Just One Catch (44 page)

Billy Graham knew it. This quintessential Luce hero—the hardheaded entrepreneur with an unshakable faith in the Christian God—warned that the Beatles and rock music were leading the children of the 1960s to perdition. When Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Christ, the Ku Klux Klan rushed to Christ's defense. They burned Beatles records and showed, more than anything, that Lennon may have uttered an uncomfortable truth.

The ex–Luce man Joe Heller knew things had changed. “He loved Bob Dylan.… [He] had everything Dylan did on a reel-to-reel tape (he had a Tandberg tape deck—I
loved
playing with that thing),” Ted recalls. Joe tried wearing a string of love beads made by his daughter. “She told me that after about three days, I'd get used to them. This is the third day and, you know, she's right,” he told an interviewer. (The beads clashed with the checkered blazer he often wore and the orange Stim-U-Dent toothpick perpetually hanging from his mouth.)

More seriously, he remained engaged with the underground press, even as mainstream publications courted him. In his blazers, Joe set “a new trend for the … 60s, along with the high-waisted dress and the overblouse,”
Vogue
said. As often as not, he displayed his “trendiness” in
The Realist, Crawdaddy!
and other tabloid-style rock-music venues.

To a dismissal by Jean Shepherd of the “polemic[al]” satire of Lenny Bruce, Joe responded, in the pages of
The Realist,
“[I]t is [not] the function of satire to present all sides of a question; that is the function of … the
Sunday Times.
I'm not sure, even, that it is the
function
of satire to convey information, but, instead, to convey an
attitude
about information.” He took Shepherd to task for suggesting that passion and intellect were mutually exclusive. “They are not at opposite ends of the pole, or even within the same circumference of definitions,” he wrote. “One of the opposites of passion is indifference; and one of the opposites of intellect is stupidity.”

In the May 1965 issue of
The Realist,
Joe attacked syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak for an “attempt to discredit the Student Non-Violent [
sic
] Coordinating Committee.” Borrowing a page from Joseph McCarthy, Evans and Novak had claimed, without substantiation, that SNCC had been infiltrated by “known Communists.” Joe called their charges “contemptible” and lauded the “hundreds of brave young men and women, white and colored, Northern and Southern,” who had organized voter-registration drives in the South, at considerable physical risk, and “demonstrated virtues not often found anywhere else in this country of ours.”

In more mainstream outlets—the
New York Times
, the
Harvard Crimson
—he criticized America's leaders. He insisted “[a]ny society that puts Cassius Clay and Benjamin Spock in jail and makes McGeorge Bundy head of the Ford Foundation is not one to which allegiance should be given lightly.”

To Richard B. Sale, an editor of the academic journal
Studies in the Novel,
who asked him to talk about Yossarian, Joe offered this: “All I want to say is it ain't that hard. It ain't that hard to take a stand on something.”

Increasingly, he was seen as—and accepted the role of—cultural spokesperson, as
Catch-22
came to be regarded as prophetic about the complexities of Vietnam (some war protesters even ragged Yossarian for not assassinating his commanding officer).

For all the talk in the “legitimate” press about a generation gap, hawks and doves, liberals and conservatives, one of the developments making possible the “American 1960s” was this: Figures such as Jack Kennedy, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, Joseph Heller, and John Yossarian moved fluidly from the mainstream to the underground and back again, from High Art to Pop Culture. The perfect icon of this blurring was the paperback book, the conveyor of classics and corn. With boundaries broken, nothing could resist change.

As early as 1960, Norman Mailer wrote in
Esquire
that a Kennedy presidency might give “unwilling charge” to forces now bottled up in the American underground. The underground could not be dismissed as marginal; now it existed on the fringe no more than
Time
's latest cover. And because it could not be dismissed, it was, some believed, dangerous. In the mid-1960s, the FBI's COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) switched its focus from investigating civil rights murders by the Ku Klux Klan to trying to block the rise of any “real Mau-Mau” who could unify black America. It tried to disrupt the “New Left movement['s] … propaganda activities,” especially in its “anarchist-type” underground papers.

According to Abe Peck, “[T]he FBI … placed an ad in the L.A.
Free Press
designed to discredit the Communist Party.” It asked the IRS to examine magazines' tax returns. It “use[d] its contacts to persuade Columbia Records to stop advertising in the underground press.” The
Crawdaddy!
offices on Fifth Avenue in New York were burgled one night, in a way that would soon conjure the word
Watergate.
(Mark Felt, later famous as “Deep Throat,” was a central figure in COINTELPRO operations.) John Lennon, whose FBI file gradually fattened as the U.S. government tried to deport him, told Paul Krassner that if anything happened to him and Yoko Ono, it would not be an accident.

Meanwhile, bombers roamed the skies above the heartland: the Strategic Air Command, keeping the United States safe from Soviet attack. Missile silos ticked among desert mirages in the American West. Watts burned. Assassins stalked leaders. Surrealism, indeed.

“If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick,” John Steinbeck wrote.

By mid-decade, the country's pace had quickened in a smoky, black-lighted whirl. In 1967,
Playboy
declared “the suburbs” were reeling from one college scandal after another, from sex to marijuana to “treated sugar cubes.” Over ten years earlier, that magazine had broken ground, scandalously; now it was mainstream, almost respectable. The once-staid
New Yorker
was upsetting longtime subscribers by printing the absurdist stories of Donald Barthelme.

Rolling Stone
was another publication redefining cultural boundaries, straddling the fence between “alternative” and “general interest.” One of its founders, Ralph J. Gleason, a jazz and pop-music critic, wrote, “I dare say that with the inspiration of the Beatles and Dylan we have more poetry being produced and more poets being made than ever before in the history of the world.” He quoted Plato on the way music (broadly defined) alters politics: “The new style quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs and from there it issues a greater force … [it] goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overthrowing everything, both in public and in private.” Gleason said, “That seems to me to be … the answer to the British rock singer Donovan's question, ‘What goes on? I really want to know.'” In addition to the Beatles and Dylan, Gleason listed Joseph Heller as one of the purveyors of the “new style.” “Heller … [has] hold of it,” he wrote.

In the liner notes to an LP record of Lenny Bruce's performance in Berkeley on December 12, 1965, Gleason wrote, “Lenny Bruce was really, along with Bob Dylan and Miles Davis and a handful of others (maybe Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, and Allen Ginsberg in another way) the leader of the first wave of the American social and cultural revolution which is gradually changing the structure of our society and may effectively revise it, if the forces of reaction which are automatically brought into play by such a drive, do not declare military law and suppress it.”

Always in the background were Vietnam and the Cold War.

That
Catch-22
was a Vietnam novel appeared to be confirmed with each new revelation of military strategies (or lack thereof), with buzzwords used by the country's leaders to obfuscate tactics and unintended consequences. Michael Herr produced some of the finest reporting on Vietnam. He collected the pieces in his book
Dispatches,
but they first appeared in a range of journals from the esoteric to the mainstream and in between—
New American Review, Rolling Stone,
and
Esquire.
Under editor Harold Hayes,
Esquire
recast journalism, stressing personal style and subjectivity over attempts at objective reporting. It was an approach perfectly suited to the merry, scary 1960s.

Herr, a Syracuse graduate, served for a time as the “unpaid film critic for a tiny, leftist magazine called
The New Leader,
but was fired after … [one] year for liking the wrong movies,” wrote critic Keith Saliba. Candida Donadio tossed Herr his first break, negotiating a contract for a short-story collection that she converted to a book deal about Vietnam.
Esquire
issued him press credentials.

Dispatches
opens with the following description:

There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn't real anymore.… [I]t was very old.… The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older [no longer extant] territories.… [N]ow[adays], even the most detailed maps didn't reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We [were learning] that the uses of most information were flexible.…

Herr went on to tell the story of an information officer who insists American troops controlled the ground once identified on maps as the Ho Bo Woods. The place had been pacified, “denying the enemy valuable resources and cover.” The Ho Bo Woods had vanished. Maps now called the region something else. “And if in the months following … enemy activity in the … area … had increased ‘significantly,' and American losses had doubled and then doubled again, none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you'd better believe it,” Herr wrote.

Years earlier, another of Candida's boys had exposed the military's “flexible … uses of information.” In chapter 12 of
Catch-22,
Yossarian moves the bomb line on the captain's map so the captain will think the Allies have captured more territory than they have, and thus won't force the men to fly a mission to Bologna. Throughout
Catch-22,
reality is never as powerful as perception and willed ignorance. If Doc Daneeka's paperwork says he's dead, then he's dead, even if he's in your face denying it. One can imagine a young GI crouched in the Ho Bo Woods, muttering, “That's some catch, that Catch-22.”

*   *   *

AT PARTIES
, Joe—the trendsetter, the cultural spokesperson—“was nothing if not a provocateur: perverse, paradoxical, consistently inconsistent,” Erica Heller said. He would “casually let it slip that he'd [not] voted [for years], then sit back smiling, relishing the … whirlwind controversy as, one by one, people challenged him, asking quite reasonably how he could possibly criticize the government (as he often did), while not participating in the process of changing and electing its leaders. As soon as I was old enough to vote, I, too, got swept up in one of these … conversations with him, at a party I'd gone to with my parents. Midway through, just as I was beginning to get very worked up, my mother leaned over to me and quietly said, ‘Don't even start. Don't you see? He loves this. He does it purposely.'”

In
Something Happened,
Bob Slocum wrestles emotionally with a strong-willed adolescent. “She would break my heart, if she were somebody else's [child],” he says, responding to his daughter's confusing combination of naïveté and maturity. “I realize now that I have not always given replies to her questions and comments that were appropriate. When she tells me she wishes she were dead, I tell her she will be, sooner or later.… My error, I think, is that I always speak to her as I would to a grown-up; and all she wants, probably, is for me to talk to her as a child.”

Slocum's daughter
tries
to tell him how to speak to her, and they have this exchange:

“You always like to give short answers when we argue. You think it's a good trick.”

“It is.”

“You're so sarcastic.”

“Be a sneak. I'm not being sarcastic now.… Sneak outside … when you want to smoke or burn that crappy incense or do something else you don't want us to know about. And close the door to your room when you're on the telephone so we won't have to listen to you complain about us to all of your friends or see those crappy sex novels you read instead of the books you're supposed to be reading for school.… Just don't let me find out.… Because if I do find out, I'm going to have to do something about it. I'm going to have to disapprove and get angry and punish you, and other things like that, and that will make you unhappy and me unhappy.”

“Why will it make
you
unhappy?” she wants to know.

“Because you're my daughter. And I really don't enjoy seeing you unhappy.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Ha!”

In many ways, Erica says, “
Something Happened
 … was certainly [an] accurate” portrait of her family. When she argued with her father or tried to discuss a serious issue with him, “it wasn't really sparring or playing because we were not evenly matched. He was a brilliant grown-up and I was a kid.” To Barbara Gelb, Erica “acknowledg[ed] her resemblance to the daughter in
Something Happened,
commenting, ‘That girl is out to make trouble every minute. As an adolescent,
I
was out to make it every five minutes.”