TV & Radio: The Wizard of Quiz

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Because Van Doren can use up only a few contestants a week, the producers manage to keep the other booth stocked with competitors brainy enough to pass a tough written qualifying exam ("The hardest one I ever took," according to Van Doren). Last week they had "ten or 15" ready, but felt that only three or four of those could be flung against Van Doren. Reason: the rest lack an imposing background and the audience might think that they were merely lambs being led to slaughter. One of the waiting eligibles is John Kieran Jr., 35, son of the original Information Please panel member, who declined an invitation himself. Much as they now want Van Doren to go on, the producers also foresee a chance that audiences may tire of his winning streak. As the Van Doren family's friend, Clifton Fadiman, puts it: "Sooner or later he's going to stop being a Christian and start being a lion."

"I'm Aghast." Even if they grow blasé or hostile toward Van Doren as an unbeatable contestant, it is difficult to imagine viewers tiring of the fascinating, suspense-taut spectacle of his highly trained mind at work. Breathing heavily, Charlie coaxes elusive answers out of odd corners of his brains by talking to himself, muttering little associated fragments of knowledge. Like a boxer staying down for a count of nine, he takes all the time he can possibly get ("Let's skip that part, please, and come back to it"). When trying to identify the character in La Traviata who sings the aria Sempre libera, he half-whispered: "She sings it right at the end of a party given by ... What's her name! Soprano. Her name is like . . . Violetta. Violetta!" Some viewers get the feeling that he knows most of the answers immediately and simply makes the audience squirm for the money he gets. But Charlie and those who know him best insist that it is actually his technique of ferreting out the answers ("You can see him making the thinking connections").

Van Doren is the first to admit that he is no genius and can claim neither a photographic memory nor total recall. Indeed, most of his education was in schools that had little interest in memory work or tests, regarded facts as mere accessories in the handling of ideas and the development of taste and reasoning. Some of his classmates at St. John's College in Annapolis, famed for its "great books" course and its cloistered devotion to scholarship, say that Van Doren's quiz wizardry flies ironically in the face of what the college and Charlie himself stand for. So does Philosopher Mortimer J. (How To Read a Book) Adler, a longtime friend, who admits "my own low fascination with the show" but adds: "I'm aghast that anyone would have this kind of information in his head. I wouldn't be caught dead with it. I just can't believe it isn't a mental burden."* Others, including faculty members at St. John's itself, point out that Van Doren's mind comes through on TV not as a card-index file but as a reasoning instrument that explores a memory clearly embedded in taste.