Just One Catch (30 page)

He highlighted structure (music, rhythm, repetition), violated chronology, and played with language, making puns and setting up sophisticated verbal ironies (swift shifts in register from the comic to the tragic). Joe's first breakthrough of this sort had come in “Castle of Snow,” with its retrospective narrator. The possibilities for tonal nuance were broad when placed in the voice of someone speaking through clashing emotions, repression, and misunderstandings.

In “Castle of Snow,” the narrator recorded “history.” In Joe's developing work, reporting gave way to performance—thus, the freer, longer sentences, the deliberate inconsistencies of tone, the indulgence in humor. Joe's weakness—his relative lack of detail—was no longer an issue. The energy came not from descriptions, but from gleeful mental leaps (“He had seen reverends and rabbis … Once he had even seen a justification…”).

Joe's old fear that his war experiences were not enough meat for a novel—or that the moment for World War II fiction had passed—no longer mattered. War was not his primary subject. It was a pretext for verbal pyrotechnics and social critique (the extent of which would not be apparent until the novel appeared, years later).

He had been liberated by his evolving conviction that “literature, except for a brief period in recent history—and that was a really brief period—has never been realistic. Starting with the Greeks and moving through the Renaissance to the present, there seems to me only a period of twenty or thirty years in which realistic literature was strong. ‘Realism' began in the nineteenth century … [and started] trailing off [around] World War II.… Apart from that time, literature has always been larger than life, romantic, imaginative. And this impulse of writers is, I think, essentially sound.”

Furthermore, he insisted, “[A]ny writer who doesn't regard his work, his writing, as being a form of art, comparable, let's say, to architecture, painting, or sculpture, is probably not serious. There must be attention given to form.… The writer must figure out the form a specific work needs to take.”

These beliefs, and their freeing effects, had resulted from the reading he had done. A reader of “Catch-18” who had known Joe's earlier stories could probably not identify his new influences.
The Good Soldier Schweik
was not well known in the United States; besides, the novel's deflationary humor (“Schweik … intervened in the World War in that pleasant, amiable manner which was so peculiarly his”—that is, by utter accident) was a staple now of the Jewish humor on nightly television shows. The echoes of Céline in Joe's prose would not be fully heard until
Catch-22.

Joe was a better reader now, as well as being a better writer. He did not just imitate his new models. In a sense, his earlier stories were reflections on reading: what it meant to absorb Hemingway or William Saroyan. By contrast, “Catch-18” pulsed with antic high energy—the rhythms of Joe's metabolism, mental and physical. It had a tone all its own: not the grumbling misanthropy of Céline, but the lighthearted skepticism of Joe Heller. And beneath the wordplay, it had the gravity of lived experience. The kindly Texan who drove everyone crazy was every other pilot Joe had met at Goodfellow Field. The notion of writing about a chaplain (the freedom to do so) may have been suggested by the character of the military chaplain in
The Good Soldier Schweik.
But the boy in “Catch-18,” with his “smooth tan hair and brown, uncomfortable eyes … [his] innocent nest of ancient pimple pricks … in the basin of each cheek,” was clearly based on the shy, pimple-faced chaplain of the 340th Bombardment Group, James H. Cooper. Most importantly, the sense of being trapped in a system that could not withstand scrutiny, and the attempt to survive with a certain brand of verbal humor, was entirely Joe's—though, again, the idea of exploring it (the
permission
to do so, the examples that said, It's okay to write about this) came to him from Kafka, Waugh, and Nabokov.

Someone who had followed Joseph Heller's career from his first appearances in
Esquire
and
The Atlantic Monthly
to the appearance, now, of “Catch-18” would certainly have been baffled and surprised by the change in his work. The reasons for the change, and the paths to it—the intensive study, the confronting of doubts, the hard, slow work—would not be readily apparent. What
would
be obvious were Joe's rejection of straightforward narrative structure and the crimped, simple style of the previous decade's magazine fiction. Moreover, a discerning reader would see how shifts in structure and style indicated a more fundamental change, a radical new view of the subjects at hand: war, faith, heroism, and language. As the writer Pete Hamill would say many years later, “Joseph Heller … did more to debunk the Hemingway myth than any critic.” Already, with “Catch-18,” this movement toward a fresh American fiction was clear.

*   *   *

A YEAR WOULD PASS
before Joe finished drafting a second chapter of his novel. He was working for
Time
now. At home and at work, the index cards piled up. Very early, Joe imagined most of the major characters in the novel, and devoted cards to them, with detailed notes about their backgrounds, characteristics, and fates. He outlined each potential chapter, and studiously cataloged each mission he had flown during the war, intending to use the missions as structural elements in the story.

“Joe started talking [to me] about [this] novel he was writing,” Frederick Karl recalled. “It was hard to grasp what it was because he seemed more concerned with filing, sorting, indexing than with writing.”

Dolores agreed. “We used to tease him that he was creating a filing system, not writing a novel. He had drawers and drawers full of file cards. He was very organized.” In her various part-time clerical jobs downtown, Dolores encountered early versions of computers. Her descriptions of them fascinated Joe. He “wanted to discuss what she did and how it all worked,” Frederick Karl said. “Somehow, this was connected to his novel, whatever that was.”

In
Catch-22,
IBM punch cards are emblematic of a failed bureaucracy, in the messes they create (they are anachronistic, as well, signaling Joe's swerve from literary realism and adding to the story's absurdity).

“The novel began to assume primary importance” in Joe's life, Karl said. “Amidst all the … sorting and indexing [of the] file cards, something was emerging.”

Ideas rejected. Structure shuffled. Small changes: eventually, a character named Aarky was re-christened Aarfy. Bigger changes: the entrepreneurial soldier, Milo Minderbinder, “exposed” as a ruthless, moneymaking crook in an early vision of the novel, developed into a more nuanced figure, amoral rather than simply villainous. Metaphysical considerations: “Yossarian is dying, true, but he has about 35 years to live.” How thick to make the irony? “[Yossarian] really does have liver trouble. Condition is malignant & would have killed him if it had not been discovered”—a thought soon tossed.

“Big Brother has been watching Yossarian,” said one card: a controlling idea that remains implicit, rather than explicit, in the final product. Joe axed a potential narrative thread in which Yossarian and Dunbar try to write a parody of a Hemingway war novel.

Joe always knew Snowden's death, on the mission to Avignon, would be the novel's central scene, and that it would be glimpsed in fragments until its full horror was finally revealed.

Also, early on, he developed the catch. In
New World Writing,
“Catch-18” is a regulation about censoring letters. With his index cards, Joe began to shade the idea into something grand enough to support a novel thematically. One card read, “Anyone who wants to be grounded can't be crazy.”

In addition to honing themes, Joe polished his expressions of them. An early note had Yossarian “fight[ing] for [his] identity without sacrificing moral responsibility.” Subsequent notes refined the wording, and thus the idea, complicating it: In the finished novel, Yossarian says, “I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them.”

*   *   *

“WE DISCUSSED
his novel-in-the-making,” said Frederick Karl, “until one day Joe pushed about seventy pages on me and wondered if I would read it. He didn't insist but I felt obliged.” (Earlier, Joe had read the manuscript of a war novel Karl had drafted. It was called
The Quest,
and Joe told his friend honestly that he didn't think it was very good and that he should stick to literary criticism.) Joe's novel was “then called
Catch-18.
What I read was stream-of-consciousness, Joycean, [an] interrupted and free-associational narrative, if one could even find the narrative. It was arty, crafty, and difficult. In some ways, brilliant—inconceivable as a trade book, something that perhaps [the avant-garde publisher] New Directions might be interested in. It was almost incoherent, but the academic in me experienced a thrill. Joe's story line, such as it was, was [full of] experimentation with language. I saw something exciting there, told Joe, and also told him no one would read it.”

Candida Donadio was getting similar reactions from editors and publishers. Joe packaged a thirty-nine page episode called “Hungry Joe,” which she sent to Arabel Porter for another issue of
New World Writing.
Porter rejected it, though she asked, “Has he finished the novel, and if so, may we see it?”

Rust Hills,
Esquire
's fiction editor, refused the same excerpt: “Too many loose ends,” he said. However, he found parts of it “quite funny,” and said, “If Heller wants to work any more on this, I guarantee him a sympathetic reading here; but, at this point, that is all I can guarantee him.” The manuscript Donadio sent
Esquire
was terribly sloppy, which didn't help. It was shot through with scribbles and penciled changes in Joe's hand. The first line—typed—read, “Hungry Joe had fifty missions, but it did him no good at all.” This was crossed out and replaced with a longhand sentence: “Hungry Joe had finished flying fifty combat missions and was waiting to go home, but that did him no good at all.” Lack of confidence and frequent loss of control screamed from every page. Donadio's dissemination of an unclean copy spoke of her blind loyalty to—and belief in—Joe, a trait she exhibited with all her clients.

Joe kept fiddling with the cards. “[Advertising work] helped me write
Catch-22,
” he told radio interviewer Don Swaim many years later. The novel was full of “[sudden] transitions and unexpected introductions [of material] … the unpredictable … [so] I felt there was a similarity between writing
Catch-22
and the work I was called upon to do in the daytime. What promotion and advertising is supposed to do, if it's done well—it should [have] some catchy, snappy, unexpected opening. I would bring as much imagination and intelligence … [to] my daily work … as I would to
Catch-22
in the evening.”

He strove for greater precision, clarity, punch. The basics: more action verbs, no ambiguous pronouns, fewer adjectives and adverbs; drop the coyness: A “modest maiden” became a “prostitute in Rome.”

*   *   *

ON SOME WEEKENDS
, Joe took a break from the novel and went to Coney Island to visit his mother. Lena was not in good health. A strangulated hernia had led to emergency surgery. Doctors discovered she was diabetic. Severely weakened after the operation, she decided she could no longer live on her own. She left the old apartment and moved into the Hebrew Home for the Aged on West Twenty-ninth Street at the boardwalk. The home had once been the grand Half Moon Hotel, the construction of which Joe had watched as a kid.

Now, Lena whiled away her hours in the peeling old structure, which Joe found “somber … an apt symbol for the … faltering Island itself, which had certainly seen more vital days.” He felt guilty for not asking her to move into the Apthorp with his family, but he didn't have room (or, truth to tell, time and patience to care for her). Sylvia and Lee also rented cramped apartments, and worked hard each day. Lena knew it wasn't possible to live with one of them, “didn't expect it to happen, and … didn't ask.” Not for the first time, Joe regretted—but with some relief—that his “family … did not … talk about sad things.”

*   *   *

LIKE HIS BROTHER AND SISTER
, many of Joe's friends were beginning to make the move from Coney Island. Development in Levittown, on Long Island, on what had once been rolling farmland, drew young families with promises of cheap housing, modest down payments, and low-interest financing. Escape to the suburbs signaled a desire for betterment (or so the advertisers claimed). Lou Berkman had moved his plumbing business to Middletown, New York. Beansy Winkler had relocated to Ocean Parkway.

Certain areas of Brooklyn, particularly Brownsville, remained largely unchanged, at least for a while, but the toughness of that neighborhood—the poverty, gangs, and anti-Semitism (despite large Orthodox Jewish populations)—developed a resilience of character in some people that drove them toward “betterment” in wealthy, optimistic postwar America. Their drive was beginning to alter popular culture, and Joe would soon know many of the people responsible for the changes.

Daniel Kaminsky, later known as Danny Kaye, was a Brownsville product. He migrated to the Catskills, refined his showbiz chops in resort hotels, and took those talents to the new medium of television (where people like Norman Barasch, soon to be Joe's good friend, wrote for him). Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, and Phil Silvers came from Brownsville. So did Jerry Lewis, Jerry Stiller, and Alfred Kazin.

In Brownsville, two teenaged friends, Eli Katz and Norman Podhoretz, drew a comic strip together called “Night Hawk.” As an adult, Katz changed his name to Gil Kane and created the comic-book heroes the Atom and the Green Lantern. Podhoretz would edit
Commentary
and become a leading figure in the neoconservative political movement (over which he and Joe would have a severe falling-out). “America's junk culture can be found in superhero comic books, its high culture in magazines such as …
Commentary,
” observes the writer Jeet Heer. Yet “comics and intellectual journals are often created by remarkably similar people.” Podhoretz and Kane “were both following common patterns of their generation. Like so many other immigrant Jews, they were benefiting from the opening up of American culture that started in the 1920s and accelerated after the Second World War.… [In particular] the cultural industries … became open to outsiders, whether they were intellectuals or cartoonists.… Having made the difficult journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan, they were ready to enjoy the full blessings of American success.”