Just One Catch (69 page)

Most of all, Joe enjoyed staying home, puttering around the kitchen with Phillipe at his heels, making himself a sandwich with a day-old bagel and some leftover turkey. He'd put Count Basie on the CD player. With his sandwich on a plate, he'd flop on the couch and open
The Great Gatsby
: “… for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent … face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

 

19.
Closing Time

“
THIS IS NO WAY
for any writer to cap a career.”

This was the judgment of David Straitfeld, writing in
New York
magazine in September 1994. “If it were Philip Roth, no one would mind his getting creamed, just to see the smirk wiped off his face. But Heller is a nice guy, at least for a writer.… His career has been an honorable one. He has never, at least until now, directly or egregiously exploited the fact that he wrote such a popular and influential book. His biggest mistake was writing his best novel first.”

Straitfeld was relating the miserable saga of the sequel to
Catch-22,
a story that had taken a nasty turn when negative reviews of
Picture This
spread like coffee stains in newspapers. In retrospect, Joe admitted he'd hoped
Picture This
would “be another
Catch
 … captur[ing] the intellectual imagination.” The critical drubbing shook him. “Even at my advanced age, with the money for the book guaranteed, it was an awful situation,” Joe said. “It does not make anyone happy to have something he's worked on, and for which he has high hopes, be dismissed or attacked publicly.”

Over at Putnam, Phyllis Grann was not happy, either. The four-million-dollar package she had arranged in 1987 for
Picture This
and the
Catch
follow-up appeared foolhardy in the wake of the novel's failure. For the first time, Joe had not earned back his advance (though whose fault this was, given publishing's inflated prices, can be argued). Grann scrambled to contain the damage to Putnam's account ledgers and her reputation for picking winners.

In 1989, Putnam announced that “by mutual agreement” with Joseph Heller, the contract for the
Catch-22
sequel had been canceled. Grann insisted sales for
Picture This
had nothing to do with the decision. Joe did not feel prepared to begin writing the sequel at this time, she said. Putnam still had the utmost faith in his talent—he would write a nonfiction book for them in the near future, perhaps with Speed Vogel (no evidence suggests any such agreement existed formally). Joe told a reporter the contract was “an oppressive obligation. I had outlined [the sequel] and written a few chapters, but I sensed it was not the book they hoped to get. I did not want to put myself in the position of laboring to do a book which was not one I wanted to write.”

He admitted he was daunted by the prospect of tackling another novel after
Picture This,
but he reread
Catch-22
for the first time in years, and found himself tickled, amazed he'd once commanded such an extensive literary vocabulary. “[M]y reaction was, ‘My god, what talent I had,'” he said. Buoyed, he asked Candida Donadio to pitch the sequel to another publisher.

“I was told you can have this [book] for $1.2 million,” said one publishing insider. “A few days later, it was down to $800,000. The price was going south in a hurry.”

At Simon & Schuster, Dick Snyder said no. “Heller's talent [is] exhausted,” he stated.

Reportedly, Donadio got two decent offers, which Joe refused. The money was insulting, he felt. Donadio was not in good shape. At the beginning of her career, she had been “maternal and nurturing to [all these] young guys, then many of them didn't want that anymore,” Bob Gottlieb said. “They became stars and they didn't want a ‘mamma mia' any longer. And then she would be distressed.” Gottlieb had stopped working with her in the early 1980s because she became increasingly untrustworthy. “Well, she lied [to me], and then she was caught,” he said. “I mean she knew she had done something terrible. She was finally forced to acknowledge it, and I never spoke to her again.… [W]e just don't lie to each other.… [I]t was a serious matter, and dealing with a well-known author and a great deal of money, and the whole thing was just a disgrace.”

She was often inebriated and forgetful, and she had not maintained her contacts in the television and movie industries. Her negotiations with editors smacked of desperation, a need to prove she could still pull off a big score. She would not speak of Thomas Pynchon or other writers who had left her. “She seemed so grief-stricken,” said one observer.

When she failed to get Joe the money he wanted for the sequel, he “dealt with her kindly but firmly,” Gottlieb says. “Joe was too clear-headed for her extreme psychic needs.” Joe turned to Amanda “Binky” Urban of International Creative Management, whom Straitfeld described as a “younger, more aggressive, less devotedly arty” agent.

At Simon & Schuster, Michael Korda told his colleagues that
Catch-22
had sparked a “major moment in S & S's postwar history”—therefore, the sequel should bear the S & S imprint. He overcame Dick Snyder's resistance.

That's one story. Another version says Urban demanded payback from Simon & Schuster for canceling publication of Bret Easton Ellis's
American Psycho
at the last minute. Urban had represented the novel; the publisher decided it was too obscene. Many publishing folk thought the
Catch-22
sequel was her compensation for the Ellis debacle.

In any case, Joe received $750,000 for the novel—still a shoddy amount, as far as he was concerned, but by now he had resigned himself to taking what he could get. Publicly, he declared, “The advance was very modest. I felt much better that way.”

(Soon afterward, Dick Snyder was forced out at Simon & Schuster, after thirty-three years, replaced by a young man named Jonathan Newcomb, who believed literacy's future lay in digital publishing.)

*   *   *

“… IN THE HOSPITAL
, Yossarian dreamed of his mother, and he knew again that he was going to die,” Joe wrote on a note card. He had dreamed of his mother for the first time in years.

This sentence (in
Closing Time,
it opens the third chapter) marked the beginning of his sequel to
Catch-22.
Once these words came to him, he knew he could write the book. He scrawled another sentence: “When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out more than half a century ago and swept in almost all the world.” The first statement committed Joe to some of the high jinks of the previous novel; the second ensured a deeper register in the new book, a straightforward, serious, crepuscular tone, one that would encompass all of Joe's learning and experience. His ambition was to write one more fiction the likes of which no other American had tried.

In
Catch-22,
he had devised a carnival ride of a novel. He would do so again—more deliberately this time—alternating realistic chapters with chapters as wild as fun-house mirrors, distorting reality. The two worlds—
step inside, be amazed; now step aside, let others through
—showed what had happened in half a century to fictional heroes (Yossarian, Dr. Strangelove) and actual World War II veterans (Kurt Vonnegut, Mel Brooks, Joey Heller).

If Coney Island had been the world, as barkers once claimed, then New York would be Coney Island. As Joe imagined it, a hellish amusement park stretched beneath the grim carneylike atmosphere of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, with tentacles reaching planet-wide. He hired a researcher, Ken Miller, a freelancer who had worked for
Time
magazine, to hang around Port Authority. Miller took notes on activities in and around the buses, and recorded anecdotes about the people who boarded them. He drew maps of the area and wrote numerous descriptions of it. (Joe had last caught a bus there years ago, to visit his pal Lou Berkman, who was dying of Hodgkin's disease.)

“At 4:30 I stood contemplating the place from across Tenth Avenue, trying to achieve some communion with it before venturing inside,” Miller wrote on November 2, 1989. “[A] dark flood of people.… [It] smell[s] powerfully of piss.… [A] bony, scared-looking white woman in her fifties—she wears a kerchief over her hair, a clean, cheap raincoat and glasses.… [She] smells wonderfully of chocolate and mint.…” Joe underlined details he thought he could use, augmenting them with a list of images from Dante's
Inferno
: “[C]ircular staircases; terraces; a dark wood; flaming eyes; heads reversed on bodies and forced to walk backwards; twinkling with little flames; frozen lake; cold rain; walled city; sinners walking in both directions.” Port Authority didn't need much refurbishing to resemble a tidy little hell.

To refresh his memory, he typed up a list of characters from
Catch-22.
As he typed, he jotted outlines of possible scenes and lines of dialogue associated with the updated characters. At one point, he ripped out pages from a paperback copy of
Catch
and wrote notes about who these people might have become, given their personalities. The chaplain, still hapless, would bumble into trouble, posing an international security threat; Milo Minderbinder would employ everybody on the planet.

Line by line, Michael Korda's editing hand was light, but he helped Joe shape and clarify portions of the book, particularly the autobiographical sections. He trimmed the manuscript from eleven hundred pages to just over six hundred. In the summer of 1994, four months after Joe had completed final revisions and was awaiting the novel's release in the fall, he told reporters, “I'm keeping my distance from the publisher.… I'm in a state of curiosity [about how the book will be received,] but I'm not going to let it become acute.” Touchingly, somewhat defensively, he added, “There's no indication of any hostility toward it [in publishing circles], or any dissatisfaction. I'm … secure.”

Still, he knew the book would disappoint readers who wanted
Catch-22
again. “[W]e don't live in that type of world any more,” he said. “The spirit of this novel is kind of moody.… [I]t is pessimistic.… We don't have heroes. We don't even know who our enemy is. The enemy is death—death!”

Then denial kicked in. He veered from the topic of the book. “I look good. I'm tan,” he said unconvincingly. “I have my hair. I don't have many wrinkles for my age. Well, I do have a wart here.…” He worried his thumb.

With Joe out of earshot, Valerie wept one day when a reporter from England asked about the book. “I hate that title,
Closing Time,
” she said. “It's as if he's saying everything's finished, and it isn't.”

*   *   *

AS THE LATE-SUMMER
leaves began to redden, Joe sat on his back terrace with a portable phone at his side, anxiously anticipating the first reactions to his novel. He reflected that, on balance, the last few years had been worthy of celebration, in spite of setbacks, restlessness, and pessimism. His father-in-law, Barney, had died of cancer in 1987. Joe missed the man's gentleness, and regretted his estrangement from Barney and Dottie (she was now living in Florida). Joe consoled himself with the fact that Barney had lived a long and enriching life. In 1990, Erica had frightened the family with an occurrence of breast cancer. But she had recovered and published a novel,
Splinters.
It included a wry portrait of her father in the guise of a roguish and untrustworthy young man (upon receiving a Nobel Prize, he lights out for Sweden). During her illness, her father was “around,” Erica says, “[though] not especially helpful, as I recall. But he was still dealing with me at that point as an extension of my mother because she and I were very close, and he was still in a rage at her.”

Joe met his children fairly often in the city. They'd have lunch or dinner, and he looked forward to seeing them. He pressed Erica for her mother's secret pot roast recipe, one of his favorite meals and one he missed terribly; under strict orders from her mother, she would not give it to him. She still worked in advertising. Ted had joined
Nickelodeon
magazine as a writer and photographer. If he or Erica needed to know how “to punctuate a sentence at work, or … needed a fact, anything about anything,” they'd phone their dad, Erica says. “He was like Google pre-Google. He always knew about everything. He met my various boyfriends over the years at dinners and I generally spent at least one weekend a summer at his house.” She preferred to see him in the city, though, because she did not feel comfortable around Valerie. Her father's apparent impatience with his wife's talk and endless puttering unnerved her.

On his patio, Joe considered recent changes in the world, possibly worth celebrating—most notably, the fact that on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen. The Cold War had shaped most of Joe's life, in its effects on American politics, culture, and economics. His novels had been Cold War novels, right down to the smell of the ink on the page. The period had given him his subjects, and influenced the scope and nature of his fame. The Cold War: peace without peace, Orwell called it. Was it really over? Well, human nature wouldn't change (already, neo-Nazis were building hives inside the new, unified Germany), nor would the blunders of world leaders. Witness the Gulf War, Joe told friends. “[A]n atrocity,” he'd say. “Bush … didn't [even] know why he was making war in Iraq.”

Joe celebrated travel. Often, he was asked to read or speak at universities, arts festivals, and conferences. “I'm a narcissist and an exhibitionist,” he admitted. “It's good being the center of attention, having people make a fuss over me. And I love the good food, the good hotels.”