Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  When he first arrived in his office at S & S, located in a building overlooking Rockefeller Center, he found on his desk a bronze plaque that read GIVE THE READER A BREAK. Designed by Dick Simon, the plaques, distributed among the staff, were the closest things the company had to an official editorial policy.

  Others in the firm had described Bob Gottlieb to Korda as a “wunderkind.” One morning, Korda wrote, “a tall young man, looking rather like one of those penniless perpetual students in Russian novels, squeezed his way into my office and sat down on the edge of my desk. He wore thick glasses with heavy black frames, and his lank, black hair was combed across his brow rather like the young Napoleon’s.” Gottlieb kept flipping his hair off his forehead with one hand; immediately, the hair resumed its old spot. His glasses were “so smeared with fingerprints … it was a wonder he could see through them.” Korda said Gottlieb’s eyes “were shrewd and intense, but with a certain kindly humorous sparkle that I had not so far seen at S & S.”

  After studying the room for a moment, Gottlieb told Korda, “You’ll never meet anybody if your back is all they see.” He pointed to the desk, which faced away from the door toward an outer window. He grasped one end of the desk and told Korda to take the other side. Together, they turned the desk around so it faced the door and the outer corridor. Gottlieb left, nodding with satisfaction. “Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good—whether it’s what you’re wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what’s going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop,” Gottlieb has said. “I don’t want to interfere with it or control it, exactly—I want it to be happy.… I might have been, I think, a rabbi, if I’d been at all religious.”

  * * *

  CANDIDA DONADIO was delighted by Gottlieb’s enthusiasm for the “Catch-18” manuscript. Finally, someone got it! “I thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall off,” she often said to describe her happiness when negotiations went well with an editor. She had also received a positive response from Tom Ginsberg at Viking. Both Gottlieb and Ginsberg offered options to draw up a contract when Joe had completed the novel. In late August 1957, Donadio met Joe in a West Side restaurant to ask him what he wanted to do.

  Looking very much like “a creature from a Roman fresco” (as Robert Stone, one of her clients, once described her), she ordered a round of martinis. This pleased Joe. He was also tickled with the Yiddish in her speech, peppered among Italian phrases and bitter pearls such as “Trust is good. Not to trust is better.” Most of all, he was gratified by her seriousness about literature, as well as with the level of personal attention she paid him. Once, describing her instinctual approach to working with writers, she said, “Language means the most to me. The way words are put together.… I want to see either a new insight or some kind of confirmation of what you already know. If I’m not sure, I look at a writer’s eyes. They tell me a great deal.… When something is wrong in a story and a writer doesn’t see it or doesn’t know it—there is something in the writer’s life he doesn’t understand.”

  Joe sipped his martini and chewed a toothpick. He told Donadio he’d stopped smoking a few years earlier, when the price of a pack of cigarettes rose to twenty-six cents the same week the first lung-cancer reports appeared; the toothpick eased his oral cravings. He listened to her lay out the pros and cons of accepting or declining the offers on the table, of working with either Gottlieb or Ginsberg. Given the demands of Joe’s day job, and his peripatetic working methods, she felt it best for him to complete more of the book and then ask for an immediate contract. He agreed. He was simply thrilled to be having this conversation. “I remember thinking that when I had the book one-third done and my agent was showing it to editors, that if they all had said ‘No,’ I would not have finished the book,” Joe told George Plimpton in 1974. “I don’t have that narcissistic drive, the megalomania involved in spending years working on a book that no one is really interested in publishing.” The catch in this statement is that he never doubted someone would want Yossarian’s story. (“He knew all along [the book] would change his life and make an impact on American fiction,” Frederick Karl said. “I really can’t emphasize that enough—his tremendous belief in this book from the beginning.”)

  Quietly, Donadio signaled for another martini. As for Robert Gottlieb, she told Joe, he was untested but smart and ambitious. She liked what she knew of him.

  The practice of submitting a promising manuscript to more than one publisher at a time was still relatively new, pioneered by agent Scott Meredith in 1952. Prior to that, literary agents had not traded much with book publishers, concentrating instead on magazine sales. The venerable agent Paul Reynolds once declined to represent Willa Cather because he did not want to bother checking periodic royalty statements from her publisher. Now, attitudes had changed: Hardback publication could lead to a paperback sale, a foreign publishing contract, serialization in magazines, and perhaps a movie tie-in. Candida Donadio saw the possibilities early. She taught herself to be business savvy while serving as a kind of den mother to her growing list of clients.

  Joe went back to his kitchen table in the Apthorp. Most evenings, he’d write one to three pages in longhand on yellow legal pads. He’d compose the same scene many times, using the same opening and closing sentences, until some of the scenes swelled from three to over a hundred pages. He liked to fill in. In this laborious way, stories grew about the shrewd young soldier, Yossarian, determined to live forever or die trying.

  * * *

  WHILE JOE was scribbling in his kitchen, Norman Mailer made another bid to be the culture’s most important and notorious bellwether. Depressed by his declining critical reputation since The Naked and the Dead (his third novel, The Deer Park, had fared just as poorly as Barbary Shore), he escaped to Mexico, where huge quantities of marijuana made him feel like a “psychic outlaw.” “I liked it,” he said later. “I liked it a good sight better than trying to be a gentleman.”

  He returned to the States, and in April 1957, he published a rambling manifesto for a cultural revolution based on personal liberation in Irving Howe’s journal, Dissent. “Jazz is orgasm,” he wrote. “Hip is an American existentialism” embedded in those who possess an “intense awareness of the present tense in life”: ex-soldiers, druggies, gangbangers, and, most particularly, blacks. The article was entitled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”

  Superficial it certainly was, but as Fred Kaplan wrote in 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Mailer’s “frantic swings”—fueled by booze and pot—“matched those of the decade, [and he] managed to capture the spirit of the time, the rumblings of an undercurrent.” Mailer’s diagnosis of the moment was more insightful than his recommendations for surviving it. “Perhaps we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years,” his essay began. “If the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, [the] only life-giving answer is to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” This was the attitude prevalent in current movies such as Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, in Elvis’s songs, in Kerouac’s novel and Ginsberg’s Howl: the recognition, as movie critic Pauline Kael put it, that the “image of instinctive rebellion expresses something in many people [at this time] that they don’t dare express.” The groundwork was being laid for mass expressions of rebellion, in both controlled and unlimited ways, from Madison Avenue to college campuses. The rebellions’ weapons would not be guns and ammo or political orthodoxy, but, rather, weed, the transistor radio, the Pill, and the paperback book.

  * * *

  BY FEBRUARY 1958, Joe had completed seven handwritten chapters of “Catch-18” and typed them up into a 259-p
age manuscript. Donadio sent it to Gottlieb. “I … love this crazy book and very much want to do it,” Gottlieb replied. Despite the firm’s weakness at the top, he was not completely free to publish whatever he pleased. Henry Simon, the younger brother of the company’s founder; Justin Kaplan, an executive assistant to Simon and Max Schuster; and Peter Schwed, an administrative editor, also read Joe’s manuscript and discussed it with Gottlieb. Schwed and Kaplan expressed reservations about the novel’s repetitiveness. Simon hated it altogether. Its view of the war was offensive, he said, and he recommended against publishing it.

  Gottlieb strongly disagreed. “It is a very rare approach to the war—humor that slowly turns to horror,” he wrote in his report to the company’s editorial board. “The funny parts are wildly funny, the serious parts are excellent. The whole certainly suffers somewhat by the two attitudes, but this can be partly overcome by revisions. The central character, Yossarian, must be strengthened somewhat—his single-minded drive to survive is both the comic and the serious center of the story.” He conceded the book would probably not sell well, but he predicted it would be a prestigious title for S & S, “bound to find real admirers in certain literary sets.” The board deferred to him. Simon & Schuster offered Joe a standard first-book agreement: $1,500—$750 as an advance and an additional $750 upon completion of the manuscript. The contract listed 1960 as the pub date.

  Gottlieb worked well with Candida Donadio, though their business approaches were startlingly different. Donadio liked nothing better than negotiating over pasta and vodka. Gottlieb preferred to hunker down in his office. “[W]hen I had been at Simon & Schuster a year they said, You should have an expense account. I said, That’s very nice but I don’t know anybody to take out to lunch,” he said. “[Anyway,] I had many, many lunches on my expense account … [but] I got to the point where having lunch with [people] all the time seemed to be yielding diminishing returns—you’re out for two hours, two and a half hours, you overeat, you’ve wasted all that time, it’s disgusting. So … I said, This is it. I won’t do lunch anymore.”

  Right away, he hit it off with Joe Heller. “I suppose our convoluted, neurotic, New York Jewish minds work[ed] the same way,” he said. He detected in Joe “two great qualities,” and they appeared to exist “in such strange discord. First, there was anxiety. That, to me, [was] the subject of Catch-22. [That book] must have welled up from the most profound anxiety in him. And the other part was appetite and joy.”

  In retrospect, Gottlieb does not appear to be an obvious editor for Joe. In 1994, John le Carré, whom Gottlieb would edit, mused that Gottlieb was generally not comfortable with “battlefield sequences” in fiction. He “tends to go very quiet when he reads that stuff and turns over the pages very quickly. It’s not a world he’s ever had to venture into, thank God, and I think he just doesn’t care for it very much. I would not see him as the best person to edit The Naked and the Dead, for example. Or James Jones.” By the same token, literary agent Lynn Nesbit said, “I probably wouldn’t send a postmodernist writer to Bob.”

  So what made him tumble to Catch-22, which has often been described as a postmodernist novel packed with battlefield scenes? At the time he met Joe, he had been reading Henry James. The master’s lengthy, obsessive sentences may have prepared him for the complex rhythms in Joe’s prose. He had grown up—a sickly boy—listening to some of the same radio shows Joe had, “Your Hit Parade,” “Fred Allen,” “Inner Sanctum.” He loved their comic timing and heightened sense of drama. He also saw that Joe’s book was not fundamentally a novel about World War II, nor, despite its anachronisms and flirtations with implausibility, was it a fiction about fiction. It was, as he had written in his report to the editorial board, about one man’s impossible wish: the desire to survive.

  * * *

  “I THINK I was [Bob’s] first writer. Not his first published writer, however, because I worked so slowly,” Joe told an interviewer in 1974. “It came so hard. I really thought it would be the only thing I ever wrote. Working on Catch, I’d become furious and despondent that I could only write a page [or so] a night. I’d say to myself, ‘Christ, I’m a mature adult with a master’s degree in English, why can’t I work faster?’”

  The various stages of the novel, housed now in the Archives and Special Collections Department of the Brandeis University Libraries, reveal that, at one point, Joe was working with at least nine different drafts, both handwritten and typed, often cutting and pasting sections from one draft into another, leaving blank spaces in some of the handwritten drafts for typed paragraphs to be inserted later. A typed section was no closer to being finished, in Joe’s mind, than a handwritten one; some of the typed paragraphs had been revised as many as three different times, in red ink, green ink, and pencil. Generally, the handwritten passages relished the intentional redundancy of expressions and images, which revisions tended to erase, largely by replacing proper nouns with pronouns. For example, the sentence “The two enlisted men who ran the medical tent for Doc Daneeka ran the medical tent so efficiently that Doc Daneeka…” became “The two enlisted men that ran the medical tent for Doc Daneeka ran it so efficiently that he…” There was a fine line, in the repetitions, between comic effect and clutter; in later drafts, Joe streamlined his descriptive passages. He retained the humor in situations, as well as in “Who’s on first?”–style dialogues, straight out of old Borscht Belt routines.

  He tried to temper the humor, as well. Comedy came easily to him. He didn’t trust it. In an early passage labeled “Chapter XXIII: Dobbs,” Joe originally wrote, “Yossarian lost his guts on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts on the mission to Avignon.” Later, Joe decided the pun on “guts” lessened the horror of Snowden’s fate; he was using the gunner’s death to serve a cheap joke. He changed the passage to read, “That was the mission in which Yossarian lost his balls … because Snowden lost his guts.…”

  From draft to draft, most of the major changes were structural. Joe shuffled chapters, finding more effective ways to introduce the large cast of characters. “I’m a chronic fiddler,” he said. Left on his own, he’d “never finish anything at all” because “I don’t understand the process of imagination. I am very much at its mercy. I feel that … ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon.… I don’t produce them at will.” At the same time, the “limitations” inherent in writing ad copy—time constraints, clients’ wishes, off-limits language—had taught him to “spur” his imagination under severe pressure. “There’s an essay of T.S. Eliot’s in which he … [claims] that if one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas,” Joe said. “Given total freedom, however, the chances are good that the work will sprawl.”

  He showed rough pages to George Mandel, who helped clarify scenes and intensify situational absurdities, and he depended on Frederick Karl’s response. Karl had always felt Joe was one of the smartest people he knew. He was gratified to see Joe’s intelligence reflected in the manuscript, notably in passages piercing institutional hypocrisies. Meanwhile, Candida Donadio sold the British publishing rights to Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg, who felt Joe was possessed of “true literary genius.” The news gave Joe a boost.

  Sometimes in the evenings, to clear his head before settling down to write, he’d take walks with his family: Shirley, elegant as ever in sleek black pumps, a black knee-length dress, and a simple pearl necklace, Erica in a double-breasted wool coat over a checkered dress, and Ted in a light pullover shirt and sweater. In a typical family photograph from this time, the children are clearly the center of Joe and Shirley’s concern. Joe, his hair cut short and wearing a dark sport coat, appears anxious, herding the kids in a straight line down the sidewalk. He looks self-absorbed, possibly thinking about his book or his mother’s continuing decline. Shirley holds back a little, watching the kids with relaxed and pleased attentiveness. Erica appears to enjoy her status as older
sister; she is a head taller than her brother, and speaks to him with a knowing expression, nudging his shoulder with her arm. Ted seems happy, amazed by his surroundings, somewhat oblivious of the others in childhood’s sweet way. Back in the apartment, Joe left Shirley to put the kids to bed and sequestered himself with his book.

  “Catch-18” had doubled in length by the time Gottlieb saw any of it again. The original manuscript had expanded from seven to sixteen chapters, and Joe had added a whole new section consisting of twenty-eight more chapters. The pages were a mix of typescript and legal-size notebook paper covered in Joe’s precise and rather crabbed handwriting.

  He was taking so long to write the book, the literary world in which he’d conceived the novel no longer existed. Norman Mailer embodied most of the changes. Additionally, each new J. D. Salinger story in The New Yorker was cause now for literary buzz. The genteel comedies of suburban manners that had once characterized the magazine’s fiction had given way to Salinger’s Zen-like ambiguities. Already, Salinger had established himself as an enigmatic figure, “the Dead Okie of Fiction,” present through absence.

  Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and a young hotshot named Philip Roth appeared to be establishing a Jewish beachhead in American fiction, bringing new brashness to American prose. As for the Beats, nothing signaled their mainstream acceptance more than Columbia University’s invitation to Allen Ginsberg to read his poetry on campus in February 1959. Lionel Trilling refused to attend the reading, but his wife went. Despite her reservations about the Beats in general, Diana declared herself deeply moved by Ginsberg’s seriousness and real lyrical gifts. A sea change had occurred.