“moved the industry one step closer”: Jon Lewis, American Film: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 278–79.
“A peculiarly American brand of auteurism”: ibid., p. 282.
incidents threatened crew morale: In his memoir, Halfway through the Door (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), Alan Arkin wrote that “the film took a direction I could not understand, and this became a source of great pain for me.… [I was] isolated and on edge … in emotional limbo” (p. 13). Art Garfunkel, who had a small role in the movie, was apparently at odds with his singing partner, Paul Simon, over the movie’s shooting schedule. Simon wanted Garfunkel back in New York to work on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album (initially, Simon also had a part in Catch-22, but his role was written out—possibly another source of Simon’s irritation). The song “The Only Living Boy in New York” was reportedly written to chide Garfunkel. It refers to getting a plane on time and flying to Mexico. The song is addressed to “Tom,” a name Simon sometimes used for Garfunkel, as the duo billed itself as Tom and Jerry when they first started singing together.
“it seemed … [like] two movies”: Jacob Brackman, “Review of Catch-22,” Esquire, September 1970, pp. 12, 14.
“Mike Nichols’ Catch-22”: Grover Sales, “Catch-$22,” San Francisco, October 1970, pp. 9–10.
“WE did this ‘Insane War Picture’ bit FIRST”: Mort Drucker and Stan Hart, “Catch-All-22,” MAD, March 1971, p. 10.
15. THE WILLIES
“It was after the war,”: Joseph Heller, Something Happened (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 78.
“thousand-and-first version”; “this written-to-death situation”: Kurt Vonnegut, “Something Happened,” New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1974, pp. 1–2.
“There’s no reason why I couldn’t work at home”: Alden Whitman, “Something Always Happens on the Way to the Office: An Interview with Joseph Heller,” in Pages: The World of Books, Writers, and Writing, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (Detroit: Gale, 1976), p. 78.
“stood around all day”: Erica Heller in an e-mail to the author, December 3, 2009.
“As the sixties passed”: This and subsequent quotes regarding Heller’s move to Knopf are taken from Michael Korda, Another Life (New York: Dell, 2000), pp. 229–30, 236–38.
“When he finished Catch-22”; “[I always knew] he’d turn it in”: Israel Shenker, “Second Heller Book Due 13 Years After First,” New York Times, February 18, 1974; posted at nytimes.com/books/98/02/15/home/heller-due.html.
“We were of an age”: Unless otherwise noted, this and subsequent quotes regarding Candida Donadio are taken from Karen Hudes, “Epic Agent: The Great Candida Donadio,” Tin House 6, no. 4 (2005): 154, 161, 163.
“She had forgotten to mention [the bird]”: Erica Heller in an e-mail to the author, June 8, 2009.
“sibling rivalry amongst her other charges”: Howard Junker, “Will This Finally Be Philip Roth’s Year?” New York, January 13, 1969, p. 46.
“Teaching takes a lot of my time”; “It’s a job I would like to keep”: Robert Alan Aurthur, “Hanging Out,” Esquire, September 1974, p. 64; Creath Thorne, “Joseph Heller: An Interview,” Chicago Literary Review, December 1974, pp. 1, 8.
“I was a really thin man”: Aurthur, “Hanging Out,” p. 54.
“The Angel of Death is in the gym today”: Joseph Heller, Good as Gold (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 200.
“I figured if a car hit me”: Edwin McDowell, “Often Lost, Sometimes Found, Authors Tell about Manuscripts,” Ocala Star Banner, September 23, 1983.
“I asked him what would happen”: Erica Heller in an e-mail to the author, May 29, 2009.
“I think I’m in trouble”: This and other rough-draft sentences are from the Something Happened note cards, Joseph Heller Archive, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
“If I live to be a hundred and fifty”: This and subsequent quotes are from the Something Happened note cards.
“I don’t think of myself as a naturally gifted writer”: Adam J. Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 111.
“I miss my dead boy”: This and subsequent quotes are from the rough draft of Something Happened, Joseph Heller Archive.
“My mother is a fish”: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 84.
“The moocow came down the road”: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 7.
“I put everything I knew”: Sam Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” Playboy, June 1975, pp. 66–68.
“What should I call the guy”: Aurthur, “Hanging Out,” p. 54.
“I was carrying the manuscript”: ibid.
“[We] have children”: Kenneth Tynan, “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man,” The New Yorker, October 30, 1978, p. 92.
“I may look a little bit Jewish”: Heller, Something Happened, pp. 349–50.
“Joe [, you] wouldn’t do that!”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, pp. 173–74.
“Bob and I think of each other as close friends”: Larissa MacFarquhar, “Robert Gottlieb: The Art of Editing I,” The Paris Review 36, no. 132 (1994): 218.
“no book like it”: Israel Shenker, “Joseph Heller Draws Dead Bead on the Politics of Gloom,” New York Times, September 10, 1968.
“areas of combat”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, pp. 113–14.
“In the office in which I work”; “I get the willies”: Heller, Something Happened, pp. 9, 1.
“[T]his is going to sound crazy to you”: This and the subsequent dialogue between Heller and Gottlieb is from MacFarquhar, “Robert Gottlieb,” p. 87.
“[I]t is midsummer, 1974”: This quote and the subsequent dialogue with Murray Schisgal are from Aurthur, “Hanging Out,” p. 50.
magazine and newspaper ads: Ads for Something Happened and review blurbs from various sources can be found in the Joseph Heller Archive.
“no attempt to understand what is going on”: Joseph Epstein, “Joseph Heller’s Milk Train: Nothing More to Express,” Washington Post Book World, October 6, 1974, pp. 1–3.
“splendidly put together”: “Something Happened … could become the dominant myth”; “baldly”: Vonnegut, “Something Happened” pp. 1–2.
“[This] is not a book for kids”: Robert Gottlieb quoted in Stone Reader, a documentary film by Mark Moskowitz, 1999.
“must be reaching a wider, older audience”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joe Heller,” pp. 66–68.
“If there were a key word”; “Zip code marketing”: Esquire, September 1974, pp. 89, 94.
from “December, 1972, to April, 1975: Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 291.
“on top of the world”; “whole manner gives the promise”: Charles T. Powers, “Joe Heller, Author on Top of the World,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1975.
If I thought I might never get another idea for a novel”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, p. 116.
“What? You’re not worried about any of this?”: Seth Kupferberg and Greg Lawless, “Joseph Heller: 13 Years from Catch-22 to Something Happened,” Harvard Crimson, October 11, 1974.
“If [your family] can live through”: Mel Brooks, “Mel Brooks Meets Joseph Heller,” Washington Post Book World, March 11, 1979, p. 4.
“… can’t believe it’s finally out”: Kupferberg and Lawless, “Joseph Heller.”
“to put to test”: Andre Furlani, “Brisk Socratic Dialogues: Elenctic Rhetoric in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened,” Narrative 3, no. 3 (1995): 253.
“brisk, Socratic dialogues”: This and subsequent quotes from the novel are in Heller, Something Happened, pp. 268, 185, 236, 128.
“son is a Socrates”: Furlani, “Brisk Socratic Dialogues,
”: p. 259.
“signs that, I believe, are clinical symptoms of psychosis”: Kupferberg and Lawless, “Joseph Heller.”
“My memory’s failing”: Heller, Something Happened, pp. 523–24.
“disorganized personality”: Kupferberg and Lawless, “Joseph Heller.”
“An unprecedented combination of inflation and recession”: Robert W. Sarnoff, RCA’s Annual Report, 1974, pp. 2–3.
“Novelist Joseph Heller[’s]”: ibid., p. 17.
“[T]he exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS”: William James cited in Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), p. xiii.
“nothing special”: This and the subsequent quotes about Gwathmey are by Erica Heller, posted at artsbeat.blogs.mytimes.com/2009/08/04/charles-gwathmey-architect-of-the-modernist-school-is-dead-at-71.
“Elaine’s had become the ‘in’ place”: A. E. Hotchner, Everyone Comes to Elaine’s (New York: Harper Entertainment, 2004), pp. 125–27. Heller had been going to Elaine’s since the early 1960s. Steve Coates reported that in 1963, George Plimpton, after attending that year’s Venice Film Festival, gathered a number of literary friends at Elaine’s to discuss the possibility of forming a Film Writers International Group. Present were Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, and Heller, among others. The idea was to formalize their already-regular meetings so they could “[drink] and talk … about wanting to get their novels and plays made into movies.” Heller, with some experience writing screenplays, was “wary” of the idea. (see Steve Coates, “Plimpton’s Party,” posted at papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/plimptons-party/?pagemode=print). Steve Katz reported that in 1968, Plimpton tried again to formalize his drinkfests with friends. He “arranged a gathering at Elaine’s with a sappy name like Convergence of Genius, or the Genius Club.” Heller was among those included, along with Robert Rauschenberg, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, and Norman Mailer. The gathering was “meant to create an artistic, literary think tank,” Katz wrote. Again, the idea went nowhere. (See Steve Katz, “Three Memoirrhoids,” posted at Keyholemagazine.com/Steve-Katz/three-Memoirrhoids.)
“Right after he finishes [writing] a book”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, p. 198.
“I … need disturbances”: ibid.
“Thank goodness, we don’t need love anymore”: ibid., p. 193.
“The kid, they say, was born in a manger”: Joseph Heller, unpublished jottings, Joseph Heller Archive.
“The President is fully aware”: Todd S. Purdum, “The Nation: The Nondenial Denier,” New York Times, February 16, 2003; posted at nytimes.com/2003/02/16/weekinreview/thenation-the-nondenial-denier.html.
“Every woman loves”: This and lines from various ads are from the Joseph Heller Archive.
“I don’t think I deserve all this money”: George Mandel, in conversation with the author, July 20, 2009.
Politically, he was drifting toward the center: On November 24, 1975, in the New York Times editorial section, Heller published a short satirical piece entitled “This Is Called ‘National Defense,’” in which he lampooned FBI agents engaged in domestic spying and said he wished they would “stop interfering with such decent people as Socrates, Martin Luther King, Eugene V. Debs, Galileo, and me.” The piece felt rather dated, not what one expected from the prophetic writer of Catch-22 and Something Happened. It would soon be clear that he was saving his satirical strength for a long exposé of American political chicanery, Good as Gold. The full text is posted at gonzomuckraker.blogspot.com/2007/11/this-is-called-national-defense.html.
“one of the bravest”: Norman Podhoretz, “The Best Catch There Is,” reprinted in Podhoretz, The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 229.
“invigorat[ed] the magazine”: Ted Solotaroff, “Adventures in Editing: Ted Solotaroff’s ‘Commentary’ Days,” posted at thenation.com/doc/20090209/solotaroff.
“I [have] … experienced an astonishing revelation”: Podhoretz, Making It, p. xi.
“Nothing, I believe, defines the spiritual character of American life”: ibid., pp. xiii–xvii.
“no-holds barred”: Joseph Epstein, “Remaking It,” New York Times, October 21, 1979; posted at nytimes.com/books/99/02/21/specials/podhoretz-breaking.html.
“love is not the answer to hate”: Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” reprinted in Podhoretz, The Bloody Crossroads, p. 369.
“revulsion”; “health”; “fevers and plagues”: Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 16–17.
“Heller … [is] far more politically Left”: Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 50.
“I never gave him the chance to dump me”: Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (New York: Verso, 2001), p. 325.
“strong attachment”; “difficult, confusing question”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” pp. 66–68.
“reconsider[ed]” Catch-22: Norman Podhoretz, “Looking Back at Catch-22”; reprinted as “Norman Podhoretz on Rethinking Catch-22,” in Bloom’s Guides: Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), pp. 118–20.
Periodically, Catch-22 has been subject to censorship in the United States. For example, in 1972, the Strongsville, Ohio, Board of Education disapproved purchase of the novel despite faculty recommendations. The board called Catch-22 “completely sick” and “garbage.” In 1974, parents in Dallas, Texas, insisted the book be removed from all high school libraries because it contained the word whore. The parents’ challenge, heard in meetings of the Dallas Independent School District, was unsuccessful. A similar failed challenge was mounted in the Snoqualmie Valley (Washington) School District in 1979. See Dawn B. Sova, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, rev. ed. (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), pp. 82–84.
I [am] getting very envious”: Maria Lenhart, “Wielding Humor’s Two-Edged Sword,” Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 1979.
“John Ehrlichman, Spiro Agnew, and H. R. Haldeman”: This and subsequent quotes from the novel are taken from Heller, Good as Gold, pp. 359, 355, 3, 360.
“public-relations enterprise”: Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” pp. 66–68.
“I [am] getting more efficient”: Lenhart, “Wielding Humor’s Two-Edged Sword.”
“[W]hen I am close to finishing a book”; “When … James Jones died”: Sorkin, ed., Conversations with Joseph Heller, p. 199.
“You’re both Italian”; “I came home late … [one evening]”: Kaylie Jones, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (New York: William Morrow, 2009), p. 234. According to Erica Heller (e-mail to the author, September 8, 2009), most people found Gloria Jones “obnoxious” and her father “tolerated” her because he had liked her husband.
Joe remained depressed: For a glimpse of his state of mind during this period, see “Joseph Heller on America’s ‘Inhuman Callousness,’” U.S. News & World Report, April 9, 1979, p. 73.
“For financial security”: “Heller Takes the Money and Runs,” New York, March 19, 1979, p. 54.
“shticky”: Robert Gottlieb in conversation with the author, August 29, 2010.
“believe in guaranteeing such immense sums”: “Heller Moves Back to Simon and Schuster for Third Novel,” Publishers Weekly, February 7, 1977, p. 37.
“You mean you’re not going to make an offer at all”?: Herman Gollob in an e-mail to the author, June 5, 2009.
“That’s not exactly how I remember things”: Gottlieb in conversation with the author.
“[Candida] would sort of start whimpering”; “There are times when it’s healthier”: Hudes, “Epic Agent,” pp. 155, 162.
“showiest [publishing house]”: This and subsequent quotes about Simon & Schuster, unless otherwise noted, ar
e from Helen Duder, “Why ‘Literary’ Is a Dirty Word at Simon & Schuster,” New York, January 16, 1978, pp. 36–40.
“terror of sorts”: Dinah Prince, “The Book on Joni Evans,” New York, March 10, 1986, p. 32.
“aggressive”; “stick-shift personality”: ibid., pp. 33–34.
“first for the publishing world”: “Stellar Sum for Heller Novel,” New York, February 7, 1977, p. 60.
“Shirley wanted to live it up a little”: Barbara Gelb in conversation with the author, August 3, 2010.
“[I]n the nonfiction area”: “Stellar Sum for Heller Novel,” p. 60.
“[The trouble] about doing a comic novel with Henry Kissinger”: Powers, “Joe Heller on Top of the World.”
In Good as Gold, Kissinger appears: The book’s working title was “Moths at a Dark Bulb.” On May 24, 1976, Heller published an excerpt from his novel in progress, under the title “Moths at a Dark Bulb,” on the New York Times editorial page. The excerpt was a mock presidential news conference. Presumably, the “dark bulb” was American government; the “moths” were members of the press and, by extension, American citizens.
“social world … where competence doesn’t count”; “just another writer now”: Heller, Good as Gold, p. 462.
“Mr. Rockefeller gave Secretary of State Kissinger a $50,000 gift”: clipping from Joseph Heller Archive.
“Good as Gold is a cultural event”: Jack Beatty, review of Good as Gold, The New Republic, March 10, 1979, pp. 42–44.
“It is all about a society that is fast going insane”: John W. Aldridge, “The Deceits of Black Humor,” Harper’s, March 1979, pp. 115–18.
“[T]here is nothing in the world that can block your appointment”: Heller, Good as Gold, p. 461.
“London. Michelmas term lately over”; “[S]omething happened”: Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: Heritage House, 1942), pp. 15, 28–29.
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