Just One Catch (21 page)

To those in the know, the review had a snide personal subtext. Trilling had refused to serve on
Commentary
's advisory board; he wished to keep his intellectual life separate from Jewish values. Following Warshow's review, he became more and more convinced it was “never possible for a Jew of my generation to ‘escape' his Jewish origin,” and it vexed his writing. Like Joe at the time, he was a man in search of a literary voice different from the ones previously modeled for him. In years to come, he could not manage a breakthrough. He published no more novels.

Nor would he come to terms with America's larger cultural shifts after the war, of which Joe's fiction would become emblematic. Five years before Joe arrived at Columbia, Trilling had encountered Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. They had been students at the university (Kerouac briefly). Ginsberg said Columbia was a “horror”: “[T]here was just nobody there … who had a serious involvement with advanced work in poetry,” he complained. “Just a bunch of dilettantes. And
they
have the nerve to set themselves up as guardians of culture? Why it's such a piece of effrontery—enough to make anyone paranoiac, it's a miracle Jack or myself or anybody independent survived.”

Despite this attitude, Ginsberg sought Trilling's blessing for his poetry, perhaps recognizing in him a kind of Jewish father figure—a role Trilling refused to accept, for the most part, though he once helped Ginsberg out of a serious legal scrape.

In 1956, when Ginsberg sent his old professor a copy of
Howl,
Trilling pronounced it “dull.” His wife, Diana, reflecting her husband's view, regarded the Beats as phony rebels, who harbored no real understanding of individual freedom. They were, she said, “panic-stricken kids in blue jeans, many of them publicly homosexual, talking about or taking drugs, assuring us that they are not out of their minds, not responsible.… Is it any wonder, then, that
Time
and
Life
write as they do about the ‘beats'—with such a conspicuous show of superiority, and no hint of fear? These periodicals know what genuine, dangerous protest looks like, and it doesn't look like Ginsberg and Kerouac.” Give
me
the Scottsboro boys and W. C. Handy's blues, she said: now,
that's
radicalism.

The Trillings' nostalgia for an old “new,” and their tone deafness to fresh cultural strains—made messier by the sense that on some level (at least among New York intellectuals) this was all a Jewish family quarrel—were apparent by the time Joe showed up in Professor Trilling's class. The older man's insistence that literature was part of a mighty cultural battle, coupled with his disgust at the forms the skirmishes seemed to be taking, increased Joe's irritation with the story conventions he was trying to copy from the pages of mainstream magazines.

The small and always airless domestic sphere, the oblique, abrupt dialogue, and the romantic cynicism: These tropes seemed more and more limited, even moribund.

The world was bigger than short stories, so fashioned, suggested. Even in the constrained and pleasant world of Morningside Heights, in the stacks of the Low Library on campus, amid the laughter in neighborhood taverns such as the Lion's Den and the West End Bar, among veterans and young husbands just like him, Joe discerned a stunning cultural complexity, about which contemporary literature was largely silent. It dazzled him with possibility. He had left the war and come to college, feeling that, generally, the country spoke with one voice. Yet now, in coffeehouse conversations, he heard different registers of American speech. As a kid, he had distinguished between Republicans and Democrats, but now he became aware of multiple shadings of moderate and extreme, liberal and conservative, isolationists and expansionists, like those who supported the Marshall Plan. He heard the split between those who, even after the fact, felt that defeating Japan, rather than Germany, should have been the war's first priority—for these people, patriotism was paramount; Japan was the country that had attacked us; it was a matter of national pride—and those, on the other hand, who felt it had been correct to halt Germany's ambitions first. For them, human rights had been the main issue.

The self-declared patriots tended to be anti-Roosevelt, coming from rural backgrounds; most of the human rights advocates came from urban professional families espousing liberal politics. In part, this debate had been rekindled on campus by
The Naked and the Dead,
in the dialogues between the characters Hearn and Cummings, heavy rehashings of various strains in the American character. To his credit, Mailer had been
trying
to grasp something essential, but his attempt, for all its boldness, its undeniable greatness, was finally pretty clumsy, Joe felt.

The vets on the Columbia campus, hailing from all across the nation, reaping the benefits of the G.I. Bill, represented the full political spectrum. Conversations in and out of class were heady, if often confused and confusing. David Herbert Donald, then a young history teacher, recalled, “Most of the students were veterans … much older than I, and all knew much more of the world than I, who grew up on a farm in Mississippi. I felt lucky if I could keep one day ahead of my students, and I lived in constant fear that I would be exposed as an ignoramus. I tried to compensate by working very hard on my lectures, ransacking the Columbia libraries and staying up night after night till long past midnight.”

Joe feared exposure, too. He hadn't read enough. His published pieces were hollow—frankly derivative, as any smart reader could see. Steadily, in classes, in long hours at the library, in conversations over drinks, he began to “acquire … standards and learned to be more critical,” he said. “I now wanted to be new, in the way that I thought, as I discovered them, Nabokov, Céline, Faulkner, and Waugh were new—not necessarily different, but new. Original.” For a while, then, in spite of impressive publications, accolades, and every indication of promise, Joseph Heller stopped writing fiction.

In
Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970,
the critic Morris Dickstein wrote, “We can scarcely understand postwar fiction without seeing how few writers from the pre-war years actually survived the war itself.” His comments are worth quoting at length in order to understand the context into which Joseph Heller tried to launch his literary career:

Some [prewar writers] died literally, and others simply lost their creative edge in the changed conditions of the postwar world. West and Fitzgerald died on successive days in 1940, Sherwood Anderson in 1941 (along with Joyce and Virginia Woolf, whose greatest influence in America was yet to come), Dreiser in 1945, Gertrude Stein in 1946, and Willa Cather in 1947. Most of the proletarian writers disappeared after one or two books, some to Hollywood or
Time
magazine, which both remained sympathetic to social melodrama, others into children's writing, historical fiction, or pulp fiction.… Committed social novelists who remained prolific were unable to regain the élan of their best work. Steinbeck would never again write anything to match the urgency of
In Dubious Battle
(1936) and
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939); James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos would never equal the social grasp and personal intensity of their Depression trilogies.… Their naturalist methods, which required an immense piling up of realistic details, and a minute verisimilitude, seemed unable to encompass the complexities and absurdities, to say nothing of the social changes, of the postwar world.

Richard Wright drifted into abstraction after
Black Boy
(1945). Novelists of manners—J. P. Marquand, James Gould Cozzens, John O'Hara—“were the diminished heirs of … writers from New England and the Northeast who closely documented the lives of the upper and professional classes,” Dickstein argued. Their work “devolved into a mere social record of … the status anxieties and sexual or professional problems of a declining elite.” Finally, Dickstein said, only “the ravages of age or alcoholism and the fragility of genius could begin to explain the decline of the greatest writers of the interwar years, Hemingway and Faulkner, which set in just as their earlier work was gaining them readers, fame, and increasing literary influence.”

The vogue for war novels in the late 1940s signaled a need for new subjects, new treatments of old themes, new means of expression, but Mailer and others were mired in received notions of craft. The attempt in
The Naked and the Dead
to make individual soldiers representative of broad social types was an extension of the proletarian writing of the 1930s. In his introduction to the massive anthology
Proletarian Literature in the United States
(1935), Joseph Freeman had written, “[F]rom the fate of a people [proletarian writers] derive their stirring themes.… Rural life, the factory, New York's streets, the office, the mill town, the south, the west, Jews, Yanks, Irish—these are the locales and characters which enliven proletarian fiction.” And they were present on Mailer's battlefields, there (as Freeman would have said) to achieve the familiar goal of baring a “civilization rent asunder by a class war”: thus, the inability of such fiction, however well-intentioned, to embrace the diversity it strove for and transcend its bullhorn monotone.

If the approach to subject—even in a combat setting—came from the previous decade's political writing, the dominant tone of Mailer's book, and of many 1940s war novels, bled through from pulp fiction and men's adventure magazines. These were offshoots of nineteenth-century dime novels about western heroes such as Billy the Kid, and Frank Munsey's
Argosy,
which printed adventure fiction on cheap pulpwood paper, giving the genre its name.

At their peak, in the 1930s, the ten-cent pulps had a circulation of more than ten million. From the beginning, Westerns drew avid readers. Titles such as
True Detective
and Hugo Gernsback's
Amazing Stories
became increasingly popular. In his inaugural issue in 1926, Gernsback promised “something that has never been done before in this country … scientifiction … a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” Stylistically, pulp tales shared a preponderance of informational dialogue, explaining plot details; spare description, so as not to impede the action; and clichés, to quickly encapsulate personalities, settings, and meanings.

During the war, paper shortages impaired printing and distributing pulps, but afterward, pulp fiction found new life in the form of mass-market paperback books. “Running parallel to many combat/war novels [of the 1940s] was the gangster/detective fiction of Mickey Spillane,” said the critic Frederick Karl (soon to become Joe's pal). “His [character] Mike Hammer is the ultimate, in popular culture, of the masculine military type. Hateful of Communists, patriotic, associated with the right, a male chauvinist, a defender of a reductive form of democracy, Hammer represents a kind of caricatured military. As in the novel of combat, Spillane's work simplified and reduced to violent endings all social, political, and ideological conflicts—hammered them down, as if in a gigantic air raid.” (Fittingly, perhaps, Mickey Spillane, like Joe, had been a World War II flier.)

The smuggling of pulp material into book form gave it a smidgen of literary respectability. And, as Spillane reminded readers at the University of South Carolina's World War II Writers Symposium in 1995, “[I]n the 1930s … the pulp fiction world was filled with magazines whose jade was battle aces … battle birds of the air that dealt with World War I.… But there wasn't much of an outlet for war stories at that time except for the pulps. The publishing industry hadn't reached out that far yet.” Following World War II, he said, the “paperback … opened up a vast field [for] writers.”

This was especially true when the “Fawcett [company] first came out with [its] Gold Medal concept.… I was sitting with [the publisher] Roscoe Fawcett, [and] we developed this thing together, of having original paperback stories,” Spillane said. With so many veterans swelling contemporary readership, combat tales were a natural, along with other pulp standbys.

In this sense, then, the real innovation of
The Naked and the Dead
lies in its introduction of a previously underground phenomenon into mainstream literature: not the war story, which Crane and Hemingway had taken up in important and serious ways, but the
pulp
war story, with its emphasis on physical action rather than the psychology of violence, sprinkled with touches from Stephen Crane and the overlay of political (that is, proletarian) concerns.

None of this addressed Joe's suspicions that the heralded conventions failed to
read
the current moment.
The Naked and the Dead
declared itself a novel of
now,
but it looked firmly backward, as did most contemporary short stories. However much he admired Mailer's book, Joe knew “that type of writing was going to go out of style.”

Perhaps nothing illustrated the paucity of conventions better than the magazines Joe had been poaching. Critic Bergen Evans, writing in
The Atlantic Monthly
in February 1948 ( just one month before Joe's appearance in its pages), said changing attitudes, rooted in harsher realities and smaller stomachs for sentimentality, postwar, were wreaking havoc on fiction, which had yet to find appropriate expressions for the country's new outlook.

For example, the “popular novelist of today,” and the writer of women's magazine fiction, “has to limn daydreams for a different group of women living under different circumstances,” Evans wrote. Readers of fiction still believed, or wanted to believe, “in true love,” but shifting cultural conditions—not the least of which was the “appalling increase [in the number of] marriageable women over marriageable men”—led to a conviction that “moral values” have been “revers[ed].” Women didn't want to hear about devotion and domestic security. “[They] long to be told that escape from dullness is possible and one of the main avenues of escape … is
un
true love,” said Evans.