Just One Catch (36 page)

“They're trying to kill me,” Yossarian [said].

“No one's trying to kill you.…”

“Then why are they shooting at me?”

“They're shooting at everyone.… They're trying to kill everyone.”

“And what difference does that make?”

It was at the heart of identity, personal and national.

“Would you like to see your country lose?”

… “We won't lose. We've got more men, more money and more material.… Let somebody else get killed.”

“But suppose everybody on our side felt that way?”

“Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way. Wouldn't I?”

It was in the rhythms of waking and sleeping; of being abandoned in a place, and time, of healing. It was in the word
father;
in being told the body was spirit, and we were all One.

There were bartenders, bricklayers and bus conductors all over the world who wanted him dead, landlords and tenants, traitors and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys, and they were all out to bump him off. That was the secret Snowden had spilled out to him [along with his guts] on the mission to Avignon—they were all out to get him; and Snowden had spilled it all over the back of the plane.

But that was just the beginning.

There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell.… There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidizing away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe.

A
yes
and a
no.

The dying gunner's secret—“Snowden's insides slither[ing] down to the floor in a soggy pile”—leaves an “easy” message for Yossarian, whose attempts at ministrations, with morphine and sulfa powder, are grotesquely worthless. “Man was matter.… Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.”

This moment—Snowden's death in the back of the B-25—breaks the surface of the novel, near its end, like a grievous and stonily repressed memory: mortal flesh's negation of life's comedy, the book's harsh rebuke to its lighthearted entertainment. A paradox: From the book's first two sentences (essentially the same sentence, more or less repeated), language has been a useless and overdetermined loop. Finally, it reveals its power to shock; to kill. Joe had developed his narrative method—displacement, interruption—by reading Céline. The
subject
of his narrative he carried in his bones.

What eventually made
Catch-22
a cult favorite among young readers in the 1960s and 1970s was Joe's demonstration that all of language was a Jewish joke. Barblike “uh-uh's” were nestled inside each and every “sure.” No official explanation, expression of patriotism, spiritual consolation, administrative rule, declaration of war, or pledge of assimilation could withstand such a withering exposé. The anachronisms—the McCarthyesque loyalty oaths, the computer glitches—felt absolutely right, though they were historically inaccurate. Chaos and nefarious methodologies have always predated their most efficient means of expression.

In Joe's novel, hypocrisy was revealed to be the DNA of rabid nationalism. According to Milo Minderbinder, one of America's “moral principles”—an ideal our country goes to war for, to protect—is that “it [is] never a sin to charge as much as the traffic [will] bear.” The ultimate consequence of this philosophy is “war … without limits and without meaning,” except blind profit, says Alfred Kazin, “a war that will only end when no one is alive to fight it.”

It was this “next war” that
Catch-22
was about, which is why it came to be read, in the sixties, as a Vietnam book and why it seems to readers today prescient about the war on terror. “Frankly, I'd like to see government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry,” Milo says—a wish virtually realized, after 9/11, with companies like the former Blackwater arming civilian contractors in Iraq.

If
Catch-22
's skewering of national pieties made it a cult book, what made it “as tragic a novel as has ever been written” was its recognition of the ultimate hypocrisy: the death in life pumping through each and every organism, the body's betrayal of itself.

“How do you feel, Yossarian?”

“Fine. No, I'm very frightened.”

The “rebels without a cause” in 1950s pop culture, and the tuned-in, dropped-out rebels of the 1960s, flattened into caricatures in
Time
magazine, did not share Yossarian's deep humanity, because, unlike the others, Yossarian, clear-eyed and scared to death, understood life's joke.

*   *   *

“I DIDN'T
WANT
to give him a Jewish name,” Joe explained. “I didn't want to give him an Irish name, I didn't want to symbolize the white Protestant.… I wanted to get … somebody who could not be identified … geographically, or culturally, or sociologically—somebody as a person who has a capability of ultimately divorcing himself completely from all emotional and psychological ties.”

The
yes
in this
no
is Yossarian's profound,
unstated
Judaism: his sense of worldly exile and intimation of connection to something ancient, even if that something survives only in an instinctual personal ritual.

While the chaplain—who quotes Psalm 137, about poor exiles weeping and hanging their harps in trees—conducts Snowden's funeral, Yossarian strips naked and crawls into a tree. He quips to Milo that he is sitting in the “tree of life.” Critics have interpreted his actions as a return to innocence, a search for God-like perspective, a refusal of the military (the shucking of the uniform). His gesture embraces each of these motives, and is, as well, a shocked response to the unfathomable horror of Snowden's death. But what gives the scene depth, beneath the comedy and superficial pleasure of Yossarian's rebellion, is its echo of the psalm.

“[T]hey that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us
required of us
mirth,” says the verse. “How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?” Instead, the homeless Jews “hanged [their] harps among the willows” and “sat down, yea, we wept.”

Yossarian has hanged himself like a harp in a tree. The potential indignity of his nakedness becomes its opposite, in his refusal of mirth, his denial of the “required song” of just another funeral oration. They that wasted Snowden have more in store for the others. Yossarian says no to them—while knowing he probably won't escape the final yes.

Early in the editorial process, Bob Gottlieb thought
Catch-22
's comedy battled its tragic undertones. He feared it might be hard to reconcile the book's two registers. Instinctually, Joe knew the relentless rhythms of Borscht Belt jokes were like the incantatory prayers one finds in Psalms: The transition from one to the other was natural, almost unnoticeable.

The retrospective narrative mode Joe had discovered with “Castle of Snow” strengthened
Catch-22,
giving the novel an elegiac tone, despite the antic humor:
Everything is over, lost already.
Which is not to say the cycle won't start again—and again—as the book's repetitions made clear.

“Haven't you got anything humorous [to offer as consolation] that stays away from waters and valleys and God?”[the colonel said].

The chaplain was apologetic. “I'm sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know
are
rather somber in tone.…”

*   *   *

NINA BOURNE
had worked hard on
Catch-22.
She saw herself as “the demented governess who believed the baby was her own.” Her conviction that the novel was a work of literary genius led her to stand up in the book's first promotion meeting. With a tremor in her voice and tears in her eyes, she announced, “We have to print 7,500”—instead of the standard 5,000-copy first printing. “[I]f the book I feel this strongly about can't have 7,500 copies, what am I doing here?” No one argued. Bourne was not one to make a scene or issue demands. Since 1939, she had done her job quietly and efficiently. She said what she meant, and if she was willing to take a risk on this book, then the company would fall in behind her.

The truth was, following Jack Goodman's death and Dick Simon's retirement, Gottlieb and Bourne were nearly in a position to run their own operation within the walls of Simon & Schuster. “If we'd had anybody to ask [how to promote
Catch-22
], they'd never have let us,” Bourne said.

She attached a quirky disclaimer to the cover of the prepublication proofs:

A funny and tragic and tonic book that says what is on the tip of the tongue of our age to say.

If a single word, thought, or overtone in the above sentence rubs you the wrong way, blame us, not the novel.

She wrote “crazed” cover letters to distinguished readers, she said, hoping to elicit comments from them for possible use in advertising. She mailed prepub copies of the novel to James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Art Buchwald, Graham Greene, S. J. Perelman, and Evelyn Waugh, among others. To each, Bourne wrote, “This is a book I'd get a critic out of the shower to read.” According to Jonathan R. Eller, “One eminent critic avoided her for years after … that.”

The “crazed” strategy seemed to backfire when, on September 6, 1961, Evelyn Waugh wrote:

Dear Miss Bourne:

Thank you for sending me
Catch-22.
I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady's reading.…

You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches—often repetitious—totally without structure.

Much of the dialogue is funny.

You may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”

Bourne was relieved when a telegram arrived from Art Buchwald in Paris:

PLEASE CONGRATULATE JOSEPH HELLER ON MASTERPIECE CATCH-22 STOP I THINK IT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST WARBOOKS STOP SO DO IRWIN SHAW AND JAMES JONES.

Just before the book's appearance in stores, Gottlieb and Bourne incited word of mouth with mysterious ads in the
New York Times
featuring Paul Bacon's cutout—nothing else. Then, in the September 11 issue of
Publishers Weekly,
a full-page ad appeared with a photo of Joe—casual, confident, handsome—and a picture of the book's cover. The copy, written by Gottlieb, read: “The growing ferment of interest in
Catch-22
confirms our faith that
Joseph Heller's
outrageously funny, powerful, totally original novel will be one of the major publishing events of the fall. Oct. 10. $5.95.”

That autumn, Joe and Shirley, along with Frederick and Dolores Karl, “spent many an evening running from one bookstore in New York to another, putting [Joe's] novel on display when no one was looking, or moving copies of
Catch-22
from under the counter of numerous Doubledays and placing it on display while burying other bestselling books,” Frederick Karl said. Joe's delight in holding the physical book, spotting copies of it in stores, was unbounded. The kid from Coney Island had pulled off something big.

Early reviews clashed—
Newsweek
favorable,
Time
tepid—but the promotional campaign had succeeded. The first printing sold out in ten days. Nina Bourne readied a second and third printing, all before Christmas.

Like Willa Cather saying the world broke in two at a particular point, Erica Heller recalled the excitement and confusion of that season. They had a “regular family life,” she said. “Trips to Coney … Fudgsicles and two-cent pretzels. Lots of sports (well, it wasn't exactly a Jewish Hickory Hill).… Then, seemingly out of nowhere, this crazy war book with its red, white, and blue cover was suddenly everywhere.”

She was only nine years old, but she noticed changes. “We used to go often on Sunday afternoons to Brooklyn to visit relatives. Before, we had taken the subway. Now we went in a cab,” she says. “One day at school, a boy in my class told me that his parents thought my father was a ‘great artist.' I went home and looked everywhere for an easel, for paints. I didn't even understand what that meant.”

Home movie footage shows Erica and Ted, in a pink nightgown and dark cotton pajamas, respectively, trotting out copies of the book in front of a thick white curtain in the Heller apartment. As Erica holds up the novel, she smiles ruefully: a look of pride and pleased resentment at being forced to perform for Daddy,
about
Daddy. Ted peers shyly at his sister and at the camera over the top of his book. He rolls his eyes as he exits the scene, this
Catch
business, thank goodness, done for the evening.

On another occasion, while the family was renting a place on Fire Island, Ted, to Joe's delight, told strangers on the beach
he
had written the book. In a copy inscribed to “Erica Jill” on September 7, 1961, Joe wrote, “With the hope that when you read this book in ten or fifteen years, you will love it at least a little—and that you will love me too. Daddy.”

High on momentum, Gottlieb and Bourne took Francis Brown, the editor of the
New York Times Book Review,
to lunch. They told Brown that
Catch-22
was unusual, as well as special, and that an older, conventional reviewer would be wrong for the book. Brown assured them he would think carefully about an appropriate reviewer. Gottlieb and Bourne left the meal excited, anticipating splendid treatment in the
Times.