Love at Goon Park (11 page)

Bowlby's ideas angered almost everyone he knew. Anna Freud dismissed him outright. She sincerely doubted that infants had enough “ego development” to grieve. Klein accepted that an infant might look sad, go through a “depressive” stage; but that wasn't missing a mother, she said, that was normal development. All Bowlby was seeing, she insisted, was reaction to sexual tensions, probably just baby castration fears and rage against dominating parents. The British Psychoanalytic Society was so hostile to attachment theory and its author that Bowlby stopped going to the meetings. “Unread, uncited, and unseen, he became the non-person of psychoanalysis,” wrote Karen.

For the moment, all that compassionate momentum on behalf of children seemed to have stalled. It was beginning to look like a noble but lost cause. Perhaps that's exactly what attracted Harry Harlow to the research. That's not to say that the call was immediate. When Harry graduated from Stanford, John Watson still ruled, and there was no one around to take young Professor Harlow particularly seriously. Stanford hadn't; and, as it turned out, when he arrived in Wisconsin, his new university didn't, either. To hoist a banner in the name of love, Harry Harlow was going to need more than a name change. He would have to persuade other psychologists to listen to him. He would have to prove that his opinions mattered. He would pursue those goals in the least predictable ways: conduct experiments at a zoo, hand-build a laboratory, become obsessed with the intelligence of monkeys, and become convinced that he could, and should, quarrel with his own profession. You could call it an unusual route to the advocacy of love and affection. But there was never anything conventional about Harry Harlow.

THREE

The Alpha Male

 

 

 

THERE ARE OBVIOUS PHYSICAL differences between Stanford and the University of Wisconsin, starting with water. The Madison campus overlooks a tree-rimmed lake rather than the sharp edge of the Pacific, a vista pretty rather than breathtaking. In the summer, Lake Mendota dances with wind-ruffled wavelets of light. In the winter, the waves freeze solid and unusually fanatical fishermen venture out on the rough gray-green surface and drill through to the frigid waters below to drop their lines. The campus, rambling above water level, changes with the lake. The tree-dense hills blaze like flame in the fall, turn white as ash in the long, long winters. The inevitable snow and ice and the frozen wind off the lake produced in Harry nostalgic memories of the same season at Stanford. Even the old slights and insults could take on a golden tint of warmth: “They expected to place me in a California junior college,” he once said, “and with every Wisconsin winter, I wish to God they had.”

But it wasn't the ice-rimmed winds or the sudden shift from graceful Italian architecture to sturdy sandstone that provided the real culture shock. It was the shift from Stanford's high-intensity program to Wisconsin's more easygoing approach. When Harry arrived in Madison, the psychology department had four faculty members, took on about three Ph.D. students a year, and was compact enough to be tucked into a basement of the administration building. It's hard to maintain visions of being an influential psychologist when no one can find you. In fact, Harry himself couldn't find the psychology department when he arrived on campus.

The university didn't cater to junior faculty. In case he'd missed that point, he had no map, no guide, and only the name of the administration building to get him there. “Excuse me,” he said to two passing students. “Can you tell me where Bascom Hall is?” They looked at him. He was not quite twenty-five years old. Short, slight, with a rounded youthful face and curly dark hair. “Sorry,” one of the students replied. “We can't help you. We're freshman too.” Fortunately for Harry, Bascom Hall had presence even if he didn't. It loomed over the campus. The administration building sat atop the university's steepest hill, overlooking a new lawn, remnant forest, and lakefront. The multistoried hall was built of local pale gold sandstone and fronted with massive white Grecian-style columns.

Harry climbed the granite steps and, just inside the front doors, he found a reassuring sign on the wall. It was a black-and-white building directory listing “Harlow, H. F., Room 14.” He wound his way into the basement, found his little cubby of a room, and sank down behind the desk, “savoring the first thrill of being a professor.” Almost immediately, the door burst open again and a young man with a shock of wild dark hair stuck his head through the opening. He regarded Harry with dismay.

“Don't tell me he isn't here yet,” the student exclaimed. “I absolutely must get started and I've been waiting to see him to know what to do. Have you any idea when this new man Harlow is coming?”

“Yes,” Harry said.

It was apparent to him that being taken seriously at Wisconsin was going to be a lot harder than he had expected. In fact, learning to be taken seriously at Wisconsin was going to teach him just about everything he would need to know to be taken seriously elsewhere. He had an inkling of that on the opening day of his first undergraduate psychology class, an experience commonly described in his department as “being thrown to the wolves.”

On the first day of class, Harry stood up in front of four hundred–plus freshmen and sophomores and was abruptly overwhelmed by his childhood shyness. His tongue tied. His r's disappeared. He tried mumbling them, but no matter. They sounded like w's. When Harry attempted to say “right” and it came out “wight,” some of the students booed. “The first ones weren't very loud, but the next ones were,” he recalled. By the end of class, he could hardly be heard over the catcalls and laughter. Not that he wanted to say anything else. He just wanted to get out of there.

Later, he would call that class one of his most important learning experiences. At the time, he was worried and hurt. In the early twenty-first century, when we work so hard to be tolerant of differences, we forget how culturally accepted intolerance once was. Thus Terman's almost unchallenged division of the world into the deserving gifted class and the undeserving stupid class. People scoring below the curve on Terman's Stanford-Binet were called “feebleminded,” remember, and that was one of the politer terms. They were also “mental defectives” or “morons” or even “undesirables.” People who limped were “gimps.” The homeless were bums. People who couldn't talk were dumb. And the Elmer Fudds of the world, people like Harry who struggled with an “r” here and there—they were ridiculous. It was standard procedure for students to boo a teacher if they considered him a joke.

At first, the situation seemed impossible. The more nervous Harry became, the more he stumbled over the dreaded r's. He decided to try appeasing the wolves in another way. He hunted up funny little anecdotes and jokes, relying heavily on
Reader's Digest,
and he
started slipping them into his lectures. The students laughed at the stories but they still booed his pronunciation. Finally, he decided to give the students something to really boo about—a groaner of a joke, a truly appalling pun. Harry was a pun addict anyway; word play was like child's play to him, pure fun. He punned and the students groaned. He added a few more puns. As the puns became more obnoxious, the groans turned into boos. So Harry became even more outrageous. The boos grew louder. Increasingly, though, it was the jokes the students were reacting to. As Harry relaxed, he was stumbling over “r” less, anyway. He discovered, too, that if he slowed down the pace of his speech, kept an even rhythm, he could almost make those errant w's disappear. He developed such a clear, distinctive speaking style that a fellow psychologist once described Harry's voice “as cool and crisp as chilled lettuce.”

Eventually, puns would come as naturally to Harry Harlow as poetry and breathing. When the university billed him for distilled water, he put up a notice on his bulletin board: “Distilled waters run steep.” When a student asked him why male animals did better in certain tests, he snapped back, “They have to meet a stiffer criterion.” Harry never completely conquered the r's, but eventually he learned not to care. He even credited the undergraduate wolves for confounding Terman's predictions and turning him into a speaker of national caliber. “Teaching elementary psychology. It's the best possible speech and timidity therapy you can have,” Harry said.

He also credited someone else. He had an accomplice in figuring out how to thwart the wolves, a graduate student in psychology, Clara Mears, who rapidly became more than a friend. Clara was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. She had little tolerance for cruelty and was delighted when Harry won the teaching war. “The only trouble,” she liked to say, “was that he never did stop punning.” And that made Harry laugh. The two of them seemed a natural support system. Friends and colleagues and family encouraged the relationship. So did Harry's old professor, Lewis Terman. Harry's friendship with Clara Ernestine Mears had an odd small-world twist to it.
She wasn't just any bright graduate student. She was a charter member of Terman's study of gifted children.

Clara was small, warm, and exuberant, “like a pet kitten,” her mother said. “One did not readily associate sorrow with her.” She had big brown eyes in a round face, a quick crisp voice, and a chuckle like a tumbling brook. She was born July 8, 1909, in Reno, Nevada, and was fourteen when both she and her older brother, Leon, were recruited into the gifted project. Clara was the youngest of five children in the Mears family and ever the most confident. Her mother described her on Terman's questionnaire as follows: Clara started reading at age four. She progressed to poetry at age five and her favorite author that year was seventeenth century poet, William Blake. By age eleven, she still liked British poets but had moved into the nineteenth century and now preferred Robert Browning. Reading was her favorite hobby, period. But her talents weren't limited to the literary. By the time she was a Browning fan, she was also doing her older sisters' algebra work for them.

Her mother's only complaint was that Clara was so indifferent to domestic chores. “She reasons someone else into it if possible. She says she will live by her brains instead of handwork.” Clara liked to cook if it was creative enough. But housework, mending, the average Sunday dinner? It bored her bright daughter right out of the house. “She plans to hire someone to do that,” Ernestine Mears wrote mournfully.

The ambitious scholar graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. She went on to a private women's school in the San Francisco bay area, Mill's College. There Clara began to appreciate her own abilities. “Dearests,” she wrote to her parents in 1928, to tell them that she had outscored her entire class on an aptitude test. “Isn't that quite astonishing? Of course, from the natural run of events I've always known I could go faster than average, but I didn't know quite where I was.” She decided to go on to graduate school. In 1930—the same year that Harry joined the faculty—the University of Wisconsin offered her a research assistantship in psychology. One of her first
classes was Harry Harlow's graduate seminar on emotions. She liked it—or perhaps him—enough that she signed up for his next course, an evening seminar in physiological psychology. “When I began making A's in physiological psychology, Harry Harlow began escorting me home,” she said.

Clara's outgoing friendliness coaxed Harry out of his natural shyness. They went to parties together, shared dinners. They played tennis and bridge and squash with fierce competitiveness. Clara, even more than Harry, loathed losing. “She does not like to be beaten in games but Harry is laughing her out of that,” her mother wrote. And Clara, herself, made a happy confession to Terman. With Harry, she felt she could just be herself. He was a man “who admires accomplishment but never demands it or suggests or overrates it instead of a father whose influence was always toward the peak.” With Harry, she had a sudden rush of pleasure in being liked just as she was. Her parents saw a kind of visible happiness. “There's a peculiar gleam or shine or radiance from her eyes. Our oldest girl was a beauty, but Clara exceeds her by now by far,” Mrs. Mears wrote happily to Terman.

Harry Harlow and Clara Mears married May 7, 1932, in Milwaukee. Terman fired off a congratulatory letter, telling the newlyweds that he rejoiced in the marriage of Clara's “splendid hereditary equipment” to “one of the most productive young psychologists in America.” In fact, married life would have started off as almost pure celebration if not for the University of Wisconsin.

Like most institutions at that time, the university had an inflexible nepotism policy. It did not allow spousal hires. As written, this policy might sound neutral. In practice, it wasn't. In the 1930s, the faculty was almost entirely male. This meant that it was usually wives, not husbands, who were kept out. It didn't matter that Clara was a promising psychologist, that even the famed Lewis Terman thought her exceptionally smart. Clara's advisor recommended that she drop out of her Ph.D. program. It would be a waste of time to continue, she was told, because Harry would always be the first choice for a job
in psychology. Many years later, Clara would still bubble with resentment. She lost her career in psychology and, eventually, she lost her sense that she and Harry were intellectual equals. She thought Harry felt the same. It would take her a long time to regain faith in herself—or in their relationship.

But at the time? She was happy anyway; they were in love, and she was resigned. She took a job as a sales clerk in the dress department of one of Madison's department stores, an elegant, locally owned company called Harry F. Manchester. Here, indeed, Clara lived up to Terman's assessment of her abilities. Within six months, she was the store's chief dress buyer. She liked stylish clothes and enjoyed telling people how to dress. She liked the salary; it allowed her to be generous. She sent some of her paycheck home to her parents every month. Retired ministers, it seemed, didn't always have the spending money that dress buyers did. On one of Terman's surveys, Clara said that her favorite personal quality was “a sense of humor.... I can't take troubles too seriously but I do face them.” She was determined to make the best of her unexpected career change. She studied fashions, made herself a model of perfect grooming (she described her least favorite personal attribute as her own relentless perfectionism).