MY $64,000 GAMBIT
An April, 2019 New York Times' obituary told us Charles Van Doren died. As the New York Times’s obit described him he was “a rare specimen: a handsome, personable young intellectual with solid academic credentials, a faculty post at a prestigious university and an impressive family pedigree.” He was 93, so we were close in age when I came upon him in the 1950s; though the few times I met him at parties he seemed older. And much wiser. However, considering what happened to him, I’m not sure he was actually very wise. For those who don’t remember - most of you I suppose - he lost his moral compass.
A prodigy participant on the enormously popular TV program “The 64,000 dollar question,” Charles, and the program itself, turned out to be phonies. Week after week he had answered very difficult questions to the utter astonishment of the viewing public. Only, it turned out, the program producers were feeding him answers. And performance directions to go with them. Such as, let’s say:, “pause here in consternation and mop your brow. Then before answering seen to summon the correct info up from the depths of your memory”
When the scam broke on national news, the story of the fixing became an all consuming national scandal. Which, if you are so inclined, you can read about in its entirety in the obituary at:
t was a fascinating time. However in this reminiscence, the Charles Van Doren catastrophe reminds me of my own duplicitous behavior with his father, Mark Van Doren, an anecdote I’d like to briefly spin out to purge (or brag?) about.
Charles’s father, Professor Mark Van Doren was one of a coterie of distinguished professors who taught at Columbia College when I and a couple of thousand other boys and men (by which I mean veterans) studied and played there in the late 1940s. Father Mark was part of an accomplished literary family including his brother Carl,a Pulitzer prize winner, and a novelist wife. Mark, a prize-winning poet and critic himsel, taught us literature with a verve, embellished, along the way, with pointed anecdotes. One, for example, about an unnamed professor who met regularly with a small select group of students to discuss great literature. This professor had a bathroom adjoining the study in which they met. The rear of the bathroom’s medicine cabinet was actually a see-through panel, the other side of which was behind a picture hanging in the study. The rascally professor would invite new candidates for the discussion-group to his apartment, and the assemblage of established participants would wait, hopefully, until the hapless novitiate went to the bathroom. When and if that new visitor opened the trick medicine cabinet to examine its contents the students in the study would smirk and silently applaud approval. And that new student was thereafter accepted into their midst as having acceptable curiosity. Those who didn’t open the cabinet weren't invited back. Presumably this, hopefully apocryphal, story meant to illustrate the high status of curiosity in Van Doren’s universe. Or perhaps just that many humans are predictable.
In addition to his many anecdotes, I relished the literary gems Professor Van Doren discovered to us. But was at least a little, and unjustifiably, jealous of the praise he lavished on student luminaries in our class, John Hollander, a prodigious writer of poems with long words and mysterious allusions, modest, but quick with quips John Rosenberg, both of whom also became literature professors. And Richard Howard who, Wikipedia puts it is an “American poet, literary critic...... and translator” who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Obviously I didn’t stand a chance against these genuinely talented classmates.. And it showed. I consistently received a B, occasionally a C+ or B+, on the little essays Van Doren extracted from us throughout the semester.
Deserving or not, I yearned for a little piece of the praise.
Author’s note: The passage above portraying me as jealous of my contemporaries is an embellishment to highlight the company from which I received considerable nourishment during my years at Columbia. In point of fact,. I did not need then, or evermore, jealousy as a motivator. In fact I have always been pretty much a golfer in game of life, playing against myself, rather than a tennis player out to slay rivals.
Thinking it over, I theorized that that grading was not Van Doren’s favorite task so that he was almost mechanical in how he marked each of our latest endeavors. I decided that he had actually classified us in his mind soon after the semester began, Now, midway through term,he was routinely awarding grades on his early judgements of each of us I thought I needed to shake him up,
We had just completed reading and discussing Dante’s Divine Comedy. That was my inspiration. I would write a fragment of a play to catch his attention. Which I did. Would that I had preserved my playlet. It couldn’t have been much of a masterpiece. As I recall, it had Dante being awakened by Beatrice in a dream-like sequence. And forgiving him, begging his pardon in return, expressing her undying love. Or what did I actually write? Who knows? Certainly not I even in the dimmest recesses of memory. But it worked. Professor Van Doren awarded me with A, or more likely, A- for the little fiction.
Not only that. All my grades thereafter were in the same tier. I was apparently correct about his grading habits. And he was as innocent about my own duplicity as he was about his son’s. I hope he would have forgiven me as, per the obituary, he did Charles.
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