THE REMARKABLE VAN DORENS

FOR the friends and family of Charles Van Doren, most of the fascination of his mental marathon is not what he says--which is fascinating enough--but the fact that he can say anything at all before the implacable eye of the television camera. "Why, I couldn't say a word up there with those earphones and all," marvels one distinguished Columbia scholar. "I'd come completely unstuck."

Charles Van Doren sticks together, in the opinion of Critic Clifton Fadiman, because of his family heritage. "Charlie was brought up to be unconscious of the fact that he has an inferior or superior," says Fadiman. "Because of this, he never starts to press. The Van Dorens represent a tradition of people that is almost dead now, like Thoreau and Emerson. They have their roots in the 19th century. They are content and confident in themselves."

The Van Doren tradition of self-reliance crossed the Atlantic in the 1650s when Pieter van Doom arrived in Peter Stuyvesant's Manhattan from Gravezande, Holland. The family grew up in the U.S. heartland, on the farmlands of Illinois. Charles Lucius Van Doren was a kindly, industrious country doctor and farmer. His wife, Eudora A. Butz, was a stern taskmaster who at the age of ten carried the mail on horseback across the prairies. Married in 1883, they raised a family of five boys. "We lived together in a busy tumult," wrote Carl, the oldest of those sons, in his autobiography Three Worlds, "in a close-knit affection which the later scattering of the family has never weakened."

Although not widely read, the country doctor had a consuming curiosity and a determination that his sons should have every opportunity for education. When Mark, the fourth-born, was six, Dr. Van Doren quit his practice at Hope, Ill., packed off his brood to Urbana 25 miles away so the boys could study in good elementary schools and be handy to the University of Illinois. "Everything interested him," says Mark of his father. "Nothing was unimportant. He had no patience with error. Since this TV business started, I got a letter from a distant cousin who said he closed his eyes when Charlie was on the air and he could see my father talking."

As the country doctor had planned, all five boys attended the University of Illinois. Guy Van Doren, 69, is now a semi-retired consulting architect in Clinton, Mich., runs a prosperous antique business on the side. Paul Van Doren, the youngest, 57, is an investment banker in New York City. Frank Van Doren, 65, is a retired farmer and agriculture expert in Tuscola, Ill.

Frank's bookshelves bulge with a special set of 64 volumes by authors with the same patronymic: Van Doren. Brother Carl, who died in 1950, started the set in 1911 with a scholarly biography of British Novelist and Poet Thomas Love Peacock. Five years later, while still a graduate student at Columbia, Mark followed with a study of American Naturalist Henry Thoreau. Close friends as well as brothers, Carl and Mark then proceeded to found a family tradition of literary excellence based on incisive, forthright thinking and sturdy independence. Carl, a big, vigorous man who was devoted to football until he stumbled on the works of Christopher Marlowe, concentrated on literary criticism and history. His thoughtful, conscientious works include The Great Rehearsal, a vivid narrative of the Philadelphia convention that drafted the U.S. Constitution, and, at the top of his achievement, the biography of Benjamin Franklin that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Like his nephew, Carl Van Doren had an encyclopedic mind. Wrote Novelist Sinclair Lewis: "He could have sat down with Erasmus; but they would have discussed football or girls or the vintage of their wine as vigorously as the latest stirring discoveries in Finnish philology."

Mark, nine years younger, wrote volumes of criticism too, but he also had the spirit of the poet.

Listen. The wind is still,

And far away in the night--

See! The uplands fill

With a running light.

So began Spring Thunder, the first of the coolly intellectual Mark Van Doren verses that now fill a dozen volumes. One volume, Collected Poems, won him the Pulitzer Prize a year after Carl. His Nathaniel Hawthorne did for one of the nation's literary founding fathers what brother Carl did for Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps Mark Van Doren's most lasting achievement has been fashioned in the classrooms of Columbia; he ranks among the great U.S. teachers. One former student, Trappist Father Thomas (The Seven Storey Mountain) Merton, wrote of him: "His classes were literally 'education'--they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas."

Together Carl and Mark were editors of The Nation, and both married girls who could write or edit as well as cook. Irita Van Doren, Carl's first wife, has edited book reviews for the New York Herald Tribune since 1926. Novelist and Editor Dorothy Graffe Van Doren, Mark's wife, wrote and produced broadcasts for the OWI during World War II. The prodigious output of this closely knit quartet soon earned it the nickname of "the Van Doren trust."

Since the end of World War II, the Van Doren trust has grown bigger yet as the children of the five Van Doren brothers, nine in all, came of age and began to produce children of their own--17 of them so far.

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