Love at Goon Park (36 page)

Harry thought they might just have to write off the long-term isolates. He didn't like it though. He'd never written off a living monkey; he'd spent his career hoarding them. Finally, one of his newest grad students, Melinda Novak, made a proposal. Novak had also joined the Wisconsin group in the late 1960s, the time Harry's depression was deepening. After graduation, she went on to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she eventually became head of the psychology department. Harry always called her one of his smartest students; so bright, he once said, that she brought tears to his eyes. He was more than willing to listen to her idea. He was more than willing to be wrong if the strange, lost isolates could be saved.

Novak's scheme, moving inch by cautious inch, was a glacial-speed approach to the peer therapy program. She thought the extreme isolates couldn't handle even a couple of hours with a baby monkey. So the long-term isolates were permitted just to see other monkeys, watch them through the bars of their cage. First they watched other isolates, comfortably similar even in their self-clasping and rocking. Then they watched the therapists, who peered back interestedly
from an adjacent cage. Then each was given a few minutes a day with a friendly little monkey, then a few minutes more until they were caged full time with a younger, socially competent therapist. It took months, sometimes half a year, before the therapist might coax normal responses from her companion. But under this feather-light program, the young macaques tentatively began to accept other animals.

And eventually, surrounded by friends and family, they began to act like normal animals. You couldn't pick them out of a monkey crowd unless they were suddenly stressed, or briefly placed back in a solo cage, where the shadows of loneliness hovered again. Then temporarily, they would fall back into their old self-rocking habit.

“Melinda's study was remarkable because we believed that one-year isolates were beyond redemption,” Jim Sackett says. “The fact that they also responded well to young infant therapists was really a major finding for theories about impoverished rearing.”

He and Novak, and Harry, too, thought that some of the techniques developed in the lab, such as peer therapy, might be helpful to people trying to help severely neglected and depressed children. Novak puts it this way: “We learned a lot from those animals—that certain kinds of behaviors could be rehabilitated, that some animals do better than others. Given that kids are reared in so many different ways, so many in a deprived situation, you need to ask those kinds of questions—how robust is the developing system? Is it buffered from certain kinds of experience?”

The monkeys dropped into the vertical chamber were different. They knew how to function socially before they were locked away. It wasn't that they had to be taught how to interact with other monkeys again. They had to want to do that. They had come back from despair and depression and rediscovered the ability—or the desire—to belong. For some of the monkeys it was harder to overcome depression than to acquire social skills. For others, it took only a few days back into the world of companionship to regain balance.

And although it would take them years to follow through the lessons of the isolation studies—from the brief separations to the full
year to the depths of the pit—they began to appreciate one of those lovely, common sense results: Everyone is different. When we discuss trauma or grief or isolation, we need to remember that we cope as individuals according to who we are, and that includes our internal strengths and our external safety net. “Perhaps the most important lesson was that not everyone was terribly affected by these experiments,” Suomi says. “It took us a while to see it, but quite frankly the vertical chamber experiments led us to recognize that individual variation matters, that it's not just background noise.” Novak also finished the isolate therapy with a strong respect for the individual. “The work let us see how flexible the system might be. We know now—better than we did then—that some animals and some people are going to handle these stresses better.”

Novak remembers Harry himself, caught in his own depression and moving more and more slowly, like a man in the last stages of exhaustion. “It [the depression] was definitely there and he was tired with it. But even in the cloud of depression, he was quick-witted and he was sharp. You might think he wasn't paying attention. He'd be resting, his head on his desk, and then suddenly he'd raise his head and he'd make the critical point.”

Still, there were also days when he simply put his head on the desk and gave in to the same kind of paralysis that numbed his pitraised monkeys. There were days when the depression was a physical weight that rested on his chest, and it took every bit of his energy just to move it off and sit up. His first graduate student, Abe Maslow, died unexpectedly of a heart attack in June 1970; it wasn't until October of that year, five months later, that Harry finally sent his condolences. “I was saddened to hear of the sudden, untimely death of Abe, just at the time that he had reached the peak of his scholastic career,” he wrote to Maslow's widow, Bertha. “I regret my long delay in replying to your letter but my wife, Peggy, has been seriously ill for almost a year, and I have had some problems.”

Peggy was definitely getting sicker. “Harry was really tied up,” Novak says. “She was the iron horse.” Everyone saw Harry as the
more vulnerable of the two. Students pitched in to drive him back and forth from the lab, cook his meals, watch and worry about how much he was drinking. Bob Zimmermann was shocked when he met Harry at research conferences in the late 1960s. “I don't think he was ever completely sober around then.” For the first time, Helen LeRoy saw the drinking taking a visible toll. She recalls watching as Harry got off an airplane and staggered just a little as he came down the ramp; she wondered then how to help him through this time. LeRoy, Jim Sackett, and Steve Suomi were all working together to keep the labs functioning smoothly. Harry was conserving his energy for his research and for just holding himself together. But Peggy never allowed herself to appear vulnerable the way Harry did. Everyone remembers her as unstoppable to the end. “She was a great model for handling death,” Melinda Novak says.

Peggy was uncomplaining, unapproachable. When she had to go to the hospital, she would sit in bed, IV lines hooked up, doggedly editing her manuscripts. When she was discharged, she was back fussing over the nuclear family apparatus. “Everyone talked about how brave she was. She was very ill, she was under chemotherapy, and she would still go up in this attic to check the monkeys, even when she was basically crawling to get there,” says Harry's old friend, UC-Berkeley child psychologist Dottie Eichorn.

Peggy didn't want, didn't ask for sympathy—and, perhaps, she found it difficult to find it for others, even Harry's long-time collaborators. In 1970, Jim Sackett was invited to write a chapter on the isolate-raised monkeys for an anthology. “So I went to Harry and I showed him the letter inviting me to do this. I said, ‘Really you should do this, this is mostly your work and I just have some things that I contributed, but at the very least, we should be co-authors.' And he said, no, no, you go ahead and do it. I asked him three or four times but I never thought about getting it in writing. So I wrote the chapter. It was a pretty good review of isolate rearing and some surrogate stuff. And then it came out and Margaret Harlow formally charged me with plagiarism.”

Sackett was shocked; really, is still shocked. He hadn't worked directly with Peggy and didn't know her well. There were rumors that she resented the amount of attention that he'd been getting. But everyone knew that he'd been standing by Harry for years and, he hoped, everyone knew that he didn't steal other people's work. Others at the psychology department had been hinting that when Harry retired, Sackett might be lab director. To come in and find this notice of formal charges on his desk, well, it stopped his breath for a moment. “So I picked it up and I took it to Harry and I said, ‘You remember when we talked about this a number of times and you insisted that you were not going to be involved in this, even when I begged you to?' And he mumbled something and just put his head down on the desk. And that, you know, was a Harry mannerism when he'd decided he'd had enough.”

Sackett was forced to go elsewhere for help. He took Peggy's complaint to the head of the psychology department, Wulf Brogden, who dismissed it without question. But winning that round didn't take away the sense of betrayal. It wasn't Peggy's actions that stung so much. It was Harry's. “Harry didn't back me up. He didn't say yes and he didn't say no.” At a time when Peggy was dying, Harry had clearly chosen his loyalties. He had no choice, he felt, but to stand by his wife. “It was obvious that was her business and he wasn't going to touch it.” Sackett understood the choice. But even understanding the personal nature of it—and so many of Harry's choices were personal—Sackett still couldn't accept that it was the right choice. He started looking for another job and took the one in Seattle when it was offered.

“And, even then, Harry never said a word to me about what had happened. I lost a lot of respect for him over that and I'd had an enormous amount of respect. He was a brilliant, incredibly hardworking man. He had a lot of gifts. But I just couldn't stay.”

Peggy was angry at the end. She was never going to finish her exploration of families and children and the way they care for each other. She wasn't even going to see her nuclear family project
through. Her daughter, Pamela Harlow, believes her mother had always thought that she would be able to make up lost time. Peggy hadn't grudged the time with Pamela and Jonathan, but she had hoped to rebuild her career. And now that, too, was being taken away from her. “She sat all that time, with all that talent, in the margins of the university,” says Lorna Benjamin Smith. “Did she have unrealized potential? There's an understatement. She was an amazing observer, smarter than smart. And she knew it, too—she was angry. It was all-out wrong what happened to her—and there's no other side to that issue.”

Margaret Kuenne Harlow died on August 11, 1971, at the age of fifty-two. She had just been made a professor of educational psychology by the University of Wisconsin, some twenty years after her first job had been taken away. Only once did Harry let any bitterness about this seep through publicly and that was during an interview for
Psychology Today,
when he let it be known that Peggy “was not listed as a member of the psychology department until the last departmental budget presented after her death. They thought that made the percentage of women look better.”

An interviewer once asked Harry whether Peggy ever tried to compete with him. “No,” he said, “there was no competition at all. She knew that I was better at creating research and that she was better at presenting it.” In this, though, perhaps Harry didn't give her enough credit. She was methodical in her work and careful in her presentation. “She was very proud of the nuclear family apparatus design,” says Gerry Ruppenthal. “And that was the first paper she wanted to do, just describing the device.” Her approach was more methodical, less dramatic—but she also had a message worth sharing.

During Peggy's fatal illness and Harry's depression, the Harlows managed to illuminate a near perfect arc of social behavior. In those years at the Wisconsin lab, you could contrast a life rich in relationships to a life having none; compare those sure-footed, confident members of Peggy's nuclear family world to the huddled creatures from Harry's well of despair. You could see the ways that fathers mattered,
as well as mothers, siblings, neighbors, friends. You could see how the very biology that makes us rejoice in company makes us, sometimes terrifyingly, vulnerable to losing it.

Harry and Peggy Harlow's studies juxtapose the ways that love can support us and the ways that it cannot. After Harry's depression experiments were finished, Steve Suomi had the vertical chambers disassembled and thrown away. An isolate monkey, he says, will tear your heart out. The chambers have never been rebuilt. The work from that time, though, stands as testament to the ways that love can be the best—and the worst—part of our lives. Harry himself understood that lesson perfectly. It wasn't long after Peggy's death that he began to consider the perils of his position. He knew, all too well, that the cold lands of loneliness are not a safe place to live, not for long, anyway.

NINE

Cold Hearts and Warm Shoulders

 

 

 

IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT, when he was still stumbling for balance, that Harry Harlow was suddenly accused of being a scientist on the wrong side of truth. It wasn't—as you might think—the monkey isolation experiments that got him into trouble. That would come later. At this moment, in the shifting culture of the 1970s, it was mother love that was the real problem. His pro-parenting stance had turned him into a politically incorrect scientist. He was unprepared, dumbfounded by that turn around. His simplest and most admired work was suddenly on the line. He couldn't, at first, understand it. Love, beauty, truth, motherhood—how could anyone object to that kind of message?

If you were a cynic, of course, and you considered those proclaiming the merits of mother love, you might wonder about their sincerity. The scientific standard bearers were all men. They were all scientists who spent more time at work than at home. They, none of them, had practiced the stay-home-and-nurture behavior that they
were urging on women. John Bowlby admitted that his wife took primary responsibility for raising their four children. And Harry had never convinced even his children that they were first in his life.