Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  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.

  He was unadventurous in other ways, too. At twenty-nine he explained, “Some honest doubts, unpropitious circumstances, and perhaps a bachelor’s wariness have prevented me from facing up to the question of marriage. . . . My relations with women are more satisfying socially than sexually. . . . I can rationalize my single state by pleading the comfort and security of life at home.” At thirty-two he had still never had a serious girlfriend. His mother was the one with whom he talked about personal problems. At age thirty-five, his thesis still incomplete, he had to leave his university for a community college, and he stopped answering questionnaires until his twenty-fifth reunion year.

  When Penn began returning questionnaires again at age forty-seven, the Study learned that he had finally received his Ph.D. at thirty-seven, and had married the same year, still a virgin. His wife was five years older than he. Penn acknowledged that they fought all the time: “Her attacks on me are so savage they reduce me to tears. . . . I think I love my wife.” Ouch. Despite all his years of marriage, the Study never gave Penn credit for completing the task of Intimacy. Although he and his wife remained stably together, there was no evidence that Penn enjoyed his marriage any more than he did his students or anything else, and he spoke about his wife as if he had finally married the mother he had lived with for so long. (His mother died when he was forty-three.)

  The acquisition of his doctoral degree did not add to Penn’s excitement about his career. When he took early retirement thirty years later, he recognized to his dismay that he had spent his whole teaching life in almost exactly the same entry-level job—teaching remedial writing. He was unhappy at work, and never in his life did he express any pleasure in teaching. What Penn liked best about his teaching job was its “tenure and security.” He preferred small classes because they were less work.

  During his fifties, Penn took a lot of sick days. He was hospitalized three times, but no problems were ever discovered. He published his thesis as a book. It sold a few copies and was then remaindered; Penn bought fifty copies himself. It received no attention and has long been out of print.

  Penn retired early, at sixty-three. His most frequent daydream was that he might yet do something of importance. But what? He had no interests or hobbies, only hope. He still remembered his pre-teen days as the happiest of his life. His sister lived in an adjoining state, but they hadn’t seen each other for two years, and he hadn’t seen his best friend in three. When I visited Penn for his retirement interview at sixty-five, he rarely made eye contact. He lectured to me impersonally about this and that, but pedantically and without charm. His social skills had apparently not improved since he was a sophomore.

  In setting up the interview, Penn had told me that he needed to ask “Mrs. Penn” if I could come to visit. “We live between frustration and despair,” Agatha Penn quipped as she (reluctantly, I thought) opened the door to me, and she pointed to two prints dedicated to those painful topics hanging on their living room wall. She didn’t laugh, however, and she avoided me for the rest of the time I was there, unlike many of the wives of my experience who—out of friendliness or curiosity or both—made their presence known from time to time with coffee or cookies.

  Penn told me that he had retired out of “disillusionment.” After years of teaching remedial English in an inner-city commuter college, “I got a little fed up.”

  “I have a very good singing voice,” Penn told me, “but since I married, I have kept my voice on ice.” His wife had been jealous of his accompanist. It was also she, it seemed, who had forbade him to return many of the Study questionnaires.

  When Professor Peter Penn died at eighty-one of cancer, he had been happier for the first half of his life, living with his mother, than he had ever managed to be in the second half. He always worked hard, and like an obedient Boy Scout or soldier he never did anything to endanger his good-conduct awards. He did not abuse alcohol or cigarettes. He stayed married for forty-four years and spent his life teaching disadvantaged college kids. But his first year of junior high school was the high point of his life, and the closest that he ever came to Identity. What happened? Penn’s college adjustment was A. There was never a hint of depression, either in his heredity or in his life. His ancestral longevity was in the top 15 percent of the College sample. Yet his score on the Decathlon was 1. The only clue—and the clue itself is a mystery, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 10—is that his maternal grandfather died very young. Despite superior ambition, excellent verbal skills, a fine singing voice, a deep wish to be a scholar, and the possession of 8,000 books, he could find no purpose or meaning in his life, professionally or otherwise. He just never grew up. A tragedy. Reviewers have called me heartless and unempathic for publishing such an unhappy tale. But I offer it not out of lack of compassion, but to show convincingly how tragic developmental failures really are.

  For a long time that was the end of Peter Penn’s story, as far as I knew it. But in April 2012, as I was readying this manuscript for the publisher, I discovered by chance that Penn had written a series of poems to his wife, and that she had underwritten their publication many years after his death. I raced home with the book, wondering (hopefully, this time) if continued follow-up would once again prove me wrong. Alas, it did not. These poems were loving, but they might have been written by a sixteen-year-old with a stiff upper lip. After ten years of marriage he had said, “Her attacks on me are so savage they reduce me to tears. . . . I think I love my wife.” And by the book’s testimony, little had changed. For forty-four years Penn wrote ritual poems to his wife on birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and Valentine’s Day. They say nothing about the relationship between them, only about his thoughts and wishes, and his unquenchable hope that if he just said the word “love” often enough it might come true. I was moved by his hope and by evidence of this unexpected mastery of sublimation as a coping style. But hope is not always enough. Nelson Mandela and Charles Boatwright used indomitable hope to get out of prison. Peter Penn used it to bear an endless incarceration.

  THE LIFE OF BILL DIMAGGIO

  Consider the contrasting life of one of the men of the Inner City cohort, Bill DiMaggio. He came from an “underclass” family; as a child he had shared a bed with his brother in an apartment without central heating. His father, a laborer, had been disabled since DiMaggio w
as a teenager, and his mother died when he was sixteen. With a Wechsler Bellevue IQ of 82 and a Stanford reading IQ of 71, Bill completed ten grades of school with difficulty.

  Nevertheless, at age fifty, Bill DiMaggio was a charming, responsible, and committed man. If he was short and noticeably overweight around the midsection, he still retained plenty of youthful vigor. His face was expressive; there was a twinkle in his eyes; and he had a good sense of humor and a healthy appetite for conversation. He maintained eye contact easily and answered questions directly and frankly. He told his interviewer that by consenting to be a continuing part of the Study, he felt that he was contributing something to other people; he felt that this “little thing” was important.

  For the first fifteen years of his adult life, DiMaggio worked as a laborer for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works. When a position opened for a carpenter, he got it by seniority. He didn’t have any carpentry skills, but he learned them on the job. “I like working with my hands,” he said. Now he took special pride in his role in maintaining some of Boston’s historic and antique municipal buildings.

  Asked how he handled problems with people at work, DiMaggio replied, “I’m the shop steward in the union, so they lay off me. I’ll stand up to them if I feel I’m right.” If he thought that a job was dangerous, for example, he would not allow his men to work on it. Under union rules, management had to listen to him, and he had learned to speak with authority.

  His bosses had been trying to get along better with him over the last year, too, DiMaggio explained. He was one of the few really experienced men on the job, and they were depending on him more. Management also depended on his experience to help teach other men; DiMaggio had a lot of responsibility. (The Study has found that after the age of 40, IQ as measured by a school-oriented test like the Wechsler Bellevue does not count for much, and DiMaggio was an excellent illustration of this.) But, he continued, “It’s only a job. I’m more concerned about my wife and kids. Once I leave work I forget about it.”

  He was in fact very interested in family matters. He described taking his sons on fishing and other trips as they were growing up. “We spent a lot of time together.” His own father—chronically unemployed—had never taken him fishing or gone out with him much.

  Asked what his greatest problem had been with his children’s growing up, DiMaggio replied with a smile, “Do you have about six months?” But he added seriously, “Being worried about drugs.” He knew that his kids smoked marijuana; and he said he and his wife could accept that. But they would not let them smoke in their house. They accepted the fact that their youngest son had moved in with his girlfriend, and they made no moral judgments about it. They chalked it up to his being “very immature,” and felt that he would become more mature as time went on. One vital ingredient of Generativity is hope, but hope is only possible if one’s mind can encompass the concept of development. Bill DiMaggio’s greatest ambition in the next ten years was to see his children living independently. The capacity to accept a generative balance between care and letting go requires a lot of maturity of one’s own.

  DiMaggio belonged to the Sons of Italy. He was quite active in that organization, and he regularly helped out with Bingo night, which meant running games for all the women who came on Wednesdays to play. He and another member, a friend, regularly cooked for the club’s Saturday morning lunches. DiMaggio enjoyed that; he liked people being happy with his food. Through the Sons of Italy, he also did volunteer community work. On the Fourth of July he helped host a big party for the kids in the neighborhood, with games and refreshments, and he was active in various other club activities for children throughout the year.

  DiMaggio and his wife had signed up to work for a candidate who was challenging the old-guard city boss for mayor. And he was active in the “Council of Organizations,” an umbrella organization for the charitable clubs in Boston’s North End. This socially and intellectually limited schoolboy had matured into a leader of leaders, a wise man, and a Guardian.

  You don’t need a Harvard degree, or even a high IQ, to grow up into a mensch, to do your bit for the next generation, to work in community building. Nor do career and family commitments have to conflict. Sadly, DiMaggio died young from a heart attack.

  CATERPILLARS AND BUTTERFLIES

  In 1980, when I was forty-five, I wrote with presumptuous authority that maturity is not a moral imperative.27 At that time, my motto for the Grant Study was that life is a journey, not a footrace, and that butterflies are neither better nor healthier than caterpillars. The men had to develop for three more decades, and I had to gather a lot more data and experience of life before I could contradict in my late seventies what I believed twenty years before. But now I do. Peter Penn and the other men like him endured lives of desperation, whether quiet or not. The Terman women who failed to master Generativity were only one third as likely to be orgasmic as those who had. There is a time for being a caterpillar, but it is brief. Psychosocial maturity may not be a moral imperative, but its lack is very painful.

  And it is a matter of life or death. In 2011, only four of the 31 Grant Study men who failed to mature past Erikson’s stage of Intimacy are still alive. Fifty of the 128 men who reached Generativity are—a very significant difference. In fact, the Generative died eight years later on average than those who never mastered Career Consolidation. The men who achieved Generativity were three times as likely to be enjoying their lives at eighty-five than men whose lives were still centered on themselves. Adult development is not just a descriptive convention; it is part of healthy growth.

  Furthermore, much of the joy in adult life grows out of these developmental accomplishments. At least for these men, to fail at Intimacy implied other painful lacks. In the Inner City cohort, two-thirds of the never-married were in the bottom fifth in overall social relations, 57 percent were in the bottom fifth in income, and 71 percent were classified by the Study raters as mentally ill.

  Some men took their developmental steps late. Occasionally this turned their lives around sufficiently that they lived long and died content. Certainly late is better than never, and many of the advantages that the Cherished enjoy in young adulthood can become available to the Loveless grown old—if they can learn in the meantime how to find love. Still, these men spent lonely and sometimes wretched years in the waiting. And although there’s no statute of limitations on development, some specific opportunities—to have children, for instance—do not wait forever.

  DEVELOPMENT THWARTED: THE LIFE OF ALGERNON YOUNG

  Maturation is not an inevitable byproduct of aging; it can be derailed. Drought can blight ripening wheat; corkage can destroy a fine Bordeaux; shin splints can turn a Derby prospect into a shambling nag. An organic insult to the brain can destroy or reverse the normal maturational process and leave an individual an insecure youth forever. Major depression, alcoholism, and Alzheimer’s disease are the most common culprits. But they aren’t the only ones. A certain amount of good luck is involved in growing old without accident, disease, or social catastrophe. The more we know about ideal development, the more easily we can recognize the forces that hinder or disrupt it, and possibly counteract them.

  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.”