Just One Catch (20 page)

In the college newspaper, a fellow student, reviewing
Apprentice,
savaged Joe's story. It was pallid, he said. “That should have steeled me against unkind critiques in the future,” Joe said many years later, “but nothing does.”

He continued to filch ideas and curt, enigmatic dialogue from Papa, like plucking chocolates out of a box. Joe's piece “Nothing to Be Done,” written at about this time, was an extension of the slender plot in “The Killers.” Joe's impulse to foreground the events of a story—as opposed to Hemingway's “iceberg” method of hiding most of what's happening between characters—reveals why Papa finally proved to be an unsatisfactory model for Joe. For Hemingway, existential ironies emerged out of whatever remained unsaid; in Joe's best work, they would come from what's said and said again, until words slip their meanings.

“The Death of the Dying Swan,” a story from this period, mined domestic misery yet again. The husband thinks he “long[s] for people who were real, people who lived with honest passions and found vigorous pleasure in the mere event of existing, people for whom death came too soon.” By contrast, his wife's notion of ecstasy is a successful cocktail party. “Darling, something terrible has happened,” she tells her husband. “I'm all ready to serve cold cuts and there's no mustard.” In another piece, “Girl from Greenwich,” Joe imagined a literary reception for a novelist (he had never attended one). Again, the ironies fly: no-good novels become bestsellers; to curry favors, reviewers give good notices to hack writers; always, always, men and women lie to one another.

In story after story, Joe labored to refine what he thought magazine editors wanted: terse, witty dialogue; urban nonchalance; minimal, hard-edged descriptions; and social irony bleeding into cynicism, redeemed by a dollop of romance: a desire for upright behavior and principled devotion.

One day, in the margins of a piece Joe turned in for class, Baudin wrote that he should drop the first three pages and start the story at the top of page four. This advice was consistent with Baudin's previous notes to Joe. “I was [always] taking too long to begin, dawdling at the opening, as though hesitant to get going,” Joe recalled in
Now and Then.
“It's a quirk of mine, perhaps a psychological flaw, that has lasted.”

He did as told and submitted the story, “Castle of Snow,” to
The Atlantic Monthly.
Within a few weeks, he received a letter from an editor at the magazine, who suggested revisions and resubmission. Rewrites done, he sent the story back. In March 1948, it appeared as an “Atlantic First” (the appearance, for the first time, of a new writer in the magazine's pages). The byline said Joseph Heller, a junior English major at New York University, was “thinking and writing in terms of peace.” “[I]n our judgment,” the magazine stated, his short stories “give very real promise.”

“Castle of Snow” was conceived and executed from a different emotional/mental plane than anything Joe had written up until now. For whatever reason—perhaps an exercise or suggestion from Baudin, perhaps a vague intuition—for this piece, Joe stopped trying to match magazinespeak and found a voice genuinely his own. In later years, he would claim his best work was generated not by plot, character, or idea, but a fully formed first sentence. Usually, he didn't know where the sentence came from—who was speaking it or what it was about—it was simply the language, the rhythm, persuading him this was a promising beginning. He would go from there. Certainly the narrator, and his retrospective viewpoint, distinguished “Castle of Snow” from Joe's efforts to date.

The story begins, “My Uncle David was a sober man, and my Aunt Sarah, an earthy, practical woman, lived uncomplainingly with him in what seemed to be a perfect and harmonious relationship.” Already, complexities bristle. The phrase “lived uncomplainingly” implies reasons for complaint, while harmony merely “seemed” to exist in the home. Clearly, the narrator knows things now he didn't know at the time. The theme of innocence lost, which Joe was unable to limn successfully in his story about the Western Union messenger, exists here in the voice, in the narrator's character and temperament, rather than in a forced or melodramatic predicament.

We learn that Uncle David, a Russian immigrant to the United States, an avid reader and dreamer who mourns the failure of the Russian Revolution, has lost his job, and Aunt Sarah's drive to hold the family together oppresses them all. The narrator was a schoolchild at the time, living in his aunt and uncle's house. What happened to his parents, we never hear. The setting is not identified, but Joe clearly drew on Coney Island. As a boy, the narrator witnesses crushing poverty—including the eviction of a family from its house—but cherishes the coziness of the neighborhood. Eventually, his uncle lands a job at a bakery but refuses to cross a picket line—he realizes he's been hired as a scab. He won't betray other men. Coming home from the bakery, he stops to play in the snow with some neighborhood boys. He loses himself in the joy of remembering the way it snowed in Russia when he and Sarah were young, and the “culmination of all that is beautiful in mankind” still seemed possible, in the giddiness of the revolution.

Sarah is humiliated by her husband's childlike behavior, and she scolds him into submission. The story peters out at this point. Overall, it suffers from Joe's inability to visualize in detail—Sarah's “unforgiving face disclos[es] her anger,” we are told in lieu of an arresting
image
of her rage. But the elegiac tone, the gentle sympathy enveloping the characters, including the harsh old aunt, and the vivid neighborhood portrait make “Castle of Snow” honestly moving. Like the best fiction, the piece remains with the reader almost as a living memory, rather than as a memory of a story once read.

Instead of using formulaic conventions, laid like grids over tenuous plotlines, Joe has built into the story metaphors, contrasts, and ironies emerging naturally from the characters. David is soul to Sarah's “earthy” body: We experience this in the way he loves his books but is finally willing to surrender them—sell them to support the family—because, finally, it is the
knowledge
from books, the intangible gifts we carry inside, and which will die with us, that matter most to him. Sarah worries only about the books' physical bulk, and the space they occupy in a trunk.

The narrator is unconsciously disturbed by the neighbors' eviction because the sight of a “pile of furniture stacked desolately in the street near the curb” must remind him that he, too, was forced from his home. His aunt and uncle love him, but he is, essentially, a guest in their house. The passivity in his speech—“There must have been some money saved”; “My cousin was [also] moved into my room”—underscores this fact.

Parent figures replacing parents, a past obscure and unexamined (something to do with Russia), a bakery job: Joe's story draws power from latent emotions surrounding his own experiences.

The Atlantic Monthly
paid him $250 for “Castle of Snow.” James Jones's short story, “A Temper of Steel,” appeared in the same issue as another “Atlantic First.” Shortly thereafter, Martha Foley chose “Castle of Snow” for inclusion in the annual
Best American Short Stories
anthology. In her forward to that year's collection, which offered pieces by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Bowles, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford, and Jessamyn West, Foley wrote that these writers were the “vanguard of the much-heralded and long-awaited ‘post-war generation' in literature.” They are, she said, the “product of travail. Not only did they have to endure the worst world war in history, but their childhood and youth were shadowed by the depression. We may expect from them a different kind of writing from that of the first famous ‘post-war generation' of the nineteen-twenties”; these young writers, just coming to maturity, “write with pity and sensitivity.”

*   *   *

MORE AND MORE
writers were feeding their words into big, noisy boxes appearing in living rooms all across the country. Television was hungry for wordsmiths. Buck Baudin seized the opportunity. He branched out from publishing stories in
Esquire
and women's magazines to penning science fiction and eventually selling a few story ideas to shows such as
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and
General Electric Theater.

In class, he encouraged working for various venues; above all, he stressed an objective approach to writing. He did not inspire in Joe the imaginative play that would seed Joe's most important breakthroughs as a writer. Still, his editorial advice was generally sound, and he remained a staunch supporter of the young man's work. One semester, he bundled up four of Joe's stories and sent them to his literary agent. A note came back saying none of the pieces was publishable. In the meantime, Joe sold two of them (“Girl from Greenwich” and “Nothing to Be Done”) to George Wiswell, an editor at
Esquire.
He placed the now-titled “A Man Named Flute” with
The Atlantic Monthly,
following the magazine's enthusiastic response to “Castle of Snow.”

By the end of the summer of 1948, Joe had published seven short stories in some of the best magazines in the country. He was preparing to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from New York University (having taken summer courses to accelerate his progress). He had his eye on the graduate program at Columbia. Perhaps he was considering a novel—many of his stories concern the same characters, a married couple, Sidney and Louise Cooper. He had the credentials to become a successful author, and he had begun to establish a track record. He was, as Martha Foley said, in the “vanguard.”

 

7.
Naked

BY NEW YEAR'S DAY 1949
, in spite of his recent publications, Joe felt “inept and immature,” convinced he was “not naturally a fiction writer.” Martha Foley may have tapped him as one of the country's most promising young short story writers, but the real literary news of 1948 was the appearance of Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead.
A sprawling combat novel, dissecting an army unit as if it were a microcosm of America, the novel was “[a] tome, [a] masterwork,” Joe realized. It was a “book with tremendous breadth and scope.”

Suddenly, World War II belonged to Norman Mailer. The author's face adorned the cover of
The Saturday Review.
“We were about the same age … and it put me in my place,” Joe said. “War novels were coming into vogue.… The first war book that made a big sensation, although it was not comparable to Mailer's, was John Horne Burns's
The Gallery,
which came out in 1947.” Joe worried about producing run-of-the-mill work that would wind up lost in a publishing trend. Whit Burnett had warned him about this. “I suppose I did have a fear that if I [wrote] a novel it would be based on the war,” he said.

In
The Naked and the Dead,
“Mailer was very good as an illusionist,” Joe thought. “He gave the impression that he had experienced the actions he wrote about.” Joe knew
his
prose was weak on detail; an illusionist he was not. Besides, he said, “I felt that my … war experiences were very limited.” After reading
The Naked and the Dead,
he firmly decided he “had better stay away from [the] subject [of war] until I had something different to write about [it].”

For all his skill in describing physical action, Mailer, at this stage of his career, didn't have much new to say about fighting. His soldiers were not like the warriors in Greek dramas, whose tragic experiences brought them face-to-face with their contradictory natures and the controlling forces of the universe. Mailer's young Americans, lacking any historical sense, and acting without grasping the gist of the conflict, discovered only violence at their cores: a fierce rush of power over others. Ostensibly, their goal, like that of the soldiers in Burns's
The Gallery,
was to recover the pastoral goodness of life at its most primitive—achieved through brave physical feats: storming Eden.

On the surface, Mailer's stark, dispassionate style looked back to the quintessential American war novel, Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage,
the skeletal sketches of Hemingway (with a touch of Dos Passos's grandeur), and the naturalism of much Depression writing: in this sense, though it was written in the forties,
The Naked and the Dead
was, spiritually, the last great American novel of the 1930s. Modern warfare had yet to find the writer that could illuminate its complexities and contradictions.

Joe saw this. He had started graduate studies in English at Columbia University. The more he read—the greater the variety of literature he was exposed to—the more he recognized that contemporary American writing, hobbled by outmoded conventions, was unable to document the nation's new realities.

He took a course taught by Lionel Trilling, who had just been promoted to full professor (in the mid-thirties, Trilling had become the first Jew to get tenure at the university). At the time, Trilling was preparing to publish his landmark volume,
The Liberal Imagination.
Anticommunism, pessimism about political action, the individual's struggle against dogmatism: These topics were much on his mind and influenced his classroom discussions. Above all, he would teach, as he wrote in the book, that “literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” Therefore, it is uniquely primed to make the deepest sense of our imaginations, politics, and humanity.

Trilling did not enjoy teaching and kept his distance from most students. But Joe would have recognized in him a kindred spirit of sorts: a man profoundly ambivalent about institutional life, his Jewish background, and his desire for literary success. In 1947, Trilling had published a novel entitled
The Middle of the Journey,
concerning ideological battles among 1930s progressives (featuring a character based on Whittaker Chambers). In
Commentary,
a journal founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945, the novel had been panned for not being Jewish enough. The reviewer, Robert Warshow, pointed out that none of the book's major characters were Jewish, though the politics that engaged them, primarily anti-Stalinism, were “in large part … Jewish middle-class” issues. Warshow accused Trilling of failing to grapple with the “‘essence' of [our] experience.”