Love at Goon Park Read Online Free

time.
    There’s a moment on the Conquest show when one of the Wisconsin experiments is displayed. It creates exactly the sequence that Harry described. The scientists send out a mechanical monster, maybe eight inches tall, that resembles a cross between a space alien and a dragon with its flashing eyes and black bat wings. “It looks diabolical,” says Collingswood. “That’s just the way a baby monkey feels about it,” replies Harry—and almost as he speaks, the baby monkeys take one look at this terror and go airborne.
    They fly like guided missiles—a perfect arc of child to mother. Look, says Harry, mouth curving. One of the baby monkeys, now firmly lodged against mother, is screeching angrily at the monster, threatening it: Back off, you. I’m with my mother now. If a measure of love is the way we shelter each other, you can mark it clearly in that fluid and beautiful flight line to home.
    The two men watch silently. Harry doesn’t have to add anything. He knows it, too. He can step back and let the relationship reveal itself. Baby to mother, arrow into the heart. He does have a take-home message though, as he stands here in his baggy coat and talks up the importance of simple affection. The message has enough potency that you can understand why it might be worth contradicting more than fifty years of scientific dogma.

    In this conversation about love, the two men have different goals. Charles Collingswood has come to Madison, Wisconsin, to illuminate an unusual experiment and to make some good television. Harry Harlow is there to help him. But he’s also trying to foment a small revolution, taking the chance to provoke the argument even during this flickering black-and-white moment on Sunday television.
    We begin our lives with love, Harry says, looking directly at the camera; we learn human connection at home. It is the foundation upon which we build our lives—or it should be—and if the monkey or the human doesn’t learn love in infancy, he or she “may never learn to love at all.” He looks absolutely confident in what he’s saying—as if there were no furious ongoing debate, as if he spoke for his profession. Arguing his point as an outsider is a skill that Harry Frederick Harlow has honed since childhood. He’s more than willing to stand on behalf of that improbable, unreliable, elusive emotion called love, to gaze into the camera lens and say: Listen to me. I’ve got something that you need to hear.

ONE
    The Invention of Harry Harlow
    Parental love, which is so touching and at bottom so childish, is nothing but parental narcissism born again and, transformed though it be into object-love, it reveals its former character infallibly.
    Sigmund Freud, 1914
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    HE WASBORN OUTOF PLACE, a dreamer and a poet planted in the practical Iowa earth. As unlikely as a rose in a cornfield. The childhood of Harry Frederick Israel—he would become Harry Harlow, but that’s a later part of the story—often made him laugh in retrospect. He was such a funny little misfit of a child, hemmed in by the orderly fields, too often dreaming down those rows of green and gold to the point where they met the rim of the sky.
    This was southeastern Iowa, after all. Everyone grew up amid the cornfields. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the landscape was a study in domestication. Paradoxically, that very neatness made Iowa a revolutionary corner of the country. Not even a hundred years before, the land had belonged to lynx and wolf, deer and buffalo, the elusive catamount, and the bright copper fox. Tall-grass prairies and wooded hills, undisciplined rivers that had never seen a levee, forests with familiar trees such as maple and birch and forgotten ones such as linn and ironwood. The Fox and the Sac tribes once hunted here,
gathered wild plants, quarreled over territorial boundaries, called it home.
    The old settlers—Iowans think