Love at Goon Park (40 page)

The article was a beginning. But, even more, Clara wanted to work with Harry on a book, a definitive book. People had been trying to talk Harry into writing definitive books for years. During the early 1960s, Harry had been the psychology consultant for McGraw-Hill's psychology tests. His old editor at McGraw-Hill, Jim Bowman, had coaxed and teased him to write a major book on his work, rather than just polish the contributions of others. Bowman thought, still thinks, that Harry Harlow was one of the smartest psychologists he ever knew. “He and I talked so many times. He was going to do a book. He was going to do a lot of books. It's really interesting to me that he never did a big book. Because he could have.”

Even in retirement, Harry kept receiving the book proposals. Bowman, retired from McGraw-Hill, still urged one more try. At his request, one of the younger editors in McGraw-Hill's textbook division, Tom Quinn, stopped in Tucson to do some recruiting. “And Harry said, sure, he was interested, but I didn't think he was really serious,” Quinn said. “He talked about some ideas he had but I had a hunch it wasn't going to happen. I sent him a letter and I don't recall ever hearing back.” Another of Harry's former students, Stephen Bernstein, now at the University of Colorado, also thought he should do a book. The book Bernstein had in mind was actually the kind of book Clara was suggesting, a collection of Harry's major works—the surrogate studies, the learning sets, sex differences, depression, the whole panorama of love. At one point, Clara suggested an almost
lyrical title for that volume,
The Lands of Love,
but Bernstein had a more pragmatic project in mind.

When Harry and Bernstein reconnected at a meeting in Switzerland, Bernstein remembered all over again what a “W. C. Fields kind of character” Harry Harlow was—they'd be driving through some quaint village and Harry would roll down the car window and shout greetings to startled pedestrians and farm animals alike. He was also reminded of what a good scientist his former professor was. He was afraid, without the book, that people wouldn't remember that. There needed to be a record, Bernstein insisted, a place where people could find Harlow's collected work. Harry agreed to Bernstein's idea as long as the editing included Clara. Bernstein agreed.

As the project grew, however, Bernstein sometimes regretted that commitment. He didn't find Clara nearly as charming as he found Harry. He found her defensive and possessive. “We didn't get along well,” he says simply. Back at Wisconsin, both Helen LeRoy and Steve Suomi also had struggled to adjust to Clara's new role in Harry's life. She was warmer and friendlier than Peggy had been, but, in her own way, equally as tough-minded. Suomi and LeRoy had both worked consistently with Harry, even during his marriage to Peggy, reading his drafts and helping improve them. Peggy had been happy to have their input. Both she and Harry thought that Helen, in particular, was an outstanding editor. But Clara didn't take their suggestions as helpful. She took them as criticism. Shortly after she began working with Harry, Clara asked him to let her handle their manuscripts herself, without being second-guessed.

“She thought she could be another Peggy,” says Suomi. “But she wasn't, not in terms of academic training or of knowledge. Some of us were uncomfortable with her co-presenting with Harry, without the requisite academic credentials. A psychoanalyst might say this was her way of competing with and surpassing Peggy in Harlow's eyes and with the rest of the world.” LeRoy, too, thought Clara was capitalizing on Harry's fame, but “I'm not sure that it is fair to say
that her later attempts at being a scientist were to compete with Peggy, but rather were Clara's efforts to prove herself to others.”

Bernstein acknowledges that the resulting book of Harry's collected works,
The Human Model,
wouldn't have been finished without Harry's wife as a collaborator. “The book does owe to Clara,” he says. “Harry was declining physically by then. She made it happen.” Perhaps it was a good thing that Harry hadn't taken on a bigger book project because he was now, in the late 1970s, starting to get sicker. The drinking, the smoking, the short nights and long lab hours, the depression, Peggy's death, leaving behind his life at Wisconsin, the Parkinson's disease, it was all catching up with him at once. He suddenly, almost abruptly, slowed to a stop. “He didn't even do much writing,” says Dennis Clark, his former student then on the Arizona faculty and now a Tucson businessman. “He'd go in the office where they had a drip coffeemaker and he'd pull out the carafe before it was full and let coffee run all over. We often wondered if the drinking had done something to him.” Harry wondered that himself. He had cut back, at Clara's insistence, but he couldn't help suspecting that years of drinking had worn him out. “You would think his liver would have totally shriveled,” said Jim King. “There was all this alcohol he consumed, the almost continuous drinking.”

Harry was so worried about that himself that he went to the doctor to have liver tests done. After the results came in, he told King about them, almost in disbelief: “You know, my liver is totally normal. I can't believe it,” he said. King still can't quite believe it himself, that Harry treated his body so badly and held together as long as he did. “I think Harry had good genes—in terms of his liver and in terms of longevity.”

It was really the Parkinson's disease that was steamrolling right over everything else. Harry was still taking medication for the disease but he was no longer responding to the drugs very well. He didn't talk about the disease much, but when he visited his old colleagues they were shocked. He traveled to Tennessee to give a speech to the psychology department, urged by Clara, and he could
hardly stand upright without help. His old friend, Verplanck, was shocked by how fast he seemed to be aging. During his notorious talk at the University of Washington, the psychology department head, Earl Hunt, had thought that the old Harry was flickering away, that sitting through the speech was like watching “an unfortunate act of a sick man at the end of a distinguished career. It had nothing to do with the great work he had done.” Harry gave a speech at Stanford and dismayed his old colleagues by blistering his hand while trying to hold a match. “When he was here, his hands were shaking,” Stanford psychologist Eleanor Maccoby says. “He was trying to light a cigarette and he held his finger in the flame and burned it. I don't think he even noticed. It was very sad.”

“As it got worse, he barely talked at all,” King says. “The shaking was better but he had the mask-like face of later Parkinson's and he got quieter and quieter.” He would still come to work, but there was no more talk of studying monkeys or of intelligence tests or of yet someday writing the big book of love. Harry would retreat into his office, writing brief answers to letters, dreaming up new rhymes. “He was lonely,” King says. “He had this office but there wasn't a great deal he could do. He sat in the office, he read things; he wrote doggerel.”

There were still flashes of the old Harry. “You know there was a head secretary there and he'd give her the verse to have the secretaries type it and she was just outraged by this. Somehow Harry heard about this, and so he would give the doggerel directly to the other secretaries. And you know, it was much more interesting than
what they were typing ordinarily and he'd bring them bottles of liquor as a thank you, and I think they enjoyed it.”

In the summer of 1981, Harry's memory began to fail. He was confused, and even hallucinated. He was in hospital for ten days in July and August and another six days in September. When he came home he was still bewildered. Once when he stumbled into the home of an elderly neighbor, the frightened woman alerted the complex with her screams. Clara decided to put him into a home. “The last few months have been a nightmare with Harry in a nursing home,” Clara wrote to Bob Sears, director of the Stanford gifted study. In November, she said, the director thought that Harry had suffered a stroke because he went into a coma and never surfaced again.

Harry Harlow died on December 6, 1981, at the age of seventysix. After his death, Clara edited another collection of his works, part of a centennial series on high points in psychology, that was put together by the academic house Praeger. She wove into it Harry's research from beginning to end and she worked on it with complete determination. She wrote again to Sears and told him that her eyes were failing, they ached and blurred, but she was absolutely going to finish the book for Harry. It was published five years after his death under the title
From Learning to Love,
and Clara began it this way: “Harry Harlow was not always famous but he was always unique.”

TEN

Love Lessons

 

 

 

AMOTHER'S FACE IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL. Harry Harlow came to believe that, years ago. He couldn't design a mother's face that would turn a baby away, not even cloth mom with her red stare and her flat green smile. In the look of her mother, the infant saw the gorgeous appearance of security, the commitment of just being there. No scientist has ever found an object in the universe that a baby would rather see than a mother's smiling face. Perhaps there's a carryover effect; beyond mom, babies love to look at faces, period. Since Harry's first mother-baby work, since Bowlby's theory was accepted, since
The Competent Infant
and the scores of other books exploring child development, psychologists had come to marvel at how passionate babies were about nature's assembly of eyes, nose, and mouth.

Scientists can, and do, show these very small humans pictures of trucks, trees, animals, flowers, people from head to foot—and infants will look at them all. They're interested. They'll study the scene, the colors and patterns. Then they'll turn back to gaze at a pictured face
all over again. Curve of lips, arch of brow, narrowing of eyes—there are countless meanings in this human canvas. A baby will peer intently and try to decipher those flickering expressions. In systematic tests where infants are shown pictures of people with varying expressions, researchers find direct evidence that the infants deftly interpret facial meaning. The babies prefer joyful faces to angry ones. And they respond. Very young humans stare happily at a beaming smile, look somberly back at a frown.

Babies scan faces, it seems, for answers to their most important questions: Am I doing the right thing? Am I making you happy? Are you paying attention to me? Am I safe? Am I loved enough to matter? In one classic experiment, called the “visual cliff test,” researchers put infants on a raised platform, a clear panel set in the middle. A baby crawling along the platform, looking down, would suddenly see a drop to the floor through the thick Plexiglas. The panel was as sturdy as the rest of the platform; but they didn't know that. Children would tremble there, fingers still gripping the opaque boards of the platform, staring down that steep virtual cliff.

The children in this study were ten months old. They would reach the drop-off, hesitate, look down. Then they would turn their heads and look back at their mothers. The small sons and daughters would hold the edge while they studied their mothers' faces. If the mothers smiled and nodded, if their faces looked calm and encouraging, most of the babies went on over. A little tentatively maybe, their hands carefully feeling the slick surface of the Plexiglas. Sometimes the researchers told the mothers to wear a difference face. If the women looked fearful or doubtful, the infants' expressions began to mirror that. Their foreheads would wrinkle in apprehension. And then the babies would slowly back away from that perceived perilous edge. In psychology, the cliff experiment is justly famous. It stands as a stunning example of how much children look to their parents for answers—and receive them—without a word spoken.

The test is also a rare example of faith in another person. How many people in our lives trust us so much that if we nod and smile,
they will chance a tumble down a cliff? So there's another point, here, about the specialized competence of infants. At this moment in their lives they give absolute trust. The same child, ten years later, relies on his own judgment, filtering a parent's assurances through experience. A brand new baby, who does not yet have such internal judgment,
must
rely on others. And since gathering facial information is imperative, babies
must
become adept at reading the subtle signals in a change of expression. They can use a mother's response to calm their own fears—or to validate them. They are like tiny treasure hunters, carefully searching the facial maps around them.

“Clearly, the emotional state of others is of fundamental importance to the infant's emotional state,” says Harvard child psychiatrist Edward Tronick. His choice of the word
others
rather than
mothers
is deliberate. Children form many important relationships with adults. A “mother” may be biological, adoptive, guardian, foster, grandparent, relative, friend. In recognizing the full range of emotional connection and intimacy, our society has begun to embrace a closer role for fathers as well. In 1994, poet and science writer Diane Ackerman wrote that, compared to a mother's love, “a father's love ... is more distanced, and often has conditions attached to it.” Now, almost a decade later, our culture seeks to bring the father into that emotionally tight inner circle of the family. Infants may also scan a dad's face for comfort and for the kind of unconditional love that used to be seen as a mother's specialty. Of course, as Harry Harlow pointed out, the majority of infants in our world still have high hopes that mother will be there, smiling or frowning, when a potential cliff looms in view.