Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  Making It was poorly received by the intellectual and literary communities; Podhoretz was arrogant, young, and untested, said reviewers. Some expressed their embarrassment that he exposed the “dirty little secret”: American—and, in this case, specifically Jewish—greed for money and power.

  Commentary began a “no-holds barred” campaign against the perceived counterculture, antiwar protesters, and liberal politics in general. In retrospect, Podhoretz’s shifting attitudes had long been apparent. As early as 1963, in an essay entitled “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” he had admitted to feelings of elitism and deep-seated racism. He said that “love is not the answer to hate—not in the world of politics, at any rate.” As the 1960s wore on, this pragmatism (as he would have it) became bitter “revulsion” against the Left. He feared for the “health” of the nation after the “fevers and plagues” unleashed upon it by people whose politics did not fit his. In a very public manner, he lashed out at former leftie pals, including Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel and Diana Trilling.

  As for his friendship with Joe: “Heller … [is] far more politically Left than many of his readers ever realized,” Podhoretz wrote in a book called Ex-Friends. “[T]o give credit where credit is due,” Joe was “among the first to spot and denounce” Podhoretz’s changing ideologies: He became “outraged by [what he saw as] the increasingly insupportable heresies to which I began giving vent.”

  “I never gave him the chance to dump me,” Joe told Christopher Hitchens, who assessed matters this way:

  [A]s Podhoretz began to fawn more openly on Richard Nixon and the Israeli general staff (as if rehearsing for the [embrace] he would later [give] Ronald Reagan), Heller [withdrew from him] … what Heller saw coming is what we now term “neoconservatism.” This is a protean and slippery definition, and very inexact as a category, but … if you take the version offered by its acolytes, you discover a group of New York Jewish intellectuals who decided that duty, honour, and country were superior, morally and mentally, to the bleeding heart allegiances of their boy- and-girlhoods. If you take the version offered by its critics, you stumble on an old Anglo-Saxon definition of the “upper crust”: “A load of crumbs held together by dough.”

  Following the 1967 Yom Kippur War, Israel would become a serious dividing point between the evolving neoconservatives and their former friends on the Left. Defense of Israel at all costs, under all circumstances, became a foundational neoconservative tenant, and it would lead in the future to their support for aggressive, unilateral American military action worldwide. Joe felt ambivalent about Israel. To interviewer Sam Merrill, he admitted he felt a “strong attachment” to the country, though he had not visited it. Nevertheless, he considered unqualified support of the Jewish homeland, without regard to its sometimes contradictory motives, a “difficult, confusing question.” He believed petroleum was the United States’ only real interest in the Middle East, and he didn’t think wars should be fought to enrich international oil companies. Beyond this, the notion that Jews could be at home anywhere in the world, land or no land, seemed to him too rosy a view of Jewish history, and of human life in general.

  (In the early 1960s, Ted Solotaroff predicted Israel would split American Jewry between those, mostly of the older, immigrant generation, whose attachments were to Eastern Europe, and who had borne Diaspora as a badge of dignity, and those, often younger, who viewed backing Israel as Judaism’s burning issue.)

  In any case, given Podhoretz’s freshly militaristic views, this leading neocon had to distance himself from the praise he had once given Joe’s antiwar novel. Eventually, he “reconsider[ed]” Catch-22, insisting it was “not as heroic as it seemed at first sight.” Its inflated reputation, he said, was due to the fact that it had been “perfectly in tune” with the “radical movement” and with a “doctrine that was being preached by most of the major gurus of the era, including writers like Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey.” It “justified draft evasion and even desertion.” Heller’s nefarious influence “lingers on,” Podhoretz wrote, “in a gutted American military and in a culture that puts the avoidance of casualties above all other considerations.” For the new Norman P., Joseph Heller lay at the heart of America’s moral rot. Catch-22 had spiritually crippled the country.

  * * *

  BUT WHAT A SUCCESS it had been! Podhoretz had to admire it on that account, Joe believed.

  Now everybody wanted a piece of literary pie. Bags of money were waiting to be made in publishing. Once, writers hoped to grasp the golden ring of the Great American Novel; to achieve something in American letters, talent and integrity were thought to be necessary. But talent and integrity were rare. Rewards for hard effort couldn’t be doled out widely enough. Now, with so much easy cash flowing, channels needed to be dug for everybody to take advantage of it. Profits shouldn’t be left to the gifted and industrious. If you were rich and famous enough, why write your own book? Somebody would do it for you. Notoriety was the new coin of the realm. Movie stars, criminals, disgraced politicians—with a little moxie, anybody could buy their way into the literary big top. “Making it” was about finessing the angles; often, talent and integrity were impediments.

  Such was Joe’s view. His cynicism grew. Like Podhoretz, he had sometimes presented himself as just another comer looking to score. His success was sweeter for being unlikely: a Coney Island pug who had never expected to go to college, now a respected author! Delirious irony! And old Norm was not wrong about the pleasures of money and prestige.

  But success hadn’t jumped in Joe’s lap. That was the thing. After Catch-22, he didn’t rush out a sequel or another antiwar novel to take advantage of his fame (never mind that he was temperamentally incapable of rushing out anything). He spent thirteen years working on a very different kind of book, risking everything for the sake of—what else?—talent and integrity.

  Which didn’t mean he didn’t want success. But he was old-fashioned enough to equate it with effort. Apparently, this equation no longer counted in publishing, but that didn’t change his mind. He could go two ways: be the starving artist or demand what he was worth. “I [am] getting very envious of seeing other writers get huge sums of money for not very good books,” he admitted to the Christian Science Monitor. “It’s now so profitable to get a book out of [one’s time in] political office that few can resist.… [But] the controversies surrounding the publication often make more interesting reading than the books.”

  Before the 1970s limped to an end, Joe would write, in disgust, “John Ehrlichman, Spiro Agnew, and H. R. Haldeman had written books. Gerald Ford was writing a book.… If Gerald Ford could write a book, was there any reason [the racehorse] Secretariat could not?… Richard Nixon had written a book.… Even that fat little fuck Henry Kissinger was writing a book!”

  For Joe, increasingly disaffected by American politics and the decline of public discourse, this was all a sign that cultural progress did not exist: Every change was for the worse. The American presidency had become a “public-relations enterprise,” he said; “the world of finance dominat[ed] the world of government” (and literature).

  As he would write in his new novel, “the most advanced and penultimate stage of civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.”

  * * *

  JOE’S THIRD NOVEL, Good as Gold, published in 1979, began: “[He] had been asked many times to write about the Jewish experience in America. This was not strictly true. He’d been asked only twice, most recently by a woman in Wilmington, Delaware, where he had gone to read, for a fee, from his … books.” This was an accurate account of the novel’s origins. The cultural context in which it arrived became apparent in the last third of the book. Joe included a news clipping in the text:

  To enhance the value of his memoirs in the marketplace, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has retained a powerful literary agency to represent him. The agency is International Creative Management.

  I.C.M.’s clien
ts include Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen, Isaac Stern, Peter Benchley, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Harry Reasoner, Joseph Heller, and Sir Laurence Olivier.

  The novel follows the attempts of an academic named Bruce Gold to transcend his working-class Jewish background, earn recognition through his writing as an influential intellectual, and secure a powerful political post in Washington, D.C.

  Since Joe was no longer teaching, he could devote every day to the project. He wrote the novel in record time for him: three years. “[I am] getting more efficient and may be prolific yet,” he quipped to a journalist. More to the point, he said, “[W]hen I am close to finishing a book, nothing is more important to me. I might stop to save a life, but nothing less.” And even more to the point: “When … James Jones died [in May 1977], leaving his last novel [Whistle] incomplete, I began to be afraid I might die before finishing Good as Gold.” A year later, another friend, Robert Alan Aurthur, a screenwriter and magazine journalist, died of lung cancer, leaving an unfinished project, the screenplay for the movie All That Jazz. The Angel of Death wasn’t confining itself to the gym. Joe was spooked.

  Life got even grimmer when Mario Puzo’s wife, Erika, died. Joe did his best to make things nicer for his friends—and to cheer himself up. He arranged a date with Puzo for Jones’s widow, Gloria. “You’re both Italian, he’s a writer—what could be better?” he told her. He accompanied his friends to help break the ice. In her memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me, Gloria’s daughter Kaylie writes:

  I came home late … [one evening] and found the three of them in [our] living room [in Southampton]. My mother, sitting regally in a hard, tall-backed Spanish chair of carved, dark wood, was holding Mario Puzo’s hand, who sat at the very edge of the couch, as if he were about to fall off. My mother was crying … and Joe Heller, their silent chaperon, sat at the other end of the room, sadly shaking his head.

  “You’re very sweet and charming,” my mother said to Mario Puzo, “but I still love my husband, you see. And he was a much better writer than you.”

  Puzo would soon find steady companionship with his wife’s former nurse, Carol Gino. Joe remained depressed. His beloved dog, Sweeney, got cancer, and Joe and Shirley had to put him to sleep. Joe had been devoted to Sweeney, grooming, walking, cuddling him and waving his paw whenever guests dropped by the apartment or left. “Say hello. Say goodbye,” he’d croon to the dog. Now he swore he’d never own another pet. The trauma was too hard to bear. One day, Shirley caught him hiding in a closet, crying about the dog.

  He hurried to finish his novel before other calamities struck. More than ever, he felt his talents should earn him comfort and safety, a buffer against misfortunes.

  An article entitled “Heller Takes the Money and Runs,” in the March 19, 1979, issue of New York magazine, reported that Joe pitched his new novel to Simon & Schuster, abandoning Knopf and his trusted editor, Bob Gottlieb. Why? “For financial security,” Joe said, “or for what I sometimes have to call greed. My agent, Candida Donadio, thought I could get a seven-figure guarantee for half of the first-draft manuscript.”

  He denied rumors that Gottlieb had rejected the manuscript on literary grounds. “Bob thought it was very funny, but he was a little concerned about overwriting and how critics and the public would receive a book so different from Catch-22 and Something Happened. So he postponed the contract until he read the rest of the manuscript,” Joe said.

  In fact, Gottlieb didn’t like the book. He thought it was “shticky—and I told Joe. I’d never be anything less than honest with Joe. He didn’t take it personally. He told me later—and this was so typical of him—that when I said the book wasn’t good, he figured he’d better get the big money up front and cash in while he could.”

  Given the dark angel’s doings, “I might have gone into a depression that would have prevented me from finishing the book,” Joe said. “I just didn’t want to gamble. How did I know the rest would be any good? It takes me anywhere from four to fourteen years to write a novel, and I wanted to know that I had enough money to keep going on to the next one if Gold wasn’t a success.”

  Gottlieb did not discuss the book publicly. He told a reporter he didn’t “believe in guaranteeing such immense sums. [M]oney is what Joe wanted this time.” According to Herman Gollob, when Donadio first told Gottlieb that Simon & Schuster was making a bid for Joe’s book, he refused to negotiate. “You mean you’re not going to make an offer at all?” she asked. “You want an offer?” Gottlieb said. “Okay, here’s my offer. Ten dollars.”

  “That’s not exactly how I remember things,” Gottlieb says. “It was all quite casual, really. I told Candida, ‘Of course, we’ll publish it,’ but I didn’t think it was so great. It wasn’t really about the money.”

  “[Candida] would sort of start whimpering at you if you gave her a low offer for a book,” recalled Victoria Wilson, whom Gottlieb hired at Knopf. “She would be operatic, but she would start with the snorkeling and snorfing. It was charming, I mean it was very disarming.” But this time the charm did not work on Gottlieb, and Donadio was rattled. She walked around with a fierce expression, her eyes bulging, recalled Dan Simon, a young editor then. He met her one day in her Chelsea office. She was smoking, and he remarked that cigarettes could be bad for her health. “There are times when it’s healthier to smoke,” she snapped. “Jesus, God, she was intense,” Simon said.

  The deal for Good as Gold was a boon for Simon & Schuster, which had just acquired new offices in Rockefeller Center and was being touted by New York as the “showiest [publishing] house in town, with a kind of febrile energy … unmatched anywhere.” “In a trade that clings to shabby gentility almost as passionately as an English squire treasures his twenty-year-old tweeds,” S & S has not hesitated to step up and proclaim itself publishing’s “Hot House,” said the magazine.

  Gottlieb’s departure in 1968 had been a near disaster, but Richard Nixon’s fall from grace salvaged the company’s fortunes. In 1973, S & S purchased Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate expose, All the President’s Men, for $55,000. Shortly afterward, Julie Nixon Eisenhower became an S & S author. Then Gulf & Western bought the company. It aligned the publisher with its Leisure Time Group (Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden, a string of Canadian movie houses). The corporate mandate said S & S should pursue “book publishing as show business.” In 1975, the CEOs installed Richard E. Snyder as the publishing house’s president. Snyder believed there was no such thing as a good book that didn’t sell. He scoffed at the notion of literary fiction. “‘Literary’ may be chic,” he said, “[but] it’s not terrific for the author.” It didn’t earn any money. Snyder expanded the company’s sales force. He monitored his editors’ expense accounts—if the monthly total was low, it meant a “clear failure to be seen in the right places [around town], wooing the right agents of the right authors.” He challenged young editors who were not spending enough to make enough: “You want to keep your job, don’t you?” He greeted his staff gruffly each morning, asking, “How the fuck are you?” One of his coworkers called him a “terror of sorts … the [Mu’ammar] Qaddafi of publishing.” Snyder’s desk, in the new Rockefeller Center offices, was made of Carpathian elm. It glowed with a kind of golden light. Burnished brass knobs adorned the doors. The interior walls were fashioned of smoked glass. You tread carefully here.

  Snyder made a deal for Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room: “By the time the book appeared, it had already been sold for a television mini-series,” he said. Judith Rossner’s rough-sex parable, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, was another example of the “synergy” Gulf & Western was after—a “product” that could take many forms and be sold and sold again: book, movie, sound-track album, and so on.

  It was a coup for S & S to lure Joe Heller back. Joni Evans, by all accounts the most “aggressive” young editor in the firm, would edit Good as Gold, with help from Michael Korda, who had looked on, in the old days, as Gottlieb and Joe edited Catch-22. Korda sa
id Evans had a “stick-shift personality … [a combination] of stand-up Jewish comedienne, [a] bundle of nerve-endings, [and] Daddy’s little girl.” Eventually, she would marry Dick Snyder and, in the words of one coworker, play the “good cop” to his “bad cop” in the S & S offices.

  For all the energy and glee suffusing the slick new S & S, one observer felt the place was “haunted by the ghost of the departed Gottlieb and forever in search of the quality that left with him.” Some agents steered clear of Snyder and company, feeling they didn’t nurture young talent. For a while, in 1973, S & S employed former senator Eugene McCarthy as a senior editor. He took the work seriously and pursued it with the kind of integrity once common in publishing. According to New York:

  [McCarthy] put in prodigious amounts of time reading poetry and political manuscripts showered upon him by friends and admirers, while the executive staff [of S & S] sat around wondering how to tell this classy man, a former candidate for president no less, that he was supposed to be at the Four Seasons [on the] expense account … hunting up new books. Everyone was a bit relieved when he left.

  For Good as Gold, Joe received a nearly two-million-dollar advance, a “first for the publishing world,” said New York: the “biggest advance for a novel in history.” For years afterward, nothing would be the same in the “show biz” book world, and Joe was a key figure in the industry’s transformation.

  His character Bruce Gold writes an essay entitled “Nothing Succeeds as Planned”; in time, that sentiment would dog Joe and other novelists, as big-money publishing demanded more “synergy” and larger blockbusters, all but eliminating the cultural cachet of the small literary novel.