The Enigma of Joseph Heller
By BLAKE BAILEY
NYT Book Review
JUST ONE CATCH
A Biography of Joseph Heller
By Tracy Daugherty
Illustrated. 548 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $35.
“Oh God, this is a calamity for American literature,” Kurt Vonnegut said on learning of Joseph Heller’s death in 1999. John Updike was less alarmed: Heller “wasn’t top of the chart” as a writer, he reflected, though he was “a sweet man” and his first novel, “Catch-22” was “important.” Note the Updikean judiciousness of “important”: he didn’t say he liked the book, but it was a great cultural bellwether as novels go, and it has endured. Despite mixed reviews on publication in 1961, “Catch-22” was soon adopted by college students who recognized a kindred spirit in Yossarian, the bombardier who rebels against a materialistic bureaucracy hellbent on killing him. “Better Yossarian than Rotarian” became a popular slogan, all the more so with the timely (for the novel’s sake) military escalation in Vietnam, which became the “real” subject of “Catch-22” and partly accounts for its sales of more than 10 million copies to date. It’s hard to argue with that kind of importance.
And it’s easy to see why Vonnegut would consider his friend’s reputation in large terms: the two had a lot in common. Both were black humorists, and both were World War II veterans who came to their most acclaimed novels the hard way: Vonnegut had to survive the Allied bombing of Dresden to write “Slaughterhouse-Five,” whereas Heller flew 60 bombing missions between May and October 1944, a feat that should have killed him three times over, statistically speaking, since the average personnel loss was 5 percent per mission. Instead, the experience turned him into a fiction writer and a tortured, funny, deeply peculiar human being. A chronic nail-biter who was understandably terrified of flying and sometimes screamed in his sleep, Heller dissembled his angst with an aloof, deadpan humor that sometimes left its victims looking like Kid Sampson in “Catch-22,” whose lower torso remains standing after his upper body is shredded by an airplane propeller. Of exactly three remarks that Heller directed at a Look magazine colleague, Mel Grayson, circa 1960, “You have dandruff” was arguably the most civil.
After a few unhappy postwar years in academia, Heller worked as a copywriter at places like Look and wrote a number of derivative but promising short stories. Then one day in 1953 the opening of a novel popped into his head: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.” Right away Heller wrote 20 pages in longhand, then spent another eight years accruing index cards and further pages that finally amounted to a very long, quirky, nonlinear war novel that was, to put it mildly, a tough sell. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Heller’s literary career without the zealous support of his agent, Candida Donadio — whose efforts on behalf of many good American writers deserve to be better remembered — and a young editor at Simon & Schuster, Robert Gottlieb, who defended the book against detractors both in-house and out. One advance reader was Heller’s idol, Evelyn Waugh, who wrote the publisher as follows: “You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches — often repetitious — totally without structure.” Waugh disliked other things about the book, too, but Art Buchwald, anyway, considered it a “masterpiece.”
(More here.)
NYT Book Review
JUST ONE CATCH
A Biography of Joseph Heller
By Tracy Daugherty
Illustrated. 548 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $35.
“Oh God, this is a calamity for American literature,” Kurt Vonnegut said on learning of Joseph Heller’s death in 1999. John Updike was less alarmed: Heller “wasn’t top of the chart” as a writer, he reflected, though he was “a sweet man” and his first novel, “Catch-22” was “important.” Note the Updikean judiciousness of “important”: he didn’t say he liked the book, but it was a great cultural bellwether as novels go, and it has endured. Despite mixed reviews on publication in 1961, “Catch-22” was soon adopted by college students who recognized a kindred spirit in Yossarian, the bombardier who rebels against a materialistic bureaucracy hellbent on killing him. “Better Yossarian than Rotarian” became a popular slogan, all the more so with the timely (for the novel’s sake) military escalation in Vietnam, which became the “real” subject of “Catch-22” and partly accounts for its sales of more than 10 million copies to date. It’s hard to argue with that kind of importance.
And it’s easy to see why Vonnegut would consider his friend’s reputation in large terms: the two had a lot in common. Both were black humorists, and both were World War II veterans who came to their most acclaimed novels the hard way: Vonnegut had to survive the Allied bombing of Dresden to write “Slaughterhouse-Five,” whereas Heller flew 60 bombing missions between May and October 1944, a feat that should have killed him three times over, statistically speaking, since the average personnel loss was 5 percent per mission. Instead, the experience turned him into a fiction writer and a tortured, funny, deeply peculiar human being. A chronic nail-biter who was understandably terrified of flying and sometimes screamed in his sleep, Heller dissembled his angst with an aloof, deadpan humor that sometimes left its victims looking like Kid Sampson in “Catch-22,” whose lower torso remains standing after his upper body is shredded by an airplane propeller. Of exactly three remarks that Heller directed at a Look magazine colleague, Mel Grayson, circa 1960, “You have dandruff” was arguably the most civil.
After a few unhappy postwar years in academia, Heller worked as a copywriter at places like Look and wrote a number of derivative but promising short stories. Then one day in 1953 the opening of a novel popped into his head: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.” Right away Heller wrote 20 pages in longhand, then spent another eight years accruing index cards and further pages that finally amounted to a very long, quirky, nonlinear war novel that was, to put it mildly, a tough sell. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Heller’s literary career without the zealous support of his agent, Candida Donadio — whose efforts on behalf of many good American writers deserve to be better remembered — and a young editor at Simon & Schuster, Robert Gottlieb, who defended the book against detractors both in-house and out. One advance reader was Heller’s idol, Evelyn Waugh, who wrote the publisher as follows: “You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches — often repetitious — totally without structure.” Waugh disliked other things about the book, too, but Art Buchwald, anyway, considered it a “masterpiece.”
(More here.)
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