But Enough About You: Essays (34 page)

Webb wrote, “In the next few days I devoured the book again. It mattered not to me that Joseph Heller was then protesting the war in which I was fighting, and it matters not a whit to me today. In his book, from that lonely place of blood and misery and disease, I found a soul mate who helped me face the next day and all the days and months that followed.”

Soul mate.
Catch-22
’s admirers cross boundaries, ideological, generational, geographical. Daugherty relates a very funny anecdote about Bertrand Russell, the pacifist and philosopher. He had praised the book in print and invited Heller to visit him while in England. (Russell was then in his nineties.) When Heller presented himself at the door, Russell flew into a rage, screaming, “Go away, damn you!
Never come back here again!” A perplexed Heller fled, only to be intercepted by Russell’s manservant, who explained, “Mr. Russell thought you said ‘Edward Teller.’ ” The ideological distance between Jim Webb and Bertrand Russell can be measured in light-years. An author who reached both of them exerted something like universal appeal.

Returning to a favorite book, one approaches with trepidation. Will it be as good as one remembers it? Has it dated? As Heller’s friend and fan Christopher Hitchens would say, “Has it time-traveled?” Any answer is subjective, but a fifty-year-old book that continues to sell 85,000 copies a year must be doing something right, time-travel-wise—even discounting the number assigned in the classroom.

I asked Salman Rushdie, another friend and admirer of Heller’s, what he thought about the book all these years later.

“I think
Catch-22
stands the test of time pretty well,” he replied, “because Heller’s language-comedy, the twisted-sane logic of his twisted-insane world, is as funny now as it was when the book came out. The bits of
Catch-22
that survive best are the craziest bits: Milo Minderbinder’s chocolate-coated cotton-wool, Major Major Major Major’s name, and of course the immortal Catch itself (“it’s the best there is”). The only storyline that now seems sentimental, even mawkish, is the one about ‘Nately’s whore.’ Oh well. As Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon, nobody’s perfect.”

A book resonates along different bandwidths as it ages.
Catch-22
’s first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured. To the Vietnam generation, enduring its own terror and madness, crawling through malarial rice paddies while pacifying hamlets with napalm and Zippo lighters, the book amounted to existential comfort and the knowledge that they were not alone. (Note, too, that
Catch-22
ends with Yossarian setting off AWOL for Sweden, which before becoming famous for IKEA and girls with dragon tattoos, was a haven for Vietnam-era draft evaders.)

As for
Catch
’s current readers, it’s not hard to imagine a brave but
frustrated American marine huddling in his Afghan foxhole, drawing sustenance and companionship from these pages in the midst of fighting an unwinnable war against stone-age fanatics.

Daugherty tells how Heller was required to take a barrage of psychological tests for a magazine job. (Fodder, surely, for an episode of
Mad Men
.) The color cards he was shown conjured in his mind terrible images of gore and amputated limbs. He mentioned to one of his examiners that he was working on a novel. One of them asked,
Oh, what’s it about?
Joe wrote in his memoir forty years later, “ ‘That question still makes me squirm.”

There’s a certain numerology about
Catch-22
: Yossarian, helpless and furious as the brass keep raising the number of missions he has to fly before he can go home. He’s Sisyphus, with attitude. Then there’s the title itself, a sort of algorithm expressing the predicament of the soldier up against an implacable, martial bureaucracy. For us civilians, the algorithm describes a more prosaic conundrum, that of standing before the soft-faced functionary telling us that he cannot register the car until we produce a document that
does not exist
. Bureaucracy, as Hannah Arendt defined it: the rule of nobody.

Roll credits.
Catch-22
is Joe Heller’s book, but it did not arrive on the shelves all by itself. His literary agent Candida Donadio got the first chapter into the hands of Arabel Porter, editor of
New American Writing
; and then into the all-important hands of Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster. Gottlieb, one of the great book editors of his day—he later became head of Alfred Knopf—played a critical role shaping the text. Daugherty describes how the two of them pieced together a jigsaw puzzle from a total of nine separate manuscripts;
Catch-22
seems to have been stitched together with no less care and effort than the Bayeux Tapestry. Their collaboration was astonishingly devoid of friction. Gottlieb is a genius, but Heller was an editor’s dream, that rare thing—an author without proprietary sensitivity, willing to make any change, to (in Scott Fitzgerald’s great phrase) murder any darling. As the work proceeded, it took on within the offices of Simon and Schuster “the aura of a Manhattan Project.”

Nina Bourne at S&S was passionate about the book and promoted it relentlessly after it initially faltered, with a zeal that would induce
a sigh of envy in any author’s breast. The jacket design with the red soldier dangling like a marionette against a blue background became iconic. It was the work of Paul Bacon, himself another World War II veteran, who also designed the original covers for
Slaughterhouse-Five
,
Rosemary’s Baby
,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
,
Ragtime
, and
Shogun
.

It was a fertile time for letters. While Heller was conjuring Yossarian and Major Major Major and Milo Minderbinder and Chaplain Chapman and the other members of the 488 Bomb Squadron, J. P. Donleavy was writing
The Ginger Man
, Ken Kesey was at work on
Cuckoo’s Nest
, Thomas Pynchon on
V
. Heller’s good friend Kurt Vonnegut was banging away at
Cat’s Cradle
.

Joseph Heller will forever be known as the author of
Catch-22
—and who wouldn’t be happy to wear that laurel? But in the opinion of some, including Bob Gottlieb, it is not his best novel. According to this view, that garland belongs to
Something Happened
, Heller’s dark and brilliant 1974 novel about the tragic office worker and family man Bob Slocum. The reviewer for
The
New York Times
wryly observed that to film
Catch-22
, Mike Nichols assembled a fleet of eighteen B-25 bombers—in effect the world’s twelfth-largest air force. To turn
Something Happened
into a movie, the reviewer ventured, would cost roughly nothing.

I put it to Joe once, after a martini or two: So, did he think
Something Happened
was a better book?

He smiled and shrugged. “Who can choose?”

American literature is deplorably replete with books that secured fame for their authors, but little fortune. Think of poor old Melville schlepping about the streets of Manhattan as a Customs inspector, having earned a lifetime profit of about $500 for
his
hyphenated masterpiece,
Moby-Dick
.

Joe made out rather better. Simon and Schuster paid him an advance of $1,500 (about $11,000 today). If the paperback royalties didn’t make him rich, they certainly made him comfortable. The movie rights went for a tidy price, and larger paychecks lay ahead. Not bad for a kid who grew up poor in Coney Island. In fact, one might ask,
What’s the catch?

We became friends in his final years. I loved him. For someone who had flown sixty missions in a world war, who had endured a devastating, near-fatal illness (Guillain-Barré), who had gone through a rough and somewhat public divorce, Joe seemed to me a surprisingly joyous person. He sought joy, and seemed to find it often enough—in his myriad and devoted friends; in good food and dry martinis; in his wife, Valerie, his son, Ted, and his daughter, Erica, who has written a touching and frank account of growing up as an Eloise of the Apthorp apartment building in Manhattan.

In that book,
Yossarian Slept Here
, she writes, “When
Catch
was finally beginning to make a real name for itself . . . my parents would often jump into a cab at night and ride around to all of the city’s leading bookstores in order to see that jaunty riot of red, white and blue and the crooked little man, the covers of ‘the book,’ piled up in towers and pyramids, stacked in all the nighttime store windows. Was anything ever again as much fun for either of them, I wonder?”

A few months before Joe died, I wrote him from the midst of a too-long book tour, in somewhat low spirits. His tough love and sharp-elbowed humor always yanked me back from the brink of acedia. This time there were no jokes, instead something like resignation.

“The life of a novelist,” he wrote me, “is almost inevitably destined for anguish, humiliations, and disappointment—when you get to read the two chapters in my new novel I’ve just finished you will recognize why.”

That book,
Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man
, is a sad one, about a novelist who has had great success early on, only to have less in later years. It was published after Joe died.

So perhaps in the end, there always
is
a catch. But the one Joe Heller left us remains, even after all these years, the best catch of all.

—Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition, 2011

The Letters of Hunter S. Thompson, Volume II

“It’s been a weird night,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote to the CBS News correspondent Hughes Rudd one morning in 1973 as dawn was breaking over Owl Farm, his “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, “and I’ve been dealing with a head full of something rumored to be LSD-25 for the past six hours, but on the evidence I suspect it was mainly that PCP animal tranq, laced with enough speed to KEEP the arms & legs moving. The brain is another question, I think, but I keep hoping we’ll have it under control before long.”

A great many of the letters in this, the second volume of a projected trilogy of the letters of the
monstre sacré
of American journalism, appear to have been written under various chemical influences in the wee small hours: “Cazart! It’s 5:57 a.m. now & the Aspen FM station is howling ‘White Rabbit’—a good omen, eh?”; “It’s 6:37 now”; “Christ, it’s 5:40 a.m.” Sometimes the sun is halfway to the meridian before he reaches for the off button on his I.B.M. Selectric: “It’s 10:33 in the morning & this is the longest letter I’ve ever written. It began as a quick note to wrap up loose ends.”

This makes for some pretty electric reading, and for some not-so-electric reading. During the period covered in this collection, Thompson was a vital, deliriously erratic force in journalism, covering the turbulent 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the 1968 election of Richard M. Nixon, the 1972 campaign, Watergate, the falls of Nixon and Saigon. There are letters here to Tom Wolfe; Senator Eugene McCarthy; the Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta (the inspiration for the “300-pound Samoan attorney” character in
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
); Charles Kuralt; Thompson’s Random House editor, Jim Silberman; Warren Hinckle (then the editor
of
Ramparts
magazine); the soon-to-be-elected-congressman Allard K. Lowenstein; Paul Krassner; Jann Wenner; the illustrator Ralph Steadman; Joe Eszterhas (then a reporter for the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
); Senator George McGovern; Gary Hart (then McGovern’s campaign manager); Anthony Burgess; Patrick J. Buchanan (then a Nixon speechwriter); Robert Kennedy’s former campaign press secretary Frank Mankiewicz; Garry Wills; Jimmy Carter (then a presidential candidate); Thompson’s then-lawyer Sandy Berger, now the national security adviser; the movie director Bob Rafelson; the political prankster Dick Tuck; and the Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. That’s a pretty good sampling of the folks who brought you the 1960s and ’70s. This being an omnium-gatherum of the Thompsonian “gonzo” archive, there are also memorandums, drafts of book-jacket copy, and movie treatment outlines.

It’s not surprising that so many of these letters are about what one of Thompson’s early boosters, Tom Wolfe, once declared the great subject of American writers: money—in this case, the general lack of it and the desperate need for more. Thompson is always one step ahead of the Internal Revenue Service, the Diners Club, or a hornet-mad collection agency. Yet again, one is sadly reminded that writing an American classic—in this case,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
—is no guarantee of financial security.

That book, which began as a series of articles in
Rolling Stone
, sold only about 18,000 copies in hardcover when it was published in 1972. “I find myself,” Thompson wrote to his mother, “getting ‘famous,’ but no richer than I was before people started recognizing & harassing me almost everywhere I go.” On the brighter side, a quarter century later finds Thompson still alive, despite a lifestyle that, if these letters are accurate, would surely have long ago brought down a milder constitution.

One of the things that made Thompson an “outlaw” hero to this reviewer’s generation was the demonic zest of his invective and contumely. The DNA of Thompson’s adjectival lexicon is made up of the following, often in sequence:
vicious
,
rancid
,
savage
,
fiendish
,
filthy
,
rotten
,
demented
,
treacherous
,
heinous
,
scurvy
,
devious
,
grisly
,
hamwit
,
foetid
,
cheapjack
, and
hellish
. Favorite gerunds and other
verb forms of abuse include
festering
,
stinking
,
soul-ripping
,
drooling
,
rabbit-punching
, and
knee-crawling
, to say nothing of even more piquant expressions.