Patriarchy: Fatherhood & the Restoration of Culture
The Boy Genius
Finding Him Again Through the Patriarchal Group
by Anthony Esolen
Lately I have made a hobby of going to a certain very fine and utterly unpolitical website, to see how great chess games were once played, and to learn about the lives and the habits of the game's most illustrious masters. That means I have come into contact with quite a few boy geniuses, as they used to be called. You may recognize their names: Bobby Fischer, Jose Raul Capablanca, Mikhail Tal, and my favorite among them, the nineteenth-century American lad, Paul Morphy.
One of the best players of his day said that losing to Paul Morphy for the first time was like your first experience of an electric shock. It has no relation to anything you have ever felt before, and it is not so much painful as utterly astonishing. That is because Morphy played the game as it had never been played. Nobody knew what he was doing. He sacrificed pieces with brave abandon. He placed them where you never expected them to be. He would allow you to put him within one move of checkmate as if it were ten. He beat his father once by driving Dad's king all the way across the board, and then delivering the checkmate by castling. He seemed to think that the main use of his pawns was to get them out of the way.
Bobby Fischer, a century later, would say that in the open game, there was still nobody who had anything that would improve upon Paul Morphy. For me, to replay his games move-by-move is to feel an intense artistic delight, as if you could hold the wrist of a young Michelangelo and feel every stroke of the chisel as he turned a great amorphous block of marble into the Pieta. The website categorizes hundreds of his games as "Chess Variants," meaning that Morphy has spotted his opponent one of his rooks, or a knight, or a knight and a pawn, or whatever; and he still carves the man up into slices. I imagine that plenty of men thought it was a privilege to be so dismembered.
Nowadays, if you have talent in chess, you will hire a coach and he will bear down upon you day after day, having you commit to memory all of the two or three hundred standard openings and their variations, and instructing you in the counting strategies of the pawns in the endgame, but at that time there were no such coaches, and Morphy, like the similar genius Capablanca, learned chess from watching his father play, but was otherwise self-taught. He was something of a lusus naturae: an odd move that Nature makes on the chessboard, dangerous and bold, with a potential for magnificent success or magnificent failure.
Peculiarly Masculine
There are several points I wish to make about the boy genius, but the first one is this: the boy genius is almost always a boy. I am persuaded that we are not just talking about a high level of intelligence. We are not talking about some quality that allows you to succeed in school. We are talking about something that is, like an electric shock, foreign, strange, unsettling, unpredictable. Blaise Pascal's sister said that Blaise, as a small boy, played with conic sections the way other children played with toys. Einstein lay on his belly on the brow of a hill in Tuscany and asked himself what the world would look like if he saw it while he was riding on a beam of light. Alexander Pope said of his boyhood, "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Tom Edison at four years old sat on a hen's egg to see if he could hatch it.
We fool ourselves if we say that we would enjoy being around such people. "Enjoy" is the wrong word. That is like saying that you enjoy the electric shock. It is like saying that you hope someday to experience a sudden tectonic shift, otherwise known as an earthquake. The basketball player Jerry Lucas once set himself to memorize the Manhattan telephone directory. I don't know whether he did it, but I do know that he kept in his mind a running tally of the statistics for every player in every single NBA game he played, going so far as to pester the scorers to make sure to whom they had awarded an assist. Lucas was a great player whom nobody seems to have liked.
The mathematician Henri Poincaré would lose himself utterly in mathematical calculation, and pace back and forth in his room, completely oblivious to his surroundings. The story goes that a young mathematician traveled all the way from Sweden to Paris to speak to Poincaré. Upon his arrival, he was ushered into Poincaré's room and his name was announced, but Poincaré didn't seem to hear. When the poor man finally cleared his throat and attempted to say something, the great man turned on him in complete surprise and bellowed out, "What are you doing here?" At which his visitor rushed out of the room and went straight back across the North Sea.
We recognize, I hope, that this sort of thing is peculiarly masculine. In some of its manifestations it resembles what we now call autism, a malady that afflicts many more boys than girls, and more severely.
One of my philosophy professors at Princeton, Saul Kripke, wrote a dissertation so subtle and penetrating—I believe on the question of how we can say that a thing that has changed is still the same thing it was before—that only four or five people in the world were considered qualified to grade it, or even to read it and understand it. So they awarded him his doctorate on those grounds. When he lectured, he showed why certain rumors regarding his table habits at home—that his wife had to feed him sometimes—were probably true. He prowled about the front of the room, making goose-like honking noises that were his form of a stutter, smiling and quite innocent of any care about how he looked. "Honk–honk–honk–Berkeley," he would spurt out, "Berkeley–Berkeley," and then he would go on a spritz of brilliance and coherence for a couple of minutes. Then the machine had to be wound up again, and the honks would resume, occasionally punctuated by a drink of water one of his graduate students would hand him, some of the water dribbling down his beard, which he wiped grandly with the back of his sleeve. I have never in my life seen a woman behave so. I have known many men who, to a lesser degree, are like Professor Kripke.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
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14.1—January/February 2001
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