The Mansion of Happiness (29 page)

Each of us, he argued, recapitulates, in the course of our lives, the
stages of human evolution. Hall’s ideas about recapitulation were racial; primitive people were children. “Most savages in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size.”
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Women, too, were doomed to a more primitive state of development. This, Hall posited, in a revealing aside, accounted for both the higher suicide rate among women and the methods women used to kill themselves: “Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man.”
⁶³

Adolescence, effervescent and plastic, is when we are most capable of making a leap, and bringing civilization along with us, to the next stage.
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Adolescents were, to Hall, the future of the race, by which he meant the Anglo-Saxon race. “There is color in their souls, brilliant, livid, loud.”
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The storm and stress of adolescence is, at heart, a crisis of faith. (James, an anti-imperialist, once remarked that perhaps the imperialist
Theodore Roosevelt was “still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence.”)
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The work of growing up, Hall argued, is the work of finding something to believe in. But as Ross observed, “what he really described was the crisis of belief of the nineteenth-century intellectual whose religious commitment had been undercut by modern science.”
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When Hall’s two-volume study of adolescence was published, in 1904, one reviewer complained that it was “chock full of errors, masturbation and Jesus. He is a mad man.”
⁶⁸
But its argument that the ages of man are the stages of evolution was also greeted as good parenting advice. The
New York Times
observed, “Many a puzzled and despairing parent will be glad to learn from this volume that the reason why ‘that boy is so bad’ is not necessarily because he has started on a downward road to wickedness and sin. Probably it is only because he has reached the age when it is necessary for him to live through the cave-man epoch of the race.”
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Most often, Hall’s study of adolescence was hailed as visionary, and for reasons that prefigure his theory of senescence. What are we to believe in, when men are animals and death is the end? Sex, science, and youth.
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In 1909, Hall brought Freud and Jung to Clark, along with twenty-seven other scholars, to celebrate the university’s twenty-year anniversary. (Jonas Clark, in his will, had forbidden Hall contact with undergraduates, but Hall remained at the university as head of the graduate program.) Only Freud and Jung stayed at his house. Hall had been reading their work for years; at least as early as 1903, as Terman remembered it, Hall had mentioned Freud in his lectures.
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He asked James to come, and to bring his latest paper on Mrs. Piper. When James arrived, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out not an offprint but a wad of dollar bills. Freud and Jung, who had heard about Hall’s reputation for moneygrubbing, found this prank terribly funny—not to mention, given Hall’s having told them that James was not taken seriously as a psychologist (which was simply untrue; the reverse was emphatically more the case), well deserved. “It looked to us a particularly happy rejoinder,” Jung wrote.
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James, feigning an apology, then pulled out from another pocket the actual paper, in which he had discussed the case of
Richard Hodgson. A former secretary of the
American Society for
Psychical Research, Hodgson, before he’d died, in 1905, had said he would try to communicate through Mrs. Piper; to prove that it was really him, he promised, he’d speak in “nigger talk.” Mrs. Piper obliged. But James concluded that the case presented “no knock-down proof”; Mrs. Piper knew Hodgson too well.
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Hall wanted some knockdown proof, too—proof that the whole thing was a sham. He had arranged to host a séance, scheduled for Saturday
evening. His plan: to pit psychical research against psychoanalysis. Do the dead speak? Or is it just we, inside our own heads, muttering? This was a dastardly kind of empiricism, closer to vengeance than science. It didn’t work. James was called away, to attend a funeral. And the séance, on Saturday, was a disappointment. The medium, a twenty-year-old girl, failed to impress Freud and Jung, who concluded, after a short interview, that her trancelike state derived from thwarted sexual desire. Hall wrote, “The German savants saw little further to interest them in the case.”
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James died later within the year. Hall began teaching a course called The Psychology of Sex. “After the Freud visit, everything in the university centered around Freudianism,” one of his students recalled. “It got to be the sexiest place you can imagine.”
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Meanwhile, Hall had remarried. His wife, a former kindergarten teacher, grew fat; she also grew eccentric. She claimed that he beat her.
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She fell ill; he committed her to a sanatorium. And then Hall and his graduate students, many of whom were very young women, turned their attention to the study of senescence.
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The transformation of old age from a stage of life into a disease was a long time coming.
Sylvester Graham had imagined a world without suffering, a world in which one day we are well, and the next we die, without illness, without pain. But the modern medical treatment of aging as a disease, and death as something to be conquered, began in earnest in the first decades of the twentieth century. The word “geriatrics” was coined, in 1909, by
I. N. Nascher, a New York doctor originally from Austria. As the story goes, Nascher was making his rounds one day when the attending physician, discussing an elderly woman who was very ill, diagnosed her as suffering from “old age.”

“What can be done about it?” Nascher asked.

“Nothing.”

Not long after, Nascher wrote an article called “Why Old Age Ends in Death.” He thought it might not have to.
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Hall followed this research.
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He had, by now, given up on writing about sex. In 1916, when asked to join the
Massachusetts Birth Control League, he declined: “I regret to say that I cannot give the use of my name in connection with your work. If you want to know why, I will tell you frankly that I have borne my share of
odium sexicum
for almost a generation of men. Some fifteen years ago I wrote a book on
adolescence advocating what I believed was true and right, and for that have been pilloried severely and
ostracized by some of my friends. The same was true because I went into the sex instruction movement.…I have done my bit in this movement and am now retiring and am going to have a rest from this trouble for the remainder of my life.”
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He began his study of old age by making a study of himself, reporting, in 1917, “that early senescence is not so bad as it is painted, but that its study is likely to prove even more interesting than that of adolescence ever was.”
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He didn’t publish much on the subject until 1921, when he wrote an essay for the
Atlantic Monthly
called “Old Age.” He had just retired; he was seventy-seven. “Now I am divorced from my world,” he wrote, “and there is nothing more to be said of me, save the exact date of my death.”
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This was balderdash. Hall dedicated his retirement—to which he objected—to writing an autobiography and to pulling together everything he had been able to discover about life after forty-five.
Senescence: The Last Half of Life
was published in 1922; it was followed, the next year, by
The Life and Confessions of a Psychologist.
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The autobiography was very shrewdly reviewed in the
Nation:
“The reading of this book leaves one a trifle depressed. It is a pathetic life-epic in a minor key. It might even be called an apology for failure. Hall, essentially a poet-dreamer, decidedly subjective in temperament, is touched by hard, materialistic science and everywhere its dehumanized hand has either made his work abortive or else left him with a feeling of incompleteness. To overcome this insufficiency he resorted to a new form of religious tenancy.”
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Hall began
Senescence
by explaining his object. “The one thing I have always planned for this stage of life,” he wrote, was to “know more about what it really is, find out its status, estimate its powers, its limitations, its physical and mental regimen; and especially, if I can, look death, which certainly cannot be very far off, calmly in the face.” He took stock of his eyesight, his limbs, his acuity. He chronicled every debility of old age, along with its treatment. He visited doctors, only to conclude, “I must henceforth, for the most part, be my own doctor.” He read all his old papers, as well as his parents’. James had published his father’s “literary remains”; Hall threw his mother’s diaries into his fireplace. He noted, “as I watched them burn in the grate one solitary spring at evening twilight, I felt that I had completed a filial function.”
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He wrote his will. It would be discovered after his death that he had hidden away a miser’s fortune, in accounts he had taken out in every savings bank in Massachusetts.
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Having taken stock of himself, Hall took a look at the lives of other old men. “Napoleon lost Waterloo at 45, Dickens had written all his best at 40, and Pepys finished his diary at 37,” he wrote (giving extraordinarily short shrift to
Great Expectations
).
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Studies, something like actuarial tables, correlating age with productivity were commonplace in those years; it was those studies that led to the invention of retirement.
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As early as the 1870s, a New York physician had conducted a study of “nearly all the greatest names in history” and examined the course of their lives: “seventy percent of the work of the world is done before forty-five,” he’d concluded, “and eighty percent before fifty.”
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From 1874 to 1900, only four American companies had retirement policies; between 1911 and 1915 alone, ninety-nine companies established such policies. In the Taylorized age of efficiency, stopping work at sixty-five became routine and, soon, mandatory.
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Hall was dubious. He looked to art, and took heart from Longfellow: “Ah, nothing is too late / Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate /…Chaucer at Wadstock, with the nightingales, / At sixty wrote The Canterbury Tales.”
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Then he sent questionnaires to all the “mostly eminent and some very distinguished old people” he could think of. He asked good questions:

From all of this, Hall concluded that humanity itself was senescing.
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“The human stock is not maturing as it should,” he wrote, because people were living longer, but they weren’t living better.
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“At no stage of life do we want more to be of service than when we are deprived of our most wonted opportunities to be so,” he said. The time had come “to add a new story to the life of man, for as yet we do not know what full maturity really is and the last culminating chapter of humanity’s history is yet to be written.” A lot of this is Hall’s patented mumbo jumbo. But much of it is a howl of pain. “We do not take,” he remarked, “with entire kindness to being set off as a class apart.”
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To the very end, the Darwin of the mind thought he was wiser than
everyone, wiser than his parents, wiser than
William James. “I am far older than my years,” he wrote, on the final page of his autobiography, “for I have laid aside more of the illusions and transcended more of the limitations with which I started than most.”
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As he was dying, he asked to be carried into his study. He had the idea that looking at his books would save his life. Aquinas, Hegel, Freud. A student of his described what happened next: “They brought a wheel chair and bore the indomitable old man into the shabby room which held so many memories of the best part of his life. Here he had thought some of his best thoughts.” Hall stared at his desk, the shelves of books. Divinity, philosophy, psychology. Nothing. He collapsed in his chair. “He had placed such hopes upon the study, and the study had failed him.”
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Doctors dissected his brain. It wasn’t as distinctive as they had hoped.
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J
ust before eight o’clock in the morning on October 20, 1975,
Thomas Trapasso left the rectory at Our Lady of the Lake, a stone church perched high on a bluff outside the small town of Mount Arlington, New Jersey. He climbed into his car. Through a driving rain, he drove downhill toward Lake Hopatcong, wended his way along the water for a mile or so, and then turned onto Ryerson Road, where he slowed down in front of a two-story bungalow. He could scarcely have missed it. Forty reporters stood in the yard, huddled beneath trees. Mail reached this house even when it bore no more address than “To Karen Quinlan’s Family, U.S.A.”
¹

Karen Ann Quinlan, twenty-one years old, was not at home. She was a dozen miles away, at Saint Clare’s, a Catholic hospital in Denville. She was in a bed, contorted, shriveled, and emaciated. Six months earlier, she had collapsed, mysteriously, after a night out with some friends and had stopped breathing. Before she was successfully resuscitated, her brain had been without oxygen for two periods of about fifteen minutes each.
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She had never regained consciousness. Since falling into a coma, she had lost
half her weight; she weighed less than seventy pounds. Her eyes opened and shut. She flailed, she grimaced: muscle spasms, and nothing more.
³
She had no chance, no conceivable hope, of any sort of recovery at all.
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A feeding tube and a respirator kept her alive. Her parents,
Julia and Joseph Quinlan, talked with Trapasso, their parish priest, who was also Julia Quinlan’s boss (she worked in the rectory, as his secretary), and then, in July, they asked their daughter’s doctors to remove the respirator. Her doctors refused.
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