Just One Catch (35 page)

The image would soon become iconic: a cartoonlike red cutout of a soldier dancing, arms raised (or engaging in a grotesque parody of a march). It was Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton rolled into one. The new pub date was set for October 1961, in time for the Christmas marketing season.

The stress of writing the novel, as well as consuming “all that expense-account food and booze” while working for
Time
and
McCall's,
Joe said, put fifty pounds on his once-thin frame. Some of his colleagues took to calling him “the Locust.” “Whatever was there I'd eat it,” he said. He still bit his nails.

His daughter believes that sometime in the summer of 1961, Shirley took the kids to a small motel in Pennsylvania, leaving Joe alone to attend to last-minute book business. “[I remember] my mother, brother, and I stayed at this motel … right on the highway, Uncle Morris' Motel (it was called that—he wasn't
our
uncle),” Erica says. “Dad … would come up there on the weekends and because my mother didn't know how to drive, we were pretty much stuck at this grim little place. There was a diner right across the highway.… ‘Travelin' Man' by Ricky Nelson was always playing on the jukebox.… We'd have all our meals there and the rest of the time we'd just pretty much be in the motel pool.… I can't imagine … how on earth we ever found this place or why it was chosen.”

While reading the
Catch
galley sheets, Joe had to write scripts for “dog and pony shows” at
McCall's
—national presentations to advertising agencies and prospective clients. Travel expenses associated with these presentations often went as high as ninety thousand dollars. Joe prepared flip charts and slide shows. He put together direct-mailing packets. His associates felt he had a “fantastic sense of the trends of the times and what was important to the people buying.”

That year, at
McCall's
annual sales convention in Nassau, Joe's slide show, “The Pages That Sell,” took center stage. His colleagues had taken a plane to the festivities. Joe still didn't fly. He'd booked passage on a boat. While his fellow conventioneers boozed it up in the bars, Joe sat on the beach, reading his galleys. One of his colleagues, Tom Buck, tried to talk him into flying back with the group. Buck, a big, gruff, friendly man with a passion for JFK, had been a barnstormer for a flying circus in the Depression years, and he spoke of the glories of flight. Joe took one look at his artificial leg—Buck had been injured in a plane crash in 1946, dropping two thousand feet into a field in Delaware—and said he'd stick with the boat. Buck laughed. “He was a self-made man and unable to hide it,” Joe said of him.

Joe's advertising buddies saw him the same way. He was a great adman, but something else was on his mind. Some days he would walk into the office and announce he was “just going to brood and not work.” One colleague said, “Joe worked [hard] on his … escape” from the “bureaucracy.”

His escape seemed perpetually threatened. One day, he got a call from Gottlieb, who said the title “Catch-18” would have to go. Leon Uris was preparing to release a novel called
Mila 18,
all about the Nazi occupation of Poland (Uris's title was taken from the designation for the headquarters of a Jewish resistance fighters' bunker in Warsaw). Uris was a well-known writer—
Exodus
had been a huge bestseller; two novels with the number 18 in the title would clash in the marketplace, and Heller, the unknown, was bound to get the short end of the deal.

The number had always been arbitrary, part of the joke about military rules. Still, Joe, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne had long thought of the book as “Catch-18,” and it was difficult to conceive of calling it anything else. “[W]e were all in despair,” Gottlieb said. In his office, he and Joe sat opposite each other, spitting out numbers like two spies speaking in code. Joe liked the sound of “Catch-11”: hard consonants followed by vowels, opening up the mouth. Gottlieb thought there were too many syllables. Besides, it was too close to the new Frank Sinatra movie,
Oceans Eleven.
They agreed to sleep on the question of a title and try again later.

On January 29, 1961, Joe sent Gottlieb a note, bringing to bear all his adman persuasion: “The name of the book is now CATCH-14. (Forty-eight hours after you resign yourself to the change, you'll find yourself almost preferring this new number. It has the same bland and nondescript significance of the original. It is far enough away from Uris for the book to establish an identity of its own, I believe, yet close enough to the original title to still benefit from the word of mouth publicity we have been giving it.)”

Gottlieb wasn't sold.

In the meantime, Simon & Schuster's lawyers had been reviewing the galleys. They worried that Joe's old war buddies might recognize themselves in his descriptions and decide to seek damages. In part, this fear reflected changes in the publishing industry. In the past, books had been a luxury item. Most publishing firms had been owned by individuals or families, often with little capital invested up front. The business was as much about shaping culture as it was about making a profit. The audience for books was relatively small, but it was an educated and loyal one. Now, the mass-market paperback, distributed like magazines on newsstands, in bus stations, and drugstores, had created a whole new readership. Big profits were possible. Publishing was no longer a “gentleman's” venture, as the old-school owners liked to think of it. Michael Korda says that when “Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer took Random House public at $11.25 a share” in October 1959, they set off a “boom in publishing stocks that quickly drew other companies, including S & S, into the stock market.” The Random House stock rose almost three dollars a share in a twenty-four-hour period, and it soon sold for forty-five dollars. Publishing became the “darling of Wall Street,” and books would never be the same. The business was sharp, it was competitive, and it carried liabilities. The S & S lawyers asked Joe to detail how much of his book was based on fact.

Joe responded, accurately, that the people, places, and events in his novel were “extensions of the possible into the fantastic.” For example, it is “fantastic” that an American would arrange, for business purposes, an attack on his own air base, as Milo Minderbinder does. But Joe was clearly recalling the surprise German air raid on Corsica just before he arrived at the base there. The raid had included “friendly” planes painted with British markings. The fantastic was one step away from the possible.

With regard to specific characters in the book, he said:

My group commanding officer in Corsica was a colonel named Chapman who was similar in build to [the fictional] Colonel Cathcart and also smoked with a cigarette holder. Along with other group commanders in the Mediterranean, I'm sure, he kept inching up the number of missions the men in his unit had to fly, as the missions tended to grow less dangerous. It is in the last circumstance that the major dramatic conflict of the novel arises, although beyond these similarities I've listed, all resemblance ends.

Every military unit of any size, I would guess, had a chaplain.… If memory serves me correctly, [our chaplain] was of slight physique and light complexion. Other than that, I know not another thing about him; we did have a captain named Myers who was called by some men by the nickname Chief”; [o]ur flight surgeon was a man from Brooklyn named Marino, and he was as helpful and sympathetic as could be. Like [the fictional] Daneeka, he was a slight, dark man. Apart from the fact that people did go to him to complain about the increases in the number of missions—as the[y] did to all the flight surgeons in the group—he bears no additional resemblance to Doc Daneeka.

[With Milo Minderbinder] we may be a little close even for my comfort, both because of a slight similarity in names and because of the activities and opportunities common to all mess officers. The name of my mess officer was, believe it or not, Mauno Lindholm. Like other mess officers on Corsica, he had a certain amount of money at his disposal to purchase fresh provisions from local sources. He flew to other places regularly for fresh eggs, meat, and vegetables. Whether he used his position and resources to make money in the black market is his own secret; there was no reason to believe he did not, and much reason to believe he did.

[T]here was in my squadron a bombardier named Yohannon who was called by the nickname “Yo-Yo.” In no other respects was he like Yossarian, whose actions are based more on my own attitudes and experiences than anybody else's.

Joe's experiences, barely fictionalized in the novel, included the encounter with Luciana in Rome and virtually every mission listed.

He concluded:

I should point out that the action of the book took place seventeen years ago, that I have no personal grievances against anyone involved in my military experiences, and that there is genuinely no attempt to embarrass or disparage any of the people I met in the army. I either liked them enormously or was indifferent to them. Keep in mind that … I made absolutely no impression on most of the people in my squadron, and none on any of the people at Group, and that, with a few exceptions, nobody was aware even at that time that a Joe Heller was serving among them, or would know it now.

He said he would prefer to “leave the book as it is.” If changes were necessary to avoid possible legal actions, switching the location from Corsica to the “island of Pianosa” and “possibly … calling the B-25 planes B-22's, ought to be sufficient.” The lawyers seemed satisfied (the B-25s would remain).

Candida Donadio took credit for retitling the book. “22 was chosen as a substitute because October 22 was [my] birthday,” she said.

“Absolutely untrue,” Gottlieb said later. “I remember it totally, because it was in the middle of the night. I remember Joe came up with some number and I said, ‘No, it's not funny,' which is ridiculous, because no number is intrinsically funny.… And then I was lying in bed worrying about it one night, and I suddenly had this revelation. And I called him the next morning and said, ‘I've got the perfect number. Twenty-two, it's funnier than eighteen.' I remember those words being spoken.… He said, ‘Yes, it's great, it's great.' And we called Candida and told her.”

Joe's suggestion that the bombers be called B-22s may have put the number in Gottlieb's mind. In any case, the number fit the story because of the novel's doubling structure: the constant linguistic repetitions, the instances of déjà vu, the repeated actions, the endless missions, and the concept of an inescapable loop.

The adman in Joe could not resist offering to the S & S marketing department “[s]uggested descriptive copy fragments for use on jacket, publicity releases, in conversation, etc.” The “fragments” included the following lines: “[
Catch-22
is] the story of a man who deserts from a society that will not allow him to live with safety and dignity”; “[it is a] modern allegory of immorality in which war is not merely horrible, but ridiculous, and brutality, vanity, and greed are not merely deplorable, but silly”; “[it is] a vivid, moving demonstration that man at his most virtuous is really not much better than man at his most immoral; that people at their most logical are no more intelligent than people at their most absurd”; “Packed with boisterous action and originality,
Catch-22
takes an uninhibited look at all those principles and institutions we have been taught to revere—and finds each one laughable. And as a consequence,
Catch-22
is perhaps as tragic a novel as has ever been written.”

Finally, the revisions were done. The legal worries had been resolved. The fall book season had arrived.
Catch-22
was about to be launched.

*   *   *

ONE DAY IN MIDTOWN,
a young man named Sam Vaughan agreed to share a cab with another man who was traveling in roughly the same direction. In the backseat of the cab, the men fell into conversation. Vaughan said he worked as an editor at a publishing house. The other man did, too. His name was Bob Gottlieb. After a moment's silence, Gottlieb turned to Vaughan and said, “Tell me about popular fiction. I really don't understand it.”

“That's some catch, that Catch-22,” [Yossarian] observed.

“It's the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.…

Catch-22 … specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. [A bombardier] was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. [A bombardier] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of … Catch-22.

Now in common usage, the term
catch-22
—an insoluble paradox, usually bureaucratic or legalistic in nature—has its roots in
yes
and
no,
and the recognition that there is often no difference between them. One is meaningless without the other, as
day
exists in opposition to
night.
That every
yes
has a
no
constituted Joe Heller's deepest knowledge and experience of the world: It was in the language he heard every day as a kid—the worrying complaint of “What, me worry?” at the core of so many Yiddishisms and Jewish jokes—and it was in his family story, when his brother became
not
his brother, his sister
not
his sister. It was in his immediate surroundings, the dirty and desperate “Funny Place” of his childhood. It was in his dreams of the future, when Lee brought him catalogs for schools he would never be able to attend. It was in his most primitive appetites—the conflict he felt in the social clubs between wanting to protect girls from “fast” boys, or to be one of the boys pulling girls into dark back rooms. It was in his military service, when his superiors (those with a “genius for ineptitude”) told him the danger he was exposed to was nothing personal, and therefore acceptable.