Literary Fiction as Psychobiography: F. Scott Fitzgerald and James McKeen Cattell

As his autobiography makes clear, Mac Runyan’s interest in psychobiography stems from his concern for life histories and particularly from his fascination with the intense study of individual lives. This interest led him in 1969 to begin his graduate study in the Harvard Program in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice and, since then, Mac’s scholarship exhibits a breadth and depth of interest that reflects the richness of his graduate education. One notable characteristic of Mac’s approach to psychobiography is its openness to alternatives to psychoanalytic psychobiography. Mac has been disappointed that he has “not found as many [alternatives] as [he] expected” (Runyan, 2021, p. 140). Perhaps this essay might begin to hint at the possibility, at least, of one of these alternatives.

As I consider my relationship with Mac, I think of him as one of the kindest men I know. His scholarly interest in the lives of individuals finds itself reflected in his concern for those around him. Over the years of our friendship, Mac has been a real personal source of support, which I am glad to acknowledge here.

Mac and I first met in the 1980s. I remember very well one visit he paid me in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I’ve lived (and taught at Worcester Polytechnic Institute) since 1970. Most psychologists probably think of Worcester as the site of Clark University, and readers of Clio’s Psyche undoubtedly know that in 1909, Sigmund Freud paid his only visit to the United States to speak at Clark. The university’s president, G. Stanley Hall, had invited him to Worcester to participate in a conference celebrating the university’s 20^th anniversary. Other prominent Europeans in the psychoan-

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alytic orbit—including Carl G. Jung, Ernest Jones, and Sandor Ferenczi—also attended, and Freud’s series of lectures were a highlight of the conference.

One artifact left by the Clark Conference is a group photo of many (almost all?) of the psychologists (and those in closely related fields, such as psychiatry and neurology) attending the event (see Ross, 1972, after p. 389). Mac took the opportunity of this visit to try to identify the spot on the Clark campus where this famous photo was taken and concluded that the group posed in front of a large window of what is now the Jefferson Academic Center facing Worcester’s Main Street. Others have suggested different sites for this photo, so Mac’s identification remains unconfirmed.

After suggesting something of Mac’s admirable character, it’s a serious comedown to present a psychobiographical essay focusing on a much-less-likable individual, James McKeen Cattell. It’s not that Cattell was not a significant character in early 20^th century American scientific life. After all, he was one of the psychologists who attended the 1909 Clark Conference, and he appears in the well-known group photo, standing in the second row and facing to his left. (He’s number 13 in the tracing of the photo published in Ross’s [1972] biography of Hall. All others in the photo face forward.) Of course, his importance for the history of American psychology—and even more for American science writ large—extends far beyond his attendance at the Clark Conference. That’s why Hall invited him. In 1909 he was in his 18^th year as Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. From 1891 Cattell had established a major center for training experimentalists and other psychologists there as well as created and implemented an ambitious (though ultimately unsuccessful) program of “mental tests,” a term he himself had apparently coined.

Some personal details will help put his life, career, and character into appropriate context. He was born in 1860, the son of a professor (and later president) of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the grandson (whose name he was given) of one of the richest men in Easton. He thus grew up as the scion of one of the city’s leading families, and when the time came, he attended Lafayette. His professors always held his performance to their high standards. But they taught most of their classes in McKeen Hall and were always aware he was their college president’s son. He later studied at Johns Hopkins, and in 1886, he earned his PhD from the University of Leipzig after working with Wilhelm Wundt,

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the purported founder of what became known as the “new psychology.” He then spent two years, intermittently, at St. John’s College, Cambridge.

While in England, he spent much time in London, where he met and became enamored of the ideas of Francis Galton. Galton’s interest in the differences between people helped shape Cattell’s own program of mental testing. But Galton’s promotion of eugenics had its strongest impact on Cattell. Importantly, Cattell always played down the negative implications of eugenics as it developed in the United States, and he never supported such programs as eugenic sterilization and immigration restriction. Instead, he promoted positive eugenical programs that called for the “fittest” individuals to marry each other and have large families. With his strong sense of self-regard, Cattell and his wife Josephine had seven children. In 1889, Cattell became Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1891, he doubled his salary with a move to Columbia University, where he remained until 1917.

But why, then, are Cattell’s life and career of particular interest in an essay offering an alternative approach to psychobiography? The immediate answer emerges as one considers just how he was presented in Louis Menand’s well-respected history, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001). This thoughtful account characterizes Cattell as “obnoxious.”

Needless to say, “obnoxious” is a strong descriptor, and it is one that really must be justified. Much recent scholarship on Cattell’s life and career provides all-too-many examples of Cattell’s unpleasant and, yes, truly obnoxious behavior. These present a psychobiographer with a series of interesting tasks; that is, to illustrate Cattell’s obnoxiousness and explain just how and why Cattell developed this trait. This essay focuses on two particularly illustrative incidents, one in 1884, soon after his 24^th birthday, and one in 1929, at age 69.

In 1883, at age 23, Cattell won a fellowship at Johns Hopkins and spent the following academic year at the university. At Lafayette, he had unavoidably been a focus of his professors’ attention. In Baltimore, however, he was not, and he arrogantly complained that Daniel Coit Gilman, the university’s president, “has not taken as much interest in me, as he might have” (Sokal, 1981, p. 74). In 1884, professors at Johns Hopkins did not renew Cattell’s fellowship for a second year and awarded it instead to a fellow stu-

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dent, John Dewey (and not Thorstein Veblen). Cattell responded by throwing a fit and attacking his professors (including a younger G. Stanley Hall) for what he saw as a purposeful personal insult: “I was scarcely treated fairly” (Sokal, 1981, p. 80). He later threatened President Gilman that, if he discovered “that personal considerations had influenced the withholding of the fellowship,” he would “bring suit against the authorities of the university” (Sokal, 1981, p. 208).

Cattell also called on Hall at his summer home, and as Hall reported the meeting to Gilman, “He came all smiles and amiability… [but] suddenly begun to talk with most insulting way and almost charged me with lying when on the spot without even a shadow of either basis or occasion. I do not know that I have ever in my life been so angry at a human being” (Sokal, 1981, p. 111). As Ross’s biography makes clear, Hall had apparently misled (perhaps even knowingly) Cattell about the renewal of his fellowship, and similar acts of perhaps purposeful dishonesty occurred throughout Hall’s career. In light of that, Cattell’s actions might be seen as a young man simply standing up for what he perceived to be his rights. But these incidents clearly exhibit the self-righteous narcissistic arrogance to which the term “obnoxious” may be appropriately applied.

But what led Cattell to act as he did? He hinted at his motivation in 1903, as he explicitly expressed his self-righteous egotism in just about so many words. As he told Edward B. Titchener, a professional colleague at Cornell, he never “object[ed] to a fight in a good cause,” and he narcissistically always “regard[ed] any cause for which [he] did fight as good” (Cattell, 1903). Instances of such fights peppered his career.

In 1917, Columbia dismissed Cattell from the professorship he had held since 1891, and the incident has often been portrayed as an egregious violation of his academic freedom, brought about by his opposition to U.S. participation in World War I. But as a recent analysis of this episode argues (Sokal, 2009), Cattell’s response to U.S. involvement served only as the clichéd last straw in his dealings with his Columbia colleagues. The university’s actions were much more a response to Cattell’s longstanding unpleasant (indeed often obnoxious) statements and actions throughout his professorship than to his opposition to the war.

Nonetheless, even after he lost his professorship, his col-

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leagues in psychology still identified him as one of their science’s founders in America, and they began honoring Cattell as one of psychology’s grand old men. Through the 1920s and 1930s, he continued to attend annual meetings of the American Psychological Association. In 1929, he served as President of the 9^th International Congress of Psychology—the first to be held in the United States—convened that September at Yale. Since I began my studies of Cattell in the late 1960s, my first years of research overlapped the final years of many psychologists whose own careers began before World War II, and I was able to interview several of them about my subject.

Several of them described Cattell as a gruff old man who shook his head ostentatiously in response to less-than-first-rate papers presented by younger scholars. Almost all of them remembered “clearly” an episode involving Cattell at the International Congress, and all claimed (at times in so many words) they’d never forget what he said. The specific incident involved Cattell’s response to a presentation by Scottish (though English-educated) psychologist William McDougall, then a professor at Duke University. Through the 1920s, McDougall performed experiments trying to demonstrate the Lamarckian inheritance of learned characteristics. Cattell was not the only auditor who heard McDougall’s presentation. But all who reported on Cattell’s response stressed its fury. One remembered that Cattell simply hissed loudly when McDougall finished his remarks. Another reported that Cattell commented that he wouldn’t believe anything McDougall said, no matter what his data supposedly showed. Interestingly, after the Congress, several younger psychologists who had heard Cattell’s response exchanged letters, and they all reported how shocked they were that Cattell acted as he did. Unfortunately, none reported precisely what Cattell said.

Fortunately for this historian, psychologist Walter R. Miles (then at Stanford University) was an obsessive notetaker and kept an almost word-for-word record of much that went on during the Congress. His report of Cattell’s response to McDougall’s presentation—recently recovered by Lizette Barton, Reference Archivist at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, where Miles’s diary has been deposited)—is exceptionally detailed. The page itself is headed (with double underlining) “The Cattell Rejoinder” and opens with the words “Cattell. Unfortunately, Sharp Rejoinder. Made friends for McDougall.” As

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Miles quotes Cattell’s comments, they began with criticisms of McDougall’s technical assumptions and went on, “these experiments are interesting but of course they are wrong… I must be permitted to say that your methods are not modern” (Miles, 1929). Cattell continued with some further technical comments. And finally, Miles recorded the following exchange: “Dr. McD do you know why they were a failure (No) I do (and will tell you later)” (Miles, 1929). Reading this account leads me to wonder if the loud hissing reported came not from Cattell but was, instead, another auditor’s response to Cattell’s comments.

This account of Cattell’s obnoxiousness—or perhaps more kindly, his self-righteous narcissistic arrogance—leads any psychobiographer to ask: Just how and why did Cattell develop this character trait? One possibility emerges when the scholar remembers that James McKeen Cattell bore the name of one of the richest men in the small city he was born and spent his earlier years. His family was certainly well off, and they supported his eight years of study and international travel to Lafayette (see Sokal, 1981, p. 245). Others were not so fortunate. For example, before he was awarded the Johns Hopkins fellowship (worth $500) that had been Cattell’s, John Dewey had to rely on a loan from an aunt and his earnings from teaching school for several years to pay for his tuition and living expenses during his first year in Baltimore.

Simply having money throughout one’s life, however, does not explain becoming obnoxious. When viewed through the lens provided by these observations and an analysis from American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps Cattell’s relative riches begin to suggest some of the roots of his character. In particular, I believe that one can learn much about Cattell—and perhaps even begin to develop a non-psychoanalytic psychobiography of him—by comparing him with Anson Hunter, the protagonist of Fitzgerald’s well-regarded 1926 short story, “The Rich Boy.”

An early pair of sentences in “The Rich Boy” comprise Fitzgerald’s (January & February 1926) most often quoted remark; they are certainly well known to readers and critics of American literary fiction: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway even had the protagonist of his equally well-regarded 1936 short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” mockingly remember “poor Scott Fitzgerald… who had started a story that once began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’” As Hemingway’s character sarcastically con-

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tinued, “Yes they have more money.”

But Hemingway’s throw-away dismissal of Fitzgerald’s introduction to his portrayal of Anson Hunter misses the depth of the portrait he paints. That is, as Fitzgerald (January & February 1926) continues, “They [the very rich] possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them…. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.”

Accepting Fitzgerald’s rather harsh characterization of the wealthy, one can see traces of the kind of self-righteous narcissistic egotism that Cattell clearly exhibited throughout his life and career. The story offers no hint that Hunter held eugenical views, but further similarities appear in Fitzgerald’s description of Anson Hunter’s boyhood. For example, Hunter found that his friends’ parents “were vaguely excited when their own children were asked to [his] house,” and even as a child he noticed “the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him” (Sokal, 2009, p. 90). Cattell experienced much the same attention—both within his family and from his friends’ parents—and like any child raised within a given setting, he took it for granted. Indeed, he grew to expect this deference as his due when he entered his academic career. Like Anson Hunter, Cattell “accepted this as the natural state of affairs” and thus developed “a sort of impatience with all groups of which he was not the center… which remained with him for the rest of his life” (Sokal, 2009, p. 90). With these words, Fitzgerald could very well have been writing about Cattell.

“The Rich Boy” follows Anson Hunter into his 30^th year and shows him in several family, social, romantic, and business settings. Hunter’s not always “successful” in all of his endeavors. But whether he’s seducing a Debutante, being forced to apologize (though never in so many words) for his actions while drunk, or dealing with a family crisis, he always remains fully confident (as Cattell was) of his personal stature and self-ensured in his ability to deal with the circumstances. Perhaps he never had (as Cattell did) “to fight in a good cause” (Cattell, 1903). But perhaps that’s a benefit of being really (or at least fictionally) “very rich.”

Here, then, is a portrait of a fictional literary figure that

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meshes just about precisely with the characterization that emerges from a detailed review of Cattell’s attitudes and actions. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s words and insights convey, I believe, a vivid psychobiographical portrait of at least two individuals—that is, both Hunter and Cattell—from which a reader can learn much. It thus offers, I think, an effective alternative approach to psychobiography beyond the psychoanalytic that Mac Runyan seeks.

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