Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  In 1956, when Ginsberg sent his old professor a copy of Howl, Trilling pronounced it “dull.” His wife, Diana, reflecting her husband’s view, regarded the Beats as phony rebels, who harbored no real understanding of individual freedom. They were, she said, “panic-stricken kids in blue jeans, many of them publicly homosexual, talking about or taking drugs, assuring us that they are not out of their minds, not responsible.… Is it any wonder, then, that Time and Life write as they do about the ‘beats’—with such a conspicuous show of superiority, and no hint of fear? These periodicals know what genuine, dangerous protest looks like, and it doesn’t look like Ginsberg and Kerouac.” Give me the Scottsboro boys and W. C. Handy’s blues, she said: now, that’s radicalism.

  The Trillings’ nostalgia for an old “new,” and their tone deafness to fresh cultural strains—made messier by the sense that on some level (at least among New York intellectuals) this was all a Jewish family quarrel—were apparent by the time Joe showed up in Professor Trilling’s class. The older man’s insistence that literature was part of a mighty cultural battle, coupled with his disgust at the forms the skirmishes seemed to be taking, increased Joe’s irritation with the story conventions he was trying to copy from the pages of mainstream magazines.

  The small and always airless domestic sphere, the oblique, abrupt dialogue, and the romantic cynicism: These tropes seemed more and more limited, even moribund.

  The world was bigger than short stories, so fashioned, suggested. Even in the constrained and pleasant world of Morningside Heights, in the stacks of the Low Library on campus, amid the laughter in neighborhood taverns such as the Lion’s Den and the West End Bar, among veterans and young husbands just like him, Joe discerned a stunning cultural complexity, about which contemporary literature was largely silent. It dazzled him with possibility. He had left the war and come to college, feeling that, generally, the country spoke with one voice. Yet now, in coffeehouse conversations, he heard different registers of American speech. As a kid, he had distinguished between Republicans and Democrats, but now he became aware of multiple shadings of moderate and extreme, liberal and conservative, isolationists and expansionists, like those who supported the Marshall Plan. He heard the split between those who, even after the fact, felt that defeating Japan, rather than Germany, should have been the war’s first priority—for these people, patriotism was paramount; Japan was the country that had attacked us; it was a matter of national pride—and those, on the other hand, who felt it had been correct to halt Germany’s ambitions first. For them, human rights had been the main issue.

  The self-declared patriots tended to be anti-Roosevelt, coming from rural backgrounds; most of the human rights advocates came from urban professional families espousing liberal politics. In part, this debate had been rekindled on campus by The Naked and the Dead, in the dialogues between the characters Hearn and Cummings, heavy rehashings of various strains in the American character. To his credit, Mailer had been trying to grasp something essential, but his attempt, for all its boldness, its undeniable greatness, was finally pretty clumsy, Joe felt.

  The vets on the Columbia campus, hailing from all across the nation, reaping the benefits of the G.I. Bill, represented the full political spectrum. Conversations in and out of class were heady, if often confused and confusing. David Herbert Donald, then a young history teacher, recalled, “Most of the students were veterans … much older than I, and all knew much more of the world than I, who grew up on a farm in Mississippi. I felt lucky if I could keep one day ahead of my students, and I lived in constant fear that I would be exposed as an ignoramus. I tried to compensate by working very hard on my lectures, ransacking the Columbia libraries and staying up night after night till long past midnight.”

  Joe feared exposure, too. He hadn’t read enough. His published pieces were hollow—frankly derivative, as any smart reader could see. Steadily, in classes, in long hours at the library, in conversations over drinks, he began to “acquire … standards and learned to be more critical,” he said. “I now wanted to be new, in the way that I thought, as I discovered them, Nabokov, Céline, Faulkner, and Waugh were new—not necessarily different, but new. Original.” For a while, then, in spite of impressive publications, accolades, and every indication of promise, Joseph Heller stopped writing fiction.

  In Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970, the critic Morris Dickstein wrote, “We can scarcely understand postwar fiction without seeing how few writers from the pre-war years actually survived the war itself.” His comments are worth quoting at length in order to understand the context into which Joseph Heller tried to launch his literary career:

  Some [prewar writers] died literally, and others simply lost their creative edge in the changed conditions of the postwar world. West and Fitzgerald died on successive days in 1940, Sherwood Anderson in 1941 (along with Joyce and Virginia Woolf, whose greatest influence in America was yet to come), Dreiser in 1945, Gertrude Stein in 1946, and Willa Cather in 1947. Most of the proletarian writers disappeared after one or two books, some to Hollywood or Time magazine, which both remained sympathetic to social melodrama, others into children’s writing, historical fiction, or pulp fiction.… Committed social novelists who remained prolific were unable to regain the élan of their best work. Steinbeck would never again write anything to match the urgency of In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939); James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos would never equal the social grasp and personal intensity of their Depression trilogies.… Their naturalist methods, which required an immense piling up of realistic details, and a minute verisimilitude, seemed unable to encompass the complexities and absurdities, to say nothing of the social changes, of the postwar world.

  Richard Wright drifted into abstraction after Black Boy (1945). Novelists of manners—J. P. Marquand, James Gould Cozzens, John O’Hara—“were the diminished heirs of … writers from New England and the Northeast who closely documented the lives of the upper and professional classes,” Dickstein argued. Their work “devolved into a mere social record of … the status anxieties and sexual or professional problems of a declining elite.” Finally, Dickstein said, only “the ravages of age or alcoholism and the fragility of genius could begin to explain the decline of the greatest writers of the interwar years, Hemingway and Faulkner, which set in just as their earlier work was gaining them readers, fame, and increasing literary influence.”

  The vogue for war novels in the late 1940s signaled a need for new subjects, new treatments of old themes, new means of expression, but Mailer and others were mired in received notions of craft. The attempt in The Naked and the Dead to make individual soldiers representative of broad social types was an extension of the proletarian writing of the 1930s. In his introduction to the massive anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935), Joseph Freeman had written, “[F]rom the fate of a people [proletarian writers] derive their stirring themes.… Rural life, the factory, New York’s streets, the office, the mill town, the south, the west, Jews, Yanks, Irish—these are the locales and characters which enliven proletarian fiction.” And they were present on Mailer’s battlefields, there (as Freeman would have said) to achieve the familiar goal of baring a “civilization rent asunder by a class war”: thus, the inability of such fiction, however well-intentioned, to embrace the diversity it strove for and transcend its bullhorn monotone.

  If the approach to subject—even in a combat setting—came from the previous decade’s political writing, the dominant tone of Mailer’s book, and of many 1940s war novels, bled through from pulp fiction and men’s adventure magazines. These were offshoots of nineteenth-century dime novels about western heroes such as Billy the Kid, and Frank Munsey’s Argosy, which printed adventure fiction on cheap pulpwood paper, giving the genre its name.

  At their peak, in the 1930s, the ten-cent pulps had a circulation of more than ten million. From the beginning, Westerns drew avid readers. Titles such as True Detective and Hug
o Gernsback’s Amazing Stories became increasingly popular. In his inaugural issue in 1926, Gernsback promised “something that has never been done before in this country … scientifiction … a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” Stylistically, pulp tales shared a preponderance of informational dialogue, explaining plot details; spare description, so as not to impede the action; and clichés, to quickly encapsulate personalities, settings, and meanings.

  During the war, paper shortages impaired printing and distributing pulps, but afterward, pulp fiction found new life in the form of mass-market paperback books. “Running parallel to many combat/war novels [of the 1940s] was the gangster/detective fiction of Mickey Spillane,” said the critic Frederick Karl (soon to become Joe’s pal). “His [character] Mike Hammer is the ultimate, in popular culture, of the masculine military type. Hateful of Communists, patriotic, associated with the right, a male chauvinist, a defender of a reductive form of democracy, Hammer represents a kind of caricatured military. As in the novel of combat, Spillane’s work simplified and reduced to violent endings all social, political, and ideological conflicts—hammered them down, as if in a gigantic air raid.” (Fittingly, perhaps, Mickey Spillane, like Joe, had been a World War II flier.)

  The smuggling of pulp material into book form gave it a smidgen of literary respectability. And, as Spillane reminded readers at the University of South Carolina’s World War II Writers Symposium in 1995, “[I]n the 1930s … the pulp fiction world was filled with magazines whose jade was battle aces … battle birds of the air that dealt with World War I.… But there wasn’t much of an outlet for war stories at that time except for the pulps. The publishing industry hadn’t reached out that far yet.” Following World War II, he said, the “paperback … opened up a vast field [for] writers.”

  This was especially true when the “Fawcett [company] first came out with [its] Gold Medal concept.… I was sitting with [the publisher] Roscoe Fawcett, [and] we developed this thing together, of having original paperback stories,” Spillane said. With so many veterans swelling contemporary readership, combat tales were a natural, along with other pulp standbys.

  In this sense, then, the real innovation of The Naked and the Dead lies in its introduction of a previously underground phenomenon into mainstream literature: not the war story, which Crane and Hemingway had taken up in important and serious ways, but the pulp war story, with its emphasis on physical action rather than the psychology of violence, sprinkled with touches from Stephen Crane and the overlay of political (that is, proletarian) concerns.

  None of this addressed Joe’s suspicions that the heralded conventions failed to read the current moment. The Naked and the Dead declared itself a novel of now, but it looked firmly backward, as did most contemporary short stories. However much he admired Mailer’s book, Joe knew “that type of writing was going to go out of style.”

  Perhaps nothing illustrated the paucity of conventions better than the magazines Joe had been poaching. Critic Bergen Evans, writing in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1948 ( just one month before Joe’s appearance in its pages), said changing attitudes, rooted in harsher realities and smaller stomachs for sentimentality, postwar, were wreaking havoc on fiction, which had yet to find appropriate expressions for the country’s new outlook.

  For example, the “popular novelist of today,” and the writer of women’s magazine fiction, “has to limn daydreams for a different group of women living under different circumstances,” Evans wrote. Readers of fiction still believed, or wanted to believe, “in true love,” but shifting cultural conditions—not the least of which was the “appalling increase [in the number of] marriageable women over marriageable men”—led to a conviction that “moral values” have been “revers[ed].” Women didn’t want to hear about devotion and domestic security. “[They] long to be told that escape from dullness is possible and one of the main avenues of escape … is untrue love,” said Evans.

  Thus, women no longer hankered for a virtuous man, but a specimen with “the face of a god and the loins of a stag.” If fiction offering such love “reflects the psyches of [its] readers, as to a considerable extent [it] must, [its] most disturbing feature is [its] aggressiveness,” Evans wrote. “Love … exists to give the woman a chance to ‘get her own back,’” after a taste of independence during the war years, when many women joined the workforce, followed by the bitterness of losing freedom in the postwar rush toward married conformity. “[Love] is, apparently, the one means thought to be at her disposal for humiliating men and ‘putting them in their place.’” The uneasy fit of old beliefs with new social predicaments had antiquated the once trusted tropes of fiction, and led to absurdities of style and story. “[T]he authors … seem bewildered at times by the impetuosity of their creations,” Evans wrote. “‘How did they get into bed so quickly?’” asks a narrator in one of the books he cited.

  “Must We Change Our Sex Standards?” asked the lead article in the June 1948 Reader’s Digest. The article examined the just-released Kinsey Report. “[Americans] have [now] been told that practices long held in abhorrence must … be regarded as acceptable,” the article explained. “Science, so it is said, does not recognize any expression of sex as ‘abnormal’ … [and] pretty much anything is all right.” How were the conventions of women’s fiction—any fiction, for that matter—supposed to tackle this monster? Just three years earlier, in his story “I Don’t Love You Any More,” Joe had mentioned Reader’s Digest as an arbiter of the “sugar and tinsel dream of life.” Who could have predicted that in so short a time the magazine would describe “abhorrent” sexual practices (even if it was to denounce them)?

  The changing subjects in Norman Rockwell’s cover paintings for The Saturday Evening Post established as firmly as anything that America had swerved from the past, with no going back. The magazine’s publisher, George Horace Lorimer, was a staunch, anti-Roosevelt Republican who wanted every aspect of his magazine to reflect his faith in hard work, self-reliance, and optimism about the nation. Rockwell’s covers, featuring idealized main streets and happy folk in commonplace, often humorous situations, mirrored the ways the magazine’s middle-class subscribers viewed themselves. “[I]f Rockwell drew cliché situations, then America itself was a cliché,” the artist Milton Glaser once said. “Not one of his drawings depicted something that did not exist.”

  This made it all the more troubling to conventional sensibilities when Rockwell showed women in the workplace—Rosie the Riveter on the cover of the May 29, 1943, issue—or men in uniform who were obviously hampered mentally, physically, and emotionally. Lorimer had died in 1937. “It was fortunate … [he] did not live to see Rockwell’s contributions to the covers of the Second World War period,” wrote John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman in their study The Magazine in America, 1741–1990.

  The immediate postwar years were even more turbulent. Weekly, monthly, magazines reported on the disarray in America’s foreign policy and belligerent talk from Russia (we should “transact our necessary business with Russia at arm’s length,” declared The Atlantic Monthly in February 1948). Again and again, articles appeared on the establishment of the state of Israel and the resultant rise in Arab militancy, on the Berlin blockade and airlift, on fears of nuclear proliferation.

  What place did the fiction of “happily ever after” have in a world like this, except as escapist fare? This question dogged the literary journals, but Joe knew it was the wrong one. Some fiction had always been escapist—honorably so, in fact. But what of the fiction that—to paraphrase Lionel Trilling—sought to take full account of human complexity? How did it move forward in such volatile terrain?

  Attempts at answers came from Saul Bellow (The Victim, 1947) and Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948), but the former was schematic, whereas the latter seemed merely confectionary. Both men had yet to find their literary footing. Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) recycled naturalism even more gleefully than Mailer h
ad, and Carson McCullers’s novels from earlier in the decade (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940, and Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1941) focused so thoroughly on southern grotesques, they had little to say about the world beyond their narrow confines. Compelling writers, all; but it was hard not to feel that the American novel was fraying a bit, unable to store—in the boxes it had built for itself—all it was asked to hold.

  As for the short story: “Not for one hundred years, not since the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, has the short story in America displayed the tendencies it has shown during the past year,” said Martha Foley in her foreword to the 1948 edition of Best American Short Stories. “The overwhelming tension, the terror, the specter of undefined guilt which permeated Poe’s work are the most obvious attributes of today’s short story writing.” The “re-emergence of the old-fashioned ghost story,” the “breathless awaiting of the unknown,” was, Foley wrote, the short story writer’s response to the “atom-bomb-inventing, airplane traveling, electronically powered United States of America.” Furthermore, the stories’ preoccupation with ill-seen fears could be “linked to the war” and its aftermath. Yet here again (if Foley’s generalizations held up), writers were responding to the new with well-worn gestures. Ghosts were creepy. They were not—in this flashpoint moment—particularly informative.

  * * *

  IN A PASSAGE he ultimately cut from his first novel, Joe mocked the writing of an academic thesis. It was, he wrote, a process whose primary requirement was to make “an original contribution of nothing new to a subject of no importance.” For his M.A. thesis at Columbia, he chose as his subject “The Pulitzer Prize Plays, 1917–1935.” He didn’t much care about the topic, nor did he know, exactly, what a thesis should entail. “I’m surprised [it] was approved,” he wrote later. It was a “trivial, unfruitful subject.” Nevertheless, it indicated both his practical ambitions and his growing dissatisfaction with the fiction he had written. Perhaps by studying the prizewinning plays of his lifetime, he could learn to be a successful dramatist. “I’m not sure that my motivations then … were worthy ones,” he said. He was soon to graduate. “I really wanted to make money and have some kind of status.… I write dialogue rapidly, so I thought I [might be] in playwriting or radio.”