Just One Catch (34 page)

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“I THINK
I was [Bob's] first writer. Not his first published writer, however, because I worked so slowly,” Joe told an interviewer in 1974. “It came so hard. I really thought it would be the only thing I ever wrote. Working on
Catch,
I'd become furious and despondent that I could only write a page [or so] a night. I'd say to myself, ‘
Christ,
I'm a mature adult with a master's degree in English,
why can't I work faster
?'”

The various stages of the novel, housed now in the Archives and Special Collections Department of the Brandeis University Libraries, reveal that, at one point, Joe was working with at least nine different drafts, both handwritten and typed, often cutting and pasting sections from one draft into another, leaving blank spaces in some of the handwritten drafts for typed paragraphs to be inserted later. A typed section was no closer to being finished, in Joe's mind, than a handwritten one; some of the typed paragraphs had been revised as many as three different times, in red ink, green ink, and pencil. Generally, the handwritten passages relished the intentional redundancy of expressions and images, which revisions tended to erase, largely by replacing proper nouns with pronouns. For example, the sentence “The two enlisted men who ran the medical tent for Doc Daneeka ran the medical tent so efficiently that Doc Daneeka…” became “The two enlisted men that ran the medical tent for Doc Daneeka ran it so efficiently that he…” There was a fine line, in the repetitions, between comic effect and clutter; in later drafts, Joe streamlined his descriptive passages. He retained the humor in situations, as well as in “Who's on first?”–style dialogues, straight out of old Borscht Belt routines.

He tried to temper the humor, as well. Comedy came easily to him. He didn't trust it. In an early passage labeled “Chapter XXIII: Dobbs,” Joe originally wrote, “Yossarian lost his guts on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts on the mission to Avignon.” Later, Joe decided the pun on “guts” lessened the horror of Snowden's fate; he was using the gunner's death to serve a cheap joke. He changed the passage to read, “That was the mission in which Yossarian lost his balls … because Snowden lost his guts.…”

From draft to draft, most of the major changes were structural. Joe shuffled chapters, finding more effective ways to introduce the large cast of characters. “I'm a chronic fiddler,” he said. Left on his own, he'd “never finish
anything at all
” because “I don't understand the process of imagination. I am very much at its mercy. I feel that … ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon.… I don't produce them at will.” At the same time, the “limitations” inherent in writing ad copy—time constraints, clients' wishes, off-limits language—had taught him to “spur” his imagination under severe pressure. “There's an essay of T.S. Eliot's in which he … [claims] that if one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas,” Joe said. “Given total freedom, however, the chances are good that the work will sprawl.”

He showed rough pages to George Mandel, who helped clarify scenes and intensify situational absurdities, and he depended on Frederick Karl's response. Karl had always felt Joe was one of the smartest people he knew. He was gratified to see Joe's intelligence reflected in the manuscript, notably in passages piercing institutional hypocrisies. Meanwhile, Candida Donadio sold the British publishing rights to Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg, who felt Joe was possessed of “true literary genius.” The news gave Joe a boost.

Sometimes in the evenings, to clear his head before settling down to write, he'd take walks with his family: Shirley, elegant as ever in sleek black pumps, a black knee-length dress, and a simple pearl necklace, Erica in a double-breasted wool coat over a checkered dress, and Ted in a light pullover shirt and sweater. In a typical family photograph from this time, the children are clearly the center of Joe and Shirley's concern. Joe, his hair cut short and wearing a dark sport coat, appears anxious, herding the kids in a straight line down the sidewalk. He looks self-absorbed, possibly thinking about his book or his mother's continuing decline. Shirley holds back a little, watching the kids with relaxed and pleased attentiveness. Erica appears to enjoy her status as older sister; she is a head taller than her brother, and speaks to him with a knowing expression, nudging his shoulder with her arm. Ted seems happy, amazed by his surroundings, somewhat oblivious of the others in childhood's sweet way. Back in the apartment, Joe left Shirley to put the kids to bed and sequestered himself with his book.

“Catch-18” had doubled in length by the time Gottlieb saw any of it again. The original manuscript had expanded from seven to sixteen chapters, and Joe had added a whole new section consisting of twenty-eight more chapters. The pages were a mix of typescript and legal-size notebook paper covered in Joe's precise and rather crabbed handwriting.

He was taking so long to write the book, the literary world in which he'd conceived the novel no longer existed. Norman Mailer embodied most of the changes. Additionally, each new J. D. Salinger story in
The New Yorker
was cause now for literary buzz. The genteel comedies of suburban manners that had once characterized the magazine's fiction had given way to Salinger's Zen-like ambiguities. Already, Salinger had established himself as an enigmatic figure, “the Dead Okie of Fiction,” present through absence.

Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and a young hotshot named Philip Roth appeared to be establishing a Jewish beachhead in American fiction, bringing new brashness to American prose. As for the Beats, nothing signaled their mainstream acceptance more than Columbia University's invitation to Allen Ginsberg to read his poetry on campus in February 1959. Lionel Trilling refused to attend the reading, but his wife went. Despite her reservations about the Beats in general, Diana declared herself deeply moved by Ginsberg's seriousness and real lyrical gifts. A sea change had occurred.

Most importantly, by the end of the 1950s, World War II (and the cultural ferment immediately preceding and following it) could no longer be approached straightforwardly in fiction, at least not effectively. No one had topped—nor could they—
The Naked and the Dead
or
From Here to Eternity.
There was no need to repeat those novels' achievements, the vivid battlefield scenes and dissections of military hierarchies. And yet, night after night at his kitchen table, Joe Heller wrote a novel about the war.

But not really.

“It had upset many people when Mailer wrote the first war novel in which the troops swore the way they have always sworn in all armies since the beginning of warfare, but nobody in American publishing was prepared for a novel like
Catch-22
that made savage fun of war, had a hero who was proud to be a coward, and ridiculed both our side and the enemy's alike,” Michael Korda wrote. “It was all very well for that kind of thing to have been done in a Czech book like
The Good Soldier Schweik,
but it was unthinkable in this country.”

Looking back, he said, it was such a “strange period, the sunset of the Fifties, before rock and roll, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and women's liberation changed all the rules we were living by.” In the publishing houses, “carbon copies still reigned supreme, and everybody in the editorial department had black smudges on their fingers and shirt cuffs, the proud badge of the profession, like a coal miner's blackened skin.”

He would pass by Bob Gottlieb's office and see parts of Joe's novel “endlessly retyped, look[ing] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as [Joe, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne] labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb's cramped office.
That,
I thought, is editing, and I longed to do the same.”

Joe prepared a 758-page typescript from this “jigsaw puzzle,” deleting digressive episodes and expanding other chapters. He and Gottlieb plunged in again. Gottlieb inspected paragraphs for what he called “impoverished vocabulary,” and asked Joe to stir things up with more active language. He caught places where Joe seemed to be “clearing his throat,” dawdling, in Joe's characteristic way, and not getting directly to the point. “Some of Bob's suggestions … involved a lot of work,” Joe recalled. “There was a chapter that came on page two hundred or three hundred of the manuscript—I believe it was the one with Colonel Cathcart; it was either that or the Major Major chapter—and he said he liked this chapter, and it was a shame we didn't get to it earlier. I agreed with him, and I cut about fifty or sixty pages from the opening just to get there more quickly.”

The work was as exhilarating as it was difficult. “Joe … and I [were] on exactly the same wavelength editorially,” Gottlieb said. “[We] never had a bad moment because he [was] perfectly detached.… [With Joe,] you [could] look at [a book] as though you were two surgeons examining a body stretched out upon a table. You just cut it open, deal with the offending organs, and stitch it up again. Joe [was] completely objective, he [had] that kind of mind.”

In their concentrated hours together, the men grew close. Joe learned that Gottlieb was married to a former actress, Maria Tucci, loved theater and dance, and enjoyed collecting women's purses as a hobby. He didn't go in for “lit crit stuff”; for him, editing, like any kind of reading, was a matter of “common sense.” Mostly, Joe came to appreciate Gottlieb's ability to surrender to a book. “If you do [that],” Gottlieb once explained, “when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear.”

Within the hallways of Simon & Schuster, an “aura of myth hovered around the book,” said Michael Korda. It was a literary Manhattan Project. “[N]obody but Gottlieb and his acolytes had read it. He had shrewdly stage-managed a sense of expectation that grew with every delay.” The occasional appearance in the office of Joe's “Sicilian Earth Mother” agent also increased the book's mystical status. Donadio “had a way of dismissing those she thought unimportant,” Korda said, which included just about everyone but Bob Gottlieb and Joe Heller.

Eventually—the 1960 deadline had passed—Joe dropped 150 pages from the manuscript, and the remaining typescript, heavily line-edited, became the printer's copy. “We worked like dogs on
Catch
 … and then just before it went to press I was reading it again, and I came to a chapter I'd always hated,” Gottlieb said. “I thought it was pretentious and literary. I said to Joe, You know, I've always hated this chapter, and he said, Well take it out. And out it went. He printed it many years later in
Esquire
as the lost chapter of
Catch-22.
That [was] Joe Heller … [he was] a pragmatist.”

Joe's work wasn't over once Gottlieb's job was done. Gottlieb sent the manuscript to a copyeditor “who misunderstood her instructions and rewrote whole paragraphs and changed the names, and made corrections,” Joe said. “She missed the whole style. She'd edited—and very well—William Shirer's
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
She was very good at that. Well, she took
Catch-22
[it was still called “Catch-18” at the time] and began making it historically correct; putting in dates where I didn't want dates.” She also “apparently had an aversion to what I think might be called compound predicates. For example, if I wrote, ‘He struck a match and lit a cigarette,' she would change it to ‘He struck a match and
he
lit a cigarette.' It was even worse when she got to sentences like ‘Get out, he said, foaming at the mouth.' This she would change to ‘Get out, he said,
and he foamed
at the mouth.'” Joe spent six weeks in early 1961 correcting the copyeditor's changes, returning the book to the conversational idioms he desired, and underscoring deliberate anachronisms.

“The S & S house style called for a military rank to be capitalized, so in those cases ‘the Major' or ‘the Captain' or ‘the General' were set that way,” Peter Schwed recalled. “Not for long. Joe insisted, and he didn't want any rebuttals, that whenever he had written about a character using only his rank without his name, the word must be set in lower case, viz., ‘the major,' ‘the captain,' ‘the general.' Joe got his way, [and] … the production department … suffered an unexpected sneak punch.”

Meanwhile, Joe felt “lucky and glad” to be working with cover designer Paul Bacon. Bacon was Joe's age, a native of Ossining, New York, and a veteran of the war. In Newark, he had attended Arts High School. His career as a jacket artist got started after a publisher noticed covers he'd designed for a few small jazz periodicals, and for the Blue Note and Riverside record labels. In 1956, he set a new trend in jacket design. At the behest of Simon & Schuster's art director, Tom Bevins, Bacon designed the cover for a novel called
Compulsion,
by Meyer Levin.
Compulsion
told the story of two young men who carried out a well-planned, cold-blooded murder of a boy, along the lines of the famous Leopold and Loeb case. S & S figured the crime's similarity to the novel's plot might help sales, but the publisher didn't want to be seen as exploiting the case or resorting to lewdness. Bacon downplayed the cover's imagery, depicting two small jittery figures printed in red. He devoted most of the space to the title and the author's name. The novel became a bestseller; the design caught the eye of other publishers. The “big book look” was born.

“I'd always tell myself, ‘You're not the star of the show. The author took three and a half years to write the goddamn thing, and the publisher is spending a fortune on it, so just back off,'” Bacon said. On the other hand, he felt writers often made cover suggestions that were too literal. These resulted in “dumb” illustrations. For Joe's book, he tried eleven different approaches. “I did a jacket that just [had the title] in very large lettering, and underneath, I can … remember … the [subtitle Heller wrote]: ‘A novel wildly funny and dead serious about a … malingerer who recognized the odds.' Gottlieb liked it but didn't do it,” Bacon said. “Then I did one that had Yossarian bull's-ass naked, but with his back to you, saluting as a flight of planes went over. I liked that one. Then I did the finger. Then I did a couple of modifications of those. Then, at some point, I came up with the little guy that I tore out of a piece of paper, representing Yossarian in full flight from everybody.”