Love at Goon Park Read Free Page B

reduction, object relationship—the last if you wanted to be Freudian about it. Why bring love into it?
    And now here’s Harry Harlow, on national television of all the damned places, with his intimate vocabulary and his insistence on emotional relationships. The conversation in the laboratory appears on a CBS show called The Measure of Love. The program is the 1959 premier of Conquest, the network’s Sunday evening science show. In the entire half-hour presentation, the word “proximity” never crosses Harry’s lips.
    Charles Collingswood, a respected CBS journalist, is the man in the elegant suit. On camera, Collingswood stands authoritatively tall. Harry Harlow looks small by comparison, dwarfed inside the ubiquitous
lab coat. He has a square face, dark eyes under near straight brows, short dark hair slicked determinedly back. His voice is a little high-pitched, smoother than Collingswood’s rumble.
    But the voice of science is unexpectedly the voice suitable to a pulpit, slightly singsong in its cadence. There’s music in the way Harry assures us that it is possible to make real what had previously been “undefinable and unmeasurable.” As he talks, one might even believe that love is substantial enough to be decanted into test tubes. When it comes to love, “your guess is as good as mine,” Collingswood says to the audience, “but guesswork is not the way of science and this, ” and his gray granite voice deepens a notch, “this is a scientific laboratory.” At the start of the program, Collingswood stands holding a monkey in one hand. The monkey is a bright-eyed baby, a natural mohawk of fluff crowning its head. It nestles in Collingswood’s curved hand like an egg in a cup, tiny fingers curled over the edge of his palm. Harry Harlow, after all, is a primate researcher, a pioneer in the emerging science of understanding monkey behavior as a way to understand us. Collingswood gestures slightly to emphasize that point, the monkey riding the sweep of motion: “In this laboratory, there are approximately 120 rhesus monkeys; the subject of a study that wants to know the answer to the question: What is an infant’s love for its mother?”
    There’s little trace, here on Conquest, of what some would say is the off-camera Harry Harlow, none of his well-known irreverence. This is a man who when a graduate student points out a golden and luminous moon snaps: “Been there a long time. I’ve seen it before.” None of that wisecracking irritation shows now. This shiny faced, sweet-talking preacher of a scientist seems wholly absorbed by the beauty of the subject. The man on camera reveals little of the man who lives at the lab, dawn to dark, fueled by coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and obsession. Okay, maybe the obsession slices through. He’s completely in the argument, trying to convince the world that if science will just pay attention, we could learn the measure of love, cup it in our hands, almost as Collingswood cradles the little monkey.

    â€œNow, Mr. Collingswood, wouldn’t you say that if you frightened a baby, that if it went running to its mother, was comforted, and then all the fear disappeared and was replaced by a complete sense of security, that baby loved his mother?” he asks in that coaxing voice.
    â€œSure,” Collingswood replies, casually. Sure, of course. Who wouldn’t believe that love was, at its best, a safe harbor—a parent’s arm scooping up a frightened child, holding it heart to heart? It’s hard to believe, in retrospect, how many powerful scientists opposed this idea. “In psychology, love was smoke, mirrors, bullshit, and that was exactly what everyone was telling Harry,” one of Harry’s graduate students recalls. It took courage, probably more than anyone at CBS appreciated, to look straight into the camera and contradict the professional standards of the