Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  On the other hand, Walter Kerr objected to Joe’s premise. “The evening posits war as a glamorous game in which no one really expects to be killed. It supposes that we regard war in this way; in effect, it accuses us of [doing so]. But who now thinks of war in this way?… The accusation … is off-target.” Heller, he said, “wants not to dramatize war in any way, shape or form, but to talk about it, shout about it, make proclamations about it—now.”

  Tom F. Driver, writing in The Saturday Review two months before the play’s New York opening, said the “imagination that created [Catch-22] is … totally verbal.… The humor of Catch-22 depended on taking words with absolute seriousness, no bones about it, the same way you’d take the b.m. on the baby’s diapers. I mean, there it is.” Heller, he said, had failed to find a theatrical equivalent of this experience. “What we’re after in the theater is energy. Not theory, and not fashion.”

  Sensitive to criticisms, Joe delayed the Broadway premiere by several months as he fine-tuned the play. “I have unlimited confidence in the stupidity of our government … I know that Congress and the President wouldn’t let me down and do something intelligent like ending the war while I was revising,” he said.

  * * *

  THE YALE PRODUCTION closed on December 23. Just over a month later, on January 31, 1968, in what came to be known as the Tet Offensive, 67,000 Vietcong troops attacked more than one hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam. U.S. military leaders were astounded by the enemy’s organization and daring. The American public’s faith in Lyndon Johnson, already badly frayed, unraveled almost completely. Thus began an extraordinarily turbulent year. As Joe tinkered with his play, as he made notes for Something Happened, public concerns swamped him; journalists would not stop pestering him for statements. Reflecting the anxiety of the moment, his pronouncements became increasingly extreme. “The American government is making war on the American people—not on Ho [Chi Minh],” he said. He applauded boys who burned their draft cards: “This could end the war. They can’t put everybody in jail.” He told the New York Times, “If it came to violence, I would not side with the Establishment, though my friendliest banker is there.… Reconciliation is not going to come from the Pope or Billy Graham or J. Edgar Hoover.… If it weren’t for my basic optimism, I’d be packing up to leave the country. But I don’t like packing.”

  He wasn’t all talk. A few months earlier, having left New Haven to return to New York for the weekend, he had met Eugene McCarthy in Sardi’s East. They’d had adjoining tables for dinner one night. A former Benedictine novice steeped in Thomistic theology, now a rather bored and iconoclastic U.S. senator, McCarthy impressed Joe with his charisma, honesty, and opposition to the war. He had decided to challenge LBJ for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination (he announced his intentions on November 30, 1967). He asked Joe if he’d run in the New York state primary as a McCarthy delegate. Joe agreed.

  “McCarthy [is] an easy man to defend,” he told a reporter. “Maybe because we don’t know as much about him as we do about Nixon and Humphrey.” Joe felt the “issues were so stark that in good conscience I had to get involved.” Stepping into the political arena, however, reminded him of a secret he had kept from most of his friends: In 1964, an acquaintance of his in the Democratic party asked Joe to draft a speech for LBJ in his campaign against Barry Goldwater, and “to [his] everlasting shame,” Joe had done it. “It was good,” he recalled, “because I was a good advertising copywriter. It was good enough considering the man it was written for.”

  From the late autumn of 1967 to the spring of 1968, Joe stumped for McCarthy. “Every place I went”—college campuses, mostly—“I ask[ed] if I would embarrass anybody if I wore a McCarthy button,” he said.

  Erica, now fifteen, was also “stung by the Gene McCarthy fever.” She said later, “He provided for me (and for many others like me, I suppose) the perfect transition from adolescence to pre-adulthood.… We believed in him enough to cut school and go lick envelopes at his midtown headquarters, to wake up at four a.m. on a frosty February morning and pile all bleary-eyed onto buses to go to New Hampshire to canvas for him.” She joined antiwar marches. “Whole classes at my high school would make the midnight run to Washington to protest the annihilation in Vietnam. And we’d return that night, exhausted, filthy, stinking of tear gas and feeling ever so virtuous,” she said.

  She didn’t talk to her father about politics, though she hoped he would notice her engagement. “I guess he was proud, but who knows?” she says. “One time in D.C., there was some demonstration at the Justice Department and I looked around and saw him in a tree with Speed Vogel! I had no idea he’d be going.”

  Joe did notice her activism, but he was concerned why organizers did not ask him to make more rally appearances. “I’m not considered a first-stringer,” he said. “They generally go for Norman Mailer first.”

  He noticed the gap in news coverage between mainstream and underground presses. Writing about protests, the New York Times tended to concentrate on beards, beads, and sandals—unlike, say, the National Guardian, which analyzed the politics and morality behind mass actions. There were many different ways to express ideology and bias.

  On March 31, 1968, LBJ announced he would not seek another term as president. This followed Robert Kennedy’s toss of his boater into the ring. McCarthy was turning out to be a lazy campaigner. Frequently, his speeches were uninspired. “All the candidates can use humor and they can all use better argumentation,” Joe noted. “Even Senator McCarthy, the most intelligent of them all [could be doing] better.” He sounded dispirited.

  In early April, Joe met Kurt Vonnegut at a literary festival on the Notre Dame campus. Immediately, they bonded. They had in common World War II (famously, Vonnegut had survived the Dresden firebombing), corporate experience, humor. At the festival one night, they were scheduled to give back-to-back speeches. Vonnegut delivered his talk—“probably the best speech [about literature] I’ve ever heard,” Joe recalled, “so casual and so funny.” As Joe rose to approach the lectern, “some sort of academic, a professor, came up over the footlights,” Vonnegut recalled. The man “shouldered Joe aside politely and said, ‘I just want to announce that Martin Luther King has been shot.’ And then this guy went back over the footlights and took his seat.”

  Joe stood immobile onstage, saying, “Oh, my god. Oh, my god. I wish I were with Shirley now. She’s crying her eyes out.”

  On April 23, individuals under the direction of Students for a Democratic Society occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, headquarters of the undergraduate college, to protest the university’s contracts with the U.S. Defense Department. The group paralyzed the campus—a far cry from panty raids.

  Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed in the hotel where Joe and Shirley had spent their honeymoon.

  By the time Hubert Humphrey secured the Democratic party’s nomination at the disastrous convention in Chicago, held in late August, Joe was immersed again in his play. It was scheduled to open on Broadway in October. About his involvement in the McCarthy campaign, he tried to sound casual. “He lost because of the nature of American politics,” he said wearily. Then he joked, “I gave very good speeches. I don’t think I was personally responsible.”

  On September 9, as Joe watched the first Broadway run-through of We Bombed in New Haven, a New York Times reporter approached him in the theater and asked what he thought of Eugene McCarthy now. Joe sighed. “[Politics is] not my thing,” he said defensively. “I don’t care enough about politicians to think it matters much who wins.”

  Sitting at home, Erica felt “utter political disillusionment.” She said she realized her generation was “incapable of internalizing [its] irrelevancy to … ’Nam.… President Johnson finally did convince us, though. And of course President Nixon [would] reaffirm … it.”

  The nation’s self-image had taken a pummeling. Arthur Schlesinger wrote in the Washington Post, “With the murder of Robert Kennedy, following
on the murder of John Kennedy and the murder of Martin Luther King, we have killed the three great embodiments of our national idealism in this generation. Each murder has brought us one stage further on the downward spiral of moral degradation and social disintegration.” One needn’t have agreed with his politics or vision to share a massive gloom and worried apprehension.

  Almost desperately, Joe turned his attention elsewhere. He took pleasure where he could. The Gourmet Club kept his spirits high—though he continued to worry about his weight. He tried not to sweat the play.

  On Mott Street one evening, just days before opening night, the group gathered outside a new restaurant Ngoot had found. “Is it as good as our old one?” Joe asked.

  “New one is as good as old one. I guarantee,” Ngoot said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because new one steal chef from old one.”

  Carl Reiner was in town. He had joined the group for the evening. Every time Reiner ate with the club, he spotted rats in the kitchens. “Traditionally, honored guests, who aren’t accustomed to seeing a rat scurry across a kitchen floor, don’t … enjoy the evening as much as those of us who are accustomed to the intrusion,” Joe told him. He said ritzy restaurants hid vermin by keeping their kitchen doors closed. “Which is dishonest! This is an honest restaurant with an open-door policy.”

  Scraps of conversation spun around the table like dishes on a lazy Susan. A typical sampling:

  GEORGE MANDEL: Everything here is salty. We’re eating a lot of salt, like Pygmies.

  MEL BROOKS: Yes, but you know, Ngoot never ate a straight dish in his life. He sticks octopus eyes into a hamburger to make it taste good.

  JOE: [Mel,] if you were not a Jew, who would you be?

  BROOKS: I think I would go all the way, I think I would be, you know …

  JOE: No, you are you, it’s not a choice. You are you. But when your ancestors came over on the Slovotnik, if instead of coming to New York, they went west and you wound up in Wisconsin, what would you be like? I know the answer already. You would be Richard Brooks.

  BROOKS: I’d be Richard Brooks. Of all the things we ordered, George, the truth, from the bottom of your heart, what is the best thing?

  MANDEL: The salt.

  BROOKS: Apart from the salt.

  MANDEL: Next to the salt is the lobster. I asked Ngoot how to eat it, and he said, “Watch Heller. He takes the best parts and leaves the worst for you.”

  After the meal that night, Joe asked Joe Stein, who was driving, if they could swing by his theater. “Hey, Joe, it’s one a.m.!” Brooks said. “Let’s go home!”

  Joe persisted. As Carl Reiner recalled it, Joe directed Stein to stop the car about thirty feet from the Ambassador, which was on the other side of the street.

  “Now what?” Stein asked.

  “Now, I sit and look at the marquee,” Joe said, rolling down his window.

  WE BOMBED IN NEW HAVEN, A NEW PLAY BY JOSEPH HELLER.

  “Just wanted to see my name up there,” Joe said quietly. “I never thought I’d be on a Broadway theater marquee, and there I am! It’s very exciting! Don’t know how long the play will run or if I’ll ever write another one so, if you guys don’t mind—a couple more minutes?”

  A rare reverential silence touched this usually boisterous group, and they all sat staring at the lights. After a while, Heller said, “Okay, Joe, drive.”

  * * *

  IN THE DAYS AHEAD, Joe kept dropping by Forty-ninth and Broadway to look at his sign, but now it only worried him. A cartoon bomb adorned the marquee next to the title. Sometimes, the bomb looked thin and silly; on other days, it appeared too fat. (Joe was too fat, not feeling well, not himself.) All wrong. Everything was off.

  Jason Robards had replaced Stacy Keach as Starkey, and Joe wasn’t sure he had the proper intensity. The rehearsals had not been as exciting or fun as they’d been in New Haven (in retrospect, Joe could admit he’d had a ball at Yale). “I imagine every amateur production has been better than the New York production, where there [is] a great deal of self-consciousness on the part of the professionals,” he said. The Theatre Development Fund had purchased sixty thousand dollars’ worth of tickets to guarantee a six-week run, but would that ensure success?

  At least Joe was pleased with Harold Leventhal, the play’s New York producer. A legend, a staunch lefty, Leventhal had worked with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan (having presented the latter at his first Town Hall concert, on April 12, 1963). More recently, he had produced a version of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, featuring Yiddish star Ida Kaminska.

  On October 17, the all-important New York Times review, written by Clive Barnes (who had also seen the Yale production), sounded a puzzled, ambivalent note about the play. “I am not at all certain what I felt, and even less certain what I think, about Joseph Heller’s … ‘We Bombed in New Haven,’” Barnes wrote. “If I was forced to a judgment I would call it a bad play any good playwright should be proud to have written, and any good audience fascinated to see.”

  Joe bit his nails.

  “[A]lthough we know that all the world’s a stage and all that jazz, the device is neither especially original nor meaningful,” Barnes went on. “[T]he [antiwar] message … becomes almost insupportable in its obviousness.”

  But Barnes loved the writing and the atmosphere. He applauded the play’s ambition: “Mr. Heller is a writer to the tip of his keyboard. His dialogue flows out, natural, real, amusing, absorbing. Here [he] is … flying high.” Additionally, Barnes said, he “has caught the anarchic mood of the present, the callousness, brutality, cynical jokiness, dissent and protest.” Heller “demonstrates a profound moral concern for what is happening in our own theater of the world,” Barnes wrote.

  In sum, “Any way you look at it, this is a pretty remarkable theatrical debut for Mr. Heller,” Barnes affirmed. “I hope he stays around our theater for a long, long time.”

  But Joe was telling friends already he never again wanted anything to do with the theater. The experience had wrung him out. Barnes’s left-handed compliments embittered him.

  Three weeks after opening night, Richard Nixon’s landslide election seemed to confirm for Joe the hopelessness with which he’d ended his play. Catch-22 reaches its climax with Yossarian asserting his freedom—vainly, perhaps, but trying. Capitulation concludes We Bombed in New Haven: a father sacrificing his son to the madness of wretched leaders.

  The play had brought the spirit of Yiddish theater to the late twentieth century. Filtered through the Catskills, early television, and jazz club stand-up, it cross-pollinated with street theater, performance art, and Happenings such as the Bed-Ins for Peace staged by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Amsterdam and Montreal. Now Joe wondered what all this had accomplished. Somewhat wistfully, he invited Eugene McCarthy to the New York opening. In the long run (the play closed after eleven weeks on Broadway), Joe pocketed the roughly $70,000 he would earn from various productions of the play, and the nearly $100,000 he had been paid by Knopf and Dell for rights to publish the script. He would not look back.

  Except: We Bombed in New Haven solidified his literary vision. The play made it possible for this painfully slow writer to develop an important body of work. Catch-22 stood on its own, and would remain his best-regarded work, but the play, in extending that novel’s concerns about bureaucracy, linking them with broader views of social relationships—within families, corporate structures, and religious traditions—provided him with material for the rest of his career. Something Happened’s Bob Slocum would be Captain Starkey in civilian clothes, sacrificing his son despite his mortal terror of losing him (at the end of the play, Starkey leaves the stage with a portfolio and a copy of the New York Times, a corporate man in the making). The hatred of war (expressed far more strongly in the play than in Catch-22) looks ahead to the scathing portraits of government flunkies animating Joe’s third novel, Good as Gold. In assuring his son, “I will weep for you. I promise you that,”
Starkey echoes the biblical King David, a subject Joe would turn to in his fourth novel. “When King David was told his son had been killed … in a rebellion against him, he cried: ‘O my son Absalom!… Would God I had died for thee!’” Starkey tells his boy. “I will weep for you. I will cry: ‘My son … my son! Would God I had died for thee!’”

  “But will you mean it?” his son asks.

  Starkey replies “slowly, truthfully”: “I won’t know. I won’t ever really know.”

  In what could only be heard, in 1968, as a rejection of U.S. culture and leadership, Starkey’s son, bundled off to war, says, “Bastard.”

  * * *

  THE 1960S, as a distinct cultural period in America, as opposed to a set of dates on a calendar, is hard to bracket. Did the era’s immense social and political energies culminate in the Eagle’s landing in the Sea of Tranquillity in 1969? Abate (sanely or sadly, depending on one’s view) in the rout of liberals in the elections of 1968? In the Kent State killings in 1970, or the announcement of the Beatles’ breakup later that year? Or did they crumble, once and for all, in the rubble of the Nixon administration, following a minor break-in at the Watergate Hotel in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972? Historians, critics, and writers have suggested each of these moments, and more, as the period’s capstone.

  For Joe Heller, the closing of his play, spurring a wholehearted recommitment to fiction writing, was a watershed. Sixties fashions would pass; what remained for Joe were a love of literature and the discipline of writing. In a telling anecdote, journalist Tom Nolan reported that in 1969, in a corner booth of a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard in L.A., “maybe a booth at which Dash Hammett once ate with Lilly Hellman—[I] had dinner with … Joseph Heller. Heller spoke of a recent meeting in San Francisco with the Jefferson Airplane, who were fans of his, and who tried to induce him to take LSD. ‘But it’ll make you want to write,’ the Airplane crew told the author. ‘I already want to write,’ Heller said.”