Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (7 page)

At the end of World War II, some of the Grant Study men were majors; others were still privates. What made the difference? It turned out that the men’s attained military rank at discharge bore no relation to their body build, their parents’ social class, their endurance on the treadmill, or even their intelligence. What did correlate significantly with attained military rank was a generally cohesive home atmosphere in childhood and warm relationships with mother and siblings. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven men with the warmest childhoods made at least first lieutenant, and four became majors. In contrast, of the thirty men with the worst childhoods, thirteen failed to make first lieutenant, and none became majors. We don’t breed good officers; we don’t even build them on the playing fields of Eton; we raise them in loving homes. This result would undoubtedly have astonished physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton (see
Chapter 3
), whom the Study asked to write its first book.
4

I offer this story for its morals. One is that belief isn’t enough—however impassioned our convictions, they need to be tested. Another
is
that information does nothing for us if we don’t make use of it. My brief excursion here answered a question that the Study had been entertaining from its very beginnings; the data that finally answered it had been available for almost seventy years. And a third: that longitudinal studies protect us from exactly such pitfalls, and from our other shortcomings of foresight and method. They give us the flexibility to re-ask old questions in new contexts, and to ask new questions of old data. That is a very important point of this book, and one I’ll keep returning to.

THE LIFE OF GODFREY MINOT CAMILLE

Now let me abandon statistics and present some idiographic evidence for the power of love; a life is worth a thousand numbers. In 1938, when Godfrey Minot Camille first presented himself to the Grant Study, he was a tall redheaded boy with a charming manner who planned to enter medicine or the ministry. Only gradually did the staff discover that the allegedly “normal” Godfrey was an intractable and unhappy hypochondriac. On the tenth anniversary of his joining the Study, each man was given an A through E rating anticipating future personality stability, and when it was Godfrey’s turn, he was assigned an “E.” But if Godfrey Camille was a disaster as a young man, by the time he was an old one he had become a star. His 5 on the Decathlon put him in the top quartile of the surviving men of the Study. What made the difference? How did this sorry lad develop such an abundant capacity for flourishing? He spent his life searching for love.

Camille’s parents were upper class, but they were also socially isolated and pathologically suspicious—both of them; social privilege did not predict the warmth, or the chill, of a man’s childhood. “Mother hasn’t exactly made up for Dad’s shortcomings,” Camille put it at nineteen. At forty-six, he sadly reaffirmed a truth he had recognized
earlier:
“I neither liked nor respected my parents.” Lewise Gregory, the Study’s family interviewer, described Mrs. Camille as “one of the most nervous people I have ever met . . . a past mistress in self-deception.” A child psychiatrist who reviewed Camille’s record thirty years later thought his childhood one of the bleakest in the Study. (Evidence used in these assessments rarely came from just one source.)

Unloved and not yet grown into a sense of autonomy, Camille as a student adopted the unconscious survival strategy of frequent visits to the college infirmary. No evidence of tangible illness was found at most of his visits, and in his junior year a usually sympathetic college physician dismissed him with the disgusted comment, “This boy is turning into a regular psychoneurotic.” Camille’s constant complaining was an immature coping style. It didn’t connect with other people, and it kept them from connecting with him; they didn’t see his real suffering and just got angry at his apparent manipulations.

When the war began, Camille was destined for failure, at least by Study criteria. He was an ectomorph, skinny and without the broad shoulders and narrow hips that might have redeemed his scrawniness as “masculine.” His athletic conditioning was poor, and he hadn’t done particularly well in college academically. He would have been doomed by my criteria, too. He had had the worst possible childhood, he used unempathic coping styles, and he seemed clumsy at human relations. To no one’s surprise, he emerged from World War II still a private—everyone had predicted he would be a loser. So, a little later, did I.

After graduation from medical school, the newly minted Dr. Camille made a suicide attempt. The Study consensus at the time of his ten-year personality assessment was that he was “not fitted for the practice of medicine,” and, unloved as he was, he found taking care of other people’s needs overwhelming. But several sessions with a psychiatrist gave him a different view of himself. He wrote to the Study,
“My
hypochondriasis has been mainly dissipated. It was an apology, a self-inflicted punishment for aggressive impulses.”

Having grasped that he was paying for anger with depression, Camille abandoned his hypochondriacal defense and the unconscious purpose it served for a more mature coping mechanism—displacement. He learned to shift his attention away from uncomfortably intense emotional issues toward more neutral ones. When his sister died, he sent the Study the autopsy report with the simple comment, “Enclosed is a copy of an autopsy protocol, which I expect is also an item of news.” He never mentioned his feelings about her death, or even the fact of it. He did not tell the Study directly about his mother’s death either, but—displacing his attention from heart to brain—wrote cryptically, “I received an inheritance from my mother.” Whatever the limitations of this approach, it was a more empathic one than his hypochondriasis had been; whereas people had once felt overwhelmed, helpless, and angry in the face of his constant physical complaints, they now found him much more comfortable to deal with.

For all his adolescent hypochondria, Camille hadn’t really been very aware either of his body or of his feelings. He felt things, yes. But what he was feeling—a symptom of illness? an upsurge of anxiety? a chimerical fantasy?—was not a distinction he knew how to make. Under stress he had sensations, and he felt that they required immediate attention. After his post-suicidal insight at thirty-two, however, he began to distinguish between physical and emotional sensations, and to pay attention to their causes. Emotional stress still led to indigestion, abdominal pains, cold hands, and gastric distress, but Camille no longer insisted to physicians that he was ill, or used his physical complaints to convey his outraged sense of need or hold someone else responsible for it. Instead, after psychotherapy, he used his physical symptoms as a clue to the presence of emotional distress.

Then,
at age thirty-five, he had a life-changing experience. He was hospitalized for fourteen months in a veterans’ hospital with pulmonary tuberculosis. Ten years later he recalled his first thought on being admitted: “It’s neat; I can go to bed for a year, do what I want, and get away with it.” “I was glad to be sick,” he confessed. And in fact that illness, a real one, ended up giving him the emotional security that his childhood, his hypochondriacal symptoms, and his subsequent careful neutrality never had. Camille felt his time in the hospital almost like a religious rebirth. “Someone with a capital ‘S’ cared about me,” he wrote. “Nothing has been so tough since that year in the sack.”

Released from the hospital, Dr. Camille became an independent physician, married, and grew into a responsible father and clinic leader. Over the next five years he mastered the adult developmental tasks of
Intimacy, Career Consolidation,
and
Generativity
(see
Chapter 5
) in rapid succession. His marriage, which lasted for more than ten years but was not particularly happy, finally ended in divorce. But one of his daughters at fifty told me in an interview that his children remembered him as an exemplary father.

Camille’s coping style was changing as the decades passed, too. His transitional reliance on displacement (the unconscious avoidance of emotional intensity) was replaced by the still more empathic involuntary coping mechanism of altruism, including the generative wish to nurture others’ development. He was now functioning as a giving adult. Whereas at thirty he had hated his dependent patients, by forty his adolescent fantasy of caring for others had become a reality. He started and directed a large Boston clinic for allergic disorders—the first time he had ever been in charge of anything. He wrote papers to help other clinicians understand and deal with the emotional needs of asthmatic patients with deprived childhoods. In vivid contrast with
his
post-graduation panic, he now reported that what he liked most about medicine was that “I had problems and went to others, and now I enjoy people coming to me.” His daughter told me when I met her that “Dad had the innate ability to just give. He could play like five-year-olds do.”

When I was fifty-five and Camille was almost seventy, I asked him what he had learned from his children. “I haven’t stopped learning from them,” he said. He seemed to appreciate that that was a facile answer, and added thoughtfully, “That’s a tough question. . . . Isn’t that a whopper!” I was disappointed; I had felt sure that this sensitive man would come up with a more profound response. But two days later he came up to me in Harvard Yard as I was about to give a talk to his reunion class. With tears in his eyes he blurted out, “You know what I learned from my children? I learned love!” Many years later, having seized a serendipitous opportunity to interview his daughter, I believed him. I have interviewed many Grant Study children, but this woman’s love for her father remains the most stunning that I have encountered among them.

When I first wrote about the life of Godfrey Camille, I had no idea what had led to his recovery. Clearly it had been catalyzed by his year of enforced invalidism, but how? At age fifty-five, he attributed everything to a visit from Jesus at the hospital; I myself (at forty) was inclined to think that it was all the loving nursing care he had received over those many months. But neither was a very satisfactory explanation. What I know now is that it doesn’t really matter. It took me many more years of prospective follow-up, and many more years of emotional growth, to learn to take love seriously. What it looks like—God, a nurse, a child, a good Samaritan, or any of its other guises—is different for everybody. But love is love.

At age seventy-five, Camille took the opportunity to describe in
greater
detail how love had healed him. This time he needed no recourse to Freud or Jesus.

Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one. My professional life hasn’t been disappointing—far from it—but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I’ve slowly become: comfortable, joyful, connected and effective. Since it wasn’t widely available then, I hadn’t read that children’s classic,
The Velveteen Rabbit,
which tells how connectedness is something we must let happen to us, and then we become solid and whole.

As that tale recounts tenderly, only love can make us real. Denied this in boyhood for reasons I now understand, it took me years to tap substitute sources. What seems marvelous is how many there are and how restorative they prove. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric. . . . I never dreamed my later years would be so stimulating and rewarding.

That convalescent year, transformative though it was, was not the end of Camille’s story. Once he grasped what had happened, he seized the ball and ran with it, straight into a developmental explosion that went on for thirty years. A professional awakening and a spiritual one; a wife and two children of his own; two psychoanalyses; a return to the church of his early years—all these allowed him to build for himself the loving surround that he had so missed as a child, and to give to others out of its riches.

More years passed. At seventy-seven, Camille was viewing his past five years as the happiest in his life. He had a new love; he was whipping
men thirty years his junior at squash; he was nurturing a beautiful garden. He was also deeply involved in the community at Trinity Church. Perhaps I had been wrong to dismiss his hospital trust in a loving Christ so offhandedly.

At eighty, Camille threw himself a potluck supper birthday party. Three hundred people from his church came. He provided the jazz band.

At eighty-two, Godfrey Minot Camille had a fatal heart attack while climbing in the Alps, which he dearly loved. His church was packed for the memorial service. “There was a deep and holy authenticity about the man,” said the bishop in his eulogy. His son said, “He lived a very simple life, but it was very rich in relationships.” Yet prior to age thirty, Camille’s life had been essentially barren of relationship. Folks change. But they stay the same, too. Camille had also spent his years before the hospital looking for love. It just took him a while to let himself find it.

By the time Godfrey Minot Camille was eighty, even Aristotle would have conceded that he was leading a good life. But who could have foreseen, when he was twenty-nine and the Study staff ranked him in the bottom 3 percent of the cohort in personality stability, that he would die a happy, giving, and beloved man? Only those who understand that happiness is only the cart; love is the horse. And perhaps those who recognize that our so-called defense mechanisms, our involuntary ways of coping with life, are very important indeed—the missing piece I mentioned above. Before age thirty, Camille depended on narcissistic hypochondriasis to cope with his life and his feelings; after fifty he used empathic altruism and a pragmatic stoicism about taking what comes. There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the seventy-five-year-old Grant Study (and exemplified by Dr. Godfrey Minot Camille). One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away. And that is why I offer Dr.
Camille’s
story as a sort of outline of the terrain we’ll be covering through the rest of this book.