Mind of an Outlaw (29 page)

Now beyond a doubt, of all the books discussed here, the one which most cheats evaluation is Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
. It was the book which took me longest to finish, and I almost gave it up. Yet I think that a year from now I may remember it more vividly than
The Thin Red Line
. Because it is an original. There’s no book like it anyone has read. Yet it’s maddening. It reminds one of a Jackson Pollock painting eight feet high, twenty feet long. Like yard goods, one could cut it anywhere. One could take out a hundred pages anywhere from the middle of
Catch-22
and not even the author could be certain they were gone. Yet the length and similarity of one page to another gives a curious meat-and-potatoes to the madness; building upon itself the book becomes substantial until the last fifty pages grow suddenly and surprisingly powerful, only to be marred by an ending over the last five pages which is hysterical, sentimental, and wall-eyed for Hollywood.

This is the skin of the reaction. If I were a major critic, it would be a virtuoso performance to write a definitive piece on
Catch-22
. It would take ten thousand words or more. Because Heller is carrying his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him (except Burroughs who has already made the trip and now sells choice seats in the auditorium), and so the analysis of Joseph H.’s Hell would require a discussion of other varieties of inferno and whether they do more than this author’s tour.

Catch-22
is a nightmare about an American bomber squadron on a made-up island off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named Yossarian who has flown fifty missions and wants out. On this premise is tattooed the events of the novel, fifty characters, two thousand frustrations (an average of four or five to the page), and one simple motif: more frustration. Yossarian’s colonel wants
to impress his general and so raises the number of missions to fifty-five. When the pilots have fifty-four, the figure is lifted to sixty. They are going for eighty by the time the book has been done. On the way every character goes through a routine
on every page
which is as formal as a little peasant figure in a folk dance. Back in school, we had a joke we used to repeat. It went:

“Whom are you talking about?”

“Herbert Hoover.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Never heard of whom?”

“Herbert Hoover.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s the man you mentioned.”

“Never heard of Herbert Hoover.”

So it went. So goes
Catch-22
. It’s the rock and roll of novels. One finds its ancestor in basic training. We were ordered to have clean sheets for Saturday inspection. But one week we were given no clean sheets from the post laundry so we slept on our mattress covers, which got dirty. After inspection, the platoon was restricted to quarters. “You didn’t have clean sheets,” our sergeant said.

“How could we have clean sheets if the clean sheets didn’t come?”

“How do I know?” said the sergeant. “The regulations say you gotta have clean sheets.”

“But we can’t have clean sheets if there are no clean sheets.”

“That,” said the sergeant, “is tough shit.”

Which is what
Catch-22
should have been called. The Army is a village of colliding bureaucracies whose colliding orders cook up impossibilities. Heller takes this one good joke and exploits it into two thousand variations of the same good joke, but in the act he somehow creates a rational vision of the modern world. Yet the crisis of reason is that it can no longer comprehend the modern world. Heller demonstrates that a rational man devoted to reason must arrive at the conclusion that either the world is mad and he is the only sane man in it, or (and this is the weakness of
Catch-22
—it never explores this possibility) the sane man
is not really sane because his rational propositions are without existential reason.

On page 178, there is a discussion about God.

Right there is planted the farthest advance of the flag of reason in his cosmology. Heller does not look for any answer, but there is an answer which might go that God gave us pain for the same reason the discovery of tranquilizers was undertaken by the Devil: if we have an immortal soul some of us come close to it only through pain. A season of sickness can be preferable to a flight from disease, for it discourages the onrush of a death which begins in the center of oneself.

Give talent its due.
Catch-22
is the debut of a writer with merry gifts. Heller may yet become Gogol. But what makes one hesitate to call his first novel great or even major is that he has only grasped the inferior aspect of Hell. What is most unendurable is not the military world of total frustration so much as the midnight frustration of the half world, Baldwin’s other country, where a man may have time to hear his soul, and time to go deaf, even be forced to contemplate himself as he becomes deadened before his death. (Much as Hemingway may have been.) That is when one becomes aware of the anguish, the existential angst, which wars enable one to forget. It is that other death—without war—where one dies by a failure of nerve, which opens the bloodiest vents of Hell. And that is a novel none of us has yet come back alive to write.

With the exception of
Another Country
, the novels talked about up to now have been books written for men.
Catch-22
was liked, I believe, by almost every man who read it. Women were puzzled. The world of a man is a world of surface slick and rock knowledge. A man must live by daily acts where he goes to work and works on the world some incremental bit, using the tools, instruments, and the techniques of the world. Thus a man cannot afford to go too deeply into the underlying meaning of a single subject. He prefers to become interested in quick proportions and contradictions, in the practical surface of things. A book like
Catch-22
is written on the face of solemn events and their cockeyed contradictions. So it has a vast appeal: it relieves the frustration men feel at the idiocy of their work.
Naked Lunch
fries the surface in a witch’s skillet; the joy in reading is equal to the kick of watching a television announcer go insane before your eyes and start to croon obscenely about the president, First Lady, Barry Goldwater, Cardinal Spellman, J. Edgar. Somewhere in America somebody would take out his pistol and shoot the set. Burroughs shatters the surface and blasts its shards into the madness beneath. He rips the reader free of suffocation. Jones wrote a book which a dedicated corporation executive or an ambitious foreman would read with professional avidity because they would learn a bit about the men who work for them.
The Thin Red Line
brings detail to the surprises on the toughest part of the skin. So these three books are, as I say, books for men. Whereas
Another Country
, obsessed with that transcendental divide keeping sex from love, is a book more for women, or for men and women. So too is
Set This House on Fire
. And much the same can be said of
Rabbit, Run
and
Letting Go
.

On record are the opinions of a partisan. So it is necessary to admit that John Updike’s novel was approached with animus. His reputation has traveled in convoy up the Avenue of the Establishment,
The New York Times Book Review
blowing sirens like a
motorcycle caravan, the professional muse of
The New Yorker
sitting in the Cadillac, membership cards to the right, fellowships in his pocket. The sort of critics who are rarely right about a book—Arthur Mizener and Granville Hicks, for example—ride on his flanks, literary bodyguards.
Life
magazine blew its kiss of death into the confetti. To my surprise,
Rabbit, Run
was therefore a better book than I thought it would be. The Literary Establishment was improving its taste. Updike was not simply a junior edition of James Gould Cozzens. But of course the Establishment cannot nominate a candidate coherently. Updike’s merits and vices were turned inside out. The good-girlish gentlemen of letters were shocked by the explicitness of the sex in
Rabbit, Run
, and slapped him gently for that with their fan, but his style they applauded. It is Updike’s misfortune that he is invariably honored for his style (which is atrocious—and smells like stale garlic) and is insufficiently recognized for his gifts. He could become the best of our literary novelists if he could forget about style and go deeper into the literature of sex.
Rabbit, Run
moves in well-modulated spurts at precisely those places where the style subsides to a ladylike murmur and the characters take over. The trouble is that young John, like many a good young writer before him, does not know exactly what to do when action lapses, and so he cultivates his private vice, he
writes
. And there are long overfingered descriptions in exacerbated syntax, airless crypts of four or five pages, huge inner exertions reminiscent of weight lifters; a stale sweet sweat clings to his phrases.

Example:
Redbook, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s
.

Example:
True Confessions
.

Example:
Elements of Grammar
.

It’s the rare writer who cannot have sentences lifted from his work, but the first quotation is taken from the first five sentences of the book, the second is on the next-to-last page, and the third is nothing less than the last three sentences of the novel. The beginning and end of a novel are usually worked over. They are the index to taste in the writer. Besides, trust your local gangster. In the run of Updike’s pages are one thousand other imprecise, flatulent, wry-necked, precious, overpreened, self-indulgent, tortured sentences. It is the sort of prose which would be admired in a writing course overseen by a fussy old nance. And in Updike’s new book,
The Centaur
, which was only sampled, the style has gotten worse. Pietisms are congregating, affirmations à la Archibald MacLeish.

The pity is that Updike has instincts for finding the heart of the conventional novel, that still-open no-man’s-land between the surface and the deep, the soft machinery of the world and the subterranean rigors of the dream. His hero, Rabbit Angstrom, is sawed in two by the clear anguish of watching his private vision go at a gallop away from the dread real weight of his responsibility. A routine story of a man divided between a dull wife he cannot bear to
live with and a blowsy tough tender whore he cannot make it with, the merit of the book is not in the simplicity of its problem, but in the dread Updike manages to convey, despite the literary commercials in the style, of a young man who is beginning to lose nothing less than his good American soul, and yet it is not quite his fault. The power of the novel comes from a sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe. It is a novel which could have been important, it could have had a chance to stay alive despite its mud pies in prose, but at the very end the book drowns in slime. Updike does not know how to finish. Faced with the critical choice of picking one woman or another (and by the end, both women are in fearful need), his character bolts over a literal hill and runs away. Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow, maybe he’ll never be back, but a decision was necessary. The book ends as minor, a pop-out. One is left with the expectation that Updike will never be great; there is something too fatally calculated about his inspiration. But very good he can be, a good writer of the first rank with occasional echoes from the profound. First he must make an enemy or two of the commissioners on the Literary Mafia. Of course a man spends his life trying to get up his guts for such a caper.