Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (25 page)

The life of Algernon Young is a cautionary tale, a sharp reminder of the vulnerability of developmental processes and of the pain of an undeveloped life. Young was a gifted man, well loved, from a family that the original Study staff had ranked as upper class. (Judge Holmes’s family had been ranked as upper-middle.) Young started out with everything going for him. He was not an alcoholic. Yet his outcome was poor, and much of his life was misery. He is one of the Study’s best rebuttals to the argument that Oliver Holmes’s money ensured his success.

Young’s mother grew up socially privileged, and her father was a sixth-generation Harvard alum. His father was a Harvard grad, and through Algernon’s childhood he was the headmaster of a Denver prep school.

Algernon’s mother depicted a cheerful and competent childhood.
Her
son was “a grown man when he was two years old,” she said—a haunting description, given how things turned out. “The children adore each other,” she told Miss Gregory, “and have always gotten on well.” Algernon attended his father’s school, where he did well academically and was one of the leaders of the student body.

His intellectual gifts were as great as any man’s in the Grant Study, and like Peter Penn he received anA on psychological soundness from his college raters. Miss Gregory thought he had “good social ability,” and so did the Study psychiatrist, who judged him “well-adjusted socially.” His college summary noted that “he has no conflict with his parents. . . . His early life was happy and, for the most part, he was a member of the group.” Only Clark Heath saw him as immature; he did not say how.

But when Young was twenty-nine, the Study anthropologist noticed that he was still “closely tied to his mother, unwilling to make new associations.” From thirty to thirty-seven he dated a woman who was a heavy drinker; he proposed to her, but she turned him down. At forty-two he finally got married. His new wife was still attached to a high-school sweetheart of whom her parents had disapproved. Three years after her wedding to Algernon her mother died, and she ran off with her old love. At forty-nine Young was single again, and living just a few blocks from his parents. His life revolved around his pets, who kept him “too busy” for other relationships. “Catering to six cats can be a big affair,” he explained. He found engagement with other people demanding and frightening; when he had to move outside his tiny circle of work and family (and sometimes within it, too) he deployed the coping style of an obsessional: isolation of affect, reaction formation, and displacement. His social life consisted of waving to fellow commuters in their cars.

Young’s work life was no more satisfying than his personal life. At twenty-nine he wrote, “The brevity of my answers leads me to
believe
that my life must have been pretty substandard. It still may be. . . . My fondness for my current work has grown less. I seem to be stuck in a rut.”

When he was in college, Young had wanted to be an automotive engineer. But he never rose above a low-paying position in a Denver heating and plumbing firm. In thirty-five years there, his greatest responsibility—installing furnaces—never changed. He took pleasure in his job only because he could build things, which had been one of the pleasures of his childhood. He told one interviewer in detail and with real enthusiasm about furnaces, but he communicated no pride in or commitment to his work role, and no sense of connection to the people he worked with.

At forty-six, when classmates far less privileged and intellectually gifted than he were firmly established in the upper middle class, Young wrote, “I feel deeply inadequate. . . . I have always felt that I could never sell myself.” At fifty, he remained unpromoted and discontented. He was still working twelve hours a day, and often on Saturdays. His work was “the same old rat race,” and his earned income was the lowest in the Study. At sixty, after thirty-five years at it, he said that what he liked best about his job was “the good benefits and the lack of stress.”

For a very long time Young did not involve himself in any community service—or indeed, in any community. His philosophical rationale for this at fifty was, “I know I can’t be my brother’s keeper,” but it appeared to me that in fact he felt too perpetually out of control in his own life to feel safe extending his attention beyond it. This of course reduced even further any chance of his establishing supportive relationships. He was asked on a questionnaire what contributions he had made that would benefit others. “If there is one, I can’t imagine what it would be,” he responded. In mid-adulthood, he was not advancing in his job, and he was too overwhelmed to emerge from self-absorption toward Generativity.

I
met Algernon Young when he was forty-seven, two years after his wife had left him. I was struck by the contrast between his Brooks Brothers tweed jacket with the stylish leather patches at the elbows and his cheap shoes and workingman’s hands. Like Heath, I felt that he was immature. He was one of only two Grant Study men who felt continuously overwhelmed by bills, and he told me that he ate alone in diners. He acted like a deferential prep-school boy being interviewed by a teacher, while in fact he was fourteen years my senior.

What stunted the development of Algernon Young after such a promising adolescence? The answer seems to have been a one-two punch of tragic fate. When Young was eleven, his mother was psychiatrically hospitalized for crippling anxiety. Her symptoms turned out to be due to hyperthyroidism, and after thyroid surgery they never recurred. But her temporary loss of control was enough of a shock to Algernon that he quit believing in God. And then, when he was halfway through college, the other shoe dropped.

This time it was his father who was hospitalized, and the circumstances were terrible. After twenty-five years of loyal service to his school, he was fired, and a whiff of scandal attended the firing, concerning a possible mismanagement of funds. The facts were that a major depression had compromised his ability to handle the complex responsibilities of his office.

Like his mother, Algernon’s father recovered from his depression and obtained a prestigious job at another school. But the son never recovered. For the rest of his life he felt (as Willy said about the death of his father in
Death of a Salesman
) “kind of temporary about myself.” Algernon Young seemed to have lost all faith in everything, including himself. As gifted in math as he was, the moment his father began having trouble handling the school finances, he failed algebra. Then he dropped out of Harvard. He took a job in a factory to support his family, and never returned to college. All of his positive college ratings
were made before the Study accepted that he was never coming back.

In our forty years of follow-up we saw no evidence of major depressive disorder in Young himself. Nor did he ever seriously abuse alcohol. He just kept away from people and confined himself to the rational predictability of furnaces. His parents’ sequential abandonments under such frightening circumstances seem to have left him trapped in a fearful need; he couldn’t trust them any longer, yet he wasn’t ready to let them go enough to form new relationships where trust was possible. He tried in his first marriage, only to be abandoned again. At age forty-nine, Young could still say, like a ten-year-old boy, “My main interest is in things mechanical.”

It is not only changes in ourselves that drive us to essay new roles; our interactions with others transform us too. But maturational transformations take place from within. They are the fruit of internalization and identification, not of instruction or even socialization. They happen only when we can metabolize, as it were, those influential others, taking them into ourselves in a profoundly intimate and structural way. There’s a world of difference between knowing something in one’s head and knowing it in one’s gut. When internalization does not take place, one of our main avenues of growth is foiled. As a child Algernon Young was given plenty of love, but after the twin catastrophes of his youth—which, however innocent and inadvertent, must have felt to him as twin failures of the two most important people in his life—he seems to have developed an emotional malabsorption syndrome—he could no longer take anything in. His identificatory capacity gave out in his mid-teens, and so did his growing. Young did not have Asperger’s syndrome, but the jury is still out on the other possible causes of his failure in maturation. It appears that he stopped being able to make use of the love that came his way; contrast his life course with that of Godfrey Camille, who was given so little love at
the
beginning that even the usually nurturing Grant Study staff dismissed him as a “regular psychoneurotic.” Yet Camille left no stone unturned until he found the love he needed, and then he absorbed it greedily.

When Young was fifty, one of his very few friends died. He told the Study that he had lost a piece of himself, and added, “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” He was addressing a question that more usually preoccupies those who survive into old age: How, over the long years of the adult lifespan, are losses replaced? How do we face the losses that we can never replace? But Young wasn’t old. He was only fifty, and he had stopped growing at eighteen.

In his later years Young’s life improved somewhat, and by the time he died he had technically met my criteria for Intimacy and partial Career Consolidation. His renascence began at fifty-one, when he gave up the agnosticism he had maintained since the early days of his mother’s troubles and rejoined his parents’ church. Probably through the church, Young met and married a widow with two children. When his mother died three years later he coped well, despite his prior dependence on her. His second marriage endured until he died at sixty-six, but it was the partners’ mutual involvement with their church that gave it substance. Study men with richer professional lives and more grandchildren often grew away from the church. But men who were needful of connection late in life sometimes sought it in religious affiliation.
28
Looking back, it appeared at first as though Young was returning to the point of crisis, allowing his mother and father to become sources of identification once more, and resuming, slowly, his own truncated development. Certainly the death of parents may release fresh growth in adult life. But even that hope would not be fully realized for the timid Algernon Young.

While Camille, newly returned to his church, gave communion to housebound parishioners and befriended the entire congregation,
Young
headed straight for the account books and became the (unpaid) church treasurer. At fifty-eight, as a born-again evangelical Baptist, he wrote the Study, “My God has supplied my needs material and otherwise.” At sixty-four he told the Study, “My labor of love to the Lord is being treasurer for the First Baptist Church,” which, he explained, was his greatest interest in life. He was still primarily interested in “mechanical” things. By the time he died at sixty-six, he could finally write, “I am a success with my family.” Camille at the end of his life fell in the top third of the Decathlon, but Young, like Lovelace, received a 0. Admittedly, Camille had had fourteen more years in which to develop.

THE LAST YEARS

At age seventy-five, the College men were asked to define what they considered wisdom to be. Here are some of their definitions.

“Empathy through which one must synthesize both care and justice.”

“Tolerance and a capacity to appreciate paradox and irony even as one learns to manage uncertainty.”

“A seamless integration of affect and cognition.”

“Self-awareness combined with an absence of self-absorption.”

“The capacity to ‘hear’ what others say.”

We also asked these seventy-five-year-old parents of the Sixties Generation a provocative question: “Taboos on obscenity, nudity, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and pornography seem to be dead or dying.
Do you believe this is good or bad?” We often received black and white answers. But one Episcopalian minister wrote: “NEITHER. What human beings need are limits to their behavior and freedom to realize their true selves—we really need a societal consensus on limits balanced with freedoms. I think these limits and freedoms and the balance between them change with the culture.” He had put aside absolute convictions about faith, morality, and authority in favor of a new appreciation of their relativity and mutability.

But remember, he was seventy-five when he wrote that reply. In his younger years, according to his daughters, he had been more judgmental. As we mature, we learn from experience how important a dimension Time is, and how profoundly it determines the shape of our reality. As we understand the relativities and complexities of life more deeply, the immature need to believe becomes a mature capacity to trust, and religious ideology makes room for spiritual empathy.

Students of late-life development, like Jane Loevinger at Washington University in St. Louis and Paul Baltes at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (who was a pioneer in wisdom research), share views very similar to that minister’s.
29
Loevinger understands the most mature phase of adult development (which she calls
Stage 6
or
Integrated
) to be characterized by tolerance of ambiguity, reconciliation of inner conflict, and the ability to cherish another’s individuality while respecting
30
For Baltes, it was “an awareness that all judgments interdependence.are a function of, and are relative to, a given cultural and personal value system.
31

Sociologist and colleague Monika Ardelt, who brought Charles Boatwright to my attention as the wisest of the Grant Study men, has spent her professional life trying to operationalize Baltes’s views.
32
Ardelt examined personality inventories that the men had taken in 1972 and 2000 (see
Chapter 3
), and derived from the results three components that she considers intrinsic to wisdom and essential to it.
33
These
were:
the cognitive capacity to grasp the deeper significance (both positive and negative) of transient phenomena; the reflective capacity to consider issues from multiple perspectives; and the affective capacity to care deeply about the well-being of others.
34
Thus measured, wisdom correlated with maturity of defenses and absence of mental illness at midlife, with close friendships, and with late-life adjustment.