Boo Hoo

\ NOEL E. PARMENTEL JR. Enough! an observer screams, surveying the lachrymose wreckage that followed Charles Van Doren’s Washington yerformance. And asks: Who are in Van Doren’s apparat? P : When Crying Charlie Van Doren, the Eggheads’ Bill Rosensohn, finally got around to testifying before the Harris Committee, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Make no mistake: pul- ing, mewling, perjured pedagogue or no, he wowed ’em. It was the sudsiest performance to open in Washington in many a moon, rivalled in utter unctuousness only by the Dick Nixon and Checkers Show, and drew rave notices. The spectacle of a congressional ‘committee being had by this maudlin fake was not enough: it was followed by the soppiest collection of public tributes since the death of Lou Geh- rig. People who ought to know better suckered up like marks on the mid- way. Dave Garroway broke up in the middle of a Method rendition of “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” and had to be helped off the set. Ed Sulli- van quoted Shakespeare and Cervan- tes and, as an afterthought, threw in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It was quite a week for Charlie. He was compared to Julius Caesar, Nathan Hale, Shoeless Joe Jackson (a canard on Joe, a man of considerable charm), Roger Casement, Herbert Hoover, St. Paul and Nat Holman. (Charlie’s own taste modestly ran, in an interview with Newsweek, to Oedipus Rex— “Some explosion had taken place in ats, too. <=.”) “Don’t forget,” quoth Hy Gardner, “Lillian Roth came back.” (Indeed she did, and in time to be on hand for The Fix.) Everyone got into the act, whatever his politics. Jack Paar and Dorothy Kilgallen chimed in, along with the New York News, Mir- tor, and Journal-American. Smarmy Charlie, expecting mixed reviews at best, had taken the trouble to send tender billets douxs to some of the New York press. They hit hard, and Went right along with The Weeper, Sincerely Regretting in every edition. _ How did this noxious weakling be- come a folk hero overnight? The sit- uation begins with the incredible gullibility of the American public, a national state of mind which is aided and abetted, encouraged, perverted, subverted, and finally skewered by what is cynically called “the com- munications industry.” The power exerted over the public mind by the television industry, and ultimately, the advertising agencies, enables stumblebums to don pancake make- up and emerge as first-raters. A Liberal Household That kind of alchemy happens to be an old Van Doren family custom. Congenitally tender-minded, this tribe of scribblers and prattlers has gone further with less than any family in recent history, not excepting the Trapps. Carl was an overrated his- torian; Mark is an inconsequential poet and critic, with the basic in- stincts of a flack. He is a kind of left- wing Mr. Chips, once in the news for some hanky-panky in the Hiss- Chambers case; an all-around Nice Guy. Both these luminaries married ladies with some influence in literary kaffe klatsches, and both played the game to the hilt. Through this parlay of incessant scribbling, literary log- rolling (all Van Dorens are inveterate book reviewers), and Seventh Ave- nue approach to culture, the family has prospered. Dan Enright and Henry Luce tapped them for Amer- ica’s Great Families. We’ve come a long way from the Lowells and God Save the Mark. Young Charlie grew up in a Green- wich Village house full of Talk and Ideas. The Van Dorens are, among other things, Liberals, and the house must have been a beehive in the haleyon days of the New Deal. As Liberals in good standing, it was in- cumbent upon the tribe to belong to the usual causes, committees and fronts, and to attend their quota of indignation meetings. The Van Dorens are indefatigable joiners. The gloppy mass of ill-digested ideas, discussed by these political naifs, dilettantes, and semi-literates, must have been heady brew for an impressionable boy growing up in New York. The frosting on the cake was the High School of Music and Art. Charlie had shown an interest in such diverse fields as astronomy, literature and the clarinet, and was considered fairly promising by his teachers. In due course he was shipped off to St. John’s College, a kind of Maryland farm club for the University of Chicago. Boywonder Hutchins and neo-Thom- ist Adler sent a pair of world federal- ists, Scott Buchanan and Stringfel- low Barr, down to run the circus at St. John’s, where the modus operandi was to hire graduate English students from cow colleges to teach country boys from western Maryland what weighed down Aristotle, Harvey and Euclid. St. John’s was a natural for Charlie, and vice versa. He enjoyed a status on the campus (being a Van Doren at St. John’s is something like being a Sarnoff at WNTA-TV), but left after two years to join the army. He appears to have spent his war playing and winning, by a mathematical system he devised, at poker. Time (whose cover story on Van Doren in 1956 was a classic ex- ample of how the au courant could be conned) observed that he had the “nerve and courage of a riverboat gambler.” (No dice: no nerve, no courage. Chutzbah, maybe.) Van Doren returned to St. John’s after the war, and presently took off for Columbia to go Academic in his father’s bailiwick. He vacillated be- tween math and English, took an M.A., went off to Cambridge and then to France. After Cambridge, Charlie decided to do something orig- inal, so he moved on to Paris, bought Novemerr 21,1959

a beret, and wished he’d known Zelda Fitzgerald. He fell out with his father and began to show the tendencies to- ward exhibitionism which have char- acterized his later career. He began work on a novel about a boy who wanted to kill his father. But in time, Charles and Mark patched it up, the prodigal returned to Bleecker Street and Papa got him a job teaching a section of English at Columbia. A lit- tle-contemplated fact is his sluggish academic record. He received his Ph.D a full seventeen years after first entering college, and did not submit his thesis until early this year—when not passing him at Columbia would have raised more of a furore than busting out Pat Boone, Charlie’s rival for campus honors.

NP

About the Author

Noel E. Parmentel Jr.

\ NOEL E. PARMENTEL JR. Enough! an observer screams, surveying the lachrymose wreckage that followed Charles Van Doren’s Washington yerformance. And asks: Who are in Van Doren’s apparat? P : When Crying Charlie Van Doren, the Eggheads’ Bill Rosensohn, finally got around to testifying before the Harris Committee, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Make no mistake: pul- ing, mewling, perjured pedagogue or no, he wowed ’em. It was the sudsiest performance to open in Washington in many a moon, rivalled in utter unctuousness only by the Dick Nixon and Checkers Show, and drew rave notices. The spectacle of a congressional ‘committee being had by this maudlin fake was not enough: it was followed by the soppiest collection of public tributes since the death of Lou Geh- rig. People who ought to know better suckered up like marks on the mid- way. Dave Garroway broke up in the middle of a Method rendition of “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” and had to be helped off the set. Ed Sulli- van quoted Shakespeare and Cervan- tes and, as an afterthought, threw in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It was quite a week for Charlie. He was compared to Julius Caesar, Nathan Hale, Shoeless Joe Jackson (a canard on Joe, a man of considerable charm), Roger Casement, Herbert Hoover, St. Paul and Nat Holman. (Charlie’s own taste modestly ran, in an interview with Newsweek, to Oedipus Rex— “Some explosion had taken place in ats, too. <=.”) “Don’t forget,” quoth Hy Gardner, “Lillian Roth came back.” (Indeed she did, and in time to be on hand for The Fix.) Everyone got into the act, whatever his politics. Jack Paar and Dorothy Kilgallen chimed in, along with the New York News, Mir- tor, and Journal-American. Smarmy Charlie, expecting mixed reviews at best, had taken the trouble to send tender billets douxs to some of the New York press. They hit hard, and Went right along with The Weeper, Sincerely Regretting in every edition. _ How did this noxious weakling be- come a folk hero overnight? The sit- uation begins with the incredible gullibility of the American public, a national state of mind which is aided and abetted, encouraged, perverted, subverted, and finally skewered by what is cynically called “the com- munications industry.” The power exerted over the public mind by the television industry, and ultimately, the advertising agencies, enables stumblebums to don pancake make- up and emerge as first-raters. A Liberal Household That kind of alchemy happens to be an old Van Doren family custom. Congenitally tender-minded, this tribe of scribblers and prattlers has gone further with less than any family in recent history, not excepting the Trapps. Carl was an overrated his- torian; Mark is an inconsequential poet and critic, with the basic in- stincts of a flack. He is a kind of left- wing Mr. Chips, once in the news for some hanky-panky in the Hiss- Chambers case; an all-around Nice Guy. Both these luminaries married ladies with some influence in literary kaffe klatsches, and both played the game to the hilt. Through this parlay of incessant scribbling, literary log- rolling (all Van Dorens are inveterate book reviewers), and Seventh Ave- nue approach to culture, the family has prospered. Dan Enright and Henry Luce tapped them for Amer- ica’s Great Families. We’ve come a long way from the Lowells and God Save the Mark. Young Charlie grew up in a Green- wich Village house full of Talk and Ideas. The Van Dorens are, among other things, Liberals, and the house must have been a beehive in the haleyon days of the New Deal. As Liberals in good standing, it was in- cumbent upon the tribe to belong to the usual causes, committees and fronts, and to attend their quota of indignation meetings. The Van Dorens are indefatigable joiners. The gloppy mass of ill-digested ideas, discussed by these political naifs, dilettantes, and semi-literates, must have been heady brew for an impressionable boy growing up in New York. The frosting on the cake was the High School of Music and Art. Charlie had shown an interest in such diverse fields as astronomy, literature and the clarinet, and was considered fairly promising by his teachers. In due course he was shipped off to St. John’s College, a kind of Maryland farm club for the University of Chicago. Boywonder Hutchins and neo-Thom- ist Adler sent a pair of world federal- ists, Scott Buchanan and Stringfel- low Barr, down to run the circus at St. John’s, where the modus operandi was to hire graduate English students from cow colleges to teach country boys from western Maryland what weighed down Aristotle, Harvey and Euclid. St. John’s was a natural for Charlie, and vice versa. He enjoyed a status on the campus (being a Van Doren at St. John’s is something like being a Sarnoff at WNTA-TV), but left after two years to join the army. He appears to have spent his war playing and winning, by a mathematical system he devised, at poker. Time (whose cover story on Van Doren in 1956 was a classic ex- ample of how the au courant could be conned) observed that he had the “nerve and courage of a riverboat gambler.” (No dice: no nerve, no courage. Chutzbah, maybe.) Van Doren returned to St. John’s after the war, and presently took off for Columbia to go Academic in his father’s bailiwick. He vacillated be- tween math and English, took an M.A., went off to Cambridge and then to France. After Cambridge, Charlie decided to do something orig- inal, so he moved on to Paris, bought Novemerr 21,1959

a beret, and wished he’d known Zelda Fitzgerald. He fell out with his father and began to show the tendencies to- ward exhibitionism which have char- acterized his later career. He began work on a novel about a boy who wanted to kill his father. But in time, Charles and Mark patched it up, the prodigal returned to Bleecker Street and Papa got him a job teaching a section of English at Columbia. A lit- tle-contemplated fact is his sluggish academic record. He received his Ph.D a full seventeen years after first entering college, and did not submit his thesis until early this year—when not passing him at Columbia would have raised more of a furore than busting out Pat Boone, Charlie’s rival for campus honors.