Most importantly, by the end of the 1950s, World War II (and the cultural ferment immediately preceding and following it) could no longer be approached straightforwardly in fiction, at least not effectively. No one had topped—nor could they—The Naked and the Dead or From Here to Eternity. There was no need to repeat those novels’ achievements, the vivid battlefield scenes and dissections of military hierarchies. And yet, night after night at his kitchen table, Joe Heller wrote a novel about the war.
But not really.
“It had upset many people when Mailer wrote the first war novel in which the troops swore the way they have always sworn in all armies since the beginning of warfare, but nobody in American publishing was prepared for a novel like Catch-22 that made savage fun of war, had a hero who was proud to be a coward, and ridiculed both our side and the enemy’s alike,” Michael Korda wrote. “It was all very well for that kind of thing to have been done in a Czech book like The Good Soldier Schweik, but it was unthinkable in this country.”
Looking back, he said, it was such a “strange period, the sunset of the Fifties, before rock and roll, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and women’s liberation changed all the rules we were living by.” In the publishing houses, “carbon copies still reigned supreme, and everybody in the editorial department had black smudges on their fingers and shirt cuffs, the proud badge of the profession, like a coal miner’s blackened skin.”
He would pass by Bob Gottlieb’s office and see parts of Joe’s novel “endlessly retyped, look[ing] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as [Joe, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne] labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb’s cramped office. That, I thought, is editing, and I longed to do the same.”
Joe prepared a 758-page typescript from this “jigsaw puzzle,” deleting digressive episodes and expanding other chapters. He and Gottlieb plunged in again. Gottlieb inspected paragraphs for what he called “impoverished vocabulary,” and asked Joe to stir things up with more active language. He caught places where Joe seemed to be “clearing his throat,” dawdling, in Joe’s characteristic way, and not getting directly to the point. “Some of Bob’s suggestions … involved a lot of work,” Joe recalled. “There was a chapter that came on page two hundred or three hundred of the manuscript—I believe it was the one with Colonel Cathcart; it was either that or the Major Major chapter—and he said he liked this chapter, and it was a shame we didn’t get to it earlier. I agreed with him, and I cut about fifty or sixty pages from the opening just to get there more quickly.”
The work was as exhilarating as it was difficult. “Joe … and I [were] on exactly the same wavelength editorially,” Gottlieb said. “[We] never had a bad moment because he [was] perfectly detached.… [With Joe,] you [could] look at [a book] as though you were two surgeons examining a body stretched out upon a table. You just cut it open, deal with the offending organs, and stitch it up again. Joe [was] completely objective, he [had] that kind of mind.”
In their concentrated hours together, the men grew close. Joe learned that Gottlieb was married to a former actress, Maria Tucci, loved theater and dance, and enjoyed collecting women’s purses as a hobby. He didn’t go in for “lit crit stuff”; for him, editing, like any kind of reading, was a matter of “common sense.” Mostly, Joe came to appreciate Gottlieb’s ability to surrender to a book. “If you do [that],” Gottlieb once explained, “when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear.”
Within the hallways of Simon & Schuster, an “aura of myth hovered around the book,” said Michael Korda. It was a literary Manhattan Project. “[N]obody but Gottlieb and his acolytes had read it. He had shrewdly stage-managed a sense of expectation that grew with every delay.” The occasional appearance in the office of Joe’s “Sicilian Earth Mother” agent also increased the book’s mystical status. Donadio “had a way of dismissing those she thought unimportant,” Korda said, which included just about everyone but Bob Gottlieb and Joe Heller.
Eventually—the 1960 deadline had passed—Joe dropped 150 pages from the manuscript, and the remaining typescript, heavily line-edited, became the printer’s copy. “We worked like dogs on Catch … and then just before it went to press I was reading it again, and I came to a chapter I’d always hated,” Gottlieb said. “I thought it was pretentious and literary. I said to Joe, You know, I’ve always hated this chapter, and he said, Well take it out. And out it went. He printed it many years later in Esquire as the lost chapter of Catch-22. That [was] Joe Heller … [he was] a pragmatist.”
Joe’s work wasn’t over once Gottlieb’s job was done. Gottlieb sent the manuscript to a copyeditor “who misunderstood her instructions and rewrote whole paragraphs and changed the names, and made corrections,” Joe said. “She missed the whole style. She’d edited—and very well—William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was very good at that. Well, she took Catch-22 [it was still called “Catch-18” at the time] and began making it historically correct; putting in dates where I didn’t want dates.” She also “apparently had an aversion to what I think might be called compound predicates. For example, if I wrote, ‘He struck a match and lit a cigarette,’ she would change it to ‘He struck a match and he lit a cigarette.’ It was even worse when she got to sentences like ‘Get out, he said, foaming at the mouth.’ This she would change to ‘Get out, he said, and he foamed at the mouth.’” Joe spent six weeks in early 1961 correcting the copyeditor’s changes, returning the book to the conversational idioms he desired, and underscoring deliberate anachronisms.
“The S & S house style called for a military rank to be capitalized, so in those cases ‘the Major’ or ‘the Captain’ or ‘the General’ were set that way,” Peter Schwed recalled. “Not for long. Joe insisted, and he didn’t want any rebuttals, that whenever he had written about a character using only his rank without his name, the word must be set in lower case, viz., ‘the major,’ ‘the captain,’ ‘the general.’ Joe got his way, [and] … the production department … suffered an unexpected sneak punch.”
Meanwhile, Joe felt “lucky and glad” to be working with cover designer Paul Bacon. Bacon was Joe’s age, a native of Ossining, New York, and a veteran of the war. In Newark, he had attended Arts High School. His career as a jacket artist got started after a publisher noticed covers he’d designed for a few small jazz periodicals, and for the Blue Note and Riverside record labels. In 1956, he set a new trend in jacket design. At the behest of Simon & Schuster’s art director, Tom Bevins, Bacon designed the cover for a novel called Compulsion, by Meyer Levin. Compulsion told the story of two young men who carried out a well-planned, cold-blooded murder of a boy, along the lines of the famous Leopold and Loeb case. S & S figured the crime’s similarity to the novel’s plot might help sales, but the publisher didn’t want to be seen as exploiting the case or resorting to lewdness. Bacon downplayed the cover’s imagery, depicting two small jittery figures printed in red. He devoted most of the space to the title and the author’s name. The novel became a bestseller; the design caught the eye of other publishers. The “big book look” was born.
“I’d always tell myself, ‘You’re not the star of the show. The author took three and a half years to write the goddamn thing, and the publisher is spending a fortune on it, so just back off,’” Bacon said. On the other hand, he felt writers often made cover suggestions that were too literal. These resulted in “dumb” illustrations. For Joe’s book, he tried eleven different approaches. “I did a jacket that just [had the title] in very large lettering, and underneath, I can … remember … the [subtitle Heller wrote]: ‘A novel wildly funny and dead serious about a … malingerer who recognized the odds.’ Gottlieb liked it but didn’t do it,” Bacon said. “Then I did one that had Yossarian bull’s-ass naked, but with his back to you, saluting as a flight of planes went over. I liked that one. Then I did the finger. Then I did a couple of modifications of those. Then, at s
ome point, I came up with the little guy that I tore out of a piece of paper, representing Yossarian in full flight from everybody.”
The image would soon become iconic: a cartoonlike red cutout of a soldier dancing, arms raised (or engaging in a grotesque parody of a march). It was Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton rolled into one. The new pub date was set for October 1961, in time for the Christmas marketing season.
The stress of writing the novel, as well as consuming “all that expense-account food and booze” while working for Time and McCall’s, Joe said, put fifty pounds on his once-thin frame. Some of his colleagues took to calling him “the Locust.” “Whatever was there I’d eat it,” he said. He still bit his nails.
His daughter believes that sometime in the summer of 1961, Shirley took the kids to a small motel in Pennsylvania, leaving Joe alone to attend to last-minute book business. “[I remember] my mother, brother, and I stayed at this motel … right on the highway, Uncle Morris’ Motel (it was called that—he wasn’t our uncle),” Erica says. “Dad … would come up there on the weekends and because my mother didn’t know how to drive, we were pretty much stuck at this grim little place. There was a diner right across the highway.… ‘Travelin’ Man’ by Ricky Nelson was always playing on the jukebox.… We’d have all our meals there and the rest of the time we’d just pretty much be in the motel pool.… I can’t imagine … how on earth we ever found this place or why it was chosen.”
While reading the Catch galley sheets, Joe had to write scripts for “dog and pony shows” at McCall’s—national presentations to advertising agencies and prospective clients. Travel expenses associated with these presentations often went as high as ninety thousand dollars. Joe prepared flip charts and slide shows. He put together direct-mailing packets. His associates felt he had a “fantastic sense of the trends of the times and what was important to the people buying.”
That year, at McCall’s annual sales convention in Nassau, Joe’s slide show, “The Pages That Sell,” took center stage. His colleagues had taken a plane to the festivities. Joe still didn’t fly. He’d booked passage on a boat. While his fellow conventioneers boozed it up in the bars, Joe sat on the beach, reading his galleys. One of his colleagues, Tom Buck, tried to talk him into flying back with the group. Buck, a big, gruff, friendly man with a passion for JFK, had been a barnstormer for a flying circus in the Depression years, and he spoke of the glories of flight. Joe took one look at his artificial leg—Buck had been injured in a plane crash in 1946, dropping two thousand feet into a field in Delaware—and said he’d stick with the boat. Buck laughed. “He was a self-made man and unable to hide it,” Joe said of him.
Joe’s advertising buddies saw him the same way. He was a great adman, but something else was on his mind. Some days he would walk into the office and announce he was “just going to brood and not work.” One colleague said, “Joe worked [hard] on his … escape” from the “bureaucracy.”
His escape seemed perpetually threatened. One day, he got a call from Gottlieb, who said the title “Catch-18” would have to go. Leon Uris was preparing to release a novel called Mila 18, all about the Nazi occupation of Poland (Uris’s title was taken from the designation for the headquarters of a Jewish resistance fighters’ bunker in Warsaw). Uris was a well-known writer—Exodus had been a huge bestseller; two novels with the number 18 in the title would clash in the marketplace, and Heller, the unknown, was bound to get the short end of the deal.
The number had always been arbitrary, part of the joke about military rules. Still, Joe, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne had long thought of the book as “Catch-18,” and it was difficult to conceive of calling it anything else. “[W]e were all in despair,” Gottlieb said. In his office, he and Joe sat opposite each other, spitting out numbers like two spies speaking in code. Joe liked the sound of “Catch-11”: hard consonants followed by vowels, opening up the mouth. Gottlieb thought there were too many syllables. Besides, it was too close to the new Frank Sinatra movie, Oceans Eleven. They agreed to sleep on the question of a title and try again later.
On January 29, 1961, Joe sent Gottlieb a note, bringing to bear all his adman persuasion: “The name of the book is now CATCH-14. (Forty-eight hours after you resign yourself to the change, you’ll find yourself almost preferring this new number. It has the same bland and nondescript significance of the original. It is far enough away from Uris for the book to establish an identity of its own, I believe, yet close enough to the original title to still benefit from the word of mouth publicity we have been giving it.)”
Gottlieb wasn’t sold.
In the meantime, Simon & Schuster’s lawyers had been reviewing the galleys. They worried that Joe’s old war buddies might recognize themselves in his descriptions and decide to seek damages. In part, this fear reflected changes in the publishing industry. In the past, books had been a luxury item. Most publishing firms had been owned by individuals or families, often with little capital invested up front. The business was as much about shaping culture as it was about making a profit. The audience for books was relatively small, but it was an educated and loyal one. Now, the mass-market paperback, distributed like magazines on newsstands, in bus stations, and drugstores, had created a whole new readership. Big profits were possible. Publishing was no longer a “gentleman’s” venture, as the old-school owners liked to think of it. Michael Korda says that when “Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer took Random House public at $11.25 a share” in October 1959, they set off a “boom in publishing stocks that quickly drew other companies, including S & S, into the stock market.” The Random House stock rose almost three dollars a share in a twenty-four-hour period, and it soon sold for forty-five dollars. Publishing became the “darling of Wall Street,” and books would never be the same. The business was sharp, it was competitive, and it carried liabilities. The S & S lawyers asked Joe to detail how much of his book was based on fact.
Joe responded, accurately, that the people, places, and events in his novel were “extensions of the possible into the fantastic.” For example, it is “fantastic” that an American would arrange, for business purposes, an attack on his own air base, as Milo Minderbinder does. But Joe was clearly recalling the surprise German air raid on Corsica just before he arrived at the base there. The raid had included “friendly” planes painted with British markings. The fantastic was one step away from the possible.
With regard to specific characters in the book, he said:
My group commanding officer in Corsica was a colonel named Chapman who was similar in build to [the fictional] Colonel Cathcart and also smoked with a cigarette holder. Along with other group commanders in the Mediterranean, I’m sure, he kept inching up the number of missions the men in his unit had to fly, as the missions tended to grow less dangerous. It is in the last circumstance that the major dramatic conflict of the novel arises, although beyond these similarities I’ve listed, all resemblance ends.
Every military unit of any size, I would guess, had a chaplain.… If memory serves me correctly, [our chaplain] was of slight physique and light complexion. Other than that, I know not another thing about him; we did have a captain named Myers who was called by some men by the nickname Chief”; [o]ur flight surgeon was a man from Brooklyn named Marino, and he was as helpful and sympathetic as could be. Like [the fictional] Daneeka, he was a slight, dark man. Apart from the fact that people did go to him to complain about the increases in the number of missions—as the[y] did to all the flight surgeons in the group—he bears no additional resemblance to Doc Daneeka.
[With Milo Minderbinder] we may be a little close even for my comfort, both because of a slight similarity in names and because of the activities and opportunities common to all mess officers. The name of my mess officer was, believe it or not, Mauno Lindholm. Like other mess officers on Corsica, he had a certain amount of money at his disposal to purchase fresh provisions from local sources. He flew to other places regularly for fresh eggs, meat, and vegetables. Whether he used his position a
nd resources to make money in the black market is his own secret; there was no reason to believe he did not, and much reason to believe he did.
[T]here was in my squadron a bombardier named Yohannon who was called by the nickname “Yo-Yo.” In no other respects was he like Yossarian, whose actions are based more on my own attitudes and experiences than anybody else’s.
Joe’s experiences, barely fictionalized in the novel, included the encounter with Luciana in Rome and virtually every mission listed.
He concluded:
I should point out that the action of the book took place seventeen years ago, that I have no personal grievances against anyone involved in my military experiences, and that there is genuinely no attempt to embarrass or disparage any of the people I met in the army. I either liked them enormously or was indifferent to them. Keep in mind that … I made absolutely no impression on most of the people in my squadron, and none on any of the people at Group, and that, with a few exceptions, nobody was aware even at that time that a Joe Heller was serving among them, or would know it now.
He said he would prefer to “leave the book as it is.” If changes were necessary to avoid possible legal actions, switching the location from Corsica to the “island of Pianosa” and “possibly … calling the B-25 planes B-22’s, ought to be sufficient.” The lawyers seemed satisfied (the B-25s would remain).
Candida Donadio took credit for retitling the book. “22 was chosen as a substitute because October 22 was [my] birthday,” she said.
“Absolutely untrue,” Gottlieb said later. “I remember it totally, because it was in the middle of the night. I remember Joe came up with some number and I said, ‘No, it’s not funny,’ which is ridiculous, because no number is intrinsically funny.… And then I was lying in bed worrying about it one night, and I suddenly had this revelation. And I called him the next morning and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect number. Twenty-two, it’s funnier than eighteen.’ I remember those words being spoken.… He said, ‘Yes, it’s great, it’s great.’ And we called Candida and told her.”
Just One Catch Page 26
