Often at night, after these visits, he’d dream he was a boy and his mother was going away somewhere, leaving him behind, and he’d yell out to her with the most agonizing yearning. He’d wake with tears in his eyes. And then he’d be back at the home, feeding fish to his mother, resenting the cold, greasy texture of the food on his fingers, and the thick slipperiness of her saliva. He’d whisper, “There, there” and “Everything’s okay,” feeling just as silly as when he’d muttered these trifles to the kid in the plane over Avignon all those years ago.
In clear moments, Lena heard the no in his yeses just as well as he did; he understood this. Words had always been a barrier between them: her refusal to master English, his growing comprehension that meanings (brother, sister) were never really fixed. During these bedside vigils, he had been thinking it was a shame she could not appreciate or grasp his success with Catch-22, but she did understand. She was the source. Mother: insoluble paradox.
In years to come, Joe would grow fascinated with clinical definitions of schizophrenia, and theories tying it to family communication problems. According to one idea, schizophrenia results when there is: “1) Involvement in an intense relationship where accurate discrimination of the message has vital importance for the individual; 2) The other person expresses two orders and one of these denies the other; 3) The individual cannot react to the contradictory messages.”
In developing themes for his second novel, Joe would work consciously with the concept of schizophrenia, but this first book had plenty of examples of it. Western culture seemed rooted in the pathology.
No. Lena didn’t need to know about Catch-22. She had lived it as an immigrant, wife, and mother.
Besides, Joe wasn’t sure how successful he was going to be—or what success even meant. There was a catch in Francis Brown’s efforts to find a young, “with it” reviewer for Joe’s book: The man he tapped, Richard Stern, thought himself an up-and-coming black humorist, for whom Catch-22 was serious competition.
On October 22, 1961, Stern wrote, on page 50 of the New York Times Book Review, “[T]he book is no novel.… Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.… The book is an emotional hodgepodge.”
Frederick Karl claimed Joe “was not dismayed” by this review, but Joe could quote it bitterly, word for word, three decades later. “I didn’t think [my family and I] would ever smile again,” he told David Straitfeld of New York magazine. Alice Denham recalled Joe as being exceedingly glum after the review. One day, he stopped by her apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street. She offered him a drink. “We thought we had the fix in,” he told her. “A bad joke.” He looked tired. He admitted, “I thought—now, don’t laugh—I might be able to quit work and write full-time. That I’d make enough.…”
The better news was that more of the readers Bourne had courted popped up with favorable comments, including S. J. Perelman, who lauded the book’s humor (and who would be instrumental in securing Joe a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in 1963). Harper Lee said, “Catch-22 is the only war novel I’ve ever read that makes any sense.” Gottlieb and Bourne bought ad space in the Times to trumpet this praise.
On November 4, Nelson Algren wrote in The Nation:
Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II. The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity are lost within it. That the horror and the hypocrisy, the greed and the complacency, the endless cunning and the endless stupidity which now go to constitute what we term Christianity are dealt with here in absolutes, does not lessen the truth of its repudiation.… [T]his novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.
Within twelve months, Norman Mailer, slow to acknowledge other novelists, would grudgingly admit, “Catch-22 is the debut of a writer with merry gifts.”
* * *
BY THANKSGIVING, nearly twelve thousand copies had sold—respectable, but not over the top. That fall, the bestsellers included Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (in its eighteenth printing, just one year after its release), J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, and, predictably, Leon Uris’s Mila 18.
Catch-22 was popular on the East Coast but did not gain national traction.
After the first of the year, S & S prepared a fourth printing. In March 1962 came the announcement of the thirteenth annual National Book Award finalists. Joe was named along with Salinger, Bernard Malamud for A New Life, Isaac Bashevis Singer for The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories, and another newcomer, Walker Percy, for a novel called The Moviegoer. Knopf, Percy’s publisher, had done almost nothing to promote the book; despite positive reviews, the novel was all but forgotten by the time the finalists were assembled. The Moviegoer had sold fewer than five thousand copies. Readers and critics were stunned, and Knopf was somewhat embarrassed, when Percy walked away with the award.
In the following days, the news emerged that Knopf had not submitted The Moviegoer for NBA consideration. Jean Stafford was one of the fiction judges that year; her husband, A. J. Liebling, had read The Moviegoer and sung its praises to her. She recommended it to the other judges. She asked the NBA if it would be all right to add Percy’s novel to the finalists, as it seemed the book had been unfairly overlooked.
Show magazine, interpreting the incident as more underhanded than it was, published an editorial denouncing Stafford and Liebling, and suggesting that “Joseph Heller’s brilliant farce-tragedy” had been cheated out of the prize it deserved. Gottlieb and Bourne wasted no time in exploiting the controversy with a new barrage of ads for Catch-22. By April 1962, nineteen thousand copies had sold and a fifth printing was ordered.
“By conventional marketing standards, that should have been the end of it,” Jonathan R. Eller wrote. “[T]he novel was selling moderately well, but Heller would clearly not reach bestseller status on the scale of John O’Hara or Harold Robbins, or in fact on any scale at all.”
But the Bob and Nina Show was not bound by conventional marketing standards, and it was not done. Bourne sent special-order cards to bookstores all over the country, guaranteeing payment of transportation costs on any order for Catch-22 placed on one of the cards; furthermore, S & S would pay return costs on any unsold special-order copies. The bookstores bit.
Next, Gottlieb purchased six columns of ad space in the April 29 issue of the New York Times Book Review. The ad’s header read: “Report on Catch-22, a novel that is showing signs of living forever.” Gottlieb quoted accolades from reviewers and writers, as well as excerpts from “the rush of wonderfully expressive letters that are coming in from readers everywhere.” Bourne printed the ad on poster board and mailed copies of it to bookstores for counter displays.
Nelson Algren continued to champion the novel. On June 23, 1962, in the Chicago Daily News, he said, “‘Catch’ is a classic because it employs fantasy to depict truth too devastating to tell by factual narration. A classic because its burlesque of army brass is rooted soundly in the thinking of the businessman in uniform, and is told by a writer whose experience of Business at war is first-hand.”
His article spurred interest in the novel throughout the Midwest. By the end of June, Joe had sold 25,000 copies.
* * *
“JOE’S CONTRIBUTION [to the promotion of the novel] was to stay calm and offer practical suggestions,” Bob Gottlieb said. “He knew everything. He knew things that nobody could know. He would call up and say, ‘Look, I’m not suggesting that you go back to press … but I think you should know, because I have a cousin [who told me], that the manufacturers of the paper in the plant you’re using are probably going out on strike in two weeks, so if yo
u need paper, you may want to order it now.’ He was always right. We always did exactly as [we were] told. When things went wrong, he was cheerful. When things went right, he was thrilled and grateful.”
This early in his career, Gottlieb didn’t know how rare it was to find an author with such a refined combination of patience and pragmatism. “Many years later … I came upon [Joe] giving advice to Bob Caro, at the time we were preparing The Power Broker for publication,” Gottlieb recalled. “He was explaining to … Caro that the most important thing he could do was to keep the publisher happy and calm because if we were happy and calm, we would do it right, but if he agitated us with complaints and constant questions, things could go wrong. This is a lesson I can say that Bob Caro didn’t learn, because no one else has ever learned it. Joe is the only person [I’ve worked with] who ever grasped this essential fact about publishing.”
* * *
IT WAS NOT EASY for Gottlieb to conduct the Catch campaign—or do any work. The world would not sit still for him. A young editor remembered getting a call from him one afternoon, suggesting lunch. This happened shortly after JFK’s speech announcing the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba. “Things were pretty weird in Manhattan, all around,” wrote Robert Nedelkoff, who heard this story from the young man.
Gottlieb’s habit was to eat a sandwich at his desk. The young man stopped at an Italian deli, bought some antipasto, and headed for Simon & Schuster. Gottlieb’s secretary insisted he hadn’t left all day, but his office appeared to be empty. “That you?” came a voice from under the desk. “Yes,” said the young editor. “I talked to my shrink this morning. He sounded kind of worried,” Gottlieb explained from his crouch. “There’s some space here. Sit down.” The young man found a spot beneath the desk and opened his container of antipasto. “Just a second,” Gottlieb said. He rose, went to the window, closed the blinds, and then resumed his position on the floor. The men ate and talked business, safe from “the Big One.”
* * *
“THIS IS THE NAKED and the Dead scripted for the Marx Brothers, a kind of From Here to Insanity,” Kenneth Allsop wrote in a prepublication review of Catch-22 for Britain’s Daily Mail. “What is especially intriguing is that [so much] excitement and enthusiasm should be a-boil in a nation so patriotically thin-skinned and fanatical about the flag. For Catch-22 is anti-war, anti-militaristic, anti-organisation, anti-slogan, anti-chauvinism. It spoofs uniform, duty, and the Uncle-Sam-right-or-wrong outlook. It is a great demented belly-laugh at the concepts of unquestioning obedience and sanctioned killing.”
That such a novel could come from Cold War America, with its nuclear bellicosity and lockstep thinking, was a delightful surprise to British readers, and the book became an immediate bestseller in England. The news was more than just pleasing to Joe; it was a palpable relief. On the eve of British publication, Secker & Warburg backed away from the novel, fearing Joe had made it far too long during final revisions and that the British public would not have patience for it. A young editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, took it on. Following Nina Bourne’s strategies, he whipped up tremendous publicity. He sent a copy to Philip Toynbee, who wrote in London’s Observer on June 17, 1962:
When I began reading Catch-22, I thought it was a farcical satire on life in the United States Army Air Force. Later I believed that Mr. Heller’s target was modern war and all those who are responsible for waging it. Still later it seemed that he was attacking social organisation and anyone who derives power from it. By the end of the book, it had become plain to me that it is—no other phrase will do—the human condition itself which is the object of Mr. Heller’s fury and disgust.… [A]t the risk of inflation, I cannot help writing that Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon.
In July, Maschler sent Joe a note: “We sold just over 800 copies last week … and we have ordered yet another reprint.… I don’t suppose we shall ever catch up with S & S but, to use an English understatement, we are not displeased.”
On November 20, in the Manchester Guardian, W. J. Weatherby said:
It is hard to imagine [Heller’s] book being a best seller even five years ago, and we can only conjecture as to why it has proved so much in keeping with the general mood now when the Cold War is still with us. It may be that the only way we can live indefinitely in this state of tension, with this kind of reality, is to be coldly, even cynically, realistic about it. Just as the poor man must face reality every day whereas the rich man need not, so perhaps now we must face the reality of war whereas before the nuclear threat we could be fooled by the romance of it.
Writing in the Evening Post, Anthony Burgess was even blunter: Britain had no illusions about its ability to control the next war. “The thesis of ‘Catch-22’ can only be universally valid when the whole world has been absorbed into the American Empire,” he said.
Gottlieb and Bourne rushed ads into the New York Times, saying, “Come on! Don’t let the English beat us! Overnight, while America slept, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 has become #1 bestseller in England. Come on Yanks! To your booksellers! Help close the Catch-gap! Onwards and upwards! Over the top! Let’s go!”
In August 1962, when Candida Donadio sold the Catch-22 film rights to Columbia Pictures for $100,000, with a $25,000 option for a treatment or first-draft screenplay, Joe took a leave of absence from McCall’s, ostensibly to prepare a chronology of events and narrative time line for the movie studio. Few of his magazine colleagues expected to see him return. One of his former bosses, Herbert Mayes, told a reporter, “Heller’s a hell of a good publicist. Sorry we lost him. What I’d like to know, though, is how he got the time on my time to write that book.”
Joe spent the rest of the summer and early fall drawing up a chart of the novel’s action for the movie people and making notes for a possible dramatic adaptation to be performed on Broadway—the producer David Merrick had suggested this idea. “I don’t know yet whether I’ll do the play or turn it over to someone else, but I will probably do the film script,” he told the New York Times.
He also enjoyed himself. “It was wonderful for Joe,” said Bob Gottlieb. “I’ve never known a writer who took a more innocent and marvelous, happy, wholesome joy in his success. He really appreciated it. It had been a long time coming. And he loved it. He loved being the author of Catch-22.”
He was invited to parties where he met actors and writers, critics and professors. He was so thrilled to be included in these gatherings, he was slow to realize many people had come to meet him. Some of Gottlieb’s colleagues felt embarrassed by Joe’s frank delight in his good fortune, and they complained that his attitude was unseemly (especially around other writers, comfortably miserable in their anonymous cocoons). “They had an idea that I was supposed to look like Thomas Wolfe, with this aura of suicidal melancholy,” Joe quipped. Gottlieb brushed away his colleagues’ complaints. Let the man celebrate his success. He knew how to handle it.
“Both [success and failure] are difficult to endure,” Joe reflected years later. “Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.… Luckily, I was thirty-eight and pretty well set in my ways when Catch-22 came out. I had a good job and a nice apartment. If I’d been, say, twenty-seven and living in a cold-water flat, my marriage would have broken up, I would have bought an estate in East Hampton I couldn’t afford and, to pay for it, I would have started a second novel too soon.”
* * *
“CATCH-22 is taking off!” Joe told Alice Denham. He had stopped by her apartment one afternoon.
“I’ll drink to that,” she said. She poured him a scotch and they toasted.
“Guess what?” Joe said. “I quit work. I’m writing a film script. For good money. I’m hot, hot!”
“Joe, that’s fabulous.” Denham’s writing was going nowhere. She had begun to think the literary world was a “boy’s club.”
“Man, is Shirley relieved,�
�� Joe said. “Greenbacks, at last. I’m meeting writers I’ve always wanted to know. Like Algren.”
“Wow, introduce me, bigshot.”
For all his bluster, “Joe Heller was always a good guy,” Denham wrote. “He didn’t have an ounce of pomposity. He was macho, of course, but he was a buddy of sorts, bursting with high spirits and fun.” Everybody liked him—“he was that sort of guy.”
That day, he shocked her by admitting he’d been “celebrating life”—he’d “[s]pent too much time with a lady friend this afternoon.” “So Joe played around, like so many others,” Denham wrote. “Somehow I[’d] thought he had a rockbound marriage.”
And he did, according to the double standards he’d learned in the military and corporate offices.
She remembered he had once consoled her after she’d had an affair with David Markson, which ended badly. Joe asked her if she wanted children, if she really wanted to be faithful. She had to be honest with herself, he said. “You don’t want to be married [now], Alice,” he told her. “You want romance. That’s different.… You’re an adventuress. Don’t knock it.”
On that occasion, she wrote, he counseled her that “[w]hen people want to get married, only then do they look around for a permanent mate. It starts with wanting marriage.”
“Is that what you did?” Denham asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “You look at people differently. I’d been through the war. I wanted to settle down.”
* * *
“A MATTER has been troubling me that I feel I should bring to your attention.” So began a letter received by Simon & Schuster in mid-May 1962. “It has to do with the appearance of my name, Robert Oliver Shipman, in the novel Catch-22.”
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