Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Mr. Shipman went on to say he was a member of the faculty at the Pennsylvania State College at the time Joseph Heller taught there. As “in the case of the chaplain in Catch-22, I was married and the father of three small children,” he said; “in the United States Army [I held] the rank of captain, the same rank indicated as being held by the chaplain in Catch-22.”

  Given these similarities, the appearance of his name in the book embarrassed him, he said: “I find it difficult to believe that the use of the name … can be attributed to mere coincidence.” He said he had no wish to humiliate Mr. Heller. He hoped the matter could be handled quietly and privately, but he wanted the name removed from all subsequent editions and reprints of Catch-22.

  On May 18, Joe wrote a long and cordial letter to Mr. Shipman, assuring him the “matter was entirely coincidental.” “I can no more explain why I used the name Robert Oliver Shipman than I can explain [my other choices] … except that in every case the basic intention was to avoid using the name of any person I had ever met or heard of. As a matter of fact, the name was originally R. C. Shipman (a fact you can verify in New World Writing 7, 1955, where the beginning of the book first appeared) and the ‘c’ became an ‘o’ as a result of an initial typing error that was allowed to stand, since the difference was of no consequence.” Nevertheless, Joe said, he understood Mr. Shipman was troubled. “[W]ith a great deal of sadness” he would “accede to [his] request” if Mr. Shipman continued to insist. The problem was, “it will probably be impossible for me to find a seven-letter substitute that will have the same symbolic connotations that the name has as a word. For another, there is the feeling that Chaplain Shipman already has a literary identity for the many people who have already read the book and the many critics who have written about it. And for another, I like to think that the book will be read, discussed, and written about for several years to come, and I feel sorry for those graduate students who will read the book in one version and find themselves discussing it with professors who have read it in another.”

  Shipman remained politely unmoved.

  For the sixth S & S printing, and all following editions of the novel, the name would be changed (though Shipman lives on in certain British paperback reprints). For the right new name, Joe returned to Penn State in his mind. He recalled the plucky young boxer, the perpetual underdog, Tapman (and, for good measure, added an extra p to the name).

  On August 6, 1962, Paula Diamond, a literary agent, sent Joe a note: “Eek, I’ve just picked up the Dell [paperback] reprint. Who is that Tappman person and what have you done with R. O. Shipman? Are there no eternal verities?” Joe responded that, after wrestling with the problem “as Jacob wrestled with the angel,” he had “capitulated” to Mr. Shipman like a “coward.”

  Mr. Shipman, who went on to serve as the assistant dean in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, had a final exchange with Joe in April 1963. He wanted to say “how well I think you substituted for the name of the chaplain … particularly the effectiveness with which you retained the seven-letter symbolism of the surname.” He had read with enjoyment in the New York Times Book Review that more than 800,000 copies of the paperback edition had sold since its release in September 1962. “Warm congratulations to you and this splendid success,” Mr. Shipman said. “I am delighted to see a writer of your obvious competence and caliber being rightly recognized and rewarded.”

  Joe replied he was glad that “no permanent resentment exist[ed]” and thanked Mr. Shipman for his “kind feelings.” He added, “To date, I have received but two queries regarding the change of name, which proves my fears that legions of Ph.D [sic] candidates would be thrown into confusion, were groundless.”

  * * *

  “THE SUCCESS of [Catch-22 in paperback] in the first few months was astonishing,” said Don Fine, Dell’s editor in chief. He had purchased rights to the novel from S & S and Pocket Books for $32,000. “This was a book lovingly and carefully prepared by Bob Gottlieb. But the book did not take off in hardcover.… I remember when I sent the contract information to Bill Callahan [Dell’s vice president in charge of sales], he wrote to me saying, ‘What the hell is a Catch-22?’ I wrote back and said, ‘It’s a World War II novel.’ We ‘packaged’ it so it could pass as a big important World War II [book].… We had an aviator’s head—not very good art—for the cover instead of [Paul Bacon’s] dangling man, which was the trademark of the hardcover. It would have destroyed the paperback with that on the cover. And this was the magic of paperback publishing in those days. We didn’t have any television spots. We probably didn’t have much point-of-sale stuff. But people read it. Young people read it and war veterans read it and goddammit, it worked! The paperback public took over this book and made it a very big success.… This was the way books got talked about and became household words.”

  “[A] nation-wide sensation at $5.95[,] now complete and unabridged at 75¢,” proclaimed the paperback cover. The Catch craze began.

  “Not since the Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies has a novel been taken up by such a fervid and heterogeneous claque of admirers,” Newsweek announced in October 1962. “The book obviously inspires an evangelical fervor in those who admire it.… It has already swept the cocktail-party circuit where Catch-22 is the hottest topic going and Joe Heller himself is the hottest catch.”

  Joe appeared on NBC’s Today show with interim host John Chancellor, projecting congeniality, confidence, and an adman’s smoothness. He talked about the universality of his characters and said, “Yossarian is alive somewhere and still on the run.” After the show, “in a bar close by the studio in which I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour than ever in my life,” Joe said, “[Chancellor] handed me a packet of stickers he’d had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN LIVES. And he confided he’d been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building.”

  Eventually, similar stickers appeared on college campuses along with copies of the paperback. Professors assigned the book, using it to discuss not only literary modernism and World War II but also current American policy in Southeast Asia, which dominated the news more and more. “[T]he war that I [was] really dealing with was not World War II but turned out to be the Vietnam war,” Joe told an interviewer.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever recover [from reading this novel],” one university teacher wrote to S & S. “But before I die of Catch-22, I will do everything to keep it alive.… I’ll write Catch-22 on every surface I can find.” Soon, Yossarian graffiti stamped campuses and cities, side by side with the stickers. The most popular slogan was “Better Yossarian than Rotarian.” Yo-Yo went as many places as Kilroy ever had.

  Publishers Weekly reported, “[At] the University of Chicago students [are] buying up second-hand Army field jackets and sewing on Yossarian name tags.” In November 1962, Esquire’s editor, Arnold Gingrich, said, “The young people … tell me that the college students are still reading ‘Catcher in the Rye’ … [but] coming up fast is ‘Catch-22.’ … Call it, if you like, the resistance movement—their revolt against authority, against organizational conformity, against the materialistic, affluent society.”

  In his documentary film, Stone Reader, Mark Moskowitz captures the feel of the moment for an adolescent reader in the 1960s, as well as the joy of discovering Catch-22:

  At some point, I outgrew the school library and found myself walking forty-five minutes to a paperback store—I think it was called Paperbacks Etcetera—in the next town. It was small, two aisles, but I could hang out there and just look at the covers, each cover with the promise of a wild story within. Tucked into a small, one-shelf section just a foot from the floor were books with World War II settings.… I looked for books in which heroes did things against all the odds.… I picked out James Jones.… A month later, having finished [his book], and therefore now feeling like an adult, I went back to get the book they compared it to on the back cover, The Naked
and the Dead. The guy behind the counter, a tall, skinny older guy, was reluctant to sell it to me, so I took it out of the library instead: an old, falling-apart hardback, black cover, no dust jacket. They would say “Fug” in the book, and that seemed interesting. I couldn’t figure out what that was—Fug. F-U-G. It couldn’t mean “fuck.” They wouldn’t let someone put that much “fuck” in a book, would they? Fug. It made it fantasy, almost. Well, that was good, too, so I went back to the little store and perused what was left of the war section. I pulled out the last one: a bright blue one. Catch-22. Seventy-five cents. That was the book. It just appealed to my subversive self.… I had climbed onto the adult plateau of Jones and Mailer and looked around and couldn’t find anything else, and then I came across Catch-22, way out there somewhere.… Everything else smacked of suburban grown-ups.… Yeah, right [I thought].… And so I would go to the library and continue to take out books and search for articles on Heller. Anything. I couldn’t believe people weren’t just standing there and shaking Catch-22 and talking about it. Why read anything else? Where was this guy?… They say one book can turn a kid on to be a reader for life. I was already a reader, but Catch-22 excited me. It was the first book I read where the author’s voice meant as much to me as the story or the characters. [Heller was] the first writer I wanted to know more about, because the voice behind the pages was a friend I thought I could never find in life.

  Joe admitted, “When [the] book first came out in paper, I’d get into the subway or train and look at the books people were reading. If the paperback had blue edges, it was Dell. My book is in Dell, so then I’d have to try to see the cover. If the guy was reading my book, it was a good feeling.”

  With stunning swiftness, the term catch-22 slipped into daily conversations nationwide—in corporate headquarters and on military bases, college campuses—to describe any bureaucratic paradox. Eventually, The American Heritage Dictionary sanctioned it, defining a catch-22 as a “difficult situation or problem whose seemingly alternative solutions are logically invalid.”

  On October 15, 1962, Simon & Schuster, Dell, and Columbia Pictures bought a full-page ad in the New York Times. The ad announced, “Happy birthday CATCH-22.” By April 1963, the paperback had sold 1,100,000 copies of the 1,250,000 in print. Hardback sales still averaged one hundred to two hundred copies a month. By the end of the decade, Dell had taken the book through thirty printings. In sales as well as critical acclaim, Catch-22 had broken out of its literary trappings and East Coast box to become a perennial American classic.

  “Without being aware of it, I was part of a near movement in fiction,” Joe reflected in 1977. “While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Pynchon was writing V, and Vonnegut was writing Cat’s Cradle. I don’t think any one of us even knew the others. Certainly I didn’t know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us.”

  Apropos of Joe’s remarks, it is worth noting that, according to critic Anatole Broyard, the college professors he encountered in the 1950s, when these novels were being written, “did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country.” The professors remained shocked and appalled by World War II, the firebombings, Hiroshima, and the concentration camps; they were fascinated by psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious mind; and they worried about the Cold War. Thanks to the ongoing effects of the G.I. Bill, their classes were filled to capacity with the largest cross section of the American public ever to attend institutions of higher learning. “All the courses I took were about what’s wrong,” Broyard wrote in his memoir, Kafka Was the Rage. “[W]hat’s wrong with the government, with the family, with interpersonal relations and intrapersonal relations—what’s wrong with our dreams, our loves, our jobs, our perceptions and conceptions, our esthetics, the human condition itself. They were furious, the professors, at the ugly turn the world had taken.”

  It is also worth noting, as Jonathan R. Eller reminds us, that all the writers Joe cited “[came] to us almost entirely in paperback.”

  * * *

  “FOR SIXTEEN YEARS I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew WWII must produce,” Stephen E. Ambrose, writer and historian, wrote to Joe in January 1962. “I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong.… Thank you.”

  In a letter written the following year, John Steinbeck said to Joe, “I would very much like to know which way you are going now. Your gargantuan approach [to literature] (and I use the term literally) can be of great value now, for peace has become almost as ridiculous as war.”

  PART FOUR What Happened

  12. The Realist

  “AMERICA IN THE SIXTIES, ostensibly an effort by the editors of Fortune [magazine] to forecast the major social and economic trends of the 60’s, reveals more about the Luce mind than about the [coming decade].” Thus began a review in the February 1961 issue of Commentary. “Written in the characteristic self-congratulatory and breathless style of Fortune … [the book] exhibits that willed commitment to a roseate view of the future which we have come to expect from Luce publications (though not, interestingly enough, from the ex-Luce men),” the reviewer said. The ex–Luce men now included Joseph Heller. “Fortune writes that soon the poor will no longer be with us.… This can be called the ‘midtown’ view of economic realities. Were Fortune’s writers to take an occasional trip some sixty blocks further downtown, they would learn that [most] people … hardly [try their luck] in the stock market.… But such realism would tend to spoil the picture so lovingly composed by Fortune.”

  The “Luce men” did misperceive the sixties—badly. In retrospect, it seems they missed the mark not because they refused to speak of “drags on productivity” (on the grounds that this would be “a mark of disaffection, perhaps even of disloyalty”). No. Fortune correctly predicted the “miracles of rising income, rising productivity, [and] rising consumption” driving the decade. The federal government under Lyndon Johnson launched a war on poverty. The major indicators suggested everyone should have “afford[ed] a second divorce along with a second car and a second television set. Cheer up, boys!” Something happened. What was it?

  If we tunnel through the years and glance back at the 1960s, from the point of view of a Commentary editor so rattled by the times that he reinvented himself, we confront the question once more: What happened? Writing in 2000, Norman Podhoretz, who once praised Catch-22’s author for his boldness as an artist, now condemned the novel as having done “moral, spiritual, and intellectual harm” to several generations of Americans.

  Between Fortune’s “roseate” view, looking ahead in 1961, and Podhoretz’s embittered summary in 2000 lay four decades of a culture at war with itself, during which Catch-22 remained steadily in print, selling in vast numbers. What happened to make the novel a central document during this period, a touchstone—positive and negative—in our self-assessments? As early as 1962, before Catch-22 sold so astonishingly, Newsweek was declaring a “Heller Cult,” saying Joe was the man to write the novel of the American 1960s (without realizing that perhaps he already had). As for the new novel Joe would tackle, he had glimpsed it in his mind at the decade’s outset, telling the Newsweek reporter he had begun to make notes on it in his rental house on Fire Island. It would be “about a married man who is working for a large company and who wants to work himself up to the point where he makes a speech at the company’s annual convention in Bermuda.”

  He paused, as if to acknowledge how unpromising this material sounded.

  “It has implications,” he said.

  That a thirty-nine-year-old World War II vet could be the literary spokesperson for a culture besotted with the Kennedys seems odd. Again in retrospect, we can see how many of the cultural skirmishes from the 1960s to the present orbited the World War II generation. Former television newscast
er Tom Brokaw called this generation the “greatest” in a bestselling book in 1998. Born in the “fulcrum [years] of America in the twentieth century” and headed for a “rendezvous with destiny” (to quote FDR), this group represented our national peak, from which all subsequent generations—their artists, writers, and politicians—had fallen, Brokaw said. Catch-22, a book embraced both as a World War II novel and a novel about Vietnam, now seems an inevitable flashpoint.

  In 1961, the Luce men were unprepared to envision Barnard College switching from the home of panty raids to the site of a major controversy over cohabitation before marriage. In 1968, Linda LeClair, a twenty-year-old sophomore at Barnard, would be punished for breaking school regulations by living off campus with her boyfriend, a junior at Columbia. The story was covered for weeks in national newspapers and sparked a dialogue about sexual mores. What had happened to our values? Our children? What would happen to marriage?

  Eventually, LeClair dropped out of college and went to live in a commune with her boyfriend, who resisted induction into the army.

  In 1961, the Luce men were unprepared to envision Catskills stages trading Borscht Belt shtick for the world’s largest rock concert, a mud bath of collective property, free love, and drugs, serenaded by Jimi Hendrix’s national anthem, whose “bombs bursting in air” became electric guitar riffs sounding like napalm falling from the sky. Many children of the Woodstock Nation wore army fatigues with Yossarian name tags on the breast pockets. What had happened to America’s rendezvous with destiny? Was the mud at Woodstock a benign metaphor for Vietnam? Was destiny supposed to look like a quagmire?

  What couldn’t be seen in 1961 was the truth of Plato’s dictum that “Forms and rhythms in [art] are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.” For years, the men on Madison Avenue had flirted with this concept in their attempts to manipulate the American consumer; soon, a man calling himself Dylan, men named John, Paul, George, and Ringo would seize the idea and plumb it to its core. Joe Heller had grabbed it when he’d changed the emphasis in his fiction from the story to the way the story is told.