Just One Catch

by Tracy Daugherty

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT on the phone, Joe asked Erica, “Well, what did she say?” He asked it so often, so urgently, she had no chance to answer.

  * * *

  SHIRLEY HELD HELLER died on June 18, 1995. Shortly afterward, family and friends arranged a memorial service in the Apthorp apartment. Joe was reluctant to attend, but Valerie insisted he be with his children. According to Erica, “[H]e showed up the night before with his sister Sylvia—who had come up from Florida—and then they came the next day for the service. He was very sad and seemed very fragile to me.… [T]he rabbi … came up to my father after the service. I think they had met in East Hampton at some point, and he asked how Dad was and how his wife was. ‘Shirley was my wife,’ he said.”

  * * *

  JOE’S BACK pains worsened. “Into each soup a little rain must fall.… I have a herniated disc … and something called spinal stenosis … crippling, painful,” he wrote Chris Buckley. “For something like four weeks now I have been reminding myself of those two characters in that … play by Beckett whose names I won’t look up, but one is unable to sit, and the other is unable to stand. I bob up and down as I type these amusing words. The neurosurgeon I saw in New York this week was optimistic as hell.… The pain treatment involves a series of injections called epidural cortisone blocks, and I’ve just had the first of these.”

  Buckley responded, “Valerie would be the best of company at the best of times, but at times like this I bet she really comes into her glory. Do everything she tells you to do. Without complaint.”

  In mid-October, doctors scheduled Joe for surgery. His recovery was painful and slow. “[D]isabled, weak, despondent, uncomfortable,” he reported to Buckley. “[M]y hands shake—from codeine,” but without the pills he would “dissolve in a puddle of tears.” He looked forward to the day he could celebrate normalcy with an extra-dry martini.

  Finally, in early November, he felt better. “Valerie is at least as good a nurse this time a[s] she was last time. She improves with practice,” he said. “The left side of my ass is starting to hurt again.… [O]ne of the very good things to emerge is the [doctor’s] order that I am not to exercise for the next two months.… This, of course, leaves me free to start a new novel.”

  When he was back on his feet, he admitted the ordeal had been more serious and frightening than he had wished to acknowledge.

  He still wouldn’t admit how much he missed Shirley.

  Several months later, in mid-September 1996, he and Valerie went to Washington, D.C., so Joe could be feted as the author of a Great Book at the Library of Congress. They dined with Chris Buckley and Christopher Hitchens at Buckley’s house. (Later, Joe wrote Buckley, “Valerie loves, loves your house.… [T]he martinis were stimulating, and the … salmon was as good as any we’ve eaten.”) At the Ritz-Carlton bar, Joe drank with Walter Cronkite. Dressed more casually than the rest of the patrons, in a blue button-down shirt, khaki pants, a sport coat, glasses suspended across his chest on a blue cord wrapped around his neck, he enjoyed surveying the room, trying to spot political hacks and staffers. He talked loudly, so no one could miss it, about the disgrace of government kickbacks. He recited a passage from Catch-22 about farmers getting rich off the federal dole for failing to grow alfalfa. He drew stares and smiled into his drink.

  At the Great Books ceremony at the Library of Congress, Ruth Bader Ginsburg read a passage from Moby-Dick. Joe went to the podium and read a section of Catch-22. In front of lobbyists, lawyers, and legislative assistants, he recited, “Some men are born mediocre, and some achieve mediocrity, and some have mediocrity thrust upon them.”

  Afterward, tired, a bit unsteady on his feet, he said, “It feels wonderfully strange to be both alive and immortal. I’m somewhat in awe of myself.”

  20. When They Speak of the War

  IN THE 1990S, Joe was just as likely to attend dinners or cocktail affairs in England, Sweden, Denmark, or Italy as he was to appear at lawn parties on Long Island. In general, his critical reputation declined. Catch-22 grew in stature. It no longer belonged to a particular moment or to Joe or to a publisher’s marketing department, but to American literature. By and large, even its detractors no longer questioned this. Love the novel or hate it, it was here to stay and deserved to be. Discussions of war as depicted in art could not be conducted without Yossarian. He might die someday, his creator said, but it wouldn’t be by Joe’s hand.

  As Joe got older, he was seen less as a celebrity author than as a grand man of letters. The slur in his voice had worsened as age further weakened his muscles, but he was a much sought-after speaker in the United States and abroad.

  At the annual Cheltenham Festival for the Book in London, he debated feminist criticism with Ariel Dorfman, Dava Sobel, Germaine Greer, W. G. Sebald, and Seamus Heaney; at the Key West Literary Seminars in Florida, he discussed the “romance” of war novels with Philip Caputo and Robert Stone—typically, a novel’s concentration on individual names and characters misrepresents the chaos and anonymity of combat, he said; at a symposium in honor of James Jones on the Southampton Campus of Long Island University, he praised Jones as America’s greatest war novelist.

  He was made a fellow at Oxford, and returned to St. Catherine’s College, where he and Shirley had spent his Fulbright year so long ago. Flying didn’t bother him now the way it had just after the war, but he irritated Valerie by insisting they arrive at airports hours in advance, as if extreme control of the itinerary could avert any possible disaster.

  Inspired by the nostalgia and travel pieces he had written for Forbes FYI, he penned an autobiography entitled Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. By letter, he collected family anecdotes from his sister in Florida. He asked Bob Gottlieb to edit the manuscript. He had written it with little hesitation or revision, using a ballpoint pen and yellow notepads. The only passages that made his hand shake were those about Shirley, which often trailed off altogether. Uncharacteristically, what revisions he did make heightened sentimentality, as, for example, when writing of adolescence, he replaced the sentence “We worked at what we could because we never doubted we had to” with “We did not want what we could not hope to have, and we were not … bitter.”

  While waiting to proof the galleys in the summer of 1997, he booked a flight to the Pritikin Institute in California “to lose about ten of the pounds I’ve been putting on,” he wrote Chris Buckley. “Valerie refuses to believe I will be going there as though to a retreat. She suspects, I suspect, I will be going there to tryst, and thus far she insists on going to California too and seeing me for dinner every night.”

  Alfred A. Knopf published Now and Then in February 1998. Most reviewers found it thin. It obfuscated more than it revealed about the author’s life, and demonstrated a remarkable lack of self-awareness, they said. “I have a feeling … there’s a part of me I’ve never been in touch with,” Joe admitted freely. “I know underneath there’s anxiety, a tendency toward despondency, a feeling of loneliness. I don’t know if that’s me or whether every human has it.” Reviews demanding soul-baring confessions did not bother Joe. In writing of intensely personal matters, he felt he had protected the people he loved. Rather than evading incidents, he believed he had shown dignity and restraint.

  Letters from Coney Island acquaintances and people he had not known there, thanking him for jogging their childhood memories, gratified him. The book’s appearance occasioned a publicity tour through Europe and readings up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States. Joe loved the attention but wore down quickly. “Knopf finds it difficult to believe that I truly would prefer not to sit in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in New York for an hour and sign books,” he wrote Buckley. At a reading and book signing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in early August 1998, his hand shook and his voice, soupy and soft, kept breaking. “I’ve become a dyspeptic recluse,” he told one young fan waiting in line with a book. He stammered on the word dyspeptic. He sold as many copies of Catch-22 as he did of Now an
d Then, and noted, ruefully, that an illustration of a Ferris wheel on the title page of his autobiography obscured his signature.

  Back in East Hampton, he kept to himself, reading (Don DeLillo, Upton Sinclair, John Barth), listening to music (Mahler, Count Basie). He resisted Valerie’s attempts to get him to go to movies (despite himself, he enjoyed Thelma and Louise one night), to go skiing in upstate Vermont, or to take another restaurant tour of Paris. He walked a little on the grounds around the house and napped each afternoon. He skittered in and out of his study. He joked with friends that he was semiretired, but he was desperate for a new idea for a novel. He toyed with the notion of another updated Bible story, or a sex book written from the point of view of a woman. He embarrassed Valerie, pestering her with questions about her sexual history and her attitudes toward the men she had been with.

  She struggled with his curmudgeonly outlook on politics, children, television (there’s no news on the News—why do you watch it all the time? he asked her). In turn, Joe showed little patience for her interest in movies, pets, Britain’s royal family, and pop-culture trends. There were those who worried he’d begun to feel trapped with a woman who didn’t share his passions. He’d quip that divorce was no longer cost-effective at his age, so he supposed he would just stay put.

  One night, at a dinner party with another couple, he banged a spoon on his glass and asked everyone to stop and listen to his wife pontificate on a subject she knew nothing about.

  Friends thought Valerie seemed jealous of Speed and his wife, Lou Ann Walker, once they had a baby together. From the first, tensions had simmered between Valerie and Speed, but “the fact of Speed [in my father’s life] was non-negotiable,” Erica says.

  At the end of an evening, after dinner with friends, Joe might take a spoonful of three-flavored ice cream topped with chocolate sauce and mutter, “Life is pretty good, even though it is completely shitty.”

  “I’m gripped by the somber realization that I have nothing to do I … enjoy doing,” he said. “Not much merry going on. Sleep a lot. Have the blues.”

  “I don’t think he knows himself,” Erica said. “At any given point during a day,” she thought, he probably veered from satisfaction to deep despair.

  Constantly, he worried that in the middle of the night he was going to have a stroke.

  * * *

  HIS BAD MOOD did not stay locked away at home. “I feel like the malevolent witch at the party, because the title and topic I’ve chosen for my speech do not seem appropriate for an occasion on which so many people are in good spirits,” he told an audience at the University of South Carolina on November 12, 1997. Readers had gathered to celebrate the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli had expanded the school’s Fitzgerald archive, working with Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie. Several writers, among them Frederick Busch, Richard Bausch, and Budd Schulberg were on hand to offer tributes to the author of The Great Gatsby.

  Joe had decided to speak on “The Literature of Despair.”

  “I’d known about Fitzgerald, of course, about his drinking, his decline in reputation,” Joe said. “[But] the more I thought, the more impressed I was with the fact that so many writers do have at least some serious emotional trouble in their lives.” He rattled off a list of novelists whose lives “took sad turns before they were over,” among them Charles Dickens, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, and John Cheever. “Of course, the question to be answered is why? What is there about the literary occupation that causes, or is the concomitant of, so much wretchedness among so many people who are successful? And the answer I give you tonight is: I don’t know,” Joe said:

  What are some of the factors that might cause or contribute to these predilections toward unhappiness? Well, in a general—a most general—way, I can try to guess:

  1. There could be something in the nature of the work, the uncertainty of success, the greater uncertainty of maintaining a peak of success and income, over a working lifetime. After all, a writer can be discovered only once, and after that, the scrutiny of critics grows more exacting.

  2. Or there could be something in the nature of the individual and the early family setting that influenced the person toward fantasizing, fictionalizing—a tendency toward daydreaming extravagant scenarios of accomplishment. These imply a wish to excel and, with those who turn to writing fiction, plays, or poems, an ambition to excel as a writer.

  3. Most likely, there is an indefinable mix of both, and maybe half a dozen other factors I haven’t mentioned.

  Then add to these the Freudian discovery that the conflicts, feelings of loneliness, and disappointments we possessed that at the beginning led us toward fictionalizing are not entirely satisfied by the success but instead remain. There has been no miraculous transformation, and in many ways the sensitive parts of us remain exactly the same.

  Let me throw in one more element, the factor that feelings of failure are almost certain to enter into the life of the published author, even with works that appear to be triumphs.… [I]nstead of rejoicing, [the writer is likely to be] enraged by those literary critics who [find the work] deficient in quality.

  Warmly welcomed by the audience, Joe finished by insisting that “after … tonight, I think I’m going to be in a very good mood for a good long time,” but he continued to brood on the issues he had raised. The talk was the closest he’d come to examining the “parts of himself” he’d refused to explore. Over the next couple of years, he refined his thoughts; a variation of them would appear in the novel he started and worked on until his death. The book would be called Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.

  * * *

  “[T]HE GAME IS OVER,” wrote the critic D. T. Max in Salon magazine in 1997, referring to Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth, whom he identified as the “grizzled Jewish peers” of Joseph Heller. “They’re all past retirement age, they’ve been thoroughly trashed by feminists and the (many) women in their lives, [and] they seem sadly out of touch with the multicultural literary fashions of the day.” The article was entitled “The Twilight of the Old Goats.”

  A few months later, a bibliophile named Lewis Pollock wrote a letter to the London Times, asking if readers could account for the “amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personnel injuries and incidents” in Catch-22 and a 1950 novel by Louis Falstein called The Sky Is a Lonely Place (in the United States, it was published as Face of a Hero). The Washington Post ran a front-page story investigating the possibility of plagiarism.

  Joe did not know Falstein’s book. Falstein died in 1995; he could not have missed Catch-22, but he never mentioned Joe’s book to any member of his family. The rituals and monotonies of war could easily account for the novels’ similarities. Joe pointed out “how much war fiction depends on the same elementary variations on themes and characters.” Bob Gottlieb defended him vigorously. “I’ve never seen, heard, or felt Joe Heller doing anything remotely less than honest during our forty-year relationship,” he said. “It is inconceivable that he used any other writer’s work.”

  Mel Gussow wrote a persuasive account of the novels in the New York Times, exonerating Joe. The “books are widely disparate in approach, ambition, style and content,” he concluded. Still, the flap, coming so soon after assertions by critics that Closing Time had taken the shine off Catch-22, was another blow.

  “What a nothing story!” Chris Buckley wrote Joe. “Honestly: do not lose one minute’s sleep … on this.” Joe responded, “Chris: Stop grieving … [though] absurdly, I find myself in a rage against a man I never knew who died a few years [ago] and was the author of a novel I never heard of!”

  * * *

  IF ANYTHING, the controversy—which blew over quickly—upped the sales of Catch-22. More than ever, the book seemed impervious to critical assaults, literary fashion, and time.

  Meanwhile, multiculturalism had
become a vital publishing trend. “Ethnic” books flooded the market, promoting diversity while, sadly, seeming much the same. Still, genuine talents emerged. Finally, U.S. fiction began to reflect the mix of blood, belief, and outlook that had blessed the nation—but not many of its books—from the first. Voices readers had not been privileged to listen to before, from ethnic enclaves, from deep within the nation’s midst, told of change and the harvests we were likely to reap from it. The names suggested the varied roads these young writers had taken: Julia Alvarez, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Junot Díaz.

  Many times, Joe had worked in, and through, changing literary climates. Could he do it once more? He resisted Buckley’s requests for new magazine articles. “I’d rather not think about another piece for FYI or anywhere else,” he said. “I feel it’s time now to begin thinking about another book, and since in my lifetime I’ve never been able to come up with more than one idea at a time, I’d like the idea I do come up with to be for that one.”

  Shortly afterward, he told Buckley he feared “my next and final novel will be about a spent novelist who spends … his [last] years writing travel articles read by few people he knows for a younger novelist like you, in a kind of odd Faustian bargain in which Mephistopholes himself is also prey to the capitalist cool he serves.”

  Valerie said she would write an article for FYI. “Here’s how my piece about taking [Joe to Europe] will begin. ‘He didn’t want to go. I did. I won.’”

  * * *

  JOURNALISTS, many discovering Catch-22 for the first time, came regularly to East Hampton. Joe never ceased to enjoy the attention, but the interviews became ordeals. He didn’t handle them as smoothly as he had in the past. For one thing, he was physically uncomfortable sitting in one place for extended periods. He squinted, hunched his shoulders, shifted his haunches. He’d flutter his fingers under a now-flabby chin. He pursed his lips, cleared his throat, bit his nails. Often, he felt frustrated by his slow speech, his inability to articulate crisply what he wanted to say. He had always spoken off the cuff; his apparent nonchalance used to be more calculating than it was now. He was no longer so quick on his feet. Cavalierly, he told interviewers to clean up his grammar when quoting him. They rarely did.