It was a matter of writing quickly and steadily. Joe remembered he’d kicked out a draft of “I Don’t Love You Any More” in about two hours. He’d fiddled with it quite a bit after that, but this wasn’t such onerous work. You get an idea, you trust it, and you go with it. Or so he told himself.
In The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain, David Seed notes the many direct echoes of Hemingway in “I Don’t Love You Any More.” Like Krebs in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” Joe’s war vet is disillusioned by what he’s witnessed: He refuses to play the hero, just as Krebs feels a “distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war.” Like the bored couple in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain,” Joe’s young newlyweds don’t know (or refuse to face) what makes them unhappy. It seems Joe had taken his structure from “Cat in the Rain”: The woman in Hemingway’s story wants a kitten, just as Joe’s veteran craves a pitcher of beer (clearly, kitten and beer are substitutes for real solutions to problems). At the end of each piece, the characters get what they asked for. In “I Don’t Love You any More,” a cruel husband goads his wife into expressing her misery by refusing to state his own, as Nick does with Marjorie in Hemingway’s “The End of Something” (love “isn’t fun any more,” Nick finally admits—though he can’t say why).
The truth is, Joe didn’t kick out drafts; he labored over them carefully, with fine literary models in mind. Quickly and steadily would never be his method, as he was already beginning to suspect. But quickly was how he wanted success to land—perhaps this accounted for his swift abandonment of California: a restlessness, an impatience with the slightest thing that felt out of whack or appeared to impede what he wanted.
He glanced up from the kitchen table at his busy, pretty wife. It hadn’t been a mistake. She, too, was glad to be back in New York. He was sure of it.
* * *
FROM THE BEGINNING, Los Angeles had felt like a folly. Early October 1945: The first few days, they’d stayed at the grand old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. A celebrity palace (Charlie Chaplin, Rudy Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Kate Hepburn, on and on and on), it was the kind of place you could wander around in for days and never find your way out. Joe and Shirley danced—their official honeymoon—in the hotel’s Coconut Grove nightclub, along with hundreds of other ex-servicemen and their gals. Late at night, they ordered room service from the lavish kitchen (in the pantry in which, twenty-three years later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy would be fatally shot). Splashy digs, but they couldn’t live like that for long. They were burning through the money from their wedding.
Through the housing office at the University of Southern California, they found a rooming house on South Figueroa Street, near Washington Boulevard, in the south-central section of the city. Once a leg of Route 66, Figueroa ran north-south between the Pacific Coast Highway and the Ventura Freeway. Washington Boulevard extended nearly to the ocean. USC was close, and so was Watts. Faux-Moroccan and garishly painted Tudor architecture lined the streets. The smell of melted cheese and sizzling chili oil came from all the Mexican and hole-in-the-wall Chinese cafés in the neighborhood. The Hellers’ landlords, an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter, belonged to an evangelical Christian sect, to which Mrs. Hunter tried to convert Shirley (apparently, she was afraid to approach Joe on the subject). The old woman also confided to Shirley that her husband had never satisfied her sexually, a calamity that sometimes led her to sit on a cake of ice. Shirley began to avoid the woman, and Joe didn’t know what to say to the silent Mr. Hunter, who slipped about the property, wraithlike, always wearing a blue or a gray cardigan sweater.
The Hellers had no kitchen; politely, they declined their landlords’ offers to come into the main house to use the stove. The newlyweds ate in a Greek coffee shop nearby, as well as in other cafés. Once, they spotted Rosalind Russell in the Brown Derby. But mostly, they noticed all the mortuary monuments on the sidewalks. Cemetery sculpture was booming in the area.
A few years earlier, in the midst of the Depression, bands of “wild boys,” as the locals called them, converged on South Figueroa Street, the site of a large government relief center. It housed itinerants (like John Steinbeck’s Joad family) who had headed to California for agricultural work and wound up in L.A., where they scrabbled for jobs in the defense industry. In the mid-thirties, over twelve thousand transients a month descended on the city. These days, nearby Watts still reeled from too many immigrants. “Mud Town,” Watts was called; formerly a sandy, treeless area, it had once served as the L.A. water basin. Estimates said about two thousand people a month, most of them black, were moving in now, displacing the area’s former residents, a mix of Chinese, Mexican, and Jewish families. An area covering two and a half square miles, it now had the highest population density of any place in Los Angeles County. Recently, the government had withdrawn its federal housing subsidies, leaving scores of people with mortgages they couldn’t afford, and police and local officials trying to keep the lid on a pressure cooker. Sometimes, on his way to campus, Joe liked to digress and walk past the odd towers in Watts made of bottles, broken dishes, and seashells, rising ever higher inside a walled garden belonging to a man named Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who said he “wanted to do something for the United States because there are nice people in this country.” The towers redeemed Watts’s ugliness, up to a point, turning waste into beauty, but Joe could feel the desperation and uneasiness in the area. Twenty years later, in August 1965, rioting and looting in Watts would claim the lives of thirty-four people. Simon Rodia left Watts and never returned. He wouldn’t talk about the poverty and racism he had seen there. “If your mother dies and you have loved her very much,” he said, “maybe you don’t speak of her.”
This was not the California Joe remembered from his military-training days. He recalled the pleasure of taking a bus down to Newport Beach and over to the Balboa Peninsula, a mini-Coney Island with amusement rides, pretty girls, and an exciting concoction he hadn’t tasted before, frozen bananas covered with chocolate and candy sprinkles. By contrast, L.A.—or at least the patch of it Joe and Shirley squatted in—was, in Raymond Chandler’s words, a “neon-lighted slum.” Here, “the bright gardens had a haunted look,” Chandler wrote in his novel The Big Sleep. The city offered “the most of everything and the best of nothing”; it was a place where “everything [was] like something else.”
Basically, L.A. was a federal garrison. Government money, feeding the production of military aircraft by Lockheed, Northrup, North American, and Douglas, had turned California’s economy into the seventh largest in the world. The poverty recorded in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was augmented now by the frenzy of opportunism traced in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (intriguingly, both novels were published in 1939, when The Big Sleep, an elegy for a clean and peaceful urban West, also appeared).
Joe and Shirley took long walks under leafy carob trees, past neat and colorful stucco houses (as much to avoid the Hunters as to try to find beauty and serenity somewhere). In the mornings, they paused to admire willowy fog curling around bushes and cars. They did not make many friends. Joe was too busy studying to socialize with his classmates, most of whom were younger than he was. For a while, Shirley halfheartedly tried to develop an interest in football, but in the end, she had to admit she didn’t give a damn about the Rose Bowl.
They spent their evenings reading (Shirley surrendered to Wuthering Heights), sightseeing in Hollywood, or listening to classical music and comedy shows (Fred Allen, Jack Benny) on the radio. They grew fond of shish kebab—it was a cheap meal—with french fries, rice, and salad, all for under two dollars. Shirley couldn’t afford new clothes. She didn’t want to write her parents for money—they had already been so generous. She wondered whether she would ever have nice hair and nails again. There had been a beauty shop on the train from New York, but she feared she wouldn’t see another hair dryer in this lifetime.
During his second semester, Joe arranged his class schedule s
o he could get away early in the afternoons and meet Shirley at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia. It had just opened again as a horse-racing venue after serving for three years as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans. Before the war, Seabiscuit had become the most famous racehorse in the world by winning the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap. Betting on the horses, against the sunny purple backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains, became Joe and Shirley’s favorite California pastime.
Joe liked the idea of school better than school itself—at least initially. He had begun as a journalism major but quickly discovered that the kids in journalism classes couldn’t write worth a damn. “I wanted to find [things] out [, but] I wasn’t sure what I wanted to learn,” he wrote years later. His most valuable object of study at USC was his own temperament. He knew he was smart—he had always been good in school—but he learned he didn’t really have a scholarly disposition. He seized on facts and figures randomly, if and when they pleased him or served his mental projects. He wasn’t about to engage fully in Latin or literary exegesis just because he was supposed to.
Before leaving New York, he had purchased a portable typewriter at Macy’s, using Sylvia’s employee discount. On this machine, he wrote his English compositions, always trying to tweak them so they would satisfy the class assignment and maybe also be suitable for magazine publication of some sort. On his own time, he continued to read John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, and William Saroyan, and to dream of publishing short stories in The New Yorker. In his classes, he discovered a liking for Aldous Huxley (briefly) and H. L. Mencken. In particular, he appreciated the sarcastic humor of Mencken’s In Defense of Women. Men were more foolish than women, Mencken wrote, because men are easily hoodwinked into marrying ladies and having to put up with them. “I am embarrassed to confess that more than Mencken’s vocabulary found its way into my literary thinking,” Joe wrote years later. “It was the fashion, the convention of the time, to present women in a stereotyped way as targets to be … derided.” He attempted similar humorous pieces and sent them to magazines, without success. Still, he viewed his English assignments as “opportunities to show [his] stuff.” In the meantime, he dispatched most of his science and history requirements.
One day, his English teacher told the class to write a short paper defining some kind of method or device—an exercise in the power of description. Joe wrote a fanciful piece called “Beating the Bangtails,” later retitled “Bookies, Beware!” It was about a precocious inventor named Marvin B. Winkler (after Joe’s old Coney Island friend), who creates a surefire process of handicapping the horses at the Santa Anita racetrack, using various paraphernalia—not very tautly described: “And thus a new weapon, the pure science method, had been added to the age-old onslaught of the bookmakers.” When he got the paper back, Joe carefully erased the A the teacher had scrawled at the top of the page, slipped the piece into an envelope, and sent it to Esquire.
A few weeks later, an excited Shirley met him at a trolley stop as he was returning to the rooming house one day after classes. She waved an opened letter: an acceptance notice from the magazine, along with a check for two hundred dollars. Promptly, he blew the money at the racetrack.
* * *
HE HAD NOW PUBLISHED pieces in two prestigious magazines, Story and Esquire. He entertained visions of making a living as a writer, cranking out two or three short stories a week—just a job. But already a deeper, slower, more ambitious passion moved him. Years later, he would say that reading Story, even more than reading The New Yorker, Esquire, and other magazines that paid greater sums for work, showed him that “fiction is not merely a diversion, but a vital form of art.”
From California, he wrote to Whit Burnett at Story, enclosing four rough chapters of a novel he’d begun and asking for the editor’s thoughts. Burnett took a while to reply. In August 1946, he finally wrote back, saying he feared Joe had succumbed too much to the influence of Thomas Wolfe (whom Joe had been reading in classes). Burnett added, “I am wondering, too, if the treatment of a flier facing the end of his missions and thinking over the meaning of the war has not been pretty well done to death.… If so, this book might have hard sledding.”
* * *
“I [THEN] HAD THOUGHTS of becoming a playwright.… It seemed easier. There were fewer words,” Joe recalled. At USC, he enrolled in a course on contemporary theater. He clashed with one of his classmates, an attractive blonde named Mary Alden, every bit his equal in knowledge and creativity. They dominated discussions in class, almost always disagreeing. Alden had done some work in theater, and she felt that by not acknowledging her experience, Joe was failing to show her respect. On the other hand, he had come from New York, and could drop names as well as facts about Broadway. He liked her but could not win her over with jokes. Their sparring he saw as good fun, but she, he reflected, “held as sacred what I took for sport.” Over the years, this dynamic—he needling, the other person scowling, unable to accept his humor—would characterize many of his social encounters.
It was not just the isolation he felt in school but also the fear that perhaps he had exiled himself from the people and places that seasoned his best literary material that soured him on California. Here he was, in the land of Chandler and Nathanael West—writers he admired but could not absorb—yet imaginatively, he was living in the East. He had discovered Jerome Weidman, whose novel I Can Get It for You Wholesale, set in Manhattan’s Garment District, pulsed with the erratic rhythms of Yiddish English and the hammered beat of physical work. To be strolling in Southern California while mentally rubbing elbows with noisy Lower East Side Jews was like trying to swim in a business suit. He was flailing about in the wrong element, and his muscles were getting soggy, slow.
Once more, he appealed to Whit Burnett. A big, voluble former newspaperman, Burnett liked Joe’s scrappiness and his apparent dedication to literature. He suggested that Joe apply to New York University, to which he wrote him a letter of recommendation. Joe knew Shirley was willing to sacrifice on his behalf and do whatever he thought he needed. He also knew she was miserable in L.A. Despite the chaos and hardship of another move so soon, he was pretty sure she’d do cartwheels all the way back to Manhattan.
* * *
MAURICE “BUCK” BAUDIN, Joe’s writing teacher at NYU, was a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French drama, but recently he had published short stories in magazines. In his fiction-writing classes, he said talent couldn’t be taught. Technique and editing—these could be learned. Good writing, he insisted, depended on careful reading. From the selection of classic stories he asked his students to read as models of literary craft, he published an anthology, Edgar Allan Poe and Others: Representative Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century.
Like Whit Burnett, Baudin admired Joe’s tenacity and his capacity to exert energy on subjects he decided to master. If Story had coaxed the artist in Joe to raise his voice, Baudin’s pragmatic approach prompted Joe to develop discipline and a professional, tough-skinned attitude toward his writing. Baudin told students to scour the contents of magazines, learn what editors wanted, and write in a calculated manner.
“I couldn’t deny to myself that I really had an imagination and a real appetite for knowledge, for reading, particularly about literature, philosophy, history,” Joe told an interviewer, Charles Ruas, in 1985. “[But] I didn’t have any concept of what I should write—almost everything I wrote was imitative.” Following Baudin’s advice, “I would read a story in a magazine like Good Housekeeping or Woman’s Home Companion, and I would then try to write a story for them. I was not very good at it.” It was like sizing words to fit into perfect slots in perfect little boxes. “I wasn’t even writing out of my own experiences as much as writing out of my experience of reading other people’s work.” Still, he had mixed and was starting to simmer a potent combination: hardheaded professionalism linked with stirrings of artistic ambition and vision, even if the vision remained, at this stage, a mirage. The rough chapters of the war novel
he had sent Whit Burnett appear not to have survived; they would have told us much about Joe’s early vision, and its relationship to what came later.
Baudin became friends with Joe and Shirley, and he went to dinner a few times at the apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street. Despite their closeness in age, Joe had trouble calling the man by his nickname. After all, he was a teacher and a successful writer. Joe followed his lessons to the letter. “[He] pointed out my faults to me—he’d say throw away the first three or four pages, and he was right,” Joe acknowledged.
In Baudin’s courses, Joe absorbed other examples of the writing life. A fellow student, David Krause, “wrote perfect short stories but couldn’t be persuaded to submit them for publication because he didn’t think they were worthy,” Joe recalled. Another classmate, Alex Austin, “a meager, short fellow who seldom raised his voice above a whisper, even when reading aloud in the classroom,” had already published hundreds of poems and stories in literary journals obscure to the other students. “It was an essential part of his daily regimen, like brushing teeth, to write at least one short story every afternoon,” Joe said. “[H]e would sit down at his typewriter, devotionally, often without a thought in mind, and simply begin typing. He had novel-length manuscripts, too, and Baudin was reduced to imploring … him to limit the number he handed in.” All this, too, was part of learning to be a writer: gauging the pros and cons of other people’s methods, personalities, and working habits, judging the constraints of perfectionism, the advantages of a certain amount of compulsion, trying to temper and balance creative forces, critical discernment.
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