Dinner at Princeton Comeuppance

N.B. This is a true personal memory about philosophers, not a review,

Dinner in Princeton, or How Bas van Fraassen Shut Up a Bigot, Albeit in a Politically Incorrect Way--He Had It Coming

There were things—most things—about Princeton my wife did not like in 1970, and one thing she did, working at a women’s health clinic in inner city (read:, black) Trenton with Rennie Hampshire. In her fifties, Rennie was slim and energetic with the bones and eyes and skin that make for that rare type, a beautiful English woman. She had once been the wife of a famous English philosopher, A.J. Ayer, but was at the time the wife of a still more famous English philosopher, Stuart Hampshire, who was the Chairman of my department. She was a busy person in occupation and manner, never still, and she had a ferocity of spirit that set her apart from anyone else I can remember in my life. Stuart often remarked with pride—and I assume with truth—that she had been the first woman to ride a motorcycle across the United States, but now her energies were directed to a poor black community in a depressed state capital. (In those days, as you crossed the Delaware River into Trenton, you were welcomed by the most self-piteous sign: Trenton Makes, the World Takes. And doesn’t give much back.)

The clinic, in the basement of an undistinguished building, provided gynecological services, birth control, pregnancy testing and check-ups, abortion referrals (to New York—abortion was illegal in New Jersey then), advice and help of many kinds. It was funded, so far as I could tell, almost entirely by the efforts of Rennie Hampshire. Her husband’s position put her often at dinner parties and other social gatherings with the well-heeled and the immensely rich, and she used these chances shamelessly to extort contributions for the clinic. I recall watching her with admiration at a dinner party in her own home, first telling some well-to-do guest about the clinic and it’s needs, and then, after dinner, pursuing him until they retired to the kitchen, one to give a check and one to receive. She was not just a fund raiser. She worked at the clinic as did any non-medical volunteer, doing whatever she could that needed doing, from counseling patients to filing records to scrubbing. My wife, Anita, helped her and loved doing it, and she loved Rennie. Rennie alone in Princeton showed Anita that Anita’s world—the world of poor, simple people, the world of personal charity—counted, and counted more than the hot house of Princeton refinements, where Anita never felt welcome or at home or free to breathe. Anita was never so happy as when leaving for Trenton, and never so exhilarated as when she returned.

Rennie had her eccentricities. She would leave small gifts—tea, or chocolates—on our porch, but on the several occasions Anita or I caught her at it, she refused to come into the house. When she and Stuart once came to dinner, she insisted on washing the dishes. I think she was determined not to be fussed over, but really did not quite understand the peculiar texture of lower middle class American formality and informality.

Of all things Princetonian, Anita most despised faculty dinner parties. Her prejudice was confirmed one evening when, after I had begged her on behalf of my career, we attended a party at the home of an eminent (about as eminent as an academic gets) professor of history of science, Thomas Kuhn. The professor’s wife, whom Anita found particularly cold, greeted us at the door and threw her arms around my wife in a grand hug, exclaiming how delighted she was that we—and my wife in particular—had come. Anita reddened, not in embarrassment, but in pleasure. I followed them into the house, our hostess walking with her arm wrapped around my wife’s waist. Half way to the other guests, she leaned her mouth to Anita’s ear and I heard her whisper: Do remind me, dear, what is your name? An understandable lapse, surely, but Anita never attended another faculty party, except once.

Bas van Fraassen is a man to envy: handsome, elegant, charming, original, brilliant, sensitive and European; even nowadays, past seventy, he can pull off dressing like a rock star and can fly the trapeze. We were friends, and his warmth and charm made Anita forgive him his occupation (he professed philosophy at Yale then). He liked her too. He was visiting us in Princeton one weekend when, on Saturday morning, Anita answered a phone call from a colleague of mine, Margaret Wilson, inviting us to dinner that evening, with apologies for the short notice.  Anita had the perfect excuse—we had a guest for the weekend—but she erred in revealing the guest’s name. Margaret, who was a straightforward person, immediately said to bring him, and Anita was stuck. So, with Bas, we went to dinner at the Wilson’s.

The party was small: the three of us, Margaret, her husband, and another colleague, George Pitcher. George was tall, slender and athletic—the only faculty member who hit home runs at the annual faculty versus student softball game—with a full head of brushy hair that fell over his forehead in a boyish cowlick but seemed never to be out of place, altogether an extraordinarily handsome man who had at least three loves, his housemate, Ed, and a pair of stray dogs that had taken up residence with them and about which he later wrote a very sentimental book. George was a polite and to appearance a gentle man, but, as I discovered when serving with him as the junior member of a committee of two that made minor personnel decisions, he was privately the kind of bigot that once flourished in Princeton, the kind for which there is only a neologism, a classist.

We sat in the Wilson’s dining room, next to a cool bower, around a circular table centered with a bowl of fruit, and had drinks and nibbles and get reacquainted talk before dinner. The talk, inevitably, turned to academic gossip, who is doing what, going where, with whom, the sort of thing that fascinates academic neighbors and bores everyone else, not least Anita, who sat quietly with the bland look that I knew hid an interior woe: not this again. Professors, philosophy professors anyway, at parties scarcely ever talk about ideas (that’s business), or politics (they all have the same, or none), or religion (what’s to talk about?), or sex (not done), or money (not done), or sports (intensely not done). Its gossip, travel and high culture.  Somehow, Rennie Hampshire’s name came up, and I think Anita mentioned her work in Trenton. George, in his quiet but forceful and authoritative voice, began a rant: What was she doing there, among the refuse of the city? Why not leave those people to themselves? The trouble with Rennie is that she does not respect her own class.

The denunciation did not stop, and as it continued Anita changed in color, her smooth face lined in anger, and, I knew, frustration. Her good manners conspired with her sense of social unease; she could not speak without demonstrating her anger. I objected ineffectually, but George talked over me. The Wilson’s looked uncomfortable and said nothing while George went on into the evils of crossing the borders of social strata that he seemed to think should be guarded with machine guns and barbed wire, Berlin walls of Class.

Noting Anita’s distress and my clumsiness, Bas quietly reached an elegant arm to the centerpiece and removed a banana. Smiling at George, he carefully peeled back half the skin of the fruit, and then, delicately, began to lick the tip. Eyes still full on George, still silently, he pushed the end of the banana into his mouth and, moving it back and forth, began to suck. George reddened, then blushed, and fell silent for the rest of the evening, shamed, if not for the right reason, then, at least, for the wrong one.