1958 – Dangerous Appetites
I understand just a little about addiction. My own troubles with hard to satisfy appetites began in 1956, attending secondary (grammar) school, and confronting the school tuck shop. A tuck shop sounds rather grand, as this was nothing more than an overlarge cupboard, from which you could buy such delights as potato crisps and various sweets. It was the Mars Bars that got me, with Wagon Wheels as a poor second. In the UK, a Mars Bar consisted of caramel and nougat, coated with milk chocolate (I recently discovered the version in the US had nougat and toasted almonds, while caramel was added later). It was first manufactured before the war, in 1932, in Slough (close to Ealing where I went to school). Like most such temptations, it was quite simply yummy! As for a Wagon Wheel, this was another tooth destroyer, comprising two round biscuits put together around a marshmallow filling and covered in milk chocolate. An Australian invention, brought to England by Gary Weston, it was another favourite of many young people.
Perhaps some background is important. Three years before I frequented the tuck shop, sweet rationing had ended in Britain. At the time the BBC reported “Children all over Britain have been emptying out their piggy-banks and heading straight for the nearest sweet-shop as the first unrationed sweets went on sale today. Toffee apples were the biggest sellers, with sticks of nougat and liquorice strips also disappearing fast. … Adults joined in the sugar frenzy, with men in the City queuing up in their lunch breaks to buy boiled sweets and to enjoy the luxury of being able to buy 2lb boxes of chocolates to take home for the weekend.” [i] In fact, this was the second attempt to take sweets off rationing. The first had been in April 1949, when enthusiastic demand had exceeded supply, and the government had to put sweets back on ration after four months. This time, the Minister of Food, (what a wonderful title – it could have been from Hogwarts!), reassured Parliament and the public that sugar stocks would be sufficient.
I suppose I could claim that it was the sudden availability of sweets when I was nine years old that set me on a path to disaster. Sugar was ‘intoxicating’, after dreary years of fruit and other good stuff! Once started, I found Mars Bars were very, very addictive. It began with one a week, then one a day, and then more than one each day. I couldn’t stop. I used up all my weekly pocket money, and I sometimes managed to extract some change from my mother’s purse, doing so without her seeing. At the same time, Mars Bars, occasional Wagon Wheels and those strange strips of nougat and liquorice were having consequences. I slowly changed from being rather slight and slim to getting plump, even a little fat. My mother saw what was happening, and I am sure she knew about my raids on her purse. I was banned from going to the tuck shop, and put on a diet. I moved from being addicted to suffering from withdrawal symptoms.
I don’t know if we all have some predisposition to addiction, but I certainly do. A little later in my school years, it was dark chocolate, but I managed to keep that under control. At university, it was wine. After a few nights of overindulgence followed by hangover headaches the next day, I learnt to curb my natural desire to drink and drink. However, I’ve never been able to eliminate that temptation. Even now, I know I could easily slip into drinking a bottle, then two of red wine every day. Moreover, I know if once I started down that path it would be difficult, almost impossible, to stop. Yes, in my own small way, I do understand the power of addiction.
There are, of course, many forms of addiction, and many temptations that can take a person down that path. Other reinforcing drugs include fame and money. One example I have written about before concerns Charles Van Doren. He drew my attention because he was my facilitator at an Aspen Institute Executive Seminar. This was some time after his adventures on television. Briefly, on November 28, 1956, Charles Van Doren made his first appearance on the NBC quiz show, Twenty-One. Approached by two NBC executives who were impressed by Van Doren’s ‘polite style and telegenic appearance’, the University of Columbia teacher was seen as the man to defeat the then champion, Herb Stempel, and, hopefully, turn around the show’s declining ratings. By January 1957, his winnings had earned him $129,000 (the equivalent of $1.2m in current US dollars) and he’d become famous; he appeared on the cover of Time on February 11, 1957. His run came to an end in March that year and after his defeat he was offered a three-year contract with the NBC worth $150,000. The teacher was now a rich television star.
Some time later, Herb Stempel told a journalist his winning run as champion on the series had been choreographed to his advantage, and that the show’s producer then told him to deliberately lose his championship to Van Doren. However, with no proof, the article was never printed. When various allegations of cheating were raised by Stempel, and then by others, Van Doren denied any wrongdoing, saying, “It’s silly and distressing to think that people don’t have more faith in quiz shows.” Fame and fortune were eating away at this hitherto exemplary academic. However, once match fixing in another game show, Dotto, was publicized in August 1958, Stempel’s statements began to appear in the press. Under public scrutiny, quiz show ratings across the networks plummeted and several were cancelled amid increasing allegations of fixing. The revelations were sufficient to initiate a nine-month grand jury investigation.
Some time after the hearings began, Van Doren emerged from hiding and, accompanied by his attorney, Charles Rubino, he confessed before the US Congress he had been given questions and answers in advance of the show.
“I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception. The fact that I, too, was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol. There may be a kind of justice in that. I don’t know. I do know … when I finally came to a full understanding of what I had done and of what I must do, I have taken a number of steps toward trying to make up for it. I have a long way to go. I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them. … I am making this statement because of them. I hope my being here will serve them well and lastingly. I asked [co-producer Albert Freedman] to let me go on [Twenty-One] honestly, without receiving help. He said that was impossible. He told me that I would not have a chance to defeat Stempel because he was too knowledgeable. He also told me that the show was merely entertainment and that giving help to quiz contests was a common practice and merely a part of show business. This of course was not true, but perhaps I wanted to believe him. He also stressed the fact that by appearing on a nationally televised program I would be doing a great service to the intellectual life, to teachers and to education in general, by increasing public respect for the work of the mind through my performances. In fact, I think I have done a disservice to all of them. I deeply regret this, since I believe nothing is of more vital importance to our civilization than education” [ii]
He never returned to Columbia University, and joined the staff of the Encyclopedia Britannica as an editor and author. He refused interviews or public comment on the subject of the quiz show scandals, and turned down an offer to be a consultant on Robert Redford’s film, Quiz Show. However, he did write once about the affair, in The New Yorker in 2008. All the Answers was published on 28 July. It reveals, in part, how a brief bout of addiction to fame and fortune had ruined his previous hopes and plans, and left him with a lifelong regret over his behaviour.
In 1958 we were to witness yet another form of addiction, to power, and to hubris, the belief that you, and you alone, know what to do. If Donald Trump has been our recent example, it was Chairman Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tung) back then who gave a terrifying display of a dangerous and almost uncontrollable desire to control. Two years before, he’d introduced the Hundred Flowers Campaign, encouraging citizens to give their opinions on the communist regime. During the campaign, differing views and solutions to national policy were encouraged based on the famous expression by Mao: “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science” It didn’t last, and soon a crackdown led to hundreds of thousands rounded up, publicly criticised, condemned to prison camps for labour and re-education, or even executed.
It was following this disaster, that om 1958 Mao introduced his Great Leap, or Great Leap Forward, an economic and social campaign to change China’s agrarian economy into a ‘communist society’ through new ‘peoples communes’. In practice, this translated into a demand for increased grain yields while also transferring industry to the countryside. Officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national bureaucrats, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted some 18 to 40 million deaths, and the Great Chinese Famine was the largest in history.
Mao was addicted to power. Although he stepped back from day-to-day leadership in 1959 he didn’t retreat from his reform policies and instead blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” for opposing him. From there he went on to introducing the Socialist Education Movement in 1963, and, most notoriously, the Cultural Revolution in 1966, both strategies to obliterate opposition and re-consolidate his power. Launching the latter in May 1966, Mao called on young people to “bombard the headquarters”, adding “to rebel is justified”. Youth needed little incentive to overthrow the bourgeois elements Mao said had infiltrated government and society and which were aiming to restore capitalism, as well as initiating a violent class struggle. The ensuing Cultural Revolution ruined both China’s economy and destroyed much of its traditional material culture. Red Guards smashed relics and religious sites. Over a ten-year period, millions were accused of bourgeois practices, imprisoned, tortured, sent out to undertake hard labour in the country while others were executed or pushed into suicide. The country was close to anarchy. Five years after it ended, in 1981, the Communist Party of China declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” [iii]
In a year of extraordinary events, one other insight into dangerous appetites came with the 1958 US publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita. It had first appeared in Paris, three years earlier. Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, it was only at the very end of the year it received a significant review when Graham Greene called it one of the three best books of 1955. [iv] Greene had set alight the touch-paper to controversy. A Sunday Express book critic declaring it “the filthiest book I have ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography”. If that wasn’t going to ensure sales, it’s hard to imagine better publicity. The British Home Office instructed UK Customs to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom, and the ban lasted for two years. Despite the drama in England, the first American edition came out in August 1958, and sold 100,000 copies in its first three weeks.
What excited such controversy? In the public mind, Lolita was a novel about explicit depravity, the dangerous appetite of a man for an underage girl. It certainly had a controversial subject: it is told in the first person by a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather, (Lolita is his private nickname for Dolores). The term Lolita has come to describe a young girl who is “precociously seductive…without connotations of victimization”. [v] Despite what frequently vicious disputes have suggested over the years, many authors have claimed it as the greatest literary work of the 20th Century. [vi]
Is it for me to recommend a book so often described as pornographic, perverse, and worse? I consider Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the great writers of the 20th Century, responsible for several extraordinary novels. Among my favourites is Pale Fire (1962), which appears to comprise a 999-line poem (Pale Fire), accompanied by an extensive academic commentary. You can read it straight through, but it is really an example of meta-fiction, and you can keep jumping between the poem and the analysis: extraordinary. An earlier novel, Bend Sinister, (1947) is a dissection of dictatorship and compliance, a dark account that appears all too real. I’ll add just one more, Ada (1969) which is the reflection of a psychologist on his involvement, over many years, with Ada, a cousin who turns out to be a sister. Each of his novels is absorbing, offering uncompromising analyses of his characters, and in doing so forcing you to think, and think again, about human nature. Lolita is another favourite, but I know it is hard to come to it with an open mind, as it’s almost buried in a constant stream of criticism, praise and rejection. Lionel Trilling put it well, commenting on the moral difficulty in approving a book with “so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator”. “We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.” [vii] No, I can’t recommend Lolita, it has to be your choice.
If 1958 was a year of personal and national dangerous appetites, in another sense there was nothing special about that year. Prone to dangerous appetites, temptations are always around us, and addictions capture people all the time. What looking back to 1958s reminds us is that addictive behaviour almost always is accompanied by hubris, the foolish, dangerous belief that, unlike others, you are in control. While we have come to understand some addictions are chemical, at least in part, almost all are self-deceiving, right up until it is too late to stop.
[i] BBC News, On This Day, 5 February 1953
[ii] “Charles Van Doreen Testimony, quoted in History Matters, from Congress, House, Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Investigation of Television Quiz Shows, 86th Cong., 1st Sess., November 2–6, 1959
[iii] There are many excellent histories, but Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, 1991, offers a chilling personal account.
[iv] Most of the details here come from Wikipedia based on Brian Boyd’s study, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 1991, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[v] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Lolita
[vi] Maria Popova, The Atlantic, The Greatest Books of All Time as Voted by 125 Famous Authors, 30 Jan. 2012
[vii] This is sourced by Wikipedia to Leland de la Durantaye, The Seduction, Boston Globe, 28 August 2005
