. S. Eliot? The record is rather grim, especially considering how much effort, how many resources, and how many hopes go into our formal educational system.

But if the school itself rarely gets mentioned as a source of inspira
tion, individual teachers often awaken, sustain, or direct a child’s interest. The physicist Eugene Wigner credits László Rátz, a math teacher in the Lutheran high school in Budapest, with having refined and challenged his own interest in mathematics (“no one else could evoke a subject like Rátz”), as well as that of his schoolmates the mathematician John von Neumann, and physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. Clearly, the teacher must have been doing something right.

What made these teachers influential? Two main factors stand out. First, the teachers noticed the student, believed in his or her abilities, and
cared
. Second, the teacher showed care by giving the child extra work to do, greater challenges than the rest of the class received. Wigner describes Rátz as a friendly man who loaned his science books to interested students and gave them tutorials and special tests to challenge their superior abilities. Rosalyn Yalow, who earned a Nobel Prize in medicine although trained as a physicist, remembers her interest in mathematics being awakened in
tenth grade, when she was only twelve years old, by a teacher named Mr. Lippy. This is what she says about him, and the other teachers who had been influential:

John Bardeen became interested in math about the same age, influenced by a teacher who noticed his abilities, encouraged him, and suggested problems he could work on. As a result of this extra attention, when he took high school algebra at age ten he won the end-of-the-year prize in a competitive math exam. The first teacher who took a close interest in the young Linus Pauling was a high school chemistry teacher by the name of William V. Greene:

To keep up interest in a subject, a teenager has to enjoy working in it. If the teacher makes the task of learning excessively difficult, the student will feel too frustrated and anxious to really get into it and enjoy it for its own sake. If the teacher makes learning too easy, the student will get bored and lose interest. The teacher has the difficult task of finding the right balance between the challenges he or she gives and the students’ skills, so that enjoyment and the desire to learn more result.

But given how famous the students in our sample became a few decades later, it is surprising how many of them have no memory of a special relationship with a teacher. This is especially true of those outside the sciences. Perhaps because a precocious math ability is easier to detect, teachers seem more willing to encourage future scientists than students gifted in the arts or the humanities. In fact, teachers are sometimes tarred uniformly with a black brush. George Klein found all but one of his teachers mediocre and felt that as a teenager he learned more about philosophy and lit
erature from debates with some of his schoolmates than from any of his classes. Brenda Milner, the neuropsychologist, remembers how frustrated she was in school because she could not draw, sing, or do any of the things that were considered “creative” by her teachers. Because she was fiercely competitive, yet inept in the skills prized by her school, she turned into a workaholic in the subjects she
was
good at:

Some of these exceptional students remember extracurricular activities more favorably than school subjects. Robertson Davies began to think of himself as a writer when he won most of the literary prizes offered by his school. John Bardeen knew he was good at math when he outperformed his older classmates in a prize competition. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann could get away with much in
school because she wrote poems the teachers thought were beautiful. The future Nobel Prize physicists at the Lutheran school of Budapest were excited by the monthly competition that Rátz made up for his students. Every month a new set of problems was published in the intramural math journal, and the students discussed and debated them at length in their free time. Whoever solved the problems most elegantly by the end of the month won a great deal of recognition from his peers as well as from the teacher.

The Awkward Years

The teenage years are not an easy time for anyone. No matter how much care parents devote to their children during this phase of life, no matter how well suited the culture is to avoiding conflict between adults and adolescents, inevitable tensions emerge when children are between the ages of twelve and twenty. The necessity to adapt to physical changes, to regulate sexual urges, and to establish independence and autonomy while maintaining ties with family and peers are tasks that confront adolescents very suddenly and generally cause quite a lot of misery all around.

Talented teenagers not only are not immune but have some special obstacles to surmount. For instance, they must devote time to the development of their interests and talents, which usually means that they are alone more often than other teens—practicing their music, writing their essays, or solving their math problems. They are on the whole less happy and cheerful as a result (though when alone they are significantly less miserable than their peers are).

Youths with special talents also tend to be less sexually aware and less independent from their families than the norm. This is an important factor in their development, because it means that they spend relatively more time in the protected, playful stages of life in which experimentation and learning are easier to achieve. Sexually active adolescents meld quickly into the program of the genes, and if they achieve autonomy too early they become burdened by social responsibilities like getting a job, keeping house, and rearing children. Thus they have less freedom to try out the new
ideas and behaviors that are essential to the development of creativity. At the same time, a youth who is not too interested in sex and depends on his parents is likely to be unpopular, a typical nerd.