Slocum is a World War II vet (formerly stationed in San Angelo, Texas), now working in the corporate world. He is doing well at his job despite the fact that there are many people in his office of whom he is afraid. He has an unhappy wife and unhappy children. He is unhappily aware that it is “almost impossible anymore to rebel and make any kind of impression. They’d simply fire and forget you as soon as you started. They would file you away.” Individuals have sacrificed freedom for high salaries and lengthy vacations: “People in the company like to live well,” he says. “We are those punched cards they pay us with.”
Slocum is “very good with the techniques of deception,” personally and professionally. His job depends on them. “[M]any people in the company … fall victim to their own propaganda,” he says. “Every time we launch a new advertising campaign … people inside the company are the first ones to be taken in by it.” He attempts to quell anxiety by starting affairs with girls he meets in the office. He is “experienced,” he says, and “can control and direct things” sexually more than he could as a boy, but the thrills are perfunctory. Wistfully, he says his wife “used to be very pretty when she was young.”
Such harsh honesty about middle age and the fate of many in the “greatest generation” (“I am one of those people … who are without ambition and have no hope”) was surprising in 1966, coming from a man with a growing reputation, among idealistic young people, as a cultural spokesperson. The excerpt could be read as a cautionary tale. It could be read as a portrait of certain American realities. But it could not be read as satire in the antic mode of Catch-22.
Joe’s words nestled among articles on “how our red-blooded campus heroes are dodging the draft,” how Richard Farina was a “mystical child of darkness,” how Marvel Comics had emerged as “twentieth century mythology.” Bob Hope was described as an entertainer who would “play anywhere—even Vietnam, where he came in two laughs under par last Christmas.” A cartoon showed a gruff present-day soldier speaking to an army chaplain who might have walked off the beaches at Normandy: “I don’t give a damn what they said during World War II, Padre, this is my foxhole and I can be an atheist if I want to!” A reporter insisted Robert Kennedy was forming a “Shadow Cabinet” in a possible bid for the presidency. A fashion spread said white crew-necked sweaters were “in” on campus that fall; the photographs featured women squeezed helplessly between two well-groomed young men (not draft dodgers, but also not boys who had to worry about going to war).
Joe’s excerpt served as bitter commentary on the rest of the magazine:
I’ve got anxiety: I repress hysteria. I’ve got wars on my mind and summer riots, peace movements and L.S.D. I’ve got old age to face. My boy, though still an innocent and unsuspecting child, is going to have to spend from two to six years of his life in the Army or Navy, and probably at war. I’ve got the decline of American culture and the guilt and ineptitude of the whole Government of the United States to carry around on my poor shoulders. And I find I’m being groomed for a better job.
And I find that I want it.
* * *
IN WORLD OF OUR FATHERS, Irving Howe wrote that the “first Yiddish stage production in New York was held on August 12, 1882, at Turn Hall on East Fourth Street between Second and Third avenues.” Yiddish theater “betrayed a mixture of shrewdness and innocence … vivid trash and raw talent,” and contained “hardly a glimmer of serious realism.” It appealed to the audience’s appetite for “spectacle, declamation, and high gesture”; it was born of Eastern European traditions in which “theatricality had long been suspect as a threat to social discipline”; it was a subversive art that “[crept] into culture” in “oblique ways.”
On October 16, 1968, in Broadway’s Ambassador Theater, Joseph Heller’s play, We Bombed in New Haven, opened, meeting all of Howe’s criteria for Yiddish theater—yet it was not talked about in terms of the deepest traditions from which it sprang. Instead, it was seen by audiences and critics as either an avant-garde production, in the vein of Beckett, Pirandello, and the Theatre of the Absurd, or as antiwar agitprop. Reviewers fought about it.
The play had premiered the previous year in New Haven. At a dinner party during a visit to Yale in December 1966, Joe mentioned to Robert Brustein, dean of the Yale Drama School, that he had been working on a stage adaptation of Catch-22, trying to distill from the book scenes about repression and death (the novel’s central themes, as he saw them). One version of the play featured misreadings from Shakespeare interspersed among quotes from the book. Brustein expressed interest. A month later, Joe had written a sketchy draft of a farce called “Bomber in New Haven”—a completed first act and an outline for the rest of the play. He said it was a “manuscript to be read like a novel.” Brustein encouraged Joe to flesh it out. Four months later, Joe sent him a full draft. Brustein was so excited by it—particularly by the second act, which turned the first act’s comedy on its head, the way Snowden’s death silenced Catch-22’s laughter—he called Philip Roth and read it to him over the phone. Encouraged by Roth’s response, Brustein invited Joe to be Playwright-in-Residence at Yale in the fall of 1967, where he would teach classes and work with the Yale Drama School to produce his play. (With Roth’s help, Joe also secured some teaching work during this period at the University of Pennsylvania.)
Some of the Yale students questioned Brustein’s decision. In his talk at Yale’s Calhoun College, the previous December, Joe, wearing a green blazer, a striped shirt, and a tie, said little about the craft of writing, presenting himself instead as a “born promotion man.”
“He’s incredible,” one student said after the talk. “He comes on like a real Madison Avenue fat cat.… If I were the author of Catch-22, I’d bill myself as a born American author.”
“Either that guy is wearing a mask or he didn’t write that book,” said another young undergrad. (When apprised of this comment, George Mandel said, “Of course he’s masked. He’d be an open wound otherwise.”)
Brustein had made the Yale Drama School a center for a theater of protest against the Vietnam War, staging, among others, Megan Terry’s Viet Rock, Barbara Garson’s Macbird, and the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now. Joe’s play, with its antiwar sentiments, fit the program beautifully. Besides, Brustein said, “Heller’s script offers a perfect skeleton for using the improvisational and commedia dell’ arte techniques we are interested in.”
Each week, Joe rode the train from Manhattan to New Haven. He took seriously the classes he taught, and had a good time with the students. One day, walking down a gloomy hallway in the Drama School Annex, encountering a group of kids waiting to file into his classroom, he said, “Today’s Rosh Hashanah, a religious holiday, right? No classes on Rosh Hashanah. So what’re you doing here?” The students stared at him. He laughed and said, “All right, you convinced me. We’ll have our class.” He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and plunged into Aristotle’s Poetics.
Unlike the kids he’d taught years ago at Penn State, these students wanted to be where they were and seemed generally well prepared. Joe liked hanging out with them, chatting. One day, he listened carefully to a student describe a talk given at the Law School by Jack Valenti. Valenti claimed to have killed ten thousand people in Italy during World War II by dropping bombs on them. He said, as a patriot, he was proud of his accomplishments. “If he said that, then he’s a schmuck,” Joe said. “First, I would suspect he’s a liar because no one can keep such accurate count, especially from the air, of how many people are killed when a bomb explodes. Second, if he had indeed killed that many people, he’s really something for boasting about it.”
Joe felt most of the students, bright as they were, didn’t know what they wanted in life. They only knew what they didn’t want—to go to war.
In October, in the chilly old WNHC building on Chapel Street, drama students staged a reading of Joe’s play. He was moved to tears by it. After that, rehearsals began in earnest for a full-scale pro
duction of the play, to open on December 4 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Larry Arrick, a veteran of Chicago’s Second City, would direct. The actors included Stacy Keach, Ron Leibman, and Estelle Parsons. The pun in the title suggests the conceit on which the drama unfolds, erasing distinctions between the reality of wartime bombing and showbiz fears of staging a play that might fizzle. Joe knew he was running a risk, daring critics to call the play a bomb—but that was part of the unsettling strategy.
The play concerns actors who believe they are impersonating members of a bomb squadron during an unspecified war. Intermittently, they dutifully act their parts, then stop to discuss the script, complain about the size of their roles, express puzzlement over their characters, and remember productions they—the actual actors—have been in. The curtain does not rise properly, a large wall clock keeps real time, and the actors treat the stage props as trinkets, never allowing illusions of realism to grip the audience. In the first act, amid much horseplay, the script calls for a character to die offstage during a bombing mission. Afterward, one of the performers, playing the role of Sergeant Henderson, wonders where the actor went. He seems to have vanished, though his bloody clothes remain. In act 2, a pair of wealthy sportsmen, one wielding a golf club and the other a hunting rifle, murder Henderson onstage. Captain Starkey, a father figure to Henderson, watches the young man die and does nothing—just like the audience.
Ruth, a Red Cross girl, accuses the audience of guilty passivity. We accept war as entertainment, lies as truth, she says. Here lay the difference between We Bombed in New Haven and the avant-garde plays against which it was measured. In Beckett’s Endgame, Clov asks, “What is there to keep me here?” Hamm replies, “The dialogue.” The effect is a blurring of the psychological and metaphysical—a burst of alienation. Joe had no interest in this. He had been reading Beckett (“I’d rather read him than see him staged”), but Joe used similar techniques for a different aim: social cohesion, rather than estrangement.
With We Bombed in New Haven, Joe intended to startle audience members into accepting personal responsibility for a war organized like a game, reviewed like a show, and managed largely offstage to hide mass killings. When Starkey asks an army major, “[L]et me in on the biggest military secret of all. Who’s really in charge and who’s really responsible,” the answer is not some silent god in a meaningless universe; the answer is us.
Naturally, Joe opened himself to charges of didacticism, propaganda, and ham-handedness. He said he was extending theatrical principles. In Greek theater, endings were always inevitable: Audiences knew the myths behind the plays, he said. He was making a larger connection, not only between drama and ancient myths but between popular entertainments and the myths of society—patriotism, heroism, “surgical strikes.” These myths allowed the killing of innocents, and let fellows like Jack Valenti sleep at night.
Moreover, in the tradition of Yiddish theater—forms of which Joe had encountered all his life, from neighborhood jokes to Marx Brothers movies, from Catskills skits to Lenny Bruce routines—he was engaging, obliquely and gleefully, in social disruption, forcing the audience to laugh at itself, to question its language and values. Sigmund Mogulesco, America’s first great Yiddish comic, never made a distinction between “art and trash,” according to Irving Howe. He’d do anything to get a reaction. Similarly, Mel Brooks said, “[I]f someone wants to call my movies art or crap, I don’t mind.”
When an interviewer asked Joe what he hoped to accomplish with We Bombed in New Haven, he said, “What else, I wanted to make a million dollars.” “No, really,” the interviewer said. “All right,” Joe replied. “Right now I want to make every woman cry and every man feel guilty when he has to go home and face his sons.… You ask what did I mean to accomplish? I meant to write a very good play.”
The rehearsals at Yale—the actors improvising, questioning, improving one day, backsliding the next, Joe rethinking, rewriting, learning the nuances of stagecraft—frazzled the playwright. Lines he’d thought were funny dragged when he heard them aloud. Some of the actors ignored his stage directions. Others seemed not to get his jokes. Shredded orange toothpicks lay at his feet. In the evenings, he’d go to his room at the Midtown Motor Inn and, tossing and turning, relive the rehearsals in his head. One night, he thought he heard maniacs in the room next door banging the walls and playing their radios loudly. At 5:00 A.M., he discovered his own bedside radio, built into the night table, had been on.
Arrick told students who came to watch rehearsals to slip quietly in and out of the building without disturbing the actors. Joe said the students could make as much noise as they wanted. “For god’s sake, speak up if you have any criticism,” he said. To streamline the first act, he cut Falstaff’s speech on honor, as well as other Shakespearian echoes left over from the now defunct Catch-22 adaptation. He increased Starkey’s ineffectuality, and linked it more clearly to the audience’s passivity. He added lines to the chorus of “idiots” who yammer behind the action (“They’re not really idiots. They’re no different from you or me, which is why they’re idiots,” he explained).
He asked that a different actor play the army major; the first actor spoke with a southern accent reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson’s—a too-specific link to Vietnam. Joe didn’t want that. On the other hand, he left in a reference to bombing Minnesota, because Hubert Humphrey had been born there, and Humphrey “told lies … believ[ing] they were true.”
“I’m learning, I’m learning that I wrote a script, not a production,” Joe said. “In novels, the writer defines and limits his characters, but not in plays. If an actor has any talent and is working with a good director, he will fill out bare words in the script.” Still, the rehearsals racked his nerves. “It’s not that I’m trying to dominate the director; it’s just that I want the director to know what’s in my mind and have the same thing in his mind so that he’ll do what I want him to do without my trying to dominate him,” he said.
Joe’s agony surprised the students; they had expected an easygoing, round-the-clock funnyman. Worried about him—and more experienced with the tedium of rehearsals—the actors suggested he stay away from the final run-throughs. He agreed. “Listen, who’s nervous?” he joked. “I’ve learned to suffer excruciating torture without making a sound while [you] blow my play.”
“The real truth is that things have been going beautifully,” he told New York Times reporter Elenore Lester. “Larry Arrick … and the actors have been a revelation to me—the way they’ve gotten hold of this thing. After the first week they understood the play better than I did. They’ve seen things in it, psychological meanings I never thought of.… The only thing is I’m not happy. It’s my nature to be suspicious. I just don’t trust people. I know it’s not right, but that’s the way I am.… I’m concerned about my literary personality. I don’t want Joseph Heller distorted.”
Uneasiness with the collaborative process signaled once and for all that Joe was a novelist, not a playwright. But he couldn’t have been in better hands. Larry Arrick understood he was “close … to the Jewish sensibility of novelists like Mailer, Roth, Bellow, and Malamud who [had] a kind of self-loathing that [was] in itself a form of purification.” Arrick said the Yale group was “the best company I’ve ever worked with anywhere. And the play is marvelous—its subject is war, but its theme is not. War is a metaphor here for [the] game … [w]e are all playing … in this country today, you know. We go to the theater or we look at Picasso’s Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art and we say, ‘Yes, war is terrible’ and then we go and have some coffee. We aren’t changed at all.”
As opening night approached, the Drama School’s publicist asked Joe if he could promote the play as a comedy in ads. Joe conceded that this might sell more tickets, but he didn’t want the play hailed as a comedy. There were plenty of jokes. But at the beginning of the second act, a character announced, accurately, “There’s nothing really funny about this, you know.”
Joe got word that Walter K
err, Barbara Harris, Mike Nichols, and Paul Newman planned to attend the premiere. “I thought we were going to have a good time putting on a play at Yale, but this way … you have all the stresses of a Broadway opening without its actually being Broadway,” he groaned.
He lumbered to his classes in the shadow of Harkness Tower, feeling heavy and tired, carrying an overstuffed briefcase. To cheer himself up, he bought a sheepskin jacket. “It’s not really very expensive and I hear they last forever,” he told anyone who stopped to admire it.
On campus, rumors spread that the Yale Draft Refusal Committee, a student group, had bought a block of seats and planned to disrupt the play. “Heller’s ending”—in which Starkey allows his son to go to war—“signified to them an acceptance of induction,” Brustein said: a serious misreading of the drama. At the eleventh hour, Brustein dissuaded the protesters.
At the end of the first performance, the audience filed out of the theater, somber and quiet. “There’s no remission at the end of my play,” Joe said. “I felt the audience didn’t deserve any consolation. The poor are suffering, the colored are suffering, the people with sons of eighteen and nineteen are suffering. I’m convinced that, if we remain accomplices of evil, we are not only guilty but deserve to be victims as well.”
One student felt the performance had taught him the power of metaphor. “Most guys think they’ll go into [the service], play the role of the soldier for two years, and then come back and pick up where they left off,” he said. “They don’t think: go in, play soldier, and be killed.”
Generally, reviews were favorable. Roderick Nordell, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, said the play “cuts to the quick.” He felt that most of the time “Mr. Heller’s … comedy serves the ultimate purpose of his tragedy.” And in Newsweek, Jack Kroll said that “the play is very likely the most powerful play about contemporary irrationality an American has written, with a natural cathartic jolt that comes from the genuineness of Heller as a moral comedian.… This is one of those rare productions that advance the whole notion of the theater.”
Just One Catch Page 35
