Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (48 page)

It also took many years to spot alcoholism as an unrecognized confounder in many classic studies of psychosocial effects on physical health. It is often unacknowledged alcoholism that causes precisely those stressors—the bankruptcy, the job loss, the divorce—on which the victim’s poor health is blamed. Not until the men were eighty did the Study discover data showing that alcoholism (entirely unmentioned in prior major studies of marriage and divorce) was by far the most important factor in Grant Study divorces. Prolonged prospective study is a gift that keeps on giving—and surprising.

INVOLUNTARY ADAPTATION

The elucidation of resilience is the third way that the Grant Study has earned its lifetime of support. Its time-lapse photographs of human development illustrate and validate what is perhaps Freud’s greatest discovery—the existence of involuntary coping mechanisms and their profound effects on adult life.
11
Freud’s discovery of defenses was analogous to the discovery of Pluto by his astronomical contemporaries. In the nineteenth century both Pluto and defenses were invisible; they could be appreciated only by the systematic distortions they caused in the otherwise predictable behavior of visible objects. But twentieth-century telescopes allowed Pluto to be seen, and the longitudinal telescope of the Grant Study has permitted the visualization of defenses and their transmutations.

Still, in 2010 a leading textbook of human development referencing
2,500 different investigators and 1,200 topics says not a word about defense mechanisms.
12
Why do involuntary coping styles receive so little attention in the resilience literature now that they are documented as such powerful predictive tools? One general reason is that the latest editions of major textbooks in the field, Kail and Cavanaugh’s
Human Development
and William Crain’s
Theories of Development,
make almost no mention of empirical longitudinal life studies at all.
13
But the more particular answer is that measuring defenses reliably is extremely costly in time, effort, and money; this unpalatable truth tends to obscure the proven validity, and the elegance, of assessing adaptation by defensive style. Paper-and-pencil tests are cheap and easy, and even scientists are sometimes tempted to look for their car keys where the light is good instead of where they dropped them.

Certainly the Grant Study has so far failed to make Freud’s inductive discovery of defenses part of the developmental landscape, and until fMRI evidence becomes available, the study of defenses may retain its scent of unreliability. Human resilience may continue to be conceptualized according to a model very different from my model of involuntary coping, and the baby may continue to be thrown out with the bathwater. It’s not too surprising that Kail and Cavanaugh don’t mention psychoanalysis, although I think that Freud deserves a historical footnote, at least. But the omission of defense mechanisms is another matter altogether. They are real, they are visible, and they are very important. And it is the Grant Study that has documented all three of these assertions.

The good news is that involuntary defense mechanisms are now included in the American Psychiatric Association’s new
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(DSM-IV), and Joshua Shenk’s 2009 cover article for
The Atlantic
on the Grant Study’s investigations of defenses and development won a fascinated national readership.
14
The next few decades of the history of science will decide if the conceptual scheme (that is,
the
paradigm) of defenses (that is, involuntary coping) is a lasting contribution to resilience and development or not. The jury is still out. Nevertheless, since the study of involuntary coping matters to me a great deal, I will offer a final illustration of its importance to human resilience and development.

THE LIFE OF ERNEST CLOVIS

Artists are people who can share their most private dreams with others through the mature defense of sublimation. Although all the College cohort’s successful academicians were skilled sublimators, like Dylan Bright in
Chapter 8
and the elusive Art Miller in
Chapter 3
, it was Professor Ernest Clovis who was the true artist in this mode of involuntary coping—for a while. What was so striking about Clovis was that he had suffered more personal tragedy than any other man in the Study, yet at midlife he could write, “Perhaps I have not struck any particularly rough spots.” An understanding of defenses enables us not to dismiss such resilience as denial, but to understand and appreciate it as a technique of coping. In Ernest Clovis, the transformation of a healthy childhood coping strategy (narcissistic fantasy) into mature generative sublimation fostered his own resilience and enriched hundreds of grateful students.

Clovis was raised in an austere and religious farming family. He maintained that he had had an enjoyable relationship with both his parents, but he also felt them to be emotionally constricted. He grew up with little physical affection, and his mother revealed to the Study staff that “very early Ernest developed qualities of self-reliance.” He was sent to boarding school at eight years old.

Ernest’s Calvinist family did not tolerate “selfishness,” even the temporary kind that supports separation and individuation, and as a young child of four and five, Ernest took comfort in fantasy. He had
an
imaginary playmate whose outstanding trait was his egotism, and by his family’s report, this companion was far more real to Ernest for a while than his toys, and maybe even than his brother and sisters. Not only did Perhapsy (that was his name) provide friendship to a geographically isolated little boy, but he also had the marvelous knack of always getting one up on the boy’s dominating father.

As his father recalled it when Ernest entered the Study, “Perhapsy was a most wonderful fellow and could do anything. No matter what we did, especially something out of the ordinary, Perhapsy always did us one better. Once we were taking a train, and while we were waiting for it to leave, Ernest saw other trains moving about the yards. Perhapsy was ‘in the big train over there,’ or he was ‘riding on top of the engine’ or some such courageous stunt. He could climb the highest buildings and mountains in the world, etc., etc. He never took a back seat for anybody.”

But as Ernest grew up, real games took the place of fantasy. “One of us asked him,” his father went on, “when we noticed he was no longer talking about his ‘friend,’ what had become of him. The answer was, ‘Perhapsy is dead.’
” Ernest was finding fresh ways to bring pleasure to a cerebral life. He learned to beat his father in tennis, and through this sublimated form of aggression they became close. In college, many of the inhibited scholarship boys like Peter Penn rationalized their lack of dates by pleading lack of money. But the equally impecunious Clovis was very successful with the opposite sex. He entertained his companions by taking them to art museums, which were free. Sublimation took the place of money as a gateway to romance.

In college, Clovis impressed Study observers as showing very little emotional color. Some men with childhoods similar to his grew up into emotionally frozen adults, like the lawyer Eben Frost from
Chapter 6
. Some chose work in the physical sciences, and led rigid lives
devoid
of observable pleasure. Not so with Clovis. He become a first-rate squash player, a distinguished medievalist, and a good father. After fifteen years of marriage, he and his second wife agreed that they still enjoyed “a very satisfactory” sex life.

During World War II, Clovis fought with Patton’s army through France, and afterward he felt an emotional pull to the French and their culture. Several of his classmates, guilty over their participation in so much destruction overseas, got involved in tangible (and ambivalent) postwar efforts to rebuild Japan and Germany. But Clovis became a scholar of the France that once had been. He plowed through medieval manuscripts; he mastered archaic dialects; he reconstructed an imaginary world that was little more tangible than Perhapsy. But he enjoyed it, and in his enjoyment he managed to connect his fantasy with the real world. From the flintstone of his intellect he struck sparks of marketable excitement, and in this Clovis illustrates a skill critical to the creative process. There is no one lonelier than the artist whose work speaks to no one, and no life less appreciated than that of the scholar who, like Peter Penn, cannot make his ideas comprehensible to the world.

Clovis, in contrast, received the most prestigious scholarships for his graduate work, the warmest accolades of his instructors, and offers of tenure from great universities. He could say, “I have developed a sense of mission that I may contribute to this country a better appreciation of France’s social and political values—not just of her literary and historical contributions.” As a teacher, an author, and a scholar his career was an unqualified success.

His home life was not so smooth. His first wife was stricken with an encephalitis that distorted her personality and rendered her permanently bedridden and irrational. The marriage became progressively and mutually more painful. Neither of his parents had ever shown emotion, and Clovis too had learned early to keep his feelings private.
Stoically,
he wrote to the Study of the “minor frustration caused by my wife’s encephalitis . . . to discuss it further with my parents would only make them unhappy. . . . I sometimes feel desire to discuss these problems with some of my wife’s women friends, but I have never done this because it would seem like complaining.” He did, however, form close substitute relationships with women. After many years he also finally did obtain a divorce, although he felt profoundly guilty about it, and eventually remarried happily.

I first met Clovis in 1969 in the stacks of Yale’s Sterling Library. He had a cramped, almost monastic cubicle filled with old books and musty manuscripts, but it was enlivened by a bright contemporary print. Clovis himself was a pleasant, good-looking forty-seven-year-old man. His somber gray suit was unexpectedly brightened by a flamboyant orange tie. He often looked away as he talked to me, and at first I experienced him as cold. But I soon realized that this was more self-discipline than emotional rigidity, and that he was a very private and self-contained individual whose emotional fires, though banked, gave off both light and warmth. The way he talked often moved me deeply. I learned that talking about people depressed him, but that the discussion of his work, French drama, would bring a smile to his face.

When Clovis told me of his father’s death four years previously, his eyes filled with tears. He hastened to assure me, “At the time of my father’s death, I had to suppress my feelings.” When he talked of the tragedy of his first wife’s illness, he became distant, acutely anxious, and distressed. Talking of his happier second marriage, he became warmer and maintained eye contact.

Clovis told me that before his first wife got sick, modern English-American theater had been a shared hobby for the two of them. Once she could no longer go to plays with him, he became passionately interested in early and arcane French dramatists. On the verge of a divorce
that his conscience could not countenance, he chose to translate from medieval French “the romantic tragedy of the hopeless love of a married man and a prostitute, both of whom chose to commit suicide rather than to be false to their love.” This self-denying professor, who in the light of day could not permit himself tears, found himself weeping alone in darkened French theaters at plays that were of only historical importance to most English-speaking people. “I cry along with the old ladies,” he confessed, “and feel thrilled by the experience.” But Clovis was no schizoid eccentric; he did not keep his source of comfort secret. At Yale he brought the early French theater vividly to the awareness of his students.

In 1972 Clovis’s daughter was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, a poorly understood disease that causes arthritis, irreversible kidney damage, and episodic emotional instability. He was affectively aware of his daughter’s peril and the awful years of his first wife’s illness were again before him. But he continued to embrace the one area of his life where he could always maintain control. He wrote that he felt “enthusiastic” about the future because of the scholarly writing on French drama that he had planned. He added, “The language of the material you read has an emotional, aesthetic satisfaction.”

Had he been unable to communicate his secret world of medieval France to others, he might have become deeply depressed. But as long as he could empathically communicate the scholarship in which he sublimated his feelings, he could retain an almost palpable animal vigor and
joie de vivre.

When I saw Clovis again in 1996, he was seventy-five, still happily married to his second wife, and close to his four children. And he had become—in a sense—a Guardian. But as Eriksonian made clear from the beginning, every developmental accomplishment has a shadow side. The shadow of Intimacy is Isolation; the shadow of Generativity is Stagnation. The shadow of Guardianship, which I have called Hoarding,
is preservation for its own sake, and Clovis had gotten trapped there.

Not all traditions merit preservation, and very few merit preservation at any cost. The ones that
are
worthy have value beyond tradition itself. In Polonius, Shakespeare gives us a classic example of elderly rigidity, which is the potential vice of all grandparents.

Clovis still wanted to create, to research, to write. But alas, there was no time. He was now the curator of a great library collection; he was editing a history of medieval France; he was editing his wife’s papers; he was certainly preserving the past for the future. But in these efforts he had exiled himself from the medieval world where his imagination could run free. To continue his own work, he felt, would be “self-interest and selfishness.” When I asked him if he wouldn’t rather write about early French theater than be a library curator, he lightened up briefly. Perhapsy lived on inside him. But he caught himself, and became again a “responsible” professor emeritus and grandfather.