Ostensibly, Something Happened is about a businessman, but at the bottom of the pool of mind-material that surfaced and coalesced into the story lay the deaths of Joe’s father and mother. Though it is impossible to date the composition of many of the rough-draft fragments, the repetitions of subjects and phrases, their revisions and eventual inclusion in larger segments support the notion that among the earliest scenes Joe established were those involving parental loss. The mother’s death leads to devastation—unambiguously. “If I live to be a hundred and fifty, I will never hear any more [words] from [my mother]. If the world lasts three billion more, there will be no others,” Slocum laments (though at this stage, there is only Joe’s handwritten sentence on a note card; no character or narrative development is indicated).
Elsewhere, Slocum torments himself with the “last pleasant memory” he has of his mother, a dinner one day when, responding to a cute remark by his baby girl, the old woman “threw back her head and laughed.” Joe circled this phrase.
On another card, he wrote clearly, carefully, “I think it was impossible for me to remain alone at night in my own room after my tonsillectomy. I think I remember being allowed to sleep in bed with my mother and father once, and I can’t imagine why they would have let me unless I was ill and scared.”
The tonsillectomy fills several cards. On one: “I woke up in the hospital without tonsils one thousand times and it was always dark, and I thought there would never be light again.” In the finished novel, when Slocum’s boy’s tonsils are removed, Slocum recalls being left alone in the hospital as a child. He reexperiences old fears through his son’s panic. “I nearly died the day my boy had his tonsils out, he looked so still lying there when they brought him back, smelling of ether,” Joe wrote. “[W]hen he cried out suddenly, ‘It hurts!’ I could not stand the pain and shouted … ‘Stop it! Stop it! You’re scaring him!’”
From the cards, and the memories Joe would develop in his memoir, one thing is clear: Though his father died when Joe was a child, he felt he was the one who would pass away in the hospital. (The scene in Catch-22 when a mother and father mistake Yossarian for their dying son also asks the question: Who is really dying—or should be?)
In Something Happened, Slocum’s desire to protect his boy (childhood itself) becomes, by the end, a murderous impulse. Slocum smothers the child with a hug. Beyond Oedipal overtones, it seems obvious that for Joe, as he worked through these real and imagined experiences using the note cards, his father’s death remained perplexing for a number of reasons, not the least of which was his obliviousness to it until after the fact. His ignorance was soon compounded by the confusion of learning other secrets about his family.
Something happened before Joe was born. Something else happened when he was little. In both cases, he missed the crucial facts: he thought he was living a life he was not really living. Perhaps, then, a version of him really had died (or hadn’t been born). Maybe he had no choice but to devote himself to pinpointing what had happened. How had he missed it—and then, unbelievably, missed it again? The circlings and recirclings of this material on hundreds of note cards suggest the urgency of Joe’s doubts and fears as he tried to fictionalize them and clarify the story of Something Happened.
Literary examples helped him find language and keep the material from becoming self-indulgent (“I don’t think of myself as a naturally gifted writer when it comes to using language. I distrust myself,” he once said). In one early draft, after Slocum has killed his boy and repressed his responsibility in the matter, Slocum says, “I miss my dead boy.” Later, Joe crossed out the word dead. “I play golf with my betters … and now I have no freedom left. I am a cow.”
This last sentence suggests Slocum’s madness. But it is also an echo of two well-known literary passages, “My mother is a fish,” from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (about, among other things, the death of a parent) and “The moocow came down the road” from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (concerning, in part, the inability of some people to outgrow their childhoods).
Borrowings from great literature could be an evasion as well as an aid. Joe tried many other endings, moving increasingly toward straightforwardness—about subjects that could not be other than ambiguous. Over and over, he worked on the following short passage: “I want my little boy back. I don’t want to lose him.” Later, he changed this to “I don’t want to lose him. I do.” He struck through “I do.” He added it once more. Then he preceded the passage with “Oh, my father … I want him back.”
“I put everything I knew about the external world into Catch-22 and everything I knew about the interior world into Something Happened,” Joe said.
One evening, he admitted to his family that when they read the book, they might think it was about them. He told them the story. “What should I call the guy in … [the] book?” he asked. “Joe,” said his son.
Around this time, the excerpt appeared in Esquire. “I was carrying the manuscript around with me, about forty pages, and I left it in a Horn and Hardart’s,” he recalled. “In total paranoia I pictured some guy finding the pages, rushing out and publishing it under his own name. So I told my agent to submit a carbon somewhere quick to establish my copyright. Rust Hills … [the] fiction editor [at Esquire] … bought it.”
As the raw material crystallized, Joe distanced himself from his character by giving him thoughts, tics, traits, and stories (all exaggerated) from many other sources, chief among them George Mandel and Mel Brooks, by now a successful filmmaker. Before the movies, Brooks had made a series of comedy records with Carl Reiner. Among the characters he created was a WASP businessman named Warren Bland—a partial prototype for Bob Slocum. Beneath the humor (“[We] have children … [but] we send them to Hartford … to Jewish and Italian families, people who like children”), the character betrays a persistent melancholy. In one routine, Bland says, “We mock the thing we are to be. We make fun of the old, and then we become them.” Slocum sounds just like this.
Before taking the manuscript to be photocopied, Joe changed Slocum’s name from Joe to Bob and then to Bill. He downplayed Slocum’s combat experiences and corporate duties, making him more of an Everyman. To sharpen Slocum’s sense of loss, he expanded the man’s memories of trysts he’d had as a youngster with a girl named Virginia in an insurance company file room (recalling his own experiences as an adolescent). He made sure Slocum would not be regarded as Jewish (“I may look a little bit Jewish to some people, and I think Jewish a great deal of the time, but it’s proof I’m not,” Slocum says).
Joe had to remind Candida Donadio she was reading fiction, not autobiography. More than once, she looked up from the manuscript and said, “Joe [,you] wouldn’t do that!”
He hadn’t spoken to Robert Gottlieb for a while. “Bob and I think of each other as close friends, but … years might go by before we talk to each other or drop each other a note,” Joe once said. “In between my novels … we’ve barely communicated.”
When Gottlieb did get hold of the 940-page manuscript, he saw there was “no book like it.” It wasn’t at all like Catch-22, “except in its power,” he said. “It’s very moving and very upsetting. It’s the way we feel about ourselves.”
Joe claimed not to know what the novel was really about. He said the “areas of combat” in it were “things like the wishes a person has, whether they are fulfilled or not, the close, intimate situations we have with our children when they’re small and as they grow older, the memories we have of our relationship with parents as they grow older.… [T]hese areas are much more difficult to deal with than those in [wartime, when] we know what the dangers are.”
Methodically, Gottlieb set about editing the manuscript. He trimmed it to eight hundred pages, then six hundred. He’d lie on the floor of his office in jeans and sneakers, with Joe’s pages spread before him, munching a sandwich. He’d look for verbs to enrich, relative clauses to switch to participial phrases. He suggested making the first
chapter the second chapter (“In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid”) and opening the novel with “I get the willies when I see closed doors” (originally, Joe had written, “I get the willies whenever I think about my father.”)
At one point, Gottlieb told Joe, “[T]his is going to sound crazy to you but this guy [Slocum] is not a Bill.”
“Oh really, what do you think he is?” Joe replied.
“He’s a Bob.”
“He was a Bob, and I changed his name to Bill because I thought you would be offended if I made him a Bob,” Joe said.
“Oh no, I don’t think he’s anything like me, it’s just that this character is a Bob.”
Okay, said Joe.
Now, Bob Slocum was ready to step out from behind closed doors.
* * *
“[I]T IS MIDSUMMER, 1974, and one begins to hear that Joseph Heller has another big one,” Robert Alan Aurthur wrote in Esquire. “[He] will not be America’s most celebrated one-book author since Michael Arlen.” Or Henry Roth. Or Ralph Ellison. Responding to the buzz from the publishing world, Aurthur contacted Joe, hoping to write a profile. Joe suggested he start by interviewing the playwright Murray Schisgal—a notoriously tough critic—who was reading the book in galleys.
Aurthur met with Schisgal. Was it true he was halfway through the book? Aurthur asked.
Schisgal nodded. “I had dinner with Joe last night and the night before,” he said.
Well, how’s the book?
“I have never … not ever seen a man eat as much as Joe Heller.” So much for the diet. Joe was celebrating.
But what about the book?
“Last night, we were put out of a restaurant when they had to close, and Heller was still on the first course.”
The book?
“The book is brilliant. The man is a great writer. There are parts in here no other writer could approach; he gets right down to the bone … stunning.”
Many early reviewers agreed, and Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, who had followed her old friend to Knopf from Simon & Schuster, wasted no time culling comments for magazine and newspaper ads. They touted the book as an immediate bestseller: “America’s New #1” (the hardback sold for ten dollars). Right away, it went through three printings. In the ads, next to a darkly serious picture of Joe—one side of his face in shadow, furrowed brow, full lips about to break into a smile, the softness of his dimpled chin the only sign of middle-age—Larry Swindell of the Philadelphia Inquirer was quoted: “Catch-22 became the novel of the 60s. Now Heller has provided the novel of and for the 70s … 50 years from now they’ll be reading it and arguing it still.” Walter Clemons, from Newsweek, said, “He has written an epic of the everyday.” Then there was John W. Aldridge: “The most important novel to appear in this country in at least a decade.”
In other ads, a dizzying pedigree appeared: “Tolstoyean,” “Dickensian,” “Joycean,” “Faulknerian,” “[Akin] to Moby Dick.”
“No matter where you go or what you do, the scrawl on the wall will say: Heller was here,” Milton Bass wrote in the Berkshire Eagle.
The major reviews—among them, Vonnegut’s in the New York Times Book Review and Joseph Epstein’s in the Washington Post Book World—did not agree; like Catch-22, Something Happened roiled critics at first and grew in stature over the years as writers considered it in more depth.
Epstein said the novel was static, repetitious, and dull, offering “no attempt to understand what is going on [with the main character], but only to describe what it feels like to live under [his] malaise.” Awareness counts for nothing in a Joseph Heller novel, he complained: There were no realized selves in his fiction. “Nothing happens in Something Happened,” he said. This would become the standard joke about the book, as Joe had anticipated (he had taken the same deliberate risk with the title of his play). Sweepingly, Epstein concluded, “[F]iction written under the assumptions of the post-Modernist sensibility cannot sustain itself over the length of a large novel. A Donald Barthelme can float a story or sketch under these same assumptions for eight or ten pages on sheer brilliance. But at greater length, things tend to flatten out.” In Something Happened, he said, “the cargo ha[s] gone sour.”
Vonnegut, though, felt the novel was “splendidly put together and hypnotic to read. It is as clear and hard-edged as a cut diamond.” Joe was a “maker of myths”:
Something Happened … could become the dominant myth about the middle-class veterans who came home from the war to become heads of nuclear families. The proposed myth has it that those families were pathetically vulnerable and suffocating. It says that the heads of them commonly took jobs which were vaguely dishonorable or at least stultifying, in order to make as much money as they could for their little families, and they used that money in futile attempts to buy safety and happiness. The proposed myth says that they lost their dignity and their will to live in the process.
It says they are hideously tired now.
He praised Joe’s courage in stating “baldly” what other novels “only implied” or “tried with desperate sentimentality not to imply: That many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.” (In literary circles, some wondered whether the Book Review’s editors should have assigned Vonnegut the novel, since he socialized with Joe.)
Despite the less-than-unanimous praise, and the obviously grim and challenging subject matter, Something Happened remained on the American bestseller lists for twenty-nine weeks, from October 1974 to May 1975. During this period, it earned Joe roughly $500,000. Gottlieb had succeeded in bringing to Knopf one of its biggest moneymakers ever.
“[This] is not a book for kids,” Gottlieb said. “It’s a book for everybody over thirty.”
Delivering public readings from the novel, Joe realized he “must be reaching a wider, older audience than [with] Catch-22.” At the University of Michigan, he “got a great response from the students with those passages dealing with Slocum’s children,” he said. “But during the parts about his office, his fearing old age, there was silence. The attention was there, but the magic was gone.”
Still, what placed the book in the forefront of cultural awareness, and ensured its inclusion in any important discussion about the current state of American letters, was the way the country seemed to have caught up to it. In 1966, when the excerpt appeared in Esquire, Slocum’s insistence that rebellion was no longer possible seemed out of place with profiles of draft dodgers and alternative lifestyles. In the September 1974 issue, which announced Joe’s new “big one,” the cover story was “Guess Who’s Going to College?” The article began, “If there were a key word on campus these days, maybe it would be ‘sensible.’ No more grasping toward the infinite—right, kids?… Grades are real, school is earnest, and after that The Job.” The piece discussed the end of the military draft—how the change had sent young people scurrying toward college programs or professional training guaranteed to secure them lucrative futures. Enrollments were slipping in humanities classes. Universities were developing sales-recruiting forces, based on corporate models, to “brand” themselves and lure students into business schools. “Zip code marketing,” targeting potential students from desirable families, had proven especially successful. Now, more college recruiters than military representatives visited high schools, and students had developed a greater sense of personal responsibility: little Slocums on the make.
The tilt away from the excesses of the 1960s toward conservatism in the early to mid-1970s was not as straightforward or simplistic as it is sometimes painted. George McGovern’s crushing electoral defeat, a few years after the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., seemed to signal the end of the liberal political agenda. On the other hand, as Abe Peck points out, from “December, 1972, to April, 1975, alone, DDT was banned, abortions were legalized, the draft ended, U.S. troops finally left Vietnam, the American Psychiatric Association ‘de-diseased’ homosexuality, and draconian sent
ences for smoking plants were reduced. The safe-energy movement began … [and] Richard Nixon resigned.”
By and large, the underground press, advocating for these changes, dissipated as much from a sense of mission accomplished as from persecution by the FBI. Many young people sought corporate positions, feeling not defeat or lack of choice, but glimmers of possibility: American business seemed to have become more enlightened.
Perhaps most important, Kurt Vonnegut’s observation that the World War II generation was now “hideously tired” could be extended to cover most adults buffeted by cultural tumults. National emergencies had reached such a pitch, they threatened the U.S. presidency. With Nixon gone and the gray-flanneled Mr. Ford at the helm, perhaps everyone could settle down now, especially with so much talk about an energy crisis.
Something Happened tapped into national exhaustion. Reaching back to 1966, it seemed as prophetic about post-Vietnam America as Catch-22 had seemed about the rock-and-roll war years.
On publicity tours for the book, Joe projected seriousness and thoughtfulness. His demeanor suggested he sat “on top of the world”; his “whole manner gives the promise of further important books to come,” said one journalist. For The Paris Review, Joe told George Plimpton, “If I thought I might never get another idea for a novel … I don’t think it would distress me. I’ve got two books under my belt now. I would be content to consider that a lifetime’s work, and I could just putter around and find other things to do. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve written two books that were unusual and unusually successful.”
This sunniness was belied by confessions that he worried when too much time passed with no word from his publisher. He had dreamed up dozens of opening lines for another novel, but none of them was any good, and he feared the American public would soon grow too distracted by technological gadgetry to keep reading fiction.
Just One Catch Page 39
