Just One Catch (58 page)

Joe was writing, and rather swiftly for him. He had come up with a good first line: “I've got the best story in the Bible,” spoken by King David. Joe liked the comic possibilities, the opportunity to lampoon history and religion. He was physically fit, working out, keeping his weight down.

But in spite of good tidings, he was restless. On a large, impersonal scale, the election of Ronald Reagan disturbed him: The neoconservatives had gotten a foothold in the White House. He told interviewers the survival of America no longer mattered to him much. Capitalism was in its death throes. “I see hopelessness,” he said to a reporter from
Rolling Stone.
The country's problems had grown so large, they were unsolvable. “An experienced businessman can't run his business, but the government can't either,” Joe said. “So socialism won't work. I mean, we have a history of corrupt government.… [Incompetence is] our tradition.… It warmed my heart [recently], in the way that watching a Laurel and Hardy comedy might warm my heart, to read about the losses that General Motors and Ford posted. We just assume these companies are infallible and in expert hands, and everything's going to go beautifully. But not only was there incompetence, there was passive acceptance.”

As for his career, Joe was beleaguered by the fact that, despite his successes, nothing matched
Catch-22
in the minds of most readers and critics. He groused that
Good as Gold
would not have been reviewed if it hadn't been for his first novel. Late in life, he responded to the comment “You've never written anything as good as
Catch-22
” by saying, “Who has?” But in the early 1980s, in his late fifties, he still fought to top himself. The critic Clancy Segal said of him, “Sheer, stark terror, however disguised as farce or satire, stalks the pages of Heller's writing.… [T]he temptation is to find the ‘something happened' that helped cause Heller's deep, sad anger of life's hurtful illogic.”

Especially in his personal life, Joe was whirling. Publicly, he spoke positively about the virtues of a long and comfortable marriage, but more and more frequently he had neglected Shirley. She found it increasingly galling to swallow the obvious but unspoken fact that he had led a double life throughout their marriage, seeing other women, privileging his own pursuits. “The Mogul,” she called him in angry moments. “At one point, she got a feminist shrink who kept telling her to leave Joe—it's enough,” said Barbara Gelb. For his part, Joe felt Shirley had not matured along with him and could no longer recognize his needs. In rough draft notes, written in the early 1980s, for what would eventually become a book about his illness, Joe wrote, “I began to feel the married life to which I had been accustomed for more than thirty years was falling apart irretrievably.” Elsewhere, he said that one night when he and Shirley were returning from a party she turned to him quite suddenly and admitted she was jealous of his fame and success. “The problem,” Joe said, “was that in all the years of my struggle to make it as a writer, she had never developed a career or life of her own.”

So when, in the midst of all this, a rare illness with no known cause struck him unexpectedly, he said, “Stress? Maybe.”

*   *   *

THE STRESS
had built incrementally. While writing
Good as Gold,
Joe had seen a therapist, Dr. Robert Michaels of Payne Whitney. The writing, particularly the autobiographical sections of the novel, stirred Joe up, and he started to think of himself as a “fatherless Coney Island child.” What had happened to him? He was in search of his real self, he said—poor abandoned Joey.

During this period, Lee made regular trips to New York from Florida, accompanying Perle as she received cancer treatments. Over coffee in diners, Joe nudged Lee to reminisce about their father. Lee was reluctant to talk, choked by the ambivalence the older man provoked in him. He admitted their father had beaten him on occasion. Then he'd express understanding and forgiveness—Isaac was only doing what he thought he must to raise a good kid. Joe stared at his brother in pity and wonderment.

In his memoir, he wrote, “The first time I met my father face-to-face to talk to him, so to speak, was in the office of a psychoanalyst sometime in 1979, when I was already fifty-six years old. My father had been dead for more than fifty of those years.”

He had been having the old dream again: Once more, he was a child, trembling in bed. A faceless figure approached his bedroom door. After a few meetings with Dr. Michaels, Joe realized with a shock one day as he lay on the therapist's couch that the dream had not recurred since their sessions began. “You don't need that dream anymore,” Michaels commented. “You have me here now.”

So, with the doctor, Joe explored the patterns in his novels: threats to children, fathers betraying sons, deaths allowing the protagonists to live. Could the emotional confusion Joe had experienced in childhood be rooted in the feeling that his father had died
as a child;
that is, he was in his infancy
as an American,
unformed, unintegrated, whereas Joe had become the successful adult American male? Their roles had reversed.

Michaels warned Joe not to overintellectualize. The danger with a literary patient was, he read all the psychoanalytic literature. Joe knew Freud as well as the doctor. He batted around
repression, narcissism, Oedipal complex,
applying the terms to himself—“All that serious stuff was easy,” Joe said. He would write in
Now and Then
, “My theory … about psychoanaly[sis] is that corrective therapy demands unwavering concentration by a patient of intelligence with a clear and untroubled head who is not in need of it.” Those who really need help won't be aided by the talk, however insightful it is.

Still, the sessions brought pragmatic results. Joe learned he “never really wanted to live in a house in Tuscany or the French Riviera or have Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe in love with [him], and [he] didn't really covet … the bolder public life lived by Norman Mailer, although there was much there to envy. People with choices generally do what they want to do and have no real choice but to be what they already are.”

At one point, he admitted to the doctor one of his reasons for seeking therapy was the “wish to have a psychiatric medical authority … to quote in comeback during domestic arguments—even to misquote, by attributing to [the shrink] statements that had not been made.” Michaels laughed at this, but Joe did feel “enormously [helped] in the matter of day-to-day embroilments at home.”

The therapist examined Joe's and Shirley's actions dispassionately and rationally. “[H]e bound me to this,” Joe said: “I was not to make fundamental changes in my life once we began—not in my marriage, my work, or other areas—without discussion with him.” Michaels was prescient, making this warning: Within months, Joe, desperately angry and depressed for nonspecific reasons, would break his promise to the doctor and severely strain, if not shatter, every important relationship in his life.

Joe's marital miseries drove him from the Apthorp. In December 1980, he was living in his studio when he heard that John Lennon, whom he had often associated with Yossarian, had been shot to death just blocks away. Reporters described Lennon's murderer as a deranged fan. It was impossible not to contemplate the violence inherent in fantasy, fan identification, or disappointment with objects of adulation as one of the consequences of celebrity in America. Moreover, Joe believed Lennon, Yossarian, Lenny Bruce figures were similar to Socrates: questioners, provocateurs, flashing mirrors at the warped cultures that had spawned them. Inevitably, society found methods to eliminate them. Joe felt anxious and chilled as he walked the edges of Central Park.

In the months following, his life seemed to fragment. His movements became erratic. His path can be traced in bits and pieces.

In March 1981, he visited a literature class at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, at the invitation of Judith Ruderman, a literary critic and then director of continuing education at Duke. About his novels, Joe spoke graciously and patiently to students. Ruderman remembered him bringing an hors d'oeuvre—pickled herring—from Zabar's to the dinner she made in his honor. “How I came to know him is … Helleresque,” she said. “[H]e developed a romantic relationship with my across-the-street neighbor after she wrote him a fan letter. When he got sick [later that year], that was the end of it.”

In
Now and Then,
Joe admitted he flew off “intrepidly” for an “unlikely weekend rendezvous, a blind date with a woman I hadn't met or known about before (my most dangerous mission, marveled my friends) and whom nobody I knew had heard of either.” When he arrived, he was “at first afflicted by an inability to function sexually.” Upon his return to New York, he confessed his failure to his therapist. “[Y]ou didn't really want to do [it],” the doctor pronounced.

Two years later, the
New York Post
rehashed Joe's North Carolina contacts. Writing on October 19, 1983, the unidentified
Post
reporter said:

Joseph Heller took the stand in Manhattan Supreme Court [at] his divorce trial.… He … took the Fifth when asked about his relationship with one Joanne Wood. Heller's estranged wife, Shirley, alleges that the author of
Catch-22
and
Something Happened
left her for Wood back in 1981. After questioning Heller … about Wood—and getting nothing but the Fifth Amendment as a response—Shirley's attorney, William Binderman, finally asked the author why he wasn't talking? Did he fear prosecution? “Yes,” said Heller.

Speed Vogel named Joanne Wood in a rough draft of
No Laughing Matter,
a book he wrote with Joe about Joe's illness. In the published book, he said Joe's new “friend [had] once worked at Duke University Medical Center in the department of epidemiology.”

Erica recalls long, tearful meetings with her father in diners, probably in the spring of 1981. He denied he had left her mother for anyone else.

Around that time, “I changed accountants,” Joe said. “I changed lawyers and then changed lawyers again.” He broke off with his therapist “abruptly.”

On July 1, 1981, the
New York Times
reported that Joe and Simon & Schuster “have had a falling out that has ended up in arbitration.” Joe said, “It's not a question of royalties but of interpretations of certain clauses in the
Gold
contract and in the contract for the new book, which may or may not result in more money.” Then he said his “indignation” had to do with the publisher's “unacceptably low” royalty terms. “My complaints were brushed aside arbitrarily and I had no recourse but to institute legal action.” Whatever the case's merits, Joe sounded hurt, inconsistent, perhaps unhappy with himself. He appeared to be looking for fights to pick.

Lashing out at everyone, he left Candida Donadio after nearly twenty-six years, accusing her of failing to support him in his tussle with S & S. She was devastated, particularly as she was on the verge of losing another cherished client, Thomas Pynchon. Melanie Jackson, Donadio's young assistant, had become romantically involved with Pynchon (later they would marry). The relationship rankled Donadio, who seems to have discovered their dalliance when her accountant pointed out an excessive number of Chinese take-out receipts among Jackson's expenses. In 1982, Jackson left the agency, taking Pynchon and several other authors with her. Pynchon sent Donadio an unusually chilly letter, severing their professional tie and telling her to please conduct any further business with him through Melanie Jackson.

At the time, Donadio was living unhappily with a screenwriter named Henry Bloomstein, whose work she was never able to place with publishers. Eventually, he moved to the West Coast, amid rumors he had only taken up with Donadio to advance his career. Donadio drank and smoked more than ever. You couldn't help but “agonize with her” during this terrible period, said Herman Gollob.

In the meantime, Joe had moved out of the Apthorp once and for all. He would never return to it as a home. He had rented the Eighth Avenue apartment. He and Shirley argued about who would spend the summer in their East Hampton house. Shirley won this round. Furious, Joe went to East Hampton, gathered a couple of pieces of furniture from the place on Skimhampton Road, and took them back to his apartment. He warned Shirley he would be “coming around” the Apthorp whenever he wanted.

He didn't have any idea how he would spend the summer—his apartment would be stifling. An opportunity presented itself when an old friend, Maia Wojciechowska, phoned to ask for his help in preparing a manuscript for publication. Wojciechowska, who wrote novels for young adults, had worked as a bullfighter before coming to the States—Hemingway once said she knew more about bulls than any woman he'd met. She had been married to the poet and art critic Selden Rodman. Now she lived in Santa Fe. She urged Joe to fly out and taste the freedom and independence of the West.

He asked his friend in North Carolina if she'd like to go with him. She said yes. With the impulsiveness that had spurred him the last several months, he agreed to help Wojciechowska with her novel; in return, she found him a place in Santa Fe. He wound up signing a year's lease for a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of town for two hundred dollars a month. For the rest of the summer and most of the fall of 1981, he sat in the sunshine with legal pads and pencils, writing his version of King David's story: the tale of an embittered old man in failing health who feels betrayed by his wife and children (while acknowledging his betrayals of them), wary of his closest associates, rueful about his achievements, uncertain about the meaning of history, and fearful about the future.

Fleetingly, the king realizes he may have believed too thoroughly in the myth of his royalty, and celebrated too much in public (his wife finds it disgusting that he has danced nearly naked in the streets of the Holy Land, showing off his genitals).