Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Mainstream magazines such as Reader’s Digest weighed in on Kinsey and ran articles about abortion. The pieces were both reactionary and exploratory, but they indicated a surprising new openness about sexual subjects.

  In this atmosphere, men and women Joe Heller’s age, having married, as they thought they were supposed to do, now starting families and working their way into the heart of American success, naturally wondered if the social contract had changed just as they’d signed it. Were they really bound by their signatures? How bound were they?

  Corporate culture encouraged having it all. Not only that, it provided multiple opportunities. Calvin Trillin, who worked at Time in the 1950s, recalled “there was lots of underground romantic stuff.… Working at Time, you had to be in close quarters with fifty people through the week. There were late closings, time spent with feet up on the desk.… You didn’t know people were involved [with each other] until there was some awful scene in the hall or you got an invitation to a wedding.”

  In 1998, Joe admitted to British journalist Lynn Barber that he’d had “affairs” during his nearly ten years in the advertising business. “[T]here were not that many.… [I]t was part of the male culture,” he said. “I was working in New York City in an atmosphere where men did that. We’d have parties and a couple would go into a room together.… I never had any wish to end my marriage.” At the time, Shirley “never accurately detected” his affairs. She was too busy raising Erica and Ted.

  Where sexual mores were concerned, the New York ad world (driven, as Tom Messner says, by World War II vets) was an extension of the army. The men reasoned that as long as they did their duty—this time, for wives, kids, extended families—they were entitled to R & R in the city, as they had been in Cairo, Rome, or Capri.

  Joe enjoyed himself, but he insisted he was not a “womanizer.” In 1975, he told Playboy interviewer Sam Merrill, “I would … say that my imagination … [kept] me from making foolish mistakes.” Obviously, Shirley would not have agreed.

  * * *

  WQXR, the classical radio station Joe liked to listen to, started its broadcast days with Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man: a rousing send-off to work (with the children crying in another room).

  In Joe’s third year at Time, the company imposed a salary freeze, marshaling start-up funds for its new publication, Sports Illustrated. Employees grumbled; investors worried about company morale. At a sales convention, Joe was asked to set up projection equipment for slide shows to accompany various presentations, including one by Henry Luce. Sternly, the Great Man told his audience “publishing was the business” of the Time-Life Corporation, and he was not going to sacrifice Sports Illustrated just to ease investors’ fears or soothe the ruffled feathers of his employees.

  Piqued, Joe began to search for a higher-paying job. Look was delighted to take him in. “A friend from Time, Arky Gonzalez, who earlier had left for more money at Reader’s Digest, cautioned me that things were very different in the rest of the business world from … Time, and that I might soon miss being there,” Joe wrote.

  Gonzalez was right. Look was not as festive, paternalistic, or forgiving of employees’ foibles as Time. Its CEOs were obsessively poll-driven, constantly comparing subscription numbers and revenue forecasts. In Madison Avenue, U.S.A., Martin Mayer called Look the “most intensely and destructively competitive of the magazines in its space-selling policy,” and Joe did not last there more than a year.

  In 1959, he moved to McCall’s to work for a young and vigorous advertising manager named Gilbert Lea. Lea had schemed hard with his editorial department to establish a “feel” for the magazine, a core direction guiding the content of the articles as well as types of ads to accompany them. “Around 1900, it was not unusual for a woman to refer to her husband as The Governor,” Lea told Mayer. “Somebody said that if you put men and women together around the turn of the century all you got was children. Today, there’s a ninety per cent overlap, a man and his wife share the same life.” This statement was questionable, coming from the center of a “male culture” condoning affairs. But Lea insisted Otis Wiese, McCall’s editor and publisher, meant no irony when he hailed “Togetherness” as the magazine’s philosophy. McCall’s was aimed at a “woman with a family instead of … individual [women].”

  “The Togetherness theme, implying the existence of children old enough to participate in family decisions (including buying decisions) gave the sales staff a ‘feel’ to sell, a ‘feel’ which matched exactly … the known audience characteristics of the magazine,” Mayer explained. Polls showed women who bought McCall’s were generally older than average, yet teenage girls also formed a large part of the readership—they saw the magazine in their mothers’ houses.

  Joe enjoyed exercising his imagination on considerations like these, but he remained frustrated that he had not found the confidence to do what George Mandel had done: finish a novel to satisfy his ambitions. Caught inside a seductive system, he firmly believed, with Mayer, that the “great bulk of advertising is culturally repulsive to anyone with any developed sensitivity. So, of course, are most movies and television shows, most popular music and a surprisingly high proportion of published books. When you come right down to it, there is not a hell of a lot to be said for most of what appears in the magazines.”

  Joe spent his creative energy spurring mass sales. This meant he could not rise far above the lowest common denominator. Still, like any good adman, he believed he had the ability to change public taste; after all, this is what he was asked to do: persuade, cajole, alter perceptions. “Advertising requires extreme simplification of complicated subjects, and the advertising writer must therefore stretch previously precise words to cover large areas,” Mayer wrote: a principle that applied equally well to Joe’s evolving concept of a new kind of American novel.

  10. 18

  “THE NOVEL, you know,” people whispered whenever Joe and Shirley left a party early.

  From the first, Joe had made no secret of his ambitions beyond the world of advertising. At night, he indulged his literary side. But the novel was not the only experimental kite he flew. In October 1952, at around the time George Mandel’s Flee the Angry Strangers appeared in hardback, Joe signed a contract with Mandel that stated “the parties”—Joe and his friend—were “mutually desirous of collaborating in the writing of a play provisionally entitled THE BIRD IN THE FEVVERBLOOM SUIT—[they are] both member[s] in good standing of the Dramatist’s Guild of the Author’s League of America.”

  A talent agent, Lucy Kroll, took the project on. A former story analyst for Warner Bros., and a cofounder of the Hollywood Theatre Alliance, Kroll had joined the Sam Jaffe Agency in New York in 1945, then established her own agency two years later. Among the many distinguished playwrights, artists, actors, and writers she represented in her career were Horton Foote, Lillian Gish, Martha Graham, James Earl Jones, and Carl Sandburg.

  The two old Coney Island pals drafted their play quickly, but work stalled on it at the revision stage. A throwback to the kinds of short stories Joe had abandoned, “The Bird in the Fevverbloom Suit” takes place in a tenement house “across the street from a railroad yard,” among tough-talking children of European immigrants. Harry Karp, “a dour, balding man in his fifties,” runs a tailor shop on the tenement’s first floor (as did Irving Kaiser’s dad in the building Joe lived in as a child). Harry’s son-in-law, Mervyn, concocts one impossible business scheme after another. He is stuck with gambling debts. Of Mervyn’s various plans, Karp says, “They fold like seersucker once he finds out he’s gotta work.”

  Without exception, the play’s women are harpies—“baby” and “doll” to each of the men. At the end, Mervyn appears to straighten up; he tells Kitty, his love, “With you sticking by me, I can only go one way. To the top. Doll, there’s no stopping me.… You’ll see, baby.” The audience knows he still leads a secret life.

  Joe had rejected such material for stories, and Mandel went nowhere near th
is sort of thing in his novel. Clearly, “The Bird in the Fevverbloom Suit” was a bid for quick commercial success—too much so. The play was bloated with clichés. Then Mandel received his check for the paperback rights to Flee the Angry Strangers. He believed he might be on the verge of serious literary success; his waning enthusiasm for the play departed altogether.

  In later years, Joe floated various stories about the origins of his first novel. “There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing,” he said. But then something happened. He told one British journalist that “conversations with two friends … influenced me. Each of them had been wounded in the war, one of them very seriously”—probably George Mandel. “The first one told some very funny stories about his war experiences, but the second one was unable to understand how any humor could be associated with the horror of war. They didn’t know each other and I tried to explain the first one’s point of view to the second. He recognized that traditionally there had been lots of graveyard humor, but he could not reconcile it with what he had seen of war. It was after that discussion that the opening of Catch-22 and many incidents in it came to me.”

  The Czech writer Arnold Lustig claimed Joe told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hasek’s unfinished World War I satire, The Good Soldier Schweik. In Hasek’s novel, a mad state bureaucracy traps a hapless man. Among other things, he stays in a hospital for malingerers and serves as an orderly for an army chaplain.

  But the most common account Joe gave of the hatching of Catch-22 varied little from what he said to The Paris Review in 1974: “I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: ‘It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ I didn’t have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind—even most of the particulars … the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor.”

  Likely, each of these scenarios is true; they don’t contradict one another, and they probably occurred at some stage in the process of imagining the novel (along with rereading Kafka, Waugh, Nabokov, and, most particularly, Céline). But we also know from Whit Burnett’s letter to Joe in California that, as early as 1946, he’d been considering a novel about “a flier facing the end of his missions.” As a spur to return to fiction, Mandel’s success with Flee the Angry Strangers can’t be overstated. One imagines Joe thinking, If a man who’s been shot in the head can write a novel, so can I.

  The morning after the opening sentence took shape, he “arrived at work”—at the Merrill Anderson Company—“with my pastry and a container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel,” he wrote. The handwritten manuscript totaled about twenty pages. He titled it “Catch-18.” The year was 1953.

  Joe didn’t send “Catch-18” to Lucy Kroll. Her interests lay more in the performing arts than in literature, and besides, Joe saw this new piece as more serious than the play. Back in his short story–writing days, he had corresponded with an editor at The Atlantic Monthly named Elizabeth McKee. She had offered to be his first agent. With Mavis McIntosh, McKee founded her own business; in 1953, her agency consisted of McIntosh, Jean Parker Waterbury, and a woman originally hired to do girl Friday work, Candida Donadio.

  “The agents were not impressed” with “Catch-18”—in fact, they found the writing incomprehensible—“but [Donadio, the] young assistant there … was, and she secured permission to submit [the] chapter to a few publications that regularly published excerpts from ‘novels in progress,’” Joe recalled in a 1994 preface to a new edition of Catch-22.

  “While he was alive[,] Heller tried to suppress that his genius was not recognized instantly, but it was [only] after many, many submissions” that Donadio succeeded in placing the manuscript, says Neil Olson. He worked with Donadio in the 1980s. “She saw something in that wild and crazy, surrealistic, bent-headed humor. When she sent out the manuscript, she kept hearing the same replies over and over again—that this is not writing, this is foolishness.”

  Joe had known his literary models—especially Céline—were never popular. He began to fear his little experiment could not breathe in the marketplace. But then one day, Donadio received a phone call from Arabel Porter, the executive editor of the biannual literary anthology New World Writing, distributed by the New American Library’s Mentor Books. She raved about Joe Heller. “Candida, this is completely wonderful, true genius,” she said. “I’m buying it.”

  His confidence buoyed, Joe began to plan a second chapter. He had switched jobs. On five-by-eight-inch Kardex cards taken from the offices of Remington Rand, he scribbled character names and notes. The work went slowly. He turned to the novel mostly at night, and was frequently (often gladly) interrupted by his wife and kids. He did not have it in him to become an aesthetic monk. Despite Audrey Chestney’s view that he never went anywhere, he and Shirley “socialized most agreeably,” he said: “We mixed easily” with friends. The couple enjoyed their evenings out when baby-sitters were available.

  They lived five blocks from Fred and Dolores Karl. Joe and Fred resumed the relationship they’d developed at Penn State. “Joe would call him and say, ‘I could go to the library to look something or other up, but I know you know it off the top of your head,’” Dolores recalls. “Fred would be working and he’d say, ‘It would do you good to go to the library. Leave me alone!’ Joe would call right back and say, ‘Come on, come have lunch with me and tell me about this stuff. I know you know it!’”

  Often, Dolores and Shirley took walks together, or they’d meet at a store. “‘For God’s sake, Dolores, what have you got on? That’s terrible!’ Shirley would say. And she’d help me,” Dolores recalls. “She taught me how to dress.”

  Dolores’s daughter Deborah says, “I grew up with the Heller kids. We were always together at holidays. Joe was fabulous with me and my sister, probably because we weren’t his kids. We’d walk out the door after a visit. We weren’t his responsibility. He was funny with us. Making jokes constantly. But Shirley was even funnier than he was sometimes. She was hilarious. Striking-looking, with bright red hair. Very smart. Quick Jewish humor. I loved her.”

  Children weren’t supposed to play in the Apthorp courtyard, but “we’d always go over there, anyway, so the kids could be together,” Dolores says. “We’d order lunch.”

  On some nights, the men would watch the kids while Dolores and Shirley went to a movie. Sometimes, the men went out while the women put the children to bed. When both couples could get a baby-sitter, they’d spend the evening together. “Fred didn’t want to go to the movies with anyone except me or Joe,” Dolores recalls. “He’d say that with anyone else, after the movie, there would always be a long discussion. But with Joe there was none of that. They’d just look at each other, knew whether they liked it or not, and that was it. And Fred liked that.”

  With the sale of “Catch-18” to New World Writing, Joe didn’t change his work or social habits—not significantly at least. But occasionally, he’d leave a party early: “The novel, you know.”

  * * *

  CANDIDA (pronounced CAN-dida) Donadio, Joe’s new agent, was twenty-four years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants. She rarely spoke about what she implied was a grim Sicilian Catholic upbringing. Short and plump, her black hair in a tight bun, she’d fix her brown eyes on a person she’d just met and startle them with some bawdy remark, delivered in an unusually deep voice. “She had more synonyms for excrement than an
yone you’d ever run across,” says Cork Smith, Thomas Pynchon’s first editor. “[S]he used to say all the time, ‘That’s caca,’” recalls Victoria Wilson, a senior editor at Knopf.

  “People tell a lot of contradictory stories about Candida, and they’re all true,” Neil Olson told writer Karen Hudes. “I think [she] … really was a shy, self-doubting, very smart, very sharp person who was capable of having these operatic explosions.… [She’d become] this figure who carried on and pulled her hair and shouted other people down.… But these explosions were very seldom directed at anybody, they were just going on inside of her.”

  She liked to say the primary task of a literary agent was to “polish silver.” She claimed she would have loved to have been a Carmelite nun. She smoked and drank heavily, indulged heartily in Italian meals, and disliked having her picture taken.

  Perhaps her conflicting currents enabled her to be an intuitive appreciator (as she put it) of truly original writing. In time, her client roster came to include some of the most prominent names in American letters: John Cheever, Jessica Mitford, Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, and Peter Matthiessen. “She really was the agent of her generation,” Neil Olson said. And “Catch-18” started it all. “It is hard for us to realize now [how perceptive she was] when you look at what a Pynchon and what a Heller was doing,” Olson said. “She was looking at these writers in the late fifties and early sixties. People were not writing that way.”

  Also, the business was tough. Soon after signing Joe, Donadio left McIntosh & McKee and joined Herb Jaffe Associates, a larger agency. Harriet Wasserman, who would one day become a successful agent, was working as a secretary for Jaffe. “Since a secretary was very important, I got paid ninety dollars a week,” she recalled. “Candida, since she was only an agent, got … seventy-five dollars a week.”