18. The New World
ON THE LATE-EVENING sea, just along the shore, boats beat against the current. Joe didn’t much care for boats, and he rarely went to the beach—too many noisy children. On this day, he walked and ran a little on the sand, not to go anywhere, but to move his muscles, still weak, still heavy at unexpected moments. He didn’t get far. He had neither the will nor the stamina to complete a rigorous workout. Forward motion felt like backward sliding, especially where the sand was softest and wettest. Perhaps he would come back tomorrow, and then, tomorrow, run a little faster, stretch his arms past the rim of the island.
Most days, he exercised at the Omni Health and Racquet Club in Southampton, a modest gym whose unassuming facade would have fit any strip mall in America. The spa, pool, and rowing machines were too downscale to draw wealthy tourists; most of the patrons were locals, there to do their business and go home. Joe fast-walked on a treadmill, wearing street clothes, sometimes reading handwritten pages he had labored over that morning. Then he’d swim a few laps. Sometimes, the writer Sidney Offit saw him at the club. “Is [the spa] sanitary?” Joe asked him once. “I don’t even shower here. None of that Charles Atlas stuff for me. A muscleman kicks sand in my eye, I go to the ophthalmologist.” The staff and other club members seemed clueless about Joe. Good, Joe told Offit: “I prefer to sweat unobserved.” One day, when a young woman behind the front desk heard Joe and Offit discussing books, she said to Joe, “I didn’t know you’re a writer. What do you write?”
* * *
LIGHTLY PERSPIRING, hair damp from the pool, he would slide into his Volvo and drive the short distance to his house, a two-story clapboard tucked into a pinewood glade not far from the beach. He’d park in slanted shade from the eaves of the shingled roof, walk slowly past balustrades and ornamental pillars, unlock the door, and drop onto the floral-patterned couch at the edge of the dining room. Usually, the house would be empty except for Phillipe, a small and somewhat aggressive bichon frise, who got so excited when people came through the door, he’d frequently hump the legs of the guests. In the past, Joe had sworn he would never own another pet—he had been so devastated by the death of his old dog, Sweeney. But Valerie wanted Phillipe, and Joe had gotten attached to him, too.
Valerie played golf and tennis and went horseback riding. She had taken bridge lessons, figure-skating lessons, country line-dancing lessons. She started knitting. She radiated enough stamina for her and her husband. When her enthusiasms wore Joe down, he turned testy, inclined to see her this way: “She [is] a person who, unfortunately, to my way of thinking, [is] interested in just about everything, with equal and nondiscriminating curiosity and enthusiasm.” On days when Joe felt strong, absorbing a little of Valerie’s energy and endearing capacity for enjoyment, his judgment, though still ironic, softened: “Like Browning’s ‘Last Duchess,’ she tends to like whatever she looks upon.” For about ten years prior to becoming a nurse, she had worked as a secretary in Manhattan real estate offices and for Union Carbide. In East Hampton, she had landed in a dream, and savored it.
Joe hated it when she left, even for a short time, to visit her sister in Pleasant Valley or to see friends in the city. Whenever she traveled, she’d leave him preprepared meals to heat in the oven, but “I still use fifty dishes and bring chaos to the kitchen,” he admitted. If an appliance malfunctioned (or if he couldn’t figure out how to use it), he’d throw it away and go into town to buy another one.
Valerie had a “good mouth,” Joe said—that is, she liked to eat as much as he did. Eating together was one of their great pleasures. After dinner, which they often had out, Joe would graze in the kitchen, standing in front of the open fridge and spooning chocolate ice cream out of the frosty container, or snatching a bagel from the sideboard, or finishing a half-eaten banana he’d left lying around that morning. Sometimes, he drooled a little when he ate—the numbness in his face had never entirely vanished—and sometimes the exertion of raising hand to mouth hardly seemed worth the effort. But it was one of the blessings of his life that his digestive system remained robust and steady. He’d scold Valerie playfully for not helping him bring more discipline to his snacking. “Hide the cookies,” he’d say. He had, he lamented, a “kind of nervous appetite.”
The couple went to bed, turning off lamps one by one in rooms still decorated, simply and tastefully, the way Shirley had left them. Phillipe padded closely up the stairs behind Joe. Purple night filled the windows. Valerie liked to read British thrillers in bed. Joe reread F. Scott Fitzgerald (“I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes…”).
At dawn, Phillipe would leave his place on the floor, sneak into bed, and find a tight, warm spot between Valerie and Joe.
On the best of mornings, sunlight glimmered through the dining room windows onto a smooth, flat table, pale vases on the living room mantel, and creamy white lamp shades. Valerie liked to sleep late. Just past eight or so, after coffee, cereal, and a grapefruit, Joe slipped on his trifocals and slipped out back, passing through the sliding glass door to reach his studio in the guesthouse. On the shelves, dozens of copies of his books, translated into various languages. Once, the child of a guest who had stayed in the low wooden house said, “Boy, this guy really likes to read books by Joseph Heller!”
Joe sat in a swivel chair at the desk and turned on the new computer he’d bought. Word processing was certainly more convenient than clacking away on an old manual or electric typewriter—and easier on his arms and hands—but he still preferred to write with pen or pencil on note cards or yellow legal pads. Depending on the season, he’d pull a cardigan sweater over his cotton shirt and sit with his pads by the backyard pool for two or three hours, listening to classical music on the radio and the soft calls of terns in the blue-white sky.
Like the staff members at the health club, many local bookstore clerks did not recognize Joe as an author—but this was par for the course on Long Island, where writers were as common as sand dunes. Besides, the stores—Bookhampton, Encore, Canio’s—were filling up with celebrity tell-alls, ghostwritten tracts by disgraced politicians and TV personalities. To be an author meant you were really a talk-show host, or something of the sort. Once, Regis Philbin, later famous for emceeing the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? walked into Encore Books. He wanted to see his book display. Later, he joked on a TV program that the cheeky desk clerk didn’t know him. “I acted like I didn’t know who he was because that’s how most authors in the Hamptons like to be treated,” Wendy Rhodes, the young employee, protested when she heard this. “Stephen King has been in here three times this summer and we ignored him,” said Deborah Schall, the store manager.
“Writers out here are like earthworms in a bottle, trying to suck nourishment from each other,” James Jones once observed of the Hamptons. “It’s weakening to weak writers, and it’s not strengthening to strong writers.”
“I don’t see it,” Joe said when asked by a magazine reporter if East Hampton had become a literary town. Novelists are temperamentally antisocial, he insisted. They don’t like to hang out with one another. John Knowles agreed. “This isn’t an art colony,” he said. “This is [just] a rural potato-growing place.”
Of course, Long Island had a history of attracting artists and writers, as well as the wealthy. As early as 1849, James Fenimore Cooper, who went to Sag Harbor to begin a whaling enterprise, decried the changes occurring on the island, the way the “rustic virtues” he so dearly loved were “rudely thrown aside by the intrusion of what are termed improvements.” These days, students still made pilgrimages to see the painting studios of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Each summer, a Bridgehampton art gallery hosted a John Steinbeck Book Fair, held in honor of the distinguished former resident.
Writers had certainly swarmed the area in recent years. They gathered in gravel-lined gardens behind boxy hedgerows to drink white wine. They strolled the beaches in the summer’s afternoon mist, se
arching for seashells, literary subjects, love. George Plimpton, Irwin Shaw, Truman Capote, Jean Stafford, Willie Morris, Kurt Vonnegut, Gail Sheehy, John Knowles.…
When neighboring novelists did get together, there was “very little bitchiness,” Joe noted. “If I were to speak critically, I would eliminate most of the writers [here],” he said. “But the social situation transcends that.”
More darkly, it could lead to cronyism and mutual favors in book reviews and articles in critical journals.
“Very few people have done major work here,” Jason Epstein groused. “There’s too much social life. It’s too pleasant.”
Or as Barbara Howar put it: “If you have writers in to dinner, you set the food on the table early, because pretty soon they’re going to be bombed.”
Joe called these affairs “Gatsby parties.” Cynical, rueful, bemused by his compatriots’ self-indulgence, he nevertheless enjoyed the romantic atmosphere of lavish gatherings. “[E]very summer, I think Great Gatsbys are giving big parties out [here] right out of the novel,” he said.
Truth be told, most nights he’d just as soon stay home and read Fitzgerald’s novel. This author impressed him more than ever. Dipping into Gatsby, Joe marveled at the older writer’s faultless control of language, a gift Joe didn’t feel he’d ever fully developed. Fitzgerald’s combination of romance and realism, philosophy and poetry was stunning. Joe was also moved by the man’s example. He was “a successful writer, and then … a writer who saw himself go into decline,” Joe said.
* * *
BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN grew fonder and fonder of Joe once Joe settled permanently in East Hampton. Friedman saw the physical toll exacted by the “bumps he had taken in his life,” but he also observed that Joe was capable of “arriv[ing] at what appeared to be a totally and almost disreputably happy state.”
Friedman had lived for a decade on the South Fork. The day after Joe showed up, Joe “told me not to worry, he could get me invited to lots of parties,” Friedman said. They lunched regularly, usually with Julie Green and Speed (now married to the writer Lou Ann Walker), occasionally Mario Puzo. Once, they considered inviting James Salter to join their group, but Joe said nah, he was too good a writer.
Joe didn’t want to talk books or writing. He said he “didn’t really enjoy light reading because it was too heavy.” He was suspicious of decaf coffee. He thought it had more caffeine in it than regular coffee. He and Puzo talked about resurrecting a board game they’d invented years ago with George Mandel—all about horse racing—and making a million overnight.
One day, a young man approached the table and asked Joe what he thought about future generations. Joe looked at the kid, astonished. “Why on God’s earth should I care about future generations?” he said.
“Well, he did care, but he preferred not to be caught at it,” Friedman said. “He loved family, friends, his achievements, pretty girls.” Though they were contemporaries, Friedman considered Joe “authentic American royalty.”
Joe took to eating lunch downtown about four days a week, often in a restaurant called Barrister’s. He liked its casual atmosphere. He worried about the weight he was gaining, in spite of workouts at the Omni, but decided “people my age are either portly or dying.” He knew all the waitresses’ names: Kehau, from Hawaii; Lori (“He likes coffee, water, and extra pickles”); Robin (“He’s my favorite—people don’t go ‘ooh’ when they see him. For Christie Brinkley, they [go] ‘ooh,’ but Mr. Heller doesn’t have to wear sunglasses when he comes in here”).
Typically, Joe ordered oysters, mock-turtle soup, or a grilled chicken sandwich on rye, followed by a brownie covered in chocolate sauce and topped with whipped cream. Only rarely did he sip a martini at lunch. He got too sleepy if he drank. Alcohol he saved for the Gatsby parties.
Valerie was glad Joe found something to do in the afternoons instead of sitting around the house. At night, she liked to step out with him to parties, dress up and mingle, her tall, slender figure unmistakable in a crowd, her red cheeks and her eyes (the “color of lobelia,” one acquaintance described them) drawing stares, her cheerfulness a source of energy and delight (“She’d be happy even if she was a Kurd,” Kurt Vonnegut said). Depending on his mood, Joe enjoyed being swept along by her giddiness, or he’d sulk, prevented from grandstanding by her movement and talk.
Mostly, he went for the food. One night, he asked Vonnegut’s wife, Jill Krementz, for the recipe of the chicken salad she’d brought to a party. She wouldn’t give it to him. He kept needling her. Finally, she admitted she’d bought it in the city somewhere, but she wouldn’t reveal the name of the store. Later, when she went to the powder room, Joe sidled up to Vonnegut and pumped him for information. Vonnegut protested he’d get in too much trouble with his wife. He wouldn’t say a word.
Special events were common (therefore not really special) in the Hamptons. Regularly, Joe’s and Valerie’s names popped up in newspaper gossip columns, among the names of celebrities attending this or that soiree. There they were at the new Bobby Van’s; someone had spotted them at the Blue Parrot, eating killer enchiladas (and was that Paul McCartney slipping in the back?).
Joe cheered at the annual Artists and Writers Softball Game, held every August on the second Saturday of the month in a field in the center of East Hampton. The annual event had begun in 1948. That year, it featured Harold Rosenberg, Franz Kline, Pollock, and de Kooning. Eugene McCarthy had played second base for the Writers in 1968; Joe had been his teammate then, back when politics seemed to matter.
In September 1990, Hamptons notables, including Valerie and Joe, took the party on the road. They attended an international feast arranged by Craig Claiborne in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France. Chefs from all parts of the globe—Jean-Louis Palladin of Washington’s Watergate Hotel, Pierre Wynants from Comme Chez Soi in Brussels, Eckart Witzigmann from Munich’s Aubergine—served regional dishes, along with more than one hundred cheeses from Cannes, at a garden party at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild. One guest described the affair as “downright Byzantine.” Joe was eager to try the white asparagus prepared by Jimmy Schmidt of Detroit’s Rattlesnake Club, but most of it had wilted in transit.
Joe had only so much tolerance for gala shindigs. “Yeah, he lived the celebrity life, but he wasn’t really part of it,” said his friend Bob Towbin. “Some piece of him was always holding back.”
At his most sanguine, Joe told himself either he’d gotten everything he wanted or he’d stopped wanting it.
One night, at a billionaire’s party on Staten Island, Vonnegut approached Joe and pointed to their host. He asked his pal how it made him feel to know that just yesterday, this young man had made more money than Catch-22 has earned in nearly thirty years? I have something he doesn’t have, Joe said: The knowledge that I’ve got enough.
He preferred lunches with his cronies or quiet dinner parties with pals. Through Craig Claiborne, he had met Warner LeRoy, one of Manhattan’s most prominent restauranteurs, and Sam Aaron, former chair of Sherry-Lehmann, the jewel of New York wine merchants. Joe had gone to high school with Aaron’s wife, Florence, though they had not known each other. Joe enjoyed the Aarons immensely. With Florence, he could reminisce about Coney Island—hot dogs and hucksters. He spoke to Sam of “worldly” matters Valerie found boring: business, international trade. “Valerie was a bit of a dipsy-doodle,” Florence thought. “Sometimes, Joe got impatient with her chatter. We’d be at a dinner and he’d tell my husband to come over and sit by him because he didn’t want to sit next to her any longer. ‘Let her talk to your wife,’ he’d say.”
Most of all, Joe enjoyed staying home, puttering around the kitchen with Phillipe at his heels, making himself a sandwich with a day-old bagel and some leftover turkey. He’d put Count Basie on the CD player. With his sandwich on a plate, he’d flop on the couch and open The Great Gatsby: “… for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent … face to face for the last time in history wi
th something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
19. Closing Time
“THIS IS NO WAY for any writer to cap a career.”
This was the judgment of David Straitfeld, writing in New York magazine in September 1994. “If it were Philip Roth, no one would mind his getting creamed, just to see the smirk wiped off his face. But Heller is a nice guy, at least for a writer.… His career has been an honorable one. He has never, at least until now, directly or egregiously exploited the fact that he wrote such a popular and influential book. His biggest mistake was writing his best novel first.”
Straitfeld was relating the miserable saga of the sequel to Catch-22, a story that had taken a nasty turn when negative reviews of Picture This spread like coffee stains in newspapers. In retrospect, Joe admitted he’d hoped Picture This would “be another Catch … captur[ing] the intellectual imagination.” The critical drubbing shook him. “Even at my advanced age, with the money for the book guaranteed, it was an awful situation,” Joe said. “It does not make anyone happy to have something he’s worked on, and for which he has high hopes, be dismissed or attacked publicly.”
Over at Putnam, Phyllis Grann was not happy, either. The four-million-dollar package she had arranged in 1987 for Picture This and the Catch follow-up appeared foolhardy in the wake of the novel’s failure. For the first time, Joe had not earned back his advance (though whose fault this was, given publishing’s inflated prices, can be argued). Grann scrambled to contain the damage to Putnam’s account ledgers and her reputation for picking winners.
In 1989, Putnam announced that “by mutual agreement” with Joseph Heller, the contract for the Catch-22 sequel had been canceled. Grann insisted sales for Picture This had nothing to do with the decision. Joe did not feel prepared to begin writing the sequel at this time, she said. Putnam still had the utmost faith in his talent—he would write a nonfiction book for them in the near future, perhaps with Speed Vogel (no evidence suggests any such agreement existed formally). Joe told a reporter the contract was “an oppressive obligation. I had outlined [the sequel] and written a few chapters, but I sensed it was not the book they hoped to get. I did not want to put myself in the position of laboring to do a book which was not one I wanted to write.”
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