But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  Soul mate. Catch-22’s admirers cross boundaries, ideological, generational, geographical. Daugherty relates a very funny anecdote about Bertrand Russell, the pacifist and philosopher. He had praised the book in print and invited Heller to visit him while in England. (Russell was then in his nineties.) When Heller presented himself at the door, Russell flew into a rage, screaming, “Go away, damn you! Never come back here again!” A perplexed Heller fled, only to be intercepted by Russell’s manservant, who explained, “Mr. Russell thought you said ‘Edward Teller.’ ” The ideological distance between Jim Webb and Bertrand Russell can be measured in light-years. An author who reached both of them exerted something like universal appeal.

  Returning to a favorite book, one approaches with trepidation. Will it be as good as one remembers it? Has it dated? As Heller’s friend and fan Christopher Hitchens would say, “Has it time-traveled?” Any answer is subjective, but a fifty-year-old book that continues to sell 85,000 copies a year must be doing something right, time-travel-wise—even discounting the number assigned in the classroom.

  I asked Salman Rushdie, another friend and admirer of Heller’s, what he thought about the book all these years later.

  “I think Catch-22 stands the test of time pretty well,” he replied, “because Heller’s language-comedy, the twisted-sane logic of his twisted-insane world, is as funny now as it was when the book came out. The bits of Catch-22 that survive best are the craziest bits: Milo Minderbinder’s chocolate-coated cotton-wool, Major Major Major Major’s name, and of course the immortal Catch itself (“it’s the best there is”). The only storyline that now seems sentimental, even mawkish, is the one about ‘Nately’s whore.’ Oh well. As Joe E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon, nobody’s perfect.”

  A book resonates along different bandwidths as it ages. Catch-22’s first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured. To the Vietnam generation, enduring its own terror and madness, crawling through malarial rice paddies while pacifying hamlets with napalm and Zippo lighters, the book amounted to existential comfort and the knowledge that they were not alone. (Note, too, that Catch-22 ends with Yossarian setting off AWOL for Sweden, which before becoming famous for IKEA and girls with dragon tattoos, was a haven for Vietnam-era draft evaders.)

  As for Catch’s current readers, it’s not hard to imagine a brave but frustrated American marine huddling in his Afghan foxhole, drawing sustenance and companionship from these pages in the midst of fighting an unwinnable war against stone-age fanatics.

  Daugherty tells how Heller was required to take a barrage of psychological tests for a magazine job. (Fodder, surely, for an episode of Mad Men.) The color cards he was shown conjured in his mind terrible images of gore and amputated limbs. He mentioned to one of his examiners that he was working on a novel. One of them asked, Oh, what’s it about? Joe wrote in his memoir forty years later, “ ‘That question still makes me squirm.”

  There’s a certain numerology about Catch-22: Yossarian, helpless and furious as the brass keep raising the number of missions he has to fly before he can go home. He’s Sisyphus, with attitude. Then there’s the title itself, a sort of algorithm expressing the predicament of the soldier up against an implacable, martial bureaucracy. For us civilians, the algorithm describes a more prosaic conundrum, that of standing before the soft-faced functionary telling us that he cannot register the car until we produce a document that does not exist. Bureaucracy, as Hannah Arendt defined it: the rule of nobody.

  Roll credits. Catch-22 is Joe Heller’s book, but it did not arrive on the shelves all by itself. His literary agent Candida Donadio got the first chapter into the hands of Arabel Porter, editor of New American Writing; and then into the all-important hands of Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster. Gottlieb, one of the great book editors of his day—he later became head of Alfred Knopf—played a critical role shaping the text. Daugherty describes how the two of them pieced together a jigsaw puzzle from a total of nine separate manuscripts; Catch-22 seems to have been stitched together with no less care and effort than the Bayeux Tapestry. Their collaboration was astonishingly devoid of friction. Gottlieb is a genius, but Heller was an editor’s dream, that rare thing—an author without proprietary sensitivity, willing to make any change, to (in Scott Fitzgerald’s great phrase) murder any darling. As the work proceeded, it took on within the offices of Simon and Schuster “the aura of a Manhattan Project.”

  Nina Bourne at S&S was passionate about the book and promoted it relentlessly after it initially faltered, with a zeal that would induce a sigh of envy in any author’s breast. The jacket design with the red soldier dangling like a marionette against a blue background became iconic. It was the work of Paul Bacon, himself another World War II veteran, who also designed the original covers for Slaughterhouse-Five, Rosemary’s Baby, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, and Shogun.

  It was a fertile time for letters. While Heller was conjuring Yossarian and Major Major Major and Milo Minderbinder and Chaplain Chapman and the other members of the 488 Bomb Squadron, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Ken Kesey was at work on Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Pynchon on V. Heller’s good friend Kurt Vonnegut was banging away at Cat’s Cradle.

  Joseph Heller will forever be known as the author of Catch-22—and who wouldn’t be happy to wear that laurel? But in the opinion of some, including Bob Gottlieb, it is not his best novel. According to this view, that garland belongs to Something Happened, Heller’s dark and brilliant 1974 novel about the tragic office worker and family man Bob Slocum. The reviewer for The New York Times wryly observed that to film Catch-22, Mike Nichols assembled a fleet of eighteen B-25 bombers—in effect the world’s twelfth-largest air force. To turn Something Happened into a movie, the reviewer ventured, would cost roughly nothing.

  I put it to Joe once, after a martini or two: So, did he think Something Happened was a better book?

  He smiled and shrugged. “Who can choose?”

  American literature is deplorably replete with books that secured fame for their authors, but little fortune. Think of poor old Melville schlepping about the streets of Manhattan as a Customs inspector, having earned a lifetime profit of about $500 for his hyphenated masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

  Joe made out rather better. Simon and Schuster paid him an advance of $1,500 (about $11,000 today). If the paperback royalties didn’t make him rich, they certainly made him comfortable. The movie rights went for a tidy price, and larger paychecks lay ahead. Not bad for a kid who grew up poor in Coney Island. In fact, one might ask, What’s the catch?

  We became friends in his final years. I loved him. For someone who had flown sixty missions in a world war, who had endured a devastating, near-fatal illness (Guillain-Barré), who had gone through a rough and somewhat public divorce, Joe seemed to me a surprisingly joyous person. He sought joy, and seemed to find it often enough—in his myriad and devoted friends; in good food and dry martinis; in his wife, Valerie, his son, Ted, and his daughter, Erica, who has written a touching and frank account of growing up as an Eloise of the Apthorp apartment building in Manhattan.

  In that book, Yossarian Slept Here, she writes, “When Catch was finally beginning to make a real name for itself . . . my parents would often jump into a cab at night and ride around to all of the city’s leading bookstores in order to see that jaunty riot of red, white and blue and the crooked little man, the covers of ‘the book,’ piled up in towers and pyramids, stacked in all the nighttime store windows. Was anything ever again as much fun for either of them, I wonder?”

  A few months before Joe died, I wrote him from the midst of a too-long book tour, in somewhat low spirits. His tough love and sharp-elbowed humor always yanked me back from the brink of acedia. This time there were no jokes, instead something like resignation.

  “The life of a novelist,” he wrote me, “is almost inevitably dest
ined for anguish, humiliations, and disappointment—when you get to read the two chapters in my new novel I’ve just finished you will recognize why.”

  That book, Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man, is a sad one, about a novelist who has had great success early on, only to have less in later years. It was published after Joe died.

  So perhaps in the end, there always is a catch. But the one Joe Heller left us remains, even after all these years, the best catch of all.

  —Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition, 2011

  YOU THIEVING PILE OF ALBINO WARTS!

  The Letters of Hunter S. Thompson, Volume II

  “It’s been a weird night,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote to the CBS News correspondent Hughes Rudd one morning in 1973 as dawn was breaking over Owl Farm, his “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado, “and I’ve been dealing with a head full of something rumored to be LSD-25 for the past six hours, but on the evidence I suspect it was mainly that PCP animal tranq, laced with enough speed to KEEP the arms & legs moving. The brain is another question, I think, but I keep hoping we’ll have it under control before long.”

  A great many of the letters in this, the second volume of a projected trilogy of the letters of the monstre sacré of American journalism, appear to have been written under various chemical influences in the wee small hours: “Cazart! It’s 5:57 a.m. now & the Aspen FM station is howling ‘White Rabbit’—a good omen, eh?”; “It’s 6:37 now”; “Christ, it’s 5:40 a.m.” Sometimes the sun is halfway to the meridian before he reaches for the off button on his I.B.M. Selectric: “It’s 10:33 in the morning & this is the longest letter I’ve ever written. It began as a quick note to wrap up loose ends.”

  This makes for some pretty electric reading, and for some not-so-electric reading. During the period covered in this collection, Thompson was a vital, deliriously erratic force in journalism, covering the turbulent 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the 1968 election of Richard M. Nixon, the 1972 campaign, Watergate, the falls of Nixon and Saigon. There are letters here to Tom Wolfe; Senator Eugene McCarthy; the Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta (the inspiration for the “300-pound Samoan attorney” character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); Charles Kuralt; Thompson’s Random House editor, Jim Silberman; Warren Hinckle (then the editor of Ramparts magazine); the soon-to-be-elected-congressman Allard K. Lowenstein; Paul Krassner; Jann Wenner; the illustrator Ralph Steadman; Joe Eszterhas (then a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer); Senator George McGovern; Gary Hart (then McGovern’s campaign manager); Anthony Burgess; Patrick J. Buchanan (then a Nixon speechwriter); Robert Kennedy’s former campaign press secretary Frank Mankiewicz; Garry Wills; Jimmy Carter (then a presidential candidate); Thompson’s then-lawyer Sandy Berger, now the national security adviser; the movie director Bob Rafelson; the political prankster Dick Tuck; and the Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. That’s a pretty good sampling of the folks who brought you the 1960s and ’70s. This being an omnium-gatherum of the Thompsonian “gonzo” archive, there are also memorandums, drafts of book-jacket copy, and movie treatment outlines.

  It’s not surprising that so many of these letters are about what one of Thompson’s early boosters, Tom Wolfe, once declared the great subject of American writers: money—in this case, the general lack of it and the desperate need for more. Thompson is always one step ahead of the Internal Revenue Service, the Diners Club, or a hornet-mad collection agency. Yet again, one is sadly reminded that writing an American classic—in this case, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—is no guarantee of financial security.

  That book, which began as a series of articles in Rolling Stone, sold only about 18,000 copies in hardcover when it was published in 1972. “I find myself,” Thompson wrote to his mother, “getting ‘famous,’ but no richer than I was before people started recognizing & harassing me almost everywhere I go.” On the brighter side, a quarter century later finds Thompson still alive, despite a lifestyle that, if these letters are accurate, would surely have long ago brought down a milder constitution.

  One of the things that made Thompson an “outlaw” hero to this reviewer’s generation was the demonic zest of his invective and contumely. The DNA of Thompson’s adjectival lexicon is made up of the following, often in sequence: vicious, rancid, savage, fiendish, filthy, rotten, demented, treacherous, heinous, scurvy, devious, grisly, hamwit, foetid, cheapjack, and hellish. Favorite gerunds and other verb forms of abuse include festering, stinking, soul-ripping, drooling, rabbit-punching, and knee-crawling, to say nothing of even more piquant expressions.

  “You worthless . . . bastard,” begins a mock-malevolent letter to his good friend Tom Wolfe, in response to a letter Wolfe wrote to him while on a lecture tour in Italy, “I just got your letter of Feb 25 from Le Grande Hotel in Roma, you swine! Here you are running around . . . Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day . . . while I’m out here in the middle of these . . . frozen mountains in a death-battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi lawyers makes my life a . . . Wobbly nightmare. . . . You decadent pig . . . you thieving pile of albino warts. . . . The hammer of justice looms, and your filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!”

  Reading Hunter Thompson is like using gasoline for aftershave—bracing. “His voice is sui generis,” writes David Halberstam in the foreword. “It is not to be imitated, and I can’t think of anything worse than for any young journalist to try to imitate Hunter.”

  So true. Thompson’s maniac style—and pharmacology—made him a folk hero on college campuses about the time these letters were written. Garry Trudeau made him into the character Duke in “Doonesbury.” (Trudeau is referred to here in a letter to Thompson’s lawyer as “that dope-addled nazi cartoonist.”)

  Reading these letters does make one consider how relatively pallid our own times are, compared with the stomping mad epoch in which he wrote them. Assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon. Today’s big issues are prescription drugs for the elderly and whither-the-Middle-East-peace-process.I An amphetamine-crazed, Wild Turkey–swilling Hunter Thompson on the press bus today would probably be put off at the first stop, as the British writer Will Self was a few years ago when he was discovered taking heroin aboard Prime Minister John Major’s press plane. It’s doubtful that Thompson’s antics—setting fire to the door of the Jimmy Carter aide Hamilton Jordan’s New York hotel room in 1976—would be looked on as merely scampish by today’s PC commissars. This isn’t to suggest his antics didn’t eventually wear thin—as anyone who ever sat through one of his college-lecture-circuit performances will tell you—but man was it fun at the time.

  The question that lingers is, how much of it was actually true? How much of it was journalism, as opposed to something between “new journalism” and out-and-out fiction? The historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited these letters and has written a fine introduction, concludes, “It would be a mistake to claim that Fear and Loathing in America answers the question of whether Thompson writes fiction or nonfiction.”

  Hm. We find Thompson writing frantic letters to his lawyer Sandy Berger, threatening the Washington writer Sally Quinn and Esquire magazine with legal action because the magazine has published an excerpt from her book in which she quotes him saying, “at least 45 percent of what I write is true.” He’s a bit concerned what effect this might have on his employers. A few pages later, in a letter to Quinn, he writes that he usually tells people that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was “60 percent–80 percent” true, “for reasons that should be perfectly obvious.” Earlier on, in a letter to Bill Cardoso of The Boston Globe, who had coined the term “gonzo journalism,” he calls one of his own articles for Scanlan’s Monthly “a classic of irresponsible journalism.” The clincher comes in a letter to his Random House editor, in which he admits that the book “was a very conscious attempt to simulate drug freakout. . . . I didn’t really make up anything—but I did, at times, bring situations & feelings I remember from other sc
enes to the reality at hand.” He later wrote to the same editor, “I have never had much respect or affection for journalism.”

  One feels Brinkley’s pain, but the reasonable reader is left to infer that Thompson’s reportage had an . . . impressionistic element—for which his fans, including this one, are profoundly grateful. These untidy letters are welcome, showing us as they do a great American original in his lair. But a word of advice: If one of his peacocks or Dobermans comes at you, be very, very afraid.

  —The New York Times, December 2000

  * * *

  I. This was written in December 2000.

  RAY BRADBURY

  In an episode of the hit TV show Mad Men, set in 1962, one of the characters is skeptical about a planned business trip to the West Coast. He asks his boss in a smug New York City way, “What’s in L.A., anyway?”

  The boss, Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, smiles coolly: “The Jet Propulsion Lab? Ray Bradbury?”

  It’s a throwaway line, a fleeting tip of the hat by Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner to the ultimate Writer’s Writer: Ray Douglas Bradbury, who, as I type these words, is one day shy of his eighty-ninth birthday here on Planet Earth. The middle name derives from Douglas Fairbanks, an idol of a different sort, from another era.

  Ray Bradbury published his first short story in 1938, which means that he has been a working author for seventy-one years. He is a self-professed “sprinter” at the short story, rather than a “marathon runner” novelist. It is hard to think of a writer who has done more with the short story form than Ray Bradbury. According to his able biographer, Sam Weller (The Bradbury Chronicles, 2005), he has written one every week since he started. By my math, that comes to 3,640. The “Also by” page of a recently published book of his essays, Bradbury Speaks, lists thirty-two titles.