Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  But Joe also had in mind, in his disgust for the city, publishing in its “bulked-up” form. His hankering for the largest advances he could get and his enjoyment of celebrity had helped alter the business in the last three decades. But now, even those who benefited from the changes wondered what kind of monster sat among them. “As far as a literary scene, there is only one major place—and that is Manhattan,” Joe said ruefully, repeating, “I’ve had enough of it.” Describing the current “scene,” journalist Henry Dasko wrote:

  Media and communication conglomerates [had] … [steadily] swallow[ed] independent companies from related fields, including magazine and book publishing. Cutthroat competition … replaced the leisurely, clubby atmosphere once prevalent in editorial offices. Writers and artists, like movie stars in Hollywood’s old studio system, became treasured business assets, and media and entertainment tycoons with unlimited resources—Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western, Steve Ross of Time Warner, Si Newhouse of Condé Nast—reached out to ensure that their prized properties were treated accordingly, with Hollywood-grade perks and maximum exposure in publications they owned and TV programs they controlled or influenced. In the 1980s, publishing became a business so glamorous that even magazine and book editors—Tina Brown, Joni Evans, Sonny Mehta—became celebrities on their own.

  Mort Janklow, a lawyer turned literary agent, liked to sit in his office, located appropriately between rows of art museums and the headquarters of American advertising, talking about the Hearst Corporation, which had bought William Morrow, with its extensive backlist and well-regarded children’s book division, for $25 million in 1981. “Since that time,” Janklow bragged, “I have made a few deals for individual authors in excess of that amount.”

  Janklow’s new business partner, Lynn Nesbit, said, “It is the easiest thing in the world right now to make a great [book] deal. Look at the money being paid! You can take almost anything and oversell it.”

  This was true, Joni Evans explained, because as “we consolidate, there is a panic among the five or six megapublishers whenever a new brand name [author] comes on the market. It’s like six countries and we each want to make sure we have the best strategic defenses, so we have … overinflated prices.”

  In time, the waste and excess on which publishing floated would sink large portions of the industry, as would happen in every sector of a national economy bingeing without forethought, but for now, many authors, agents, and editors seemed willing to trade quality for Solomon’s curse: the rewards to be snatched from apparently limitless piles of money.

  Joe had grabbed his share. He was a brand name. But he was battered. The reviews for God Knows had hurt him—not just the criticisms but also the tone of them, a loud cynicism unavoidable when people (in this case, reviewers) felt abashed to be part of a system everyone believed to be badly out of control.

  It was a relief, then, to sit in East Hampton and hide behind Speed Vogel as they drafted the book about Joe’s disease. “I wanted the book. I was trying to start a list—it would have been one of my first acquisitions,” recalls LuAnn Walther, Speed’s friend at Bantam. “I hadn’t seen anything like the story of that illness and the way Speed became part of Joe’s recovery. It struck me as an interesting idea for a nonfiction book. My editor in chief at the time, Linda Gray, was dubious about it. It may be that I wasn’t able to bid on it. I don’t quite remember. Maybe Candida didn’t think a young editor at a mass-market publisher was right for it.”

  Clearly, in marketing terms, the book would be a risk. God Knows had become a bestseller, but Joe’s critical reputation was shaky. Readers wanted another Catch-22. Nonfiction? A medical ordeal (not the happiest of topics)? A coauthor—a guy named Speed? Are you serious?

  The book ended up at Putnam, with Faith Sale. Known as a literary editor, and a devoted writers’ advocate, she had worked with Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Amy Tan, and Donald Barthelme. She had gone to Putnam in 1979 at the behest of Phyllis Grann, the first female CEO in publishing, and a woman who “[made] books [like] Spielberg [made] movies,” according to Tom Clancy, one of her brand-name authors. Grann modeled herself on the “mogul mode,” and was famous in the book biz for her Thursday-morning breakfast meetings, the “only breakfast meeting where no food is served,” said one of her colleagues. It was all business, all the time.

  Sales, sales, and bigger sales were Grann’s goal, but she had hired Faith to add prestige to the house. She left her alone to do her work. Speed and Joe liked Faith enormously. Her editing philosophy consisted of “back-and-forth exchange[s], in which both author and editor benefit from listening as well as speaking/writing,” she said. She recalled that the “first time I was to edit [Joe], I could hardly bring myself to speak to him.… Who was I to presume to improve anything this world-class writer had put on paper? And [at first] he confirmed my worst fears by saying no to every suggestion I made. Little by little, however, in the course of two or three or four … phone sessions, during several days of each of many weeks, he went back and changed every spot I had pointed to. By the end of the process, he was deputizing me to do whatever I thought was necessary if I couldn’t reach him.… [but] I didn’t make the smallest change without consulting him.”

  Speed enjoyed not only Faith’s editorial acumen but also Joe’s, and the critiques of her assistant, Ben McCormick. The persona Speed projected in the book was perfectly in tune with his real-life demeanor, but initially he had difficulty finding the right ironic tone. On one page of an early draft, concerned with Speed’s depiction of Joe’s domestic helplessness, Faith scrawled in the margin, “You mustn’t sound mean. Playful, yes.” A few times, Joe winced at cruel-sounding passages meant as jokes about Joe’s occasional grumpiness.

  “I’m not that way, but if you want to write it like that, go ahead,” he told Speed.

  “Ask Valerie if you’re like that,” Speed replied.

  A reporter, overhearing one of these exchanges at the East Hampton house, said Valerie, on the hot seat, responded, “I can’t make a comment. I’m eating here and I’m sleeping here. I can’t say a word.”

  “I don’t think I snarl [as Speed wrote in the book],” Joe said.

  Valerie said, “I don’t want to jeopardize…”

  “But I must concede this because my other friends have this impression of me,” Joe said. “Valerie doesn’t deny it. I can be impatient. I am not a good listener.”

  “I don’t want to jeopardize my position,” Valerie said. “No.…”

  “With Valerie, with friends, if they’re telling me something and I think they’re digressing or taking too long to get to what they want to say, I will say, ‘Get to the point,’ or ‘Why are you telling me this?’”

  Sometimes, while drafting No Laughing Matter, Joe felt Speed was imitating his style. After one mild disagreement, Speed said, “How many times am I going to have to keep rewriting this?”

  Joe gave his friend narrative openings, writing in the margin of a handwritten page, “Here’s an entry for you into the Gourmet Club, if you want one” or “You can use this [passage], if you want to.” Speed had landed in as fine a creative-writing course as anyone could imagine.

  No Laughing Matter was jazzed by contrasts: Speed on the move (frequently on his bike), Joe paralyzed in bed; Speed capable, buoyant, a self-described luftmensch (literally “airman,” according to Sanford Pinsker, “the sort of person who regards life as a roller coaster”), Joe helpless, bitterly melancholy, in spite of his unflagging humor.

  The loyalty of Joe’s pals makes for a moving primer on friendship. Today, medical narratives are common, a booming publishing trend, but in 1986, when the book appeared, they were not so plentiful. The book’s mirth and restraint, as well as its remarkable lack of self-pity, remain refreshing. Joe’s eye for situational ironies and institutional absurdities (in hospitals and courtrooms) was as sharp as ever.

  In one review of the book, in the East Hampton Star, a medical doctor, Jay I. Meltzer, wrote that Joe un
masked himself as passive, unable to communicate with his doctors. In the ICU, Joe suffered “an altered mental state brought out by helplessness and withdrawal of the usual stimuli of life and its replacement by noise, constant activity, observation, and the feeling of being an object in an ambience of death.” The book, Meltzer concluded, was a “picture of overwhelming denial.”

  As David Seed points out, the good doctor did not “consider how [much] artifice may be playing a part in No Laughing Matter. The role of passive victim was no doubt attractive to Heller [as a narrative device] because it opens up all sorts of possibilities of self-mockery and irony in his account.”

  Yet nothing Joe wrote failed to happen. The book’s structure, with Speed as narrative buffer—comic relief, contradictory voice, at some points a silent presence stopping Joe from considering topics further—enacts repression.

  As usual in a Joseph Heller book, a crucial death occurred in the penultimate section. Speed wrote: “With a peaceful smile, [Joe] turned his face toward mine and softly murmured, ‘It’s been such a wonderful year.’ He looked up into my misty eyes and said, ‘I’m going now. Thank you.’ Slowly his eyes fell closed and he died in my arms.”

  A marvelous parody of sentimentality, which No Laughing Matter had resisted, the passage gave Joe a comic opening to the book’s finale: “I did no such thing. What the hell’s the matter with him?.… What I did do that evening was enjoy a hearty dinner of the pot roast he cooked.”

  But the passage repeated a pattern Joe knew was central to the vision of his novels: a sacrifice, ensuring the main character’s survival. In this instance, Joe was main character as well as sacrifice. The moment occurred following harrowing depictions of disease and the dissolution of his marriage: further evidence that he saw his old life as finished (for it is almost certain Joe arranged the book’s ending).

  He had died and he had survived—as he had as a child when his tonsils were taken, as he had over Avignon. Help him. I’m all right.

  And now: the fullness of days.

  * * *

  “[T]HIS IS AN INTOXICATING experience unlike any other I’ve ever had,” Joe said. “I don’t want to take it in stride. I want to revel in it.”

  He was speaking of his October 1986 visit to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Catch-22. Flyers featuring a naked Yossarian in a tree overlooking the school were posted on campus, a sleek, modern facility at the base of Pikes Peak. Academic papers were presented on the cultural, social, and theological aspects of the novel. The movie was screened. A birthday cake with twenty-five candles was produced. And when Joe was introduced to the cadets in a cavernous auditorium, nearly “nine hundred future officers stood as one to applaud the white-haired author,” said the New York Times.

  Norman Podhoretz, Joe’s neoconservative nemesis, publicly disparaged the fact that a military institution would honor a book he considered damaging to America’s might, not to say the souls of the nation’s youth. But Col. Jack Shuttleworth, head of the Academy’s English Department, said, “We want these men and women to be a thinking part of a large military bureaucracy. We don’t want them to be victims of the Colonel Cathcarts of the world. To put it bluntly, you don’t want dumb officers out there protecting your country.”

  Joe was impressed with the officers in training. “We oversimplify our military,” he observed. “We think they have one mind. But they are very educated today and they want their families and students to be well educated. The degree of acceptance here, maybe even love, for the book is very surprising, and gratifying.”

  He spoke to the cadets about the novel’s continued relevance. “I don’t understand the merger mania sweeping American business, but I’m sure Milo [Minderbinder] would,” he said. As for the catch: “It doesn’t exist. That’s the catch. If it existed in writing or something, we could change it.”

  Not all students were admiring. “I’d like to know what your book should make those of us at the Air Force Academy think of our duty to defend our country,” demanded one freshman, with a grim and angry look on his face.

  Calmly, Joe said, “Well now, there’s nothing in the book that says you shouldn’t defend your country. It’s been called an anti-war book, but it’s certainly not an anti–World War II book. There is never an objection raised in the book to the legitimacy of our participation in World War Two. The conflict … had to do with individuals, individuals being under an authority that has no concern for those individuals and their needs as human beings. The whole sensibility of the book is not about fighting in World War II but about the war between individuals and this inhuman, bureaucratic authority.”

  The young man sat back down, although his combative demeanor did not abate.

  Students offered Joe an example of an Air Force Academy catch-22: Before repairing a uniform, it had to be freshly cleaned. But the cleaning staff had orders not to clean any uniform needing repairs.

  While the celebration unwound, newspapers and magazines worldwide noted Catch-22’s birthday and debated its legacy. Writing in the New York Times, John W. Aldridge said the novel was a “monumental artifact of contemporary American literature, almost as assured of longevity as the statues on Easter Island. Yet … we [are still learning] how to read this curious book and, as is the case with those statues, to understand how and why it got here and became what it is instead of what we may once have believed it to be.”

  On its arrival, he said, the book “seemed anomalous and more than a trifle ominous,” but it appeared to answer Philip Roth’s complaint in his essay “Writing American Fiction,” printed the same year, that American experience “stupefies … sickens … infuriates,” and makes any attempt to write about it feeble. Heller answered Roth by creating a novel that “remind[ed] us … of all that we have taken for granted in the world and should not, the madness we try not to bother to notice, the deceptions and falsehoods we lack the will to try to distinguish for truth.”

  Aldridge concluded, “Twenty-five years later, we can see that the situation Mr. Heller describes has, during those years, if anything grown more complicated, deranging and perilous than it was in 1944 or 1961. The comic fable that ends in horror has become more and more clearly a reflection of the altogether uncomic and horrifying realities of the world in which we live and hope to survive.”

  Other critics named cultural icons stemming directly or indirectly from Catch-22: Dr. Strangelove, McHale’s Navy, M*A*S*H (television’s Hawkeye, a domesticated Yossarian). “[T]he novel’s first and greatest sequel was to be the war in Vietnam,” J. Hoberman wrote a few years later in ArtForum: “Scarcely a week goes by when the phrase [catch-22] is not invoked by someone” in print to describe “government regulations, hospital procedures … war … [or] matters of housing, ranging from mortgages and rent laws to co-op boards and homelessness.”

  Back at the Air Force Academy, Joe, addressing the largest audience he had ever faced (“Sir, could you autograph your book for me, please sir?”), said, “I’m as happy as a lark. All my fantasies have been fulfilled. The sad part to me is that now I’ll have to wait another twenty-five years to come back.”

  * * *

  WE THINK the world will be very interested in what Joe Heller has to say on the subject after all this time, Phyllis Grann announced in April 1987.

  Joe was not so sure.

  Grann was referring to the meat of the two-book contract Joe had just signed with Putnam Berkley—reportedly a four-million-dollar deal for an unnamed novel and a sequel to Catch-22.

  Most certainly the idea for a sequel did not come from Joe. For years, he had assiduously avoided the thought (though perhaps his experience at the Air Force Academy made the possibility of a sequel more palatable). Grann told everyone, “Joe is one of the greatest writers of my generation.” This acquisition, she said, was “one of the most exciting” Putnam had ever made. Eventually, Joe himself was persuaded. Grann would not disclose specifics of the deal
, which only fueled publicity. “If all the rumors of what we are said to have paid authors were true, they would never have to work again,” she said. The old adman in Joe enjoyed this game, even as the novelist in him shied away from it. “I will only confirm that I got less than I asked for and more than I deserve,” he told a New York Times reporter.

  Who wouldn’t want the money? If you wanted it, you had to give people what they demanded. This time, the top-dollar opportunity had come about because Bob Gottlieb had left Knopf to edit The New Yorker. Publishers, thinking Joe must be a free agent now, wooed him. His pleasant experience with Faith Sale on No Laughing Matter gave Putnam the edge—but on Phyllis Grann’s terms. The money was there. People wanted another Catch-22. How about it?

  What Joe wanted was to “write good novels.” That’s “[a]ll I’m trying to do,” he told Charlie Ruas. He believed even a recluse like Samuel Beckett wanted to be wildly successful. Any American novelist, if he’s honest, Joe said, would like to be as brilliant as Beckett and fiscally solvent as a writer of potboilers. In the end, Joe’s only “objective [was] to be successful in writing what I and other people would consider a serious work,” he said. Money had nothing to do with this ambition. It was partly a matter of character—like “my characters [I] may not be decent, but [I] do know what decency is”—and partly temperament. “I can be a fairly prolific writer if I don’t have distractions, because there is very little else that I want to do.… If I retired, I would live exactly the way I live now, assuming my health was good. Sleep as late as I want to, which is about eight in the morning, have a leisurely breakfast, and begin writing fiction. That’s what I want to do.”

  Money enabled him to do it. As for the mind-boggling amount of cash—well, it was a crazy culture, and there was no escaping the looniness. Joe had long associated money with life, and poverty with death. At least he could conduct his negotiations from a distance now, without traveling to Manhattan. He didn’t miss Manhattan—really, he didn’t. Editorial offices were awful—too much frenzy in the air. It was so much saner to sit on the back terrace, listening to classical music, reading Thucydides, Aristotle, and Plato, to whom he had returned with deep pleasure. He would soon be sixty-four years old. He had earned a little sanity. If only his children would visit from time to time … not long, mind you, just enough to stay in touch.…