Just One Catch (23 page)

Gates replied that, despite the department's need for instructors, “I believe I should not encourage you to apply.” The college would insist on a personal interview, he said, and Joe's long-distance circumstances did not make this possible. Joe did not give up. “Although I should prefer to finish the year at Oxford, I could manage to leave several weeks before the end of June if the interview is necessary before then,” he wrote back.

Gates recognized that no other applicant matched Joe. Already, his credentials—publications in
Story, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly,
and
Best American Short Stories,
all within a five-year span—surpassed those of most tenured members of the department. Gates wrote to the director of placement at Columbia, professing his interest in Joe and requesting a photograph as well as “detailed information on his personality.” On March 24, 1950, Margaret Morgan of Columbia's Division of Teaching Placement replied that New York State's antidiscrimination law precluded sending a photograph; however, she recalled Mr. Heller as “a very fine appearing young man.” She said she had phoned Mr. Paul S. Wood, with whom Mr. Heller had studied in Columbia's English Department. Mr. Wood reported that Mr. Heller was a “fine looking, clean-cut lad; [he] makes friends and holds them. He is a little shy, but this should not provide a serious difficulty, since he improves upon acquaintance and his shyness would not prove to be an obstacle in his classroom teaching.”

Follow-up letters of recommendation asserted that Joseph Heller was a “young man of serious interests, creative gifts, and high intelligence” (Sidney Hook, Department of Philosophy, NYU); a “poised and mature” person, with “excellent powers of expressing his thought both orally and on paper … clearly the best in [his] class” (Lionel Casson, assistant professor of classics, NYU); a man who “does well at anything he puts his mind to” (Maurice Baudin); and an “extremely personable gentleman” (Lillian Hornstein, assistant professor of English, NYU). Joe's thesis director, Paul Wood, said again that Joe was “somewhat retiring” (special deference toward a man with so much authority over him? dreaminess? impatience?). But Joe, Wood concluded, was “unusually likeable.”

His college transcripts list a wide range of courses, including Latin and Greek, Economic Behavior, Shakespeare, the English Bible, Modern Art, Modern Music and Its Backgrounds, Writing for Radio, and Theories of the Universe.

“I am twenty-seven years old and married,” Joe informed Professor Gates.

By May 3, the Department of English Composition at Penn State had narrowed its field of applicants from eighty to ten. Professor Gates urged Joe to return to the States and set up an interview as soon as possible. The job paid three thousand dollars for the academic year, he said. Joe replied he was “scheduled to arrive in New York on July 1, but I could attempt to secure earlier passage if that is longer than you are prepared to wait.” Gates said July 1 was “satisfactory.” “In other words,” he added, “we are holding the place open for you.”

On July 5, Gates wrote Joe, in New York, that he should take the Pennsylvania Railroad to Lewiston, then catch the Boalsburg bus to State College. The next letter in the men's exchange came from Joe in New York. It is dated July 31. He had been offered the job, and he wanted to assure Professor Gates that “I am not in the reserves, organized or inactive, and I would venture the opinion that only under a program of total mobilization would I be considered for conscription.” He asked Gates for help securing housing. He said he and his wife would be willing to share an apartment or a house. “My efforts to find a place to live [there] have met with failure till now,” he wrote. “As you stated, vacancies are few, and those units which have been offered to me are miles beyond the bounds of economy.”

Like most college towns in the country, State College, Pennsylvania, was still overrun with veterans taking advantage of the G.I. Bill. Trailers and prefab structures lined the town's dirt streets, and many faculty members lived in semipermanent buildings on campus, amid constant, noisy construction of new academic halls. The land felt raw, cold, and exposed. Locals referred to the area and its surroundings as “Happy Valley.”

 

8.
Tea and Sympathy

FROM THE MAIN
campus gate, South Allen Street appeared to be made of sky more than asphalt; a mild curve of earth led the eye gently upward until the road petered out into late-afternoon clouds or early-evening starshine. Together, the buildings on either side of the street—nothing over three stories high—resembled a failed movie set, ready to be torn down and stored away. Automobiles, wide-grilled, big-bumpered, shiny, and black, lined up like insects having shed their carapaces in a ritual of mating or dying. They crowded out all other moving things. Local business owners complained of ex-servicemen marauding about town, intoxicated, but the street often seemed deserted to Joe from his campus perspective. Evergreens waved in chilly breezes. In their bending and swaying, they seemed to convey the odor of manure (from nearby farms), which sometimes pervaded the town, especially when the air hung heavy and still.

The Department of English Composition occupied the Sparks Building, a large rectangular structure of light brick and simple concrete ornamentation, surrounded by thin young trees. The lecture theaters were spacious and steep, tier after tier of hard wooden seats whose straight backs and skinny armrests clashed with the necessities of human anatomy. In the front of the rooms, small tables with flimsy lecterns gave the teachers some modicum of authority. Blackboards, built into the walls and attached to rollers, like windows in frames, moved up and down. To a jittery young instructor, they could seem like sets of teeth ready to chomp one's back.

Joe's new colleagues in the liberal arts did not try to hide their poor morale. The college administration—in flux since the recent death of the school's long-term president—aggressively courted federal dollars for scientific research related to national defense. In particular, administrators were excited about developing an underwater sound laboratory, whose purpose would be to explore technological innovations in submarine warfare. Little attention, and even less money, filtered down to the humanities. Until very recently, the largest program in the School of Liberal Arts had been Commerce and Finance, which most humanities teachers argued belonged in a School of Business. Besides, they said, the program—like most programs in the liberal arts—had been stagnant for twenty years.

“In those days, [Penn State] was more of an agricultural school than anything else. Our classes were filled with kids from the coal mines who were brought in to play football, box, wrestle, and then kicked out for poor grades,” Frederick Karl recalled. Like Joe, he was a first-year composition instructor. He was working, long-distance, on finishing his Ph.D. requirements at Columbia. “Penn State was, for us New Yorkers, the heart of the boondocks,” he said.

He remembered that “Joe's office was across the corridor from mine, and boy, was he bored.” Joe had no interest in the essentially remedial-level writing classes he taught. The students, he said, showed even less enthusiasm. “He would come over to my office, put his feet up on my desk, and insist on talking,” Karl said.

“Come have lunch,” Joe would say.

“I have work to do. Don't you have work to do?” Karl replied.

This casual banter would characterize the men's relationship for the rest of Joe's life. Karl, tall and bearded, deliberate in his movements and speech, was a disciplined, methodical scholar whose interests ranged from Joseph Conrad to Franz Kafka to the contemporary American novel. He didn't enjoy teaching composition any more than Joe did, but he took the work seriously and dispatched it without complaining. Joe figured it was his duty to save his new friend from the burdens of his responsible nature.

Joe and Shirley had still not found good living quarters and occupied a cramped, spare space near campus. As a result, “Shirley was often back in New York,” Karl said. “I was planning to get married, and Joe's desperation for company was such that he asked me and my wife-to-be to move in with him [somewhere]. Nothing came of that, perhaps fortunately, since close proximity then might have destroyed what would prove to be a fifty-year friendship.”

When Shirley was away, staying with her parents, Joe fell into a routine of teaching classes during the week and then catching a train to Manhattan on the weekends. He considered buying a car, but the Pennsylvania road system was so bad at the time, the trip to New York took nearly eleven hours.

According to Erica Heller, Joe and Shirley were together in Manhattan one weekend, “walking on the street, carrying groceries, when my mother stepped in a pothole and tripped. A piece of the wine bottle they'd been carrying went through her left hand, severing an artery. She needed several operations. I know they sued the city and won, but she had to see a doctor for quite some time [after that].”

Karl confirmed that at a certain point, early in Joe's first year at Penn State, Shirley stayed in New York more or less permanently to receive the medical attention she needed.

Miserably, Joe sat in his squat, stale-smelling bedroom, recalling balmy nights back in the city, when he and Shirley entertained friends with drinks on the rooftop of the building on West Seventy-sixth (though perhaps not all of his memories were pleasant—Erica remembers hearing as a child that her parents were once robbed in that apartment, though she can't recall details). In the summers, Dottie and Barney usually took a country house or went off on vacation to some luxury hotel somewhere. They would invite Shirley and Joe along.

Now, Joe was breathing cow-shit fumes, going to lunch with a friend who'd rather be working, and trying to decide what to do with cheating students. One day, when he caught a pair of boys copying each other's assignments in class, he remembered his own “malfeasance” with the foreign-language requirement at Columbia, and was “compelled … to show mercy,” he said.

*   *   *

AS HE DID
with Frederick Karl, Joe got along well with most of his colleagues. Gordon Smith was an exception. He was one of those people who interpreted Joe's sarcasm as mean-spiritedness. One weekend, the men and their wives visited the Gettysburg battlefield and cemetery. Joe made jokes about war, heroism, and the realities of combat versus mythic representations of it. He hopped around the field like a rabbit and said to Smith, who considered himself a Civil War expert, “What happened on
this
spot?” and “Who got shot
here
?” Smith thought him disrespectful. The budding friendship sputtered; Smith refused to speak to him again.

With another colleague, Joseph Rubin (a fellow veteran), Joe felt comfortable enough to confess his homesickness for New York. In Bernard Oldsey, whose keen interest in contemporary fiction matched Joe's, he found another confidant. They kicked around ideas for a movie script together, a World War II drama that never went anywhere. And Bob Mason and his wife, Abby, were especially sweet. They forgave Joe's rough edge because they understood he rarely meant his sarcasm to be taken personally. Bob appreciated the fact that Joe always “wanted to be honest, in a way, and literal.” “When you needed him, he came through,” Abby says—as when she had her first child at three in the morning, one terribly cold day, and they called Joe to stay with them at the hospital.

Joe also got to know Dr. John Campbell Major, a specialist in British literature, who had gone to school in Nebraska and Pennsylvania, taught for a while at Oregon Agricultural College, and served as a major in the army. The students called him Doctor, but it amused Joe to think of him as Major Major.

Another veteran on the staff whose name caught Joe's attention—though apparently the men never met—was Robert Oliver Shipman. A married father of three, Shipman held a reserve commission in the army, at the rank of captain, and served on campus as a chaplain and spiritual adviser to student groups. Consciously or not, Joe filed these details in his head.

For many in the campus community, athletics filled aimless hours. Over the years, Penn State's athletic teams had achieved mixed results; perhaps this accounted for the fact that a scrappy student boxer named Charles Allan Tapman remained a campus legend over a decade after his departure. He was a 127-pound featherweight who received a trophy as the “Top [Nittany] Lion Boxer” in 1939. Often overmatched, in terms of strength and skill, he nevertheless managed to compile an impressive win-loss record by being—according to college newspapers—“plucky,” “gentlemanly,” and in “magnificent physical condition.” The “old lion in [him]” always gave him “raw, red courage,” according to a letter in the March 17, 1939,
Penn State Collegian.

Joe found it both touching and sad that people still spoke of Tapman reverentially, as though his spirit conferred blessings on the campus. Obviously, he had been a lovable underdog of a man, cheated—by many accounts—out of a collegiate title in 1937 by a Jewish boxer from Cornell named Moses Goldbas. Reports of the title fight concurred that at one point the referee had separated Tapman and Goldbas from a clench. Tapman stepped back, but Golbas rushed in and slugged him, unawares, with a left hook, which floored him. Tapman recovered, but he was not the same, and lost the bout on points. Officials failed to penalize Goldbas for violating the rules: an injustice that lived on in the hearts of the Lions. For his part, Joe told Joseph Rubin he was charmed by the thought of a boxer named Tapman.

For single faculty members not thrilled by sports, and those, like Joe, often left on their own, “the box” was the cure for loneliness. Ever since the 1936 Olympic Games had been broadcast over television stations in Berlin and Leipzig, the enthusiasm for live programming beamed into one's home had spread around the globe. Joe found it ironic, given television's commercial breakthrough in Hitler's Germany, how, in the United States, the box was essentially Jewish. That is, the variety shows he watched on friends' bulky, flickering TVs—
The Jack Benny Program, The Burns and Allen Show,
Milton Berle's
Texaco Star Theater
—were nothing more than the old Borscht Belt vaudeville shtick he had enjoyed at Grossinger's the week he met Shirley. In particular, Sid Caesar's
Your Show of Shows
had the flavor of the Catskills on a Saturday night—now quickly becoming part of mainstream entertainment in America.