If the world didn’t have enough problems already, there have been disturbing reports out of New York about Joseph Heller. Assumed by many to be one of the funniest writers alive, largely because of his World War II burlesque, “Catch-22,” Heller has been catching some grief lately about his comic image.
Not only have dispatches from the publishing front cast doubts on his talents as a humorous writer, but one interview depicted him as an unlovable curmudgeon, a “crotchety old fogey” of 71 whose offensive habits include sulkiness, gluttony and a “tendency to growl.” Worse still, he was accused of behaving in a “winsome” manner if it would help him sell books.
Heller took the article (in The New York Times) in good spirits, assuming that the writer, an old friend, had her tongue in cheek. “I thought it was funny,” Heller says, “but a great many other people weren’t so sure.” Foremost among the skeptics was a correspondent for New York magazine, who passed along the mock slurs as if they were serious and, according to Heller, “was stunned that I was not as shocked as he was.”
Sitting beside the pool of his East Hampton home on a humid August afternoon, Heller exhibits no signs of crotchety or sulky behavior. (With no food in sight, it’s impossible to verify reports of his gluttony.) But he’s certainly winsome and charming as he talks (in a growl that’s straight out of his boyhood Brooklyn) about his latest novel, “Closing Time” (Simon & Schuster), which, he hastens to assure a visitor, is not really a sequel to “Catch-22,” no matter what it says on the book jacket.
“I’m not sure what word does apply,” Heller says of “Closing Time,” acknowledging that he’s gun-shy because sequels to novels as momentous as “Catch-22” often tarnish the memory and reputation of the original. “If I’d simply picked up where `Catch-22′ ended, there’d be good reason to derogate the book.”
“Closing Time” does pick up nearly 50 years after the end of “Catch-22,” which turned the war in Europe into a theater of the absurd, a bloody “Duck Soup.” And Heller does resurrect several of its zaniest characters, chiefly Yossarian, the misfit Air Force bombardier, who showed up in formation naked, refused to fly more missions, and vowed to live forever or die trying. More than anyone else, Yossarian, an Armenian pretending to be an Assyrian, embodied the seditious, Marx Brothers spirit of “Catch-22”: that in a world of such celestial illogic, a measure of insanity is required to remain sane.
As “Closing Time” opens, Yossarian is 68 and in the midst of his second divorce, after a helter-skelter career in advertising, speechwriting and stockbrokering. Although he’s in perfect health, Yossarian is no longer sure he wants to live forever, not in a world of “inflation and deflation, higher interest rates and lower interest rates, the budget deficit, the threat of war and the dangers of peace . . . friction, entropy, radiation, and gravity.”
Like Yossarian, whose fictional World War II experiences roughly correspond to his own, Heller says he’s bewildered and amused by the chaos and paradoxes of the peacetime world. As the 20th Century approaches its closing time, the author speaks of the “tremendous economic, moral and ethical confusion,” the absence of youthful fervor, of the “very grave menaces confronting us, from the accidents of nuclear physics to the blunders of political leaders in one country or another.”
But the threat to human life and world stability still isn’t as grave or as direct as it was during World War II, Heller adds, so a novel that tried to duplicate or recapture the lunacy, attitudes and energy of “Catch-22” wouldn’t have been “appropriate to our time. It would have seemed dated and unconvincing.”
In the 33 years since its publication, “Catch-22” has become a milestone of black humor, acquiring a reputation as a savage lampoon of military mindlessness, with the title replacing “snafu” as the operative term for its surreal incompetence. But there’s a catch, Heller points out, a fundamental misunderstanding about the message of the book, which was neither anti-war nor anti-military.
Here’s to the military!
“Never in `Catch-22′ are the necessity, the wisdom or the righteousness of participating in that war questioned,” says Heller, who flew more than 60 missions for the Army Air Corps and has always insisted that World War II was “one of the best times in my life. My income had never been higher and it was a good deal of fun-when we weren’t fighting.”
While he certainly intended to ridicule aspects of the military, Heller adds, the main targets of “Catch-22” were our social, political and economic systems, next to which the military Establishment looks strong and healthy, almost rational. “The military makes its blunders, but it’s possibly the only well-regulated, well-operating organization that America is capable of,” he says. “It hasn’t gone to hell.”
Along with Yossarian, Heller reactivates several other “Catch-22” irregulars in “Closing Time,” namely Milo Minderbinder, the black-market mess officer who now heads M&M Enterprises and is trying to sell the government on his “Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber”; Milo’s devious aide-de-camp, ex-PFC Wintergreen; and the woeful Chaplain Tappman, who was permanently quarantined after his bladder began producing heavy water.
Alternating and contrasting with the comic episodes in “Closing Time” are the lamentations and recollections of two new fictional characters, Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz, both of whom have grown up near Coney Island, the novelist’s old neighborhood, and survived World War II combat.
“I thought the most convincing way to give the book an authentic feeling, of the way lives were lived over the past 50 years, was by drawing on my own life,” Heller says. Although Coney Island assumes grotesque, Dantesque proportions in “Closing Time,” Heller has mostly affectionate memories of his childhood playground.
“We had the boardwalk. We played football on the beach in the winter. It was a continual carnival, as good a place to grow up as could possibly exist on the face of the earth.”
While Sammy Singer’s combat experiences, flying missions off the coast of Italy, also parallel those of Heller (and Yossarian), Lew Rabinowitz has survived the firebombing of Dresden, along with Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist and friend of the author, who has a nominal cameo in “Closing Time.” Writing the novel, Heller relied on Vonnegut for firsthand descriptions of the Dresden holocaust, “so I included him as a character rather than thanking him in the preface.”
Melancholy times
Flattered to learn that he’s in the book, which he says he hasn’t read, Vonnegut hopes to return the favor by casting Heller in one of his novels. Testifying to Heller’s “prickly” but enduring comedic instincts, Vonnegut adds: “I’ve got a great line of his that I want to use. He said, `If it wasn’t for World War II, I’d be in the dry-cleaning business.’ “
However playful and surrealistic, the predominant tone of “Closing Time” is remorseful and melancholy, echoing the spirit of our age, the author says. The book’s frequently dolorous mood may partly account for early media speculation about the decine of Heller’s comic resources. In its advance review of the novel, for instance, Publishers Weekly referred to the “sophomoric doodling and longeurs,” concluding, “Despite flashes of the old wit and fire, this is a tired, dispirited and dispiriting novel.”
If he’s dispirited about the bum notice, Heller isn’t letting it show. As he notes, his experience with “Catch-22” three decades earlier had prepared him for rejection. Though the novel is a contemporary classic (and the title paradox an entry in most contemporary dictionaries), there were as many negative as positive reviews. The single most devastating was one by Chicago novelist Richard Stern in The New York Times, which Heller recalls with gleeful hindsight in his introduction to the 33rd anniversary edition of “Catch-22,” published simultaneously with “Closing Time.”
If “Closing Time” is not as explosively funny as “Catch-22,” if its pace is adagio rather than scherzo, that’s the way Heller wanted it to be. The humor is deliberately “saturnine,” he says, pointing out that “Catch-22” wasn’t strictly a laugh riot either. “One thing that continually surprises me is how many people say it’s the funniest book they’ve ever read. . . . I have to tell them that it’s not just funny. There’s a great deal in it that’s morbid and violent.”
A decade of trauma
Considering Heller’s traumas over the last decade, it’s amazing that he has managed to maintain a semblance of his formidable humor and high spirits. The trouble began with the dissolution of his marriage of 36 years, followed by an attack of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder that left him temporarily paralyzed.
“It was agonizing, but not from the pain,” he recalls. “I could still talk, which kept me going, because I could joke all day long with medical personnel and friends.” But, Heller adds, “The nights were horrible,” and the entire episode was, as the novelist titled the memoir he wrote with his friend Speed Vogel, “No Laughing Matter.”
Recuperating from his divorce and Guillain-Barre, Heller left Manhattan and moved into his East Hampton summer house with his nurse, Valerie, now his second wife. They stayed through the winter, then permanently settled here. “When we came out in May of ’82, I had no idea that it’d be so long before I could take care of myself. But the house was warm and we discovered there was a very active social life out here.”
Other than a visible tremor in his hands, Heller appears to be as vigorous and healthy as Yossarian in “Closing Time.” His polar cap of hair is set off by a deep tan, and he’s dressed in the Hamptons’ semi-official summer uniform: polo shirt, shorts and sandals. “I walk a little stiffly, my upper lip is rigid when I talk, and just about every one of my muscles is weaker than it would have been without the disease,” he says.
“But I can do everything except run, which I would not want to do anyway. Thank God, my appetite and digestion are still good. I love to eat and drink.”
As its origins suggest, Heller’s two-story East Hampton home is an oversized summer cottage, not in the slightest palatial, despite the pool and the impressive gardens. Showing his visitor around, the novelist stops on a porch to point out some wall photos taken on Corsica during World War II, identifying the fliers in his squadron who were prototypes for characters in “Catch-22.” The tour ends in the studio behind his garage, where “I do my three handwritten pages a day.”
Heller has done little writing since he finished “Closing Time.” In recent weeks, he has played poolside host to a stream of media interviewers, drawn from as far as Denmark, Germany and Scotland, by the prospect of a “sequel” to “Catch-22.”
No more apologies
When “Closing Time” reaches bookstores, Heller will hit the road on a long promotional mission, taking him to Chicago (Oct. 11 and 12) and other U.S. cities, then he’s off to Europe. Without any ideas yet for another book, Heller is happy for the diversion. “I enjoy it because the publisher puts me in first-class hotels and I’m the center of attention wherever I go.
“I no longer have to pretend that I’m not absolutely delighted to have succeeded as a novelist, to be well known and respected,” he says. “I suppose it’s one of the things that keeps me from late-life depression. The most satisfying thing is that I’ve done the work I want to do and almost never have to associate with people I don’t like.”
Despite its intimations of mortality, Heller does not expect “Closing Time” to close out his career as a novelist. By the time he arrives back in East Hampton and recovers from his tour, he’s confident he will have refueled his imagination and be ready to start on another book.
Among the sadder notes sounded in “Closing Time” are those that allude to the short afterlife of most authors, however famous in their heyday. “Almost nobody knows who William Saroyan is,” Heller says. “I wouldn’t be surprised that in 10 or 15 years, references to Truman Capote will be lost on the younger generation.”
And Joseph Heller? The novelist isn’t worried about his own literary staying power, thanks to “Catch-22.”
“I think that’s going to last,” he says with a winsome smile, but one that plainly indicates this is no laughing matter.
