Walking to lunch a day or so later with George Mandel, Joe “expressed horror of the exceptionally broad avenue we were crossing, but strode right on to the safer side … short of breath,” Mandel said. “I think that disturbing symptom … escaped me because of his unfailing nerve.”
On the evening of December 10, 1999, a Friday, “Joe was on the phone, trying to get a friend to get him off the hook … so he wouldn’t have to go to the movies [with me],” Valerie said. “But no one answered, so Joe and I went to see James Bond. And did have a good time. He was laughing out loud, grabbing my arm, slapping my knee. So much laughing. Thrilling at the special effects. It was a wonderful date.”
The movie was The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan. Perhaps the film’s finest moment was the line “If you can’t trust a Swiss banker, what’s the world come to?” Joe could have delivered something better—had topped it, in fact, with greater wit and timing in his part of the screenplay for Casino Royale so many years ago.
The next day, he sent Chris Buckley a fax: “We both may have reason to be [smug] for backing what thus far looks like a winner of sorts with Ted’s novel. As a … proud father, I’m taking the liberty of sending you a couple of good pre-pub reviews.” Afterward, he and Valerie drove to a restaurant called the Palm, in the Hunting Inn on Main Street in East Hampton, for steaks and Nova Scotian lobster.
The following morning, clear skies ushered unusual winter light and warmth into the backyard. Joe and Valerie talked of the trips they’d take in the coming year—a new century, a new millennium—Italy, Ireland at the end of the summer. The publication of his novel would bring a fresh round of travel and events—enjoyable if planned well in advance and not scheduled too close together. “He was looking forward to so much,” Valerie said. A copy of the galleys for Ted’s book, Slab Rat, lay open on a living room table. Joe smiled each time his glance fell on the pages.
After dinner that evening, he said the house felt stuffy. He wanted to take a walk on the beach. The stars were as clear as the sunshine earlier. Later, Valerie couldn’t remember how long he’d been gone. When he returned, he was sweating and pale. He went to bed early (Phillipe following quietly at his heels) with what he thought was indigestion. “That night … he became my patient again,” Valerie said.
* * *
“VALERIE CALLED us at about five A.M.,” Dolores Karl recalled. “I heard the phone ring. Fred was already awake, and I got up. Who would call that early? Fred came out of his study and said, ‘Dolores, sit down. Joe is dead.’ I could see how shaken he was. Right away, I phoned Valerie and asked if she needed help, and she said she would appreciate it if I came over. When I told Fred, he said, ‘Don’t leave me alone.’ Well, if you knew Fred—‘Don’t leave me alone’ was not one of his statements. Usually, he was happy to be left alone to work. I knew something was wrong. So I called the doctor and immediately the doctor hospitalized him. He was suffering a severe heart attack.”
Much later, once Fred was resting comfortably and Dolores knew he would be all right, she learned from Valerie that Joe’s heart attack had probably started during his walk on the beach. Back in the house, in bed, he took some medication for indigestion. It didn’t help. Soon, he slipped into unconsciousness, breathing shallowly. Valerie tried to resuscitate him. By the time she got the ambulance there, he was dead.
She spent the morning of December 13 phoning East Hampton friends and friends in the city. Finally, she called Joe’s kids.
“Oh God, this is a calamity for American literature,” Kurt Vonnegut said when he got the news.
John Updike was more restrained: “[As a novelist,] he wasn’t top of the chart, [but] he was a sweet man. And Catch-22 is an important book.”
Taken together, the comments traced Joe’s critical reputation during his lifetime.
Elie Wiesel said, “I will miss reading the books he didn’t write.”
On the afternoon of the thirteenth, Chris Buckley faxed Valerie: “Sweetheart, he loved you so deeply. He talked about you at every lunch and dinner we had, always with pride.… [Years ago,] if someone had told 2nd Lieutenant Joey Heller, as he was about to set off on one of those harrowing sixty missions in his B-25 that he would survive the war and die peacefully more than half a century later, one of the most celebrated writers in American history, a proud father, in the arms of the woman he loved, surely he would have said, ‘What’s the catch?’”
* * *
THE RABBI at Joe’s funeral service did not know Joe’s son and daughter would appear, and so he did not mention them in his remarks. He had understood from Valerie that Joe’s kids were estranged from him. Joe’s nephew, Paul, who now ran a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, managed to plug the restaurant in his eulogy for his uncle.
Joe had wanted to be cremated, but he was placed in a casket draped with an American flag. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” Erica said. Someone told her that because her father was a war veteran, the costs of the funeral would be mitigated if it were conducted military-style. Erica’s weeping appeared to unnerve Valerie.
Joe was interred in the Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton. Jerry McQueen was one of the pallbearers. He remembered hefting Joe into the Russian Tea Room years ago when Joe—as Mario Puzo put it—had come back from the dead.
“When we left the grave site, Mel Brooks was reading some of the names on the tombstones—McCarthy, Smith, Vitale,” McQueen recalled. “Brooks said, ‘Joe, they buried you in a goy cemetery.’ We all laughed”—the day’s last sound.
Epilogue : Cleaning House
“TWO WEEKS [after my father died], a messenger came to me at work and delivered [my] book to me.… This was the biggest moment in my life, and I couldn’t tell him about it,” Ted said. Subsequently, Ted married and had a daughter, whom he dearly wishes his father could have met. He published his second novel, Funnymen, in 2002.
Erica continues to live in the Apthorp. It remains a haunted house of sorts, under constant renovation (often without heat or electricity), new ownership, and with byzantine alterations to its occupancy policies. She has written a memoir of her mother and father.
Valerie sold the house she shared with Joe, but she still lives nearby.
The reception of Joe’s posthumously published Portrait of an Artist, as an old Man was tepid. Joe’s profile of an elderly fiction writer prone to frequent naps, lustful urges with no chance of fulfillment, discouraging talks with his editor, and false starts on novels (Tom Sawyer as a Wall Streeter, Hera as a harpie, A Sexual Biography of My Wife), met its toughest resistance from the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani. She called the novel “embarrassing” and expressed “regret” that it would harm a “distinguished,” “inspired,” and “sometimes brilliant” career. Heller’s old skills—“bravura satire … zany, improvisational humor … ferocity and swagger”—were “sorely lacking” in Portrait, she said.
On the other hand, The Observer’s Tim Adams called the novel a “sardonic little abdication address, a posthumous piece of self-parody … [and] one last muted hurrah from a writer who [knew] his place in the authorial Hall of Fame was never really in doubt.” Listing the book as one of the best American novels of 2000, David Gates, writing in Newsweek, said it was Heller’s “slightest but scariest [production]: it amounts to a literary suicide note.… Heller must have known this book would chill every writer, and many readers, to the heart, while offering not a bit of comfort. For having that much nerve, you’ve got to admire him.” And The New Yorker, which never published Joe, even when Bob Gottlieb edited the magazine, said, “There is something bleakly bracing in [the old writer’s] obsession with his own literary desiccation.”
* * *
A DECADE AFTER JOE’S DEATH, We Bombed in New Haven was staged regularly in regional theaters (in Fullerton, California, Valparaiso, Indiana, and Portland, Oregon), its antiwar theme perpetually timely. God Knows had been adapted for the stage in Israel. A new Hebrew translation of Catch-22 had become an immediate
bestseller in that country. Something Happened served as one of the templates for cable television’s hottest new show, Mad Men, and Joe’s novels, particularly Something Happened and Closing Time, were receiving renewed scholarly attention.
In the summer of 2010, the journalist John Grant wrote that Heller’s “vision” was “tragically in synch” with the “highly privatized” way the U.S. military was prosecuting its war in Afghanistan—that is, paying its enemies to run convoys delivering food and supplies to U.S. troops. “Milo Minderbinder [is alive] in Afghanistan,” Grant declared. At the same time, said the New Statesman, Milo oversaw British Petroleum’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “Even when it’s fouling its own nest and screwing everything in sight, [Milo’s] syndicate”—in which “everybody has a share,” making it too big to fail—“is good for the country. Similar logic is being used by … BP,” wrote William Wiles on the magazine’s blog site.
As these references suggest, Joe’s reputation and importance to American literature rests—as he always knew it would—with Catch-22, which has sold over ten million copies to date, is a mainstay in college courses ranging from English to history to political science, and currently averages annual sales (according to Nielson BookScan) of around 85,000 copies.
On that basis alone, Thomas Edwards was right when he asserted in The New York Review of Books that “Heller is among the novelists of the last [few] decades who matter.”
“[Catch-22] still blows me away,” says Carl Hiassen. “[It] is one of the most phenomenal novels in the English language because of Heller’s ability to make you laugh literally on every page while writing about the darkest of all human conditions, wartime.”
Recently, Adam Mars-Jones, grousing in The Observer about what he felt was an overpraised new war novel, said, “Joseph Heller found … [that] a pose of heartlessness twists the knife more than any amount of earnest pain: thanks to this discovery, a book written about the second world war, published in 1961 (the year Hemingway died), belongs to the future rather than the past.”
* * *
IN RECENT YEARS, with the deaths of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and J. D. Salinger, following the earlier losses of Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, William Gaddis, Susan Sontag, and Joe, among others, readers, critics, and observers of American culture have noted the passing of an astonishingly fertile era of U.S. literature.
It has coincided with the disappearance of the World War II generation. “Veterans of the Second World War dominated American public life for decades, but [John Paul] Stevens is practically the last one still holding a position of prominence. He is the only veteran of any kind on the [Supreme] Court,” Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the March 22, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. “The war helped shape his jurisprudence, and even today shapes his frame of reference.”
Weeks later, Stevens announced his retirement.
With the advent of the e-book, publishing, as understood by Joe’s generation (one that still believed in the possibility of the Great American Novel and an underground press), may also have reached the finish line—or at least found a tipping point, with ramifications for authors, editors, booksellers, and readers still unclear.
Exactly ten years after the night Joe died, the New York Times, whose print version, like that of most newspapers and magazines, was struggling to remain afloat financially, reported that a legal battle had commenced for the digital rights to Catch-22. “[E]xactly who owns the rights to such [a title] is in dispute” among authors’ heirs, traditional print publishers, and purveyors of new electronic formats, “making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth,” Mokoto Rich wrote.
If he were here, Joe might ask if digital money was the same as printed money. In any case, his response to the information revolution, and the turmoil into which it has plunged publishing, would likely be a laugh and a shrug. Writing is just a form of procrastination, he used to say. What’s all the fuss?
* * *
ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY of Joe’s death, Christopher Buckley published a piece on the op-ed page of the New York Times. He yearned to know what Joe would have thought about America’s absurd and terrifying entry into the twenty-first century, including incidents such as “9/11 … Saddam Hussein’s hanging, available on cellphone and YouTube, Dick Cheney shooting his lawyer … John Kerry, war hero, being depicted as a Swift-boating wimp … A.I.G. bonuses … [and] President Obama’s accepting the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after ordering 30,000 more Americans to war.”
But the world, propelled or pulled by events, ignores us—as Joe recognized in his most intimate writings. Perhaps the purest measure of a woman or man is not in the moments we manage to catch and consider publicly, but in the instants, minute to minute, we nearly miss.
Like this: “In the early 1980s, I was cleaning houses with my friend Mary in East Hampton and we had Joseph Heller’s house on our schedule. I’d been there a few times and I remember it as very simply done inside. It seemed exactly the kind of house a man who was focused on other things would keep: it had only the essentials. It wasn’t homey. It didn’t show any personality. It was just pleasant and practical. That made it really easy to clean,” says Margaret Dawe, now an associate professor of English at Wichita State University. “One day, Mary and I were simultaneously having family/love crises. On the way to Joseph Heller’s we stopped and bought lottery tickets because we were desperate for something good to happen.
“We went into his kitchen to start and by then we were in tears. Usually, Mr. Heller left for the day when we came and we didn’t know he was there. We were standing at the sink filling a bucket of water and we’d already sprinkled the Spic and Span and we were both crying as the water ran, when Mr. Heller walked into the kitchen. I knew him from pictures in the paper. He was one of the writers who turned me upside down. I was fifteen when I read Catch-22, and I was laughing so hard reading it, the tears ran down my face.
“When he walked in the kitchen, we were all surprised to see one another and he saw us just sobbing and everyone kind of stopped. I was so embarrassed. And he looked from one of our faces to the other and he said, ‘Is there anything I can do except leave?’ Everything dire and dreadful inside us melted and Mary and I threw our heads back laughing. So, you know, we did win the lottery.”
Joe hesitated only a moment between the freezer full of ice cream and the bucket of warm cleanser, in the presence of laughing women in tears, in sunlight promising good work hours ahead, and slipped quietly out of the kitchen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MICHAEL HOMLER of St. Martin’s Press asked me one day if anyone had written a full-length biography of Joseph Heller, and this project was born. I am grateful to Michael for his suggestion and pitch-perfect editorial guidance. It has been a pleasure to work once more with Michael, George Witte, and the St. Martin’s team. My thanks to Henry R. Kaufman for his legal counsel, Carol Edwards for the copyediting, and John Morrone for overseeing editorial production.
Kit Ward’s enthusiasm and wisdom were essential to the book.
Kerry Ahearn, Chair of the English Department at Oregon State University, arranged for a sabbatical leave which enabled me to research and write. To Kerry, Ann Leen, and my colleagues in the College of Liberal Arts at OSU, I am grateful for years of friendship and support.
Ted Leeson is the best prose-doctor in the country. He coaxed several of my sentences to life.
Ryan Wepler at Brandeis University proved to be an efficient and discerning research assistant. Thanks to Rebecca Olson for putting me in touch with Ryan. At the University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library, Patrick Scott, Jeffrey Malkala, and Elizabeth Sudduth offered me warmth, hospitality, and help. Sandra Stelts at Penn State University was gracious in gathering Helleriana for me.
Daniel Setzer’s and Don Kaiser’s military knowledge is matched by their generosity. Their research and resources are invaluable to all
students of World War II. At Goodfellow Field, the base historian, Chad Dull, treated my father and me to a wonderful day while providing fascinating information about the base during Heller’s time there. Betty Whitely, Archives Technician at the Military Personnel Records Facility of the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis ably assisted Erica Heller and me in our search for Joseph Heller’s military discharge records.
Phyllis Bobb, Tammy Carter at the University of Arizona, Nancy Crampton, Jill Krementz, Jonathan Barth, and Susan Wood Richardson were very kind in helping me secure photographs and permissions.
At the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ellen Kastel offered patient aid and kindness.
For their expert guidance through the world of 1950s American advertising, I am indebted to Bob Levenson, Tom Messner, and Curvin O’Reilly.
I am grateful to Robert Gottlieb for walking me through some of the ins and outs of publishing, particularly with reference to Good as Gold.
Joseph Heller was blessed with a capacity for friendship, as evidenced by the eagerness of so many of his family, friends, and colleagues to speak of him openly and with tremendous warmth. In particular, Erica Heller has gone out of her way to help me and her father’s readers know his life as well as it can be known. Our many exchanges have been as delightful as they were fruitful, and her tour of the Apthorp was lovely. Ted Heller has been exceptionally generous. I am more grateful than I can say for his help and good humor.
My sincere thanks to Valerie Heller, George Mandel, and Luann Walker for sharing glimpses of their lives with Joe and Speed Vogel. Valerie was most helpful in providing encouragement, contact information, and rare photographs.
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