Just One Catch (70 page)

Invitations came from literary symposia, military commemorations, and—more and more frequently—Jewish Festschrifts. “It was always easy to accept who I was,” Joe told members of the Beth Shalom and Sinai Temple in West Los Angeles. “As I enter my senior years it's something I'm very proud of and most comfortable with. I believe I'd rather be Jewish than anything else. And I've always felt that way.”

In the spring of 1992, he spent several weeks in Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center at Lake Como. There, he worked on
Closing Time
with “more [ambitions] than any one human could realistically hope to accomplish,” he said. In Rome, at a restaurant called Colline Emiliane, dining with Valerie and actors Mickey Knox and Martin Balsam, old acquaintances of Joe, he ran into Federico Fellini. Forty-five years had passed since Fellini had drawn a caricature of Joe in a side-street storefront. The men had little to say to each other. They sat praising the restaurant's mushrooms. “The evening ended quietly with the restaurant emptied of all patrons but [us], with Balsam and I consuming one good grappa after another while Valerie and Mickey Knox waited with helpless impatience to steer us back to our respective hotels,” Joe recalled. “Finally, the owner poured the two of us another large glass, this one complimentary, on condition we go the hell home when we finished.” For one pleasant evening, Joe had scuttled back in time. He was on R & R again during the war, in the night world of Rome, enveloped in a wistful nostalgia appropriate to the valedictory musings of
Closing Time.

He could have rested on his laurels, reading from
Catch-22
wherever he went, but—here was the miracle most worth celebrating in his seventy-first year—he still wanted to write, and to send ripples through American literature.

*   *   *

JOE PAID A BRIEF VISIT
to Coney Island in the company of a European television crew just before the first advance reviews of
Closing Time
were scheduled to appear. The film crew was making a documentary on the old amusement parks. The British producers had carried across the sea images of a place that no longer existed. Joe witnessed their disappointment at the rusting reality. His melancholy did not match theirs; it was personal, attached to faces blown on the wind. His brother Lee had died. Joe hadn't seen him much in recent years, and felt bad about that. Hillel. Elias. Lee.

Over here, a patch of sand where Joe and Beansy Winkler had once hawked sodas to tourists; over there, the site of a triumphant joke-telling round by Lou Berkman.

Joe ordered a hot dog and fried potatoes with extra salt at Nathan's. He perked up. The Brits became excited when they spotted the red skeleton of the Parachute Jump. The old Luna Park was now a row of apartment projects, but the filmmakers, reciting the history they'd learned, were beginning to see past the bleakness. They strolled through a ghost Coney. Their mood improved, and so did Joe's. A school bus pulled into a parking lot, disgorging a group of Asian, black, and white children. They ran screaming toward the Wonder Wheel, one of the few rides remaining. On the boardwalk, Joe watched a huddle of Orthodox Jewish kids contemplating the foaming surf. The film crew turned a camera on him. The director asked about his past. He spoke of immense changes; the breeze took most of his words. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the Wonder Wheel turn and turn again.

*   *   *

“THEY COULD POSSIBLY
SHIT
on it,” said Candida Donadio. She had not sold
Closing Time,
but she took a proprietary interest in it. As the critics sharpened their pencils, she fretted on Joe's behalf: “If the reviews [are] bad, I suppose he may not choose to write again.”

“There's no question, Joe is running a risk,” Bob Gottlieb said. “If you have a lifelong love affair with a book, you're likely to want a sequel to be, in essence, the same book. But
Closing Time
couldn't possibly be the same—the events are 50 years later. Joe is an older man, writing about a different time. He isn't capable of writing the same book.” Would he have counseled Joe not to attempt a sequel? “Serious writers should do what they feel they should do. You can't prescribe for them,” Gottlieb said.

“We've positioned it as a bestseller, but we will see and react,” Bob Wietrak, a director of marketing for the Barnes & Noble book chain, announced. “If the reviews aren't good, that will affect [the way we try to sell it].”

In September 1994, as 170,000 copies of the book were readied for shipment, the Book-of-the-Month Club declared it would pass on
Closing Time
: Female readers—the club's bread and butter—were not likely to be engaged by a novel about elderly war veterans.
Vanity Fair
canceled a planned profile of Joe, offering no explanation.

Penny Kaganoff, editor in chief of
Kirkus,
fired the first shot: “There comes a time when an author just can't write anymore. That's the time to close the chapter down.… If someone wanted to do [Heller] a favor, they would have stopped him.”

In London's
Times,
Ben Macintyre spoke for most reviewers: “[I]n
Catch-22,
Heller chose his targets carefully. In
Closing Time,
the effect is more that of napalm, an angry old man settling accounts and preparing for The End.”

A dissenting view came from William H. Pritchard, writing in the
New York Times Book Review.
He praised the novel's “richness of narrative tone and human feeling,” its “poetic quality.” Heller had “more than got away” with the sequel, he said; the book was “an independent creation in whose best parts the seriousness and the joking are inseparable, as they should be in art.”

“Score one for Joseph Heller,” said Carlin Romano in the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
He described the book as having a “fictional architecture (complicated by multiple narrative voices) that's nervy for a writer facing serious chain-store expectations for the fall season.
Closing Time
is a gutsy feat. For a writer co-opted years ago by various critics and politicos, it's a declaration of independence.”

Many reviewers suggested the sequel dimmed the reputation of
Catch-22
and tarnished Joe's career. “What I sense in most of these reviews is a personal rebuke,” Bob Gottlieb said sadly. People were mad at Joe for messing with their memories of
Catch-22.
As for the author, he was, as David Craig said, making a bid for literary immortality.

*   *   *

MAN IS MATTER.

Yossarian learns this lesson in
Catch-22
when he plunges his hands into Snowden's torn body in the back of the B-25. In
Closing Time,
Yo-Yo, elderly, working like Bob Slocum in corporate offices, living like Bruce Gold in an America run by nincompoops, railing like King David against a hellish world, questioning like Socrates society's narrow choices, experiences the material breakdown of bodies, including his own, at every turn.

The novel begins by revealing the backstage machinery behind the comic pageantry. “In … twenty more years, we will all look pretty bad in … newspaper pictures and television clips, kind of strange, like people in a different world, ancient and doddering, balding, seeming perhaps a bit idiotic, shrunken, with toothless smiles in collapsed, wrinkled cheeks,” says Sammy Singer, an old Coney Island boy who served with Yossarian on the mission to Avignon. He was, the reader learns, the unnamed crewman who fainted as Yossarian tried in vain to save Snowden's life.

“People I know are already dying and others I've known are already dead,” Singer says. “We don't look that beautiful now. We wear glasses and are growing hard of hearing, we sometimes talk too much, repeat ourselves, things grow on us, even the most minor bruises take longer to heal and leave telltale traces. And soon … there will be no more of us left.”

This is the gruesome reality propping up the fiction. Yossarian flies through the world of
Catch-22
free of gravity. He breathes anachronisms and absurdity. In
Closing Time,
he remains a fictional character inhabiting a comic-book planet (as opposed to Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitiz, who operate in a realistic milieu), but he is specifically identified with the World War II generation. At the end of the novel, he survives—indeed, he believes he is immortal, living happily ever after in good fictional style—but he has not escaped time's depredations. In his previous incarnation, he has decided to live forever or die trying. Now, he says the best way to live is to prepare to die.

The Yossarian chapters are packed with comic invention—mad sexual escapades; surreal worlds (Dante's
Inferno
as Steeplechase, in tunnels beneath Port Authority); apocalyptic moments; satirical set pieces lampooning the jet set; literary, musical, and cultural allusions (Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner): Here is the novel as roller coaster. In these sections, readers encounter distorted images of themselves, just as the old Steeplechase offered visitors opportunities to laugh at their follies.

But then, in the Singer-Rabinowitz chapters, Joe dropped the garish curtains, killed the blinking lights. He exposed the show's cogs: old age, divorce, illness, death. By yo-yoing the reader from whimsy to severity, Joe hoped to achieve what critic Robert Polhemus called the height of comic art: to “combin[e] the intensity of the [humorous] moment—the mood of laughter and release—with the promise of some form of enduring life in which we have a part.”

The fulcrum from fantasy to reality and back again was the moment Joe returned to in memory and writing all his life: the wounded gunner in the back of the plane over Avignon.

In
Catch-22,
Snowden's death turns comedy into tragedy. In
Closing Time,
it binds the literary (Yossarian) to the real (Singer). It demonstrates how events inform literary art. Man is matter, but the imagination soars above it. We inhabit two realms, body and mind, even if they are really only one. Sammy Singer
is
Yossarian—and Joey Heller, among many others. (Storytelling is a matter of organizing experience and fantasizing, indulging in a conscious extension of the imagination, Joe once said. A schizophrenic exercise, it is both denial and confession).

At novel's end, the world appears to be hurtling toward its doom. Nevertheless, with the insouciance of a hero in a fiction, Yossarian feels “stimulated … by … optimism.” He believes “that nothing harmful could happen to him, that nothing bad could happen to a just man. This was nonsense, he knew; but he also knew, in his gut, he'd be … safe.”

On the other hand, Sammy Singer holds “no illusions.” His theater of operations is the real. Widowed, aging, he is last seen (fittingly enough) in an airplane, listening to “mournful … Jewish” music, reading the death-haunted stories of Thomas Mann. “Mostly of late in [art] he preferred the melancholy to the heroic,” the narrator says of this quiet, elderly man. There is only one place Sammy Singer can end up. It will not be an imaginary Sweden, and it will not be in Yossarian's immortal embrace.

*   *   *

“IT'S MY MASTERPIECE,”
Joe told Jerry McQueen, speaking of
Closing Time.
The reviewers did not agree, but Joe felt the novel would survive them. It would fly through the darkness long after the newspapers had wrapped old fish.

For the first time in his career, he had created rounded characters, not just the comic figures that had been his signature. He had written movingly and honestly about women, marriage, fatherhood, and companionship. He had lovingly evoked Coney Island and the ethnic atmospheres of his childhood neighborhoods. The novel would not replace
Catch-22
as his bestloved book, but it was, Joe believed, a better, richer book, and the finest one he was capable of writing.

The reviews' bitterness was offset by personal responses he received from readers and people he had known. One day, he got a phone call from Meredith Berkman, niece of Lou the junkman. Lou had died in 1981. Joe based the character Lew Rabinowoitz on him. Meredith wanted to meet and talk about her uncle. Saturday afternoon at the Plaza? Fine, Joe said.

“[I had heard that Heller] … had the reputation of being a gruff, arrogant man with little patience [for others],” Berkman said, “but he [was] warm and open throughout our conversation.”

Her eyes welled up. Joe clasped her hands across the table. “Don't start to cry,” he said nervously. She told him her family loved the Coney Island sections of
Closing Time.
Joe professed his affection for her uncle. The only reason he hadn't gone to Lou's funeral was because “I don't like rituals,” he said. He cautioned her not to mix fiction with facts. “This is
not
your [family's] life [in the novel]. I think you may or may not be projecting onto me a love or a nostalgia … that's much more romantic than it actually was,” he said. He pulled a Stim-U-Dent from the pocket of his tweed jacket. “I must tell you something else. Even when I'm writing about subjects that are real and intimate, I don't feel that intimacy while I'm writing it. I doubt I'm different from other authors. When an author's in an emotional state, he can't write. There's something cool and calculating and objective about the act of writing fiction.” They ordered coffee. “For me, most of the act of writing now consists of two emotions,” Joe said. “One is strength. The other is apprehension, the stress of … deciding what to do and doing it. [I feel] almost triumphant relief when it's done.”

Berkman thanked him for his honesty—and for stimulating the first frank talk her family had ever had about sex. When her sister was reading the novel, she said, she came across a reference to “Coney Island whitefish.” Their father, Charlie, had to explain they were condoms.