“there was lots of underground romantic stuff”: ibid., p. 231.
“affairs”: Lynn Barber, “Bloody Heller,” The Observer, March 1, 1998; posted at guardian.co.uk/books1998/mar/01/fiction.josephheller.
“womanizer”: ibid.
“I would … say that my imagination”: Adam J. Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 174.
“A friend from Time”: Heller, Now and Then, p. 113.
“most intensely and destructively competitive”: Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., p. 187.
“feel”: This and subsequent Gilbert Lea quotes are taken from ibid., p. 180.
“The Togetherness theme”: ibid., p. 179.
“great bulk of advertising”: ibid., p. 315.
“Advertising requires extreme simplification”: ibid., p. 316.
10. 18
“The novel, you know”: Susan Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes, Maybe Yes, But Not the Whole Book”: The New Journal 26 (1967): 7.
“the parties”: Joseph Heller and George Mandel, Dramatist’s Guild Collaboration Contract, October 17, 1952, Joseph Heller Archive, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
“across the street from a railroad yard”: This and subsequent quotes from Joseph Heller and George Mandel, “The Bird in the Flevverbloom Suit,” are taken from the draft of the play, Joseph Heller Archive.
“There was a terrible sameness”; “conversations with two friends”: W. J. Weatherby, “The Joy Catcher,” The Guardian, November 20, 1962.
The Czech writer Arnold Lustig: Arnold Lustig, with Frantisek Cinger, 3 X 18: Portraits and Insights (Prague: Nakladatelstvi Andrej Stastny, 2003), p. 271.
“I was lying in bed”: Adam J. Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), pp. 106–107.
“a flier facing the end of his missions”: letter from Whit Burnett to Joseph Heller, August 22, 1946, Archives of Story magazine and Story Press, 1981–1989, Princeton University Manuscripts Division, Princeton University Library.
“arrived at work”: Joseph Heller, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 167.
“The agents were not impressed”: Joseph Heller, “Preface to Catch-22,” in Catch-22 (1961; reprint with a preface by Heller, London: Vintage, 1994), unpaginated.
“While he was alive”; “She saw something”: Karen Hudes, “Epic Agent: The Great Candida Donadio,” Tin House 6, no. 4 (2005): 153.
“Candida, this is completely wonderful”: Jonathan R. Eller, “Catching a Market: The Publishing History of Catch-22,” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 17 (1992): 478.
“socialized most agreeably”: Heller, Now and Then, p. 249.
“Joe would call him”: This and all other comments by Dolores Karl are from a conversation with the author, April 24, 2009.
“I grew up with the Heller kids”: Deborah Karl in conversation with the author, April 18, 2009.
“She had more synonyms for excrement”; [S]he used to say all the time”: Hudes, “Epic Agent,” p. 152.
“People tell a lot of contradictory stories”: ibid., p. 155.
“polish silver”; Carmelite nun: Daniel Simon, “Literature’s Candida,” posted at www.thnation.com/doc/20010528/simon.
“She really was the agent of her generation”: Lawrence Van Gelder, “Candida Donadio, 71, Agent Who Handled ‘Catch-22,’ Dies,” New York Times, January 25, 2001; posted at www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/arts/candida-donadio-71-agent-who-handled-Catch-22.
“Since a secretary was very important”: ibid.
“a Bohemian Quakeress”: letter from Victor Weybright to Mrs. Carleton Palmer, May 25, 1953, New World Writing Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
“[Publishing] a literary and academic journal”: letter from Victor Weybright to Rudolf M. Littauer, New World Writing Collection.
“provide a friendly medium”; “Avant Garde Means You!”: Thomas L. Bonn, “Among the Eminent, the Aspiring, and the Young: A Short History of New World Writing,” Publishing Research Quarterly (1993): 6, 17.
“cultural high-water mark”: Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), pp. 191–92.
“difference in quality”: Bonn, “Among the Eminent, the Aspiring, and the Young,” p. 9.
“[T]he story begins to end”: Victor Weybright, “To the Reader,” New World Writing 15 (1959): unpaginated.
“I should like to tell you”: Davis, Two-Bit Culture, p. 200.
“him a great disservice”: Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 209.
“sick of well-meaning editors”: ibid.
“Coney Island of the soul”: Bill Morgan, The Lost Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), p. 89.
“the booze ran freely”: Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), p. 283.
“It is certainly the funniest thing”: letter from Victor Weybright to Arabel Porter, June 28, 1954, New World Writing Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
“Among all the recommended pieces”: comments by Arabel Porter to Walter Freeman, June 14, 1954, New World Writing Collection.
“with a pain in his liver”: This and subsequent quotes from “Catch-18” are taken from Joseph Heller, “Catch-18,” New World Writing, no. 7 (1955): 204–14.
“I’m not that interested in the subject of war”: Israel Shenker, “Did Heller Bomb on Broadway?” New York Times, December 29, 1968.
“seek[ing] a way of telling a story”; “an act of the imagination”: Richard B. Sale, “An Interview in New York with Joseph Heller,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972); reprinted in Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, pp. 79–80.
“literature, except for a brief period in recent history”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, p. 79.
“[A]ny writer who doesn’t regard his work”: ibid., p. 80.
“Schweik … intervened”: Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Schweik, translated by Paul Selver (1930; reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), p. 12.
“Joseph Heller … did more to debunk the Hemingway myth”: Pete Hamill, “The Bearing of a Green: Some Thought[s] on Being Irish-American,” posted at petehamill.com/bearinggreen.html.
“Joe started talking [to me] about [this] novel”: This and subsequent remarks by Frederick Karl were made at “Joseph Heller: A Celebration,” a memorial service held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on June 13, 2000. Transcribed by the author from a video recording (courtesy of Erica Heller).
“We used to tease him”: Dolores Karl in conversation with the author, April 24, 2009.
Ideas rejected: Notes Heller made on index cards are cited in James Nagel, “The Catch-22 Note Cards,” Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 394–405. In the early 1970s, Heller gave Nagel permission to study the cards.
a character named Aarky was rechristened Aarfy: This happened late in the process; in an undated note to his editor Robert Gottlieb, Heller explained that “[s]ince beginning [the] book, I have become associated in business with a man named Arky”—Arky Gonzalez, a colleague at Time—“[and it] would be embarrassing to him and me to use the name Aarky.” This note is part of the Joseph Heller Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections Department, Waltham, Massachusetts.
“I’m not running away from my responsibilities”: Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961; reprint, New York: Dell, 1971), p. 461.
“Has he finished the novel”: Davis, Two-Bit Culture, p. 200.
“Too many loose ends”: letter from Rust Hills to Candida Donadio, March 11, 1959, Joseph Heller Colle
ction, Brandeis University.
“Hungry Joe”: Joseph Heller, draft of “Hungry Joe (from the Novel ‘Catch-18’)”: Joseph Heller Collection, Brandeis University.
“[Advertising work] helped me write Catch-22”: Joseph Heller, interviewed by Don Swaim, “Wired for Books,” CBS Radio, September 19, 1984; audio recording posted at wiredforbooks.org/josephheller.
“modest maiden”: Joseph Heller, notes for Catch-22, Joseph Heller Collection, Brandeis University.
“somber”; “didn’t expect it to happen”; “family … did not talk”: Heller, Now and Then, pp. 46–47.
“America’s junk culture”: Jeet Heer, “Gil Kane and Norman Podhoretz,” National Post, January 8, 2004; posted at www.jeetheer.com/comics/kanepodhoretz.htm.
“Walt Disney had an intense dislike for Coney Island”: Raymond M. Weinstein, “Disneyland and Coney Island: Reflections on the Evolution of the Modern Amusement Park,” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 1 (1992): 131.
“Disney understood well the mood”: ibid., p. 52
The Left’s dithering: See Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), pp. 10–11.
“business civilization”: Judith Smith, “Writing the Intellectual History of Fortune Magazine’s Corporate Modernism,” Reviews in American History 33, no. 3 (2005): 419. For more background on Henry Luce’s corporate philosophy, see Michael Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
“I am biased in favor of God”: James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston: Twayne, 1987), p. 173.
“Christianity is not a religion for weaklings”: James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 127.
“I never talk alone with a woman”; “lovesick women [and] bobby soxers”: ibid., p. 125.
“In wartime the Armed Services”: Adam Parfrey, It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), p. 5.
“just the way things were”: This and subsequent quotes from Bruce Jay Friedman are taken from ibid., pp. 15–17.
“Damsels [had] been distressed”: Parfrey, It’s a Man’s World, p. 178.
“dehumanized” and “repetitious”; “wholesome, entertaining and educational”: Nathan Abrams, “From Madness to Dysentery: Mad’s Other New York Intellectuals,” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 3 (2003): 437.
“Of course, we had the big problem”: ibid., p. 438.
“[B]oys were allowed to purchase [men’s] magazines”: Parfrey, It’s a Man’s World, p. 178.
“In many ways Mad represented”: Abrams, “From Madness to Dysentery,” p. 439.
“Beneath the pile of garbage”: ibid., p. 440.
“[W]e like to say that Mad”: ibid., p. 441.
“the essence of Mad’s success”; “Is Your Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks?”: ibid., pp. 443, 447.
“Mad expresses … the teenagers’ cynicism”: ibid., p. 449.
“Paperback books and the baby boomers”: Davis, Two-Bit Culture, p. 1.
“political and ideological novel”: William Barrett, “Lapse of a Novelist,” posted at commentarymagazine.com.
“One senses the joy”: Norman Podhoretz, “The Language of Life,” posted at commentarymagazine.com.
“the novel of the fifties”: This and subsequent Karl quotes are taken from Frederick Karl, American Fictions 1940–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 179–80.
“[H]e was drunk by the time he appeared on stage”; “Kerouac was not only giving our generation a bad name”: Wakefield, New York in the Fifties, pp. 167–68.
“Please, Alice”: This and all other quotes regarding Denham are taken from Alice Denham, Sleeping with Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Book Republic Press, 2006), pp. 96–98.
“I loved it there”: Ted Heller in an e-mail to the author, October 7, 2009.
“[I] … was catapulted”; “That question still makes me squirm”; “[I]t was only then”: Heller, Now and Then, pp. 227–29.
“Critics and publishers”: publishers’ note, New World Writing, no. 7 (1955).
“Men went mad and were rewarded with medals”: Heller, Catch-22, p. 16.
11. 22
“At that moment in the demented history of Simon & Schuster”: Robert Gottlieb, remarks made at “Joseph Heller: A Celebration,” a memorial service held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on June 13, 2000. Transcribed by the author from a video recording (courtesy of Erica Heller).
“why this applicant”; “[g]o home and write me a letter”; “brooded about this”; “Dear Mr. Goodman”: Peter Schwed, Turning the Pages: An Insider’s Story of Simon & Schuster 1924–1984 (New York: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 235–36.
“Until the 1920s”: This and subsequent Korda quotes are taken from Michael Korda, Another Life (New York: Dell, 2000), pp. 46–48, 41–42, 52, 53–55.
“Whatever I look at”: Larissa MacFarquhar, “Robert Gottlieb: The Art of Editing I,” The Paris Review 36, no. 132 (1994): 222.
“I thought my navel would unscrew”: Karen Hudes, “Epic Agent: The Great Candida Donadio,” Tin House 6, no. 4 (2005): 152.
“a creature from a Roman fresco”: ibid.
“Language means the most to me”: “The Agents: Writing with a $ Sign,” posted at www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,900028,00.html.
“I remember thinking”: Adam J. Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 115.
“He knew all along”: Frederick Karl, remarks made at “Joseph Heller: A Celebration.”
“I liked it”: Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), p. 17.
“Jazz is orgasm”: This and subsequent quotes from the essay are taken from Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent 4 (1957): 276–93; reprinted in Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1959), pp. 337–58.
“frantic swings”: Kaplan, 1959, p. 21.
“I … love this crazy book”: Robert Gottlieb, reader’s report on Catch-22, dated February 12, 1958, cited in Jonathan R. Eller, “Catching a Market: The Publishing History of Catch-22,” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 17 (1992): 480.
“It is a very rare approach to the war”: ibid.
“[W]hen I had been at Simon & Schuster a year”: MacFarquhar, “Robert Gottlieb,” p. 208.
“I suppose our convoluted, neurotic”: ibid., p. 187.
“two great qualities”: Gottlieb, remarks made at “Joseph Heller: A Celebration.”
“battlefield sequences”: MacFarquhar, “Robert Gottlieb,” p. 213.
“I probably wouldn’t send”: ibid.
“I think I was [Bob’s] first writer”; “It came so hard”: Robert Alan Aurthur, “Hanging Out,” Esquire, September 1974, pp. 54, 64.
“The two enlisted men”: This and subsequent quotes are from the rough drafts of Catch-22, Joseph Heller Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections Department, Waltham, Massachusetts.
“I’m a chronic fiddler”; “I don’t understand the process of imagination”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, pp. 161, 107.
“true literary genius”: Eller, “Catching a Market,” p. 481.
“It had upset many people”: Korda, Another Life, p. 53.
“strange period”: ibid., p. 94.
“endlessly retyped”: ibid., p. 77.
“impoverished vocabulary”: This and other quotes from Robert Gottlieb on the following pages are taken from MacFarquhar, “Robert Gottlieb,” pp. 186–87, 197–98, 199, 200.
“Some of Bob’s suggestions”:
MacFarquhar, “Robert Gottlieb,” p. 205.
“aura of myth”: Korda, Another Life, p. 53.
“Sicilian Earth Mother”; “had a way of dismissing those”: ibid., pp. 236–37.
“who misunderstood her instructions”: Seth Kupferberg and Greg Lawless, “Joseph Heller: 13 Years from Catch-22 to Something Happened,” Harvard Crimson, October 11, 1974.
“The S & S house style”: Schwed, Turning the Pages, p. 156.
“lucky and glad”: Steven Heller, Design Literary (New York: Allworth Press, 2004), p. 241.
“I’d always tell myself”; “I did a jacket”: ibid., pp. 238, 240.
“all that expense-account food;” “the Locust”; “Whatever was there”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, pp. 103–04.
“[I remember] my mother, brother, and I stayed at this motel”: Erica Heller in an e-mail to the author, December 30, 2009. Ms. Heller is not certain about the timing of this motel stay. Initially, she thought it was the summer of 1961, but later she believed it could have been the summer of 1962. Her descriptions of her father’s work at the time inclined me to place the incident in 1961.
“fantastic sense of the trends of the times”: Susan Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes, Maybe Yes, But Not the Whole Book,” The New Journal 26 (1967): 39, 40.
“He was a self-made man”: Rinker Buck, Flight of Passage (New York: Hyperion, 1997), p. 5.
“just going to brood and not work”; “Joe worked [hard]”: Braudy, “A Few of the Jokes…,” p. 40.
“[W]e were all in despair”: Hudes, “Epic Agent,” p. 153.
“The name of the book is now CATCH-14”: note from Joseph Heller to Robert Gottlieb, January 29, 1961, Joseph Heller Collection, Brandeis University.
“Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer took Random House public”: Korda, Another Life, p. 102.
“extensions of the possible into the fantastic”: This and all subsequent quotes regarding the novel and its relationship to real-life events are taken from Joseph Heller’s notes to Robert Gottlieb, analysis of characters in Catch-22, Joseph Heller Collection, Brandeis University.
“22 was chosen”; Hudes, “Epic Agent,” pp. 153–54.
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