Just One Catch (65 page)

Meaning after the fact: the ultimate anachronism.

With
God Knows,
it became obvious that “midrash” had been Joe's project all along—as, on some level, it was the task of many Jewish performers, writers, actors, and journalists of his generation: the comic routines of Lenny Bruce; the political analysis in
Commentary;
the book and motion picture parodies in
Mad
magazine.

If Western culture did not sparkle under the interpretive glare … well, don't shoot the man with the spotlight. In
God Knows,
Joe presents Solomon, the father of Western wisdom, as a blockhead (nicknamed “Schlomo”), someone who jots down and repeats knowledge without understanding its uses.

Many critics said Joe's portrait of Solomon had no basis in the Bible, but, in fact, for all his wisdom, the biblical Solomon lives carelessly, shortsightedly, far beyond his means. He winds up fatally weakening the kingdom he inherited. For the first time in Joe's work, a son outlives his father; through his profligacy, he undermines all that his father achieved.

Full of bitterness and regret, David understands one thing clearly: The short view will never suffice. Contemplating the beautiful young Shunammite Abishag, provided by his attendants to comfort him in his old age, he cries, “I want my God back; and they send me a girl.”

With this fourth novel, Joe's prophecy skills improved. Just as
Catch-22
seemed to anticipate Vietnam,
Something Happened
the “Me Decade,” and
Good as Gold
the neoconservatives' lock on political power,
God Knows
sketched the greedy, grab-what-you-can entrepreneur who would spark the United States' deepest economic crisis since the 1930s. He was there in the figure of Solomon—Western wisdom personified.

In the worst days of his illness, with the writing stalled on
God Knows,
Joe felt as paralyzed, physically and spiritually, as his beleaguered king. He was caught between events and the telling of them, preparing only for inevitable death. Now, largely recovered, with the novel behind him, he could take a longer, more sanguine view of his life. “There are such musical, soothing phrases in the King James translation [of the Bible], being ‘full of years and full of days,'” he mused. “I think implicit in that was a resignation that if one
did
live to the point where he was full of days, it was time to go.”

*   *   *

“I COULD
DO
without the city. It wouldn't bother me if I never set foot in Manhattan again. I've had enough of it,” Joe told a
New York Times
reporter in the spring of 1987. He remembered his days in a wheelchair, when cabs wouldn't stop for him. Stairs and escalators still gave him trouble. It was better to sit on his back terrace in East Hampton, watching trees and shrubs start to bud, staring at brittle gold leaves in his swimming pool, emptied for the winter, the pool's aquamarine sides soothing to the eyes in the growing spring light.

But Joe also had in mind, in his disgust for the city, publishing in its “bulked-up” form. His hankering for the largest advances he could get and his enjoyment of celebrity had helped alter the business in the last three decades. But now, even those who benefited from the changes wondered what kind of monster sat among them. “As far as a literary scene, there is only one major place—and that is Manhattan,” Joe said ruefully, repeating, “I've had enough of it.” Describing the current “scene,” journalist Henry Dasko wrote:

Media and communication conglomerates [had] … [steadily] swallow[ed] independent companies from related fields, including magazine and book publishing. Cutthroat competition … replaced the leisurely, clubby atmosphere once prevalent in editorial offices. Writers and artists, like movie stars in Hollywood's old studio system, became treasured business assets, and media and entertainment tycoons with unlimited resources—Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western, Steve Ross of Time Warner, Si Newhouse of Condé Nast—reached out to ensure that their prized properties were treated accordingly, with Hollywood-grade perks and maximum exposure in publications they owned and TV programs they controlled or influenced. In the 1980s, publishing became a business so glamorous that even magazine and book editors—Tina Brown, Joni Evans, Sonny Mehta—became celebrities on their own.

Mort Janklow, a lawyer turned literary agent, liked to sit in his office, located appropriately between rows of art museums and the headquarters of American advertising, talking about the Hearst Corporation, which had bought William Morrow, with its extensive backlist and well-regarded children's book division, for $25 million in 1981. “Since that time,” Janklow bragged, “I have made a few deals for individual authors in excess of that amount.”

Janklow's new business partner, Lynn Nesbit, said, “It is the easiest thing in the world right now to make a great [book] deal. Look at the money being paid! You can take almost anything and oversell it.”

This was true, Joni Evans explained, because as “we consolidate, there is a panic among the five or six megapublishers whenever a new brand name [author] comes on the market. It's like six countries and we each want to make sure we have the best strategic defenses, so we have … overinflated prices.”

In time, the waste and excess on which publishing floated would sink large portions of the industry, as would happen in every sector of a national economy bingeing without forethought, but for now, many authors, agents, and editors seemed willing to trade quality for Solomon's curse: the rewards to be snatched from apparently limitless piles of money.

Joe had grabbed his share. He was a brand name. But he was battered. The reviews for
God Knows
had hurt him—not just the criticisms but also the
tone
of them, a loud cynicism unavoidable when people (in this case, reviewers) felt abashed to be part of a system everyone believed to be badly out of control.

It was a relief, then, to sit in East Hampton and hide behind Speed Vogel as they drafted the book about Joe's disease. “I wanted the book. I was trying to start a list—it would have been one of my first acquisitions,” recalls LuAnn Walther, Speed's friend at Bantam. “I hadn't seen anything like the story of that illness and the way Speed became part of Joe's recovery. It struck me as an interesting idea for a nonfiction book. My editor in chief at the time, Linda Gray, was dubious about it. It may be that I wasn't able to bid on it. I don't quite remember. Maybe Candida didn't think a young editor at a mass-market publisher was right for it.”

Clearly, in marketing terms, the book would be a risk.
God Knows
had become a bestseller, but Joe's critical reputation was shaky. Readers wanted another
Catch-22.
Nonfiction? A medical ordeal (not the happiest of topics)? A coauthor—a guy named
Speed
? Are you serious?

The book ended up at Putnam, with Faith Sale. Known as a literary editor, and a devoted writers' advocate, she had worked with Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Amy Tan, and Donald Barthelme. She had gone to Putnam in 1979 at the behest of Phyllis Grann, the first female CEO in publishing, and a woman who “[made] books [like] Spielberg [made] movies,” according to Tom Clancy, one of
her
brand-name authors. Grann modeled herself on the “mogul mode,” and was famous in the book biz for her Thursday-morning breakfast meetings, the “only breakfast meeting where no food is served,” said one of her colleagues. It was all business, all the time.

Sales, sales, and bigger sales were Grann's goal, but she had hired Faith to add prestige to the house. She left her alone to do her work. Speed and Joe liked Faith enormously. Her editing philosophy consisted of “back-and-forth exchange[s], in which both author and editor benefit from listening as well as speaking/writing,” she said. She recalled that the “first time I was to edit [Joe], I could hardly bring myself to speak to him.… Who was I to presume to improve anything this world-class writer had put on paper? And [at first] he confirmed my worst fears by saying no to every suggestion I made. Little by little, however, in the course of two or three or four … phone sessions, during several days of each of many weeks, he went back and changed every spot I had pointed to. By the end of the process, he was deputizing me to do whatever I thought was necessary if I couldn't reach him.… [but] I didn't make the smallest change without consulting him.”

Speed enjoyed not only Faith's editorial acumen but also Joe's, and the critiques of her assistant, Ben McCormick. The persona Speed projected in the book was perfectly in tune with his real-life demeanor, but initially he had difficulty finding the right ironic tone. On one page of an early draft, concerned with Speed's depiction of Joe's domestic helplessness, Faith scrawled in the margin, “You mustn't sound mean. Playful, yes.” A few times, Joe winced at cruel-sounding passages meant as jokes about Joe's occasional grumpiness.

“I'm not that way, but if you want to write it like that, go ahead,” he told Speed.

“Ask Valerie if you're like that,” Speed replied.

A reporter, overhearing one of these exchanges at the East Hampton house, said Valerie, on the hot seat, responded, “I can't make a comment. I'm eating here and I'm sleeping here. I can't say a word.”

“I don't think I snarl [as Speed wrote in the book],” Joe said.

Valerie said, “I don't want to jeopardize…”

“But I must concede this because my other friends have this impression of me,” Joe said. “Valerie doesn't deny it. I can be impatient. I am not a good listener.”

“I don't want to jeopardize my position,” Valerie said. “No.…”

“With Valerie, with friends, if they're telling me something and I think they're digressing or taking too long to get to what they want to say, I will say, ‘Get to the point,' or ‘Why are you telling me this?'”

Sometimes, while drafting
No Laughing Matter,
Joe felt Speed was imitating his style. After one mild disagreement, Speed said, “How many times am I going to have to keep rewriting this?”

Joe gave his friend narrative openings, writing in the margin of a handwritten page, “Here's an entry for you into the Gourmet Club, if you want one” or “You can use this [passage], if you want to.” Speed had landed in as fine a creative-writing course as anyone could imagine.

No Laughing Matter
was jazzed by contrasts: Speed on the move (frequently on his bike), Joe paralyzed in bed; Speed capable, buoyant, a self-described
luftmensch
(literally “airman,” according to Sanford Pinsker, “the sort of person who regards life as a roller coaster”), Joe helpless, bitterly melancholy, in spite of his unflagging humor.

The loyalty of Joe's pals makes for a moving primer on friendship. Today, medical narratives are common, a booming publishing trend, but in 1986, when the book appeared, they were not so plentiful. The book's mirth and restraint, as well as its remarkable lack of self-pity, remain refreshing. Joe's eye for situational ironies and institutional absurdities (in hospitals and courtrooms) was as sharp as ever.

In one review of the book, in the
East Hampton Star,
a medical doctor, Jay I. Meltzer, wrote that Joe unmasked himself as passive, unable to communicate with his doctors. In the ICU, Joe suffered “an altered mental state brought out by helplessness and withdrawal of the usual stimuli of life and its replacement by noise, constant activity, observation, and the feeling of being an object in an ambience of death.” The book, Meltzer concluded, was a “picture of overwhelming denial.”

As David Seed points out, the good doctor did not “consider how [much] artifice may be playing a part in
No Laughing Matter.
The role of passive victim was no doubt attractive to Heller [as a narrative device] because it opens up all sorts of possibilities of self-mockery and irony in his account.”

Yet nothing Joe wrote failed to happen. The book's structure, with Speed as narrative buffer—comic relief, contradictory voice, at some points a silent presence stopping Joe from considering topics further—enacts repression.

As usual in a Joseph Heller book, a crucial death occurred in the penultimate section. Speed wrote: “With a peaceful smile, [Joe] turned his face toward mine and softly murmured, ‘It's been such a wonderful year.' He looked up into my misty eyes and said, ‘I'm going now. Thank you.' Slowly his eyes fell closed and he died in my arms.”

A marvelous parody of sentimentality, which
No Laughing Matter
had resisted, the passage gave Joe a comic opening to the book's finale: “I did no such thing. What the hell's the matter with him?.… What I did do that evening was enjoy a hearty dinner of the pot roast he cooked.”

But the passage repeated a pattern Joe knew was central to the vision of his novels: a sacrifice, ensuring the main character's survival. In this instance, Joe was main character
as well as
sacrifice. The moment occurred following harrowing depictions of disease and the dissolution of his marriage: further evidence that he saw his old life as finished (for it is almost certain Joe arranged the book's ending).

He had died and he had survived—as he had as a child when his tonsils were taken, as he had over Avignon.
Help him
.
I'm all right
.

And now: the fullness of days.

*   *   *

“[T]HIS IS AN INTOXICATING
experience unlike any other I've ever had,” Joe said. “I don't want to take it in stride. I want to revel in it.”

He was speaking of his October 1986 visit to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of
Catch-22.
Flyers featuring a naked Yossarian in a tree overlooking the school were posted on campus, a sleek, modern facility at the base of Pikes Peak. Academic papers were presented on the cultural, social, and theological aspects of the novel. The movie was screened. A birthday cake with twenty-five candles was produced. And when Joe was introduced to the cadets in a cavernous auditorium, nearly “nine hundred future officers stood as one to applaud the white-haired author,” said the
New York Times.