The Prima Donnas (2)

What exactly counts as an intellectual prima donna?  Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty were still in Princeton when I arrived there.  Both were famous in the world beyond Princeton, both had enjoyed impact well beyond their own discipline, both were courted for endowed lectures and international conferences.  

But that could be said about such reclusive figures as Kurt Goedel, surely the farthest from even faint prima donna-hood. 

In common usage, literally, a prima donna is the lead singer in an opera; the connotations vary from “temperamental” and “charismatic” through “vain” and “autocratic”, even “petulant”.  I did not mean to play on the negative connotations, but rather on the performance, charisma, and grip on the audience that qualifies a prima donna to be a prima donna.

Meeting in person such characteristics were not obvious in Kuhn or Rorty. Dinners or parties with American academics are not generally feasts of wit and scintillating conversation — Stuart Hampshire gave me the term ADP, “awful dinner party”, when he thought back to his years there — so perhaps I should blame it all on social context.  No one got Kuhn to speak engagingly about paradigms, or even engagingly about anything.  

But Rorty did have personal charisma, in a quiet and understated form.  At that time, at least, it would not be evident until he was off guard: a shy smile, gentle humor, though greatly modified by his deep pessimism.  Sometimes the pessimism seemed to turn dark, even despondent.  I met him one morning outside 1879 Hall, and congratulated him, he had just won the MacArthur ‘genius’ award. “Hmmm …” he said, “It’s meant for people to change their lives.  [pause] I don’t want to change my life.”  He was looking at the ground, sadly reflecting on himself, and on this cultural phenomenon of life-changing grants.

Umberto Eco

 How different everything was among Italians!  In any conversation one could blossom and shine, charm and flatter, be on stage or just quietly glow and bask.  

Umberto Eco was a master in all of these.  It was actually in America that we first met — a party at Rutgers where he came to a symposium.  My friend Ernie introduced me and Eco said, looking at me, artfully puzzled “Oh?  perhaps the son of the logician?”  

This was after he had risen from literary icon to public glory by publishing his novel The Name of the Rose. The book is enormous with lots of bits of Latin and theology, but, as a reviewer wrote, the summer it came out you found it on all the beaches in Europe.  

Eco was a big man with a big personality.  I think it was in 1984 that he spent a longer time in New York, at Columbia University.  One evening after dinner I walked back with him to his apartment in the West Village.  On one street he suddenly stopped, in front of a window display of a crystal ball.  “Let’s have our palms read!”  

As we went in a dark-haired young woman appeared from behind a curtain.  My hand first … all the news was good, except that my crucial life-line was broken in several places, which pointed to abrupt and shattering changes.  Then she sat down with Eco’s hand and became troubled and seemingly disturbed. “I’m sorry but I have to tell you, you will never have much money ….  But you will see happiness, unexpected”.  , He had just sold the movie rights to The Name of the Rose, with Sean Connery in the star role, probably for a million or so. I don’t know about the unforeseen happiness.

Later among friends Eco was telling some raunchy jokes that poked fun at academics, and he told of our evening in suggestive tones: “We came upon a door with a red light above it, of course we had to go in …”.  

Norwood Russell Hanson

My paradigm of a prima donna: Russ Hanson, a greater than life-size philosopher with a buccaneer’s joy in life. 

When I came to Yale, fresh out of graduate school in 1966, they assigned me an office next to Hanson’s, on the 3rd floor of a smallish building, Connecticut Hall.  It was an idyllic time for me, with free time, seclusion up there in the attic, and good friends.  On sunny days I would sometimes climb out of the window to eat my lunch on the roof, like the people in Frayn’s Landing on the Sun.  It was a while before I had much contact with Hanson, who seemed always to be traveling, whether to lecture or to fly his Bearcat, a World War Two fighter plane.  So to begin there were just the stories, how he had challenged the university over a tenure case by flying over the Yale Bowl to drop leaflets, how he had come unscathed out of a lawsuit through expert testimony that the witnesses could not tell whether he was flying just ten feet above the golf course … or farther back, that as a Marine fighter pilot he had been grounded for looping the loop around the Golden Gate bridge.

But he materialized soon enough: the few of us in logic and philosophy of science had a little reading club in Danny’s, Charles Daniels’, rooms.  When Hanson walked in it was less like a human entrance than like a theater’s scene change — he filled the room with both mind and body.  

 For Hanson was not a prima donna of just the stage, his character had no sides, he was what he was through and through.  Or at least, what I saw of him never stopped.  Sometimes I looked a little askance, I guess, but  he would just laugh out loud.  It didn’t matter. He had convinced the world that our language is irremediably theory-laden, that perception was never untutored, and that science could be discussed with literary flair.  I could forgive him anything.

Hanson would ask universities to pay for his gas so he could fly himself instead of paying for airfare for him.  Later that year, in the spring, a phone call woke me up at around midnight, from a colleague, Ron Jager.  “Bas, I’m calling to tell you that Russ died.  He was flying to Cornell, we just got the news, he crashed.”  

There was endless speculation about how he managed to fly into a hill, in the relatively flat country around Ithaca, as he did.  But he died the way he lived, and the way he had said he wanted to die.

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