Gaines’s company published Tales from the Crypt, Weird Fantasy, The Vault of Horror, and a relatively new title (from October 1952), written and edited by a man named Harvey Kurtzman: Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD: Humor in a Jugular Vein.
“Of course, we had the big problem: could we ever live under the censorship of the Comics Code?” Kurtzman said. “We decided, absolutely no. We could not go on as a comic book.” Thus, Mad was born. Technically, by shifting from hand lettering to set type, the publication became a magazine instead of a comic. It was not bound by the strict new code.
Restrictions on magazine content were lighter (not to say ambiguous and paradoxical). “[B]oys were allowed to purchase [men’s] magazines that promoted wholesale violence against an entire gender, while Playboy-style girlie mags that revered women and their bodies were considered unfit material for underage [readers],” Adam Parfrey wrote. (Playboy debuted in December 1953.)
“In many ways Mad represented a group of alternative New York Jewish intellectuals,” says critic David Abrams. “[M]any of Mad’s staff were Jewish, either native New Yorkers or émigrés from Europe, a high proportion of them survivors of Nazi Germany. Like the New York intellectual milieu, many of them had come to political awareness during the Depression.”
Yiddish phrases stippled the magazine’s pages. By 1967, theologian Vernard Eller could say, “Beneath the pile of garbage that is Mad, there beats, I suspect, the heart of a rabbi.” Abrams contends that “Mad’s critique of America was far more effective and devastating than [its] better-known counterparts … such as Commentary, Dissent, Partisan Review, and The New Leader.” This was so, he says, because the intellectual journals were constrained by their sponsoring organizations (in Commentary’s case, the powerful American Jewish Committee) or editors’ ideologies. “[W]e like to say that Mad has no politics and that we take no point of view,” Gaines once said, but “the magazine is more liberal than not liberal.”
Abrams may overstate Mad’s intellectual rigor, but he is right to call attention to its growing influence during the 1950s and 1960s. Its highly visible political satire, scored to Borscht Belt rhythms, perhaps eased the way for Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Joseph Heller, or helped them gain greater acceptance. Politics and punning, smarts and snappy play—the High and the Low—had embraced.
Mad carried no advertising (ironic, given the location of its offices on Madison Avenue). Among its favorite targets for satire were ad agencies—“the essence of Mad’s success is its nimble spoofing of promotions of all kinds,” Time noted in 1958. The Disney Corporation came under fire (Mickey Mouse as a rat-faced thug). Joseph McCarthy didn’t escape: “Is Your Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks?” asked one of the magazine’s fake ads.
Predictably, Mad spawned a backlash from the intellectual set. In The New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald wrote, “Mad expresses … teenagers’ cynicism about the world of mass media that their elders have created—so full of hypocrisy and pretense governed by formulas. But Mad itself has a formula. It speaks the same language, aesthetically and morally, as the media it satirizes; it is as tasteless as they are, and more violent.” Mad’s critiques took the form of their targets. Indecipherability, relativism, what critics would soon call “postmodernism” had crept into mass culture. What could Superman—or Lionel Trilling—do about that?
The truth is, the mixture of High and Low had already made enough mud to cause a landslide. Mike Hammer was Superman in a trench coat, with a couple of shots of whiskey under his belt. Mad was Commentary with its thumbs in its ears (and boy, did Alfred E. Neuman have ears!). Books were masquerading as comics. Publishers were no longer predictable: New American Library, disseminator of cutting-edge, avant-garde pieces in New World Writing, also gave us Mickey Spillane. To date, the country’s biggest-selling paperback was Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care (it first appeared in June 1946). As Kenneth C. Davis wrote, “Paperback books and the baby boomers were made for each other”: a “mass medium for a mass generation.”
* * *
JOE KEPT TRACK of these trends: They were useful for his writing, in the daytime and at night. He roamed bookstores. Since The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity, the American novel had taken a few intriguing twists. Norman Mailer had followed his war epic with a “political and ideological novel” that was a “dismal … failure,” according to Commentary. Barbary Shore, published in 1951, attempted to transcend the naturalism that had made the earlier novel so old-fashioned. But Mailer’s heart wasn’t in the ideas or vaguely modernist style he’d adopted to try to please the intellectuals who’d dismissed him. Still, Barbary Shore gave “abundant indications of Mailer’s talents … [and] stubborn integrity,” Commentary averred. He remained a writer to watch.
Meanwhile, Saul Bellow had fashioned an expansive new style. While structurally familiar (a more or less straightforward first-person narrative), his latest novel leapt with the energies of American idioms more zestily than any writer’s work since Mark Twain’s. “One senses the joy with which Mr. Bellow breathes the freer air; he writes like a man set loose from prison,” Norman Podhoretz said in a review of The Adventures of Augie March in October 1953. Whereas Twain had limned black dialects, Bellow drew upon Jewish-American rhythms and quirks, announcing major shifts in America’s postwar cultural mix.
In 1955, William Gaddis published an immense novel called The Recognitions, all about plagiarism, forgeries, and counterfeiting, themes that made it, in Frederick Karl’s view, “the novel of the fifties.” As in the national discourse, disseminated through popular media, “[l]ayers of untruth” comprised the novel; beneath the lies, “somewhere, [lay] the real,” Karl wrote. “[C]old war, pinkos, left-winger, Red China, McCarthyism, Hiss, Rosenbergs, liberal intellectual, egghead … labels [became] a kind of totem [in the fifties].… We demeaned every experience and every response by means of a reductive vocabulary which transmitted only the artificial.” In capturing this glutted, mediated atmosphere, The Recognitions became “our archetypal experience for the fifties, a model … for the way in which we saw and will continue to see ourselves,” Karl said.
In conversations with Karl, Joe learned of other young writers to watch: James Baldwin, J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Grace Paley. American writers were stirring, trying to get their arms around this rough, slouching beast, the modern world.
Joe grew increasingly frustrated, although he tried to be patient, with his slow pace as a writer. His process—indexing, sorting, cross-referencing, reshuffling—was deliberate and fruitful, but it did not buzz with the excitement of the immediate dispatch. And the culture was shifting so fast!
Just as James Jones had surged ahead of him after their appearance in The Atlantic Monthly, now Jack Kerouac had jumped out of New World Writing with his novel. It was all the rage. On the Road appeared in 1957. Kerouac gave readings at the Vanguard, a popular jazz club in the Village, to the accompaniment of saxophone and drums. Dan Wakefield remembered going to see him one night: “[H]e was drunk by the time he appeared on stage, dropping the papers he was trying to read from, slurring his words, swaying back and forth not in time to the rhythm of the music but simply as a man does when he is trying not to fall down.” Wakefield felt that “Kerouac was not only giving our generation a bad name … but by his antics he was also—a worse crime—giving writing and writers in general a bad name … playing right into the hands of the enemy—Time Inc.—giving them fodder for reams of copy decrying youth, writers, artists, iconoclasts, rebels.”
Over in the enemy camp, Joe felt the same way. But he also had two kids to clothe and feed, clients to please, and many seductive perks it would be silly to ignore. His writing continued to crawl.
* * *
ONE EVENING in the winter of 1956, in a fourth-floor apartment in a brownstone on Fifty-eighth Street behind the Plaza Hotel, the Magazine Management staff threw a party. Present were Bruce Jay Friedman and his wife, Ginger, Mario Puzo, Martin Goodman, Stan Lee (in
charge of the company’s comic-book division), and a young man named David Markson, then working on his first novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee. Also laughing and flitting about the rooms was Alice Denham, a young Floridian with literary ambitions who had come to New York to meet writers. She had hung around the San Remo with James Baldwin. She had flirted with Norman Mailer and had a fling with James Jones. While trying to write, she earned a living as a photographer’s model (she was that year’s “Playmate of the Year” in Playboy magazine).
A day or two before the party, she went to the “Mag Man” studios at 655 Madison Avenue for a photo shoot. One of the men’s magazines planned a spread called “Girl Gun Runners of Saigon.” A makeup artist gave her an Asian look. She posed in an open-necked shirt, showing plenty of cleavage, while cocking a rifle and gripping a pistol. She asked a young editor whether there really were girl gun runners in Saigon. “Please, Alice,” he said, “this is True Adventures. We make it up.”
In 2006, Denham published a memoir entitled Sleeping with Bad Boys. Despite its lurid title and steamy prose style, its fidelity to facts was confirmed by David Markson and Adele Mailer (Norman’s wife in 1956), neither of whom came off particularly well in the book.
The night of the Mag Man party, Denham wrote, Joe Heller arrived with his “curvy” wife, Shirley. Joe was “everybody’s buddy,” Denham said. She was genuinely fond of him, but she perceived that his “wife did everything [for him].” According to her, he “didn’t have to pick up a plate or his underwear. [Maybe] [o]ccasionally pat a child on the head.”
Joe knew of Denham’s literary ambitions. He said to her, “Let me introduce you to my agent, Candida.” Donadio represented many of the fellows laboring as “editorial slaves” at Magazine Management. She was sitting on a sofa in the middle of the room. She “was dark, melancholic, haunted, and overweight,” Denham wrote. “She did not move from the … sofa … where she received supplicants.” Joe introduced Denham. “[Alice is] working on a novel you might take a look at,” he suggested. According to Denham, the “dark lady … looked me over, glared at me … and refused to acknowledge my presence.” Joe grabbed Denham’s arm and pulled her away.
“What did I do?” she asked.
“She doesn’t like good-looking women,” Joe said. “I should’ve known.”
Bruce Jay Friedman, who had witnessed the incident, assured Denham that Donadio wouldn’t speak to his wife, Ginger, either.
Joe sighed. “Well, so much for the mother of us all,” he said.
* * *
SUMMERS, Joe and Shirley rented a place on Fire Island. “I loved it there (no cars at all, fresh air, very walkable),” Ted Heller recalls. While the kids played on the beach, Joe worked on his novel. An outer landmass off Long Island’s south shore, Fire Island provided a popular summer escape for New York City’s middle-class and wealthy families, as well as for many artists. Truman Capote was rumored to have written Breakfast at Tiffany’s there. Occasionally, W. H. Auden could be spotted beachside, along with Carson McCullers, Janet Flanner, and Jane Bowles. Earl Hamner, Jr., whose novel Spencer’s Mountain would later serve as the basis for the long-running television series The Waltons, rented a house next to the Hellers’. Not far from them—but unknown to them at the time—the young TV writer Mel Brooks often took a place near his pal Carl Reiner.
Joe’s job transitions—to Look and McCall’s—played hell with his writing schedule. When he made the move to McCall’s, he was required to take a series of psychological evaluations before his appointment could be confirmed (New York had fallen for European-style psychoanalysis).
At the company’s request, he spent nearly two days in a midtown office submitting to questions on Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests administered by two Columbia University professors. In the TAT drawings, Joe saw only a mother holding her son. An overwhelming sadness overcame him. In the color-card tests, he pictured blood and amputated limbs. “[I] was … catapulted into a state of startled confusion and silence,” he recalled. In discussions with one of the professors, he mentioned he was working on a novel. Oh, what’s it about? the man asked. “That question still makes me squirm,” Joe wrote nearly forty years later. “[I]t was only then, in trying to talk about [the novel] coherently, that I realized … how extensively I was focusing on the grim details of human mortality, on disease, accidents, grotesque mutilations,” he wrote.
Earlier, he had applied for a life-insurance policy (his first) for his wife and kids. He was asked to list his father’s cause of death on the application form. Joe paused, pen in hand. He didn’t know. In all these years, he had never bothered to find out. He had not wanted to think about it. He called Sylvia to ask but didn’t press for details.
* * *
“CRITICS AND PUBLISHERS … have … been calling for a new voice, a literary prophet capable of creating a meaningful form out of the conflicting elements in the world we know,” Arabel Porter had written in the publisher’s note for the issue of New World Writing in which Joe’s work appeared. “The editors … cannot now point to any one writer who has, so far, achieved the stature so urgently demanded. And yet, the writers themselves—or the best of them—continue to work with spirit, in their own ways, in their own idioms—quite aware of the world in which they live, and of the special demands now made upon them.”
Jack Kerouac’s crowd dismissed Joe as a Lamb Chop. His colleagues took him for just another adman. His literary agent couldn’t make any headway with his work. His mother was probably dying.
These were the pressures Joe experienced while sitting at his kitchen table in the evenings. He felt not like a prophet, but a clown, a morbid jester. All he could do was shape one slow sentence at a time. They were good sentences. He believed that, but would anyone else? “Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. All over the world,” he wrote. “There was no end in sight.”
In another room, the children cried.
“The only end in sight was Yossarian’s own.”
11. 22
ROBERT GOTTLIEB was just a kid, really. And the company was his to play with.
“At that moment in the demented history of Simon & Schuster, there was no one in charge—which is often the case in publishing, but it was never acknowledged,” he recalled.
In August 1957, at about the time Candida Donadio sent Gottlieb a roughly seventy-five-page manuscript entitled “Catch-18,” Jack Goodman, Simon & Schuster’s editorial director, had passed away unexpectedly. Poor health forced founder Dick Simon to retire later that year. According to Jonathan R. Eller, who has traced Catch-22’s publishing trail, six S & S executives died or moved to other firms in the mid-1950s, leaving the twenty-six-year-old Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, a young advertising manager with whom he worked, with remarkable editorial pull.
Dick Simon and Max Schuster had started the firm in 1924, publishing the first crossword puzzle book (Simon’s aunt was a newspaper-puzzle aficionado). It became an immediate bestseller. In 1939, S & S, along with Robert Fair de Graff, created the country’s first paperback publisher, Pocket Books. Gottlieb, a New York native, educated at Columbia and Cambridge, where he studied with the literary critic F. R. Leavis, came aboard in 1955 as Jack Goodman’s assistant.
In Turning the Pages, a history of the company, Peter Schwed said the personnel manager who first interviewed Gottlieb wondered “why this applicant, assuming he had the money, didn’t seem to have the inclination to buy and use a comb.” At the end of a lengthy interview session, Goodman told Gottlieb to “[g]o home and write me a letter telling me why you want to get into book publishing.” According to Schwed, Gottlieb “brooded about this on his way home and exploded when telling his wife about it. ‘What in heaven’s name is Goodman telling me to do? The last time I had an idiot assignment like this was in the sixth grade when the teacher made us write a paper on ‘What I did in my summer vacation’!” The following morning, he delivered a letter to Goodman. It read, in full, “Dear Mr. Goodman: The reason I want t
o get into book publishing is because it never occurred to me that I could work anywhere else. Sincerely, Robert Gottlieb.” Goodman hired him on a six-month trial basis. At the end of the probationary period, Gottlieb walked into his boss’s office and announced, “[My] six months are up and [I’ve] come to tell you that [I’ve] decided to stay.”
Michael Korda, then another young S & S editor, recalled the publishing business as segregated, but changing, in those days. “Until the 1920s, book publishing in America was dominated by old, ‘respectable’ houses that for the most part, didn’t hire Jews,” he wrote in his memoir Another Life. “[Then], in the late twenties and thirties, there emerged houses that were owned by Jews who were willing to take risks, who knew how to promote and market books.” Korda credited World War II with bringing “Jews and Gentiles together in large numbers for the first time, the common experience of war erasing many of the differences that had separated them.”
Primarily, what characterized Simon & Schuster in 1958, when Korda “stumbled into [his] job” there, was its atmosphere of “thwarted ambition and intrigue”—largely a result of the recent deaths and defections. Additionally, the firm’s list seemed moribund to Korda, stuck in the previous decade’s celebration “of the suburban house, the six o’clock cocktail shaker, and the regulation suit, a world defined by [books such as] The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”—both S & S publications. The company needed to be “shaken by a revolution.” A fresh vision was overdue. The big war novels of Mailer and Jones had sent a “flurry of excitement” through the publishing industry for a while, and there had been a few “seismic tremor[s]” from On the Road, but “for the most part,” Korda said, “publishing, like literature, slumbered on.”
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