Just One Catch (67 page)

The Embarrassment of Riches
traced links between seventeenth-century Dutch art and business. Schama showed how Rembrandt's paintings were tied to social prestige; how art, as a commodity, promoted Dutch sovereignty and legitimized its cultural codes; how art and politics were the tools of a particular social class whose passion—no, sole purpose—was to generate money from money, and did so by rigging markets and going to war.

All of this sounded quite contemporary to Joe. It dovetailed with his experience as an artist caught in a commodity culture out of control (to his benefit
and
harm). His pal Mario Puzo often spoke of the choice he'd made to stop writing “literary” novels and do everything he could to capitalize on
The Godfather
's success. “If you're a guy who has a wife and children, and you continue to write small classics, you're committing murder. You're murdering your family,” Puzo would say.

Joe wanted to earn serious money
from
serious art, and he labored hard at it, though he remained doubtful it was possible. “[T]here's … something contradictory in what I say,” he admitted. “I'm one of the people who profit from the profit motive. I deal with money as a phenomenon and an inducement and portray this directly in my books.… I'm very conscious of money. I don't sell my books to publishers for a small amount.… Negotiations are very intense. I know the value. [At the same time,] I … know when I have enough. But I also know I'd rather write the books I want to than leave writing and go speculate and double or triple my money.”

As his recent studies reminded him, material reality tends to shape (or corrupt) ideals. In the novel, he offered a vivid example of this dynamic, formulating the core theme of the book, binding the various topics (money, art, war).

Writing about seventeenth-century Holland, Joe said, “To a country whose economic health depended on sea voyages, the telescope, like cartography and all other navigational devices, was of primary importance, and even a man of great mind like the Dutch Jew Spinoza earned a respectable living grinding lenses.… Spinoza died at forty-four, from lungs ruined, it is conjectured, by particles of glass inhaled in the performance of his honest duties as a lens grinder.” With ideals and ethics, Spinoza had hoped to unlock the secrets of the universe. In the end, the materials with which men probed the cosmos undid him.

Just so with an artist or a writer. The art, the ideal, was also a commodity (complete with price tag). Could the two be reconciled? Did they destroy each other? In
Good as Gold,
Joe had tackled this conundrum, calling into question the legitimacy of his novel by reminding the reader of its productness—its similarity to Henry Kissinger's book, with which it competed in the marketplace.

Now again, thinking of the Greeks, of Rembrandt, of commerce and trade, Joe raised the paradox: In 1961, he wrote, Rembrandt's painting,
Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer
—made at a time when Rembrandt's “reputation had dimmed” because he pursued his art rather than the portraits the public wanted from him—sold to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art at a record-breaking price of $2.3 million. That was the year Joe—who would earn record-breaking advances for novels he hoped were ambitious works of art—published
Catch-22,
the book that made him a brand-name author (people spoke of a Heller, as they did of a Rembrandt).

Through this ingenuous combination—a meditation on Rembrandt creating Aristotle on a canvas that lands in contemporary New York—Joe achieved the long view in his novel. The setup enabled him to discuss Greek ideals of art and democracy, the beginnings of modern trade and economic manipulation, and ongoing worldly debacles. In Joe's hands, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was an extension of a grubby back alley in old Amsterdam.

History unraveled as a blur of folly: “From Athens to Syracuse by oar and sail was just about equivalent to the journey by troopship today from California to Vietnam or from Washington, D.C. to … the Persian Gulf,” Joe wrote. The consequences of these travels—and the sense that nothing would ever change—went without saying.

In Joe's conception, as Aristotle's figure emerges on Rembrandt's canvas, he observes his surroundings, including present-day New York:

“A man cannot expect to make money out of the community and to receive honor as well,” [Aristotle] had written in Athens in his
Nicomachean Ethics.

In Sicily [where the painting of Aristotle first got shipped] he was no longer positive.

In London and Paris he began to have doubts.

In New York he knew he was wrong, because all the people who had contributed to the acquisition of his painting by the Metropolitan Museum of Art were making much money out of the community and were held in very great honor, especially after the purchase, for on the brass wall label in the museum the names [of the donors] … appear[ed] alongside the masterpiece with the names of Aristotle, Homer, and Rembrandt.

Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself.

Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.

When most of a nation's money sits in the vaults of an exclusive social club whose existence is predicated on the adventurism of war, waged to pry open global markets, justice cannot flourish, Joe argued. The public good will not be served, and the most terrible suffering will fall on children.

This view had animated all of Joe's novels—never more explicitly than this one, which at first he called
Poetics,
after the Aristotle book he had first read as a graduate student at Columbia. Later, he taught
Poetics
at the Yale Drama School. When published, the novel's title became
Picture This.

Joe had crafted a painterly verbal style by flattening his prose, deleting adjectives and adverbs, muting anything distinctive in the voice. Individual sentences have the quick, sometimes tentative, investigative quality of a brushstroke. There are few transitions, mooting the whole question of anachronisms (for there is no single setting, in time or place). As much as possible, given the nature of writing, the reader is forced to confront the entire novel at once, as one might a painting on a wall.

Socrates (the provocateur) dies—indeed,
accepts
his death—in the penultimate chapter, a Heller scapegoat: “[T]here was [no] tolerance … for the satirical dissent for which Socrates was notable.” Today, the world knows only an idealized version of Socrates through Plato's writing. The sacrifice of material reality (the philosopher's body) makes possible the ideal of artistic portraiture.

And the
uses
of art? On this subject, Joe, the old antiwar playwright, was grumpier than ever: “Aristophanes,” he said, “was writing [satirically] about an autocratic wartime leader who was at the height of his popularity. / Athens voted first prize to both these plays. / And voted … to continue the war.”

*   *   *

“IN WHAT I HOPE
is an amusing way, it's really an extremely pessimistic book,” Joe conceded in a conversation with Bill Moyers for Public Television's
World of Ideas. Picture This,
Joe said, does not flinch from the fact that “the United States is … founded solely on the philosophy of business … [and] is the only society in which virtue has become synonymous with money.” The word
democracy
does not appear in the Constitution, he said. “Democracy was always a threat that [the Founding Fathers] wished very much to avoid.… They felt that the mob—that's a word they used—would not know how to vote, would not know where their interests lay. The other fear was that the mob indeed
would
know where their interests lay, and … would vote [accordingly].”

Beyond all this, Greek history teaches that a pure “democratic ideal is [not] even possible,” Joe said. “[T]here can be [no] such thing as participatory democracy. One of our illusions—and it's a very comforting illusion—is that by voting, we are participating in government. Voting is a ritualistic routine. The right to vote is indispensable to our contentment, but in application it's absolutely useless … [because] the candidates are supported by people who are from the same financial and social status.”

When Moyers accused Joe of fatalism, Joe said, in effect, Read your history. “I went back to ancient Greece because I was interested in writing about American life and Western civilization,” he said. “In ancient Greece I found striking—and grim—parallels.… Extremely grim. In the war between Sparta and Athens, the Peloponnesian War, I could see a prototype for the Cold War between this country and Russia.”

“Our popular notion of Greece is of a wise, humane, intelligent, moderate society. Is that what you found?” Moyers asked.

“I didn't find that at all,” Joe said. “I found that as democracy was instituted, Athens became more chaotic, more corrupt.… [C]ommerce was important to Athens, so business leaders … obtained control of the political machinery, and Athens became more and more warlike.” There you have the genesis of present-day American democracy. “I'm trying to say that the … people in a democratic society are no more rational than they are in any other type of society,” Joe ventured. “They are manipulated. It is the function of a leader in a democracy, if he wishes to be a leader, to manipulate the emotions and the ideas of the population.… [M]oney and conquest and commerce [are] the constants in human history.”

In his curmudgeonly tirade, he seemed to confirm one reviewer's observation that the author of
Catch-22
had become like the embittered, sassy Mark Twain who had tired of life and begun to think of himself as a philosopher rather than a humorist.

In general, reviewers of
Picture This,
which was released on September 6, 1988, expressed perplexity, impatience, and irritation. Richard Raynor, in
The Times
of London, praised Joe's “most endearing quality,” his refusal to “take institutions seriously; or rather … he takes them so seriously they become hilarious.” Other writers hated the book or fumbled to offer a coherent response. “[I]t represents very spaced-out writing,” said Robert M. Adams in the
New York Times Book Review.
“It may be funky as well, and for all I know it's awesome.” The New York
Daily News
proclaimed the novel to be “[t]hought-provoking,” but then gave up: “It is as difficult to write
about
as it probably was to write.”

In the
Washington Post Book World,
Jonathan Yardley pulled no punches. “It's true, as Dr. Johnson put it, that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,'” he said, “but it's also true that writing done primarily for money often lacks both inspiration and authority—in both of which ‘Picture This' is notably deficient.… ‘Picture This' may do wonders for Joseph Heller's bank account, but what it is likely to do for his literary reputation is another matter altogether.” Clearly, Joe had not “tossed off [the book],” Yardley said. “[H]e seems to have worked diligently at it.” But “[m]ore's the pity”—the novel was “random,” “unoriginal,” and “ill-digested.”

Yardley's view found support in most major review outlets. Walter Goodman of the
New York Times
sneered, “We have picked up a word from the Greeks for this sort of thing. Sophomoric.”

Goodman's words “had a devastating effect on me,” Joe confessed. He endured the worst reviews of his career; in many cases, it was hard not to believe the confluence of money and art had not shaded the responses, making for disturbingly personal remarks. “‘Picture This' … is devoid of energy, bite, wit, imagination—of just about everything save a dogged determination to plow through to the final page and fulfill the contract's demands,” Yardley wrote. “At its conclusion, one can only cringe at the prospect of what the ‘sequel' to ‘Catch-22' may bring.”

Not surprisingly,
Picture This
sold dismally.

“Very few complex good books are popular to a mass audience,” Joe said.

Apparently, readers wanted
Mad
magazine. Joe was giving them the old
Commentary
—which most of them wouldn't have known about anyway. Late in life, the trouble with the long view was this: Few were left to share it.

 

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?”