Just One Catch (66 page)

Norman Podhoretz, Joe's neoconservative nemesis, publicly disparaged the fact that a military institution would honor a book he considered damaging to America's might, not to say the souls of the nation's youth. But Col. Jack Shuttleworth, head of the Academy's English Department, said, “We want these men and women to be a thinking part of a large military bureaucracy. We don't want them to be victims of the Colonel Cathcarts of the world. To put it bluntly, you don't want dumb officers out there protecting your country.”

Joe was impressed with the officers in training. “We oversimplify our military,” he observed. “We think they have one mind. But they are very educated today and they want their families and students to be well educated. The degree of acceptance here, maybe even love, for the book is very surprising, and gratifying.”

He spoke to the cadets about the novel's continued relevance. “I don't understand the merger mania sweeping American business, but I'm sure Milo [Minderbinder] would,” he said. As for the catch: “It doesn't exist. That's the catch. If it existed in writing or something, we could change it.”

Not all students were admiring. “I'd like to know what your book should make those of us at the Air Force Academy think of our duty to defend our country,” demanded one freshman, with a grim and angry look on his face.

Calmly, Joe said, “Well now, there's nothing in the book that says you shouldn't defend your country. It's been called an anti-war book, but it's certainly not an anti–World War II book. There is never an objection raised in the book to the legitimacy of our participation in World War Two. The conflict … had to do with individuals, individuals being under an authority that has no concern for those individuals and their needs as human beings. The whole sensibility of the book is not about fighting in World War II but about the war between individuals and this inhuman, bureaucratic authority.”

The young man sat back down, although his combative demeanor did not abate.

Students offered Joe an example of an Air Force Academy catch-22: Before repairing a uniform, it had to be freshly cleaned. But the cleaning staff had orders not to clean any uniform needing repairs.

While the celebration unwound, newspapers and magazines worldwide noted
Catch-22
's birthday and debated its legacy. Writing in the
New York
Times,
John W. Aldridge said the novel was a “monumental artifact of contemporary American literature, almost as assured of longevity as the statues on Easter Island. Yet … we [are still learning] how to read this curious book and, as is the case with those statues, to understand how and why it got here and became what it is instead of what we may once have believed it to be.”

On its arrival, he said, the book “seemed anomalous and more than a trifle ominous,” but it appeared to answer Philip Roth's complaint in his essay “Writing American Fiction,” printed the same year, that American experience “stupefies … sickens … infuriates,” and makes any attempt to write about it feeble. Heller answered Roth by creating a novel that “remind[ed] us … of all that we have taken for granted in the world and should not, the madness we try not to bother to notice, the deceptions and falsehoods we lack the will to try to distinguish for truth.”

Aldridge concluded, “Twenty-five years later, we can see that the situation Mr. Heller describes has, during those years, if anything grown more complicated, deranging and perilous than it was in 1944 or 1961. The comic fable that ends in horror has become more and more clearly a reflection of the altogether uncomic and horrifying realities of the world in which we live and hope to survive.”

Other critics named cultural icons stemming directly or indirectly from
Catch-22
:
Dr. Strangelove, McHale's Navy, M*A*S*H
(television's Hawkeye, a domesticated Yossarian). “[T]he novel's first and greatest sequel was to be the war in Vietnam,” J. Hoberman wrote a few years later in
ArtForum
: “Scarcely a week goes by when the phrase [catch-22] is not invoked by someone” in print to describe “government regulations, hospital procedures … war … [or] matters of housing, ranging from mortgages and rent laws to co-op boards and homelessness.”

Back at the Air Force Academy, Joe, addressing the largest audience he had ever faced (“Sir, could you autograph your book for me, please sir?”), said, “I'm as happy as a lark. All my fantasies have been fulfilled. The sad part to me is that now I'll have to wait another twenty-five years to come back.”

*   *   *

WE THINK
the world will be very interested in what Joe Heller has to say on the subject after all this time, Phyllis Grann announced in April 1987.

Joe was not so sure.

Grann was referring to the meat of the two-book contract Joe had just signed with Putnam Berkley—reportedly a four-million-dollar deal for an unnamed novel and a sequel to
Catch-22.

Most certainly the idea for a sequel did not come from Joe. For years, he had assiduously avoided the thought (though perhaps his experience at the Air Force Academy made the possibility of a sequel more palatable). Grann told everyone, “Joe is one of the greatest writers of my generation.” This acquisition, she said, was “one of the most exciting” Putnam had ever made. Eventually, Joe himself was persuaded. Grann would not disclose specifics of the deal, which only fueled publicity. “If all the rumors of what we are said to have paid authors were true, they would never have to work again,” she said. The old adman in Joe enjoyed this game, even as the novelist in him shied away from it. “I will only confirm that I got less than I asked for and more than I deserve,” he told a
New York Times
reporter.

Who wouldn't want the money? If you wanted it, you had to give people what they demanded. This time, the top-dollar opportunity had come about because Bob Gottlieb had left Knopf to edit
The New Yorker.
Publishers, thinking Joe must be a free agent now, wooed him. His pleasant experience with Faith Sale on
No Laughing Matter
gave Putnam the edge—but on Phyllis Grann's terms. The money was there. People wanted another
Catch-22.
How about it?

What Joe wanted was to “write good novels.” That's “[a]ll I'm trying to do,” he told Charlie Ruas. He believed even a recluse like Samuel Beckett wanted to be wildly successful. Any American novelist, if he's honest, Joe said, would like to be as brilliant as Beckett and fiscally solvent as a writer of potboilers. In the end, Joe's only “objective [was] to be successful in writing what I and other people would consider a serious work,” he said. Money had nothing to do with this ambition. It was partly a matter of character—like “my characters [I] may not be decent, but [I] do know what decency is”—and partly temperament. “I can be a fairly prolific writer if I don't have distractions, because there is very little else that I want to do.… If I retired, I would live exactly the way I live now, assuming my health was good. Sleep as late as I want to, which is about eight in the morning, have a leisurely breakfast, and begin writing fiction. That's what I want to do.”

Money
enabled
him to do it. As for the mind-boggling
amount
of cash—well, it was a crazy culture, and there was no escaping the looniness. Joe had long associated money with life, and poverty with death. At least he could conduct his negotiations from a distance now, without traveling to Manhattan. He didn't miss Manhattan—really, he didn't. Editorial offices were awful—too much frenzy in the air. It was so much saner to sit on the back terrace, listening to classical music, reading Thucydides, Aristotle, and Plato, to whom he had returned with deep pleasure. He would soon be sixty-four years old. He had earned a little sanity. If only his children would visit from time to time … not long, mind you, just enough to stay in touch.…

Reportedly, Valerie had the impression he was estranged from his children, but this wasn't exactly the case. They'd show up if needed. But they were frankly suspicious of their father's liaison with this woman. It was obvious to them what he had done. In the grip of illness and marriage woes, he had reached out for the first caretaker he could find, an enabler. The children were hurt on their mother's behalf, confused, dismayed by his behavior. Sensing this—hurt and angry himself over the perceived loss of loyalty—Joe spoke to Erica and Ted “badly about the other,” Erica says. “My mother tried very hard to undo the damage”—to encourage affection and mutual engagement—“but couldn't, and the result is that [nowadays] Ted and I barely know each other.”

*   *   *

ON APRIL 11, 1987
, Joe consented to set foot in Manhattan, where he would marry Valerie in the lavish East Side apartment of his friend Stanley Cohen, a lawyer whose legal affairs frequently took him to the south of France, and his wife, Toby Molenaar, a writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker.

In the days before the wedding, Joe was voluble and excited. “I was helpless. [Valerie] took care of me,” he told a
Boston Globe
reporter, recounting, to his own amazement, how he'd gotten to this point. “There were no secrets between us, absolutely no pretensions. I discovered she was the most cheerful person I had ever known. She had fun listening to me, and I had fun listening to her. I guess it all boils down to her positive attitude.… I'm going to marry Valerie because there's no one in the world I love more. We learned to live successfully with each other when she was taking care of me. She made my life entertaining when it wasn't entertaining.… [In time, friends] invited me to parties. Valerie knew exactly how to push the wheelchair in front of the corridor and maneuver me inside. So she came with me to parties and we became social creatures. This was our ‘dating.' My life became ‘our' life.”

Speed told Joe he didn't have to
marry
Valerie. The “engagement came about because I didn't know what to give [her] for Christmas,” Joe said. “She had never been engaged or married so I gave her an engagement ring. I said, ‘Is this a serious engagement?' She said, ‘Yes.'”

He mused, “I do know I like the idea of marriage.… I never thought I'd marry again because I never thought I'd take time to look. This was one of the great benefits of my illness. I met Valerie under the most trying circumstances and the trials brought us together. Marriage will put my life in context again. I really like being attached to somebody.”

The wedding was small. Joe's kids did not attend. Valerie, with her hair cut short, wore a traditional white lace dress and pearl earrings. Her reddish hair, red cheeks, and red lips glowed warmly against the apartment's pale blue walls, parquet floors, and richly colored paintings in elaborate gold frames. Joe wore a simple blue suit with a plain red tie. He was trim and fit, his white hair swept away from his forehead. All day, he infected his friends with loud, sincere, and hearty laughter.

*   *   *

THE LONG VIEW
, the tunnel of history, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle—Joe had been contemplating these things, reading and researching, since his illness. He was in the mood for summing up, for Big Picture thinking.

He felt he had to move fast. “I'm in the twilight of my career,” he told friends matter-of-factly. In an astonishingly short time for any author, but especially for Joe, he had, since his recovery, completed
God Knows, No Laughing Matter,
occasional pieces (on illness and food) for
McCall's
magazine and the
New York Times
' “Sophisticated Traveler” column, and completed preparatory reading for a novel “about money and war.”

In Plato's
Phaedrus,
Socrates says, “[W]riting … has this strange quality about it, which makes it … like painting: the painter's products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence.” The quote intrigued Joe. It affirmed his aesthetic approach, and renewed his energy for attempting another “new” kind of novel.

He had once said, “I like to think of the books I write as being interesting in themselves, rather than in just what they say. It's like a painting. A Renoir nude is not telling you about the nude; the painting itself has an existence. Not because of what's in it. It's like what I try to do with my books. The book itself is what it's about.” If his novel's
ostensible
subjects were “money and war,” its style—the experience of it—would be painterly, whatever that meant.

When friends asked what he was working on, he muttered
art
,
philosophy
: “There's no evidence that Socrates even lived.… And Plato never says anything about himself. Aah, the more I talk about it, the less interesting it sounds.”

Fortuitously, Joe was reading—in addition to the Greeks—three books that crystalized the method he was groping toward: Julian Barnes's novel,
Flaubert's Parrot
; Gary Schwartz's 1985 biography,
Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings
; and Simon Schama's 1987 study of Dutch commerce, trade, and culture,
The Embarrassment of Riches.

Flaubert's Parrot
was a meditation on the French writer's art. It read less like a novel than a series of philosophical disquisitions on the creative process. Joe admired it enormously, not least because it made a distinction between art and artist, the one an ideal, the other a flawed reality, a needy individual scrabbling in a deeply unsatisfactory world.

Gary Schwartz's portrait of Rembrandt supported this view. Schwartz emphasized the gap between the artist's exquisite paintings and his squalid life. Rembrandt's days and nights had all been about money. To Joe, he was part Milo Minderbinder, hustling and dealing, and part Bob Slocum, manipulating his poor son, Titus, whose trust fund Rembrandt tried to control.