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Catch As Catch Can

Page 30

by Joseph Heller


  Well, Catch-22 did very well at the box office those first few months. After that it did less well and currently shows a loss of some ten million dollars, which hardly indicates a need for a quick motion picture sequel. More importantly to me, it did even better on the book racks. During the summer after it opened I got a call from Dell Publishing saying that in the preceding six weeks Catch-22 had been the fastest-selling book they’d ever produced. Over a million copies were sold in those six weeks and it made the Times paperback best-seller list. That made me happy. And it also amused me, in a kind of sadistic way, because I knew that many of those million copies had been bought by people who wouldn’t be able to get past page six or eight. But that didn’t bother me, because I get the royalties anyway—people don’t have to read it, just buy it—and it’s nice to get money from the people who make millionaires out of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann.

  I’ve also done Catch-22 as a stage play—it’s already been performed in East Hampton and it got a rave review in The New York Times —but because I don’t like working in the theater I just sold the amateur and stock rights directly to Samuel French. Usually you go for a big commercial production and then sell the rights, but in this case production rights are available to anyone who wants them. The reason I’m not interested in working on productions of the play is that I don’t like working with people. I don’t have the patience for it—I like working alone—and rehearsals are tedious for me and I don’t like rewriting even when I know what to rewrite and how to rewrite it. Another thing is that I don’t like sitting and watching actors rehearsing and listening to their discussions. I’m not geared for it and I’m not stagestruck.

  Anyhow, there isn’t much relationship between a book, a motion picture script, and a stage play. A few people in movies know this, but most of them aren’t all that intelligent. The ideal motion picture would be one that has no language in it at all— movies are essentially a nonliterary medium. In a play the architecture from the very beginning is based on language, dialogue. That’s why in the stage version of Catch-22 I’m able to cover ten times as much ground as the movie covered. Characters come on only when they’re ready to speak, and as soon as they’re finished they’re whisked offstage. And changes of place are made very freely. If I have a character say, “I’m going to Rome,” and then have him step across the stage and meet a girl dressed as a prostitute, the audience knows right away that the scene has shifted to Rome.

  But despite everything—all this prosperity, fame, and success—I’m still unchanged, still wonderfully unspoiled by it all. Modesty remains my most flamboyant characteristic. I’m still just as corruptible as I was the day I sold Catch-22 to Columbia and, God willing, I’ll remain that way in all my dealings with motion picture people. I’m at work on a novel now and have been for several years. Most people who’ve read it think it’s truly extraordinary—as extraordinary as Catch-22 was. But even if it should turn out to be a terrible novel, which probably won’t happen, it will sell a fantastic number of copies.

  I don’t know whether it will be made into a movie. These days the motion picture business is such a devastated area it should be getting federal aid. But even if the book is made into a movie, I won’t work on it, certainly not from the start. I’d step in and do rewrites and polishes, if I’m asked to and am overpaid at least as much as everyone else, but I would not want to work on a movie script from the beginning to the end. It takes too much time and too much effort if you’re going to do it well. To have to go to meetings, and to have to agree with the producer and director on what approaches to take, and then to have to write the script all require the same amount of energy that goes into fiction writing, and I’d rather spend my energy in fiction writing. It’s really the only kind of work I do that I consider serious writing. When I’m doing novels it’s just between me and the paper. I forget the audience and problem of sales and the film rights and all other sorts of similarly irrelevant and debasing things. And that’s the way I like it.

  REELINGIN CATCH - 22*

  The concept of the novel came to me as a seizure, a single inspiration. I’d come to the conclusion that I wanted to write a novel, and moving back to New York after two years of teaching college in Pennsylvania sent the ambition coursing again. I had no idea what it would be about, however. Then one night the opening lines of Catch-22 —all but the character’s name, Yossarian— came to me: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

  My mind flooded with verbal images. I got up in the night and walked around, just thinking about it. The next day I returned to the small ad agency where I worked, wrote the first chapter in longhand, spent the week touching it up, and then sent it to my literary agent. It took a year more to plan the book and seven years to write it, but it remained pretty much the same inspiration that came to me that night.

  I don’t know where it came from. I know that it was a conscious assembling of factors, but the unconscious element was very strong, too. Almost immediately I invented the phrase “Catch-18,” which would later be changed to “Catch-22” when it was discovered that Leon Uris’s Mila 18 would be coming out at about the same time as my book. Initially Catch-22 required that every censoring officer put his name on every letter he censored. Then as I went on, I deliberately looked for self-contradictory situations, and artistic contrivance came in. I began to expand each application of Catch-22 to encompass more and more of the social system. Catch-22 became a law: “they” can do anything to us we can’t stop “them” from doing. The very last use is philosophical: Yossarian is convinced that there is no such thing as Catch-22, but it doesn’t matter as long as people believe there is.

  Virtually none of the attitudes in the book—the suspicion and distrust of the officials in the government, the feelings of helplessness and victimization, the realization that most government agencies would lie—coincided with my experiences as a bombardier in World War II. The antiwar and antigovernment feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the Fifties. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself.

  Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat’s Cradle. I don’t think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn’t know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Pynchon and in Cat’s Cradle.

  Catch-22was more political than psychological. In the book, opposition to the war against Hitler was taken for granted. The book dealt instead with conflicts existing between a man and his own superiors, between him and his own institutions. The really difficult struggle happens when one does not even know who it is that’s threatening him, grinding him down—and yet one does know that there is a tension, an antagonist, a conflict with no conceivable end to it.

  Catch-22came to the attention of college students at about the same time that the moral corruption of the Vietnam War became evident. The treatment of the military as corrupt, ridiculous and asinine could be applied literally to that war. Vietnam was a lucky coincidence—lucky for me, not for the people. Between the mid and late Sixties, the paperback of Catch-22 went from twelve printings to close to thirty.

  There was a change in spirit, a new spirit of healthy irreverence. There was a general feeling that the platitudes of Americanism were horseshit. Number one, they didn’t work. Number two, they weren’t true. Number three, the people giving voice to them didn’t believe them either. The phrase “Catch-22” began appearing more and more freq
uently in a wide range of contexts. I began hearing from people who believed that I’d named the book after the phrase.

  One way or another, everybody is at the mercy of some context in the novel. I move from situations in which the individual is against his own society, to those in which the society itself is the product of something impenetrable, something that either has no design or has a design which escapes the boundaries of reason.

  There is a dialogue early in the book between Lieutenant Dunbar and Yossarian. They are discussing the chaplain, and Yossarian says, “Wasn’t he sweet? Maybe they should give him three votes.” Dunbar says, “Who’s they?” And a page or two later, Yossarian tells Clevinger “They’re trying to kill me,” and Clevinger wants to know “Who’s they?”

  It is the anonymous “they,” the enigmatic “they,” who are in charge. Who is “they?” I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even “they” themselves.

  “I AMTHE BOMBARDIER!”*

  When I enlisted in the Army Air Corps on the nineteenth of October, 1942, I was nineteen years old. Four of us, all from Coney Island, went to enlist at the same time. We went down to Grand Central Station and spent almost a whole day filling out forms. There was a long medical examination. We were inducted right then. Somebody said something, and you nodded, and you took a step forward—and you were in the Army. Ten or fifteen days later, we had to report back to Penn Station and we took a train out of Camp Upton on Long Island. Then we went to Miami Beach, where the Air Corps had taken over almost every hotel. Then we got on the train again and it must have been eight, ten, or twelve days to Lowry Field in Denver, a huge training center.

  I loved Denver. It was winter, but it was a beautiful winter, the kind of winter you never see in New York. This was my first time out of New York except for maybe one trip to New Jersey as a kid. That was part of the excitement of it, the adventure. Also there was a feeling that you were doing something that was socially approved and esteemed. In Denver, and then wherever I went, there was always a list of families that wanted to have servicemen to dinner. They didn’t care if you were from Coney Island. They didn’t care if you were Jewish. They might have cared if you were black. Well, they might have cared if you were Jewish too. One of the things that surprised me was how courteous and generally how warmhearted people are outside New York. There’s an affection and an optimism that New Yorkers are not accustomed to. And there’s also very slow service in luncheonettes.

  Toward the end of my training I was told that they wanted aviation cadets. So I took a few intelligence tests and passed, and I was classified a bombardier and went to bombardier school. After that I was commissioned a second lieutenant, given a furlough and came home a hero in my aviation cap. I have photographs of me—I look like I’m six.

  We flew overseas in B-25s, which were ridiculously small. We were assigned to a squadron on the west coast of Corsica. In ten months I flew sixty missions and my squadron lost two or three planes at the most.

  I was not scared until my thirty-seventh mission. Until then it was all play, all games, it was being in a Hollywood movie. I was too stupid to be afraid. In the beginning I didn’t know what flak was. You saw black puffs of smoke. And then on certain missions you would hear it explode. I had seen only one plane go down, and that was slow and beautiful. I saw a plane high above the others, with a beautiful plume, you know, an orange plume— wonderful. I remember I was bewitched, it was like a motion picture. It began to circle and I saw parachutes coming out, and then it began to spin all the way down. Three people were killed in that one.

  On the day of the invasion of southern France I flew two missions. We bombed gun emplacements on the beaches of southern France in the morning, and in the afternoon we went to Avignon. We lost at least three or four planes, a lot for one group. The mission was planned to attack three bridges simultaneously. Before we turned to go in, I saw a plane destroyed for the first time. A few miles away I saw an engine on fire, and then I saw the wing fall off, and then I saw the plane drop like a rock spinning. Everybody in there was killed.

  We went in and dropped the bombs—and suddenly I felt my plane dropping. I heard a shell explode, and right after that we began to drop. And I was paralyzed. That was fear. And I thought, I’m going down, like that other plane over there. And then we leveled out, and there was a ghostly silence. I looked down and saw that the earplug of my headset had pulled out of the connection. When I plugged it in, I heard a guy wailing on the intercom, “Help the bombardier!” So I said, “I am the bombardier!” The top-turret gunner in my plane was wounded in the leg and I had to give him first aid.

  After that, I was scared even on the milk runs.

  Almost all our bombing missions were bridges. I didn’t think about the people on the ground. I would guess very few military personnel or civilians were injured by our bombs. But I would also say that if we had been bombing cities I doubt if it would have bothered me. It would bother me now. I was an ignorant kid. I was a hero in a movie. I did not believe for a second that I could be injured. I did not really believe that anyone was being injured. Until Avignon, the war was the most marvelous experience in my life. I wouldn’t feel this way if I had been wounded. I certainly wouldn’t feel this way if I had been killed. But for me—and I think for many people looking back—it was wonderful. I’m telling you, the war was wonderful.

  The bomb dropped in August. I had been discharged in June. I remember where I was. I had been taken to the race track by a good friend of mine, and as we were coming out they were handing out newspapers—“Atom Bomb, Atom Bomb.” Nobody knew what it was except it was a very big deal. I thought, What a wonderful thing!

  Twenty-one years old. I had no idea what war was like until I read about the Vietnam War. That war was described much better than any other war I’ve read about, probably because the writers were in combat. Really in combat. I don’t consider that I’ve been in combat with my ten months overseas. It looks like combat in the eyes of other people, you know? And the longer I live, the more it becomes heroic. Because I’ve survived so long— not because I survived the war.

  CONEY ISLAND*

  The Fun Is Over

  Coney Island is beautiful to children and ugly to adults, and, in this respect, it is often typical of life itself.

  Most people, including many who have been there, are surprised to learn that families live in Coney Island and children are brought up there. The image they have is of a gigantic, enclosed amusement park that is locked up at the end of each season until the following spring. In fact, though, the amusement section occupies perhaps nine blocks of a seaside community that is nearly four miles long and perhaps half a mile wide and which, by contemporary suburban standards, is heavily developed and densely populated with year-round residents. Even back in 1929, when I was in kindergarten, there were enough families living in Coney Island on a permanent basis to overcrowd the two elementary schools—and each of these schools stood six stories high and a full block wide.

  The schools were almost a mile apart, and one already had an annex, a series of bungalows one street away, for students in some of the lower grades. Before the end of the Thirties, a modern junior high school was built to absorb the upper grades. For some implausible reason, the new junior high school was given the name Mark Twain, possibly because Robert Moses (who re ally runs New York State and has done so from the day of his birth) was too diffident to name the school after himself, or possibly because Samuel Clemens was the only noncontroversial American left who had ever written anything of quality.

  Coney Island is, of course, in Brooklyn, lying laterally along the southern rim of that borough and facing the Atlantic Ocean a few miles outside the mouth of New York Harbor. While not a slum, Coney Island was, and is, a depressed neighborhood and seems, from my present perspective, a bleak and squalid place. The older my mother grew, the more she detested it and regretted having to live there, particularly in summer, when the streets were filled continuously with people and noise
. We were children from poor families and didn’t know it. Everyone’s father had a job, but incomes were low. It is a blessing of childhood to be oblivious to such conditions, and I do not think the circumstance of moderate poverty was too upsetting to our parents, either, nearly all of whom were immigrants. They worked hard and did not quarrel often. They did not drink or divorce, and, unless they were more circumspect than my own generation, they did not fool with the wives or husbands of their friends and neighbors.

  There were apartment houses on every block in my section of Coney Island. All were buildings with three landings of apartments above the ground floor, which might have a row of stores or another hallway of apartments. None had elevators, and one of the painful memories I have now is of old men and women (in time, the old men and women were our own fathers and mothers) laboring up the steep staircases.

  Scattered everywhere about the island, mostly toward the beach side, were those ingenious complexes of bungalows and frame buildings called “villas” or “courts” or “esplanades.” They would lie empty for nine months of the year and then fill each June with families who rented the cramped housekeeping units for the summer and came pouring in with their bedding and baby carriages—almost all of them arriving on the same day, it seemed. They would come from other parts of Brooklyn and from the Bronx, Manhattan and New Jersey to spend the summer in teeming proximity that would have been intolerable to people more refined. And they would spend the summer happily, for the same families would return, with their bedding and growing children, to the same “villas,” “courts” and “esplanades” year after year.

  Back about 1927, some shrewd speculators decided to build a luxury hotel right on the boardwalk, the Half Moon, and promptly went bankrupt. What in the world led those crafty real estate operators to suppose that people with enough money to go elsewhere would ever come to Coney Island? Today, the hotel is a home for the aged, and this, though morbid, is an apt symbol for the old and decaying island itself. Since the War, with the exception of three city-financed housing projects, there has not (to my knowledge) been a single new residential dwelling constructed; and the amusement area of Coney Island, once as upto-date as any, has not provided a significant new attraction since the parachute jump was borrowed from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

 

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