Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  In Catch-22, IBM punch cards are emblematic of a failed bureaucracy, in the messes they create (they are anachronistic, as well, signaling Joe’s swerve from literary realism and adding to the story’s absurdity).

  “The novel began to assume primary importance” in Joe’s life, Karl said. “Amidst all the … sorting and indexing [of the] file cards, something was emerging.”

  Ideas rejected. Structure shuffled. Small changes: eventually, a character named Aarky was re-christened Aarfy. Bigger changes: the entrepreneurial soldier, Milo Minderbinder, “exposed” as a ruthless, moneymaking crook in an early vision of the novel, developed into a more nuanced figure, amoral rather than simply villainous. Metaphysical considerations: “Yossarian is dying, true, but he has about 35 years to live.” How thick to make the irony? “[Yossarian] really does have liver trouble. Condition is malignant & would have killed him if it had not been discovered”—a thought soon tossed.

  “Big Brother has been watching Yossarian,” said one card: a controlling idea that remains implicit, rather than explicit, in the final product. Joe axed a potential narrative thread in which Yossarian and Dunbar try to write a parody of a Hemingway war novel.

  Joe always knew Snowden’s death, on the mission to Avignon, would be the novel’s central scene, and that it would be glimpsed in fragments until its full horror was finally revealed.

  Also, early on, he developed the catch. In New World Writing, “Catch-18” is a regulation about censoring letters. With his index cards, Joe began to shade the idea into something grand enough to support a novel thematically. One card read, “Anyone who wants to be grounded can’t be crazy.”

  In addition to honing themes, Joe polished his expressions of them. An early note had Yossarian “fight[ing] for [his] identity without sacrificing moral responsibility.” Subsequent notes refined the wording, and thus the idea, complicating it: In the finished novel, Yossarian says, “I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them.”

  * * *

  “WE DISCUSSED his novel-in-the-making,” said Frederick Karl, “until one day Joe pushed about seventy pages on me and wondered if I would read it. He didn’t insist but I felt obliged.” (Earlier, Joe had read the manuscript of a war novel Karl had drafted. It was called The Quest, and Joe told his friend honestly that he didn’t think it was very good and that he should stick to literary criticism.) Joe’s novel was “then called Catch-18. What I read was stream-of-consciousness, Joycean, [an] interrupted and free-associational narrative, if one could even find the narrative. It was arty, crafty, and difficult. In some ways, brilliant—inconceivable as a trade book, something that perhaps [the avant-garde publisher] New Directions might be interested in. It was almost incoherent, but the academic in me experienced a thrill. Joe’s story line, such as it was, was [full of] experimentation with language. I saw something exciting there, told Joe, and also told him no one would read it.”

  Candida Donadio was getting similar reactions from editors and publishers. Joe packaged a thirty-nine page episode called “Hungry Joe,” which she sent to Arabel Porter for another issue of New World Writing. Porter rejected it, though she asked, “Has he finished the novel, and if so, may we see it?”

  Rust Hills, Esquire’s fiction editor, refused the same excerpt: “Too many loose ends,” he said. However, he found parts of it “quite funny,” and said, “If Heller wants to work any more on this, I guarantee him a sympathetic reading here; but, at this point, that is all I can guarantee him.” The manuscript Donadio sent Esquire was terribly sloppy, which didn’t help. It was shot through with scribbles and penciled changes in Joe’s hand. The first line—typed—read, “Hungry Joe had fifty missions, but it did him no good at all.” This was crossed out and replaced with a longhand sentence: “Hungry Joe had finished flying fifty combat missions and was waiting to go home, but that did him no good at all.” Lack of confidence and frequent loss of control screamed from every page. Donadio’s dissemination of an unclean copy spoke of her blind loyalty to—and belief in—Joe, a trait she exhibited with all her clients.

  Joe kept fiddling with the cards. “[Advertising work] helped me write Catch-22,” he told radio interviewer Don Swaim many years later. The novel was full of “[sudden] transitions and unexpected introductions [of material] … the unpredictable … [so] I felt there was a similarity between writing Catch-22 and the work I was called upon to do in the daytime. What promotion and advertising is supposed to do, if it’s done well—it should [have] some catchy, snappy, unexpected opening. I would bring as much imagination and intelligence … [to] my daily work … as I would to Catch-22 in the evening.”

  He strove for greater precision, clarity, punch. The basics: more action verbs, no ambiguous pronouns, fewer adjectives and adverbs; drop the coyness: A “modest maiden” became a “prostitute in Rome.”

  * * *

  ON SOME WEEKENDS, Joe took a break from the novel and went to Coney Island to visit his mother. Lena was not in good health. A strangulated hernia had led to emergency surgery. Doctors discovered she was diabetic. Severely weakened after the operation, she decided she could no longer live on her own. She left the old apartment and moved into the Hebrew Home for the Aged on West Twenty-ninth Street at the boardwalk. The home had once been the grand Half Moon Hotel, the construction of which Joe had watched as a kid.

  Now, Lena whiled away her hours in the peeling old structure, which Joe found “somber … an apt symbol for the … faltering Island itself, which had certainly seen more vital days.” He felt guilty for not asking her to move into the Apthorp with his family, but he didn’t have room (or, truth to tell, time and patience to care for her). Sylvia and Lee also rented cramped apartments, and worked hard each day. Lena knew it wasn’t possible to live with one of them, “didn’t expect it to happen, and … didn’t ask.” Not for the first time, Joe regretted—but with some relief—that his “family … did not … talk about sad things.”

  * * *

  LIKE HIS BROTHER AND SISTER, many of Joe’s friends were beginning to make the move from Coney Island. Development in Levittown, on Long Island, on what had once been rolling farmland, drew young families with promises of cheap housing, modest down payments, and low-interest financing. Escape to the suburbs signaled a desire for betterment (or so the advertisers claimed). Lou Berkman had moved his plumbing business to Middletown, New York. Beansy Winkler had relocated to Ocean Parkway.

  Certain areas of Brooklyn, particularly Brownsville, remained largely unchanged, at least for a while, but the toughness of that neighborhood—the poverty, gangs, and anti-Semitism (despite large Orthodox Jewish populations)—developed a resilience of character in some people that drove them toward “betterment” in wealthy, optimistic postwar America. Their drive was beginning to alter popular culture, and Joe would soon know many of the people responsible for the changes.

  Daniel Kaminsky, later known as Danny Kaye, was a Brownsville product. He migrated to the Catskills, refined his showbiz chops in resort hotels, and took those talents to the new medium of television (where people like Norman Barasch, soon to be Joe’s good friend, wrote for him). Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, and Phil Silvers came from Brownsville. So did Jerry Lewis, Jerry Stiller, and Alfred Kazin.

  In Brownsville, two teenaged friends, Eli Katz and Norman Podhoretz, drew a comic strip together called “Night Hawk.” As an adult, Katz changed his name to Gil Kane and created the comic-book heroes the Atom and the Green Lantern. Podhoretz would edit Commentary and become a leading figure in the neoconservative political movement (over which he and Joe would have a severe falling-out). “America’s junk culture can be found in superhero comic books, its high culture in magazines such as … Commentary,” observes the writer Jeet Heer. Yet “comics and intellectual journals are often created by remarkably similar people.” Podhoretz and Kane “were both following common patterns of their generation. Like so many other immigrant Jews, they were benefiting from the opening up of American culture t
hat started in the 1920s and accelerated after the Second World War.… [In particular] the cultural industries … became open to outsiders, whether they were intellectuals or cartoonists.… Having made the difficult journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan, they were ready to enjoy the full blessings of American success.”

  In the 1960s and 1970s, the blurring of High and Low would characterize American art and entertainment—from the visual arts (Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg) to the movies (Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola); from the comics (R. Crumb, Charles Schultz) to literature (exhibit A: Catch-22). Critics have attributed this development to many causes: the easy availability of paperbacks (Jane Austen consorting on bookshelves with Mickey Spillane), tabloids, and television programming; technological advances (silk screening, photographic manipulation); and advertising, with its hunger for co-opting original ideas to spur mass sales. But Heer is also right: Much of the energy behind this mixing of cultural products, aims, and ambitions came from the drive for integration by groups of people seizing opportunities formerly denied them.

  Not surprisingly, individuals who held privileged social positions, and shaped their ideas of culture around them, fought change. On July 17, 1955—shortly after the appearance of “Catch-18” in New World Writing—Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California. If “Catch-18” was part of the trend toward blurring, bringing with it new ideas of art, literature, and entertainment, Disneyland (in spite of its technical dazzle and television promotions) was part of the resistance to change, a wistful attempt at preserving “old” culture.

  Originally, Disney, a son of the rural Midwest, had intended to call Disneyland “Walt Disney’s America.” His America was not Joe Heller’s. In fact, according to Raymond M. Weinstein, a scholar of modern culture, “Walt Disney had an intense dislike for Coney Island and what he thought it represented—dirty, disorganized … garish.” It wasn’t the amusement rides Disney objected to; his revulsion seemed tied to something deeper—perhaps the ethnic mix, the noisy clash of immigrant voices and styles?

  “Disneyland [was] the embodiment of one man’s prepossession toward America’s most important beliefs, values, and symbols [rooted in] … his boyhood experiences in the … Midwest,” Weinstein wrote. In its cleanliness, logical organization (its perfection of park administration), and old-fashioned Main Street atmosphere, it would be the anti–Coney Island. “Disney understood well the mood of the 1950s—with its bomb threats, Cold War, domestic paranoia, foreign conflicts,” Weinstein said. “[H]is brand of amusement played into everyone’s desire to go back to their childhood and the childhood of the nation.”

  Well, not everyone’s—as the disruptive energy in the pages of The Green Lantern, Commentary, and New World Writing demonstrated.

  * * *

  JOE KNEW it was no exaggeration to say that in the pages of comic books, journals, and magazines, a war was being waged for America’s soul. Superman had gone from fighting corporate greed to battling Nazis—now, in this era of atomic-bomb threats and rumors of UFOs, he fended off invaders from darkening skies. However ridiculous these scenarios seemed, they offered debates on threats to the nation and what to do about them.

  Similar considerations filled Commentary and other journals. For example, as early as 1952, a prominent member of Commentary’s editorial staff, Irving Kristol, wrestled his conscience and broke with his fellow staffers’ liberal views. He wrote that Joe McCarthy was certainly a threat to the nation’s political integrity, but a bigger problem was the Left’s refusal to disavow communism. The Left’s dithering, he said, gave McCarthy ammunition. Kristol’s colleagues fired back, accusing him in print of defending McCarthyism. The battle for the nation’s soul—not to mention Commentary’s—intensified.

  Meanwhile, inside Henry Luce’s empire, where Joe was safely ensconced, the arguments centered on corporate culture, corporate responsibilities. Fortune and Time, reflecting Luce’s belief that America must own the century, insisted corporate leaders had to do more than earn profits; they had to forge in America a “business civilization” in which financial values shaped everything from arts and entertainment to architecture to the nation’s infrastructure to the behavior of families. Capitalism had to have a moral basis.

  What did this mean? Luce summed it up in practical terms: “I am biased in favor of God, Eisenhower, and the stockholders of Time Inc.” He promoted a certain image of American masculinity. Time and Life ran numerous articles on Billy Graham’s increasingly popular Christian crusades, describing Graham as lean, blond, and handsome. Besides his physical attributes, a large part of what made Graham so attractive, said Luce, was the businesslike efficiency of his religious operation. When Graham went to New York City in the summer of 1957 for a series of rallies, he surrounded himself at news conferences with elite male business figures, including William Randolph Hearst, Jr., and Henry Luce. In Yankee Stadium, on July 20, Vice President Richard Nixon appeared at his rally. The stadium was an appropriate venue, not just for accommodating the crowd but also for stressing Graham’s athleticism and love of sports, part of his all-American image. Sports metaphors leavened his sermons. “Christianity is not a religion for weaklings,” he asserted. “We must be strong, virile, dynamic, if we are to stand.”

  What role did women play in this mix of bodybuilding, business, and faith? “I never talk alone with a woman,” Graham told an interviewer. Fervently, he avoided “lovesick women [and] bobby soxers” (as the interviewer put it). The American soul demanded sexual vigilance. Luce, praying each morning in his private elevator, agreed.

  Next to Time on the newsstands, competing views of masculinity waved their muscular pages, including the pulp version with postwar variations. “In wartime the Armed Services taught soldiers how to fight enemies, but [back home], working-class soldiers depended upon the mass-market magazines for their civilian life-lessons,” wrote Adam Parfrey, editor of It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps. “All of them had, among the lures of woman flesh and vicious bad guys, a lot of warnings, how-to’s, and comforting memories of wartime, when decisions were black and white, the villains darker and the victories sweeter.”

  Bruce Jay Friedman went to work for Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management Company in 1954, after a stint in Korea. Racism, misogyny, and imperialism were “just the way things were” in titles such as Male, Stag, and True Action—known in the trade as “armpit” publications, he said. “We didn’t think twice about it”: This was blue-collar manhood.

  The magazines printed the word nympho every chance they got. In addition to “girl pinching” pieces, a staple of the postwar pulps was “true” stories about battlefield heroism. Friedman would show Goodman a layout. “This one true?” Goodman asked. “Well, sort of,” Friedman replied. His boss nodded happily.

  One day, Friedman hired a young writer named Mario Puzo, a big man who loved a good drink and a fine cigar. Puzo “would create giant mythical armies, lock them in combat in Central Europe, and have casualties coming in by the hundreds of thousands,” Friedman said. “Although our mail was heavy, I don’t recall a single letter casting doubt on any of these epic conflicts.” After work each day, Puzo pounded away on a novel, a “Mafia epic,” he said.

  Other regular features in the men’s magazines included “Animal Nibbler” stories, “about people who had been nibbled half to death by ferocious little animals,” Friedman explained. “The titles were terrifying cries of anguish. ‘A Grysbok Sucked My Bones’; ‘Give Me Back My Leg’; they seemed to have even more power when couched in the present … tense. ‘A Boar Is Grabbing My Brain.’”

  “Sintown” stories were a hit with readers. “I always thought [of them] as ‘scratch the surface’ yarns,” Friedman said. “(Outwardly, Winkleton, Illinois, is a quiet, tree-lined little community.… But scratch the surface of this supposedly God-fearing little town and you will find that not since Sodom and Gomorrah and blah blah blah.) Any town with a bar and a hooker would do.”

&nb
sp; Even here, amid the puerility, soul struggles evolved. As Cold War dustups frayed the country’s nerves, and cracks began to appear in suburbia’s blissful pavement, previously suppressed fantasies crept into the men’s magazines. They took the form of “Leg Shackler” stories: “Slaves of the Emperor of Agony,” “Savage Rites of the Whip,” “Tormented Love.” As Parfrey noted, “Damsels [had] been distressed since the turn of the century in pulps, but nearly always the illustrations suggested that a hero was nearby, and his rescue pending.” More and more, “heroes came to play an increasingly minor role in illustrations until [they were] completely phased out.” Apparently, readers of these magazines came to believe that “saving women from torture was [no longer] on any level heroic.” This growing trend would reach its peak in the mid-1960s, Parfrey said, at “the time of the Vietnam War’s escalation and the emergence of feminism.”

  Skirmishes over manhood, politics, or corporate behavior might have been restricted to small pockets of readers here and there, given the specialized nature of magazines. But the tensions escaped their stapled spines. The term culture war would not achieve currency until decades later, but a culture war this was.

  In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he claimed comic books and men’s magazines were spreading an epidemic of juvenile delinquency and homosexuality among the nation’s youth. His supporters boycotted newsstands and burned comic books. Writing in Commentary, Norbert Muhlen cursed the “dehumanized” and “repetitious” stories of “death and destruction” in comics, which were “helping to educate a whole generation for an authoritarian rather than a democratic society.” With little change, his words could have served a leg-shackling Nazi, but the U.S. Congress became concerned enough (or alert enough to an issue worth exploiting politically—it was certainly easier to face this than Joe McCarthy) to threaten government censorship of comics. In response, William Gaines, publisher of Educational Comics, and his business manager, Lyle Stuart, created the Comics Magazines Association of America, a self-regulatory agency set up to administer a code—a stamp of approval guaranteeing “wholesome, entertaining and educational” contents. Any title that didn’t comply would face distribution hurdles. This move was meant to stave off harsher regulation by the government.