He admitted he was daunted by the prospect of tackling another novel after Picture This, but he reread Catch-22 for the first time in years, and found himself tickled, amazed he’d once commanded such an extensive literary vocabulary. “[M]y reaction was, ‘My god, what talent I had,’” he said. Buoyed, he asked Candida Donadio to pitch the sequel to another publisher.
“I was told you can have this [book] for $1.2 million,” said one publishing insider. “A few days later, it was down to $800,000. The price was going south in a hurry.”
At Simon & Schuster, Dick Snyder said no. “Heller’s talent [is] exhausted,” he stated.
Reportedly, Donadio got two decent offers, which Joe refused. The money was insulting, he felt. Donadio was not in good shape. At the beginning of her career, she had been “maternal and nurturing to [all these] young guys, then many of them didn’t want that anymore,” Bob Gottlieb said. “They became stars and they didn’t want a ‘mamma mia’ any longer. And then she would be distressed.” Gottlieb had stopped working with her in the early 1980s because she became increasingly untrustworthy. “Well, she lied [to me], and then she was caught,” he said. “I mean she knew she had done something terrible. She was finally forced to acknowledge it, and I never spoke to her again.… [W]e just don’t lie to each other.… [I]t was a serious matter, and dealing with a well-known author and a great deal of money, and the whole thing was just a disgrace.”
She was often inebriated and forgetful, and she had not maintained her contacts in the television and movie industries. Her negotiations with editors smacked of desperation, a need to prove she could still pull off a big score. She would not speak of Thomas Pynchon or other writers who had left her. “She seemed so grief-stricken,” said one observer.
When she failed to get Joe the money he wanted for the sequel, he “dealt with her kindly but firmly,” Gottlieb says. “Joe was too clear-headed for her extreme psychic needs.” Joe turned to Amanda “Binky” Urban of International Creative Management, whom Straitfeld described as a “younger, more aggressive, less devotedly arty” agent.
At Simon & Schuster, Michael Korda told his colleagues that Catch-22 had sparked a “major moment in S & S’s postwar history”—therefore, the sequel should bear the S & S imprint. He overcame Dick Snyder’s resistance.
That’s one story. Another version says Urban demanded payback from Simon & Schuster for canceling publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho at the last minute. Urban had represented the novel; the publisher decided it was too obscene. Many publishing folk thought the Catch-22 sequel was her compensation for the Ellis debacle.
In any case, Joe received $750,000 for the novel—still a shoddy amount, as far as he was concerned, but by now he had resigned himself to taking what he could get. Publicly, he declared, “The advance was very modest. I felt much better that way.”
(Soon afterward, Dick Snyder was forced out at Simon & Schuster, after thirty-three years, replaced by a young man named Jonathan Newcomb, who believed literacy’s future lay in digital publishing.)
* * *
“… IN THE HOSPITAL, Yossarian dreamed of his mother, and he knew again that he was going to die,” Joe wrote on a note card. He had dreamed of his mother for the first time in years.
This sentence (in Closing Time, it opens the third chapter) marked the beginning of his sequel to Catch-22. Once these words came to him, he knew he could write the book. He scrawled another sentence: “When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out more than half a century ago and swept in almost all the world.” The first statement committed Joe to some of the high jinks of the previous novel; the second ensured a deeper register in the new book, a straightforward, serious, crepuscular tone, one that would encompass all of Joe’s learning and experience. His ambition was to write one more fiction the likes of which no other American had tried.
In Catch-22, he had devised a carnival ride of a novel. He would do so again—more deliberately this time—alternating realistic chapters with chapters as wild as fun-house mirrors, distorting reality. The two worlds—step inside, be amazed; now step aside, let others through—showed what had happened in half a century to fictional heroes (Yossarian, Dr. Strangelove) and actual World War II veterans (Kurt Vonnegut, Mel Brooks, Joey Heller).
If Coney Island had been the world, as barkers once claimed, then New York would be Coney Island. As Joe imagined it, a hellish amusement park stretched beneath the grim carneylike atmosphere of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, with tentacles reaching planet-wide. He hired a researcher, Ken Miller, a freelancer who had worked for Time magazine, to hang around Port Authority. Miller took notes on activities in and around the buses, and recorded anecdotes about the people who boarded them. He drew maps of the area and wrote numerous descriptions of it. (Joe had last caught a bus there years ago, to visit his pal Lou Berkman, who was dying of Hodgkin’s disease.)
“At 4:30 I stood contemplating the place from across Tenth Avenue, trying to achieve some communion with it before venturing inside,” Miller wrote on November 2, 1989. “[A] dark flood of people.… [It] smell[s] powerfully of piss.… [A] bony, scared-looking white woman in her fifties—she wears a kerchief over her hair, a clean, cheap raincoat and glasses.… [She] smells wonderfully of chocolate and mint.…” Joe underlined details he thought he could use, augmenting them with a list of images from Dante’s Inferno: “[C]ircular staircases; terraces; a dark wood; flaming eyes; heads reversed on bodies and forced to walk backwards; twinkling with little flames; frozen lake; cold rain; walled city; sinners walking in both directions.” Port Authority didn’t need much refurbishing to resemble a tidy little hell.
To refresh his memory, he typed up a list of characters from Catch-22. As he typed, he jotted outlines of possible scenes and lines of dialogue associated with the updated characters. At one point, he ripped out pages from a paperback copy of Catch and wrote notes about who these people might have become, given their personalities. The chaplain, still hapless, would bumble into trouble, posing an international security threat; Milo Minderbinder would employ everybody on the planet.
Line by line, Michael Korda’s editing hand was light, but he helped Joe shape and clarify portions of the book, particularly the autobiographical sections. He trimmed the manuscript from eleven hundred pages to just over six hundred. In the summer of 1994, four months after Joe had completed final revisions and was awaiting the novel’s release in the fall, he told reporters, “I’m keeping my distance from the publisher.… I’m in a state of curiosity [about how the book will be received,] but I’m not going to let it become acute.” Touchingly, somewhat defensively, he added, “There’s no indication of any hostility toward it [in publishing circles], or any dissatisfaction. I’m … secure.”
Still, he knew the book would disappoint readers who wanted Catch-22 again. “[W]e don’t live in that type of world any more,” he said. “The spirit of this novel is kind of moody.… [I]t is pessimistic.… We don’t have heroes. We don’t even know who our enemy is. The enemy is death—death!”
Then denial kicked in. He veered from the topic of the book. “I look good. I’m tan,” he said unconvincingly. “I have my hair. I don’t have many wrinkles for my age. Well, I do have a wart here.…” He worried his thumb.
With Joe out of earshot, Valerie wept one day when a reporter from England asked about the book. “I hate that title, Closing Time,” she said. “It’s as if he’s saying everything’s finished, and it isn’t.”
* * *
AS THE LATE-SUMMER leaves began to redden, Joe sat on his back terrace with a portable phone at his side, anxiously anticipating the first reactions to his novel. He reflected that, on balance, the last few years had been worthy of celebration, in spite of setbacks, restlessness, and pessimism. His father-in-law, Barney, had died of cancer in 1987. Joe missed the man’s gentleness, and regretted his estrangement from Barney and Dottie (she was now living in Florida). Joe consoled himself
with the fact that Barney had lived a long and enriching life. In 1990, Erica had frightened the family with an occurrence of breast cancer. But she had recovered and published a novel, Splinters. It included a wry portrait of her father in the guise of a roguish and untrustworthy young man (upon receiving a Nobel Prize, he lights out for Sweden). During her illness, her father was “around,” Erica says, “[though] not especially helpful, as I recall. But he was still dealing with me at that point as an extension of my mother because she and I were very close, and he was still in a rage at her.”
Joe met his children fairly often in the city. They’d have lunch or dinner, and he looked forward to seeing them. He pressed Erica for her mother’s secret pot roast recipe, one of his favorite meals and one he missed terribly; under strict orders from her mother, she would not give it to him. She still worked in advertising. Ted had joined Nickelodeon magazine as a writer and photographer. If he or Erica needed to know how “to punctuate a sentence at work, or … needed a fact, anything about anything,” they’d phone their dad, Erica says. “He was like Google pre-Google. He always knew about everything. He met my various boyfriends over the years at dinners and I generally spent at least one weekend a summer at his house.” She preferred to see him in the city, though, because she did not feel comfortable around Valerie. Her father’s apparent impatience with his wife’s talk and endless puttering unnerved her.
On his patio, Joe considered recent changes in the world, possibly worth celebrating—most notably, the fact that on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen. The Cold War had shaped most of Joe’s life, in its effects on American politics, culture, and economics. His novels had been Cold War novels, right down to the smell of the ink on the page. The period had given him his subjects, and influenced the scope and nature of his fame. The Cold War: peace without peace, Orwell called it. Was it really over? Well, human nature wouldn’t change (already, neo-Nazis were building hives inside the new, unified Germany), nor would the blunders of world leaders. Witness the Gulf War, Joe told friends. “[A]n atrocity,” he’d say. “Bush … didn’t [even] know why he was making war in Iraq.”
Joe celebrated travel. Often, he was asked to read or speak at universities, arts festivals, and conferences. “I’m a narcissist and an exhibitionist,” he admitted. “It’s good being the center of attention, having people make a fuss over me. And I love the good food, the good hotels.”
Invitations came from literary symposia, military commemorations, and—more and more frequently—Jewish Festschrifts. “It was always easy to accept who I was,” Joe told members of the Beth Shalom and Sinai Temple in West Los Angeles. “As I enter my senior years it’s something I’m very proud of and most comfortable with. I believe I’d rather be Jewish than anything else. And I’ve always felt that way.”
In the spring of 1992, he spent several weeks in Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center at Lake Como. There, he worked on Closing Time with “more [ambitions] than any one human could realistically hope to accomplish,” he said. In Rome, at a restaurant called Colline Emiliane, dining with Valerie and actors Mickey Knox and Martin Balsam, old acquaintances of Joe, he ran into Federico Fellini. Forty-five years had passed since Fellini had drawn a caricature of Joe in a side-street storefront. The men had little to say to each other. They sat praising the restaurant’s mushrooms. “The evening ended quietly with the restaurant emptied of all patrons but [us], with Balsam and I consuming one good grappa after another while Valerie and Mickey Knox waited with helpless impatience to steer us back to our respective hotels,” Joe recalled. “Finally, the owner poured the two of us another large glass, this one complimentary, on condition we go the hell home when we finished.” For one pleasant evening, Joe had scuttled back in time. He was on R & R again during the war, in the night world of Rome, enveloped in a wistful nostalgia appropriate to the valedictory musings of Closing Time.
He could have rested on his laurels, reading from Catch-22 wherever he went, but—here was the miracle most worth celebrating in his seventy-first year—he still wanted to write, and to send ripples through American literature.
* * *
JOE PAID A BRIEF VISIT to Coney Island in the company of a European television crew just before the first advance reviews of Closing Time were scheduled to appear. The film crew was making a documentary on the old amusement parks. The British producers had carried across the sea images of a place that no longer existed. Joe witnessed their disappointment at the rusting reality. His melancholy did not match theirs; it was personal, attached to faces blown on the wind. His brother Lee had died. Joe hadn’t seen him much in recent years, and felt bad about that. Hillel. Elias. Lee.
Over here, a patch of sand where Joe and Beansy Winkler had once hawked sodas to tourists; over there, the site of a triumphant joke-telling round by Lou Berkman.
Joe ordered a hot dog and fried potatoes with extra salt at Nathan’s. He perked up. The Brits became excited when they spotted the red skeleton of the Parachute Jump. The old Luna Park was now a row of apartment projects, but the filmmakers, reciting the history they’d learned, were beginning to see past the bleakness. They strolled through a ghost Coney. Their mood improved, and so did Joe’s. A school bus pulled into a parking lot, disgorging a group of Asian, black, and white children. They ran screaming toward the Wonder Wheel, one of the few rides remaining. On the boardwalk, Joe watched a huddle of Orthodox Jewish kids contemplating the foaming surf. The film crew turned a camera on him. The director asked about his past. He spoke of immense changes; the breeze took most of his words. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the Wonder Wheel turn and turn again.
* * *
“THEY COULD POSSIBLY SHIT on it,” said Candida Donadio. She had not sold Closing Time, but she took a proprietary interest in it. As the critics sharpened their pencils, she fretted on Joe’s behalf: “If the reviews [are] bad, I suppose he may not choose to write again.”
“There’s no question, Joe is running a risk,” Bob Gottlieb said. “If you have a lifelong love affair with a book, you’re likely to want a sequel to be, in essence, the same book. But Closing Time couldn’t possibly be the same—the events are 50 years later. Joe is an older man, writing about a different time. He isn’t capable of writing the same book.” Would he have counseled Joe not to attempt a sequel? “Serious writers should do what they feel they should do. You can’t prescribe for them,” Gottlieb said.
“We’ve positioned it as a bestseller, but we will see and react,” Bob Wietrak, a director of marketing for the Barnes & Noble book chain, announced. “If the reviews aren’t good, that will affect [the way we try to sell it].”
In September 1994, as 170,000 copies of the book were readied for shipment, the Book-of-the-Month Club declared it would pass on Closing Time: Female readers—the club’s bread and butter—were not likely to be engaged by a novel about elderly war veterans. Vanity Fair canceled a planned profile of Joe, offering no explanation.
Penny Kaganoff, editor in chief of Kirkus, fired the first shot: “There comes a time when an author just can’t write anymore. That’s the time to close the chapter down.… If someone wanted to do [Heller] a favor, they would have stopped him.”
In London’s Times, Ben Macintyre spoke for most reviewers: “[I]n Catch-22, Heller chose his targets carefully. In Closing Time, the effect is more that of napalm, an angry old man settling accounts and preparing for The End.”
A dissenting view came from William H. Pritchard, writing in the New York Times Book Review. He praised the novel’s “richness of narrative tone and human feeling,” its “poetic quality.” Heller had “more than got away” with the sequel, he said; the book was “an independent creation in whose best parts the seriousness and the joking are inseparable, as they should be in art.”
“Score one for Joseph Heller,” said Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He described the book as having a “fictional architecture (complicated by multiple narrat
ive voices) that’s nervy for a writer facing serious chain-store expectations for the fall season. Closing Time is a gutsy feat. For a writer co-opted years ago by various critics and politicos, it’s a declaration of independence.”
Many reviewers suggested the sequel dimmed the reputation of Catch-22 and tarnished Joe’s career. “What I sense in most of these reviews is a personal rebuke,” Bob Gottlieb said sadly. People were mad at Joe for messing with their memories of Catch-22. As for the author, he was, as David Craig said, making a bid for literary immortality.
* * *
MAN IS MATTER.
Yossarian learns this lesson in Catch-22 when he plunges his hands into Snowden’s torn body in the back of the B-25. In Closing Time, Yo-Yo, elderly, working like Bob Slocum in corporate offices, living like Bruce Gold in an America run by nincompoops, railing like King David against a hellish world, questioning like Socrates society’s narrow choices, experiences the material breakdown of bodies, including his own, at every turn.
The novel begins by revealing the backstage machinery behind the comic pageantry. “In … twenty more years, we will all look pretty bad in … newspaper pictures and television clips, kind of strange, like people in a different world, ancient and doddering, balding, seeming perhaps a bit idiotic, shrunken, with toothless smiles in collapsed, wrinkled cheeks,” says Sammy Singer, an old Coney Island boy who served with Yossarian on the mission to Avignon. He was, the reader learns, the unnamed crewman who fainted as Yossarian tried in vain to save Snowden’s life.
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