"Van Doren" and "Redford." (what is wrong with director Robert Redford's film 'Quiz Show' about Columbia Univ professor Charles Van Doren and the TV game show scandal of the 1950s)

"HOW," I asked Charles Van Doren, "could you possibly have named all the Aleutian Islands?" We were at lunch in the Columbia Facuty Club on Morningside Drive. That might not actually have been the question, but at least the type of question. A typical Charles answer was: "When I was a child, one of my hobbies was geography [or astronomy, or genealogy], and I have a good memory." Well, maybe so.

The point to bear in mind is that in Charles's Columbia environment--students and colleagues alike--Charles's quiz-show fame on Twenty-One was not very important. It is exactly here that I think the roots of Charles's tragicomedy lie, and not in the wholly suppositious notion of "parricide" advanced by the Robert redford movie Quiz Show

His students and colleagues respected Charles as an excellent young English professor, and his colleagues liked him. He and I were both specializing in eighteenth-century literature, thugh he was senior to me. Charles was writing a good book on the poet William Cowper. So, as I say, from a Columbia perspective the quiz show was not important. Knowing the names of the Aleutian Islands was not important. Such things were a stunt--essentially disconnected and trivial information. Out there, under the dark skies of the Republic, millions of people might think that Charles was an intellectual and an "egghead." We regarded him as a very able professor who had a peculiar gift, and we thought it rather fun that he had broken the bank at Monte Carlo.

What was important at Columbia was chiseled on the frieze of Butler Library: Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, Milton. A key Columbia ideal was "critical intelligence," and the ability to master intellectual connections. Charles scored very well on both counts. What mattered was Columbia and its faculty. Imagine the English Department where Charles and I were junior members: Mark Van Doren taught alongside Lionel Trilling, F. W. Dupee, Joseph Wood Krutch, Quentin Anderson, Richard Chase. That was a world. That was important.

Robert Redford's opinion, which he heightened in the script submitted to him, was that Charles sought out the crooked world of TV and the quiz show because he sought revenge of some sort on his father's Olympian status. This strikes me as completely gratuitous. I saw no evidence of hostility between them, but rather an easy and thorough friendliness.

Of course Mark Van Doren was a towering presence. But Mr. Redford depicts his students as regarding him with polite boredom. Where Mr. Redford got such a notion remains a puzzle. A young Robert Redford might have thus regarded him, but not his actual Columbia students. (It is amusing that Mr. Redford's 1956 "Columbia" is co-ed. This allows him to show young women hopping up and down and "Charles" as a sex symbol, an Egghead Elvis, which is nonsensical.)

The real students thought of Mark Van Doren as an electrifying if understated classroom professor. He used no notes. He would open a book and begin dealing with a particular passage. His mode was conversational. Often, he would single out an individual student and draw him into the conversation. He sometimes stayed with such a student through much of the hour, drawing out thoughts the student himself had not dreamed he had.

Mr. Redford's version of him is genteel and somewhat febrile. Oh, no. The last time I saw the real Van Doren was during the spring of 1963, when he was close to retirement. I sat in my office in Hamilton Hall. Enjoying the spring warmth, a pigeon flew to my window sill, then jumped into my office and strolled on my carpet. Mark appeared at the door, in his floppy felt hat, and regarded the bird. "St. Francis," he said, and smiled. That was the closest I am likely ever to get to sainthood. As one watches Mr. Redford's movie, the gap between the real Mark Van Doren and the "Mark Van Doren" of the movie becomes a chasm.

Watching "Mark Van Doren" in Quiz Show, I began to see that Mr. Redford himself, unlike the Columbia students of the time, quite possibly thinks the real Mark Van Doren was ... boring, that the real Columbia was snobbish and boring. I began to see that the real Robert Redford actually belongs to the ersatz world of Twenty-One.

The nausea increases. Just as Mark becomes "Mark" and Columbia becomes "Columbia," so Charles Van Doren becomes "Charles." The process of distortion and falsification becomes so insistent that the two producers, Robert Redford of Quiz Show and Dan Enright, the producer of Twenty-One, begin to come into focus as a single producer, and the thought arises that maybe Mr. Redford knows that this is so. Both Robert Redford and Dan Enright--"Redford" and "Enright"?--smile knowingly and plead "artistic license." I note here that testimony to the movie's deceptions have begun to pour in beyond anything I can provide myself. Thus the daughter-in-law of Edward Kletter, director of advertising for the maker of Geritol (sponsor of Twenty-One), has stated publicly that he did not in any way resemble the character played in the movie by Martin Scorcese, and did not know about the fraud: "I do not want the Robert Redford movie to become the 'textbook' on this period. I don't want the granddaughters of Edward Kletter to be ashamed of their grandfather."

As I've said, I differ from Mr. Redford in my opinion of the roots of the real Charles's mini-catastrophe. My guess is that the real Charles tried out for the thing entirely as a lark, much as a group of young professors might go slumming at Atlantic City or seek out a really awful saloon--great because so awful--downtown somewhere. I think the real Charles initially got a kick out of the NBC zoo and its antics, and naively--he never struck me as very worldly--found himself way in over his head.

Charles and maybe even Enright seem to have been naive enough to think that a conspiracy so vast as this quiz show could really remain secret. Of course someone would blow the whistle. Charles should have jumped ship early on by answering Babe Ruth instead of Ty Cobb and gone back to Cowper. Instead, when the unserious world of pop TV suddenly blew skyhigh, things became serious for Charles at Columbia. Drowning in his imposture, he had lied to his chairman and to the Columbia administration.

Mr. Redford seems to think that he is on to matters of profound significance in his movie, and he does nibble around the edges of them. He has told an interviewer that the movie is about the tension between "ethics and capitalism." Well, ahem. There is always tension between individual ethics and any organized group--the military, the church, a university, a society. The theme Mr. Redford wanted to express, but has failed to do, is the fictive nature of modernity. Money (capitalism) allows for much self-invention. The question then becomes whether and how the invented self can approach authenticity. Of course the adventures of the self under circumstances of freedom can be marvelous or awful, or both at the same time.

Quiz Show tries to be a parable about deception, but all art is deception, and the issue is one of the qualityy of the deception. Mr. Redford himself is up to his ears in deception of a low kind. Though the characters have real names, Quiz Show falsifies history throughout. Chronology is twisted. The movie ends with a series of brief prose passages intended to give the future history of the main characters, as in Chariots of Fire. But Mr. Redford falsifies history even here. The klunky Herb Stemple, Charles's opponent on Twenty-One, did not end in pathos and complete futility, as the film implies. He taught social studies for years in the New York school system. The real Charles did work for an encyclopedia, but Mr. Redford leaves out that he taught, wrote good books, and published good anthologies. Mr. Redford fakes their histories in order to give the movie a downbeat coda.

Does Mr. Redford, the moralizer, suspect that he is "Dan Enright"? He is a major capitalist, and his movie company is not a commune. Is there tension between his ethics and "capitalism"? He grew up in Santa Monica, but today he presents himself as a Man of the West, in tight jeans and plaid shirt. His office in Radio City, where he spends a great deal of time, is decorated in fake adobe. He seems to pride himself on his ideas, but they are crude, the ideas of a Beverly Hills virtue monger. The more you think about him, the more you think about Dan Enright.