Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (23 page)

Thirty years later, I have changed my tune. Now I can see that Boatwright remained committed to his wife as long as he could. Even in the throes of divorce he relied on empathy rather than blame: “She is a wonderful person, but so negative with everything.” We learned much later that over those last five years she had been increasingly incapacitated by alcoholism, but Boatwright did not reveal this fact until he was over seventy. (In retrospect, his temporary difficulties with his children may have been a result of their mother’s alcoholism.) An observer might complain that he was in denial, but he was not blind to the situation. It would be more precise to say that, true to his character, he was taking responsibility for his wife’s failings. Resentments, however justified, are rarely a source of happiness, and Boatwright was a natural adherent to the principle that forgiveness is better than revenge.

Similarly, Boatwright stayed close to his father, remaining appreciative and protective of him throughout his illness. On his deathbed, Boatwright’s father said to him, “I don’t understand why you were always so nice to me.” Batalden asked him about that too, and Boat-wright replied, “
He
was nice to
me.
He took an interest in me, and everything I did. He meant to be a good man. He really did.” For Charles Boatwright, lemons were mostly the
sine qua non
of lemonade. Gratitude, and the mature adaptive coping style of sublimation,
came
naturally to him. Some Grant Study men went to look after Germany and Japan after the end of World War II; they had to be sent home because their anger broke through their ersatz altruism. But there was nothing ersatz about Boatwright.

While in Vermont, Boatwright had been active in building up a lumber cooperative, a farmer’s cooperative, an egg cooperative, and a central high school. He made extra money as journalist, milk deliverer, carpenter/painter, accountant for a filling station, and artificial inseminator of cattle. At that time, the early 1950s, Clark Heath noted that Boatwright had “persistent difficulty establishing a career,” but he thought him to be, nevertheless, one of the “most stable and successful men” in the Study. Heath was a very wise man and nearing his own retirement, and this was a paradox that it took the Study (or at least me) a lifetime to resolve.

Now I understand that community-building is a career of its own—one of the really great ones. But when I began with the Grant Study in my thirties, I was too deep into the “selfish” phase of my own career consolidation to understand what Charles Boatwright was about. I could see that he worked hard throughout his life, but as he moved from one job to another, it was hard to tell where his commitment or his competence lay. Clearly he didn’t see his work as a career, yet—I realized once I stopped dismissing his optimism—he found meaning and success in whatever he undertook. It took me a long time to understand that the career that Boatwright consolidated was looking after others more needy than himself. Even in college his chief extracurricular activity had been Phillips Brooks House, Harvard’s social service organization. His career was not all about him. Pollyanna’s wasn’t about her, either.

In his fifties, abandoning caution, Boatwright left the corporate world of his post-Vermont forties, and borrowed the money to follow
a
dream. He bought a boatyard. At the age of fifty-six, he married the widow (and mother of three sons) of his business partner in that venture, who had died suddenly and tragically the year before. According to both spouses, this marriage has been happy for the last thirty-five years. In the 1980 biennial questionnaire, he wrote characteristically of his second marriage, “Her children needed me very badly. So in January 1978 we were married. It has been perfect for me. No one has ever healed me with such love. And in return I have come to love her completely. We have been enormously happy.”

Characteristically too, Boatwright devoted himself to his stepsons. “Being a stepfather has an enormous number of problems, but I seemed to have coped well. They all call me Dad. We are a very loving and close family. I’m an enormously lucky fellow.” True, Boatwright had told us that he was happy with his first wife the first time around. But this time his second wife, who has had her own private interview, confirms how happy she is with him. When Boatwright was sixty-one, an interviewer asked him what pleased him most about his wife. “He said, ‘She loves me,’
” the interviewer wrote. “He beamed, and his face lit up.”

When he was seventy-nine, Boatwright told Batalden that he and his wife gave more to charity than they should. Most of their giving, he explained, goes into land conservation—that is, preserving the past. Nevertheless, he was in touch with the future. He worked as the town auditor in Stowe, Vermont, where he had a vacation house. This was a volunteer position requiring a month’s labor every winter. He also, on a largely volunteer basis, managed the town offices, transitioning them all to the computer.

At eighty-three, Boatwright was still working twenty-eight hours a week: “I’m pushing nonprofits to be all they can be. . . . I’m the guy who says we have to try.” The hope of men like Mandela and Boat-
wright
springs eternal. At eighty-five he believed that his most creative activity was “to inspire people to see all sides of a problem”—a hallmark of wisdom.

By the time he was eighty-nine there was no doubt that Boat-wright was an old man. He still exercised two hours a day, but cross-country skis and tennis racquets had been given away; now he contented himself with slow walking. He admitted that he felt tired and was plagued with minor ailments: two bad knees, two bad shoulders, shingles, cataracts, and ankle edema. But he still took no medicines and called his health “excellent.” When asked what he did now that he hadn’t done a decade ago, he growled, “A hell of a lot less!” He had reduced his volunteer work to three hours a week, spending his time instead with his grandchildren, and visiting shut-in and dying friends. The task of Integrity is not to set the world on fire, but to come to terms with reality and maintain one’s sense of life in the face of death. At age ninety Charles Boatwright is still very much alive.

Psychologist Laura Carstensen and her Stanford colleagues have documented that in late life emotions often take the place of thinking.
22
As Boatwright explained it to Batalden, “With age, you acquire more understanding. The things you felt so passionate about when you are young, you learn to let go of. You realize that all those things you thought you were going to be, you ain’t. As I have often said, at this stage in life it’s not what you’ve accomplished in a day, but how the day felt.”

A questionnaire when the men were about seventy-six asked what they were proudest of, and what they wanted to be remembered for. Boatwright’s response: “I don’t give a damn if I’m remembered for anything. I’ve enjoyed my life and had a hell of a good time. I’m more proud of those times I’ve helped others.” He added at eighty-three, “I know I’m a Pollyanna, but it’s better than being a pessimistic grouch.” Maybe Pollyanna and Aristotle have something in common on the
subject
of the good life. And maybe the fans of “selfish” genes are selling Mother Nature short.

Boatwright knew how to love and to work. He was capable of a long and happy marriage, and could look tenderly after the well-being of children (and others) in need of his care. He was truly gifted in the mature adaptational device of sublimation, and he seemed to be ever more absorbed, as he grew older, in explicitly spiritual rather than worldly fulfillment. When asked what he had learned from his children, Boatwright replied without hesitation, “Oh my gosh, an infinite amount. Much, much more than they’ve learned from me, I’m sure. . . . They keep me up to date; they keep me young. I’m infinitely grateful to them for keeping me on the positive side of life.” So there’s that question again. Are compassion and gratitude Pollyannaish? Or are they the beginning of wisdom? A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox! But Professor Monika Ardelt, who has been studying wisdom for years, identified him as the wisest man in the Study, and she should know. Certainly her identification, which called him belatedly to my more respectful attention, had a hand in raising my own wisdom quotient, too.

Boatwright’s story brings up another aspect of adult development—both mine and the men’s. When I was thirty-three, most of the Study men looked depressed to me. In fact they were not clinically depressed, but at age forty-seven they had become comfortable about acknowledging their depressed emotions. I had not. Yet. Age has long been observed to be a factor in emotional experience, even outside of the context of healthy development. In manic-depressive psychosis, for instance, mania often dominates the picture in the years between twenty and thirty, while between forty and fifty the depressive component is more prominent. Delinquents and addicts tend to be more
able
to admit previously denied depression into consciousness after the age of forty, feeling it instead of acting it out or projecting their emotional pain. The same pattern occurred with the maturation of normal men in the Grant Study.

Their capacity to tolerate more conscious depression in midlife than earlier in their lives (or than I could as a still-young man) meant that they were also less incapacitated by the frustrations of life, their own and others’. What had happened to permit such changes? When I was forty, I attributed them to maturing defense mechanisms. Later I learned (from Washington University developmentalist Jane Loevinger, who collaborated with the Study for a time) that the ability to pull differentiated emotions up into awareness is another marker of ego development.
23
Advances in brain science now suggest that the biological capacity to bring emotional valence into consciousness matures as the brain’s tracts become more efficiently insulated (better myelinated) with increasing age.
24
In fact, what we understand as maturation depends, in part, on this fact of brain physiology, which allows better integration of the “emotional” subcortical brain with the “planful” frontal cortex. Is there any reason to dismiss any of these considerations? I don’t think so. I grow older and wiser, and science does, too.

Over the last thirty years there has also developed an increasing awareness that people become less—not more—depressed between fifty and eighty.
25
Selective attrition probably accounts for some of the declining prevalence of depression, but it is also due in part to what Laura Carstensen has called
socioemotional selectivity:
that is, the tendency of the old to remember the pleasant in favor of the unpleasant.
26
The lives of the Grant Study men support that theory. If Adam Newman had remained twenty years old all his life, he would have been a basket case at the end of it.

WHEN
PEOPLE DON’T GROW

What happens, however, when people
don’t
accomplish Erikson’s life tasks? What happens to adults who, as they grow older, fail at work and at love, or who are trapped in unempathic, isolating coping styles?

Peter Penn was one of those. He was married for almost forty-five years; he was a tenured professor of English; he published a book in his field. And yet he never really entered the world of adulthood; in most ways he never left home. He didn’t meet the criteria for depression, but there is no evidence that he ever felt joy. This is his story. It’s a sad one. Developmental failure is always sad.

Penn was a frightened little boy. Until he was seven, he couldn’t fall asleep without his mother in his room. He was very inhibited; the closest to profanity that he ever came, by his mother’s report, was a slip of paper in his high-school knickerbockers that said, “Gosh dang it.” His mother actually confronted him about this, and he explained that he had been furious at his teacher, and had written the words to dissipate his rage.

His childhood was very bleak. His mother was a nervous worrier, and his father a very distant man. Nevertheless Peter was president both of his church group and of his seventh-grade class. That was perhaps his finest hour. Once puberty began, his emotional growth ceased. I have no good explanation for this. One colleague has suggested undiscovered abuse, and another has wondered if perhaps Penn was a closeted homosexual. But there’s no evidence for either of these suppositions; they are facile speculations and they tell us less about Penn than about how easy—and tempting—it is to manufacture theories after the fact.

There was nothing the matter with his intelligence. Fascinated by
religion
and by history, he majored in American history and literature—an elite major. His father had attended business college, and his mother was a high school graduate, but neither cared much for reading. Still, Penn planned to become an English professor.

In college, he seemed to lack a sense of identity and even a life narrative. He could not describe his relationships with his parents; when asked to describe himself, he could only tell stories, and they mostly didn’t involve him. Interviewers wrote, “He was pleasant, cheerful and extremely boring,” and “He was passive in the way a sponge is passive.” He remained that way as an adult—passive and very dependent. The zest for life that makes our adolescent children want to leave even loving parental homes was not in Peter Penn’s repertoire.

Lewise Gregory described the sophomore Penn as “ponderous and lumbering.” His college life was barren. The literary magazine
The Advocate
didn’t offer him a position on the staff. He did no dating because, he explained, he was “too busy” and had “no car or money.” He didn’t like dances, and had few friends. He did not take part in sports. Like Sam Lovelace he had a high resting pulse rate. His only activity was the Glee Club.

Penn won writing prizes and graduated
magna cum laude;
even so, Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences turned him down. He was one of only six Grant men who finished the war as a private, and he returned from World War II with a good conduct medal.

After the war, he returned to his hometown to pursue a Ph.D. in English. At thirty he confessed, “It is so easy to live at home and eat Mother’s cooking.” Like many second-year graduate students, he became a teaching assistant in a freshman basic writing course. The scholarly essays that he submitted to academic journals were not accepted. He wasn’t mentally ill. He never saw a psychiatrist; he took no
mood-altering
drugs. He just remained essentially what he had been in seventh grade—a good and not very imaginative seventh-grader.