Just One Catch (39 page)

In his documentary film,
Stone Reader,
Mark Moskowitz captures the feel of the moment for an adolescent reader in the 1960s, as well as the joy of discovering
Catch-22
:

At some point, I outgrew the school library and found myself walking forty-five minutes to a paperback store—I think it was called Paperbacks Etcetera—in the next town. It was small, two aisles, but I could hang out there and just look at the covers, each cover with the promise of a wild story within. Tucked into a small, one-shelf section just a foot from the floor were books with World War II settings.… I looked for books in which heroes did things against all the odds.… I picked out James Jones.… A month later, having finished [his book], and therefore now feeling like an adult, I went back to get the book they compared it to on the back cover,
The Naked and the Dead.
The guy behind the counter, a tall, skinny older guy, was reluctant to sell it to me, so I took it out of the library instead: an old, falling-apart hardback, black cover, no dust jacket. They would say “Fug” in the book, and that seemed interesting. I couldn't figure out what that was—Fug. F-U-G. It couldn't mean “fuck.” They wouldn't let someone put that much “fuck” in a book, would they? Fug. It made it fantasy, almost. Well, that was good, too, so I went back to the little store and perused what was left of the war section. I pulled out the last one: a bright blue one.
Catch-22.
Seventy-five cents.
That
was the book. It just appealed to my subversive self.… I had climbed onto the adult plateau of Jones and Mailer and looked around and couldn't find anything else, and then I came across
Catch-22,
way out there somewhere.… Everything else smacked of suburban grown-ups.… Yeah, right [I thought].… And so I would go to the library and continue to take out books and search for articles on Heller. Anything. I couldn't believe people weren't just standing there and shaking
Catch-22
and talking about it. Why read anything else? Where
was
this guy?… They say one book can turn a kid on to be a reader for life. I was already a reader, but
Catch-22
excited me. It was the first book I read where the author's voice meant as much to me as the story or the characters. [Heller was] the first writer I wanted to know more about, because the voice behind the pages was a friend I thought I could never find in life.

Joe admitted, “When [the] book first came out in paper, I'd get into the subway or train and look at the books people were reading. If the paperback had blue edges, it was Dell. My book is in Dell, so then I'd have to try to see the cover. If the guy was reading my book, it was a good feeling.”

With stunning swiftness, the term
catch-22
slipped into daily conversations nationwide—in corporate headquarters and on military bases, college campuses—to describe any bureaucratic paradox. Eventually,
The American Heritage Dictionary
sanctioned it, defining a
catch-22
as a “difficult situation or problem whose seemingly alternative solutions are logically invalid.”

On October 15, 1962, Simon & Schuster, Dell, and Columbia Pictures bought a full-page ad in the
New York Times.
The ad announced, “Happy birthday CATCH-22.” By April 1963, the paperback had sold 1,100,000 copies of the 1,250,000 in print. Hardback sales still averaged one hundred to two hundred copies a month. By the end of the decade, Dell had taken the book through thirty printings. In sales as well as critical acclaim,
Catch-22
had broken out of its literary trappings and East Coast box to become a perennial American classic.

“Without being aware of it, I was part of a near movement in fiction,” Joe reflected in 1977. “While I was writing
Catch-22,
J. P. Donleavy was writing
The Ginger Man,
Kerouac was writing
On the Road,
Ken Kesey was writing
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Pynchon was writing
V,
and Vonnegut was writing
Cat's Cradle.
I don't think any one of us even knew the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us.”

Apropos of Joe's remarks, it is worth noting that, according to critic Anatole Broyard, the college professors he encountered in the 1950s, when these novels were being written, “did their best to make us feel like exiles in our own country.” The professors remained shocked and appalled by World War II, the firebombings, Hiroshima, and the concentration camps; they were fascinated by psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious mind; and they worried about the Cold War. Thanks to the ongoing effects of the G.I. Bill, their classes were filled to capacity with the largest cross section of the American public ever to attend institutions of higher learning. “All the courses I took were about
what's wrong,
” Broyard wrote in his memoir,
Kafka Was the Rage.
“[W]hat's wrong with the government, with the family, with interpersonal relations and intrapersonal relations—what's wrong with our dreams, our loves, our jobs, our perceptions and conceptions, our esthetics, the human condition itself. They were furious, the professors, at the ugly turn the world had taken.”

It is also worth noting, as Jonathan R. Eller reminds us, that all the writers Joe cited “[came] to us almost entirely in paperback.”

*   *   *

“FOR SIXTEEN YEARS
I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew WWII must produce,” Stephen E. Ambrose, writer and historian, wrote to Joe in January 1962. “I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong.… Thank you.”

In a letter written the following year, John Steinbeck said to Joe, “I would very much like to know which way you are going now. Your gargantuan approach [to literature] (and I use the term literally) can be of great value now, for peace has become almost as ridiculous as war.”

PART FOUR
What Happened

 

12.
The Realist

“
AMERICA IN THE SIXTIES
,
ostensibly an effort by the editors of
Fortune
[magazine] to forecast the major social and economic trends of the 60's, reveals more about the Luce mind than about the [coming decade].” Thus began a review in the February 1961 issue of
Commentary.
“Written in the characteristic self-congratulatory and breathless style of
Fortune
 … [the book] exhibits that willed commitment to a roseate view of the future which we have come to expect from Luce publications (though not, interestingly enough, from the ex-Luce men),” the reviewer said. The ex–Luce men now included Joseph Heller. “
Fortune
writes that soon the poor will no longer be with us.… This can be called the ‘midtown' view of economic realities. Were
Fortune
's writers to take an occasional trip some sixty blocks further downtown, they would learn that [most] people … hardly [try their luck] in the stock market.… But such realism would tend to spoil the picture so lovingly composed by
Fortune.
”

The “Luce men”
did
misperceive the sixties—badly. In retrospect, it seems they missed the mark not because they refused to speak of “drags on productivity” (on the grounds that this would be “a mark of disaffection, perhaps even of disloyalty”). No.
Fortune
correctly predicted the “miracles of rising income, rising productivity, [and] rising consumption” driving the decade. The federal government under Lyndon Johnson launched a war on poverty. The major indicators suggested everyone should have “afford[ed] a second divorce along with a second car and a second television set. Cheer up, boys!” Something happened. What was it?

If we tunnel through the years and glance back at the 1960s, from the point of view of a
Commentary
editor so rattled by the times that he reinvented himself, we confront the question once more: What happened? Writing in 2000, Norman Podhoretz, who once praised
Catch-22
's author for his boldness as an artist, now condemned the novel as having done “moral, spiritual, and intellectual harm” to several generations of Americans.

Between
Fortune
's “roseate” view, looking ahead in 1961, and Podhoretz's embittered summary in 2000 lay four decades of a culture at war with itself, during which
Catch-22
remained steadily in print, selling in vast numbers. What happened to make the novel a central document during this period, a touchstone—positive and negative—in our self-assessments? As early as 1962, before
Catch-22
sold so astonishingly,
Newsweek
was declaring a “Heller Cult,” saying Joe was the man to write
the
novel of the American 1960s (without realizing that perhaps he already had). As for the new novel Joe would tackle, he had glimpsed it in his mind at the decade's outset, telling the
Newsweek
reporter he had begun to make notes on it in his rental house on Fire Island. It would be “about a married man who is working for a large company and who wants to work himself up to the point where he makes a speech at the company's annual convention in Bermuda.”

He paused, as if to acknowledge how unpromising this material sounded.

“It has implications,” he said.

That a thirty-nine-year-old World War II vet could be the literary spokesperson for a culture besotted with the Kennedys seems odd. Again in retrospect, we can see how many of the cultural skirmishes from the 1960s to the present orbited the World War II generation. Former television newscaster Tom Brokaw called this generation the “greatest” in a bestselling book in 1998. Born in the “fulcrum [years] of America in the twentieth century” and headed for a “rendezvous with destiny” (to quote FDR), this group represented our national peak, from which all subsequent generations—their artists, writers, and politicians—had fallen, Brokaw said.
Catch-22,
a book embraced both as a World War II novel and a novel about Vietnam, now seems an inevitable flashpoint.

In 1961, the Luce men were unprepared to envision Barnard College switching from the home of panty raids to the site of a major controversy over cohabitation before marriage. In 1968, Linda LeClair, a twenty-year-old sophomore at Barnard, would be punished for breaking school regulations by living off campus with her boyfriend, a junior at Columbia. The story was covered for weeks in national newspapers and sparked a dialogue about sexual mores. What had happened to our values? Our children? What would happen to marriage?

Eventually, LeClair dropped out of college and went to live in a commune with her boyfriend, who resisted induction into the army.

In 1961, the Luce men were unprepared to envision Catskills stages trading Borscht Belt shtick for the world's largest rock concert, a mud bath of collective property, free love, and drugs, serenaded by Jimi Hendrix's national anthem, whose “bombs bursting in air” became electric guitar riffs sounding like napalm falling from the sky. Many children of the Woodstock Nation wore army fatigues with Yossarian name tags on the breast pockets. What had happened to America's rendezvous with destiny? Was the mud at Woodstock a benign metaphor for Vietnam? Was destiny supposed to look like a quagmire?

What couldn't be seen in 1961 was the truth of Plato's dictum that “Forms and rhythms in [art] are never changed without producing changes in the most important political forms and ways.” For years, the men on Madison Avenue had flirted with this concept in their attempts to manipulate the American consumer; soon, a man calling himself Dylan, men named John, Paul, George, and Ringo would seize the idea and plumb it to its core. Joe Heller had grabbed it when he'd changed the emphasis in his fiction from
the story
to
the way the story is told.

What was true in 1961—the prevailing national temper that Joe would voice in his second novel, published in 1974, when sixties convulsions were settling (or subtler)—was this: “I know so many things I'm afraid to find out.”

*   *   *

WHAT DID YIDDISH
sound like with a Chinese accent?

Joe would soon find out via Irving “Speed” Vogel, who introduced him to Ngoot Lee and established an extended series of friendships that would comfort Joe for the rest of his days. Speed once said, “The “motivation of my entire life has been friends.” Like Joe, he had a
gift
for friendship.

One day on Fire Island, in the summer of 1962, Joe, Shirley, and their children were walking on the beach. Speed Vogel had bought an oceanside house from Carl Reiner and was out, that afternoon, sunbathing. He noticed an attractive woman. He studied her face and recognized her as an old friend of his kid sister: Shirley Held. She told him she was married to the writer Joseph Heller. He gushed about
Catch-22.
She took him over to meet Joe and they hit it off. In no time, “Joe somehow managed to squeeze all [my] juicy gossip … out of [me],” Speed wrote.

Irving Vogel was the son of an Eastern European immigrant who became one of Manhattan's most prosperous building contractors. Julius Vogel built apartment houses in the Bronx, on the Upper West Side, and all along Broadway and Central Park. The family lived on Riverside Drive at Seventy-second Street. As a teenager, Speed referred to his dad's buildings as his father's “erections.” The two did not get along. Dubbed “Speed” at the age of four by a wry camp counselor ribbing him for taking so long to tie his shoes, the young Vogel did not share his father's drive for achievement. He preferred a slower pace, a more bohemian life. He rebelled against the family and its riches (while continuing to accept his father's money). For a while, he worked as a herring taster at a Manhattan delicatessen, Zabar's, he started a textile business, he worked as an assistant to the architect Charles Gwathmey, and he tried his hand at sculpture, working with found metals.