A middle-aged woman who had just finished Something Happened in galleys said to me the other day that she thought it was a reply to all the recent books by women about the unrewardingness of housewives' lives. And Slocum does seem to argue that he is entitled to at least as much unhappiness as any woman he knows. His wife, after all, has to adapt to only one sort of hell, the domestic torture chamber in Connecticut, in which he, too, must writhe at night and on weekends, when he isn't committing adultery. But he must go regularly to his office, where pain is inflicted on all the nerve centers which were neglected by the tormentors at home.
(The place where Slocum works, incidentally, is unnamed, and its products and services are undescribed. But I had a friend of a friend of an acquaintance ask Mr. Heller if he minded naming Slocum's employers. Mr. Heller replied with all possible speed and openness, "Time, Incorporated." So we have a small scoop.)
Just as Mr. Heller is uninterested in tying a tin can to anything as localized as a company with a familiar name, so is he far above the complaining contests going on between men and women these days. He began this book way back in 1962, and there have been countless gut-ripping news items and confrontations since then. But Heller's man Slocum is deaf and blind to them. He receives signals from only three sources: his office, his memory and home.
And, on the basis of these signals alone, he is able to say, apparently in all seriousness: "The world just doesn't work. It's an idea whose time is gone."
This is black humor indeed—with the humor removed.
Robert Slocum was in the Air Force in Italy during World War II, by the way. He was especially happy there while demonstrating his unflagging virility to prostitutes. So it was also with John Yossarian, the hero of Catch-22, whose present whereabouts are unknown.
There will be a molasses-like cautiousness about accepting this book as an important one. It took more than a year for Catch-22 to gather a band of enthusiasts. I myself was cautious about that book. I am cautious again.
The uneasiness which many people will feel about liking Something Happened has roots which are deep. It is no casual thing to swallow a book by Joseph Heller, for he is, whether he intends to be or not, a maker of myths. (One way to do this, surely, is to be the final and most brilliant teller of an oft-told tale.) Catch-22 is now the dominant myth about Americans in the war against fascism. Something Happened, if swallowed, could become the dominant myth about the middle-class veterans who came home from that war to become heads of nuclear families. The proposed myth has it that those families were pathetically vulnerable and suffocating. It says that the heads of them commonly took jobs which were vaguely dishonorable or at least stultifying, in order to make as much money as they could for their little families, and they used that money in futile attempts to buy safety and happiness. The proposed myth says that they lost their dignity and their will to live in the process. It says they are hideously tired now. To accept a new myth about ourselves is to simplify our memories—and to place our stamp of approval on what might become an epitaph for our era in the shorthand of history. This, in my opinion, is why critics often condemn our most significant books and poems and plays when they first appear, while praising feebler creations. The birth of a new myth fills them with primitive dread, for myths are so effective. Well—I have now suppressed my own dread. I have thought dispassionately about Something Happened and I am now content to have it shown to future generations as a spooky sort of summary of what my generation of nebulously clever white people experienced, and what we, within the cage of those experiences, then did with our lives.
And I am counting on a backlash. I expect younger readers to love Robert Slocum—on the grounds that he couldn't possibly be as morally repellent and socially useless as he claims to be.
People a lot younger than I am may even be able to laugh at Slocum in an affectionate way, something I am unable to do. They may even see comedy in his tragic and foolish belief that he is totally responsible for the happiness or unhappiness of the members of his tiny family.
They may even see some nobility in him as an old soldier who has been brought to emotional ruin at last by the aging process and civilian life.
As for myself: I can't crack a smile when he says, ostensibly about the positions in which he sleeps, "I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of the corpse." And I am so anxious for Slocum to say something good about life that I read hope into lines meant to be supremely ironical, such as when he says this: "I know at last what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up I want to be a little boy."
What is perhaps Slocum's most memorable speech mourns not his own generation but the one after his, in the person of his sullen, teen-age daughter. "There was a cheerful baby girl in a high chair in my house once," he says, "who ate and drank with a hearty appetite and laughed a lot with spontaneous zest; she isn't here now, and there is no trace of her anywhere."
We keep reading this overly long book, even though there is no rise and fall in passion and language, because it is structured as a suspense novel. The puzzle which seduces us !s this one: Which of several possible tragedies will result from so much unhappiness? The author picks a good one.
I say that this is the most memorable, and therefore the most permanent variation on a familiar theme, and that it says baldly what the other variations only implied, what the other variations tried with desperate sentimentality not to imply: That many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.
WAS it unethical of me to review a book by a friend of mine for The New York Times'? I did not know Heller all that well back then. We had taught at City College together, and had exchanged greetings in the halls. If I had known him well, I would have refused the assignment.
But then, after I accepted it, I rented a summer house close to his on Long Island—and I got to know him better and better at precisely the time I was reviewing Something Happened. He was especially concerned, it turned out, about who was going to do that job for the Times.
I told him that I had heard a strong rumor, one which satisfied him entirely, that the Times had hired Robert Penn Warren, who was, even as we spoke, probably ransacking the book for its deepest meanings in his leafy hideaway in Vermont.
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
I admire anybody who finishes a work of art, no matter how awful it may be. A drama critic from a news magazine, speaking to me on the opening night of a play of mine, said that he liked to remind himself from time to time that Shakespeare was standing right behind him, so that he had to be very responsible and wise whenever he expressed an opinion about a play.
I told him that he had it exactly ass backwards—that Shakespeare was standing behind me and every other playwright who was foolhardy enough to face an opening night, no matter how bad our plays might be.
AND here is how I praised my friend Irwin Shaw at a banquet in his honor at The Players club here in New York, a so-called pipe night, on October 7, 1979. My friend Frank Sinatra was there, and my friends Adolph Green and Betty Comden, and my friend Joseph Heller, and my friend Willie Morris, and my friend Martin Gabel, and on and on. I had this to say:
"I apologize for reading from a piece of paper. Writers are pitiful people in a way. They have to write everything out.
"This is an actors' club, and I must admit that actors are far superior to writers when it comes to public speaking. They have somebody else write whatever it is they're going to say, and then they memorize it.
"This is a club for memorizers, and I think it's nice that they have a club. Everybody who wants a club should have one. That's what America is all about.
'That, and fighting different diseases, and so on.
"We are here principally to honor Irwin Shaw as an artis
t and human being, I would like to thank him, too, for his demonstration of what a lifetime of vigorous athletics can do to the human body.
"He likes to be thought of as a very tough guy. And it's true that he has turned skiing into a contact sport.
"So, Irwin, I salute you now as the Rocky Graziano of American letters—because that is the way I think you want to be saluted. And you will be happy to know that I often get taxi drivers who don't talk just a little like you. Irwin, they talk exactly like you.
"They've also all turned out to be gentlemen like you. "And how can you claim to be so tough anyway, when you have written one of the most innocent and beautiful stories I ever hope to read? I refer to 'The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.' This story says that even men in love will look longingly at every beautiful girl who comes along when the weather is warm, but concludes that there is no harm in this. "Irwin, how innocent can you be? "Well, I hate to say this with Joseph Heller present.
"Actually, it's sort of elating to say it with Joseph Heller present…
"Irwin Shaw wrote the best American novel about World War Two, which was The Young Lions. He was the only one of us who had enough wisdom and nerve to write about the European part of that war from both sides of the lines. As a German-American, of course, I was sorry to see him make the Nazis the bad guys.
"But by and large The Young Lions was such a good book that it made Ernest Hemingway mad. He thought he had copyrighted war.
"But the Ernest Hemingway story is a tragic one, and the Irwin Shaw story is anything but that. Look how happy Irwin is.
"I know where a lot of that happiness is coming from, but some of it should surely be attributed to the fact that the publication of Irwin's collected short stories last year confirmed beyond a doubt that he is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.
"Oh, I know it is cruel on a man's ninety-second birthday to talk about nothing but the work he did as a youngster. But I have done that tonight for selfish reasons, to celebrate my own youth, when I was so enthusiastic about so many things. That's what it was to be young—to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.
"And I was so enthusiastic about everything written by Irwin Shaw. He continues to write as well as ever, but I can no longer take pleasure in reading him, since he is my colleague now. I simply can't afford to like anybody but me. When I read anybody else now, I see his or her words only dimly, as though through a finely divided mist of sulfuric acid or mustard gas.
"I can see this much in Irwin's present work, though: Despite all the high living he has done far away from us, in Europe and the Hamptons and so on, he still knows how Americans talk and feel. This is highly unusual in our literary history. Almost every other important American writer who has lived elsewhere has soon lost touch with how we talk and feel.
"How has he worked this miracle? I will have to guess, but I am almost sure I'm right about this. Every time Irwin comes to New York, I think, he takes a job driving a taxicab.
"Now that I have let you in on his little secret, you won't be surprised if you find him driving you home after this banquet in his honor.
"I thank you for your attention."
AND here is what I said about my friends Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, perhaps the most significant and ridiculous American comedy team alive today, as an introduction to their book Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray (Random House, 1975):
It is the truth: Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.
And if they know what they are doing, they will have especially respectful words for Bob and Ray, whose book this is. They will say, among other things, that Bob and Ray's jokes were remarkably literary, being fun to read as well as to hear. They may note, too, that Bob and Ray had such energy and such a following that they continued to create marvelous material for radio at a time when radio creatively was otherwise dead.
I have listened to Bob and Ray for years and years now—in New England, in New York City. We are about the same age, which means that we were inspired by roughly the same saints—Jack Benny, Fred Allen, W. C. Fields, Stoopnagle and Bud, and on and on. And my collected works would fill Oliver Hardy's derby, whereas theirs would fill the Astrodome.
This book contains about one ten-thousandth of their output, I would imagine. And it might be exciting to say that it represents the cream of the cream of the cream of their jokes. But the truth is that there has been an amazing evenness to their performances. I recall a single broadcast of ten years ago, for example, which might have made a book nearly as elating as this one.
I was in the studio when I heard it—and saw it, too. I was supposedly applying for a job as a writer for Bob and Ray. We meant to talk about the job in between comedy bits, when the microphones were dead. One of the bits I remember was about selling advertising space on the sides of the Bob and Ray Satellite, which was going to be orbited only twenty-eight feet off the ground.
There was an announcement, too, about the Bob and Ray Overstocked Surplus Warehouse, which was crammed with sweaters emblazoned with the letter "O." If your name didn't begin with "O," they said, they could have it legally changed for you.
And so on.
There was an episode from Mary Backstayge. Mary's actor husband, Harry, was trying to get a part in a play. His big talent, according to his supporters, was that he was wonderful at memorizing things.
There was an animal imitator who said that a pig went "oink oink," and a cow went "moo," and that a rooster went "cock-a-doodle-doo."
I very nearly popped a gut. I am pathetically vulnerable to jokes such as these. I expect to be killed by laughter sooner or later. And I told Bob and Ray that I could never write anything as funny as what I had heard on what was for them a perfectly ordinary day.
I was puzzled that day by Bob's and Ray's melancholy. It seemed to me that they should be the happiest people on earth, but looks of sleepy ruefulness crossed their faces like clouds from time to time. I have seen those same clouds at subsequent encounters—and only now do I have a theory to explain them:
I surmise that Bob and Ray feel accursed sometimes—like crewmen on the Flying Dutchman or caged squirrels on an exercise wheel. They are so twangingly attuned to their era and to each other that they can go on being extremely funny almost indefinitely.
Such an unlimited opportunity to make people happy must become profoundly pooping by and by.
It occurs to me, too, as I look through this marvelous book, that Bob and Ray's jokes are singularly burglar-proof. They aren't like most other comedians' jokes these days, aren't rooted in show business and the world of celebrities and news of the day. They feature Americans who are almost always fourth-rate or below, engaged in enterprises which, if not contemptible, are at least insane.
And while other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray's characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. There is a refreshing and beautiful innocence in Bob's and Ray's humor.
Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.
And this I believe.
Cheers.
AND here is what I said at a funeral here for my friend James T. Farrell on August 24, 1979, whose body was taken afterward to a Catholic cemetery in his native Chicago:
"I am here at the request of a member of the family— perhaps as a representative of the generation of American writers most influenced by James T. Farrell. I was not a close friend. Many of you were, and I envy you that. I knew him some. I found him easy to love and admire. He was eighteen years my senior.
"Here is what he did for me and many like me when I was very young: He showed me through his books that it was perfectly all right, perhaps even u
seful and beautiful, to say what life really looked like, what was really said and felt and done—what really went on. Until I read him, I wished only to be well received in polite company.
"We were both University of Chicago people.
"I note that there is a cross over his casket. That is a nice try by whoever put it there, but it is surely known in heaven that James T. Farrell of Chicago and New York was not among our leaders in organized tub-beating for Jesus Christ. He took his chances that way. If he is being scolded at this moment at the Pearly Gates, it may be for his overemphasis of rationality and compassion and honor at the expense of piety. I fear not for him. This is an argument he has won before.
The last time I was in this melancholy depot, it was to say farewell to Janet Planner, another midwesterner who became a planetary patriot. Ms. Planner and Mr. Farrell were members of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ms. Planner came regularly to the annual spring meeting of that organization. So do many of our leading culture heroes. James T. Farrell never came. One time I asked him why not. He said that he did not care to come face to face with some of the critics, fellow writers, who had damned his work years ago—had damned it ostensibly for bad writing, but actually for the supposedly incorrect political opinions he was known to hold. He was a premature anti-Stalinist. He was, and remained so to his death, a left-wing thinking man. "The malicious attacks did not humble him, could not humble him, since he was Irish. They did, however, so muddy his reputation that a dispassionate appraisal of his life's work remains to be made. It is a huge work. It is Balzacian in scale. I spoke at his seventy-third birthday, two years ago, and I suggested that, if only James T. Farrell had produced such a body of work in a smaller country, he would have won a Nobel prize by then. That was a strong statement. It had the added force of ringing true.
Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House Page 43