But these advantages are balanced by the world's high expectations. "You have to write better than everyone else. People are dying to say that the family has gone from less good to second-rate," says Alexander. "There was a review of my memoir in a San Francisco paper which was mostly favorable but which said at the end that it wasn't as good as an Evelyn Waugh novel." Most writers would not be subjected to such a pointless comparison. "I would love to get on with what I do without constant references to my ancestors, but that won't happen. I'll always be referred to as a Waugh."
Alexander tries to sidestep the inevitable comparisons by focusing on genres not colonized by his forebears: He says he will never write a novel or become a newspaper columnist. "This may sound conceited, but I'd like to think I've done better than they would have done had they tried to write the same books I've written."
And Auberon, who died in 2001, might have agreed. When Time was published, Alexander first learned of his father's opinion of it in a review Auberon wrote. He called it a masterpiece. Recalling that moment, Alexander writes, "As far as I was concerned it was a rare and personal message—after a lifetime of doubting and quavering confidence, a final thumbs-up to his elder son... I suppose, when I think of it, that all of us Waughs only become writers to impress our fathers."
DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER | Dynasty as Supernova
In 1961, Douglas Hofstadter's father, Robert, won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the structure of nucleons. It was the kind of honor that could intimidate a son. But Douglas went on to earn his own accolades: In 1980, he won a Pulitzer Prize for the now-classic Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a literary, scientific, and philosophical tome that examines similarities between the work and lives of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
His father didn't push him into science; Douglas was pulled toward it. "I was predisposed to be curious about the world," Douglas says. "My father did tell me about square roots, and he dumped on me that there was a square root of negative one, and that it was an 'imaginary' number. Imaginary! I could see that the world went way beyond simple things."
The family moved to California in 1950, to Stanford University's family housing in ex-military barracks. "It was a very ugly place," says Douglas. "But they had an amazing circle of friends there. It included people from many disciplines—all warm, loving people. I was surrounded by books, most of which I didn't read, but I absorbed that books were important. My parents never told me anything about music; they just had music, and my mother would play Cole Porter on the piano. She was very interested in language and had a brilliant sense of humor. Both of them cared deeply about other people. I was never told that was important, though. It was all learning by example."
A formidable year for Douglas was his 13th, when the family went to Geneva for his father's sabbatical. "I learned to speak French and became incredibly, powerfully drawn to languages and people of different cultures." Another profound influence on his thinking was his younger sister, Molly, who is severely disabled and does not speak. "When you see brain damage, you realize that everything comes back to physical structures. Brains are responsible for our selves and our souls. It's all physical."
Though he knew he was one of the best students in his high school, Douglas worried that he was not smart enough. "I hate to admit it," he says, "but when I was 15 or 16, I was obsessed with IQ scores. I thought that number was destiny." Around the same time, he remembers his father and a colleague ecstatically poring over a graph in their apartment. "I was convinced that he'd discovered some basic secret of the universe. Though my father never mentioned prizes—for him the motivation was in understanding and penetrating mysteries—I somehow knew he would win the Nobel Prize that year." For Douglas, his father's win came at the perfect time. "I was terribly insecure; it made me feel that if my dad can do this, then I've got a good chance of being a major leaguer." In typical teenage fashion, the boost gave way to a bit of braggadocio: "Until I was about 21, I would drop little things, such as references to Sweden, into conversations so that it would come up. 'Why did you go to Sweden?' someone would ask. And I would say, 'Well, my dad won the Nobel Prize.' I'm glad to say that that inner need for showing off went away."
The award was never what his father most cared about, but it served an important purpose: It gave Douglas the security that he, too, could accomplish something great.
After graduate school in physics, where Douglas hit "abstraction ceilings" and became convinced that he would be a mediocre physicist at best, he ventured into cognitive science, making models of how the mind works and how we use analogies to understand the world. "Eventually I found a niche in which a combination of abilities allowed me to flourish." If Douglas's current titles at Indiana University don't sum him up, they at least showcase his eclectic interests: professor of cognitive science and computer science; adjunct professor of history and philosophy of science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology; and director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.
Immortalizing the Hofstadter name was as far from Douglas's mind as it was from his father's. But now that each has received renown, attention automatically turns to his children.
Tags:
artist,
artistic gifts,
family,
forebears,
innate ability,
intangibles,
legacy,
nature and nurture,
scions,
success,
talent
