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.
Thirty years later, I have changed my tune. Now I can see that Boatwright remained committed to his wife as long as he could. Even in the throes of divorce he relied on empathy rather than blame: “She is a wonderful person, but so negative with everything.” We learned much later that over those last five years she had been increasingly incapacitated by alcoholism, but Boatwright did not reveal this fact until he was over seventy. (In retrospect, his temporary difficulties with his children may have been a result of their mother’s alcoholism.) An observer might complain that he was in denial, but he was not blind to the situation. It would be more precise to say that, true to his character, he was taking responsibility for his wife’s failings. Resentments, however justified, are rarely a source of happiness, and Boatwright was a natural adherent to the principle that forgiveness is better than revenge.
Similarly, Boatwright stayed close to his father, remaining appreciative and protective of him throughout his illness. On his deathbed, Boatwright’s father said to him, “I don’t understand why you were always so nice to me.” Batalden asked him about that too, and Boat-wright replied, “He was nice to me. He took an interest in me, and everything I did. He meant to be a good man. He really did.” For Charles Boatwright, lemons were mostly the sine qua non of lemonade. Gratitude, and the mature adaptive coping style of sublimation, came naturally to him. Some Grant Study men went to look after Germany and Japan after the end of World War II; they had to be sent home because their anger broke through their ersatz altruism. But there was nothing ersatz about Boatwright.
While in Vermont, Boatwright had been active in building up a lumber cooperative, a farmer’s cooperative, an egg cooperative, and a central high school. He made extra money as journalist, milk deliverer, carpenter/painter, accountant for a filling station, and artificial inseminator of cattle. At that time, the early 1950s, Clark Heath noted that Boatwright had “persistent difficulty establishing a career,” but he thought him to be, nevertheless, one of the “most stable and successful men” in the Study. Heath was a very wise man and nearing his own retirement, and this was a paradox that it took the Study (or at least me) a lifetime to resolve.
Now I understand that community-building is a career of its own—one of the really great ones. But when I began with the Grant Study in my thirties, I was too deep into
the “selfish” phase of my own career consolidation to understand what Charles Boatwright was about. I could see that he worked hard throughout his life, but as he moved from one job to another, it was hard to tell where his commitment or his competence lay. Clearly he didn’t see his work as a career, yet—I realized once I stopped dismissing his optimism—he found meaning and success in whatever he undertook. It took me a long time to understand that the career that Boatwright consolidated was looking after others more needy than himself. Even in college his chief extracurricular activity had been Phillips Brooks House, Harvard’s social service organization. His career was not all about him. Pollyanna’s wasn’t about her, either.
In his fifties, abandoning caution, Boatwright left the corporate world of his post-Vermont forties, and borrowed the money to follow a dream. He bought a boatyard. At the age of fifty-six, he married the widow (and mother of three sons) of his business partner in that venture, who had died suddenly and tragically the year before. According to both spouses, this marriage has been happy for the last thirty-five years. In the 1980 biennial questionnaire, he wrote characteristically of his second marriage, “Her children needed me very badly. So in January 1978 we were married. It has been perfect for me. No one has ever healed me with such love. And in return I have come to love her completely. We have been enormously happy.”
Characteristically too, Boatwright devoted himself to his stepsons. “Being a stepfather has an enormous number of problems, but I seemed to have coped well. They all call me Dad. We are a very loving and close family. I’m an enormously lucky fellow.” True, Boatwright had told us that he was happy with his first wife the first time around. But this time his second wife, who has had her own private interview, confirms how happy she is with him. When Boatwright was sixty-one, an interviewer asked him what pleased him most about his wife. “He said, ‘She loves me,’” the interviewer wrote. “He beamed, and his face lit up.”
When he was seventy-nine, Boatwright told Batalden that he and his wife gave more to charity than they should. Most of their giving, he explained, goes into land conservation—that is, preserving the past. Nevertheless, he was in touch with the future. He worked as the town auditor in Stowe, Vermont, where he had a vacation house. This was a volunteer position requiring a month’s labor every winter. He also, on a largely volunteer basis, managed the town offices, transitioning them all to the computer.
At eighty-three, Boatwright was still working twenty-eight hours a week: “I’m pushing nonprofits to be all they can be. . . . I’m the guy who says we have to try.” The hope of men like Mandela and Boat-wright springs eternal. At eighty-five he believed that his most creative activity was “to inspire people to see all sides of a problem”—a hallmark of wisdom.
By the time he was eighty-nine there was no doubt that Boat-wright was an old man. He still exercised two hours a day, but cross-country skis and tennis racquets had been given away; now he contented himself with slow walking. He admitted that he felt tired and was plagued with minor ailments: two bad knees, two bad shoulders, shingles, cataracts, and ankle edema. But he still took no medicines and called his health “excellent.” When asked what he did now that he hadn’t done a decade ago, he growled, “A hell of a lot less!” He had reduced his volunteer work to three hours a week, spending his time instead with his grandchildren, and visiting shut-in and dying friends. The task of Integrity is not to set the world on fire, but to come to terms with reality and maintain one’s sense of life in the face of death. At age ninety Charles Boatwright is still very much alive.
Psychologist Laura Carstensen and her Stanford colleagues have documented that in late life emotions often take the place of thinking.22 As Boatwright explained it to Batalden, “With age, you acquire more understanding. The things you felt so passionate about when you are young, you learn to let go of. You realize that all those things you thought you were going to be, you ain’t. As I have often said, at this stage in life it’s not what you’ve accomplished in a day, but how the day felt.”
A questionnaire when the men were about seventy-six asked what they were proudest of, and what they wanted to be remembered for. Boatwright’s response: “I don’t give a damn if I’m remembered for anything. I’ve enjoyed my life and had a hell of a good time. I’m more proud of those times I’ve helped others.” He added at eighty-three, “I know I’m a Pollyanna, but it’s better than being a pessimistic grouch.” Maybe Pollyanna and Aristotle have something in common on the subject of the good life. And maybe the fans of “selfish” genes are selling Mother Nature short.
Boatwright knew how to love and to work. He was capable of a long and happy marriage, and could look tenderly after the well-being of children (and others) in need of his care. He was truly gifted in the mature adaptational device of sublimation, and he seemed to be ever more absorbed, as he grew older, in explicitly spiritual rather than worldly fulfillment. When asked what he had learned from his children, Boatwright replied without hesitation, “Oh my gosh, an infinite amount. Much, much more than they’ve learned from me, I’m sure. . . . They keep me up to date; they keep me young. I’m infinitely grateful to them for keeping me on the positive side of life.” So there’s that question again. Are compassion and gratitude Pollyannaish? Or are they the beginning of wisdom? A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox! But Professor Monika Ardelt, who has been studying wisdom for years, identified him as the wisest man in the Study, and she should know. Certainly her identification, which called him belatedly to my more respectful attention, had a hand in raising my own wisdom quotient, too.
Boatwright’s story brings up another aspect of adult development—both mine and the men’s. When I was thirty-three, most of the Study men looked depressed to me. In fact they were not clinically depressed, but at age forty-seven they had become comfortable about acknowledging their depressed emotions. I had not. Yet. Age has long been observed to be a factor in emotional experience, even outside of the context of healthy development. In manic-depressive psychosis, for instance, mania often dominates the picture in the years between twenty and thirty, while between forty and fifty the depressive component is more prominent. Delinquents and addicts tend to be more able to admit previously denied depression into consciousness after the age of forty, feeling it instead of acting it out or projecting their emotional pain. The same pattern occurred with the maturation of normal men in the Grant Study.
Their capacity to tolerate more conscious depression in midlife than earlier in their lives (or than I could as a still-young man) meant that they were also less incapacitated by the frustrations of life, their own and others’. What had happened to permit such changes? When I was forty, I attributed them to maturing defense mechanisms. Later I learned (from Washington University developmentalist Jane Loevinger, who collaborated with the Study for a time) that the ability to pull differentiated emotions up into awareness is another marker of ego development.23 Advances in brain science now suggest that the biological capacity to bring emotional valence into consciousness matures as the brain’s tracts become more efficiently insulated (better myelinated) with increasing age.24 In fact, what we understand as maturation depends, in part, on this fact of brain physiology, which allows better integration of the “emotional” subcortical brain with the “planful” frontal cortex. Is there any reason to dismiss any of these considerations? I don’t think so. I grow older and wiser, and science does, too.
Over the last thirty years there has also developed an increasing awareness that people become less—not more—depressed between fifty and eighty.25 Selective attrition probably accounts for some of the declining prevalence of depression, but it is also due in part to what Laura Carstensen has called socioemotional selectivity: that is, the tendency of the old to remember the pleasant in favor of the unpleasant.26 The lives of the Grant Study men support that theory. If Adam Newman had remained twenty years old all his life, he would have been a basket case at the end of it.
WHEN PEOPLE DON’T G
ROW
What happens, however, when people don’t accomplish Erikson’s life tasks? What happens to adults who, as they grow older, fail at work and at love, or who are trapped in unempathic, isolating coping styles?
Peter Penn was one of those. He was married for almost forty-five years; he was a tenured professor of English; he published a book in his field. And yet he never really entered the world of adulthood; in most ways he never left home. He didn’t meet the criteria for depression, but there is no evidence that he ever felt joy. This is his story. It’s a sad one. Developmental failure is always sad.
Penn was a frightened little boy. Until he was seven, he couldn’t fall asleep without his mother in his room. He was very inhibited; the closest to profanity that he ever came, by his mother’s report, was a slip of paper in his high-school knickerbockers that said, “Gosh dang it.” His mother actually confronted him about this, and he explained that he had been furious at his teacher, and had written the words to dissipate his rage.
His childhood was very bleak. His mother was a nervous worrier, and his father a very distant man. Nevertheless Peter was president both of his church group and of his seventh-grade class. That was perhaps his finest hour. Once puberty began, his emotional growth ceased. I have no good explanation for this. One colleague has suggested undiscovered abuse, and another has wondered if perhaps Penn was a closeted homosexual. But there’s no evidence for either of these suppositions; they are facile speculations and they tell us less about Penn than about how easy—and tempting—it is to manufacture theories after the fact.
There was nothing the matter with his intelligence. Fascinated by religion and by history, he majored in American history and literature—an elite major. His father had attended business college, and his mother was a high school graduate, but neither cared much for reading. Still, Penn planned to become an English professor.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 17