Just One Catch (51 page)

In those days, it was rare for an editor not to stay with one firm until retirement. The move was one more indication—like Random House putting its stock on the open market—that publishing, once a genteel trade, had become just another American business.

“[A]gent after agent called to say that this author or that one wanted to go to Knopf with Bob,” Korda recalled. “[It] was dispiriting and alarming.” He felt the company had “nickel and dimed” Gottlieb, until he'd had enough. Knopf had offered him the position of editor in chief; he would be the “heir apparent” and “chosen successor to the Knopfs.”

Joe tried to work without letting the news distract him. S & S insisted his contract did not give him the legal right to abandon the house just because his editor had left. He owed the firm a book and had to deliver it. He trusted Gottlieb and Candida Donadio to protect him.

One day, Korda met Donadio for a “stormy drink,” probably in the Italian Pavilion, where she had a regular table. She wore “layers of black
schmatta,
” he said, and her “enormous handbag [was] weighted … with the manuscripts of her clients.” Almost everybody in the restaurant worked in publishing, and it occurred to Korda that they all knew why he was seeing her. She enjoyed watching him squirm. S & S had great plans for the future, he told her. He was certain they could make her clients happy. She smiled. She said she wished the company well but maintained that her clients had to go where they felt comfortable. Korda asked her to give S & S a chance. She insisted he expedite the release of her writers from their contracts. And if he didn't? Korda asked. “There isn't an agent in New York who will send S & S a manuscript,” she said.

“All writers were like children, but her writers
were
her children,” Korda wrote. “She felt about them as if she were their mother. If we forced the issue, she would fight … to defend them.”

Joe went happily to Knopf.

Gottlieb had never worried about him—or the long-delayed second novel (in 1961, Joe had promised to deliver the book before men walked on the moon, but the Sea of Tranquility proved easier to achieve than his deadline): “When he finished
Catch-22,
he knew what the title of his next book would be, knew more or less what the book would say, and knew he didn't want to write it then, but he felt no pressure or neurotic agitation,” Gottlieb said. “[I always knew] he'd turn it in—like all real writers—when he was ready.”

Gottlieb could afford to be sanguine. According to
Esquire
magazine, he was, along with Donadio, at the “red hot center” of the New York publishing world. They were a formidable team. “We were of an age, and we had the same interests and the same tastes to a large extent,” Gottlieb told Karen Hudes. “It was a real friendship.” Donadio lived a block away from Gottlieb and his wife, at Fifty-third Street and Second Avenue. She would “pad over in her sneakers and babysit” their young daughter, Lizzie, he said. She longed to have her own children, but “I think she thought she wasn't attractive,” Gottlieb explained. “There was a very big dark side. She was a hidden person … [and she] did more drinking than she should have done.”

In 1965, she attempted marriage to a writer and academic named H. E. F. “Shag” Donohue. Gottlieb threw a dinner party in the couple's honor. The marriage lasted three months. Donadio's friend Harriet Wasserman claimed in a published interview with Karen Hudes that she once saw Donohue put Donadio in a headlock. “[S]he looked terrified,” Wasserman said. Overall, “[s]he was a desperately lonely, unhappy person.”

In public—combining business and pleasure—Donadio could be “a great pal, a great drinking buddy,” said Herman Gollob, an editor at Little, Brown and then at Atheneum. When he first heard of her, he asked his colleagues if she was “screwing all the guys to get clients.” When they met, she said, “You think I fuck to get clients, do you?” “I meant that as a compliment!” he insisted, and they became tight. When he worked at Little, Brown, he rejected only one manuscript she sent him. “It was about a guy screwing a gorilla,” he said. He sent Donadio a note: “Dear Candida, Ape-fucking novels you're sending me?” She framed the letter and hung it on her office wall.

At home, she kept a macaw in a cage—if her bird gnawed on a manuscript, she said, it was probably good. Erica recalls having dinner once in Donadio's apartment and being startled by the macaw, which lived in the bathroom. “She had forgotten to mention [the bird]. I went in there at one point and almost had a coronary,” Erica says. Donadio claimed her apartment was haunted, and visitors confirmed one spot was colder than others. She could be superstitious—a Sicilian weakness, she'd say. She'd consult the
I Ching
to make office decisions. Once, she told her colleague Neil Olson that she was taking Good Friday off. “Neil, we don't know, he may have
been
the son of God,” she said.

About
her
sons, there was no doubt. She protected her boys, her writers—from editors, critics, often from one another. In 1969, when, according to reports, she negotiated a $250,000 advance for Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint,
along with additional monies for a movie option and a paperback sale to Bantam, she refused to discuss the deal in public, fearing “sibling rivalry amongst her other charges.”

Joe was especially sensitive about money. He always worried that he didn't have enough to take care of his family. In 1971, he returned to teaching, accepting a position—at the rank of full professor, specializing in creative writing—at New York's City College (though the previous year, he had earned eighty thousand dollars in royalties from
Catch-22
). At City College, he made $32,625 a year. Among his colleagues were Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut. The students (Oscar Hijuelos, for one) were talented, smart, and challenging. “Teaching takes a lot of my time, and I enjoy it … a lot,” Joe said. His experience at Yale had erased the bad taste left by Penn State. When students were committed and ambitious, he discovered, universities could be a congenial place for a writer. “It's a job I would like to keep. It's interesting. It seems worthwhile,” he said. “The hardest thing to teach these people is that writing is hard work—and hard work for everyone. I've got a doctor [in my class] who wants to give up medicine, a lawyer who wants to quit the law. They read the finished, published work and think that's exactly the way the writer dictated it. Well … they're wrong.”

In the early 1970s,
his
novel writing still came hard—in part because of time in the classroom or reading student manuscripts, in part because he had been busy with short dramatic adaptations of
Catch-22,
and also because he remained intermittently active in politics, giving speeches for George McGovern. In East Hampton, he participated with other celebrities in a benefit softball game aimed at raising money for the Democratic party.

He spent many hours fretting about health. Toward the end of his time at Yale, he had caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror and was shocked by how bloated he looked. The double chins in his publicity pictures bothered him. A year or so later, an acquaintance of his, a man he often saw working out at the YMCA, died of a heart attack. This spurred Joe to action. “I was a really thin man who put on a lot of weight,” he told writer Robert Alan Aurthur. He remembered the willpower he'd shown, years earlier, when he quit smoking; once more, he summoned that determination. For breakfast, he limited himself to coffee and grapefruit. He often skipped lunch. In the afternoons, he'd take Sweeney, the family's new Bedlington terrier, for long walks around the neighborhood (past the briefcase men) and think about his novel. On the small track at the Y, he ran three or four miles a day. From over 200, he dropped to 160. He looked ten years younger.

At the Y, he avoided meeting anyone's eyes. He pursued his running (nine sets of eight laps each) with grim seriousness. He worried about the slightest ache or twinge—in his lower back, bladder, calves, the tendons of his ankles, or the bottoms of his feet. Sometimes vertical pains shot through his chest and up through his collarbone. This was a hell of a way to try to feel better. He'd lift small weights in the often-empty exercise room near the sleep lounge, the television room, the showers, and the sauna.

“The Angel of Death is in the gym today,” said the Y's patrons every so often: Not infrequently, ambulance crews showed up to cart away on a stretcher an elderly man in T-shirt and shorts who had collapsed while running or doing chin-ups on a bar.

In this melancholy spirit (stretching, rolling his arms to ease the needling pains), Joe squirreled away portions of
Something Happened
in a locker at the Y, in case fire raced through the Apthorp or his studio, or he keeled over one day.

In the spring of 1974—a fit fifty-one-year-old!—he completed the manuscript to his satisfaction and decided to copy it for Donadio. He took Erica with him to the photocopying shop. “I figured if a car hit me, if I got mugged, or if I dropped dead of a heart attack, the manuscript might still be saved,” he said. “I asked him what would happen if he had a heart attack and
I
got run over,” Erica recalls.

Joe said, “Then we're in trouble.”

I think I'm in trouble. I think I've committed a crime. I've always felt so. The victims have always been children.

Oh my father—why have you done this to me?

I am in need of the nipple that succored me and whatever arms cuddled me. I didn't know names. I loved the food that fed me, the arms that touched and moved me and gave me to understand that I was not for that moment alone. Without them, I would be alone. I am afraid of the dark now. I have nightmares in strange beds, and in my own.

I was a boy when I met her and she was a girl, and now we are man and woman. We were shy once.…

… my children are parts of myself … in my wish to remain mute and dependent. All of us are projections of each other.

[There are] people everywhere of whom I am afraid.

These sentences, and hundreds of others, some typed, some written in red ink, black ink, or pencil, Joe kept on note cards or pieces of paper during the thirteen years he conceived, reconceived, shaped, and reshaped
Something Happened.
Several sentences came with headers, such as “Boy,” “Weird Experiences,” “Torment,” and “Wife (Sleep).” Many of the phrases made it into the final version of the novel, tucked into larger sections; others were dropped. Taken together, the poundage of rough drafts indicates that while Joe's concurrent projects—screenplays and dramas—were willed into shape by a craftsman conscious of their commercial appeal,
Something Happened
was a poetic meditation on the psyche of a disturbed middle-aged man, a series of excursions into waking dream states in which a lifetime of experiences, fears, and imaginative visions were distilled in fragments whose ultimate forms Joe could not predict, and did not try to force.

Despite the image he sometimes peddled of a man unmotivated by a strong desire to write, the obsessive nature of these meditations, the length of the process, and Joe's refusal to abandon it regardless of interruptions and the lure of more lucrative assignments reveal not only his ambition to be a serious artist but his inability to be anything else. No other activity besides novel writing challenged his mind or altered his perceptions so thoroughly—which is why he kept returning to
the novel,
agonies and all.

Ostensibly,
Something Happened
is about a businessman, but at the bottom of the pool of mind-material that surfaced and coalesced into the story lay the deaths of Joe's father and mother. Though it is impossible to date the composition of many of the rough-draft fragments, the repetitions of subjects and phrases, their revisions and eventual inclusion in larger segments support the notion that among the earliest scenes Joe established were those involving parental loss. The mother's death leads to devastation—unambiguously. “If I live to be a hundred and fifty, I will never hear any more [words] from [my mother]. If the world lasts three billion more, there will be no others,” Slocum laments (though at this stage, there is only Joe's handwritten sentence on a note card; no character or narrative development is indicated).

Elsewhere, Slocum torments himself with the “last pleasant memory” he has of his mother, a dinner one day when, responding to a cute remark by his baby girl, the old woman “threw back her head and laughed.” Joe circled this phrase.

On another card, he wrote clearly, carefully, “I think it was impossible for me to remain alone at night in my own room after my tonsillectomy. I think I remember being allowed to sleep in bed with my mother and father once, and I can't imagine why they would have let me unless I was ill and scared.”

The tonsillectomy fills several cards. On one: “I woke up in the hospital without tonsils one thousand times and it was always dark, and I thought there would never be light again.” In the finished novel, when Slocum's boy's tonsils are removed, Slocum recalls being left alone in the hospital as a child. He reexperiences old fears through his son's panic. “I nearly died the day my boy had his tonsils out, he looked so still lying there when they brought him back, smelling of ether,” Joe wrote. “[W]hen he cried out suddenly, ‘It hurts!' I could not stand the pain and shouted … ‘Stop it! Stop it! You're scaring him!'”

From the cards, and the memories Joe would develop in his memoir, one thing is clear: Though his father died when Joe was a child, he felt
he
was the one who would pass away in the hospital. (The scene in
Catch-22
when a mother and father mistake Yossarian for their dying son also asks the question: Who is really dying—or should be?)