Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (17 page)

When I met Samuel Lovelace at fifty, he was a distinguished-looking man, neatly dressed in suit and bow tie. His hair was gray; as in college, he looked older than his years. During the interview he smoked incessantly and gazed out the window, making no eye contact. Since I never got a smile from him or even a direct gaze, it was hard to feel connected with him. The reasons were not hard to understand; he didn’t feel connected either.

He was finding love as hard to come by in adult life as he had in childhood. At nineteen, he had said of himself, “I don’t find it very easy to make friends,” and at thirty that it was “difficult to meet new people.” At fifty, nothing had changed. He described himself as “sort of shy,” and told me that he didn’t socialize much. At work (he was an architect) he felt bullied and manipulated by his boss. I asked him who his oldest friend was, but he told me instead about a man whom he greatly envied. In the twelve months preceding our interview, he and his wife had invited no one over to their house.

Lovelace’s lack of hope and trust in other people made him extremely vulnerable to loneliness, which was one of the enduring issues of his adult life. His marriage to a chronically alcoholic woman was desperately unhappy. His mother had nagged him into going to church when he was young, but he had quit as soon as he escaped to college—another opportunity for community lost. His discomfort in social situations kept him from joining organizations, and so did his
apparent
dislike of games (which, as his later life demonstrated, probably reflected social discomfort far more than the lack of skill his parents so insistently attributed to him).

Lovelace approved of hippies on the grounds that “I’m for anything that will shake up the adult world”; the only positive feeling that he harbored about the status quo was the hope that it would change. At eighteen, such a philosophy is healthy, but at fifty, as I noted in a paper on the twenty-fifth reunion poll of the class of 1944, it is correlated with social isolation and with seeking psychotherapy.
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Indeed, other people were so lacking in his life that Lovelace’s chief source of comfort at that time was the psychiatrist whom he had visited for fifteen years.

The unloved often have a special capacity to identify and empathize with the pain and suffering in the world, and so it was with the self-doubting, pessimistic, hippie-loving Lovelace, who had opposed Joe McCarthy, supported Adlai Stevenson, and believed American military involvement was no solution to the problem of Vietnam. While many conservative men with happy childhoods wished to slow down the process of racial integration in the country, Lovelace wished to hasten it. Still, an essential passivity and sense of isolation kept him from acting. “Although I take a liberal stance at cocktail parties, I can’t follow it out onto the streets,” he said. Sometimes he didn’t even vote.

In Freud’s psychoanalytic worldview,
orality
characterizes the earliest stage of psychosexual development. It is the period during which, allegedly, the mouth is the infant’s primary erogenous zone and the focus of all libidinal interests and conflicts. But orality is more usefully seen as a metaphor for the longing of hearts that have not learned to fill themselves with hope and love, as Erikson recognized when he wisely reframed its developmental correlate as lack of basic trust.
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It was perfectly true that Lovelace was a man of many oral habits. He used stimulants to start the day, inhaled several packs of cigarettes to
see
him through it, and drank eight ounces of bourbon to soothe its end. Then he took three sleeping pills to go to sleep. It was also true that as a child he had bitten his fingernails, and he still occasionally put his thumb into his mouth as he talked with me. But none of this was the point. The main legacy that Sam Lovelace’s parents had left him was not literal hunger, but a profound lack of trust in them or anyone else, including himself. What was spoiling Lovelace’s life was fear.

At thirty-nine he wrote, “I feel lonely, rootless, and sort of disoriented.” He said of his painful marriage: “No matter how hollow a marriage it may be, it still gives one a home and a place in society. . . . Despite even some hatred, it’s easier to suffer with Janie than to suffer without her.” He confessed that he was “afraid of giving up marriage and standing on my own,” and one reason for his fear was that his wife was much richer than he was. Clearly he wanted something better, but he was afraid to try to find it. Initiative and autonomy are very difficult when the world is such a perilous place, but Lovelace berated himself for his inadequacies.

I interviewed Lovelace again when he was fifty-three, after the death of his alcoholic wife. I wanted permission to publish his story, and I thought it was important to make that request in person. With the burden of his agonizing marriage relieved, his life was one important degree less dangerous, and he was no longer the cadaverous, worried man I had met three years before. He—almost—had a glow in his face. He was now president of the Louisville Home for the Aged, and had sublimated his fears of aging and death (as marked in him as in any man in the Study) in pride at giving the older residents of his city a better quality of life. His social life had improved, if only slightly. He gave me permission to publish his bleak history, which was certainly an altruistic act.

Even having seen the changes in Lovelace over his first three years
as
a widower, however, I was not prepared for the man I interviewed just before his eightieth birthday. He was much less depressed. He looked younger than he had twenty-five years before, and when I said something about that he told me that I was not alone in thinking so. Except for the antidepressant Zoloft, he had given up the tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and stimulants of his youth. He had had girlfriends after his wife died. Like many of the Loveless men, it was hard for him to let love in, and for many years he had eluded any serious attachment. But at sixty-three he finally succumbed and remarried. Compared to the other men’s, his second marriage scored in the “unhappy” category. Nevertheless, at seventy-nine he told me that his wife was the best thing that ever happened to him. As we’ll see in
Chapters 5
and
7
, brain maturation leads to an increased capacity for intimacy, especially when that has been retarded by emotional privation. Even this ambiguous marriage was an improvement over anything he had ever had before, and he could appreciate and rejoice in that.

In his chronic withdrawal and lack of energy, Lovelace had had little room for personal interests. But now, warmed perhaps by his new marriage, the man who had been a “failure” at sports throughout his life was (his wife assured me) a fabulous dancer. Lives change, and things can get better. But the people who don’t learn to love early pay a high price in what Conrad calls woe. And, as I’ll show in a brief statistical foray, Lovelace remained to the end one of the most loveless men in the Study.

IMPORTANT LINKS BETWEEN CHILDHOOD AND OLD AGE

The men at fifty.
When the College cohort was about fifty, I explored in a series of analyses the relationship between childhood environment and adult outcome. The results confirmed the qualitative message
of Holmes’s and Lovelace’s stories—that for good or ill, the effects of childhood last a long time. Half the men from the best childhoods, but only an eighth from the worst, had made what we then considered optimum adult adjustments. Only a seventh of the Cherished, but fully half of the Loveless, had at one time been diagnosed as mentally ill, under which rubric we included serious depression, abuse of drugs or alcohol, and a need for extended psychiatric care (more than 100 visits) or hospitalization. The Loveless were five times as likely as the Cherished to be unusually anxious. They took more prescription drugs of all kinds, and they were twice as likely to seek medical attention for minor physical complaints. They spent five times as much time in psychiatric offices.

Some readers may object to my classifying a hundred visits to a psychotherapist as a statistical manifestation of mental illness. There are lots of reasons that healthy people go to psychiatrists, you might point out. What about young psychotherapists who seek analysis as part of their training or professional development, for instance? Here I’ll avoid a he-said she-said argument, and let the Grant Study’s telescope provide a statistical resolution. Of the twenty-three men with the lowest Decathlon score, nine had seen a psychiatrist one hundred times and only seven never. Of the thirty men with Decathlon scores over 6, only three had ever seen a psychiatrist at all and none more than ninety-nine times—a very significant difference. Of the five psychiatrists in the Study, all had seen a psychiatrist over one hundred times. Even if for the sake of argument we accept that as irrelevant, four had also used harmful amounts of psychoactive drugs and three had experienced a major depression. This is not to say that having once been considered less than mentally robust by the Study a man was doomed to carry that label forever; Godfrey Camille did not. Nor does it mean that people can’t turn their lives around; Godfrey Camille did. But it does indicate that people who seek a great deal
of
psychiatric care have something in their lives that needs turning around. People whose lives feel just fine tend to eschew psychiatrists.

In individual case records, we frequently observed the following unhappy sequence. A poor childhood led (first) to an impaired capacity for intimacy, and (second) to an above-average use of mood-altering drugs. Warm childhoods clearly gave the more fortunate men a sense of comfort with and acceptance of their emotional lives that lasted into old age, while bleak early years left their survivors with (third) an enduring apprehension about trusting and facing the world by themselves. The fourth and cruelest aspect of bleak childhood was its correlation with friendlessness at the end of life. The Cherished were likely to be rich in friendships and other social supports at seventy—five times more likely than the Loveless who trusted neither the universe nor their emotions, and remained essentially friendless for much of their lives. The Loveless Adam Newman, for example, who insisted that he never knew what the word “friend” meant, had managed to find a wife who fully satisfied his limited emotional desires. But she was his only friend, and he was all too uncomfortably aware that her death would leave him essentially alone.

The Cherished were eight times more likely to report good relationships with their siblings, and more likely to achieve the wider social radius that Erikson called
mature
or
generative.
I will admit that I feel some uncertainty about whether childhood environment is solely responsible for this; I suspect that there are genes for loving natures, undiscovered though they yet be. Here again, time will tell.

Let me turn now to the corollary of this chapter’s lesson—that it is the quality of their total experience that determine the way children adapt to life, not any single piece of good or ill fortune. The Grant Study turned up no single childhood factor that predicted well-being (or its opposite) at fifty. It was the number, or perhaps the constellation,
of positive and negative childhood factors that predicted mental health risks, not any particular ones or any pattern among them. But the total mattered.

At about age fifty, the men were asked to respond to 182 true-or-false statements in the Lazare Personality Scale.
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Eight of those statements very significantly distinguished the men who thirty years later would receive the lowest Decathlon scores from the men who received the highest. That is, they distinguished the lonely, the unhappy, and the physically disabled from the happy, successful, and physically well. Remarkably, the same eight midlife questions also very significantly distinguished the men who had been classified as Loveless and Cherished
thirty years prior to testing.

• My behavior with the opposite sex has led to situations that make me anxious.

• I have often thought that sexually, people are animals.

• I usually feel that my needs come first.

• Others have felt that I have been afraid of sex.

• I easily become wrapped up in my own interests and forget the existence of others.

• I put up a wall or shell around me when the situation requires it.

• I keep people at a distance more than I really want to.

• I have sometimes thought that the depth of my feelings might become destructive.

What does this have to do with childhood? These eight revealing questions address a fundamental discomfort with the emotional aspects
of life, and a resulting self-doubt, pessimism, and fearfulness. Men with warm childhoods subscribed to very few of these statements, but (very significantly) the less fortunate men often subscribed to four or more. And the more at ease the men were with their feelings, the more successful they were at the rest of their lives.

The College men who did not achieve successful or gratifying careers revealed a life-long inability to deal with anger, which I have documented in
Adaptation to Life
and also in a statistical examination of the work lives of the Inner City men.
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Anger is a delicate balancing act. No one can avoid anger forever and hope to prosper in the real world, but discomfort with aggression is a developmental challenge not only for women and overeducated men; it was for the Inner City men, too.

So how does a child learn to trust what he feels and other people’s responses to his feelings? When you’re just getting the hang of grief, rage, and joy, it makes all the difference in the world to have parents who can tolerate and “hold” your feelings rather than treating them as misbehavior.
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Maybe Mrs. Holmes’s willingness to let her two sons act up in the living room was a coincidence, but I doubt it.

And what if you don’t have parents like that? How do you learn such things if you can’t engage comfortably with other people? How do you tackle the world confidently, or risk finding someone to love, or even find room among your fears to relax and pay attention to things other than yourself? There was no man in the Study who had a bleaker childhood than Sam Lovelace. All the circumstances in his constellation conduced to a heart that didn’t know how to be satisfied. His Childhood Environment score was a rock-bottom 5, and he alone answered “True of me” to all eight of the questions. His Decathlon score was 0, and at age seventy there were only two men in the Study with fewer social supports than he. It’s not enough to be loved; you have to be able to let love in. As Sam’s mother had told us
when
he was eighteen, “People like Sam more than he likes them.” But liking—
trusting
is probably more the issue—has to be learned, and Sam didn’t learn it at home.