Recently I had reason to think about the concept of degrees of separation. The idea that everyone in the world is connected by six or fewer acquaintances--the Six Degrees of Separation thesis-- was proposed by a Hungarian writer in 1929, and made famous by a 1990 play of that title by John Guare.
Various studies of often shaky procedures have attempted to test it, with mixed results. One suggested that the number of connections that link nearly everyone on the planet more likely exceeds ten. But the idea has fascinated people anyway.
There is in particular a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players attempt to connect a given actor to the actor Kevin Bacon, who had claimed to have worked with or known everybody in Hollywood. The first--and probably the only--game I ever played online was a variation of this. I don't remember the site that hosted it, but the game was to propose the names of two actors, and the person who could connect them first through movies they were in, and with the fewest links, won that round and got to propose the next pair.
So the names could be Will Smith and Laurence Olivier. Here's how that might go: Will Smith was in the film version of
Six Degrees of Separation with Ian McKellen. McKellen starred in a film version of
Richard III with Maggie Smith. Maggie Smith played Desdemona in a film version of
Othello starring Laurence Olivier. (There's also another path to Maggie Smith and
Othello.)
Or Will Smith was in several
Men in Black films with Tommy Lee Jones, who was in
Lincoln with David Straithairn, who starred in
Good Night, and Good Luck with Robert Downey, Jr. who costarred with Gwnyeth Paltrow in several Iron Man films and with Jude Law in several Sherlock Holmes films; both Paltrow and Law starred in
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which featured a video cameo by Laurence Olivier.
But what interests me are connections in real life, especially mine. Mostly but not only, from years as a journalist, I've met a number of people who provide connections to a lot of prominent people in various fields. Some (but not all) were or are themselves pretty prominent. Through spending time with Billy Joel and briefly meeting Paul Simon, I am two degrees from, say, Paul McCartney (I have several other routes to being 2 degrees from John Lennon and George Harrison) as well as Springsteen, Sting and, of course, Garfunkel.
Through a brief exchange with Neil Armstrong, I am 2 degrees from probably every astronaut who rocketed to the moon, and through Nichelle Nichols, several women astronauts on the Shuttle. From meeting Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin, I am 2 degrees from any number of science fiction writers, and by several routes (including agents and editors), 2 degrees from any number of novelists, such as Jim Harrison. I am even 2 degrees from the super-reclusive Thomas Pynchon, because he once lived here on the North Coast for awhile, and I met someone who met him.
Through Frank Rich (NYTimes theatre critic) and a lot of theatre actors (for example, at the O'Neill Center) I'm second degreed with a lot of stage names, and probably third degreed with many more. And through Janet Maslin (NYTimes film critic), as well as my own interviews with film actors and directors (especially veterans like Martin Ritt) as well as several friends who wound up in the movie biz (not to mention a memorable encounter with the young Karen Allen), I've got a number of additional two degree Hollywood connections to rival Kevin Bacon. Names newly prominent might require an extra degree.
Not bad for somebody you never heard of, as well as somebody a lot of these famous secondary connections never heard of either.
But what about degrees of separation across time as well as social and other kinds of space? That's what fascinates me now.
For example, if a simple handshake creates a degree, my separation from President John F. Kennedy is 1. Otherwise it is 2. Through Harris Wofford (former US Senator from PA, with whom I worked on a project when he was PA Secretary of Labor and Industry) I am 2 degrees from JFK as well as RFK and Martin Luther King.
I am 2 degrees from President Obama, through Knox classmate and friend John Podesta, and he is my most direct connection to a number of Washington figures of the present and recent past, including the Clintons. (I am also distantly related to the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas, though that's more tenuous.)
But I am also 2 or 3 degrees from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and 3 degrees from a number of prominent figures of the World War II era, including Winston Churchill, General George Marshall and Harry Hopkins. And Adolf Hitler.
And as I recently discovered to my awe and astonishment, I am no more than 5 degrees from President Abraham Lincoln.
The route for these connections begins with Larry Jackson, a friend for several decades, who I met in Cambridge, MA. He knew actor and famed director Orson Welles quite well. Welles is my connection to FDR, Churchill, Marshall and others, who he knew. (Recall that
Citizen Kane was released in 1941, and before that, Welles was active in the Depression era Federal Theatre Project. He campaigned several times for FDR. Add to the many important people he met in his long life as a globe-trotting celebrity, those he met as the child of a wealthy and well-connected father.) Welles also met Hitler when Hitler was a colorless member of the fringe Nazi Party.
I learned much of this from recently re-watching an interview Welles did with Dick Cavett, in which he also talked about a fascinating woman he knew when he was quite young and she was in her 90s. And she had known Abraham Lincoln.
This started me considering other connections through time, and some are surprising. I can name two routes through which I am 3 degrees from H.G. Wells, whose writing career began in the 1890s. That puts me no more than 4 degrees from Carl Jung and Conan Doyle (not to mention Lenin and Stalin), and 5 degrees from Charles Darwin. Probably 5 degrees as well from Charles Dickens.
If my JFK handshake is allowed, I'd be two degrees from FDR (who JFK must have met when his father was FDR's Ambassador to England) and therefore 3 degrees from Teddy Roosevelt and others of that era, through FDR.
Through meeting Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, I am 2 degrees from Jack Kerouac and William Carlos Williams. But through meeting Buckminster Fuller (grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller), I am four degrees from Emerson and Thoreau.
I am also 2 degrees from Ernest Hemingway (through writer William Eastlake) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (through a waiter at his favorite St. Paul hotel bar.) And through a writer I never met but with whom I exchanged letters, 2 degrees to Pablo Picasso. They seem very remote now even in time, though all but Fitzgerald were alive in my lifetime.
There's something mysterious about all this and how it feels. Maybe many mysteries in fact. But at the very least it comports with a stretched sense of time that is acquired with age. It is not surprising to me that I shook hands with JFK, heard Martin Luther King speak at the March on Washington, and also voted twice (actually four times) for Barack Obama. For someone younger, it might seem incredible. That's also how I feel when I look at the past before my life: it seems so remote and spread out.
So for instance I was astounded to read an interview with Rebecca West, once the lover of H.G. Wells, who mentioned meeting contemporary playwright Tom Stoppard. Wells and Stoppard seem like figures in different time universes, which in most senses they are, but not altogether. They were in fact alive at the same time, though barely.
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| Cocteau, Picasso, Stravinsky, Olga Picasso |
Or that Jean Cocteau knew Braque and the young Picasso (and Gino Severini), and had his last film produced by Francois Truffaut. In fact, only 30 or 40 years separates the Paris of Picasso from the Paris of Truffaut. (And since I met Truffaut, I'm 2 degrees from Cocteau, and 3 from everyone he met, including Uncle Gino.)
Still, it is one thing to try to realize that my great-grandparents may well have been alive when Lincoln was, and another to be able to count the links in my chain of connection to Lincoln himself. Especially since it is possible if not likely that none of my great-grandparents in their European hinterlands had much of an idea of who Lincoln was.
What is it about these connections? In truth, I make more direct connections with these people through reading their words, listening to their music, watching their films and so on. I guess some of it is physical. The tradition of shaking the hand of someone who had shaken the hand of someone famous (however many hands are involved in that chain) goes back at least to a famed 19th century boxer John L. Sullivan. I remember I spent a day shaking hands with my high school classmates when I returned from the JFK Inaugural weekend.
The physical connection suggests family or community, which is also I suppose the point of the degrees linking all of humanity. Perhaps it also suggests the fact that we breathe the same air, that we are composed of the same molecules, as everyone living or who has ever lived.
But it also makes time, history and greatness more intimate. A short chain of touch stretches from me to Abraham Lincoln. I suppose that soon no one will be able to claim even those five degrees of touch, so this also grounds me in my time, even as it widens that ground.
Like any kind of historical consciousness, this suggests that more is possible than what we have in the present, and surprising elements of our present have close precedents in the past. But it makes all that more visceral, while it nourishes and strengthens the imagination.
It also frees me from this moment, this troubled and slowly suicidal context, in which it seems scarcely possible that someone like FDR ever existed. But a chain of touch of (at most) two people separates me from him, and links me to him. Through those links, he lives. In those links, I live.
