Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  At night, in the apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street, he worked on his thesis. Occasionally, he and Shirley invited someone to dinner—Buck Baudin was still a frequent guest—or Shirley’s mother dropped in to cook for them and her husband. “[H]er parents found delight in watching me eat—always a second helping, often a third,” he recalled. Dottie was particularly proud of her prime rib crusted with garlic, salt, and paprika.

  Joe had trouble convincing his brother and sister to visit. They worked hard, and subway travel, on a weekend or at the end of a day, was an extra ordeal for them. When they did come, Lee’s wife, Perle, “gushed in praise at the [apartment’s] sensible arrangement and the authentic look of several of the almost-genuine antique pieces” Shirley and Dottie had found to decorate the place, Joe said. Lee told Joe how proud he was of his achievements in school. He tried to ignore the splinters of jealousy he felt over his little brother’s opportunities.

  Few of Joe’s old Coney Island pals had gotten out—or gotten far. Beansy Winkler had joined a photographic firm, converting Air Corps footage into color film for commercial use. Lou Berkman had left his father’s junk shop to start a plumbing-supply business. Davey Goldsmith went to work for a hatband company.

  George Mandel was the happiest success story Joe knew. He had recovered from his head wound and moved into a Greenwich Village loft to paint and write. He still illustrated comic books and lived, as well, on disability payments from the army. The comic-book industry had expanded during the war years, as superheroes—many of them fighting Nazis—embodied America’s hopes and fears. “Superheroes allowed adolescents and adults to slip back to the confidence and inviolability of that last moment of childhood,” wrote Gerard Jones in Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. “It had been a long, nerve-wearing run for twenty years, through Prohibition and sexual revolution and economic transformation and urbanization and Depression and the rumors of war, when a naïve nation had to pretend to be adult and sophisticated.”

  Most importantly, while serious fiction struggled to make sense of the war’s consequences, comic-book heroes could serve unabashedly as “slapstick comedians in a vaudeville of holocaust,” Jones said. If given free rein, a talented and ambitious artist like George Mandel was well positioned to help the comics move from the straightforward heroism required in combat to the superhuman challenges awaiting peacetime America.

  Often, Joe visited Mandel in the Village, sometimes in the company of Danny the Count. Mandel entertained them with stories of his recovery in the ward of a military hospital. Everybody in his sector had suffered a head wound, he said. Each man wore a turban of bandages. One day, a fellow patient dreamed up a money scheme: He was sure it would make him a millionaire once he got back to the States. He walked around the ward, asking everybody what they thought of his idea. The men told him he was brilliant. When he got to Mandel, he said, “All the guys think I’ll make a million dollars. What do you think?” “Yeah, sure,” Mandel told him. “But maybe you better ask somebody who ain’t been shot in the head.”

  * * *

  “YOU’RE NOT GOING to England!” Dottie said.

  Shirley had just informed her mother that Joe had received a Fulbright Scholarship. President Truman had signed the program into law a few years before, by which war-surplus money could be used to facilitate student exchanges. What it meant for Joe was a year of study at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University.

  “I didn’t even wait to see if my master’s thesis had been accepted,” Joe recalled. “There was a ship sailing with two or three hundred Fulbright and Rhodes scholars.”

  He also seems to have “cut corners” on his foreign-language requirement, confessing in his memoir that a “charitable young lady from California,” presumably a fellow student, “surreptitiously helped me meet the … requirement.” He added, “I’m sorry now I did that.”

  As when he had crossed the ocean after the war, he was one of the few people who didn’t get seasick. He retained a healthy appetite. Days later, Shirley was grateful to be on solid ground.

  St. Catherine’s College, whose roots went back to 1868, sat on the bank of the Cherwell River, on the east side of Oxford. It had a glass and concrete facade, with a prominent bell tower and a large dining hall inside, noteworthy for its striking Cumberland-slate floor. If Shirley had visions of spending a year touring the romantic old capitals of Europe, she was soon crestfallen. At one point, she and Joe did catch a ferry from England to France, and passed a few days in Paris, enjoying the restaurants (which seemed to have recovered from the German occupation more quickly than anything else). They also made a halfhearted, but failed, attempt to find a synagogue there in which to observe Yom Kippur; Lena had warned them before they left the States that Europeans would think badly of American Jews if they didn’t attend services.

  For the most part, Joe hunkered down at Oxford and immersed himself in books. “When I had the Fulbright, I spent one term on Milton and one on Chaucer and one on Shakespeare and I came to the conclusion that Milton is pretty much of a waste,” he told a journalist in 1969. “There’s almost nothing he says that’s pertinent or of any importance to us today, not only in terms of philosophy or attitude but even aesthetically.” The remark shows he was continuing to read for his writing, not for any scholarly pursuit. Nevertheless, he also read a “massive amount of Shakespeare criticism from Samuel Johnson to Jan Kott.” He read Swift and Voltaire. Aristophanes fascinated him, he said, because of his interest in “war mentality and … wartime society.”

  College reports indicate he made “very good progress” while at St. Catherine’s. An old friend from NYU, Edward Bloustein, who went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, remembered Joe “was impressed by the place more than his studies and spent a considerable proportion of the year working hard on a short story.” The story does not seem to have survived, or to have stirred a desire in Joe to return to fiction full-time.

  Bloustein, who later became president of Rutgers University, spent much of his time at Oxford trying to repair international relations after Joe had swept through a room. “I [always] had a distinct sense of the strength of this guy,” Bloustein told Barbara Gelb. “But he had … a very biting humor that sometimes distress[ed] me. His humor [was] delivered so deadpan, people misinterpret[ed] it and [could] feel insulted. This happened often when I was with him in England. I would take the people aside and explain Joe to them, and then they would find him the attractive man he [was].”

  Before Joe sailed overseas, he left a dossier with the Columbia University Placement Bureau, to be mailed out whenever a job opportunity arose. Journalism, teaching—he wasn’t sure what he wanted, but on January 31, 1950, he wrote Professor Theodore J. Gates at Pennsylvania State College to apply formally for a teaching position in the Department of English Composition. The Placement Bureau had notified Joe of the opening. “I have had no previous teaching experience,” he admitted, “but my scholastic record is a good one.” He said he planned to return to the United States at the end of June. As his residence, he gave Dottie and Barney’s address.

  Gates replied that, despite the department’s need for instructors, “I believe I should not encourage you to apply.” The college would insist on a personal interview, he said, and Joe’s long-distance circumstances did not make this possible. Joe did not give up. “Although I should prefer to finish the year at Oxford, I could manage to leave several weeks before the end of June if the interview is necessary before then,” he wrote back.

  Gates recognized that no other applicant matched Joe. Already, his credentials—publications in Story, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, and Best American Short Stories, all within a five-year span—surpassed those of most tenured members of the department. Gates wrote to the director of placement at Columbia, professing his interest in Joe and requesting a photograph as well as “detailed information on his personality.” On March 24, 1950, Margaret Morgan of Columbia’s Division of Teaching Placement r
eplied that New York State’s antidiscrimination law precluded sending a photograph; however, she recalled Mr. Heller as “a very fine appearing young man.” She said she had phoned Mr. Paul S. Wood, with whom Mr. Heller had studied in Columbia’s English Department. Mr. Wood reported that Mr. Heller was a “fine looking, clean-cut lad; [he] makes friends and holds them. He is a little shy, but this should not provide a serious difficulty, since he improves upon acquaintance and his shyness would not prove to be an obstacle in his classroom teaching.”

  Follow-up letters of recommendation asserted that Joseph Heller was a “young man of serious interests, creative gifts, and high intelligence” (Sidney Hook, Department of Philosophy, NYU); a “poised and mature” person, with “excellent powers of expressing his thought both orally and on paper … clearly the best in [his] class” (Lionel Casson, assistant professor of classics, NYU); a man who “does well at anything he puts his mind to” (Maurice Baudin); and an “extremely personable gentleman” (Lillian Hornstein, assistant professor of English, NYU). Joe’s thesis director, Paul Wood, said again that Joe was “somewhat retiring” (special deference toward a man with so much authority over him? dreaminess? impatience?). But Joe, Wood concluded, was “unusually likeable.”

  His college transcripts list a wide range of courses, including Latin and Greek, Economic Behavior, Shakespeare, the English Bible, Modern Art, Modern Music and Its Backgrounds, Writing for Radio, and Theories of the Universe.

  “I am twenty-seven years old and married,” Joe informed Professor Gates.

  By May 3, the Department of English Composition at Penn State had narrowed its field of applicants from eighty to ten. Professor Gates urged Joe to return to the States and set up an interview as soon as possible. The job paid three thousand dollars for the academic year, he said. Joe replied he was “scheduled to arrive in New York on July 1, but I could attempt to secure earlier passage if that is longer than you are prepared to wait.” Gates said July 1 was “satisfactory.” “In other words,” he added, “we are holding the place open for you.”

  On July 5, Gates wrote Joe, in New York, that he should take the Pennsylvania Railroad to Lewiston, then catch the Boalsburg bus to State College. The next letter in the men’s exchange came from Joe in New York. It is dated July 31. He had been offered the job, and he wanted to assure Professor Gates that “I am not in the reserves, organized or inactive, and I would venture the opinion that only under a program of total mobilization would I be considered for conscription.” He asked Gates for help securing housing. He said he and his wife would be willing to share an apartment or a house. “My efforts to find a place to live [there] have met with failure till now,” he wrote. “As you stated, vacancies are few, and those units which have been offered to me are miles beyond the bounds of economy.”

  Like most college towns in the country, State College, Pennsylvania, was still overrun with veterans taking advantage of the G.I. Bill. Trailers and prefab structures lined the town’s dirt streets, and many faculty members lived in semipermanent buildings on campus, amid constant, noisy construction of new academic halls. The land felt raw, cold, and exposed. Locals referred to the area and its surroundings as “Happy Valley.”

  8. Tea and Sympathy

  FROM THE MAIN campus gate, South Allen Street appeared to be made of sky more than asphalt; a mild curve of earth led the eye gently upward until the road petered out into late-afternoon clouds or early-evening starshine. Together, the buildings on either side of the street—nothing over three stories high—resembled a failed movie set, ready to be torn down and stored away. Automobiles, wide-grilled, big-bumpered, shiny, and black, lined up like insects having shed their carapaces in a ritual of mating or dying. They crowded out all other moving things. Local business owners complained of ex-servicemen marauding about town, intoxicated, but the street often seemed deserted to Joe from his campus perspective. Evergreens waved in chilly breezes. In their bending and swaying, they seemed to convey the odor of manure (from nearby farms), which sometimes pervaded the town, especially when the air hung heavy and still.

  The Department of English Composition occupied the Sparks Building, a large rectangular structure of light brick and simple concrete ornamentation, surrounded by thin young trees. The lecture theaters were spacious and steep, tier after tier of hard wooden seats whose straight backs and skinny armrests clashed with the necessities of human anatomy. In the front of the rooms, small tables with flimsy lecterns gave the teachers some modicum of authority. Blackboards, built into the walls and attached to rollers, like windows in frames, moved up and down. To a jittery young instructor, they could seem like sets of teeth ready to chomp one’s back.

  Joe’s new colleagues in the liberal arts did not try to hide their poor morale. The college administration—in flux since the recent death of the school’s long-term president—aggressively courted federal dollars for scientific research related to national defense. In particular, administrators were excited about developing an underwater sound laboratory, whose purpose would be to explore technological innovations in submarine warfare. Little attention, and even less money, filtered down to the humanities. Until very recently, the largest program in the School of Liberal Arts had been Commerce and Finance, which most humanities teachers argued belonged in a School of Business. Besides, they said, the program—like most programs in the liberal arts—had been stagnant for twenty years.

  “In those days, [Penn State] was more of an agricultural school than anything else. Our classes were filled with kids from the coal mines who were brought in to play football, box, wrestle, and then kicked out for poor grades,” Frederick Karl recalled. Like Joe, he was a first-year composition instructor. He was working, long-distance, on finishing his Ph.D. requirements at Columbia. “Penn State was, for us New Yorkers, the heart of the boondocks,” he said.

  He remembered that “Joe’s office was across the corridor from mine, and boy, was he bored.” Joe had no interest in the essentially remedial-level writing classes he taught. The students, he said, showed even less enthusiasm. “He would come over to my office, put his feet up on my desk, and insist on talking,” Karl said.

  “Come have lunch,” Joe would say.

  “I have work to do. Don’t you have work to do?” Karl replied.

  This casual banter would characterize the men’s relationship for the rest of Joe’s life. Karl, tall and bearded, deliberate in his movements and speech, was a disciplined, methodical scholar whose interests ranged from Joseph Conrad to Franz Kafka to the contemporary American novel. He didn’t enjoy teaching composition any more than Joe did, but he took the work seriously and dispatched it without complaining. Joe figured it was his duty to save his new friend from the burdens of his responsible nature.

  Joe and Shirley had still not found good living quarters and occupied a cramped, spare space near campus. As a result, “Shirley was often back in New York,” Karl said. “I was planning to get married, and Joe’s desperation for company was such that he asked me and my wife-to-be to move in with him [somewhere]. Nothing came of that, perhaps fortunately, since close proximity then might have destroyed what would prove to be a fifty-year friendship.”

  When Shirley was away, staying with her parents, Joe fell into a routine of teaching classes during the week and then catching a train to Manhattan on the weekends. He considered buying a car, but the Pennsylvania road system was so bad at the time, the trip to New York took nearly eleven hours.

  According to Erica Heller, Joe and Shirley were together in Manhattan one weekend, “walking on the street, carrying groceries, when my mother stepped in a pothole and tripped. A piece of the wine bottle they’d been carrying went through her left hand, severing an artery. She needed several operations. I know they sued the city and won, but she had to see a doctor for quite some time [after that].”

  Karl confirmed that at a certain point, early in Joe’s first year at Penn State, Shirley stayed in New York more or less permanently to receive the med
ical attention she needed.

  Miserably, Joe sat in his squat, stale-smelling bedroom, recalling balmy nights back in the city, when he and Shirley entertained friends with drinks on the rooftop of the building on West Seventy-sixth (though perhaps not all of his memories were pleasant—Erica remembers hearing as a child that her parents were once robbed in that apartment, though she can’t recall details). In the summers, Dottie and Barney usually took a country house or went off on vacation to some luxury hotel somewhere. They would invite Shirley and Joe along.

  Now, Joe was breathing cow-shit fumes, going to lunch with a friend who’d rather be working, and trying to decide what to do with cheating students. One day, when he caught a pair of boys copying each other’s assignments in class, he remembered his own “malfeasance” with the foreign-language requirement at Columbia, and was “compelled … to show mercy,” he said.

  * * *

  AS HE DID with Frederick Karl, Joe got along well with most of his colleagues. Gordon Smith was an exception. He was one of those people who interpreted Joe’s sarcasm as mean-spiritedness. One weekend, the men and their wives visited the Gettysburg battlefield and cemetery. Joe made jokes about war, heroism, and the realities of combat versus mythic representations of it. He hopped around the field like a rabbit and said to Smith, who considered himself a Civil War expert, “What happened on this spot?” and “Who got shot here?” Smith thought him disrespectful. The budding friendship sputtered; Smith refused to speak to him again.