Just One Catch (64 page)

Obviously, Joe was not content to hurl javelins
straight
at the West's shibboleths. Maybe bravery
does
overcome long odds. But what the accepted knowledge doesn't tell us is how to cope with the emptiness that visits us once the odds are beaten and euphoria drifts away.

Nothing fails like success.

In his kvetching about the hollowness of grand achievement, it was hard not to hear, from Joe's elderly king, the ruefulness of the author of
Catch-22,
gazing back at his youthful exuberance … his reevaluation of what the real odds were, and what was worth beating.

*   *   *

GOD KNOWS
was published with great anticipation on October 8, 1984. The print run was 150,000 copies. The advances from European publishers were ten times higher than Joe had ever gotten—Finland coughed up thirty thousand dollars. Dell snatched the paperback rights. The Book-of-the-Month Club planned to showcase the novel. Almost immediately, Joe could count on earning close to $500,000. Medically, he had overcome daunting odds (he made great newspaper copy). He was back with his old editor, Bob Gottlieb—the unbeatable team.

Shortly before the book appeared, Art Cooper, the big, garrulous new editor of
GQ,
had run an excerpt of
God Knows
in the magazine. “I had decided to put Joe on the cover … the first time a writer had been on the cover, and I was a little concerned,” he recalled. “But Joe, who always reminded me that he was a handsomer version of Paul Newman, persuaded me that it would be a good idea. I did [it], and a couple years later I put Paul Newman on the cover.… [A]s always, Joe was right. [He] sold 150,000 more copies on the newsstand.”

The
God Knows
book party, held at the Russian Tea Room, was a festive and moving affair, with survivors of Guillain-Barré syndrome whom Joe had met during his illness on hand to celebrate more than the launch of a novel. Speed, Valerie, and Joe toasted with flutes of champagne.

“Like cunnilingus, tending sheep is dark and lonely work,” Joe's David says.

“Some Promised Land,” he gripes. “To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO.”

These lines were quoted as evidence of the novel's immature humor in the largely hostile reviews that appeared in the next few weeks. Reviewers compared the novel unfavorably to Mel Brooks's comic monologue “The 2,000-Year-Old Man” and decried the trouncing of biblical tradition. “Apparently written on the principle that shockingly bad taste is automatically funny,
God Knows
deliberately exploits Samuel 1 and 2 in the worst possible taste,” said
Library Journal.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in the
New York Times,
called the novel “very tired” and “shallow,” while Richard Cohen, in the
Washington Post Book World,
found it “repetitious, often annoying … [and] at odds with itself.”
Time
dismissed it as a “disappointing hodgepodge of repetition and irrelevancy” (a “slap in the face,” Joe said of that review).

Most vitriolic was Leon Wieseltier's attack in
The New Republic
:

God Knows
is junk. It is also a best seller. Thus historians will have employment. They will have the difficult task of explaining how it was that the arrested adolescence of a few Jewish men [i.e., Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Joseph Heller] became the cherished currency of an entire chapter of American culture.

God, and David, and the psalms, and all the strange and sublime things that Joseph Heller has … trivialized … have anyway survived worse.

The claw swipe at other Jewish novelists was telling: Wieseltier was not commenting on Joe's literary intentions, his success or failure on aesthetic grounds. Rather, he was morally offended by the nature of the project, the way earlier critics had fussed over Philip Roth's “defacing” of Jewish values in
Portnoy's Complaint
or Saul Bellow's depictions of indecorous Jewish behavior in
Herzog.
There was, in this criticism, an implicit charge of anti-Semitism, a concern that if we turn on ourselves, we give goyim the go-ahead to rush us full force.

“Look, I've adjusted to this, that my books are not going to get unanimously good reviews. Though with this one I had the expectation,” Joe said. “But all of my books deal in very rough, rude fashion with subjects about which there are great conflicts of opinion. And the average reader expects to be told in a few pages what the book is about, expecting the character to be fairly consistent in his personality.”

One of the few major reviewers to consider the book on its own terms was Mordecai Richler, writing in the
New York Times Book Review
:

The abundantly talented Joseph Heller has never accepted limits; neither has he repeated himself. He has yet to try to slip by with a “Catch-23” or a “Something Else Happened.” Instead, each time out, he has begun afresh, discovering human folly for the first time: himself amazed, irreverent and charged with appetite. It couldn't have always been easy. The incredible success of his first novel … must, by this time … be maddening to him.… [I]f you are going to hit .400, don't be so reckless as to do it in your rookie season.

Following the uneven
Good as Gold,
Richler wrote, “Mr. Heller is dancing at the top of his form again.” With
God Knows,
the “Jewish novel in America, which began by describing the immigrant experience and then sailed into the mainstream to excoriate Jewish mothers and deal with the ironies of assimilation, has … escalated to the highest rung of insolence, even [deliberate] sacrilege, addressing itself directly to God.” Like “all [of] his work,” this new novel was “informed by an uncommon generosity of spirit,” Richler said. “He doesn't so much tell a story as peel it like an onion—returning to the same event again and again, only to strip a layer of meaning from it, saving the last skin for the moving [finale].” Readers, he said, were “unlikely … [to] see a more ambitious or enjoyable novel about God and man this season.”

*   *   *

AS IN EACH OF JOE'S NOVELS
, the conflicts in
God Knows
stem from a struggle between fathers and sons. In Joe's previous book, says David Seed, Bruce Gold “becomes the head of a family which is constantly denying its own structure”—a circumstance that vexes all of Joe's heroes. Yossarian's military superiors deny they are a threat to his life; Slocum denies the effects of his aloofness on his children; Gold's father denies the present, while the family's conversations ignore the group's warped dynamics.

King David also misses family stability. He yearns for a caring father, but each figure that might suffice—Jesse, Saul, God—disappoints him. Saul, especially, confounds David, hugging him to his breast, only to shove him away in jealous rage (it is easy to see Joe's brother in Saul's behavior: A father substitute for Joe, as Saul was to David, Lee vacillated between pride and envy as Joe went to college and achieved monumental success).

God retreats into silence.
David
must become the father, the responsible one, a development for which he is poorly prepared. Like Slocum, he overidentifies with his favorite son (“O my son Absalom!… Would God I had died for thee”) and longs for childhood's pleasures. Guilt-ridden, he yearns to destroy himself, mentally hurling a javelin at his youthful face. In the end, under pressure from his estranged wife, David denies his family's structure. He appoints his youngest son, Solomon, his successor instead of Adonijah, his eldest surviving boy.

Joe presents David as an underappreciated author. He claims to have written most of the Western world's masterpieces; Shakespeare and Beethoven stole his best ideas, he says. He is a man devoted to, and fleeing, women: “I was always faithful to my wives and concubines.” A relentless self-promoter, David reels off a monologue as slick as an adman's brochure.

Joe's favorite narrative method—the retrospective elegy—is firmly established here. On his deathbed, David considers his life's events, looking for the moment that made him the bitter husk he is. His accomplishments strike him as hollow; he is as politically successful, and corrupt, as Henry Kissinger in
Good as Gold.
He regrets the mess he has made of his marriage to Bathsheba. His children have foundered in various attempts to match his deeds.

His attendants have “perfumed [his] bed with aloes, cinnamon, and myrrh,” but “I can still smell me,” he says. “I stink of mortality and reek of mankind.” We meet David as we met Yossarian: in bed, doted on by nurses. But Yossarian is bursting with life. David is riddled with death. No wound, like Snowden's, is necessary for the smell of his guts to come spilling into the open. He is rotting from the inside out.

Joe's use of biblical material energizes the retrospective view. David's story is both a look back, exploring the patterns of a life lived in full, and a prophecy, as the reader, familiar with biblical tales, knows what's coming. The import of David's actions for Western civilization is clear to us. As a key figure in Judaism and Christianity—two sides of a family that often deny
their
structural affinities—David is an all-encompassing father. His past remains our future. (On a personal level, Joe was aware of writing prophecy: David's predicament, he said, predicted his illness.)

The novel's structure demands a Socratic reevaluation of Judeo-Christian values. It does so by presenting
narrative
as
denial,
an elaborate cover-up justifying David's actions. For example, David claims he would do anything to save his children's lives, but, in fact, his adulterous behavior leads to the death of his infant, while his desire to hold power results in Absalom's slaughter. In the first instance, David blames God; in the second, his general Joab. “David, it's enough already,” Joab tells him as David weeps for Absalom. “You're making a spectacle of yourself.” But that's the point. The spectacle, the elaborate design, the boasts and drama of the narrative, hide David's complicity. As Joe depicts him, David is the West's first master of spin.

Traditional narratives often reveal private motivations behind public careers. For instance, “Shakespeare's method … [is] to show that what one is as a man determines what one is as king. In the plays of the Henry IV–Henry V cycle, Shakespeare chronicles ideal kingship, dramatizing that Hal succeeds as king precisely because he has previously succeeded as man,” wrote David M. Craig. “Heller's method is exactly the opposite. Beginning with the record of kingship that the Bible supplies, he imagines what the man must be like who had done such deeds.”

That the king archetype enabled Joe to create his most fully formed character is an irony rooted in Joe's wide reading. To begin with, he understood the difference between the Greeks' and the Hebrews' notions of character (two traditions that, not always easily, combine to form the heart of Western culture).

As Judith Ruderman says, “[I]t is the capacity for change, exhibited by biblical figures who are treated at length, that reveals the modernity of the ancient Jewish conception of character. As the writers and redactors of the Bible saw them, people were unpredictable—veritable centers of surprise.” By contrast, characters in Greek drama and poetry are “labeled with Homeric epithets, fixed tags by which they are [consistently] identifiable.” How is it, Joe wondered, that, during the course of Western history, Jewish characters in the Bible have come to be simplified (as heroes and villains) in the fixed manner of the Greeks? Go figure.

If, in his earlier novels, Joe's conceptions of character were largely fixed (Yossarian, heroic in his innocence; Slocum, paralyzed by the
something
that happened to him; Gold, emblematically Jewish in Protestant society), in
God Knows
, he rejected centuries of simplistic biblical commentary. He embraced the old Hebrew view of the self, presenting a flawed and fully human King David. Sacrilegious on the surface, perhaps, the project was consistent with—and respectful of—the tradition from which biblical stories sprang.

At one point in the novel, Samuel insists it was Saul's destiny to die in battle. David snaps, “That's bullshit, Samuel.… We're Jews, not Greeks. Tell us another flood is coming and we'll learn how to live under water.” Far from traducing his Jewish heritage, Joe was engaging it more seriously than ever.

He often claimed he was not interested, one way or the other, in the existence of God: It is when an individual
turns away
from conceptions of the holy that the self, in its humble complexity, aware of its hungers and faults, starts to emerge. This point is illuminated by the retrospective view: An individual's actions are not as important as what the individual makes of them. Meanings and patterns belong to reflection and reconsideration. David's self-assessments contain both psychological and theological ramifications: On the one hand, we get a character study; on the other, a reexamination of Western culture's ethical, political, and spiritual foundations, embodied in David. In this sense, Joe partook of the rabbinic tradition of the midrash, adding commentary, in the form of stories, to the Bible in order to elucidate its meanings.

“To the Rabbis … the Torah was the perfect, immutable word of God,” John Friedman and Judith Ruderman wrote. “Every letter, every word, every space between the words held strata of knowledge waiting to be revealed or interpreted. The superficial meanings of the words were merely that: the starting places for religio-literary excavation. A little digging, and an idea or story could even be found to mean the opposite of what one had thought at first glance.”