Love at Goon Park Read Free Page A

particularly like to thank copy editor Jennifer Blakebrough-Raeburn, who has a wonderful literary mind, and senior project editor Marietta Urban. And I also had the good fortune of being teamed with Perseus’s terrifically smart publicist Leigh Weiner.
    Last, but not least, as they say: This book is about family and love and partnership and relationships and there is no way that it would have been finished without the love and support of mine. I’ve been wrestling with the Harry story for so long now that both my children, Marcus and Lucas, also call him by his first name. So does my husband, Peter Haugen, who has held down the home front too many times while Harry, my laptop, and I were hunkered down in my basement office together. The three of them kept me from disappearing entirely into the book, partly because they never fail to remind me that nothing matters more than those we love.

PROLOGUE
    Love, Airborne
    IN A WHITE ROOM, TWO MEN are talking about love. One of them stands keenly upright, pressed into a deftly cut suit. The other is less elegant: slight, dark-haired, a little stoop-shouldered, shrugged into a floppy lab coat. Both their voices sound hollow in the pale space around them. The room seems glossy with cold. Nearby counters are polished to an icy sterility. Metal and glass equipment gleam bluish in the wash of fluorescent lights. Against this background—chilled essence of laboratory—the speakers sound like men out of place and time, their conversation absurdly soft with talk of poets and love songs, starry nights, and daytime dreams.
    Or perhaps they are just ahead of their time. At this moment, in the close of the 1950s, no one stands in a laboratory to discuss love in these terms. Even psychologists—those perpetual students of human behavior—aren’t lobbying to include warmhearted affection among the charts and the graphs and the calibrated machinery. Experimental psychologists have been rejecting the notion of love as good research material for years. Powerful psychologists have made it clear that fuzzy and sentimental emotions are the stuff of fiction, not of research reports. Researchers who study human relationships prefer to avoid using the l-word. You can still open the acclaimed history of Psychology in America, by Stanford’s Ernest Hilgard, and find the word “love” missing entirely from the subject index.

    So it’s a professional gamble for the small man in the lab coat even to have this conversation. He is an experimental psychologist—a stubborn, scruffy, middle-aged researcher named Harry Frederick Harlow who happens to believe that his profession is wrong and doesn’t mind saying so. Of course, he’s often been told that the problem lies with him. The unexpectedly outspoken son of a poor family from Iowa, he’s developed a habit of scrapping with mainstream psychology. Professor Harlow has already been asked to correct his language: He’s been instructed on the correct term for a close relationship. Why can’t he just say “proximity” like everyone else? Somehow the word “love” just keeps springing to his lips when he talks about parents and children, friends and partners. He’s been known to lose his temper when discussing it. “Perhaps all you’ve known in life is proximity,” he once snapped at a visitor to his lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “I thank God I’ve known more.”
    How close do you have to be standing to connect with a person? Harry liked to ask that question, drawling it out with a nice sarcastic edge. Three inches? Four? Could you build a relationship at a distance of six inches? His colleagues, as they told him, saw no need for mockery. He could choose other scientific terms if he didn’t like proximity. The scientific vocabulary also offered attachment, conditioned response, primary drive reduction, stimulus-response, secondary drive