CHAPTER FOUR
A Wesleyan Honeymoon
Newlyweds.
Did I say Vera and I didn’t have a honeymoon? Wrong. Our stay at Wesleyan was a two-year honeymoon. We set up housekeeping in Veterans Village, a cluster of converted army barracks owned by the university, located in a rural area but only a mile or two from campus. Each apartment consisted of a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The university provided us with a bed, a table, and four chairs, and all for thirty-eight dollars per month, utilities included. We added the brick-and-board bookcase that was de rigueur for graduate students at that time. The inexpensiveness of that apartment, combined with the fact that Vera and I were both employed, meant that, for the first time in either of our lives, we could open a savings account.
The barracks were not well built. The buildings were poorly insulated, the floors creaked, the doors were not plumb, and the walls were thin and didn’t quite reach the ceiling. When we got to know Rich and Arlene, neighbors in the adjacent apartment, they asked us the name of the novel that Vera and I were reading to each other in bed at night. It was Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.
“Oh,” said Rich. “From what I can gather, it’s a fascinating story. Arlene and I often stand in our bathroom for a half hour at a time, listening to you read. By the way, I missed a part. Did Settembrini really kill Naphta in that duel?”
“No,” I replied. “As often happened in these tests of honor, Settembrini purposely fired his shot into the air. But then Naphta trumped Settembrini by putting a bullet in his own head, thus ending their duel.” After dutifully filling Rich in, I began to blush as the realization struck me that if they could listen to us reading in our bed, what else could they overhear? Vera and I realized that, honeymoon or not, we would need to try to cavort more quietly in the future.
But lack of privacy was a small price to pay in exchange for the feeling of community in Veterans Village. Our fellow tenants were all young married couples; most were graduate students, and some were young faculty members. There were frequent potlucks, volleyball games, and general all-around schmoozing. It was a lot like dormitory life at Brandeis except that everyone was older, more serious, and more married. Some of our neighbors had babies, some had toddlers, which made us think seriously about having a child. I was only twenty-two years old, and there I was, already considering becoming a father. Why not? If many of our neighbors could start raising a family, why couldn’t we?
As I look back, I am amused at how ready I was to become a husband and father. Just two years earlier, when I was a junior at Brandeis, I had decided never to marry. It was not a quiet decision, either. I frequently proclaimed my aversion to marriage out loud, to my friends, acquaintances, and anyone else who would listen. Vera recalls that I announced my no-marriage decision to her when we were just beginning our friendship, almost as a warning to her. I had almost never seen a happy marriage up close. My own parents were hardly a loving couple, and, apart from Uncle Leo and Aunt Lillian, I never saw a sign of romance or even mutual affection among my many aunts and uncles. Because divorce was rare among middle-class Jews at that time, the older couples I knew seemed to be plodding unhappily through life hooked together, like a pair of oxen pulling a heavy wagon. Moreover, my first college romance, with Barbara, was uninspiring. Being married to her would have meant joining that wagon train.
Then I met Vera, and my resolution to remain a bachelor for life dissolved in her sunlight. And now here we were at Veterans Village, surrounded by happily married young people who were going to school and raising families. So much change in such a short time, and I had a lot to learn. When it came to marital disagreements, for example, I was something of a wild animal, not unlike my father. Growing up, I had learned only one way to deal with the frustrations of a domestic dispute: raising my voice and pounding the table for emphasis. Vera, though, had grown up in a family where disagreements were discussed calmly and thoughtfully; her father was a gentle, timid man who would never dream of raising his voice. Indeed, he would much prefer to lose the argument than raise his voice in anger. Our two incompatible notions of how to argue crashed into each other, and it didn’t take me long to discover that my behavior frightened Vera.
One night, during a disagreement about an inconsequential matter, I got so frustrated that I stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind me. Halfway down the stairs I stopped and said to myself, “What the hell are you doing—and where the hell do you think you are going? Damn it, schmuck, you are not your father!” I walked back up the stairs and into our living room. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. Seeing the effect of my anger on Vera had startled me into self-reflection. I was confused; isn’t anger what men do? Wasn’t the only alternative to become meek and obsequious, to back down as Vera’s father had done? Yet my explosive fury hurt Vera and made it hard for her to listen to the substance behind my shouting, preventing us from dealing with the causes of our disagreements. I realized I would have to find a way to express my feelings honestly. It took time.
My primary male role model for domesticity was Mike Wertheimer. Mike was a young assistant professor in the Psychology Department, living with his wife, Nan, who was also an experimental psychologist, and their two toddlers. He was not only a first-rate teacher and researcher but also an excellent father, way ahead of his time in taking a great deal of responsibility for child care. He would frequently wander over to our apartment with his two-year-old daughter, Karen, perched on his shoulders, while pushing Duffy, his nine-month-old son, in a stroller, and invite me to join him for a cup of coffee or a walk around the neighborhood. Vera and I spent a lot of time with Mike, Nan, and their kids, hiking in the mountains, picnicking, and just hanging out. They made parenthood look very inviting. The Wertheimers were our first dinner guests. Vera was teaching herself to cook, primarily through trial and error, trying to remember how her mother had prepared meals in prewar Budapest. Before long she developed a great chicken paprikash, and was delighted when Mike ate everything on his plate and then used his bread to mop up any remaining trace of gravy. Vera considered him the perfect guest.
The atmosphere of the Veterans Village community shaped our direction as a young married couple. But it was the Wesleyan campus, and especially the Psychology Department, that gave us our first taste of what it might be like to live the life of a college teacher. For both of my years at Wesleyan, I was the only student in the graduate program. In many respects, this was a disadvantage. I had no peers to interact with, share ideas and anxieties with, and complain to about the faculty, the workload, and the weather. I also had no comparison group. How could I assess how well (or poorly) I was doing if I had no one with whom I could compare myself? Moreover, there were no graduate seminars, as there had been for master’s degree candidates in previous years. Thus, my graduate training consisted entirely of doing supervised research.
But the advantages of my situation far outweighed the disadvantages. Because I was more advanced than the undergraduates, and because I had no fellow graduate students to hang out with, the faculty treated me like a colleague—a very junior colleague, to be sure, but a colleague nonetheless. I had easy access to every member of the psychology faculty for casual conversations. We frequently ate lunch together, and in midafternoon, when some of the members of the Psychology Department wanted a break, we’d stroll over to Downy House, a charming, wood-paneled coffeehouse, where we were frequently joined by faculty from other departments. One frequent visitor to the unofficial psychology table was David McCallister, a distinguished anthropologist, and another was the inimitable Norman O. “Nobby” Brown, who had just completed his masterly analysis of Freud, Life Against Death. They followed the lead of my psychology “colleagues” in discussing things with me as if I were a fellow faculty member.
The tone of this egalitarian treatment was set by David McClelland, the department chairman, who treated both Vera and me with warmth and kindness from the very outset of our stay at Wesleyan. A few days after our arrival at Veterans Village, knowing how sparsely the apartments were furnished, he invited me to borrow desks, chairs, and lamps from the Psychology Department. And then, when he saw that I had no way to transport the bulkier furniture, he helped me load a heavy desk into the back of his station wagon, drove me to the barracks, and, huffing and puffing, helped me carry it up two flights of stairs. I will never forget his generosity.
Dave had an easygoing, casual demeanor. As my mentor and Vera’s boss, he was extraordinarily easy to work for. He was clear about what he expected us to do, but he left the details of how and when to do it entirely up to us. Indeed, he always seemed pleasantly surprised whenever we entered his office with a completed task in hand. He was the first Quaker I’d ever met, and a serious one—“thee-ing” and “thou-ing” with his wife and children in a sweet and affectionate way. Yet this good-natured guy was not only the departmental chairman but also its most distinguished member. At thirty-seven he had already written a successful textbook in personality, as well as a little book that had a big impact, The Achievement Motive. Dave, the quiet Quaker, spent his life studying achievement motivation and exemplifying it.
Dave had developed a reliable technique for measuring the degree of a person’s achievement motivation (which became abbreviated as “nAch”). He would show test subjects an image of people in everyday life, like a middle-aged man and a young man in a rural setting, leaning against a fence and chatting, and ask them to write a structured story about who the people are, what is happening, and what the outcome will be. Dave and his assistants would then score the essays for achievement imagery: Were the men talking about repairing the roof, planting flowers, or going to the movies? Was the older man trying to convince the young man to go to college as a way of opening up opportunities for himself or to focus on raising a prizewinning cow at the next county fair? If you consistently wrote about self-improvement, inventing something, getting a promotion, scoring the winning touchdown, and so on, you would be deemed to have higher achievement motivation than if your stories were about people talking about the movies or sharing a sunset. The strength of the achievement motive, McClelland argued, is captured in the fantasies the test taker reveals. “In fantasy anything is at least symbolically possible,” he wrote. “A person may rise to great heights, sink to great depths, kill his grandmother, or take off for the South Sea Islands on a pogo stick.” Needless to say, people who are high in achievement motivation don’t write about sinking to great depths or retiring to the South Seas.
At the time I met McClelland, the research on achievement motivation was already producing some fascinating results. Dave and his associates had found that achievement motivation was a better predictor of college success than IQ. And, in a deceptively simple study in which children played a ring-toss game, they showed why that might be. Imagine you’re a child and you get to stand wherever you want to pitch a ring onto a peg. Will you stand up close and be guaranteed success, even if that success won’t be very gratifying? Will you stand way back so that you are sure to fail, since after all you aren’t particularly good at this skill? Children who scored low in achievement motivation did one or the other, standing either directly on top of the peg or clear across the room. But the kids with high nAch consistently chose to stand at a moderate distance from the peg. At that distance, with practice, they could sharpen their skills and eventually become adept at the task. According to McClelland, they were like successful entrepreneurs; they took a moderate risk for reasonably high reward. In this instance, the reward is the gratification of improvement and eventual high scores.
Vera was McClelland’s full-time research assistant. She immediately mastered the coding system for scoring achievement motivation in people’s stories and became the standard by which Dave judged the efficacy of other scorers. Dave was constantly expanding the kind of evidence that might reveal signs of achievement motivation. Why, he wondered, were some countries full of high achievers and others low achievers? This question led him to Max Weber’s classic essay linking the rise of capitalism to the Protestant ethic, the belief that God looked favorably on those who work hard and are able to delay immediate gratification for greater gain in the future. McClelland reasoned that if Weber were right, then Protestant countries should be trying to infuse their youngsters with achievement motivation to a greater extent than Catholic countries. To test this hypothesis, he asked Vera to gather a random sample of elementary school readers that were currently popular in several countries. She found several bilingual foreign students and oversaw them as they translated these books into English. Vera then scored these stories for achievement imagery in much the same way she had previously scored adults’ spontaneous stories in response to pictures. The data confirmed Weber’s speculation: Children’s readers in Protestant countries were loaded with achievement imagery, while such imagery was scarce in Catholic countries.
For my own research with Dave, I took up his challenge of helping him find a nonverbal measure of achievement motivation. This would allow him to test children who were too young to be able to read and write, to determine how early in a child’s life the motive appears. An interesting challenge, but where to start? You can’t start with children, because you need to correlate your nonverbal measure with the standardized verbal test of achievement. Some psychologists had suggested that personality traits reveal themselves nonverbally in the way people walk, the way they draw pictures, in the slant of their handwriting, and so on. I was skeptical, but I dutifully scoured the stacks at the college library in search of books or articles that might enlighten me. Most of what I found was not terribly convincing, but then, while rummaging around, I discovered a little gem in the Psychological Review for 1896. It was the report of an experiment, d “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” by Gertrude Stein. Yes, that Gertrude Stein. She conducted the experiment while she was a student of the great American psychologist William James. Stein’s experiment was the first serious attempt to investigate the phenomenon of automatic writing. She rigged a sling from a rope attached to the ceiling and placed her subject’s arm in the sling. It was fitted with a stylus so that when the subject moved his arm, the movement was recorded on the paper below. She instructed her subjects to relax completely. She predicted that the markings on the paper would reflect the person’s unconscious thinking. Her results were inconclusive, but the experiment was her first step in applying James’s notion of “the stream of consciousness” into her own subsequent creative writing.
I also dug up a little book that, among other things, contained photographs of a page from original musical scores by two famous composers. I don’t remember the name of the author or the book, but the two scores were memorable. One was written in a very neat, tidy, and orderly manner, while the other was scrawled tempestuously across the page. The author informed us that one had been composed and transcribed by Beethoven and the other by Mozart and then (rather smugly, I thought) invited the reader to guess which was which. The difference was striking, and the identification was obvious, confirming, the book’s author said, his theory that personality is revealed in handwriting (in this case, score writing). When I showed the book to one of my neighbors, a graduate student in music, he found it fascinating. So did I. But I realized that, from a scientific perspective, the author’s demonstration was meaningless. If we are allowed to cherry-pick examples that confirm our theory, there is no way that we can be wrong. I wondered how many tempestuous composers there were who wrote in a neat manner. One pair of composers, carefully preselected by the theorist, does not a confirmation make.
Although I found no single piece of research on so-called graphic expression to be convincing, the overall thrust of the research was just barely provocative enough to motivate me to take a closer look on my own. I began to think about what form of graphic expression I could investigate. Well, how about doodling? Everybody doodles. I found it at least conceivable that the way people doodle might reflect something important about their personality. But what would I do, lurk around telephone booths and grab the callers’ notepads? I needed to find a way to get people to doodle under standardized conditions and then try to see if people with high nAch produce doodles that are reliably different from those produced by people with low nAch.
Here is how I decided to do it: I drew a complex doodle consisting of straight lines, circles, S-shaped lines, multiwaved lines, fuzzy lines, and ellipses. I then projected it on a screen for two seconds and asked a group of college students to copy it as best they could. Because two seconds was not nearly enough time for the students to get a clear idea of the doodles on the screen, what they drew was less a copy of what they saw than an expression of how they usually doodled.
We had already given these students the standardized nAch test. I now selected the doodles of those students on the high end of the nAch continuum and spread them out in a single row across our living room floor. Next I took the doodles of those on the low end of the nAch continuum and spread them out in a row parallel to the first. Vera and I then crawled around on our hands and knees looking for anything that distinguished the two rows. It was Vera who spotted the first major difference: The lines and geometric figures of the high nAch students were mostly discrete, made with a single bold stroke of the pen, while those of the low nAch students were fuzzy, overlaid, and repetitive. For example, where high nAch students would draw a circle, the low nAch students would draw the same circle going around and around five or six times. I discovered some other differences: Where students with high nAch would draw an S-shaped line, those with low nAch would draw it as multiwaved; high nAch students tended to fill up the page with doodles, while low nAch students left a lot of blank space, especially at the bottom of the page. The doodles of people high in nAch, I concluded, were more efficient. They expressed as much as possible with the least effort. Why make a multiwaved line when the same statement can be made with one S-shaped line? Why overdraw a circle when the same circle can be made with one round stroke? Why waste space, when one can fill it?
Of course, that was a post hoc interpretation. I didn’t predict any of the doodle differences, so they easily could have been caused by chance alone. What I needed to do next was cross-validate, testing my hypotheses on an entirely new group of subjects. I did the research. And got the same results. There was a significant correlation between achievement motivation and the way people doodled, in exactly the way that Vera and I had found while crawling around on the living room floor. I developed a precise technique for scoring doodles and was able to train my undergraduate research assistants to use it with great reliability. The relationship between doodling and nAch continued to hold.
In his own research McClelland found that for people high in nAch, the feeling that comes from a job well done is far more important than financial rewards, praise, or recognition. They are forever seeking to improve their performance and to take on greater responsibility at work, not for the status but for the challenge. As he and I chatted over coffee at Downy House, he often expressed his belief that people with high nAch are the ones who make things happen. Six years later, in his masterwork, The Achieving Society, McClelland argued that the major difference between successful and unsuccessful nations lies in the achievement motivation of its citizens. In it, he cited and extended Vera’s research on children’s readers in underdeveloped countries, and he expanded my research on graphic expression in a highly creative (some might say “far out”) way: He applied my coding system to the decorative paintings on ancient Greek vases, as photographed and collected in the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Sure enough, he found that vases that were produced and painted just prior to historical surges in Greek achievement were characterized by a greater use of efficient forms of graphic expression—such as S-shaped lines and filling more space—than those painted during more quiescent epochs. Greek vase painters were showing signs of high nAch in much the same way that twentieth-century college students were.
Actually, while I was at Wesleyan I devoted most of my energy not to research but to teaching. I can best describe what I was doing as teaching myself how to teach. Because I was employed as a TA, for the first time in my life I started to look at the process of teaching in an entirely different way, not from a student’s perspective (“Hey, am I going to understand this stuff and get a good grade here?”) but from the teacher’s perspective (“How can I help these students comprehend this complex material?”). I was fortunate in having three excellent role models: Dave McClelland, Joe Greenbaum, and Mike Wertheimer. Stylistically, they could not have been more different from one another, but each was a first-rate instructor. Mike was extremely well prepared; he would come in with a sheaf of notes from which he would deliver a clear, formal lecture that was thorough and precise, but he left little room for spontaneity. Joe was an entertainer; he was funny and erudite, and referred often to movies and literature, but he always managed to bring his examples back to the essence of the course. McClelland was casual; he would walk in without notes and chat informally but with obvious expertise. I was impressed by all three of them, and, over the years, my own teaching style became a blend of their methods. I learned to be so well prepared that I could afford to be casual and responsive to the momentary mood of my audience; I learned how to hold my students’ attention by keeping them entertained, not with jokes but with stories—some funny, some touching—that I would weave into the lesson in such a way that they illuminated and expanded on it. I learned to draw on material from life, literature, philosophy, films, and the day’s news.
Halfway through the spring semester of my first year, Mike Wertheimer invited me to give a guest lecture in his Introductory Psychology course. I had a whole week to get ready, and I used all of it. I was so well prepared that I felt confident enough to walk in without notes. I printed a brief outline on the blackboard, which was more for my own benefit than for the students. As I faced the class and waited for them to settle down, I could feel my heart pounding. But as soon as I started to talk, my shyness and my nervousness vanished—just as they did when I sat behind the microphone at the Pokerino tables at the Revere Beach Boardwalk.
Vera had asked me if I would mind if she sat in. We both saw this as an important event, and I very much wanted her to be present. But in those days Wesleyan was an all-male school; it would have been impossible for Vera to slip into the classroom and sit, unnoticed, at the back of the room, and frankly I was embarrassed at the prospect of the students grinning when they noticed that Elliot’s wife had come to hear him lecture. It was stupid of me, and I now regret that decision, but, with reluctance, I asked Vera not to come. Vera understood my discomfort completely, but she couldn’t stand the idea of missing the first lecture of my life. So as soon as the class started, she sat on the floor just outside the classroom, opened the door a crack, and eavesdropped. The students seemed to enjoy my talk; they laughed at all my attempts at humor and were solemn at all the serious and touching things I described. As soon as the lecture ended, and before the applause died down, Vera ran back to her office before any of the students could spot her. Mike Wertheimer, always thoughtful and considerate (and not knowing that Vera had been eavesdropping), made a beeline to her office and said, “Your husband was superb!” A few minutes later I came into Vera’s office, hugged her, and said, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Learning about the classroom from the perspective of the teacher also illuminated an experience that had deeply touched me when I was at Brandeis. In my senior year I had enrolled in a small seminar called Logic and the Scientific Method, taught by the distinguished philosopher Aron Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch, an austere man in his midfifties, smoked incessantly during class, inhaling through a long, black cigarette holder, and spoke with a heavy accent that was a blend of Russian and German. He was stern and impatient, always on the verge of losing his temper with any of us if we failed to immediately grasp some of the complex material he was presenting. Yet I found him to be an excellent teacher. From Professor Gurwitsch’s rather harsh Socratic prodding, I learned the art of critical thinking and the importance of challenging entrenched ideas with logic and evidence.
One afternoon, as I was leaving Gurwitsch’s class, the professor spotted me with a thin little book under my arm and asked me what I was reading. I handed it to him. It was the English translation of L’homme machine, written in 1748 by the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie. I had been assigned this book and was supposed to give a report on it for a seminar in the history of psychology. I had accepted the assignment with reluctance, because I had never heard of La Mettrie and I was hostile to his general notion that humans are programmed like machines in their thinking and behavior. But once I got into it I found the book enthralling. La Mettrie wrote with passion and precision, and his ideas about human nature were revolutionary for his era. Moreover, because he was a materialist writing in Catholic France, I realized that writing that book must have been an act of great intellectual courage. Gurwitsch glanced at the first few pages and grunted.
“Do you like this book?” he asked.
“I love it,” I replied enthusiastically.
“Oh,” the professor said. “Et croyez-vous que l’homme est une machine?”
“Absolutely not! I disagree with all of his conclusions, but I am impressed by the sheer brilliance of his reasoning,” I said.
Then a remarkable thing happened. Gurwitsch’s entire face softened, his eyes glistened, and he leaned forward. He put his hand on top of my head and gently squeezed it, with obvious affection. “Good boy,” he said softly.
It was the first time a professor had ever physically touched me and with such warmth. But, more important, Gurwitsch had shown me, almost wordlessly, that it was a good thing—perhaps even a noble thing—to be able to love a book, an idea, with which you disagreed. At Wesleyan, taking the first steps on the road to becoming a professor myself, I gained an even greater understanding of what his gesture, face, and tears were conveying. It was nothing less than the profound satisfaction a teacher feels when a student really gets it.
During the summer after our first year at Wesleyan, three important things happened. The first was that Vera and I decided to have a baby. Vera had always wanted to have children, many children, and the fact that so many of our friends at Veterans Village were happily raising young kids made it look easy. Moreover, I was now sure what I wanted to do professionally: teach psychology at the college level. I would get a Ph.D. and become a professor at a small college. I would not have to do much research and could do for my students what Abe Maslow and Aron Gurwitsch had done for me. Being launched on a clear career path, I could see no reason Vera and I shouldn’t start raising a family.
The second thing that happened was that Dick Alpert and Ralph Haber, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford who were McClelland’s former graduate students, came back to Wesleyan, joining Vera and me to work on one of McClelland’s research projects. During that summer the four of us became close friends, and we have remained close ever since. Ralph was to become a distinguished cognitive and forensic psychologist, contributing research on perception and memory as well as serving as an expert witness on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Dick went to Harvard as a developmental psychologist but was to leave academia and become the influential spiritual leader Baba Ram Dass. (I respect his transformation, but I have never stopped calling him Dick, and whenever we meet I eventually get around to telling him, much to his delight, that he hasn’t changed all that much since 1955.)
The third thing that happened that summer was that Dave McClelland told me, in confidence, that although it wasn’t official yet, he was expecting an offer from Harvard to become professor and director of the psychological clinic in a year. He wanted to know if I would be willing to join him at Harvard as a graduate student and his primary research assistant. I said that I was honored by his offer and would certainly consider it. But I told him that I was also intending to apply to Stanford, which looked good to me because Dick and Ralph were so happy there. Dave said that Stanford was a terrific university—“I think they call it the Harvard of the West,” he joked—and that I couldn’t go wrong no matter which place I chose.
When Stanford accepted me and offered me a teaching assistantship for the first year, Vera and I spent a long time making the decision. We agreed that it would be easier and safer to go to Harvard because Dave and I were fond of each other and because he was so easy to work for. Cambridge was also familiar territory; it was only a few miles from my mother and sister, a few miles from Brandeis and Maslow. Being on the East Coast would also mean that I could see more of Jason, who was a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago. Stanford, in contrast, seemed remote. I had never been west of the Mississippi. Hell, I had never been west of Philadelphia.
But the one thing that made Harvard most attractive also was my greatest concern: Dave McClelland. As much as I liked and admired Dave, I felt that I had already learned most of what I could from him, and I wasn’t excited about doing still more research on achievement motivation. If he brought me to Harvard, he would have had every right to expect me to work with him; once there, it would be difficult and perhaps even disloyal to switch mentors. Stanford, though, was virgin, unknown territory. Aside from Dick and Ralph, I knew no one there and would be obligated to no one. To Dave’s great credit, he never applied any pressure, nor did he try to influence my decision in any way. When I told him my choice was Stanford, he said that he was disappointed but that he completely understood my decision and wished me well.
It didn’t take long for Vera to become pregnant, and the baby was due in early March 1956. Our old Nash was becoming unreliable, and I began to have nightmares about the damn thing breaking down on the way to the hospital. Besides, if we were going to drive to California in the summer, we knew the old Nash would not be up to the challenge. So, in February, we decided that it would be prudent to buy a new car. A year earlier one of our neighbors in Veterans Village had bought a brand-new Volkswagen, and none of us could get him to stop talking about its virtues. It is hard to believe, but, at that time, 99 percent of all cars on our nation’s roads were American. The VW burst on the scene with a reputation for reliability and fuel efficiency. What’s more, we might even be able to afford the $1,560 for a new one. Well, not quite. We were about $300 short. Then it dawned on me: my bar mitzvah money! I was bar mitzvahed in 1945, with the war still raging. In those days war bonds were a tidy bar mitzvah present because they cost only $18.75; ten years later they would be redeemable for $25. So my aunts and uncles could give me a $25 present for only $18.75. I cashed in the bonds, got $175 for the old Nash—exactly what I had paid for it eighteen months earlier—and bought the new car.
And just in time. On leap-year night of February 29, Vera went into labor. It had started snowing that afternoon and was still snowing as we, shivering with excitement, climbed into our spanking-new VW and drove to the hospital. In 1956 husbands were considered to be a nuisance in maternity wards. As soon as Vera checked in, they hustled me out of the way and put me into a tiny, windowless waiting room that had all the charm of a prison cell. When I arrived, another expectant father was already there, smoking and pacing the floor. We exchanged pleasantries:
“Your first one?”
“Yeah.”
“My third. Nuttin’ to it,” he said nervously.
He then offered me a cigarette, and we both smoked and paced like expectant fathers in Hollywood films of that era. About five hours later a student nurse stuck her head in the room and asked me if I wanted to see my son. They didn’t allow me to hold him, but I could view him through a window. I then went in to see Vera, who was groggy and still reeking with the smell of ether, the anesthetic favored by most hospitals at that time. But she was deliriously happy. We looked at each other and cried. We could hardly believe it. We had brought a new being into the world. We were parents.
We decided to name our son Hal, after my father. In the naming of a child, the Jewish tradition is to choose the name of a beloved person who is no longer alive as a way of preserving the memory of that person. Typically, the child gets the identical Hebrew name as the deceased and an English name that begins with the same letter of the alphabet as the deceased’s English name. We wanted an H name for my father, Harry, but why not Henry, Harold, Howard, Horace, Hubert, or Hyman? We chose the name Hal because we hoped our son would be as wild and adventurous in his youth, and as judicious and wise in adulthood, as was Shakespeare’s memorable Prince Hal.
In naming my son after my father, I thought that I was merely making my mother and my grandfather happy by observing what had been, to me, a meaningless ritual. But the name had a surprising impact on me. When I picked up my new baby, fed him, burped him, changed his diaper, held him close, and said his name, I often thought about my father and the difficult roller coaster of a life he had led. How he started with nothing, worked hard, pulled himself out of poverty, opened a successful business, and moved into the middle class; how he lost it all, slid back into poverty, and felt the humiliation of being rescued from prison by the father-in-law he disliked. And how, just as he was beginning to get himself together, he died feeling like a failure, a man who had let down his wife and kids. The birth and naming of my infant son opened my heart to my father and his plight. For the first time since my father’s death, he became a frequent visitor in my thoughts and dreams.
I loved watching Vera with Hal. Everything she did with the baby flowed effortlessly. She took about a month off from work, and then, in early April, we brought Hal into the psychology building, and each of us took turns caring for him while the other worked. At coffee time we brought him to Downy House and put him in the center of the table in his basket. As we sat around the table talking psychology, each member of the group would occasionally tune out of the conversation to do a little cooing, baby talking, and chin chucking.
In early June, after the Wesleyan commencement, Vera and I packed up and left Veterans Village. Our plan was to drive cross-country to Stanford, but first we spent six weeks as the guests of Dave and Mary McClelland at Yelping Hill, a fifty-acre compound in the Berkshires. The compound consisted of several small cabins, which the McClellands owned with several of their friends. Vera and I did a little work for Dave, but mostly we played with Hal and chatted with the residents and their constant stream of interesting guests. Our favorite was a young artist, a few years older than us, who stayed in a cabin near ours. Dave and Mary had introduced him as Maurice, but he asked us to call him Mark. We had already seen Mark’s droll and charming illustrations in one of our favorite children’s books, Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig. Vera and I spent a lot of time with him hiking, swimming, picking wild blueberries, discussing psychology, and lying on our backs at night, in a meadow, watching star showers. He confided to us that he was taking a leap from illustrating other people’s books to writing and illustrating his own, and that he had already finished one; sure enough, the following spring he sent us a signed copy of Kenny’s Window. A few years later we were delighted to learn that our summer friend had won the Caldecott Medal for a book that turned out rather well. It was called Where the Wild Things Are.
At last we were ready for our journey west. We bought a big map demarking almost every national and state park. We bought sleeping bags, air mattresses, and a Coleman stove, so that we could occasionally eat something hot and sterilize Hal’s baby bottles. Our plan was to sleep under the stars every night unless it was raining, a plan that lasted until another of the McClellands’ friends took pity on us in our hopeless naïveté. “You will wake up every morning soaking wet from the dew,” he said. “Look, I just bought some new camping gear so, here, take my old pup tent.”
The pup tent duly packed, we rigged the back seat of the VW with Hal’s crib mattress. (I figured that he might as well get used to sleeping in cars. Someday, he might be a penniless student at Brandeis.) And off we went.
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Newlyweds.
Did I say Vera and I didn’t have a honeymoon? Wrong. Our stay at Wesleyan was a two-year honeymoon. We set up housekeeping in Veterans Village, a cluster of converted army barracks owned by the university, located in a rural area but only a mile or two from campus. Each apartment consisted of a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The university provided us with a bed, a table, and four chairs, and all for thirty-eight dollars per month, utilities included. We added the brick-and-board bookcase that was de rigueur for graduate students at that time. The inexpensiveness of that apartment, combined with the fact that Vera and I were both employed, meant that, for the first time in either of our lives, we could open a savings account.
The barracks were not well built. The buildings were poorly insulated, the floors creaked, the doors were not plumb, and the walls were thin and didn’t quite reach the ceiling. When we got to know Rich and Arlene, neighbors in the adjacent apartment, they asked us the name of the novel that Vera and I were reading to each other in bed at night. It was Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.
“Oh,” said Rich. “From what I can gather, it’s a fascinating story. Arlene and I often stand in our bathroom for a half hour at a time, listening to you read. By the way, I missed a part. Did Settembrini really kill Naphta in that duel?”
“No,” I replied. “As often happened in these tests of honor, Settembrini purposely fired his shot into the air. But then Naphta trumped Settembrini by putting a bullet in his own head, thus ending their duel.” After dutifully filling Rich in, I began to blush as the realization struck me that if they could listen to us reading in our bed, what else could they overhear? Vera and I realized that, honeymoon or not, we would need to try to cavort more quietly in the future.
But lack of privacy was a small price to pay in exchange for the feeling of community in Veterans Village. Our fellow tenants were all young married couples; most were graduate students, and some were young faculty members. There were frequent potlucks, volleyball games, and general all-around schmoozing. It was a lot like dormitory life at Brandeis except that everyone was older, more serious, and more married. Some of our neighbors had babies, some had toddlers, which made us think seriously about having a child. I was only twenty-two years old, and there I was, already considering becoming a father. Why not? If many of our neighbors could start raising a family, why couldn’t we?
As I look back, I am amused at how ready I was to become a husband and father. Just two years earlier, when I was a junior at Brandeis, I had decided never to marry. It was not a quiet decision, either. I frequently proclaimed my aversion to marriage out loud, to my friends, acquaintances, and anyone else who would listen. Vera recalls that I announced my no-marriage decision to her when we were just beginning our friendship, almost as a warning to her. I had almost never seen a happy marriage up close. My own parents were hardly a loving couple, and, apart from Uncle Leo and Aunt Lillian, I never saw a sign of romance or even mutual affection among my many aunts and uncles. Because divorce was rare among middle-class Jews at that time, the older couples I knew seemed to be plodding unhappily through life hooked together, like a pair of oxen pulling a heavy wagon. Moreover, my first college romance, with Barbara, was uninspiring. Being married to her would have meant joining that wagon train.
Then I met Vera, and my resolution to remain a bachelor for life dissolved in her sunlight. And now here we were at Veterans Village, surrounded by happily married young people who were going to school and raising families. So much change in such a short time, and I had a lot to learn. When it came to marital disagreements, for example, I was something of a wild animal, not unlike my father. Growing up, I had learned only one way to deal with the frustrations of a domestic dispute: raising my voice and pounding the table for emphasis. Vera, though, had grown up in a family where disagreements were discussed calmly and thoughtfully; her father was a gentle, timid man who would never dream of raising his voice. Indeed, he would much prefer to lose the argument than raise his voice in anger. Our two incompatible notions of how to argue crashed into each other, and it didn’t take me long to discover that my behavior frightened Vera.
One night, during a disagreement about an inconsequential matter, I got so frustrated that I stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind me. Halfway down the stairs I stopped and said to myself, “What the hell are you doing—and where the hell do you think you are going? Damn it, schmuck, you are not your father!” I walked back up the stairs and into our living room. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. Seeing the effect of my anger on Vera had startled me into self-reflection. I was confused; isn’t anger what men do? Wasn’t the only alternative to become meek and obsequious, to back down as Vera’s father had done? Yet my explosive fury hurt Vera and made it hard for her to listen to the substance behind my shouting, preventing us from dealing with the causes of our disagreements. I realized I would have to find a way to express my feelings honestly. It took time.
My primary male role model for domesticity was Mike Wertheimer. Mike was a young assistant professor in the Psychology Department, living with his wife, Nan, who was also an experimental psychologist, and their two toddlers. He was not only a first-rate teacher and researcher but also an excellent father, way ahead of his time in taking a great deal of responsibility for child care. He would frequently wander over to our apartment with his two-year-old daughter, Karen, perched on his shoulders, while pushing Duffy, his nine-month-old son, in a stroller, and invite me to join him for a cup of coffee or a walk around the neighborhood. Vera and I spent a lot of time with Mike, Nan, and their kids, hiking in the mountains, picnicking, and just hanging out. They made parenthood look very inviting. The Wertheimers were our first dinner guests. Vera was teaching herself to cook, primarily through trial and error, trying to remember how her mother had prepared meals in prewar Budapest. Before long she developed a great chicken paprikash, and was delighted when Mike ate everything on his plate and then used his bread to mop up any remaining trace of gravy. Vera considered him the perfect guest.
The atmosphere of the Veterans Village community shaped our direction as a young married couple. But it was the Wesleyan campus, and especially the Psychology Department, that gave us our first taste of what it might be like to live the life of a college teacher. For both of my years at Wesleyan, I was the only student in the graduate program. In many respects, this was a disadvantage. I had no peers to interact with, share ideas and anxieties with, and complain to about the faculty, the workload, and the weather. I also had no comparison group. How could I assess how well (or poorly) I was doing if I had no one with whom I could compare myself? Moreover, there were no graduate seminars, as there had been for master’s degree candidates in previous years. Thus, my graduate training consisted entirely of doing supervised research.
But the advantages of my situation far outweighed the disadvantages. Because I was more advanced than the undergraduates, and because I had no fellow graduate students to hang out with, the faculty treated me like a colleague—a very junior colleague, to be sure, but a colleague nonetheless. I had easy access to every member of the psychology faculty for casual conversations. We frequently ate lunch together, and in midafternoon, when some of the members of the Psychology Department wanted a break, we’d stroll over to Downy House, a charming, wood-paneled coffeehouse, where we were frequently joined by faculty from other departments. One frequent visitor to the unofficial psychology table was David McCallister, a distinguished anthropologist, and another was the inimitable Norman O. “Nobby” Brown, who had just completed his masterly analysis of Freud, Life Against Death. They followed the lead of my psychology “colleagues” in discussing things with me as if I were a fellow faculty member.
The tone of this egalitarian treatment was set by David McClelland, the department chairman, who treated both Vera and me with warmth and kindness from the very outset of our stay at Wesleyan. A few days after our arrival at Veterans Village, knowing how sparsely the apartments were furnished, he invited me to borrow desks, chairs, and lamps from the Psychology Department. And then, when he saw that I had no way to transport the bulkier furniture, he helped me load a heavy desk into the back of his station wagon, drove me to the barracks, and, huffing and puffing, helped me carry it up two flights of stairs. I will never forget his generosity.
Dave had an easygoing, casual demeanor. As my mentor and Vera’s boss, he was extraordinarily easy to work for. He was clear about what he expected us to do, but he left the details of how and when to do it entirely up to us. Indeed, he always seemed pleasantly surprised whenever we entered his office with a completed task in hand. He was the first Quaker I’d ever met, and a serious one—“thee-ing” and “thou-ing” with his wife and children in a sweet and affectionate way. Yet this good-natured guy was not only the departmental chairman but also its most distinguished member. At thirty-seven he had already written a successful textbook in personality, as well as a little book that had a big impact, The Achievement Motive. Dave, the quiet Quaker, spent his life studying achievement motivation and exemplifying it.
Dave had developed a reliable technique for measuring the degree of a person’s achievement motivation (which became abbreviated as “nAch”). He would show test subjects an image of people in everyday life, like a middle-aged man and a young man in a rural setting, leaning against a fence and chatting, and ask them to write a structured story about who the people are, what is happening, and what the outcome will be. Dave and his assistants would then score the essays for achievement imagery: Were the men talking about repairing the roof, planting flowers, or going to the movies? Was the older man trying to convince the young man to go to college as a way of opening up opportunities for himself or to focus on raising a prizewinning cow at the next county fair? If you consistently wrote about self-improvement, inventing something, getting a promotion, scoring the winning touchdown, and so on, you would be deemed to have higher achievement motivation than if your stories were about people talking about the movies or sharing a sunset. The strength of the achievement motive, McClelland argued, is captured in the fantasies the test taker reveals. “In fantasy anything is at least symbolically possible,” he wrote. “A person may rise to great heights, sink to great depths, kill his grandmother, or take off for the South Sea Islands on a pogo stick.” Needless to say, people who are high in achievement motivation don’t write about sinking to great depths or retiring to the South Seas.
At the time I met McClelland, the research on achievement motivation was already producing some fascinating results. Dave and his associates had found that achievement motivation was a better predictor of college success than IQ. And, in a deceptively simple study in which children played a ring-toss game, they showed why that might be. Imagine you’re a child and you get to stand wherever you want to pitch a ring onto a peg. Will you stand up close and be guaranteed success, even if that success won’t be very gratifying? Will you stand way back so that you are sure to fail, since after all you aren’t particularly good at this skill? Children who scored low in achievement motivation did one or the other, standing either directly on top of the peg or clear across the room. But the kids with high nAch consistently chose to stand at a moderate distance from the peg. At that distance, with practice, they could sharpen their skills and eventually become adept at the task. According to McClelland, they were like successful entrepreneurs; they took a moderate risk for reasonably high reward. In this instance, the reward is the gratification of improvement and eventual high scores.
Vera was McClelland’s full-time research assistant. She immediately mastered the coding system for scoring achievement motivation in people’s stories and became the standard by which Dave judged the efficacy of other scorers. Dave was constantly expanding the kind of evidence that might reveal signs of achievement motivation. Why, he wondered, were some countries full of high achievers and others low achievers? This question led him to Max Weber’s classic essay linking the rise of capitalism to the Protestant ethic, the belief that God looked favorably on those who work hard and are able to delay immediate gratification for greater gain in the future. McClelland reasoned that if Weber were right, then Protestant countries should be trying to infuse their youngsters with achievement motivation to a greater extent than Catholic countries. To test this hypothesis, he asked Vera to gather a random sample of elementary school readers that were currently popular in several countries. She found several bilingual foreign students and oversaw them as they translated these books into English. Vera then scored these stories for achievement imagery in much the same way she had previously scored adults’ spontaneous stories in response to pictures. The data confirmed Weber’s speculation: Children’s readers in Protestant countries were loaded with achievement imagery, while such imagery was scarce in Catholic countries.
For my own research with Dave, I took up his challenge of helping him find a nonverbal measure of achievement motivation. This would allow him to test children who were too young to be able to read and write, to determine how early in a child’s life the motive appears. An interesting challenge, but where to start? You can’t start with children, because you need to correlate your nonverbal measure with the standardized verbal test of achievement. Some psychologists had suggested that personality traits reveal themselves nonverbally in the way people walk, the way they draw pictures, in the slant of their handwriting, and so on. I was skeptical, but I dutifully scoured the stacks at the college library in search of books or articles that might enlighten me. Most of what I found was not terribly convincing, but then, while rummaging around, I discovered a little gem in the Psychological Review for 1896. It was the report of an experiment, d “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” by Gertrude Stein. Yes, that Gertrude Stein. She conducted the experiment while she was a student of the great American psychologist William James. Stein’s experiment was the first serious attempt to investigate the phenomenon of automatic writing. She rigged a sling from a rope attached to the ceiling and placed her subject’s arm in the sling. It was fitted with a stylus so that when the subject moved his arm, the movement was recorded on the paper below. She instructed her subjects to relax completely. She predicted that the markings on the paper would reflect the person’s unconscious thinking. Her results were inconclusive, but the experiment was her first step in applying James’s notion of “the stream of consciousness” into her own subsequent creative writing.
I also dug up a little book that, among other things, contained photographs of a page from original musical scores by two famous composers. I don’t remember the name of the author or the book, but the two scores were memorable. One was written in a very neat, tidy, and orderly manner, while the other was scrawled tempestuously across the page. The author informed us that one had been composed and transcribed by Beethoven and the other by Mozart and then (rather smugly, I thought) invited the reader to guess which was which. The difference was striking, and the identification was obvious, confirming, the book’s author said, his theory that personality is revealed in handwriting (in this case, score writing). When I showed the book to one of my neighbors, a graduate student in music, he found it fascinating. So did I. But I realized that, from a scientific perspective, the author’s demonstration was meaningless. If we are allowed to cherry-pick examples that confirm our theory, there is no way that we can be wrong. I wondered how many tempestuous composers there were who wrote in a neat manner. One pair of composers, carefully preselected by the theorist, does not a confirmation make.
Although I found no single piece of research on so-called graphic expression to be convincing, the overall thrust of the research was just barely provocative enough to motivate me to take a closer look on my own. I began to think about what form of graphic expression I could investigate. Well, how about doodling? Everybody doodles. I found it at least conceivable that the way people doodle might reflect something important about their personality. But what would I do, lurk around telephone booths and grab the callers’ notepads? I needed to find a way to get people to doodle under standardized conditions and then try to see if people with high nAch produce doodles that are reliably different from those produced by people with low nAch.
Here is how I decided to do it: I drew a complex doodle consisting of straight lines, circles, S-shaped lines, multiwaved lines, fuzzy lines, and ellipses. I then projected it on a screen for two seconds and asked a group of college students to copy it as best they could. Because two seconds was not nearly enough time for the students to get a clear idea of the doodles on the screen, what they drew was less a copy of what they saw than an expression of how they usually doodled.
We had already given these students the standardized nAch test. I now selected the doodles of those students on the high end of the nAch continuum and spread them out in a single row across our living room floor. Next I took the doodles of those on the low end of the nAch continuum and spread them out in a row parallel to the first. Vera and I then crawled around on our hands and knees looking for anything that distinguished the two rows. It was Vera who spotted the first major difference: The lines and geometric figures of the high nAch students were mostly discrete, made with a single bold stroke of the pen, while those of the low nAch students were fuzzy, overlaid, and repetitive. For example, where high nAch students would draw a circle, the low nAch students would draw the same circle going around and around five or six times. I discovered some other differences: Where students with high nAch would draw an S-shaped line, those with low nAch would draw it as multiwaved; high nAch students tended to fill up the page with doodles, while low nAch students left a lot of blank space, especially at the bottom of the page. The doodles of people high in nAch, I concluded, were more efficient. They expressed as much as possible with the least effort. Why make a multiwaved line when the same statement can be made with one S-shaped line? Why overdraw a circle when the same circle can be made with one round stroke? Why waste space, when one can fill it?
Of course, that was a post hoc interpretation. I didn’t predict any of the doodle differences, so they easily could have been caused by chance alone. What I needed to do next was cross-validate, testing my hypotheses on an entirely new group of subjects. I did the research. And got the same results. There was a significant correlation between achievement motivation and the way people doodled, in exactly the way that Vera and I had found while crawling around on the living room floor. I developed a precise technique for scoring doodles and was able to train my undergraduate research assistants to use it with great reliability. The relationship between doodling and nAch continued to hold.
In his own research McClelland found that for people high in nAch, the feeling that comes from a job well done is far more important than financial rewards, praise, or recognition. They are forever seeking to improve their performance and to take on greater responsibility at work, not for the status but for the challenge. As he and I chatted over coffee at Downy House, he often expressed his belief that people with high nAch are the ones who make things happen. Six years later, in his masterwork, The Achieving Society, McClelland argued that the major difference between successful and unsuccessful nations lies in the achievement motivation of its citizens. In it, he cited and extended Vera’s research on children’s readers in underdeveloped countries, and he expanded my research on graphic expression in a highly creative (some might say “far out”) way: He applied my coding system to the decorative paintings on ancient Greek vases, as photographed and collected in the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Sure enough, he found that vases that were produced and painted just prior to historical surges in Greek achievement were characterized by a greater use of efficient forms of graphic expression—such as S-shaped lines and filling more space—than those painted during more quiescent epochs. Greek vase painters were showing signs of high nAch in much the same way that twentieth-century college students were.
Actually, while I was at Wesleyan I devoted most of my energy not to research but to teaching. I can best describe what I was doing as teaching myself how to teach. Because I was employed as a TA, for the first time in my life I started to look at the process of teaching in an entirely different way, not from a student’s perspective (“Hey, am I going to understand this stuff and get a good grade here?”) but from the teacher’s perspective (“How can I help these students comprehend this complex material?”). I was fortunate in having three excellent role models: Dave McClelland, Joe Greenbaum, and Mike Wertheimer. Stylistically, they could not have been more different from one another, but each was a first-rate instructor. Mike was extremely well prepared; he would come in with a sheaf of notes from which he would deliver a clear, formal lecture that was thorough and precise, but he left little room for spontaneity. Joe was an entertainer; he was funny and erudite, and referred often to movies and literature, but he always managed to bring his examples back to the essence of the course. McClelland was casual; he would walk in without notes and chat informally but with obvious expertise. I was impressed by all three of them, and, over the years, my own teaching style became a blend of their methods. I learned to be so well prepared that I could afford to be casual and responsive to the momentary mood of my audience; I learned how to hold my students’ attention by keeping them entertained, not with jokes but with stories—some funny, some touching—that I would weave into the lesson in such a way that they illuminated and expanded on it. I learned to draw on material from life, literature, philosophy, films, and the day’s news.
Halfway through the spring semester of my first year, Mike Wertheimer invited me to give a guest lecture in his Introductory Psychology course. I had a whole week to get ready, and I used all of it. I was so well prepared that I felt confident enough to walk in without notes. I printed a brief outline on the blackboard, which was more for my own benefit than for the students. As I faced the class and waited for them to settle down, I could feel my heart pounding. But as soon as I started to talk, my shyness and my nervousness vanished—just as they did when I sat behind the microphone at the Pokerino tables at the Revere Beach Boardwalk.
Vera had asked me if I would mind if she sat in. We both saw this as an important event, and I very much wanted her to be present. But in those days Wesleyan was an all-male school; it would have been impossible for Vera to slip into the classroom and sit, unnoticed, at the back of the room, and frankly I was embarrassed at the prospect of the students grinning when they noticed that Elliot’s wife had come to hear him lecture. It was stupid of me, and I now regret that decision, but, with reluctance, I asked Vera not to come. Vera understood my discomfort completely, but she couldn’t stand the idea of missing the first lecture of my life. So as soon as the class started, she sat on the floor just outside the classroom, opened the door a crack, and eavesdropped. The students seemed to enjoy my talk; they laughed at all my attempts at humor and were solemn at all the serious and touching things I described. As soon as the lecture ended, and before the applause died down, Vera ran back to her office before any of the students could spot her. Mike Wertheimer, always thoughtful and considerate (and not knowing that Vera had been eavesdropping), made a beeline to her office and said, “Your husband was superb!” A few minutes later I came into Vera’s office, hugged her, and said, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Learning about the classroom from the perspective of the teacher also illuminated an experience that had deeply touched me when I was at Brandeis. In my senior year I had enrolled in a small seminar called Logic and the Scientific Method, taught by the distinguished philosopher Aron Gurwitsch. Gurwitsch, an austere man in his midfifties, smoked incessantly during class, inhaling through a long, black cigarette holder, and spoke with a heavy accent that was a blend of Russian and German. He was stern and impatient, always on the verge of losing his temper with any of us if we failed to immediately grasp some of the complex material he was presenting. Yet I found him to be an excellent teacher. From Professor Gurwitsch’s rather harsh Socratic prodding, I learned the art of critical thinking and the importance of challenging entrenched ideas with logic and evidence.
One afternoon, as I was leaving Gurwitsch’s class, the professor spotted me with a thin little book under my arm and asked me what I was reading. I handed it to him. It was the English translation of L’homme machine, written in 1748 by the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie. I had been assigned this book and was supposed to give a report on it for a seminar in the history of psychology. I had accepted the assignment with reluctance, because I had never heard of La Mettrie and I was hostile to his general notion that humans are programmed like machines in their thinking and behavior. But once I got into it I found the book enthralling. La Mettrie wrote with passion and precision, and his ideas about human nature were revolutionary for his era. Moreover, because he was a materialist writing in Catholic France, I realized that writing that book must have been an act of great intellectual courage. Gurwitsch glanced at the first few pages and grunted.
“Do you like this book?” he asked.
“I love it,” I replied enthusiastically.
“Oh,” the professor said. “Et croyez-vous que l’homme est une machine?”
“Absolutely not! I disagree with all of his conclusions, but I am impressed by the sheer brilliance of his reasoning,” I said.
Then a remarkable thing happened. Gurwitsch’s entire face softened, his eyes glistened, and he leaned forward. He put his hand on top of my head and gently squeezed it, with obvious affection. “Good boy,” he said softly.
It was the first time a professor had ever physically touched me and with such warmth. But, more important, Gurwitsch had shown me, almost wordlessly, that it was a good thing—perhaps even a noble thing—to be able to love a book, an idea, with which you disagreed. At Wesleyan, taking the first steps on the road to becoming a professor myself, I gained an even greater understanding of what his gesture, face, and tears were conveying. It was nothing less than the profound satisfaction a teacher feels when a student really gets it.
During the summer after our first year at Wesleyan, three important things happened. The first was that Vera and I decided to have a baby. Vera had always wanted to have children, many children, and the fact that so many of our friends at Veterans Village were happily raising young kids made it look easy. Moreover, I was now sure what I wanted to do professionally: teach psychology at the college level. I would get a Ph.D. and become a professor at a small college. I would not have to do much research and could do for my students what Abe Maslow and Aron Gurwitsch had done for me. Being launched on a clear career path, I could see no reason Vera and I shouldn’t start raising a family.
The second thing that happened was that Dick Alpert and Ralph Haber, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford who were McClelland’s former graduate students, came back to Wesleyan, joining Vera and me to work on one of McClelland’s research projects. During that summer the four of us became close friends, and we have remained close ever since. Ralph was to become a distinguished cognitive and forensic psychologist, contributing research on perception and memory as well as serving as an expert witness on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Dick went to Harvard as a developmental psychologist but was to leave academia and become the influential spiritual leader Baba Ram Dass. (I respect his transformation, but I have never stopped calling him Dick, and whenever we meet I eventually get around to telling him, much to his delight, that he hasn’t changed all that much since 1955.)
The third thing that happened that summer was that Dave McClelland told me, in confidence, that although it wasn’t official yet, he was expecting an offer from Harvard to become professor and director of the psychological clinic in a year. He wanted to know if I would be willing to join him at Harvard as a graduate student and his primary research assistant. I said that I was honored by his offer and would certainly consider it. But I told him that I was also intending to apply to Stanford, which looked good to me because Dick and Ralph were so happy there. Dave said that Stanford was a terrific university—“I think they call it the Harvard of the West,” he joked—and that I couldn’t go wrong no matter which place I chose.
When Stanford accepted me and offered me a teaching assistantship for the first year, Vera and I spent a long time making the decision. We agreed that it would be easier and safer to go to Harvard because Dave and I were fond of each other and because he was so easy to work for. Cambridge was also familiar territory; it was only a few miles from my mother and sister, a few miles from Brandeis and Maslow. Being on the East Coast would also mean that I could see more of Jason, who was a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago. Stanford, in contrast, seemed remote. I had never been west of the Mississippi. Hell, I had never been west of Philadelphia.
But the one thing that made Harvard most attractive also was my greatest concern: Dave McClelland. As much as I liked and admired Dave, I felt that I had already learned most of what I could from him, and I wasn’t excited about doing still more research on achievement motivation. If he brought me to Harvard, he would have had every right to expect me to work with him; once there, it would be difficult and perhaps even disloyal to switch mentors. Stanford, though, was virgin, unknown territory. Aside from Dick and Ralph, I knew no one there and would be obligated to no one. To Dave’s great credit, he never applied any pressure, nor did he try to influence my decision in any way. When I told him my choice was Stanford, he said that he was disappointed but that he completely understood my decision and wished me well.
It didn’t take long for Vera to become pregnant, and the baby was due in early March 1956. Our old Nash was becoming unreliable, and I began to have nightmares about the damn thing breaking down on the way to the hospital. Besides, if we were going to drive to California in the summer, we knew the old Nash would not be up to the challenge. So, in February, we decided that it would be prudent to buy a new car. A year earlier one of our neighbors in Veterans Village had bought a brand-new Volkswagen, and none of us could get him to stop talking about its virtues. It is hard to believe, but, at that time, 99 percent of all cars on our nation’s roads were American. The VW burst on the scene with a reputation for reliability and fuel efficiency. What’s more, we might even be able to afford the $1,560 for a new one. Well, not quite. We were about $300 short. Then it dawned on me: my bar mitzvah money! I was bar mitzvahed in 1945, with the war still raging. In those days war bonds were a tidy bar mitzvah present because they cost only $18.75; ten years later they would be redeemable for $25. So my aunts and uncles could give me a $25 present for only $18.75. I cashed in the bonds, got $175 for the old Nash—exactly what I had paid for it eighteen months earlier—and bought the new car.
And just in time. On leap-year night of February 29, Vera went into labor. It had started snowing that afternoon and was still snowing as we, shivering with excitement, climbed into our spanking-new VW and drove to the hospital. In 1956 husbands were considered to be a nuisance in maternity wards. As soon as Vera checked in, they hustled me out of the way and put me into a tiny, windowless waiting room that had all the charm of a prison cell. When I arrived, another expectant father was already there, smoking and pacing the floor. We exchanged pleasantries:
“Your first one?”
“Yeah.”
“My third. Nuttin’ to it,” he said nervously.
He then offered me a cigarette, and we both smoked and paced like expectant fathers in Hollywood films of that era. About five hours later a student nurse stuck her head in the room and asked me if I wanted to see my son. They didn’t allow me to hold him, but I could view him through a window. I then went in to see Vera, who was groggy and still reeking with the smell of ether, the anesthetic favored by most hospitals at that time. But she was deliriously happy. We looked at each other and cried. We could hardly believe it. We had brought a new being into the world. We were parents.
We decided to name our son Hal, after my father. In the naming of a child, the Jewish tradition is to choose the name of a beloved person who is no longer alive as a way of preserving the memory of that person. Typically, the child gets the identical Hebrew name as the deceased and an English name that begins with the same letter of the alphabet as the deceased’s English name. We wanted an H name for my father, Harry, but why not Henry, Harold, Howard, Horace, Hubert, or Hyman? We chose the name Hal because we hoped our son would be as wild and adventurous in his youth, and as judicious and wise in adulthood, as was Shakespeare’s memorable Prince Hal.
In naming my son after my father, I thought that I was merely making my mother and my grandfather happy by observing what had been, to me, a meaningless ritual. But the name had a surprising impact on me. When I picked up my new baby, fed him, burped him, changed his diaper, held him close, and said his name, I often thought about my father and the difficult roller coaster of a life he had led. How he started with nothing, worked hard, pulled himself out of poverty, opened a successful business, and moved into the middle class; how he lost it all, slid back into poverty, and felt the humiliation of being rescued from prison by the father-in-law he disliked. And how, just as he was beginning to get himself together, he died feeling like a failure, a man who had let down his wife and kids. The birth and naming of my infant son opened my heart to my father and his plight. For the first time since my father’s death, he became a frequent visitor in my thoughts and dreams.
I loved watching Vera with Hal. Everything she did with the baby flowed effortlessly. She took about a month off from work, and then, in early April, we brought Hal into the psychology building, and each of us took turns caring for him while the other worked. At coffee time we brought him to Downy House and put him in the center of the table in his basket. As we sat around the table talking psychology, each member of the group would occasionally tune out of the conversation to do a little cooing, baby talking, and chin chucking.
In early June, after the Wesleyan commencement, Vera and I packed up and left Veterans Village. Our plan was to drive cross-country to Stanford, but first we spent six weeks as the guests of Dave and Mary McClelland at Yelping Hill, a fifty-acre compound in the Berkshires. The compound consisted of several small cabins, which the McClellands owned with several of their friends. Vera and I did a little work for Dave, but mostly we played with Hal and chatted with the residents and their constant stream of interesting guests. Our favorite was a young artist, a few years older than us, who stayed in a cabin near ours. Dave and Mary had introduced him as Maurice, but he asked us to call him Mark. We had already seen Mark’s droll and charming illustrations in one of our favorite children’s books, Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig. Vera and I spent a lot of time with him hiking, swimming, picking wild blueberries, discussing psychology, and lying on our backs at night, in a meadow, watching star showers. He confided to us that he was taking a leap from illustrating other people’s books to writing and illustrating his own, and that he had already finished one; sure enough, the following spring he sent us a signed copy of Kenny’s Window. A few years later we were delighted to learn that our summer friend had won the Caldecott Medal for a book that turned out rather well. It was called Where the Wild Things Are.
At last we were ready for our journey west. We bought a big map demarking almost every national and state park. We bought sleeping bags, air mattresses, and a Coleman stove, so that we could occasionally eat something hot and sterilize Hal’s baby bottles. Our plan was to sleep under the stars every night unless it was raining, a plan that lasted until another of the McClellands’ friends took pity on us in our hopeless naïveté. “You will wake up every morning soaking wet from the dew,” he said. “Look, I just bought some new camping gear so, here, take my old pup tent.”
The pup tent duly packed, we rigged the back seat of the VW with Hal’s crib mattress. (I figured that he might as well get used to sleeping in cars. Someday, he might be a penniless student at Brandeis.) And off we went.
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