Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller at the Miami Book Fair International of 1986 Joseph Heller at the Miami Book Fair International of 1986
Occupation	Novelist, Short story writer, Playwright
Genre	Satire, Black Comedy
Notable works	Catch-22

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American satirical novelist, short story writer and playwright. He wrote the influential novel Catch-22 about American servicemen during World War II. The title of this work entered the English lexicon to refer to absurd, no-win choices, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, the same negative outcome is a certainty.

Heller is widely regarded as one of the best post-World War II satirists. Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain exemplars of modern satire.

Early years

Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents from Russia. Even as a child, he loved to write; at the age of eleven, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland. He sent it to New York Daily News, which rejected it. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to Italy, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it." On his return home he "felt like a hero... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs."

After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California and NYU on the G.I. Bill. In 1949, he received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Following his graduation, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St. Catherine's College in Oxford University. After returning home, he taught composition at Penn State University for two years, then briefly worked for Time, Inc., before taking a job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency, where he worked alongside future novelist Mary Higgins Clark. At home, Heller would write. He was first published in 1948, when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories. That first story nearly won the "Atlantic First."

Career

Catch-22

While sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of a hook, "It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him." Within the next day, he began to envision the story that could result from this beginning, and invented the characters and the plot, as well as the tone and form that the story would eventually take. Within a week, he had finished the first chapter and sent it to his agent. He did not do any more writing for the next year, as he planned the rest of the story. The initial chapter was published in 1955 as "Catch-18", in Issue 7 of New World Writing.

His only son, Jeremiah Landrum, currently resides in Knox, Indiana. Although he originally did not intend the story to be longer than a novelette, Heller was able to add enough substance to the plot that he felt it could become his first novel. When he was one-third done with the work, his agent, Candida Donadio, began submitting the novel to several publishers. Heller was not particularly attached to the work, and decided that he would not finish it if publishers were not interested. The work was never rejected, and was soon purchased by Simon and Schuster, who gave him US $750 and promised him an additional $750 when the full manuscript was delivered. Heller missed his deadline by four to five years, but, after eight years of thought, delivered the novel to his publisher.

The finished novel describes the wartime experiences of Army Air Corps Captain John Yossarian. Yossarian devises multiple strategies to avoid combat missions, but the military bureaucracy is always able to find a way to make him stay. As Heller observed, "Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts -- and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?" Heller has also commented that "peace on earth would mean the end of civilisation as we know it" -- perhaps further food for thought when reading Catch-22, in which the concept and circumstances of war are so overwhelming and fundamental.

Just before publication, the novel's title was changed to Catch-22 to avoid confusion with Leon Uris's new novel, Mila 18. The novel was published in hardback in 1961 to mixed reviews, with the Chicago Sun-Times calling it "the best American novel in years", while other critics deride it as "disorganized, unreadable, and crass". It sold only 30,000 copies in the United States hardback in its first year of publication. (Reaction was very different in Great Britain, where, within one week of its publication, the novel reached number one on the bestseller lists.) Once it was released in paperback in October 1962, however, Catch-22 caught the imaginations of many baby-boomers, who identified with the novel's anti-war sentiments. The book went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States. The novel's title became a buzzword for a dilemma with no easy way out. Now considered a classic, the book was listed at number 7 on Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the century. The United States Air Force Academy uses the novel to "help prospective officers recognize the dehumanizing aspects of bureaucracy."

The movie rights to the novel were purchased in 1962, and, combined with his royalties, made Heller a millionaire. The film, which was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Alan Arkin, Jon Voight and Orson Welles, was not released until 1970.

Other works

Shortly after Catch-22 was published, Heller thought of an idea for his next novel, which would become Something Happened. He did not act on this idea for two years, however. During that time period he focused on scripts, completing the final screenplay for the movie adaptation of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, as well as a television comedy script that eventually aired as part of "McHale's Navy". He also completed a play in only six weeks, but spent a great deal of time working with the producers as it was brought to the stage.

In 1969, Heller wrote a play called We Bombed in New Haven. The play delivered an anti-war message while discussing the Vietnam War. It was originally produced by the Repertory Company of the Yale Drama School, with Stacey Keach in the starring role. After a slight revision, it was published by Alfred Knopf and then debuted on Broadway, starring Jason Robards.

Heller's follow-up novel, Something Happened was finally published in 1974. Although critics were enthusiastic about the book, book buyers were not. Heller wrote an additional four novels, each of which took him several years to complete. One of his later novels, Closing Time, revisited many of the characters who had been featured in Catch-22 as they adjusted to post-war New York. All of the novels sold respectably well, but could not duplicate the success of his debut. Told by an interviewer that he had never produced anything else as good as Catch-22, Heller famously responded, "Who has?"

Work process

Heller did not begin work on a story until he had envisioned both a first and last line. The first sentence usually appeared to him "independent of any conscious preparation". In most cases, the sentence did not inspire a second sentence. At times, he would be able to write several pages before giving up on that hook. Usually, within an hour or so of receiving his inspiration, Heller would have mapped out a basic plot and characters for the story. When he was ready to begin writing, he would focus on one paragraph at a time, until he had three or four handwritten pages, which he would then spend several hours reworking.

Heller maintained that he did not "have a philosophy of life, or a need to organize its progression. My books are not constructed to 'say anything.'" Only when he was almost one-third finished with the novel would he gain a clear vision of what it should be about. At that point, with the idea solidified, he would rewrite all that he had finished and then continue to the end of the story. The finished version of the novel would often not begin or end with the sentences he had originally envisioned, although he usually tried to include the original opening sentence somewhere in the text.

Illness

On Sunday, December 13, 1981, Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a debilitating syndrome that was to leave him temporarily paralyzed. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of Mount Sinai Medical Hospital the same day (Heller 1986, pp. 23–34), and remained there, bedridden, until his condition had improved enough to permit his transfer to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, which occurred on January 26, 1982 (Heller 1986, pp. 170–174). His illness and recovery are recounted at great length in the autobiographical No Laughing Matter (Heller 1986), which contains alternating chapters by Heller and his good friend Speed Vogel. The book reveals the assistance and companionship Heller received during this period from a number of his prominent friends—Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman and George Mandel among them.

Heller eventually made a substantial recovery. In 1984, while in the process of divorcing his wife of 35 years, he met Valerie Humphries, the nurse who had helped him to recover, and later married her.

Later years

Heller returned to St. Catherine's as a visiting Fellow, for a term, in 1991 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998, he released a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in which he relived his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered some details about the inspirations for Catch-22.

He died of a heart attack at his home in December 1999, shortly after the completion of his final novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. On hearing of Heller's death, his friend Kurt Vonnegut said, "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for American letters."

Catch-22 Controversies

In April 1998, Lewis Pollock wrote to The Sunday Times for clarification as to "the amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personnel injuries and incidents" in Catch-22 and a novel published in England in 1951. The book that spawned the request was written by Louis Falstein and titled The Sky is a Lonely Place in Britain and Face of a Hero in the United States. Falstein's novel was available two years before Heller wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 (1953) while he was a student at Oxford. The Times stated: "Both have central characters who are using their wits to escape the aerial carnage; both are haunted by an omnipresent injured airman, invisible inside a white body cast". Stating he had never read Falstein's novel, or heard of him, Heller said: "My book came out in 1961[;] I find it funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself, who died just last year"(The Washington Post, April 27, 1998).

Works

Short stories

• Catch As Catch Can: The Collected Stories and Other Writings (2003)

Autobiographies

• No Laughing Matter (1986)
• Now And Then (1998)

Novels

• Catch-22 (1961)
• Something Happened (1974)
• Good as Gold (1979)
• God Knows (1984)
• Picture This (1988)
• Closing Time (1994)
• Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000)

Plays

• We Bombed in New Haven (1967)
• Catch 22 (1971)
• Clevinger's Trial (1973)

Screenplays

• Sex and the Single Girl (1964)
• Casino Royale (1967) (uncredited)
• Dirty Dingus Magee (1970)

References

• Heller, Joseph (1986). No Laughing Matter. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 0-399-13086-1. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• [2] transcript of conversation with Ramona Koval, ABC Radio National, recorded 1998 and rebroadcast on The Book Show, June 9, 2008
• A Joseph Heller Archive at the University at South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library
• Joseph Heller's Penn State University historical marker
• The Paris Review interview
• Joseph Heller at the Internet Book List
• New York Times Obituary for Joseph Heller