Just One Catch (24 page)

In little over a decade, Joe would know all the writers in Caesar's stable: Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and—in an especially close friendship—Mel Brooks, who cut his teeth in the Jewish Alps. Norman Barasch, another television scriptwriter friendly with Joe, explained, “You look at the number of Jewish comedy writers of that generation—Simon, Gelbart, Brooks—and it's more than a coincidence. Their humor came about as the result of the social situation they found themselves in growing up. There was no money. It was very anti-Semitic. When your childhood is not very pleasant, you turn to whatever you can, which in our cases was comedy. Joe was in the same position. Plus, he had an iconoclastic, antiauthoritarian makeup to his character anyway.”

Joe was amazed to see mocking, self-deprecatory, antiauthoritarian Yiddish humor slipping into the consciousness of millions of Americans far removed from the urban East Coast. And he appreciated the way Caesar's writers based most of their comedy on banal situations, following the logistics of the circumstances to absurd extremes. This fidelity to logic kept the skits truthful, even at their wildest. Frederick Karl praised a similar principle in the works of his beloved Franz Kafka. Once you accepted
The Metamorphosis
's premise—that a man could be turned into a giant vermin—the story unfolded with rigorous plausibility, he said: All events were the inevitable consequences of what had come before.

Joe was too restless to sit and watch television for long periods. The medium interested him sociologically but didn't stimulate his intellect. He preferred to read. Of the Kafka books Karl recommended to him, Joe seized most fervently on
The Trial.
He recognized, in a hapless man's conflict with a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, a bit of his military experience—the continual upping of the mission count as a flier was about to complete his duty.

Furthermore, “the idea of being charged with something and not knowing what it is, and being judged guilty … [the authorities acting] sure [you] must have committed some crime because everybody's committed some crime,” reminded him, he said, of something else he had seen on television, though logical and humorous it most certainly was not: a report on the hearings of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, as well as the Tydings Committee's investigation of Joe McCarthy's charges that “persons who are disloyal to the United States are … employed by the Department of State.”

The more Joe thought about Kafka, the more he thought Kafka's attitude, his use of anxiety and mystification, was appropriate to America now.

Joe took other books from Karl, and read randomly, but with increasing discrimination, on his own. Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!
had a “structure” he admired, an “epic feeling,” he said. He reread Nathanael West, more appreciative from a distance of the way West transformed California's grimness into truthful absurdity (à la Kafka). In the same week, he read Louis-Ferdinand Céline's
Journey to the End of the Night
and Vladimir Nabokov's
Laughter in the Dark.
He was bowled over by Céline's “slangy use of prose and the continuity that is relaxed and vague rather than precise and motivated,” he said. In Nabokov, he admired the “flippant approach to situations which were filled with anguish and grief and tragedy,” the “blending of the comic and tragic.”

He no longer wanted to think about the short stories he had published. He was learning new ways of approaching fiction. He wanted to manipulate time, structure, and colloquial speech the way Céline did, but he wasn't sure he could. Besides, what did he want to say? And about what?

*   *   *

A BRIEF NOTICE
in Leonard Lyons's syndicated gossip column, “The Lyons Den,” on November 16, 1954, revealed that Joe's typewriter was not entirely idle while he taught at Penn State. Lyons reported, “Robert Anderson, author of ‘Tea and Sympathy,' and his agent-wife, are being sued over the play by Bob Mason and Joe Heller, former teachers at the Univ. of Pa [
sic
]. They don't claim plagiarism, but a breach of ‘fiduciary relationship.'”

This was the first, but certainly not the last, time Joe Heller's name popped up in a newspaper gossip column.

Robert Anderson, who would write several plays, including
I Never Sang for My Father,
as well as the screenplays for
The Sand Pebbles
and
The Nun's Story,
got a glorious start on Broadway with
Tea and Sympathy,
the story of an artistic boy shunned by his prep school classmates on suspicion of being homosexual. Reviewing the production in the
New York Times,
the esteemed critic Brooks Atkinson said that
Tea and Sympathy
“restores our theater to an art again with a fine play … [of] great skill and beauty.”

Anderson's wife, Phyllis Stohl, was a director and literary agent. Bob Mason, who lives now in Washington, D.C., maintains that Anderson swiped the screenplay he and Joe wrote in Pennsylvania. “Joe said that, in New York [while on a holiday break from teaching], he'd met someone from Hollywood who was trying to find a role for an adolescent boy struggling to come into manhood. So Joe concluded that maybe we had a chance at something if we worked on this play. We'd meet in my apartment or his house,” Mason says. They submitted the script to Stohl, who pitched it to Otto Preminger. “He invited us to the St. Regis Hotel in New York, where he was staying,” Mason says. “We met for four hours. Preminger was really taken with the play. This was on a Friday. He said, ‘Okay, Phyllis, send me the contracts on Monday. When Joe and I left, we were just walking on air. But nothing happened.”

Next thing Mason knew, Stohl's husband was being praised for having written what was essentially
their
play. “We hired an eminent lawyer, Rudolph Halley, on a contingency basis,” he says. “None of us had any dough. He did everything he could. Interviewed everyone. Preminger said he didn't remember the meeting with us, because he had so many meetings, but he said, ‘The way Heller and Mason describe things sounds like the way I work.' We finally gave up because we heard Phyllis was dying of cancer, and the Andersons had moved the money around, somehow, so the best person to sue wouldn't really have access to it.” Stohl died in 1956, and Anderson passed away in 2009.

Curiously, when asked by the
New York Times
about
Tea and Sympathy
in a wide-ranging interview in 2004, the playwright and director Arthur Laurents would only mutter, “That play is a fraud.”

The most famous line in the drama occurs at the end. The wife of the housemaster at the prep school—played by Deborah Kerr, in 1953, in her Broadway debut (the same year as her appearance in the film version of
From Here to Eternity
)—befriends the ostracized boy, to the ultimate ruin of her marriage. Pulling the boy into her arms, she says, “Years from now when you talk about this, and you will, be kind.”

*   *   *

SENATOR JOSEPH R. MCCARTHY
resembled a praying mantis whenever he opened his mouth (especially on a washed-out, jumpy television screen): a mandibled creature, eating its own. In the marines, during the war, he had flown twelve combat missions as a gunner-observer—hence, his self-given nickname, “Tail-Gunner Joe,” and his campaign slogan, “Congress needs a tail-gunner.” It turned out that he had falsely inflated his combat record, claiming thirty-two missions instead of twelve, in order to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross.

His unremarkable Senate career got a boost on February 9, 1950, when he told a Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that the “State Department is infested with Communists.” Over the next four years, his reckless (and never-substantiated) charges against Jewish professionals in show business, and against hundreds of government employees, including Harry Truman's secretary of defense, George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan (and, McCarthy said, part of a “conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man”), spawned Senate hearings, vigorous debates in the media, and considerable domestic turmoil.

Joe was disgusted by the senator's antics, but he recognized that McCarthy was merely exploiting a national mood. If there had been no Joe McCarthy, the period would still be known for its “Red scares.”

One night on the Penn State campus, a faculty member gave a speech denouncing McCarthy for his “career destruction of mere Communist suspects.” He was preaching to the choir. The audience nodded agreeably.

George Mandel happened to be visiting Joe at the time, and they had gone to hear the speech together. “With reflexes attuned to Joe since high school days … I sank down [in my chair] as soon as he raised his hand,” Mandel recalled. Joe “called across the auditorium to ask if
actual
Communists could justifiably be ruined.” The speaker, flustered, “pharumph-phumped,” Mandel said, and “side-stepped into the wings.” Audience members turned to Joe, wide-eyed. After all, the speech maker was a well-respected, tenured member of the college community. Joe was just a neophyte English lecturer.

Mandel told Joe he had been working on a novel, all about the jazz scene in Greenwich Village. This news unsettled Joe, and intensified his feeling that he was wasting his days here in the “boondocks,” cut off from the sources of his creative energy. Clearly, New York was feeding his old friend, who seemed to be faring well after his war wound, though occasionally he suffered a mild seizure. He and Joe reminisced about Coney Island—theirs had been a Jewish neighborhood without any “Jewish hang-ups,” Mandel said wistfully—and Joe felt even more homesick.

He decided he was falling farther off the planet when James Jones's
From Here to Eternity
appeared just as Joe was beginning his second year as a composition instructor. Jones and Joe had come out of the literary starting gate at about the same time, three years ago, with stories in the same issue of
The Atlantic Monthly.
With this immense new war novel, Jones had pulled ahead. He had even outdone Norman Mailer (Mailer said Jones was the “only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself.”).

Okay, Joe thought. This was not Santa Anita, after all. Writing was not horse racing. But it was hard not to feel a
little
jealous while admiring Jones's achievement. “[At the time,] I could not see myself spending more than two years writing a novel. If I wrote a novel, I wanted to finish it quickly and have it published quickly,” Joe recalled. “So I had written thirty, forty, fifty pages of [a] novel, and then I read
From Here to Eternity
.… I said, ‘No chance of that.' … I did not have the vocabulary. I didn't have the patience. I didn't have the knowledge. I didn't have the talent. I didn't have the intensity or the interest that any respectable novelist would have in order to go to work [, so] I threw those pages away.… [I figured] there was nothing I could add to war literature that was not in
From Here to Eternity
and had not been produced before by Norman Mailer and … John Horne Burns.”

From Here to Eternity
followed a reluctant hero, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, as he tried to establish an individual code of honor in a world gone awry, moving through a devotion to art (playing the bugle), fidelity to war (boxing), and attempts to escape mass organization. Like
The Naked and the Dead,
Jones's novel was faithful to naturalism (that is, the triumph of fate over character). It proclaimed a proletarian social outlook (Prewitt was the son of a coal miner, at the mercy of one financially based injustice after another). But what distinguished it from Popular Front screeds and Mailer's book was Jones's refusal to indulge in either unearned optimism or easy cynicism. If, spiritually,
The Naked and the Dead
was the last great American novel of the 1930s,
From Here to Eternity
was the postwar era's most eloquent elegy for the world it would bury.

Joe found some consolation in the fact that his recent reading of Céline, Nabokov, and Kafka had kindled his interest in styles and techniques other than realism. More than that, he had come to believe
he
was not a literary realist. This was akin to admitting to Joe McCarthy he was not a true American.

He may have fallen behind his contemporaries, but if he ever managed to pull something together, it was going to look different from anything that had ever been published in the United States.

Adding to Joe's present discomfort was the fact that his Kafka pipeline had disappeared: Frederick Karl, and his young bride, Dolores, had left State College and moved to Manhattan, where Karl had gotten a job in the English Department at the City College of New York.

Joe slogged through another year of boring courses with bored students, taking the train to see Shirley in New York on the weekends. At around this time, according to Barbara Gelb, Joe “calculated that his life was half over, and began to fear he had no future.” The current arrangement could not continue—especially once Shirley learned she was pregnant.

In the spring of 1952, Joe began to apply for jobs in New York. Since he did not hold a Ph.D. degree, a plum academic job in Manhattan was probably not feasible. Besides, for now, he had had enough of teaching. On May 27, he wrote to Professor Gates, requesting a leave of absence for the academic year 1952–1953. “I have the opportunity at this time to secure a position in the publishing field, and it is my intention to spend the year acquiring professional experience in editorial work.” Nothing suggests he had any editorial opportunities; he used this as an excuse to secure a leave. He had no thought of returning, under any circumstances.