Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (22 page)

Perhaps it was a Terman woman, very near death, who embraced the concept of Integrity most succinctly in an explanation of what life was like for her since becoming bedridden: “My accomplishments since then have been to stay alive and alert and to be thankful for all the blessings that have been mine.” A recent questionnaire had inquired about her aims for the future. Instead of checking whether it
was
important for her to “die peacefully,” she wrote beside that box, “Who has a choice? Death comes when it comes.” Instead of checking whether it was important for her “to make a contribution to society” she wrote beside the box, “In a minor way I have already done so.” Instead of fruitlessly complaining that she was of no further use, she—empathically to those around her—reflected the inner peace that came of having paid her dues. That’s not chutzpah, that’s wisdom.

AN ERIKSONIAN LIFE

My first efforts in 1971 to unravel adult development focused on Erikson’s stages of Intimacy and Generativity.
18
At that time, my favorite illustration of adult development was a fifty-year-old Study member, George Bancroft. Asked how he had grown in stature between college and middle life, Bancroft replied, “From age twenty to thirty I learned how to get along with my wife; from age thirty to forty I learned how to be a success at my job; and since I have been forty, I have worried less about myself and more about the children.” That summed up succinctly everything I (then) thought there was to adult development. It was the map of world as I knew it at thirty-seven: grown-ups mastered Generativity, and then they died.

But as the decades passed I was increasingly aware that this was not an accurate life map. It took me a while to see what was going on; I was a man in my early fifties studying men in their late sixties, and the fact that they were still growing was more than I (or the fifty-year-old Erikson before me) could readily appreciate. We all needed more time. This was the gift the Grant Study gave over and over again. The ensuing years afforded me both a wider theoretical compass and an expanded experience of my own development, as well as many more chances to observe the men. One man in particular. As I sailed off toward
terra incognita,
my favorite guide to adult development continued to be Professor Bancroft.

At
fifty, as you’ve seen, Bancroft was a generative Mr. Chips. He looked after his own children, and he looked after the history students at his small college. But not so long after that he became dean of the college, and, I noticed, he suddenly had all the students to attend to, to say nothing of the care of his entire young faculty. I could also see that that was a different order of responsibility; it was no longer Bancroft’s job to manage individuals’ day-to-day development, but instead to establish the kind of atmosphere in which everyone could thrive. His social radius had expanded greatly, and he was no longer functioning as a parent, but as an elder.

For a while Bancroft was still too busy “worrying about the children” to write books. At research universities, writing books is a top priority, because career development and ultimately tenure depend on it. But at small colleges and high schools, book-writing tends to be a retirement activity, like genealogy and town histories. And so it was for Bancroft. At seventy he retired. His focus, which had shifted from teaching history to tending his school now shifted again—this time to writing history. His attention moved even further outward as he began to fill the very role for which, in my opinion, evolution permits grandparents to survive. Once older adults can no longer procreate children, their task has been to preserve the culture, to become what anthropologists call “firestick elders.” That is what Bancroft did. Between seventy and ninety he wrote five books that for generations to come will bring America’s past to life for her new citizens. He had turned his attention to recollection and preservation, and at last I was able to recognize this, in him and in others. Henry Ford, at age seventy, founded the Greenfield Village Museum to preserve the beauty of a style of life that his creation of the Model T assembly line had helped to destroy. Charles Lindbergh devoted his life after seventy to the preservation of Stone Age cultures that his charting of intercontinental air routes had begun to obliterate. They too became guardians of what seemed to them most meaningful in life.

Bancroft
always did have a special way of making development real and visible to me. In 2010, when he was eighty-eight, I asked him that same question of almost forty years before, about how he had grown in stature. (I was fishing for clues about how his transformation into Guardianship had come about.) We were talking on the phone, and my question caught him by surprise. But his answer surprised me even more. “You learn a little more about yourself and you learn how to be alone . . . in part so that you can face death without fear. As the saying goes, ‘When you grow old, you get to know women and doctors.’ All my male friends have died. . . . You let your wife learn about you. . . . I have to go for a driving test, to see if the world will be safer if I give up my license.” And there you have it—an extraordinary description of Erikson’s final task of Integrity.

For Bancroft, as for every other American adolescent, the acquisition of that driver’s license had once been a critical first venture into adulthood, part of the mastery of Identity and the world outside his parents’ house. Seventy years later, the developmental task of Integrity was about being able to give the precious license up, and, if necessary, to adopt with equanimity Job’s mantra: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

THE LIFE OF CHARLES BOATWRIGHT

I didn’t think about wisdom as a model of maturity until I was over sixty-five. I didn’t think much about Charles Boatwright, either. When I was doing my work on good and bad outcomes in the 1970s, his marriage was a shambles, and even in his mid-fifties he seemed to me occupationally feckless. At that point in my life I didn’t see much to exemplify optimum adult development at that point in his, and I let him slide gently off my radar.

In 2009, however, when I was seventy-five, Monika Ardelt pointed
out
to me that Charles Boatwright had scored higher than any man in the Grant Study on her measure of wisdom.
19
That got my attention, all right, and I looked at him closely for the first time in years. Boat-wright’s Decathlon score was 7 out of 10; only 3 percent of Grant Study men scored higher. In fact, late in life he was scoring high on every measure of maturity I had ever devised. Here was yet one more demonstration that my black-and-white, good-or-bad predictions at age forty-seven were unreliable. What on earth had happened?

I thought back to those early years. I’d found Boatwright’s file tedious going. His lack of career commitment was one of the reasons I’d scored him as a potential “bad outcome” in my old black-and-white days. It was easy to marshal other evidence of failure, too: a divorce, an estrangement from his daughter, a drifting son. Yet he wrote constantly of his good fortune in leading such a wonderful life, and exclamation points punctuated his enthusiasm.

Here’s how he answered a Study questionnaire when he was forty-nine. How had he grown in stature and matured between the ages of twenty and fifty? Between twenty and thirty, Boatwright said, “I learned humility and how to work hard and to dedicate myself to others. I learned to love.” Between thirty and forty, “I went to graduate school and matured rapidly in business and in the community. I became an important cog in the community. I was a flaming do-gooder. I learned further to take responsibility.” Between forty and fifty, “I feel a marked change has come over me. I have learned to be more kind, and have more empathy. I have learned to be tolerant. I have a much better understanding of life, its meaning and purposes. I’ve left the church, but in many ways I feel more Christian. I now understand . . . the old, the meek, the hard worker, and most of all children.” Reading this in 1974, I was inclined to roll my eyes. I thought I recognized the kind of premature selflessness that cloaks a lack of clear identity—a series of early efforts to deny his own needs
and
project them onto others—and Boatwright’s failures at Intimacy and Career Consolidation, like Camille’s, seemed to confirm that. However, I was dead wrong.

Dr. Maren Batalden, the astute internist who did some of the post-retirement interviews for us, had a similar reaction to Boatwright many years later. She visited him when he was seventy-nine. When she asked him about his mood, he gushed, “Optimistic, optimistic. Pollyanna, Pollyanna.” Even Boatwright did not seem quite able to believe his own words.

But Batalden changed her mind, which should have alerted me even before Monika Ardelt did. She recounted that while transcribing the tapes of her interview with the seventy-nine-year-old Boatwright, she had felt “critical of his contradictions and his ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’ assertions of his good luck.” But as she began to write her report, she suddenly found that she had to contradict herself. “In fact, my experience with Boatwright was delightful . . . interesting and interested, gracious, charming, and engaged. I was impressed with his voracious hunger for learning, which obviously keeps him vital. He is, I think, remarkably effective in actually getting what he wants. After fifteen years of gradually progressive discontent in the staid corporate world, he had leaped into debt and boldly returned to the rhythm of life he felt himself most suited to. Without really consolidating a career, he seems to be in a state of unequivocal Generativity.”

Still, it wasn’t until ten years later that Ardelt’s comment made me look again at Boatwright’s record. And when I did, I recognized that it wasn’t he who had suddenly matured. It was I. I had finally learned that hope and optimism are not emotions to be dismissed lightly; perhaps this was a reflection of some spiritual growth of my own. And while it’s easy to scoff at Pollyanna stereotypes, the wisdom of Pollyanna
herself—the real young heroine of the book named for her—is nothing to laugh at.
20

My years of studying adaptive styles had shown me that projection sometimes evolves into altruism. But when? When does a miserable Albanian teenager turn into Mother Teresa? Would Nelson Mandela have served himself better, locked away on Robben Island, by bemoaning his helplessness and planning revenge? Or was he wiser to do just as he did—tell his captors funny jokes while maintaining the invincible hope that they’d “walk hand in hand some day”? It can take a lifetime even to formulate questions like that, and for me, where Charles Boatwright was concerned, it did.

His life illustrates five of the Study’s six models for maturation: increasing capacities for working and loving, widening of the social radius, development of mature defenses, attention to the spiritual as well as the material, and growing wisdom. The sixth model, brain maturation, will have to wait for a lifetime study of neuroimaging—a study that probably won’t be feasible until close to the end of the twenty-first century.

Boatwright came from a distinguished New England academic family. Both his parents had taught at the college level before assuming more conventional 1920s careers. His father became a stockbroker, and his mother was a homemaker who was active in unpaid social service work. Throughout his life, Boatwright enjoyed a warm and loving relationship with his father, mother, and younger sister, and with a close-knit extended family. By 1940 the family was wealthy and owned three houses, but Boatwright inherited a commitment to social welfare from his mother, and he boasted that his father had “started out from absolutely nothing in the way of a job and worked his way up to
the
top.” The hardworking father was not remote. He made sure that he spent time with his family.

From the very beginning of the Study, Boatwright appeared to be well adjusted. His childhood received high marks from independent raters blind to his future, even though his father would manifest very serious mental illness by the middle of Boatwright’s adolescence. When Boatwright was twenty, his mother described him as “very affectionate, sensitive but with a great deal of courage and determination. Gets on remarkably well with both young and old. . . . Has never been a problem in any sense of the word. Good self-control. . . . Always made friends easily but was always able to amuse himself.” When he was a child his mother would spank him and put him in a large closet for punishment. When she returned, she would find that he was “entirely content and had usually found something to play with.” Sophisticates may scorn optimists—consider the scorn Voltaire heaped upon Dr. Pangloss—but the Grant Study suggests that Martin Selig-man’s research is right on target. Optimism is far more often a blessing than a curse.
21

After college, Boatwright was rejected for military service because of poor eyesight. He found employment in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, equipping ships with radar and repairing radar equipment. In the Study questionnaires he described his work with great satisfaction. Then he moved to Vermont as “assistant manager,” but really caretaker, of a tree farm owned by his father.

At nineteen Boatwright said of his father, “We do everything together, practically,” and of his family, “We all get along beautifully together.” This statement was typical of his tendency to see the glass as always half full. From Boatwright’s fifteenth year through about his thirty-fifth, his father was racked with manic-depressive illness, and became a very difficult and sometimes cruelly critical man.

Boatwright’s marriage was a similar story. He married at twenty-two,
and stayed married for thirty years. And he always rated his marriage as happy until his early fifties, when I was deep in my process of classifying the men as good or bad outcomes. That was the year he wrote to the Study that his wife had been very unhappy living in Vermont, that she was in love with an old friend, and that she had decided to leave. “It’s all so confining. I feel wasted and unused,” he wrote. “I don’t have really much love or feeling for her, and that is terribly hard on her too.” A year later he was divorced, and I was dismissing him once again as a Pollyanna and a master of denial.