Shirley was a silent presence during many of Joe’s interviews, sitting beside him demurely as journalists pulled pencil and paper from briefcases or fiddled with tape recorders. In the middle of an interview at Harvard in October 1974, Joe listed fears he’d had about events—newspaper strikes, a new war—that might limit his public exposure. Shirley squirmed. Joe turned to her. “What? You’re not worried about any of this?” he asked. She said she’d now like to see Harvard Yard. Dolores Karl says Shirley hated Something Happened. She felt it was too autobiographical. She was embarrassed and disconcerted by the portrait of a narcissistic, fretful man whose love for his wife and children is balanced by equal bouts of revulsion, and who engages in serial adultery to take the edge off his fears of failure.
Later, Mel Brooks would say to Joe, “If [your family] can live through [Something Happened], they can live through anything.” Joe replied, “Oy, what we went through with that!”
Whenever an interviewer asked Shirley about the book, her face became a mask. “I … can’t believe it’s finally out,” she’d say.
* * *
IN PLATO’S Phaedrus, Socrates says the purpose of language is “to put to test” our deepest beliefs. With words, we arrive at self-knowledge and “care of the soul.” Socrates claims to know little; he challenges others, hoping to expose shallow values and to shame people into admitting ignorance. Something Happened submits the reader to a series of Socratic challenges regarding American ideals: love of country, family, material success.
Bob Slocum sees himself engaging in “brisk, Socratic dialogues” with his son. “I am Socrates, he is the pupil. (Or so it seems, until I review some of our conversations when I am alone, and then it often seems that he is Socrates),” Slocum says. In an essay on the rhetoric in Something Happened, Andre Furlani says Slocum does not hope to improve others with his questions: He seeks to draw them into paralysis. He is not genuinely interested in answers; his questions hide fears of results he does not want to face. Rather than a “test” serving “the soul,” language, for Slocum, is a game in which the aim is to “outfox” everyone. It is meant to conceal his desires.
In fierce, painful exchanges, his daughter attempts to challenge him. But she is a child and cannot compete with his knowledge and ease with words. Smugly, Slocum watches as the “composure with which she entered [an argument with him] crumbles away into terrified misgivings and she is left, at last, standing mute and foolishly before me, shivering and exhausted, bereft of all her former confidence and determination. (I can outfox her every time.)”
Slocum knows he should take no pleasure in verbally abusing his child. “Why must I win this argument?… Why must I show off for her and myself and exult in my fine logic and more expert command of language and details—in a battle of wits with a fifteen-year-old?” he asks. “I could just as easily say, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.’ Even though I’m right and not really sorry. I could say so anyway. But I can’t. And I am winning … I am a shit. But at least I am a successful one.”
Slocum cares more for his son than for his daughter. He sees himself in his boy, who does not rival him directly. The son is truly a Socrates figure, presenting an innocent face. At one point, Slocum sneaks behind the boy’s back; he speaks to the physical education teacher at school, hoping to help the boy become more competitive at sports. Later, the son says to Slocum, “You didn’t tell me that you went to see him.” Slocum replies, “How did you find out?… Who told you?” His son says, “You told me. Just now. By answering me.”
Ultimately, the boy’s nonchallenges penetrate his father’s psychic defenses. Caught in his own word traps, Slocum devolves into mild madness. The boy withdraws from him, disturbed by the ferocity with which Slocum attacks the daughter. Slocum recalls his father’s disappearance when he was a child, and feels similarly betrayed by his boy. As Furlani says, the “son is a Socrates whom the father feels compelled to kill … [just like] the philosopher [was] fated to die, indeed condemned to death [by his society], because his presence ultimately [was] too sharp a goad.”
The something that happened to Slocum was primal loss followed by conformity, as though the loss had never occurred. Now he witnesses this socialization process swamping his children. It is too late to save his daughter, but he believes he can rescue his boy by freezing him in time before the boy changes too much, inflicting on Slocum another irrecoverable loss. The mad logic of this is so pure, so embedded in life’s yeses and noes, it becomes an emotional Catch-22: loss as the method of stopping further loss.
Slocum shows “signs that, I believe, are clinical symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia,” Joe said of his main character. “[H]e’s saying, ‘There’s somebody inside me who wants to do these things I’m ashamed of. I’m too nice a guy to do this.’ Then he has to create a third [personality], to supervise the other two. Then a fourth one that’s watching everything.… What I’m trying to do is set up a process of alienation from oneself.” Joe felt he had achieved alienation through point of view. “The first and third person are fused in a way I’ve never seen before, and time is compressed into almost a solid substance,” he said. In the narration, there is a vast emotional distance between the observing and acting selves (conveyed by long, qualifying parenthetical asides), and yet there is very little temporal space between them:
My memory’s failing, my bladder is weak, my arches are falling, my tonsils and adenoids are gone … and now my little boy wants to cast me away and leave me behind for reasons he won’t give me. What else will I have? My job? When I am fifty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than … reaching sixty-five. When I am sixty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than reaching seventy-five, or dying before then.…
Oh, my father—why have you done this to me?
I want him back.
I want my little boy back too.
I don’t want to lose him.
I do.
“Something happened!” a youth in his early teens calls excitedly to a friend and goes running ahead to look.
A crowd is collecting at the shopping center.… A plate glass window has been smashed. My boy is lying on the ground.… He is panic-stricken. So am I.
“Daddy!”
He is dying.… I can’t stand it. He can’t stand it.… I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze.
Slocum is a “disorganized personality,” Joe explained, “a personality that can’t be integrated in a way that the healthiest of personalities should be.… [M]ore and more people I know about [are] having trouble [with this].… It’s becoming harder and harder for people to achieve in their work, to [hang on to] a personal sense of identity.” But Slocum masks himself and pushes ahead. At the end, he is able to say, “Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command.” He becomes a true American success story.
* * *
“AN UNPRECEDENTED COMBINATION of inflation and recession made 1974 a uniquely difficult year for the economy at home and abroad,” said RCA’s Annual Report, 1974. “Whipsawed by these forces, the company’s net profit declined by 38 per cent to $113.3 million.” In typically masked language, the writer of the report followed this gloomy news with a vague assertion that “hopeful signs” indicated “renewed strength and purpose ahead.”
Among RCA’s holdings in 1974 were the NBC television network, RCA Records, Banquet Frozen Foods, and Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House). In the report’s glossy pages, along with a photograph of the singer John Denver sitting with the president of RCA Records and one of Freddie Prinze of the TV show Chico and the Man, is a picture of Joe with Random House president Robert L. Bernstein and Bob Gottlieb. Bernstein stands tall over the other two, talking down to them. “Novelist Joseph Heller[’s] … Something Happened is a major bestseller,” reads the caption next to the photo. Largely on the back of Joe’s novel, the publishing division (Random House, Pantheon, and Knopf) “increased its sales by 25 per cent to a new high,” despite
the adverse effects of “industry-wide inflationary costs.” Unfortunately, the report says, a new accounting method will mean an overall “loss position” for the publishing division this year. Happily, these losses were offset by the successes of the “other products and services” lumped in with books, particularly the “inspiring performance” of “edible oils … [and the] Man Pleaser [frozen] Dinners, which offer larger portions of fried chicken, turkey, Salisbury steak, and meat loaf.”
* * *
WILLIAM JAMES wrote, “[T]he exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS is our national disease.” Joe had read this quote in a piece by Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. Podhoretz liked to cite James in order to dispute him. He believed America had a “dirty little secret”: Ambition for affluence and fame had replaced “erotic lust” as the prime hunger of the “well-educated American soul.” For Podhoretz, this was a perfectly fine state of affairs.
Certainly, the success of Something Happened suited Joe. He quit teaching at City College. He bought a summer house in the Amagansett dunes—“nothing special,” Erica says. One day, Joe asked the architect Charles Gwathmey to look at the house. He had met the man through Speed Vogel, and he hoped Gwathmey might suggest ways “to make [the house] a bit more presentable.” Gwathmey “shrugged his shoulders, squinting into the sun,” Erica recalls. “‘Gut it,’ he said, got into his black car and drove away.” (Some time later, Gwathmey visited the Hellers at the Apthorp; he strolled around the courtyard with Shirley, who asked him what changes he’d make to the building. “Gut it,” he said.)
Joe loved the Amagansett place. He enjoyed tanning on the sundeck while drinking French-roast coffee, eating Jarlsberg cheese, and reading. He went for a daily run to try to get his weight back down. Sometimes in the evenings, a soft fog rose from the sea.
The small living room, painted white, was brightened by three Matisse lithographs Shirley had bought. Joe played Mozart or Wagner on the stereo system. Ted missed summering at Fair Harbor or Seaview, communities on Fire Island, cozier, calmer spots—but change, whether or not for the better, was the price of success.
In the city, “Elaine’s had become the ‘in’ place … because of all the famous writers and … movie stars who frequented the place,” said novelist Winston Groom. In fact, Joe had been a regular at the restaurant for years, but its glamour was growing along with the stature of its patrons. Groom recalled one evening in the mid-1970s when a reporter from a Kansas City newspaper showed up to do a piece on New York glitterati. Elaine would not let him approach her elite customers. She sat him in a corner—they could approach him, if they wished. Mailer was there, along with Joe, William Styron, Irwin Shaw, Woody Allen, and Diane Keaton. At one point, “Barbra Streisand swept through the door, wearing some kind of sequined gown that made her look like she had been set on fire,” Groom said. No one spoke to the reporter.
Finally, at about 10:30, he called Elaine over. “If you won’t let me talk to them, then can’t you at least tell me what they are talking about?” he said. “What are they talking about?” Elaine replied. “Well, they’re talking about what all writers talk about: baseball, money, and pussy.”
Joe rented a new writing studio at 130 West 57th Street, a block from Carnegie Hall and the Russian Tea Room. It was in a quaint 1907 building where William Dean Howells had once lived, and where Woody Allen’s film production company was headquartered. Joe’s apartment had projecting bay windows set in ornamented cast-iron frames. Northern light flooded the room.
He often stayed late and sometimes slept in the studio. Making an excuse to Shirley, he would say he was trying to stay out of the way of Viola, the family’s housekeeper, who was fiercely loyal to his wife. Shirley never asked about his comings and goings, though she speculated freely about friends whom she suspected of having affairs. Her circumspection and politeness (terror, exhaustion, boredom?) irritated Joe. He hated to say it, but shouldn’t a successful man have a more thrilling marriage than this? The kids were young adults now, mostly on their own, both at NYU (Erica was finishing up there). The Apthorp apartment was empty and quiet. Excitement zizzled the rest of his life, although it’s true that his favorite moments were at home with a book in his lap and Mozart on the stereo. “Right after he finishes [writing] a book he gets better; he’s serene and sweet,” Erica told Barbara Gelb.
Still, he didn’t know what to do with his restlessness, his contradictory impulses. “I need … disturbances,” he’d told Shirley once. “I draw inspiration from daily embarrassments.” Many nights, he lay awake, worrying about how to stay interested in his life, while Shirley snored softly beside him.
To hide his anxieties, he told friends, “Thank goodness, we don’t need love anymore. And without love, all we have to worry about is passion, bliss, and ecstasy.”
What he really needed was a good first line for a novel. He’d thought of this: “The kid, they say, was born in a manger, but frankly I have my doubts.” Not bad—better than most he’d imagined—but he didn’t feel it would take him very far.
One day, to his great annoyance, Shirley announced she was going to throw a party for his sister. Sylvia told Shirley no one had ever made a birthday party for her. Joe didn’t relish an apartment bursting with noisy people, silly family chatter, but Shirley made a lavish cake, put everyone at ease, and Sylvia wept with gratitude. Joe was moved to tears, especially when his sister (still missing her late husband) recalled job hunting as a girl, taking the subway into the city and being turned away because she was Jewish. It was good to see Sylvia and Lee again after so long a time (though the older they got, with their soft features, darker coloring, the less they looked like Joe and his mother). Shirley was a wonderful wife, always remembering family occasions, giving gifts at bar and bat mitzvahs—things Joe would never think of—and he felt fortunate, beyond measure, to be with her.
* * *
POLITICS BORED—NO, enraged—him. You could not say American leadership had been a success. The McGovern debacle, the Watergate disaster.… Joe could not stir himself from an almost paralyzing, cynical indolence. That goddamned moron, Nixon’s young press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, had permanently damaged the language: “The President is fully aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia,” he had said. “That is not to say that anything is going on in Southeast Asia.” How could you respond to that? It was beyond ridicule.
And personally, now that the tear gas had cleared, who could deny it was easier to stay silent? Why not settle back on a comfy couch with pockets full of coins? (Recently, Vogue lingerie ads had announced, “Every woman loves … pretty lingerie. And Scarlatti on the hi-fi. And Telly [Savalas] on the telly. And the new Joseph Heller … it’s all part of the lure of life at home.”)
Joe confessed to George Mandel, “I don’t think I deserve all this money. It puts me into a class for which I have very little sympathy.” But he couldn’t kid himself: Politically, he was drifting toward the center. Maybe it was a hopeful sign that he didn’t feel good about it. He consoled himself that he was not as out of step as his old acquaintance, and now sworn enemy, Norman Podhoretz, the “success” guru.
In 1961, in a review in Show magazine, Podhoretz had praised Catch-22 as “one of the bravest and most … successful attempts we have yet had to describe and make credible the incredible reality of American life in the middle of the 20th century.” Joe appreciated these comments. The men became “fairly friendly,” Podhoretz recalled. They chatted now and then at literary parties. As the editor of Commentary, Podhoretz had “invigorat[ed] the magazine and steer[ed] it in a … more leftward direction,” according to Ted Solotaroff, who began writing for Commentary in September 1960: “Norman made it clear that the magazine would hold its own as the suddenly prominent new voice of a new decade.”
But it was also apparent that Podhoretz was hungry for social success. He “openly acted upon” his desire for money, publicity, and celebrity, Solotaroff said. In 1967, in a book called Making It, Podhoretz
announced, “I [have] … experienced an astonishing revelation: it is better to be a success than a failure.… [I]t [is] better to be rich than to be poor.… Fame, I now [see] … [is] unqualifiedly delicious: it [is] better to be recognized than anonymous.” He expressed his distaste for what the mainstream press called “the counterculture”: The extreme Left wanted to destroy America, Podhoretz said. He wanted to bask in its luxuries.
In part, then, his rightward drift began as an ongoing and conscious act of integration. Like Joe, he was Jewish, Brooklyn-born, educated at Columbia under the tutelage of Lionel Trilling. He was strongly influenced by the anti-Communist liberal thinking of Trilling’s immediate circle. Like Bob Gottlieb, he had gone to Cambridge to study with the literary critic F. R. Leavis. And now he was the editor of one of the leading intellectual journals of the day.
But intellectual pursuits did not bring him as much prestige as he wished. To get inside America—become indispensable to it—meant moving in the highest social spheres, meeting and influencing men and women of power. This was Podhoretz’s aim. Making It was a paean to shameless social climbing. “Nothing, I believe, defines the spiritual character of American life more saliently than … [the] contradictory feelings our culture instills in us toward the ambition for success, and toward each of its various goals: money, power, fame, and social position,” he wrote. “On the one hand, we are commanded to become successful … on the other hand, it is impressed upon us by means both direct and devious that if we obey the commandment, we shall find ourselves falling victim to … [a] radical corruption of spirit.” He spelled out how the “gospel of success” reigned supreme in his Brooklyn childhood, at Columbia, and was reinforced by the “ethos of New York literary society.” And he excoriated the hypocrisy of a culture that worshipped success but insisted the striver be modest, humble, and circumspect in chasing power. “I will no doubt be accused of self-inflation and therefore of tastelessness. So be it,” he declared. He would embrace the free market, American materialism, and empire building abroad—because he could excel in these areas. If his fellow former lefties wanted anarchy or socialism, well … good luck and good riddance.
Just One Catch Page 40
