Just One Catch (37 page)

At work each day, Joe endured the ribbing of colleagues who said he must have found the manuscript under a rock or something.
He
couldn't have written it. Who was he kidding? Maybe you wrote a
few
of those jokes, but not the whole book. He said he'd treat people to lunch if they'd check the book's sales at nearby stores, and he chided friends who bought the novel on discount at places like Korvette.

Joe made regular trips to Coney Island's Hebrew Home for the Aged to sit with his mother. They exchanged few words. She was frail, moving in and out of lucidity. When she
did
try to speak, she would stutter or lose her train of thought, then smile at him apologetically, almost whimsically. Together, they listened to the waves on the beach below: regular sighs like openmouthed breaths. He helped her sip water from a plastic cup, fed her fragments of whitefish or soft pieces of sweet candy. He noticed stiff gray hairs sprouting from her cheeks and chin—her arthritic fingers were too twisted for tweezers now—and chastised himself for the revulsion he felt. Leaving was always a relief, but then on the subway he'd brood that he was an unfeeling, uncaring man—had he ever really cared for anyone? How could he be so cold? On the other hand,
wouldn't
it be better for everyone, including Lena, if she just slipped away quietly, quickly? How long could this go on?

Often at night, after these visits, he'd dream he was a boy and his mother was going away somewhere, leaving him behind, and he'd yell out to her with the most agonizing yearning. He'd wake with tears in his eyes. And then he'd be back at the home, feeding fish to his mother, resenting the cold, greasy texture of the food on his fingers, and the thick slipperiness of her saliva. He'd whisper, “There, there” and “Everything's okay,” feeling just as silly as when he'd muttered these trifles to the kid in the plane over Avignon all those years ago.

In clear moments, Lena heard the no in his yeses just as well as he did; he understood this. Words had always been a barrier between them: her refusal to master English, his growing comprehension that meanings (
brother, sister
) were never really fixed. During these bedside vigils, he had been thinking it was a shame she could not appreciate or grasp his success with
Catch-22,
but she
did
understand. She was the source. Mother: insoluble paradox.

In years to come, Joe would grow fascinated with clinical definitions of schizophrenia, and theories tying it to family communication problems. According to one idea, schizophrenia results when there is: “1) Involvement in an intense relationship where accurate discrimination of the message has vital importance for the individual; 2) The other person expresses two orders and one of these denies the other; 3) The individual cannot react to the contradictory messages.”

In developing themes for his second novel, Joe would work consciously with the concept of schizophrenia, but this first book had plenty of examples of it. Western culture seemed rooted in the pathology.

No. Lena didn't need to know about
Catch-22.
She had
lived
it as an immigrant, wife, and mother.

Besides, Joe wasn't sure how successful he was going to be—or what success even meant. There was a catch in Francis Brown's efforts to find a young, “with it” reviewer for Joe's book: The man he tapped, Richard Stern, thought himself an up-and-coming black humorist, for whom
Catch-22
was serious competition.

On October 22, 1961, Stern wrote, on page 50 of the
New York Times Book Review,
“[T]he book is no novel.… Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.… The book is an emotional hodgepodge.”

Frederick Karl claimed Joe “was not dismayed” by this review, but Joe could quote it bitterly, word for word, three decades later. “I didn't think [my family and I] would ever smile again,” he told David Straitfeld of
New York
magazine. Alice Denham recalled Joe as being exceedingly glum after the review. One day, he stopped by her apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street. She offered him a drink. “We thought we had the fix in,” he told her. “A bad joke.” He looked tired. He admitted, “I thought—now, don't laugh—I might be able to quit work and write full-time. That I'd make enough.…”

The better news was that more of the readers Bourne had courted popped up with favorable comments, including S. J. Perelman, who lauded the book's humor (and who would be instrumental in securing Joe a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in 1963). Harper Lee said, “
Catch-22
is the only war novel I've ever read that makes any sense.” Gottlieb and Bourne bought ad space in the
Times
to trumpet this praise.

On November 4, Nelson Algren wrote in
The Nation
:

Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts,
Catch-22
is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II.
The Naked and the Dead
and
From Here to Eternity
are lost within it. That the horror and the hypocrisy, the greed and the complacency, the endless cunning and the endless stupidity which now go to constitute what we term Christianity are dealt with here in absolutes, does not lessen the truth of its repudiation.… [T]his novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.

Within twelve months, Norman Mailer, slow to acknowledge other novelists, would grudgingly admit, “
Catch-22
is the debut of a writer with merry gifts.”

*   *   *

BY THANKSGIVING
, nearly twelve thousand copies had sold—respectable, but not over the top. That fall, the bestsellers included Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
(in its eighteenth printing, just one year after its release), J. D. Salinger's
Franny and Zooey,
John Steinbeck's
The Winter of Our Discontent,
Irving Stone's
The Agony and the Ecstasy,
Harold Robbins's
The Carpetbaggers,
and, predictably, Leon Uris's
Mila 18.

Catch-22
was popular on the East Coast but did not gain national traction.

After the first of the year, S & S prepared a fourth printing. In March 1962 came the announcement of the thirteenth annual National Book Award finalists. Joe was named along with Salinger, Bernard Malamud for
A New Life,
Isaac Bashevis Singer for
The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories,
and another newcomer, Walker Percy, for a novel called
The Moviegoer.
Knopf, Percy's publisher, had done almost nothing to promote the book; despite positive reviews, the novel was all but forgotten by the time the finalists were assembled.
The Moviegoer
had sold fewer than five thousand copies. Readers and critics were stunned, and Knopf was somewhat embarrassed, when Percy walked away with the award.

In the following days, the news emerged that Knopf had not submitted
The Moviegoer
for NBA consideration. Jean Stafford was one of the fiction judges that year; her husband, A. J. Liebling, had read
The Moviegoer
and sung its praises to her. She recommended it to the other judges. She asked the NBA if it would be all right to add Percy's novel to the finalists, as it seemed the book had been unfairly overlooked.

Show
magazine, interpreting the incident as more underhanded than it was, published an editorial denouncing Stafford and Liebling, and suggesting that “Joseph Heller's brilliant farce-tragedy” had been cheated out of the prize it deserved. Gottlieb and Bourne wasted no time in exploiting the controversy with a new barrage of ads for
Catch-22.
By April 1962, nineteen thousand copies had sold and a fifth printing was ordered.

“By conventional marketing standards, that should have been the end of it,” Jonathan R. Eller wrote. “[T]he novel was selling moderately well, but Heller would clearly not reach bestseller status on the scale of John O'Hara or Harold Robbins, or in fact on any scale at all.”

But the Bob and Nina Show was not bound by conventional marketing standards, and it was not done. Bourne sent special-order cards to bookstores all over the country, guaranteeing payment of transportation costs on any order for
Catch-22
placed on one of the cards; furthermore, S & S would pay return costs on any unsold special-order copies. The bookstores bit.

Next, Gottlieb purchased six columns of ad space in the April 29 issue of the
New York Times Book Review.
The ad's header read: “Report on
Catch-22,
a novel that is showing signs of living forever.” Gottlieb quoted accolades from reviewers and writers, as well as excerpts from “the rush of wonderfully expressive letters that are coming in from readers everywhere.” Bourne printed the ad on poster board and mailed copies of it to bookstores for counter displays.

Nelson Algren continued to champion the novel. On June 23, 1962, in the
Chicago Daily News,
he said, “‘Catch' is a classic because it employs fantasy to depict truth too devastating to tell by factual narration. A classic because its burlesque of army brass is rooted soundly in the thinking of the businessman in uniform, and is told by a writer whose experience of Business at war is first-hand.”

His article spurred interest in the novel throughout the Midwest. By the end of June, Joe had sold 25,000 copies.

*   *   *

“JOE'S CONTRIBUTION
[to the promotion of the novel] was to stay calm and offer practical suggestions,” Bob Gottlieb said. “He knew everything. He knew things that nobody could know. He would call up and say, ‘Look, I'm not suggesting that you go back to press … but I think you should know, because I have a cousin [who told me], that the manufacturers of the paper in the plant you're using are probably going out on strike in two weeks, so if you need paper, you may want to order it now.' He was always right. We always did exactly as [we were] told. When things went wrong, he was cheerful. When things went right, he was thrilled and grateful.”

This early in his career, Gottlieb didn't know how rare it was to find an author with such a refined combination of patience and pragmatism. “Many years later … I came upon [Joe] giving advice to Bob Caro, at the time we were preparing
The Power Broker
for publication,” Gottlieb recalled. “He was explaining to … Caro that the most important thing he could do was to keep the publisher happy and calm because if we were happy and calm, we would do it right, but if he agitated us with complaints and constant questions, things could go wrong. This is a lesson I can say that Bob Caro didn't learn, because no one else has ever learned it. Joe is the only person [I've worked with] who ever grasped this essential fact about publishing.”

*   *   *

IT WAS NOT EASY
for Gottlieb to conduct the
Catch
campaign—or do
any
work. The world would not sit still for him. A young editor remembered getting a call from him one afternoon, suggesting lunch. This happened shortly after JFK's speech announcing the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba. “Things were pretty weird in Manhattan, all around,” wrote Robert Nedelkoff, who heard this story from the young man.

Gottlieb's habit was to eat a sandwich at his desk. The young man stopped at an Italian deli, bought some antipasto, and headed for Simon & Schuster. Gottlieb's secretary insisted he hadn't left all day, but his office appeared to be empty. “That you?” came a voice from under the desk. “Yes,” said the young editor. “I talked to my shrink this morning. He sounded kind of worried,” Gottlieb explained from his crouch. “There's some space here. Sit down.” The young man found a spot beneath the desk and opened his container of antipasto. “Just a second,” Gottlieb said. He rose, went to the window, closed the blinds, and then resumed his position on the floor. The men ate and talked business, safe from “the Big One.”

*   *   *

“THIS IS
THE NAKED
and the Dead
scripted for the Marx Brothers, a kind of
From Here to Insanity,
” Kenneth Allsop wrote in a prepublication review of
Catch-22
for Britain's
Daily Mail.
“What is especially intriguing is that [so much] excitement and enthusiasm should be a-boil in a nation so patriotically thin-skinned and fanatical about the flag. For
Catch-22
is anti-war, anti-militaristic, anti-organisation, anti-slogan, anti-chauvinism. It spoofs uniform, duty, and the Uncle-Sam-right-or-wrong outlook. It is a great demented belly-laugh at the concepts of unquestioning obedience and sanctioned killing.”

That such a novel could come from Cold War America, with its nuclear bellicosity and lockstep thinking, was a delightful surprise to British readers, and the book became an immediate bestseller in England. The news was more than just pleasing to Joe; it was a palpable relief. On the eve of British publication, Secker & Warburg backed away from the novel, fearing Joe had made it far too long during final revisions and that the British public would not have patience for it. A young editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, took it on. Following Nina Bourne's strategies, he whipped up tremendous publicity. He sent a copy to Philip Toynbee, who wrote in London's
Observer
on June 17, 1962:

When I began reading
Catch-22,
I thought it was a farcical satire on life in the United States Army Air Force. Later I believed that Mr. Heller's target was modern war and all those who are responsible for waging it. Still later it seemed that he was attacking social organisation and anyone who derives power from it. By the end of the book, it had become plain to me that it is—no other phrase will do—the human condition itself which is the object of Mr. Heller's fury and disgust.… [A]t the risk of inflation, I cannot help writing that
Catch-22
is the greatest satirical work in English since
Erewhon.