Love at Goon Park (3 page)

There's little trace, here on
Conquest,
of what some would say is the off-camera Harry Harlow, none of his well-known irreverence. This is a man who when a graduate student points out a golden and luminous moon snaps: “Been there a long time. I've seen it before.” None of that wisecracking irritation shows now. This shiny faced, sweet-talking preacher of a scientist seems wholly absorbed by the beauty of the subject. The man on camera reveals little of the man who lives at the lab, dawn to dark, fueled by coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and obsession. Okay, maybe the obsession slices through. He's completely in the argument, trying to convince the world that if science will just pay attention, we could learn the measure of love, cup it in our hands, almost as Collingswood cradles the little monkey.

“Now, Mr. Collingswood, wouldn't you say that if you frightened a baby, that if it went running to its mother, was comforted, and then all the fear disappeared and was replaced by a complete sense of security, that baby loved his mother?” he asks in that coaxing voice.

“Sure,” Collingswood replies, casually. Sure, of course. Who wouldn't believe that love was, at its best, a safe harbor—a parent's arm scooping up a frightened child, holding it heart to heart? It's hard to believe, in retrospect, how many powerful scientists opposed this idea. “In psychology, love was smoke, mirrors, bullshit, and that was exactly what everyone was telling Harry,” one of Harry's graduate students recalls. It took courage, probably more than anyone at CBS appreciated, to look straight into the camera and contradict the professional standards of the time.

There's a moment on the
Conquest
show when one of the Wisconsin experiments is displayed. It creates exactly the sequence that Harry described. The scientists send out a mechanical monster, maybe eight inches tall, that resembles a cross between a space alien and a dragon with its flashing eyes and black bat wings. “It looks diabolical,” says Collingswood. “That's just the way a baby monkey feels about it,” replies Harry—and almost as he speaks, the baby monkeys take one look at this terror and go airborne.

They fly like guided missiles—a perfect arc of child to mother. Look, says Harry, mouth curving. One of the baby monkeys, now firmly lodged against mother, is screeching angrily at the monster, threatening it: Back off, you. I'm with my mother now. If a measure of love is the way we shelter each other, you can mark it clearly in that fluid and beautiful flight line to home.

The two men watch silently. Harry doesn't have to add anything. He knows it, too. He can step back and let the relationship reveal itself. Baby to mother, arrow into the heart. He does have a take-home message though, as he stands here in his baggy coat and talks up the importance of simple affection. The message has enough potency that you can understand why it might be worth contradicting more than fifty years of scientific dogma.

In this conversation about love, the two men have different goals. Charles Collingswood has come to Madison, Wisconsin, to illuminate an unusual experiment and to make some good television. Harry Harlow is there to help him. But he's also trying to foment a small revolution, taking the chance to provoke the argument even during this flickering black-and-white moment on Sunday television.

We begin our lives with love, Harry says, looking directly at the camera; we learn human connection at home. It is the foundation upon which we build our lives—or it should be—and if the monkey or the human doesn't learn love in infancy, he or she “may never learn to love at all.” He looks absolutely confident in what he's saying—as if there were no furious ongoing debate, as if he spoke for his profession. Arguing his point as an outsider is a skill that Harry Frederick Harlow has honed since childhood. He's more than willing to stand on behalf of that improbable, unreliable, elusive emotion called love, to gaze into the camera lens and say: Listen to me. I've got something that you need to hear.

ONE

The Invention of Harry Harlow

 

 

 

HE WASBORN OUTOF PLACE, a dreamer and a poet planted in the practical Iowa earth. As unlikely as a rose in a cornfield. The childhood of Harry Frederick Israel—he would become Harry Harlow, but that's a later part of the story—often made him laugh in retrospect. He was such a funny little misfit of a child, hemmed in by the orderly fields, too often dreaming down those rows of green and gold to the point where they met the rim of the sky.

This was southeastern Iowa, after all. Everyone grew up amid the cornfields. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the landscape was a study in domestication. Paradoxically, that very neatness made Iowa a revolutionary corner of the country. Not even a hundred years before, the land had belonged to lynx and wolf, deer and buffalo, the elusive catamount, and the bright copper fox. Tall-grass prairies and wooded hills, undisciplined rivers that had never seen a levee, forests with familiar trees such as maple and birch and forgotten ones such as linn and ironwood. The Fox and the Sac tribes once hunted here,
gathered wild plants, quarreled over territorial boundaries, called it home.

The old settlers—Iowans think the term “pioneer” sounds too transient—began transforming the land in the early nineteenth century. The little town of Fairfield, where Harry was born many years later, was chartered in 1836, neatly laid out around a traditional town square. For decades, it retained a frontier quality. Until the 1870s, hogs were allowed to run through the square. When the mayor finally insisted that livestock be penned, pig owners angrily protested this affront to liberty. People paid their bills with what they could grow or raise. The town doctors accepted everything from chickens to tomatoes. The pharmacies on the square sold Indian remedies to their customers, tidily packed cloth bags with chamomile flowers for measles and slippery-elm bark for pneumonia.

Science was something distant, not quite real and not all that important. “Few knew or cared that the world was filled with innumerable fascinating creatures or that the history of the earth was written in the rocks beneath their feet,” wrote the Fairfield historian Susan Fulton Welty in a loving tale of her hometown. In the late nineteenth century, some Fairfield high school students formed a science club. They were enthusiastic, but they found the subject mysterious at best. One of the first meetings raised the question “Is a Bat a Bird?” The members were mostly nature collectors. They packed their clubhouse with pinned insects, dried flowers, the brittle remains of ferns and mosses, and assorted bones. At one point, club members assembled almost the entire skeleton of a horse, built from bleached bones found tumbled in a nearby pasture.

By the time Harry Israel was born, the frontier had been tidied away. The town square was neatly paved. The Sac and the Fox had mostly vanished, pushed to the west. The herbal remedies had been replaced by a red-brick hospital and more European-style medicine. The woodlands and feathery fields were plowed, tilled, and rotated into submission. Even the science enthusiasts had given up bone hunting. The local high school now taught the study of nature, “with
especial attention to the highest of vertebrates, Man himself.” Harry would have preferred it just a little less, well, predictable. Years later, he would confess that completely orderly science bored him. He could never quite accept rules as absolute. He was never really convinced that “Man himself” was an example of evolutionary perfection. A work in progress, maybe. He would have been happy to argue the point—if it had been open for debate in Fairfield. His family would have said that Harry was born to argue. So would his peers. When he graduated from high school, this quote appeared under his yearbook picture: “Though rather small, we know most well, in argument, he doth excel.”

He was born on a Halloween evening, October 31, 1905, at his family home in Fairfield. “Within thirty minutes I had precipitated a violent family quarrel,” Harry once wrote. His Aunt Nell had come all the way from Portland, Oregon, and wanted to hold the baby first. But his two older brothers begged her to take them on a quick trickor-treat outing. When the three of them returned, baby Harry was lying cozily in his Aunt Harriet's lap. “This was a situation in which better late than never did not pertain,” Harry would joke later. Harriet lived just around the corner in Fairfield. Nell had traveled hundreds of miles. And the ungrateful baby's parents had named the child
Harry.
In family lore, the story of his birth always resounded with the ensuing thunder.

“Another memory which I do not have happened when I was three,” Harry wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. The entry was typical of the way he recounted his childhood—always flippant about growing up in Iowa. As he told the story, when he was a little boy, he owned a porcelain child's potty, which he loved. He would carry it around the house with him. One day, according to his mother, “guided by uncontrolled scientific curiosity, I dropped a large stone on the potty's bottom to see what would happen.” He sobbed over the pieces for days afterward. An incurable punster for most of his life, Harry wrote that his grief was probably caused by his having hit “rock bottom.”

His parents were Alonzo Harlow Israel and Mable Rock Israel. If Harry was something of a misfit, that standard was perhaps first set by his father. Lon Harlow—he loathed the name “Alonzo” and as an adult refused to respond to anyone who called him that—had hoped to be a doctor. He gave that up, though, dropping out of medical school in his third year to marry Mable Rock. Lon never quite found anything else that he liked as much as the study of medicine. He reluctantly tried and happily abandoned farming. He tinkered with what Harry called “intermittent, unsuccessful inventing.” Lon experimented with home appliances, and once even developed a small washing machine. He dabbled at running a garage and battery business, teaching himself about mechanics by reading books and manuals in a weekend frenzy. He started a small real estate business with his father. Eventually, Lon and Mable bought a general store in a small town near Fairfield and settled there. Harry's parents had been married for ten years and were in their mid-thirties when he was born. At the Fairfield public library today, there is an archived photo of Lon on his wedding day: a slim man with a pointed chin, dark eyes under deep brows, a thin mouth just tilted into a smile at the corners. There is also a photo of Mable wearing a lacy white dress that seems to float at the edges. Mable was barely five feet tall. In the picture, she is as delicate as a fairy, fine-boned and graceful in her posture, her shining dark hair pulled smoothly back from a small, rather beautiful face. The Israels had four sons, in this order: Robert, Delmer, Harry, and Hugh. The boys all had their mother's slight build, their father's brown eyes and heavy eyebrows. In Harry's face, one can also see Mable's finely drawn features and slightly squared, stubborn chin.

Harry remembered his parents as being determined that their children would grow beyond them. They had to fight for that—another lesson learned early. He was just three years old when his older brother Delmer was diagnosed with Pott's disease, sometimes called tuberculosis of the spine. Lon Harlow had outguessed the local doctor on the ailment. Disturbed by the increasingly warped look of his son's back, Lon bent an iron rod into the same odd curve. He sent the bar
to a research hospital in Chicago, where doctors made the diagnosis from the distinctive bend in the metal. They recommended that the boy go to a warmer, drier climate—then the standard remedy for TB. Frightened for their son, the Israels sold their house and moved the family to New Mexico. Short on money, they camped in a small canyon outside Los Cruces. Delmer's health did improve in the brilliantly lit New Mexico air. But the family, already poor, grew more so. They lost their remaining possessions in a season of wild spring flooding. At one point, Lon Harlow was forced to carry his children out of a rising stream when it flooded through their tent. In little more than a year, the family returned, near destitute, to start over again in Fairfield.

His parents, Harry said, “literally lived for their children. Fortunately, they did not have enough money to be really indulgent.” Not that he wouldn't have enjoyed a little more indulgence—or extra affection. His own research would lead him to realize, many years later, how much he had felt like an afterthought and how much he had minded. “I remember my mother as a tiny, beautiful, hardworking, and efficient woman who reared four sons, and probably a husband, ably, lovingly, providently. I always thought of her as a person who loved me dearly, and I am sure she did.” With Delmer's illness, though, he suspected “she was probably hard pressed to shower affection on others.” Harry was just a toddler when his brother fell ill. His mother was there, near the home, physically—just not quite all there emotionally for a small, shy younger brother. “I have no memory of partial maternal separation, but I may have lost some percentage time of maternal affection, and this deprivation may have resulted in consuming adolescent and adult loneliness.”

Almost five thousand settlers now occupied Fairfield. Ornate buildings, topped with towers and ramparts, housed shoemakers, grocers, barrel makers, tailors, druggists, clothing stores, furniture stores. The square was a gathering place for the farmers who now ploughed the surrounding country. Even in winter, when the farms were iced over and Fairfield's streets were deep with snow, farmers came to town. They simply took the wheels off their wagons and replaced them with
heavy, ironclad sled runners. Fairfield's children used to play street games in which they jumped from farm bobsled to farm bobsled. They called the game “hopping bobs,” and, as one sled hopper recalled, the farmers were cheerfully tolerant of the leaping children.