Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  For now, Joe was pleased. He and Shirley bought a summerhouse in East Hampton and paid to put in a pool. “Shirley wanted to live it up a little,” says Barbara Gelb.

  The same article in New York that announced Joe’s advance said, “[I]n the nonfiction area, it is rumored that Henry Kissinger’s memoirs are being offered for around the same figure.”

  * * *

  “[THE TROUBLE] about doing a comic novel with Henry Kissinger as the central [character is that] Kissinger will be forgotten and a man of almost no importance a very short time from now,” Joe once said. “Right now he’s a great joke, one of the genuinely funny characters in American life. But he won’t last.”

  In Good as Gold, Kissinger appears as an animating spirit. Bruce Gold envies the former secretary of state; he is everything Gold wishes to be—a man revered as a public intellectual with almost unlimited political influence. But Gold also hates the man: In his view, Kissinger has sold his soul to get where he is, trading principles and political conscience for opportunism, cash, and lubricous shiksas. Kissinger is the ultimate assimiliationist; assimilation leads to spiritual death.

  Gold considers writing an essay entitled “Invite a Jew to the White House (and You Make Him Your Slave).” Ralph Newsome, one of the president’s toadies, tells Gold political appointments are one thing, but Washington revolves around the “social world … where competence doesn’t count [and where] … Jews don’t really make it.… They never did.” Kissinger is “just another writer now scrounging around for royalties and publicity. I hope that doesn’t sound snobbish, Bruce.”

  Gold keeps a file of newspaper items on Kissinger. For years, Joe did this, too (one example, from the New York Times, October 8, 1974: “Mr. Rockefeller gave Secretary of State Kissinger a $50,000 gift when Mr. Kissinger left his employ to join the Nixon administration.” Underneath this, Joe scribbled, “Remember the Neediest!”; he seemed particularly interested in Kissinger’s meddling in Iraq, the manipulations and abandonment of Kurdish leaders).

  Like Joe, Gold contemplates writing a Kissinger book. On many levels, then, Good as Gold is a metafictional novel: a book about the writing of a book, which the reader now holds. But beyond this, Good as Gold was a metaevent. Its presence as an object in the world, mocking the kind of object it was—a cultural milestone notable for the money, gossip, and celebrity glitter attached to it—made it one of the oddest literary artifacts ever to appear in the United States.

  Like many of the dialogues in Something Happened, the novel was a Socratic challenge. It offered reassessments of the categories of literature, commodity, cultural value, art, entertainment, hoax. Joe not only had his cake and ate it; he was selling the recipe at a hefty profit. It was up to the reader to decide what kind of taste it left in the mouth.

  If the book succeeded aesthetically, it was because, behind the unattractive, celebrity-seeking hero (to whom the author invited comparisons), Joe also signaled: Reader, I’m in the same luxury liner you are, subject to the same tempests of rage, and I don’t know how to feel about them, either.

  Finally, as a companion to Kissinger’s memoir (by virtue of being linked in the press to Kissinger’s book), it was a fierce attack on America’s self-image as crafted by a prominent government insider. In a review of the novel in The New Republic, Jack Beatty wrote, “Good as Gold is a cultural event. A major novelist has taken on our greatest celebrity with all the power of wit and language at his command.… [P]erhaps not since Tolstoy eviscerated Napoleon … has a central historical figure been so intimately castigated by the Word. Score one for literature.”

  More somberly, John W. Aldridge, reviewing the book for Harper’s, remarked, “It is all about a society that is fast going insane, that is learning to accept chaos as order, and unreality as normal. The horror is that the time may soon come when the conditions Heller depicts will no longer seem either funny or the least bit odd.”

  * * *

  GOOD AS GOLD was also about Jewish families from Coney Island. It marked a turn in Joe’s writing toward straightforward, nostalgic autobiography. This strain would grow and dominate his later work. Had he lived longer and abandoned the conviction that he needed to write the Great American Novel—a burden of his generation—it might have proved his greatest achievement.

  The reviewers who did not cotton to Good as Gold—there were several—said its modalities did not mesh. Broad caricature distinguished the Washington scenes; the political flunkies spoke Ziegler-like nonsense: “[T]here is nothing in the world that can block your appointment, unless something gets in the way.” By contrast, the family scenes—Gold’s raucous dinners with his father, sisters, brother, and their spouses—are touchingly realistic, salted with Yiddishisms and noisy kvetching.

  Finally, there are vivid and sensitive descriptions of Coney Island’s decline since Gold’s childhood, the crumbling infrastructure, abandonment of youth to joblessness, listlessness, and drugs—the neglect of the public good that comes from a bad government concerned only with perpetuating rituals, and individuals more interested in social climbing than caring for their families.

  Joe established these tonal clashes to convey a clangorous culture into which it is finally impossible to integrate, for it is coming apart. From region to region, profession to profession, social class to social class, no one speaks the same language. Before writing the novel, Joe immersed himself in Charles Dickens to grasp the English master’s sweep and whimsical satire. Joe was particularly impressed with Bleak House, which operates in two registers: the public voice (“London. Michelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.”) and Esther Summerson’s private voice (“[S]omething happened when I was still quite a little thing.”). Joe adopted Bleak House’s strategy, contrasting Gold’s family dinners with his public experiences in Washington; the leap from literary realism to absurdity was too much for many readers. (On the other hand, Leonard Michaels, reviewing the novel for the New York Times Book Review, said it offered “an astounding vision of our leaders in Washington. Astounding because, while fantastic, it doesn’t seem incorrect.”)

  As with Catch-22 and Something Happened, the events in Good as Gold resolve after a traumatic death. These deaths always occur in the books’ penultimate sections, as if rising from the depths of repressed memory. In this case, Gold’s older brother, Sid, passes away unexpectedly, forcing Gold to abandon his political ambitions and return to the family to care for his aging father and flailing sisters. Ambivalently, Gold embraces his Jewish heritage. At novel’s end, as he is heading to his wife by way of Coney Island Avenue, he comes upon a “softball game in a schoolyard played by boys wearing yarmulkes.” He leaves his car to watch:

  Athletes in skullcaps? The school was a religious one, a yeshiva. Some of the teenagers had sidelocks, and some of the sidelocks were blond. Gold smiled. God was right [about the Jews]—a stiff-necked, contrary people. Moisheh Kapoyer, here it was winter and they were playing baseball, while everyone else played football and basketball.

  And a stubborn dispute was in progress.… The pitcher was sulking and refused to throw the ball. The batter was waiting in a squat with his elbows on his knees.… As Gold watched, the catcher, a muscular, redheaded youth with freckles and sidelocks and a face as Irish or Scottish or Polish as any Gold had ever laid eyes upon, moved wrathfully toward the pitcher with words Gold for a minute had trouble believing.

  “Varf!” shouted the catcher. “Varf it, already! Varf the fucking ball!”

  This was as “vivid an anecdote of assimilation as I could find,” Joe said.

  * * *

  WRITING IN INQUIRY, Murray N. Rothbard noted another crucial aspect of Good as Gold:

  [T]he most repellent character in Joseph Heller’s hilarious novel … is one Maxwell Lieberman, the editor of a small, pretentious, once liberal now neoconservative monthly, a man who eats greedily with both hands, a New York Jewish intellectual whose sole literary output
is a series of autobiographies celebrating his own life and thought. I have no way of knowing what Norman Podhoretz’s eating habits are. But Podhoretz is a New York Jewish intellectual, the longtime editor of the pretentious, once liberal now neoconservative monthly Commentary, and a man whose most visible literary output consists of autobiographical volumes celebrating his own career.

  Podhoretz also noticed Joe’s “savage caricature” of him. It “cement[ed] our new ex-friendship,” he said.

  Rothbard applauded Joe for satirizing Podhoretz’s embrace of “the old question, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’” Podhoretz believed foreign-policy initiatives should be grounded on “an all-out and unmitigated support for the state of Israel, which he identifies with the cause of Jewry.” He had changed the “meaning of the word ‘intellectual’”; to Podhoretz, an intellectual is a “man who push[es] and elbow[s] his way upward from the ranks to what passes for fame and fortune.”

  But Joe was not just being nasty about Podhoretz. Good as Gold mounts a full critique of neoconservative thought as it developed in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s in the writings of Irving Kristol, Daniel Moynihan, and others. Specifically, Joe attacked the neocons’ belief that the loss of faith in government, now widespread in the United States, was, in Peter Steinfels’s words, “primarily a cultural crisis, a matter of values, morals, and manners,” and not—as Joe saw it—a matter of abysmal leadership by self-serving scoundrels such as Nixon, Kissinger, and the neocons themselves. Neoconservatives espoused the “theory of unintended consequences,” Steinfels said; the government was the “victim of ‘overload.’ Attempting too much, it has naturally failed,” and so its “authority … should be shielded by dispersing responsibility for [its] failure as much as possible.” This could be achieved by farming out government responsibilities to private enterprise, and forcing the free market to take the blame for screwups.

  As Marshall Toman points out in Studies in Contemporary Satire, “When Bruce Gold, abandoning his former liberal beliefs and adopting neoconservative opinions for the power their [approval] will bring him, writes ‘Nothing Succeeds as Planned,’ he contributes precisely the intellectual support … the conservative government needs to justify its lack of social involvement.”

  Lieberman hopes to be appointed “broad gauge advisor on domestic policy,” a position for which Irving Kristol was considered in 1972. Lieberman misuses language the way Kristol often did, saying “literally” for “figuratively” (“Don’t words mean anything to you?” Gold chastises him).

  While writing the novel, Joe kept folders of newspaper stories on the neocons, as he did with Henry Kissinger. He told interviewer Charlie Reilly, “A phrase that really gets to me … would be one of those neoconservative references to Vietnam as a national tragedy, but only because we lost. That thought fills me with ire. To begin with, the person who says it is typically untouched by tragedy; like me, he has not lost a son or a job. In addition, the implication is that if we had won, the war would have been somehow less tragic. People with that mentality, I have to admit, impress me as being the scum of the earth.”

  * * *

  “THE HONEYMOON is over for Joseph Heller,” John Leonard declared in the New York Times. “He will be thumped … for having written this savage novel.… Those [who] have suggested that he might be more Jewish in his fiction are going to be sorry they asked.”

  Joe was courting trouble because Good as Gold entered (with fists aflutter) a Jewish family quarrel, not to mention a New York–Washington spat. It was, as well, a literary insider’s joke. For these reasons, its appeal would be more limited than that of Catch-22 and Something Happened. Despite this (and because, like Catch, it was a satire), it appeared on official bestseller lists, a paradox worthy of Ron Ziegler. An increasingly narrowing range of interests and reference points would plague the rest of Joe’s career.

  * * *

  MOISHEH KAPOYER, a person who does everything in reverse: Mr. Backwards, Mr. Yes for No. Moisheh Kapoyer was also the name of a character in a cartoon feature in the Jewish Daily Forward, alongside letters in the “Bintel Brief.” Like Socrates, his specialty was tossing off “upside down” remarks.

  In Good as Gold, Joe used the expression to describe Jewish contrariness. He used it to deride Henry Kissinger: Here was a Jew seeking success in Christian Washington. In the deepest chill of the Watergate scandal, he fell on his knees to pray beside Richard Nixon, a man he considered anti-Semitic.

  For Joe, Moisheh kapoyer captured the paradox of the integrated Jew—and, more broadly, of all Americans, living in a wealthy culture often inimical to moral principles. The phrase defined the style of humor propelling Joe’s fiction. He could name it now, in his third novel, employing the language of his mother.

  Good as Gold appeared at a transitional time, when many once-liberal Jews were turning “upside down,” preparing to endorse Ronald Reagan. This alliance would give Norman Podhoretz and others like him the political influence they sought. The novel appeared at a time when Jewish humor, formerly marginalized in places like the Catskills, had reversed its fortunes to become perhaps the dominant mode of American entertainment, on television, in movies, comic books, satirical magazines (and some would say in the comic-strip worlds of good and evil displayed in certain intellectual journals).

  By 1979, the Jewish-American novel, with its deflationary humor, could legitimately be called one of the most important literary developments in the second half of the twentieth century. Beside Joe’s novel, in 1979, sat Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives, and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, meditations on writing, the legacy of World War II, and Judaism’s place in the Western cultural imagination.

  Earlier in the 1970s, Saul Bellow had secured his title of major American novelist with Humboldt’s Gift, and even non-Jewish writers—Styron, Updike (in his Bech books)—were tackling Jewish themes, as if they were the ones trying to assimilate into mainstream culture.

  The critic Leon Wieseltier observed:

  America … was where Jewish humor fantastically flourished. It has become perhaps the most well-known product of American Jewish culture. But something happened to Jewish humor in America. It shrank in its scope. Its metaphysical commentary, its interest in the collective fate, the dimension of desperation that had made it an essential instrument of the healing heart, all disappeared. As the jokes have gone from Yiddish to English, they have gone from God to parents.

  One could argue—as did biblical scholar Robert Alter—that Yiddish-based humor always had a tiny scope. In fact, this was its point: to whittle the metaphysical down to the daily (“If you want to forget all your troubles, put on a shoe that’s too tight,” said one Yiddish proverb).

  In any case, Good as Gold, Joe’s first openly Jewish novel, certainly trafficked in parent jokes, banal realities, and did so with gusto. Almost immediately, he decided his next effort would encompass all families—the generations of Jewish history. It would examine not only fathers but the Father. Joe Heller’s next book would pose a direct challenge to God.

  PART FIVE Die Trying

  16. Hard to Swallow

  WHEN IT WAS OVER and Joe could finally leave his hospital bed, emerge again into the world in a wheelchair, and visit a local restaurant, it was Jerry McQueen who, one night in April 1982, drove Joe to the Russian Tea Room, pulled the car onto the sidewalk, stopped within a few feet of the door, hugged Joe in his bearish arms, and carried him inside to be settled in his wheelchair at a cloth-covered table next to plush red leather seats. “I [had] never seen [Joe] so ebullient, so purely joyful,” said Barbara Gelb, another dinner guest that evening, along with her husband, Arthur, a New York Times managing editor, and Joe’s nurse-companion, Valerie Humphries. “That night, [Joe] was as close to euphoria as [he] had ever come.”

  A heavy rain was falling. “I was dry as a bone … when I was finally inside [the restaurant] in my wheelchair,” Joe recalled. “[The] others were drenche
d and disheveled.” During dinner, he felt “genuine happiness,” though it remained difficult for him to swallow food; chewing awkwardly, his cheeks partially numb, he covered his mouth with his hand.

  He had met Jerry McQueen through the Gelbs. Barbara had written a book called On the Track of Murder, all about McQueen, a homicide detective. A man “on good terms with himself and the world,” he was nevertheless anxious about his health—a trait he shared with Joe (sometimes, said Gelb, McQueen would “develop mysterious muscle twitches … that vanished as inexplicably as they arose”). He was pugnacious, wary, and witty. He was not tall and could be, Gelb said, “self-conscious about his height. Perhaps in compensation, he often walked with a semi-swagger, suggesting latent menace—James Cagney playing a bad guy. His hands were blunt-fingered, not formed for eloquence.”

  He was patient, a good listener, quick to pick up body language from others, perhaps a consequence of being the son of deaf parents who had never learned to speak. As a young cop, McQueen took adult-education courses at John Jay College, developing an interest in the Iliad and Socrates. He earned a B+ on a paper denouncing Socrates for so blithely accepting his martyrdom.

  But it was McQueen’s knowledge of the city that attracted Joe—as though no harm could come to anyone close to a man who could smell danger. As a rookie policeman, McQueen had paced every filthy inch of his precincts, gotten to know the shopkeepers and street toughs, learned local lingoes, got to know the stink of each block’s garbage. Like an animal marking territory, he had “peed on tenement rooftops,” he said, in alleys all over Manhattan. In command of birth and death, he had delivered babies and examined corpses for the last stories they told. He could glance at a place—say, the Hudson View Hotel, located near Riverside Drive in the West Seventies—and tell in an instant that among its eccentric residents, any one of them was capable of murder. By the time he’d met Joe in the mid-1970s, he was tired of perpetual discouragement. Almost half the city’s homicides went unsolved each year. Whenever a corpse appeared on a street, McQueen wanted to stick a “suicide note in his pocket, confessing to all our murders,” he said.