Reportedly, Valerie had the impression he was estranged from his children, but this wasn’t exactly the case. They’d show up if needed. But they were frankly suspicious of their father’s liaison with this woman. It was obvious to them what he had done. In the grip of illness and marriage woes, he had reached out for the first caretaker he could find, an enabler. The children were hurt on their mother’s behalf, confused, dismayed by his behavior. Sensing this—hurt and angry himself over the perceived loss of loyalty—Joe spoke to Erica and Ted “badly about the other,” Erica says. “My mother tried very hard to undo the damage”—to encourage affection and mutual engagement—“but couldn’t, and the result is that [nowadays] Ted and I barely know each other.”
* * *
ON APRIL 11, 1987, Joe consented to set foot in Manhattan, where he would marry Valerie in the lavish East Side apartment of his friend Stanley Cohen, a lawyer whose legal affairs frequently took him to the south of France, and his wife, Toby Molenaar, a writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker.
In the days before the wedding, Joe was voluble and excited. “I was helpless. [Valerie] took care of me,” he told a Boston Globe reporter, recounting, to his own amazement, how he’d gotten to this point. “There were no secrets between us, absolutely no pretensions. I discovered she was the most cheerful person I had ever known. She had fun listening to me, and I had fun listening to her. I guess it all boils down to her positive attitude.… I’m going to marry Valerie because there’s no one in the world I love more. We learned to live successfully with each other when she was taking care of me. She made my life entertaining when it wasn’t entertaining.… [In time, friends] invited me to parties. Valerie knew exactly how to push the wheelchair in front of the corridor and maneuver me inside. So she came with me to parties and we became social creatures. This was our ‘dating.’ My life became ‘our’ life.”
Speed told Joe he didn’t have to marry Valerie. The “engagement came about because I didn’t know what to give [her] for Christmas,” Joe said. “She had never been engaged or married so I gave her an engagement ring. I said, ‘Is this a serious engagement?’ She said, ‘Yes.’”
He mused, “I do know I like the idea of marriage.… I never thought I’d marry again because I never thought I’d take time to look. This was one of the great benefits of my illness. I met Valerie under the most trying circumstances and the trials brought us together. Marriage will put my life in context again. I really like being attached to somebody.”
The wedding was small. Joe’s kids did not attend. Valerie, with her hair cut short, wore a traditional white lace dress and pearl earrings. Her reddish hair, red cheeks, and red lips glowed warmly against the apartment’s pale blue walls, parquet floors, and richly colored paintings in elaborate gold frames. Joe wore a simple blue suit with a plain red tie. He was trim and fit, his white hair swept away from his forehead. All day, he infected his friends with loud, sincere, and hearty laughter.
* * *
THE LONG VIEW, the tunnel of history, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle—Joe had been contemplating these things, reading and researching, since his illness. He was in the mood for summing up, for Big Picture thinking.
He felt he had to move fast. “I’m in the twilight of my career,” he told friends matter-of-factly. In an astonishingly short time for any author, but especially for Joe, he had, since his recovery, completed God Knows, No Laughing Matter, occasional pieces (on illness and food) for McCall’s magazine and the New York Times’ “Sophisticated Traveler” column, and completed preparatory reading for a novel “about money and war.”
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says, “[W]riting … has this strange quality about it, which makes it … like painting: the painter’s products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence.” The quote intrigued Joe. It affirmed his aesthetic approach, and renewed his energy for attempting another “new” kind of novel.
He had once said, “I like to think of the books I write as being interesting in themselves, rather than in just what they say. It’s like a painting. A Renoir nude is not telling you about the nude; the painting itself has an existence. Not because of what’s in it. It’s like what I try to do with my books. The book itself is what it’s about.” If his novel’s ostensible subjects were “money and war,” its style—the experience of it—would be painterly, whatever that meant.
When friends asked what he was working on, he muttered art, philosophy: “There’s no evidence that Socrates even lived.… And Plato never says anything about himself. Aah, the more I talk about it, the less interesting it sounds.”
Fortuitously, Joe was reading—in addition to the Greeks—three books that crystalized the method he was groping toward: Julian Barnes’s novel, Flaubert’s Parrot; Gary Schwartz’s 1985 biography, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings; and Simon Schama’s 1987 study of Dutch commerce, trade, and culture, The Embarrassment of Riches.
Flaubert’s Parrot was a meditation on the French writer’s art. It read less like a novel than a series of philosophical disquisitions on the creative process. Joe admired it enormously, not least because it made a distinction between art and artist, the one an ideal, the other a flawed reality, a needy individual scrabbling in a deeply unsatisfactory world.
Gary Schwartz’s portrait of Rembrandt supported this view. Schwartz emphasized the gap between the artist’s exquisite paintings and his squalid life. Rembrandt’s days and nights had all been about money. To Joe, he was part Milo Minderbinder, hustling and dealing, and part Bob Slocum, manipulating his poor son, Titus, whose trust fund Rembrandt tried to control.
The Embarrassment of Riches traced links between seventeenth-century Dutch art and business. Schama showed how Rembrandt’s paintings were tied to social prestige; how art, as a commodity, promoted Dutch sovereignty and legitimized its cultural codes; how art and politics were the tools of a particular social class whose passion—no, sole purpose—was to generate money from money, and did so by rigging markets and going to war.
All of this sounded quite contemporary to Joe. It dovetailed with his experience as an artist caught in a commodity culture out of control (to his benefit and harm). His pal Mario Puzo often spoke of the choice he’d made to stop writing “literary” novels and do everything he could to capitalize on The Godfather’s success. “If you’re a guy who has a wife and children, and you continue to write small classics, you’re committing murder. You’re murdering your family,” Puzo would say.
Joe wanted to earn serious money from serious art, and he labored hard at it, though he remained doubtful it was possible. “[T]here’s … something contradictory in what I say,” he admitted. “I’m one of the people who profit from the profit motive. I deal with money as a phenomenon and an inducement and portray this directly in my books.… I’m very conscious of money. I don’t sell my books to publishers for a small amount.… Negotiations are very intense. I know the value. [At the same time,] I … know when I have enough. But I also know I’d rather write the books I want to than leave writing and go speculate and double or triple my money.”
As his recent studies reminded him, material reality tends to shape (or corrupt) ideals. In the novel, he offered a vivid example of this dynamic, formulating the core theme of the book, binding the various topics (money, art, war).
Writing about seventeenth-century Holland, Joe said, “To a country whose economic health depended on sea voyages, the telescope, like cartography and all other navigational devices, was of primary importance, and even a man of great mind like the Dutch Jew Spinoza earned a respectable living grinding lenses.… Spinoza died at forty-four, from lungs ruined, it is conjectured, by particles of glass inhaled in the performance of his honest duties as a lens grinder.” With ideals and ethics, Spinoza had hoped to unlock the secrets of the universe. In the end, the materials with which men probed the cosmos undid him.
Just so with an artist or a writer. The art, the
ideal, was also a commodity (complete with price tag). Could the two be reconciled? Did they destroy each other? In Good as Gold, Joe had tackled this conundrum, calling into question the legitimacy of his novel by reminding the reader of its productness—its similarity to Henry Kissinger’s book, with which it competed in the marketplace.
Now again, thinking of the Greeks, of Rembrandt, of commerce and trade, Joe raised the paradox: In 1961, he wrote, Rembrandt’s painting, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer—made at a time when Rembrandt’s “reputation had dimmed” because he pursued his art rather than the portraits the public wanted from him—sold to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art at a record-breaking price of $2.3 million. That was the year Joe—who would earn record-breaking advances for novels he hoped were ambitious works of art—published Catch-22, the book that made him a brand-name author (people spoke of a Heller, as they did of a Rembrandt).
Through this ingenuous combination—a meditation on Rembrandt creating Aristotle on a canvas that lands in contemporary New York—Joe achieved the long view in his novel. The setup enabled him to discuss Greek ideals of art and democracy, the beginnings of modern trade and economic manipulation, and ongoing worldly debacles. In Joe’s hands, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was an extension of a grubby back alley in old Amsterdam.
History unraveled as a blur of folly: “From Athens to Syracuse by oar and sail was just about equivalent to the journey by troopship today from California to Vietnam or from Washington, D.C. to … the Persian Gulf,” Joe wrote. The consequences of these travels—and the sense that nothing would ever change—went without saying.
In Joe’s conception, as Aristotle’s figure emerges on Rembrandt’s canvas, he observes his surroundings, including present-day New York:
“A man cannot expect to make money out of the community and to receive honor as well,” [Aristotle] had written in Athens in his Nicomachean Ethics.
In Sicily [where the painting of Aristotle first got shipped] he was no longer positive.
In London and Paris he began to have doubts.
In New York he knew he was wrong, because all the people who had contributed to the acquisition of his painting by the Metropolitan Museum of Art were making much money out of the community and were held in very great honor, especially after the purchase, for on the brass wall label in the museum the names [of the donors] … appear[ed] alongside the masterpiece with the names of Aristotle, Homer, and Rembrandt.
Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself.
Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.
When most of a nation’s money sits in the vaults of an exclusive social club whose existence is predicated on the adventurism of war, waged to pry open global markets, justice cannot flourish, Joe argued. The public good will not be served, and the most terrible suffering will fall on children.
This view had animated all of Joe’s novels—never more explicitly than this one, which at first he called Poetics, after the Aristotle book he had first read as a graduate student at Columbia. Later, he taught Poetics at the Yale Drama School. When published, the novel’s title became Picture This.
Joe had crafted a painterly verbal style by flattening his prose, deleting adjectives and adverbs, muting anything distinctive in the voice. Individual sentences have the quick, sometimes tentative, investigative quality of a brushstroke. There are few transitions, mooting the whole question of anachronisms (for there is no single setting, in time or place). As much as possible, given the nature of writing, the reader is forced to confront the entire novel at once, as one might a painting on a wall.
Socrates (the provocateur) dies—indeed, accepts his death—in the penultimate chapter, a Heller scapegoat: “[T]here was [no] tolerance … for the satirical dissent for which Socrates was notable.” Today, the world knows only an idealized version of Socrates through Plato’s writing. The sacrifice of material reality (the philosopher’s body) makes possible the ideal of artistic portraiture.
And the uses of art? On this subject, Joe, the old antiwar playwright, was grumpier than ever: “Aristophanes,” he said, “was writing [satirically] about an autocratic wartime leader who was at the height of his popularity. / Athens voted first prize to both these plays. / And voted … to continue the war.”
* * *
“IN WHAT I HOPE is an amusing way, it’s really an extremely pessimistic book,” Joe conceded in a conversation with Bill Moyers for Public Television’s World of Ideas. Picture This, Joe said, does not flinch from the fact that “the United States is … founded solely on the philosophy of business … [and] is the only society in which virtue has become synonymous with money.” The word democracy does not appear in the Constitution, he said. “Democracy was always a threat that [the Founding Fathers] wished very much to avoid.… They felt that the mob—that’s a word they used—would not know how to vote, would not know where their interests lay. The other fear was that the mob indeed would know where their interests lay, and … would vote [accordingly].”
Beyond all this, Greek history teaches that a pure “democratic ideal is [not] even possible,” Joe said. “[T]here can be [no] such thing as participatory democracy. One of our illusions—and it’s a very comforting illusion—is that by voting, we are participating in government. Voting is a ritualistic routine. The right to vote is indispensable to our contentment, but in application it’s absolutely useless … [because] the candidates are supported by people who are from the same financial and social status.”
When Moyers accused Joe of fatalism, Joe said, in effect, Read your history. “I went back to ancient Greece because I was interested in writing about American life and Western civilization,” he said. “In ancient Greece I found striking—and grim—parallels.… Extremely grim. In the war between Sparta and Athens, the Peloponnesian War, I could see a prototype for the Cold War between this country and Russia.”
“Our popular notion of Greece is of a wise, humane, intelligent, moderate society. Is that what you found?” Moyers asked.
“I didn’t find that at all,” Joe said. “I found that as democracy was instituted, Athens became more chaotic, more corrupt.… [C]ommerce was important to Athens, so business leaders … obtained control of the political machinery, and Athens became more and more warlike.” There you have the genesis of present-day American democracy. “I’m trying to say that the … people in a democratic society are no more rational than they are in any other type of society,” Joe ventured. “They are manipulated. It is the function of a leader in a democracy, if he wishes to be a leader, to manipulate the emotions and the ideas of the population.… [M]oney and conquest and commerce [are] the constants in human history.”
In his curmudgeonly tirade, he seemed to confirm one reviewer’s observation that the author of Catch-22 had become like the embittered, sassy Mark Twain who had tired of life and begun to think of himself as a philosopher rather than a humorist.
In general, reviewers of Picture This, which was released on September 6, 1988, expressed perplexity, impatience, and irritation. Richard Raynor, in The Times of London, praised Joe’s “most endearing quality,” his refusal to “take institutions seriously; or rather … he takes them so seriously they become hilarious.” Other writers hated the book or fumbled to offer a coherent response. “[I]t represents very spaced-out writing,” said Robert M. Adams in the New York Times Book Review. “It may be funky as well, and for all I know it’s awesome.” The New York Daily News proclaimed the novel to be “[t]hought-provoking,” but then gave up: “It is as difficult to write about as it probably was to write.”
In the Washington Post Book World, Jonathan Yardley pulled no punches. “It’s true, as Dr. Johnson put it, that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’” he said, “but it’s also true that writing done primarily for money often lacks both inspiration and authority—in both of which ‘Picture This’ is no
tably deficient.… ‘Picture This’ may do wonders for Joseph Heller’s bank account, but what it is likely to do for his literary reputation is another matter altogether.” Clearly, Joe had not “tossed off [the book],” Yardley said. “[H]e seems to have worked diligently at it.” But “[m]ore’s the pity”—the novel was “random,” “unoriginal,” and “ill-digested.”
Yardley’s view found support in most major review outlets. Walter Goodman of the New York Times sneered, “We have picked up a word from the Greeks for this sort of thing. Sophomoric.”
Goodman’s words “had a devastating effect on me,” Joe confessed. He endured the worst reviews of his career; in many cases, it was hard not to believe the confluence of money and art had not shaded the responses, making for disturbingly personal remarks. “‘Picture This’ … is devoid of energy, bite, wit, imagination—of just about everything save a dogged determination to plow through to the final page and fulfill the contract’s demands,” Yardley wrote. “At its conclusion, one can only cringe at the prospect of what the ‘sequel’ to ‘Catch-22’ may bring.”
Not surprisingly, Picture This sold dismally.
“Very few complex good books are popular to a mass audience,” Joe said.
Apparently, readers wanted Mad magazine. Joe was giving them the old Commentary—which most of them wouldn’t have known about anyway. Late in life, the trouble with the long view was this: Few were left to share it.
Just One Catch Page 50
