Just One Catch (54 page)

Finally, at about 10:30, he called Elaine over. “If you won't let me talk to them, then can't you at least tell me what they are talking about?” he said. “What are they talking about?” Elaine replied. “Well, they're talking about what
all
writers talk about: baseball, money, and pussy.”

Joe rented a new writing studio at 130 West 57th Street, a block from Carnegie Hall and the Russian Tea Room. It was in a quaint 1907 building where William Dean Howells had once lived, and where Woody Allen's film production company was headquartered. Joe's apartment had projecting bay windows set in ornamented cast-iron frames. Northern light flooded the room.

He often stayed late and sometimes slept in the studio. Making an excuse to Shirley, he would say he was trying to stay out of the way of Viola, the family's housekeeper, who was fiercely loyal to his wife. Shirley never asked about his comings and goings, though she speculated freely about friends whom she suspected of having affairs. Her circumspection and politeness (terror, exhaustion, boredom?) irritated Joe. He hated to say it, but shouldn't a successful man have a more thrilling marriage than this? The kids were young adults now, mostly on their own, both at NYU (Erica was finishing up there). The Apthorp apartment was empty and quiet. Excitement
zizzled
the rest of his life, although it's true that his favorite moments were at home with a book in his lap and Mozart on the stereo. “Right after he finishes [writing] a book he gets better; he's serene and sweet,” Erica told Barbara Gelb.

Still, he didn't know what to do with his restlessness, his contradictory impulses. “I need … disturbances,” he'd told Shirley once. “I draw inspiration from daily embarrassments.” Many nights, he lay awake, worrying about how to stay interested in his life, while Shirley snored softly beside him.

To hide his anxieties, he told friends, “Thank goodness, we don't need love anymore. And without love, all we have to worry about is passion, bliss, and ecstasy.”

What he really needed was a good first line for a novel. He'd thought of this: “The kid, they say, was born in a manger, but frankly I have my doubts.” Not bad—better than most he'd imagined—but he didn't feel it would take him very far.

One day, to his great annoyance, Shirley announced she was going to throw a party for his sister. Sylvia told Shirley no one had ever made a birthday party for her. Joe didn't relish an apartment bursting with noisy people, silly family chatter, but Shirley made a lavish cake, put everyone at ease, and Sylvia wept with gratitude. Joe was moved to tears, especially when his sister (still missing her late husband) recalled job hunting as a girl, taking the subway into the city and being turned away because she was Jewish. It was good to see Sylvia and Lee again after so long a time (though the older they got, with their soft features, darker coloring, the less they looked like Joe and his mother). Shirley was a wonderful wife, always remembering family occasions, giving gifts at bar and bat mitzvahs—things Joe would never think of—and he felt fortunate, beyond measure, to be with her.

*   *   *

POLITICS BORED—NO
,
enraged
—him. You could
not
say American leadership had been a success. The McGovern debacle, the Watergate disaster.… Joe could not stir himself from an almost paralyzing, cynical indolence. That goddamned moron, Nixon's young press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, had permanently damaged the language: “The President is fully aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia,” he had said. “That is not to say that anything is going on in Southeast Asia.” How could you respond to that? It was beyond ridicule.

And personally, now that the tear gas had cleared, who could deny it was easier to stay silent? Why not settle back on a comfy couch with pockets full of coins? (Recently,
Vogue
lingerie ads had announced, “Every woman loves … pretty lingerie. And Scarlatti on the hi-fi. And Telly [Savalas] on the telly. And the new Joseph Heller … it's all part of the lure of life at home.”)

Joe confessed to George Mandel, “I don't think I deserve all this money. It puts me into a class for which I have very little sympathy.” But he couldn't kid himself: Politically, he was drifting toward the center. Maybe it was a hopeful sign that he didn't feel good about it. He consoled himself that he was not as out of step as his old acquaintance, and now sworn enemy, Norman Podhoretz, the “success” guru.

In 1961, in a review in
Show
magazine, Podhoretz had praised
Catch-22
as “one of the bravest and most … successful attempts we have yet had to describe and make credible the incredible reality of American life in the middle of the 20th century.” Joe appreciated these comments. The men became “fairly friendly,” Podhoretz recalled. They chatted now and then at literary parties. As the editor of
Commentary,
Podhoretz had “invigorat[ed] the magazine and steer[ed] it in a … more leftward direction,” according to Ted Solotaroff, who began writing for
Commentary
in September 1960: “Norman made it clear that the magazine would hold its own as the suddenly prominent new voice of a new decade.”

But it was also apparent that Podhoretz was hungry for social success. He “openly acted upon” his desire for money, publicity, and celebrity, Solotaroff said. In 1967, in a book called
Making It
, Podhoretz announced, “I [have] … experienced an astonishing revelation: it is better to be a success than a failure.… [I]t [is] better to be rich than to be poor.… Fame, I now [see] … [is] unqualifiedly delicious: it [is] better to be recognized than anonymous.” He expressed his distaste for what the mainstream press called “the counterculture”: The extreme Left wanted to destroy America, Podhoretz said.
He
wanted to bask in its luxuries.

In part, then, his rightward drift began as an ongoing and conscious act of integration. Like Joe, he was Jewish, Brooklyn-born, educated at Columbia under the tutelage of Lionel Trilling. He was strongly influenced by the anti-Communist liberal thinking of Trilling's immediate circle. Like Bob Gottlieb, he had gone to Cambridge to study with the literary critic F. R. Leavis. And now he was the editor of one of the leading intellectual journals of the day.

But intellectual pursuits did not bring him as much prestige as he wished. To get
inside
America—become indispensable to it—meant moving in the highest social spheres, meeting and influencing men and women of power. This was Podhoretz's aim.
Making It
was a paean to shameless social climbing. “Nothing, I believe, defines the spiritual character of American life more saliently than … [the] contradictory feelings our culture instills in us toward the ambition for success, and toward each of its various goals: money, power, fame, and social position,” he wrote. “On the one hand, we are commanded to become successful … on the other hand, it is impressed upon us by means both direct and devious that if we obey the commandment, we shall find ourselves falling victim to … [a] radical corruption of spirit.” He spelled out how the “gospel of success” reigned supreme in his Brooklyn childhood, at Columbia, and was reinforced by the “ethos of New York literary society.” And he excoriated the hypocrisy of a culture that worshipped success but insisted the striver be modest, humble, and circumspect in chasing power. “I will no doubt be accused of self-inflation and therefore of tastelessness. So be it,” he declared. He would embrace the free market, American materialism, and empire building abroad—because he could excel in these areas. If his fellow former lefties wanted anarchy or socialism, well … good luck and good riddance.

Making It
was poorly received by the intellectual and literary communities; Podhoretz was arrogant, young, and untested, said reviewers. Some expressed their embarrassment that he exposed the “dirty little secret”: American—and, in this case, specifically Jewish—greed for money and power.

Commentary
began a “no-holds barred” campaign against the perceived counterculture, antiwar protesters, and liberal politics in general. In retrospect, Podhoretz's shifting attitudes had long been apparent. As early as 1963, in an essay entitled “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” he had admitted to feelings of elitism and deep-seated racism. He said that “love is not the answer to hate—not in the world of politics, at any rate.” As the 1960s wore on, this pragmatism (as he would have it) became bitter “revulsion” against the Left. He feared for the “health” of the nation after the “fevers and plagues” unleashed upon it by people whose politics did not fit his. In a very public manner, he lashed out at former leftie pals, including Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel and Diana Trilling.

As for his friendship with Joe: “Heller … [is] far more politically Left than many of his readers ever realized,” Podhoretz wrote in a book called
Ex-Friends.
“[T]o give credit where credit is due,” Joe was “among the first to spot and denounce” Podhoretz's changing ideologies: He became “outraged by [what he saw as] the increasingly insupportable heresies to which I began giving vent.”

“I never gave him the chance to dump me,” Joe told Christopher Hitchens, who assessed matters this way:

[A]s Podhoretz began to fawn more openly on Richard Nixon and the Israeli general staff (as if rehearsing for the [embrace] he would later [give] Ronald Reagan), Heller [withdrew from him] … what Heller saw coming is what we now term “neoconservatism.” This is a protean and slippery definition, and very inexact as a category, but … if you take the version offered by its acolytes, you discover a group of New York Jewish intellectuals who decided that duty, honour, and country were superior, morally and mentally, to the bleeding heart allegiances of their boy- and-girlhoods. If you take the version offered by its critics, you stumble on an old Anglo-Saxon definition of the “upper crust”: “A load of crumbs held together by dough.”

Following the 1967 Yom Kippur War, Israel would become a serious dividing point between the evolving neoconservatives and their former friends on the Left. Defense of Israel at all costs, under all circumstances, became a foundational neoconservative tenant, and it would lead in the future to their support for aggressive, unilateral American military action worldwide. Joe felt ambivalent about Israel. To interviewer Sam Merrill, he admitted he felt a “strong attachment” to the country, though he had not visited it. Nevertheless, he considered unqualified support of the Jewish homeland, without regard to its sometimes contradictory motives, a “difficult, confusing question.” He believed petroleum was the United States' only real interest in the Middle East, and he didn't think wars should be fought to enrich international oil companies. Beyond this, the notion that Jews could be at home
anywhere
in the world, land or no land, seemed to him too rosy a view of Jewish history, and of human life in general.

(In the early 1960s, Ted Solotaroff predicted Israel would split American Jewry between those, mostly of the older, immigrant generation, whose attachments were to Eastern Europe, and who had borne Diaspora as a badge of dignity, and those, often younger, who viewed backing Israel as Judaism's burning issue.)

In any case, given Podhoretz's freshly militaristic views, this leading neocon had to distance himself from the praise he had once given Joe's antiwar novel. Eventually, he “reconsider[ed]”
Catch-22,
insisting it was “not as heroic as it seemed at first sight.” Its inflated reputation, he said, was due to the fact that it had been “perfectly in tune” with the “radical movement” and with a “doctrine that was being preached by most of the major gurus of the era, including writers like Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey.” It “justified draft evasion and even desertion.” Heller's nefarious influence “lingers on,” Podhoretz wrote, “in a gutted American military and in a culture that puts the avoidance of casualties above all other considerations.” For the new Norman P., Joseph Heller lay at the heart of America's moral rot.
Catch-22
had spiritually crippled the country.

*   *   *

BUT WHAT A SUCCESS
it had been! Podhoretz had to admire it on that account, Joe believed.

Now
everybody
wanted a piece of literary pie. Bags of money were waiting to be made in publishing. Once, writers hoped to grasp the golden ring of the Great American Novel; to achieve something in American letters, talent and integrity were thought to be necessary. But talent and integrity were rare. Rewards for hard effort couldn't be doled out widely enough. Now, with so much easy cash flowing, channels needed to be dug for everybody to take advantage of it. Profits shouldn't be left to the gifted and industrious. If you were rich and famous enough, why write your own book? Somebody would do it for you. Notoriety was the new coin of the realm. Movie stars, criminals, disgraced politicians—with a little moxie, anybody could buy their way into the literary big top. “Making it” was about finessing the angles; often, talent and integrity were impediments.

Such was Joe's view. His cynicism grew. Like Podhoretz, he had sometimes presented himself as just another comer looking to score. His success was sweeter for being unlikely: a Coney Island pug who had never expected to go to college, now a respected author! Delirious irony! And old Norm was not wrong about the pleasures of money and prestige.

But success hadn't jumped in Joe's lap. That was the thing. After
Catch-22,
he didn't rush out a sequel or another antiwar novel to take advantage of his fame (never mind that he was temperamentally incapable of rushing out
anything
). He spent thirteen years working on a very different kind of book, risking everything for the sake of—what else?—talent and integrity.