It was not just the weakness, the pain of lying helplessly while others weighed his fate, that saddened him, but an even eerier sense of having passed on, of witnessing the immediate aftermath of his death. It was as though he had the long view: his whole life, condensed, and now the afterlife, beginning modestly, almost imperceptibly—hushed, dim, still.
A stark counterpoint to this experience occurred a couple of weeks later. In his private room, with nothing else to do for extended periods but watch television, he was “dismayed to discover that there is not even ten minutes’ worth of authentic … news to be reported every twenty-four hours, and a good portion of that has to do with fires, record colds and snowfalls, gruesome homicides, and plane crashes that could have been excerpted from the newscasts of the week before.”
The long view and the imperceptions of impatience; ignorance of what is before us and inability to see past substanceless shapes: These conditions—their paradoxes, ironies, absurdities, and tragic consequences—had been Joe’s themes all along, but now, as he edited the final draft of his King David novel, the contrasts between longevity and shortsightedness, the tunnel of history and the boxy maze of the everyday, were visceral, sharp, almost as pungent as during his bombing missions.
They’re not trying to kill you; they’re trying to kill everybody.
What difference does that make?
There it was: the long view versus the short. And the hell of it was, the short view was nearly always celebrated as received wisdom. Nothing had changed over time. Received wisdom was the problem. By establishing it as the primary target of satire in the King David novel, Joe (granted, for now, a beyond-death perspective) hoped to better animate his perennial themes.
Through received wisdom, every generation learns that courage and purity of heart can overcome daunting odds—for example, David and Goliath. On that score, Joe’s David proclaims, “If I’d known in my youth how I’d feel in old age, I think I might have given … Goliath a very wide berth that day, instead of killing the big bastard and embarking so airily on the high road to success that has carried me in the end to this low state of mind.”
Obviously, Joe was not content to hurl javelins straight at the West’s shibboleths. Maybe bravery does overcome long odds. But what the accepted knowledge doesn’t tell us is how to cope with the emptiness that visits us once the odds are beaten and euphoria drifts away.
Nothing fails like success.
In his kvetching about the hollowness of grand achievement, it was hard not to hear, from Joe’s elderly king, the ruefulness of the author of Catch-22, gazing back at his youthful exuberance … his reevaluation of what the real odds were, and what was worth beating.
* * *
GOD KNOWS was published with great anticipation on October 8, 1984. The print run was 150,000 copies. The advances from European publishers were ten times higher than Joe had ever gotten—Finland coughed up thirty thousand dollars. Dell snatched the paperback rights. The Book-of-the-Month Club planned to showcase the novel. Almost immediately, Joe could count on earning close to $500,000. Medically, he had overcome daunting odds (he made great newspaper copy). He was back with his old editor, Bob Gottlieb—the unbeatable team.
Shortly before the book appeared, Art Cooper, the big, garrulous new editor of GQ, had run an excerpt of God Knows in the magazine. “I had decided to put Joe on the cover … the first time a writer had been on the cover, and I was a little concerned,” he recalled. “But Joe, who always reminded me that he was a handsomer version of Paul Newman, persuaded me that it would be a good idea. I did [it], and a couple years later I put Paul Newman on the cover.… [A]s always, Joe was right. [He] sold 150,000 more copies on the newsstand.”
The God Knows book party, held at the Russian Tea Room, was a festive and moving affair, with survivors of Guillain-Barré syndrome whom Joe had met during his illness on hand to celebrate more than the launch of a novel. Speed, Valerie, and Joe toasted with flutes of champagne.
“Like cunnilingus, tending sheep is dark and lonely work,” Joe’s David says.
“Some Promised Land,” he gripes. “To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO.”
These lines were quoted as evidence of the novel’s immature humor in the largely hostile reviews that appeared in the next few weeks. Reviewers compared the novel unfavorably to Mel Brooks’s comic monologue “The 2,000-Year-Old Man” and decried the trouncing of biblical tradition. “Apparently written on the principle that shockingly bad taste is automatically funny, God Knows deliberately exploits Samuel 1 and 2 in the worst possible taste,” said Library Journal. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in the New York Times, called the novel “very tired” and “shallow,” while Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post Book World, found it “repetitious, often annoying … [and] at odds with itself.” Time dismissed it as a “disappointing hodgepodge of repetition and irrelevancy” (a “slap in the face,” Joe said of that review).
Most vitriolic was Leon Wieseltier’s attack in The New Republic:
God Knows is junk. It is also a best seller. Thus historians will have employment. They will have the difficult task of explaining how it was that the arrested adolescence of a few Jewish men [i.e., Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Joseph Heller] became the cherished currency of an entire chapter of American culture.
God, and David, and the psalms, and all the strange and sublime things that Joseph Heller has … trivialized … have anyway survived worse.
The claw swipe at other Jewish novelists was telling: Wieseltier was not commenting on Joe’s literary intentions, his success or failure on aesthetic grounds. Rather, he was morally offended by the nature of the project, the way earlier critics had fussed over Philip Roth’s “defacing” of Jewish values in Portnoy’s Complaint or Saul Bellow’s depictions of indecorous Jewish behavior in Herzog. There was, in this criticism, an implicit charge of anti-Semitism, a concern that if we turn on ourselves, we give goyim the go-ahead to rush us full force.
“Look, I’ve adjusted to this, that my books are not going to get unanimously good reviews. Though with this one I had the expectation,” Joe said. “But all of my books deal in very rough, rude fashion with subjects about which there are great conflicts of opinion. And the average reader expects to be told in a few pages what the book is about, expecting the character to be fairly consistent in his personality.”
One of the few major reviewers to consider the book on its own terms was Mordecai Richler, writing in the New York Times Book Review:
The abundantly talented Joseph Heller has never accepted limits; neither has he repeated himself. He has yet to try to slip by with a “Catch-23” or a “Something Else Happened.” Instead, each time out, he has begun afresh, discovering human folly for the first time: himself amazed, irreverent and charged with appetite. It couldn’t have always been easy. The incredible success of his first novel … must, by this time … be maddening to him.… [I]f you are going to hit .400, don’t be so reckless as to do it in your rookie season.
Following the uneven Good as Gold, Richler wrote, “Mr. Heller is dancing at the top of his form again.” With God Knows, the “Jewish novel in America, which began by describing the immigrant experience and then sailed into the mainstream to excoriate Jewish mothers and deal with the ironies of assimilation, has … escalated to the highest rung of insolence, even [deliberate] sacrilege, addressing itself directly to God.” Like “all [of] his work,” this new novel was “informed by an uncommon generosity of spirit,” Richler said. “He doesn’t so much tell a story as peel it like an onion—returning to the same event again and again, only to strip a layer of meaning from it, saving the last skin for the moving [finale].” Readers, he said, were “unlikely … [to] see a more ambitious or enjoyable novel about God and man this season.”
* * *
AS IN EACH OF JOE’S NOVELS, the
conflicts in God Knows stem from a struggle between fathers and sons. In Joe’s previous book, says David Seed, Bruce Gold “becomes the head of a family which is constantly denying its own structure”—a circumstance that vexes all of Joe’s heroes. Yossarian’s military superiors deny they are a threat to his life; Slocum denies the effects of his aloofness on his children; Gold’s father denies the present, while the family’s conversations ignore the group’s warped dynamics.
King David also misses family stability. He yearns for a caring father, but each figure that might suffice—Jesse, Saul, God—disappoints him. Saul, especially, confounds David, hugging him to his breast, only to shove him away in jealous rage (it is easy to see Joe’s brother in Saul’s behavior: A father substitute for Joe, as Saul was to David, Lee vacillated between pride and envy as Joe went to college and achieved monumental success).
God retreats into silence. David must become the father, the responsible one, a development for which he is poorly prepared. Like Slocum, he overidentifies with his favorite son (“O my son Absalom!… Would God I had died for thee”) and longs for childhood’s pleasures. Guilt-ridden, he yearns to destroy himself, mentally hurling a javelin at his youthful face. In the end, under pressure from his estranged wife, David denies his family’s structure. He appoints his youngest son, Solomon, his successor instead of Adonijah, his eldest surviving boy.
Joe presents David as an underappreciated author. He claims to have written most of the Western world’s masterpieces; Shakespeare and Beethoven stole his best ideas, he says. He is a man devoted to, and fleeing, women: “I was always faithful to my wives and concubines.” A relentless self-promoter, David reels off a monologue as slick as an adman’s brochure.
Joe’s favorite narrative method—the retrospective elegy—is firmly established here. On his deathbed, David considers his life’s events, looking for the moment that made him the bitter husk he is. His accomplishments strike him as hollow; he is as politically successful, and corrupt, as Henry Kissinger in Good as Gold. He regrets the mess he has made of his marriage to Bathsheba. His children have foundered in various attempts to match his deeds.
His attendants have “perfumed [his] bed with aloes, cinnamon, and myrrh,” but “I can still smell me,” he says. “I stink of mortality and reek of mankind.” We meet David as we met Yossarian: in bed, doted on by nurses. But Yossarian is bursting with life. David is riddled with death. No wound, like Snowden’s, is necessary for the smell of his guts to come spilling into the open. He is rotting from the inside out.
Joe’s use of biblical material energizes the retrospective view. David’s story is both a look back, exploring the patterns of a life lived in full, and a prophecy, as the reader, familiar with biblical tales, knows what’s coming. The import of David’s actions for Western civilization is clear to us. As a key figure in Judaism and Christianity—two sides of a family that often deny their structural affinities—David is an all-encompassing father. His past remains our future. (On a personal level, Joe was aware of writing prophecy: David’s predicament, he said, predicted his illness.)
The novel’s structure demands a Socratic reevaluation of Judeo-Christian values. It does so by presenting narrative as denial, an elaborate cover-up justifying David’s actions. For example, David claims he would do anything to save his children’s lives, but, in fact, his adulterous behavior leads to the death of his infant, while his desire to hold power results in Absalom’s slaughter. In the first instance, David blames God; in the second, his general Joab. “David, it’s enough already,” Joab tells him as David weeps for Absalom. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.” But that’s the point. The spectacle, the elaborate design, the boasts and drama of the narrative, hide David’s complicity. As Joe depicts him, David is the West’s first master of spin.
Traditional narratives often reveal private motivations behind public careers. For instance, “Shakespeare’s method … [is] to show that what one is as a man determines what one is as king. In the plays of the Henry IV–Henry V cycle, Shakespeare chronicles ideal kingship, dramatizing that Hal succeeds as king precisely because he has previously succeeded as man,” wrote David M. Craig. “Heller’s method is exactly the opposite. Beginning with the record of kingship that the Bible supplies, he imagines what the man must be like who had done such deeds.”
That the king archetype enabled Joe to create his most fully formed character is an irony rooted in Joe’s wide reading. To begin with, he understood the difference between the Greeks’ and the Hebrews’ notions of character (two traditions that, not always easily, combine to form the heart of Western culture).
As Judith Ruderman says, “[I]t is the capacity for change, exhibited by biblical figures who are treated at length, that reveals the modernity of the ancient Jewish conception of character. As the writers and redactors of the Bible saw them, people were unpredictable—veritable centers of surprise.” By contrast, characters in Greek drama and poetry are “labeled with Homeric epithets, fixed tags by which they are [consistently] identifiable.” How is it, Joe wondered, that, during the course of Western history, Jewish characters in the Bible have come to be simplified (as heroes and villains) in the fixed manner of the Greeks? Go figure.
If, in his earlier novels, Joe’s conceptions of character were largely fixed (Yossarian, heroic in his innocence; Slocum, paralyzed by the something that happened to him; Gold, emblematically Jewish in Protestant society), in God Knows, he rejected centuries of simplistic biblical commentary. He embraced the old Hebrew view of the self, presenting a flawed and fully human King David. Sacrilegious on the surface, perhaps, the project was consistent with—and respectful of—the tradition from which biblical stories sprang.
At one point in the novel, Samuel insists it was Saul’s destiny to die in battle. David snaps, “That’s bullshit, Samuel.… We’re Jews, not Greeks. Tell us another flood is coming and we’ll learn how to live under water.” Far from traducing his Jewish heritage, Joe was engaging it more seriously than ever.
He often claimed he was not interested, one way or the other, in the existence of God: It is when an individual turns away from conceptions of the holy that the self, in its humble complexity, aware of its hungers and faults, starts to emerge. This point is illuminated by the retrospective view: An individual’s actions are not as important as what the individual makes of them. Meanings and patterns belong to reflection and reconsideration. David’s self-assessments contain both psychological and theological ramifications: On the one hand, we get a character study; on the other, a reexamination of Western culture’s ethical, political, and spiritual foundations, embodied in David. In this sense, Joe partook of the rabbinic tradition of the midrash, adding commentary, in the form of stories, to the Bible in order to elucidate its meanings.
“To the Rabbis … the Torah was the perfect, immutable word of God,” John Friedman and Judith Ruderman wrote. “Every letter, every word, every space between the words held strata of knowledge waiting to be revealed or interpreted. The superficial meanings of the words were merely that: the starting places for religio-literary excavation. A little digging, and an idea or story could even be found to mean the opposite of what one had thought at first glance.”
Meaning after the fact: the ultimate anachronism.
With God Knows, it became obvious that “midrash” had been Joe’s project all along—as, on some level, it was the task of many Jewish performers, writers, actors, and journalists of his generation: the comic routines of Lenny Bruce; the political analysis in Commentary; the book and motion picture parodies in Mad magazine.
If Western culture did not sparkle under the interpretive glare … well, don’t shoot the man with the spotlight. In God Knows, Joe presents Solomon, the father of Western wisdom, as a blockhead (nicknamed “Schlomo”), someone who jots down and repeats knowledge without understanding its uses.
Many critics said Joe’s portrait of Solomon had no basis in the Bible, but, in fact, for all his wisdom, the
biblical Solomon lives carelessly, shortsightedly, far beyond his means. He winds up fatally weakening the kingdom he inherited. For the first time in Joe’s work, a son outlives his father; through his profligacy, he undermines all that his father achieved.
Full of bitterness and regret, David understands one thing clearly: The short view will never suffice. Contemplating the beautiful young Shunammite Abishag, provided by his attendants to comfort him in his old age, he cries, “I want my God back; and they send me a girl.”
With this fourth novel, Joe’s prophecy skills improved. Just as Catch-22 seemed to anticipate Vietnam, Something Happened the “Me Decade,” and Good as Gold the neoconservatives’ lock on political power, God Knows sketched the greedy, grab-what-you-can entrepreneur who would spark the United States’ deepest economic crisis since the 1930s. He was there in the figure of Solomon—Western wisdom personified.
In the worst days of his illness, with the writing stalled on God Knows, Joe felt as paralyzed, physically and spiritually, as his beleaguered king. He was caught between events and the telling of them, preparing only for inevitable death. Now, largely recovered, with the novel behind him, he could take a longer, more sanguine view of his life. “There are such musical, soothing phrases in the King James translation [of the Bible], being ‘full of years and full of days,’” he mused. “I think implicit in that was a resignation that if one did live to the point where he was full of days, it was time to go.”
* * *
“I COULD DO without the city. It wouldn’t bother me if I never set foot in Manhattan again. I’ve had enough of it,” Joe told a New York Times reporter in the spring of 1987. He remembered his days in a wheelchair, when cabs wouldn’t stop for him. Stairs and escalators still gave him trouble. It was better to sit on his back terrace in East Hampton, watching trees and shrubs start to bud, staring at brittle gold leaves in his swimming pool, emptied for the winter, the pool’s aquamarine sides soothing to the eyes in the growing spring light.
Just One Catch Page 48
