She spent most of her time promoting this fellow nobody had ever heard of, Joseph Heller.
* * *
ACCORDING TO HER BOSS, Victor Weybright, cofounder and editor in chief of New American Library, Arabel J. Porter was “a Bohemian Quakeress, with inspired eyes and ears which seem to see and hear all the significant manifestations of the literary, dramatic and graphic arts.” Initially, she gained editorial experience with Lippincott and Dutton, before working with the Office of War Information. After the war, Weybright hired her to select content and work out royalties for the anthology series New World Writing.
New American Library, founded in 1948, had become (along with Pocket Books) one of the largest paperback publishers in the country. In 1951, Weybright proposed to his partners that NAL publish a regular anthology of new writing as a way of attracting fresh talent to the company, finding young writers who might be contracted to publish original books with them. His formal proposal for the series contained a hint of Cold War politics: “[Publishing] a literary and academic journal would naturally give us standing amongst critics, writers, teachers, at home and abroad; and it would, [I am] certain, make a most favorable impression upon the Department of State and other agencies concerned with projecting American culture abroad.”
New World Writing would “provide a friendly medium for many of the young writers who have difficulty in finding a market for their work because, in some way or another, they ‘break the rules,’” promised NAL. “Avant Garde Means You!” the journal proclaimed. “Avant Garde may sound stuffy—but it only means a reconnaissance party—adventurous people who willingly enter uncharted territory.”
Weybright gave Arabel Porter free rein with the series; her literary tastes were varied, surprising, and bold. The first issue appeared in April 1952 and featured work by Christopher Isherwood, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, William Gaddis, Thomas Merton, Shelby Foote, Wright Morris, Howard Nemerov, and James Laughlin. The second issue, on sale in November, offered pieces by James Jones, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Shirley Jackson, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Jean Genet, Theodore Roethke, and Pablo Picasso. Immediately, the series became the “cultural high-water mark for the paperback book during the 1950s,” according to Kenneth C. Davis, author of Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America. New World Writing offered “the best and brightest in American letters ever published by a paperback house.” Starting with the second issue, NAL established a print run of 150,700 copies every six months. Sales and critical responses were good. Britain’s Times Literary Supplement observed that New World Writing exposed the “difference in quality” between new American and English literature. “The American stories are not only more skillful but in some indefinable way more ‘alive,’” the paper said. “The life of a situation, the tang and feeling of it, is presented accurately and vividly.”
The series ran until 1959, when competition from literary journals and other anthologies ate into its sales. “[T]he story begins to end,” Weybright wrote in the final issue. “New ‘little’ and literary magazines, edited by young men and women who were still in blue jeans and ponytails back in 1951 and 1952, are … springing up all over the land.” Besides, Weybright’s interests were shifting to screenplays and bestselling books with potential tie-ins to Hollywood (a phenomenon made possible by the huge sales of cheap paperback editions).
For seven years, New World Writing had dazzled the American literary world. In terms of cultural impact, no single issue had been more dazzling—or remains so—than number 7, published in April 1955.
A subheading on the front cover said “A New Adventure in Modern Reading.” The contents included work by Dylan Thomas, who had died in November 1953, poetry by A. Alvarez, Thomas Gunn, Donald Hall, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, prose by Heinrich Böll, and two startling, unclassifiable pieces, one titled “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” by a writer called Jean-Louis, and “Catch-18,” by Joseph Heller.
Joe knew how valuable the exposure was in New World Writing. He wrote to Arabel Porter, “I should like to tell you at this time that it was with great delight and pride that I received news you were interested in publishing a section of Catch-18.” In fact, it was the only section he had written so far. “[A]nd I should like to express my thanks for the recognition implicit in your decision and the encouragement I received from it.”
As for Jean-Louis: This was the nom de plume of a writer long disgusted with his treatment by publishers. He felt New World Writing had done “him a great disservice” while editing his piece “by splitting an approximately five-hundred word sentence in two,” according to biographer Ellis Amburn.
“Jazz of the Beat Generation” was part of a larger manuscript called On the Road. Jack Kerouac was “sick of well-meaning editors who championed his [manuscripts] but returned them with lame notes blaming lack of house support,” Amburn wrote. “Then he would see the same editors at the San Remo [bar], and they would fawn on him, thrilled to be in the presence of a bona fide subterranean and pumping him for tips on how to be hip, slick, and cool. One editor … even asked him to write a nonfiction guide on how to be ‘groovy.’ ‘You asshole,’ Kerouac replied.”
Though early versions of On the Road and Catch-22 made their appearances in the same place at the same time, and were later linked in terms of aesthetic and cultural influence, they could not have sprouted from more different sources.
Kerouac’s favorite hangout, the San Remo, located at 93 MacDougal Street, on the corner of Bleecker, was a self-proclaimed (self-conscious) den of bohemian, subversive, poetic intellectuals and wannabe Beatniks. Maxwell Bodenheim, a writer who all but lived in the bar, chanting poetry and cadging drinks, called the San Remo a “Coney Island of the soul.”
Joe had worked his way out of the poverty of the real Coney Island to earn a spot in the Madison Avenue world and secure a place for his family in a well-appointed apartment building.
Kerouac considered himself literary. Joe projected confidence but worried he was not a natural writer. Kerouac groused about editors too dense to recognize his genius. Joe was grateful to receive encouragement. (As payment, Joe got $125 from NAL, Kerouac $120.)
In the Village, “the booze ran freely and the talk was always funny, sharp, knowing, dealing with what we cared about most—books, magazines and stories, the words and the people who wrote them,” Dan Wakefield said. “Nobody talked of advances or royalties or how much money any book or writer made. That was the sort of thing business people talked about, the organization men, the ones in the gray flannel suits … [what we] called the Lamb Chop set.”
Sitting up on the West Side, Joe Heller was an anomaly: a Beat in “Lamb Chop” clothing, one might say. But that wasn’t quite right. More accurately, he was a unique individual, uniquely placed, his position within the Luce organization reminiscent of those of James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, and Dwight Macdonald. At the height of the Depression, these writers managed to fill the pages of Fortune with searching (often subversive) social commentary—before Luce purged “poetry” from his pages.
At first, in literary circles, Jean-Louis’s “Jazz of the Beat Generation” sparked most of the chatter about New World Writing number 7. In San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg told people who Jean-Louis really was, and passed around copies of the journal. Kenneth Rexroth featured Kerouac’s piece on a radio broadcast, and compared Kerouac to Jean Genet and Céline.
Meanwhile, Candida Donadio detonated several times because “Catch-18” had not received the traction she expected from its appearance. She talked up Joe to publishers, all of whom seemed baffled by the piece.
Still, the editors at New American Library remained convinced that when all was said and done, number 7’s real gem was “Catch-18.” “It is certainly the funniest thing we have ever had,” Weybright told Arabel Porter. Endorsing the reader’s report that first brought the story to her attention, Porter wrote, “Among all the recommended pieces lately, I think this stands out. It seems
like part of a really exciting, amusing novel.”
* * *
“CATCH-18”—only ten pages long in the journal’s small print—introduces us to a World War II–era American soldier named Yossarian, in a military hospital “with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time only confused them.”
Yossarian is happy to be hospitalized, excused from flying bombing missions, and has not told the doctors his liver pain has gone away. He “had made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital,” where the food was “almost palatable, and his meals were brought to him in bed.”
Sharing the ward with him are his buddy Dunbar, a man “working hard at increasing his life span … by cultivating boredom” (so much so that Yossarian wonders if he is dead), a Texan so likable no one can stand him, and a “soldier in white,” who is “encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze.” A slim rubber hose attached to his groin conveys his urine to a jar on the floor; another pair of hoses appears to feed him by recycling the piss.
Outside, there is always the “monotonous, old drone of bombers returning from a mission.”
One day, Yossarian receives a visit from a chaplain. A chaplain is something he has not seen before: Yossarian loves him “at first sight.” “He had seen reverends and rabbis, ministers and mullahs, priests and pairs of nuns. He had seen ordnance officers and quartermaster officers and post exchange officers and other spooky military anomalies. Once he had even seen a justification, but that was a long time before and then it was such a fleeting glimpse that it might easily have been an hallucination.”
Yossarian speaks to the chaplain—a slapstick and meaningless dialogue. Eventually, the Texan’s friendliness drives his comrades batty. They clear out of the ward and return to duty. That’s the story.
The charm and energy of the piece, its originality, lay in its playful language: There is a “vortex of specialists” swirling through the ward; a patient has “a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma … [and] a pathologist for his pathos.…”
“Catch-18”—an arbitrary phrase—is a rule requiring officers who censor enlisted men’s letters to sign their names to the pages. In the hospital, Yossarian, a low-level officer, spends his days editing letters and signing them, out of boredom and glee, “Washington Irving” or “Irving Washington.” Instead of deleting sensitive information, he declares “Death to all modifiers.” He scratches out adjectives and adverbs or, “reach[ing] a much higher plane of creativity,” attacks everything but articles. A, an, and the remain on the page. Everything else, he tosses. At one point, the army sends an undercover man into the ward. He poses as a patient. His job is to suss out the prankster. In the end, he catches pneumonia, and is the only one left in the hospital when the others leave.
Readers who could not appreciate wordplay didn’t cotton to the piece. What was the story’s point? What did it say about war? Those who understood, from Yossarian’s business with the letters, that instead of war, it was about the limitations and misuse of language (which foments disasters like medical malpractice and armed conflict) entered into the spirit of “Catch-18.”
“I’m not that interested in the subject of war,” Joe told the New York Times—somewhat coyly—in 1968. “I was [more] interested in personal relationships to bureaucratic authority.” The second statement rings truer than the first. In any case, paramount to Joe in developing the material that became Catch-22 was “seek[ing] a way of telling a story that [was] different from the mere narration of the events of history,” something more like “an act of the imagination.” In other words, he had shifted the emphasis in his writing from the story to the way the story was told. The act of telling became the point of the fiction.
He highlighted structure (music, rhythm, repetition), violated chronology, and played with language, making puns and setting up sophisticated verbal ironies (swift shifts in register from the comic to the tragic). Joe’s first breakthrough of this sort had come in “Castle of Snow,” with its retrospective narrator. The possibilities for tonal nuance were broad when placed in the voice of someone speaking through clashing emotions, repression, and misunderstandings.
In “Castle of Snow,” the narrator recorded “history.” In Joe’s developing work, reporting gave way to performance—thus, the freer, longer sentences, the deliberate inconsistencies of tone, the indulgence in humor. Joe’s weakness—his relative lack of detail—was no longer an issue. The energy came not from descriptions, but from gleeful mental leaps (“He had seen reverends and rabbis … Once he had even seen a justification…”).
Joe’s old fear that his war experiences were not enough meat for a novel—or that the moment for World War II fiction had passed—no longer mattered. War was not his primary subject. It was a pretext for verbal pyrotechnics and social critique (the extent of which would not be apparent until the novel appeared, years later).
He had been liberated by his evolving conviction that “literature, except for a brief period in recent history—and that was a really brief period—has never been realistic. Starting with the Greeks and moving through the Renaissance to the present, there seems to me only a period of twenty or thirty years in which realistic literature was strong. ‘Realism’ began in the nineteenth century … [and started] trailing off [around] World War II.… Apart from that time, literature has always been larger than life, romantic, imaginative. And this impulse of writers is, I think, essentially sound.”
Furthermore, he insisted, “[A]ny writer who doesn’t regard his work, his writing, as being a form of art, comparable, let’s say, to architecture, painting, or sculpture, is probably not serious. There must be attention given to form.… The writer must figure out the form a specific work needs to take.”
These beliefs, and their freeing effects, had resulted from the reading he had done. A reader of “Catch-18” who had known Joe’s earlier stories could probably not identify his new influences. The Good Soldier Schweik was not well known in the United States; besides, the novel’s deflationary humor (“Schweik … intervened in the World War in that pleasant, amiable manner which was so peculiarly his”—that is, by utter accident) was a staple now of the Jewish humor on nightly television shows. The echoes of Céline in Joe’s prose would not be fully heard until Catch-22.
Joe was a better reader now, as well as being a better writer. He did not just imitate his new models. In a sense, his earlier stories were reflections on reading: what it meant to absorb Hemingway or William Saroyan. By contrast, “Catch-18” pulsed with antic high energy—the rhythms of Joe’s metabolism, mental and physical. It had a tone all its own: not the grumbling misanthropy of Céline, but the lighthearted skepticism of Joe Heller. And beneath the wordplay, it had the gravity of lived experience. The kindly Texan who drove everyone crazy was every other pilot Joe had met at Goodfellow Field. The notion of writing about a chaplain (the freedom to do so) may have been suggested by the character of the military chaplain in The Good Soldier Schweik. But the boy in “Catch-18,” with his “smooth tan hair and brown, uncomfortable eyes … [his] innocent nest of ancient pimple pricks … in the basin of each cheek,” was clearly based on the shy, pimple-faced chaplain of the 340th Bombardment Group, James H. Cooper. Most importantly, the sense of being trapped in a system that could not withstand scrutiny, and the attempt to survive with a certain brand of verbal humor, was entirely Joe’s—though, again, the idea of exploring it (the permission to do so, the examples that said, It’s okay to write about this) came to him from Kafka, Waugh, and Nabokov.
Someone who had followed Joseph Heller’s career from his first appearances in Esquire and The Atlantic Monthly to the appearance, now, of “Catch-1
8” would certainly have been baffled and surprised by the change in his work. The reasons for the change, and the paths to it—the intensive study, the confronting of doubts, the hard, slow work—would not be readily apparent. What would be obvious were Joe’s rejection of straightforward narrative structure and the crimped, simple style of the previous decade’s magazine fiction. Moreover, a discerning reader would see how shifts in structure and style indicated a more fundamental change, a radical new view of the subjects at hand: war, faith, heroism, and language. As the writer Pete Hamill would say many years later, “Joseph Heller … did more to debunk the Hemingway myth than any critic.” Already, with “Catch-18,” this movement toward a fresh American fiction was clear.
* * *
A YEAR WOULD PASS before Joe finished drafting a second chapter of his novel. He was working for Time now. At home and at work, the index cards piled up. Very early, Joe imagined most of the major characters in the novel, and devoted cards to them, with detailed notes about their backgrounds, characteristics, and fates. He outlined each potential chapter, and studiously cataloged each mission he had flown during the war, intending to use the missions as structural elements in the story.
“Joe started talking [to me] about [this] novel he was writing,” Frederick Karl recalled. “It was hard to grasp what it was because he seemed more concerned with filing, sorting, indexing than with writing.”
Dolores agreed. “We used to tease him that he was creating a filing system, not writing a novel. He had drawers and drawers full of file cards. He was very organized.” In her various part-time clerical jobs downtown, Dolores encountered early versions of computers. Her descriptions of them fascinated Joe. He “wanted to discuss what she did and how it all worked,” Frederick Karl said. “Somehow, this was connected to his novel, whatever that was.”
Just One Catch Page 22
