Joseph Heller (1923-1999). Biography and creativity

The novelist, satirist, short story writer, playwright, and screenplay writer Joseph Heller is best known for Catch-22 (1961), a postwar novel filled with dark humor that lampoons government bureaucracy, big business, and the military. This novel, along with the work of his contemporaries Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, inaugurated a new era of sociocritical, ironical literary responses to the cold war, post-World War II consumerism, and, eventually, the Vietnam War. Heller holds the honor of introducing a new phrase to the American vocabulary: Catch-22, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, denotes “a supposed law or regulation containing provisions which are mutually frustrating [or . . .] a set of circumstances in which one requirement [is] dependent upon another, which is in turn dependent upon the first.”

This concept, used to characterize how individuals get trapped in the contradictory and absurd machinations of modern bureaucracies, forms the novel’s central trope and a dominant theme in Heller’s works. Although Heller’s subsequent 10 novels, autobiographical memoirs, and plays never received the critical success of his first novel, Catch-22 is a landmark work in 20th century American fiction that has sold over 18 million copies and continues to be taught and read in high schools and colleges across the United States.

Heller was born on May 1, 1923, to Russian Jewish immigrants, Lena and Isaac Heller, in Brooklyn, New York. Lena knew very little English, so little that Heller and his two older siblings, Sylvia and Lee, had to coach her so that she could be eligible to vote. Isaac, an agnostic socialist, drove a delivery truck for a bakery until he bled to death after having surgery when young Joseph was five. Heller later recalled in his autobiography, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (1998), the profound effect his father’s untimely departure had on his psyche: “I was biting my fingernails at the age of seven. And except for two hospital confinements very much later, during which my anxieties were focused on inescapable concerns, I have gone on biting them and still do” (14). These anxieties about death, which preoccupied Heller’s mind at a very young age, are reflected in the preoccupations of his protagonists, such as John Yossarian in Catch-22 and Closing Time or Bob Slocum, the narrator of Something Happened (1974).

Growing up in moderate poverty amid the ocean beaches and amusement parks of Coney Island, Heller became familiar with the nature of public spectacles, confidence tricks, and rampant capitalism at a young age. On the decline as a tourist destination for Heller’s entire childhood, many of the rides and prize stands that populated Coney Island prospered by luring customers to spend money for things of inferior value. As Heller later recalled: “All of this [provided] practical, worldly knowledge that taught us to always look for fair value for money. We also learned at an early age a fact of capitalism that directed us toward the antithetical principal that it is usually impossible to obtain fair value” (Now and Then 51).

The contradictory and absurd nature of the predicament consumers found themselves in at Coney Island made a strong impression on Heller. The barkers, who would walk up to passers-by and offer to guess their age, weight, occupation, or other personal information, provided another bit of “practical, worldly knowledge” for the young Heller, who described the spectacle as follows: “The fact was that the barker could never lose. He knew no more about the tricks of the trade than you do, but he always came out ahead, right or wrong, because the customer could never win . . . [because] the prize at stake invariably cost him less, considerably less, than the patron had spent to win it” (51-52). As David Seed has observed, Heller’s comic and absurd vision of the world seems to have been partially gleaned from the showmen who populated his childhood.

Since his siblings already had jobs in Manhattan, Heller had many hours alone at the family apartment to read whatever was available, which included short stories and essays from magazines like Collier’s, Liberty, and the New Yorker. Heller also loved the novels of the British humorist P. G. Wodehouse and the humorous writings of Robert Benchley. Heller attended and graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. During his years there he distinguished himself as an especially creative student. Early signs of Heller’s artistic leanings include a book report he wrote on Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) that was written from Tom Sawyer’s perspective, and an autobiographical, first-person account of the metal used to make the gun that killed Abraham Lincoln (Now and Then 15).

Heller recalls, “I was born, I remember, in a mine in Chile, in a shovelful of iron ore” (15). These ambitions to write prompted Heller, then 16, to submit a short story inspired by Russia’s recent invasion of Finland to various periodicals. Following the valiant efforts of a lone Finnish soldier trying to fend off Russian invaders, it was rejected.

After graduating from high school in 1941, Heller enrolled in night school at Brooklyn College. Before classes commenced, he dropped out, favoring the nocturnal social life New York afforded him. In the year that followed, Heller worked various jobs, most notably as a file clerk for a casualty insurance company—an experience he was later to revisit through Bob Slocum’s character in Something Happened— before joining the Army Air Corps in 1942.

Stationed with the 488th Squadron of the 340th Bombardment Group at Alisan, Corsica, during the height of World War II, Heller served as a wing bombardier in the twin-engine, medium-range B-25 bomber. From their sunny Mediterranean base, the 488th was assigned to bomb rail and highway bridges in support of the Allied advance through France and Italy. Heller eventually flew 60 missions in the flakladen skies of southern Europe. Many of the harrowing events John Yossarian, the antihero of Catch-22, lives through actually happened to Heller during his time in combat. At first, the routine risks of flying over heavily defended cities did little to affect Heller’s psyche: He remembered these early brushes with potential disaster as like “a fantasy nightmare from which I had luckily escaped without harm in my trusting innocence, like an ingenious kid in a Grimm fairy tale” (Now and Then 178).

On August 15, 1944, the day allied forces landed at Normandy, Heller’s squadron incurred heavy casualties during a bombing run on the bridges at Avignon in southern France. After his copilot became temporarily crazy, purposefully diving the plane back into the clouds of flak they had just escaped, Heller had to attend to a wounded fellow crew member. This mission changed the face of the war for Heller, shattering his fearless innocence and serving as the basis for one of the climactic scenes in Catch-22. Heller was terrified of flying for the rest of his life, electing to return to the States in a troop carrier when his tour of duty finally ended. In his time overseas Heller was promoted to lieutenant, earning an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit Citation.

After completing his 60th mission—under the protective cover of extra armored vests—Heller had to wait in Alisan for his orders, spending much of his time in front of a borrowed typewriter writing short stories. Although he emulated the works of authors familiar to Heller at the time, such as the novelists Ernest Hemingway and Jerome Weidman and short story writers William Saroyan and Irwin Shaw, these efforts little resembled the semiautobiographical narratives for which he would become famous. The only surviving work from this period, “I Don’t Love You Anymore,” chronicles the return of a married serviceman from combat duty and his realization that he no longer loves his wife. His first published work, the 2,000-word piece appeared in the publication Story in 1945.

Upon his return, Heller married his affluent girlfriend, Shirley Held, whom he had met at a resort in the Catskills when on leave from the Air Corps, and boarded a train bound for Los Angeles, where he pursued an English degree at the University of Southern California under the GI Bill. Encouraged by his composition instructor Maurice Baudin and the Story editor Whit Burnett, Heller wrote a series of fiction and nonfiction pieces and submitted them for publication. Eventually, Esquire magazine accepted his short story “Beating the Bangtails,” under the title “Bookies, Beware!” (1947). Heller had written the story, a vignette on winning bets on horses at the track by utilizing “pure science,” for a freshman composition course. Ironically, the $200 Heller received for the essay was quickly lost at the track.

Transferring to New York University, Heller continued writing for Esquire and the Atlantic Monthly, publishing another four stories before he completed his B.A. in 1948. Heller spent the next two years earning his master’s degree in English at Columbia University and studying overseas at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, as a Fulbright Scholar. These academic achievements earned him a place on the English faculty at Pennsylvania State College upon his return. Life as an academic proved to be unpalatable to the author, who, after only two years of teaching, decided to move into advertising, accepting a copywriter position at a small advertising agency in 1952. Over the next nine years Heller held various advertising positions at Time, Look, and, finally, McCall’s. This prolonged exposure to corporate culture and office politics would eventually form the basis for Heller’s second novel, Something Happened (1974).

It was during this nine-year stint in advertising that Heller composed his first novel and master- work, Catch-22. In 1955 Heller got the first chapter of Catch-22 (then entitled Catch-18) published in the anthology New World Writing #7, a collection that also contained an excerpted chapter from Jack Kerouac’s novel-in-progress On the Road (1957). Three years later, he signed a contract with Simon and Schuster for the publication of Catch-18, then only one third finished. As the 1961 publication date approached, Heller’s editor noticed that a prominent science fiction writer, Leon Uris, was due to publish a novel entitled Mila 18 the same year. To prevent confusion, Heller chose the number 22 instead, a number that, Heller admitted, fit the novel better since repetition is such a significant device in the narrative.

Despite Heller’s obscurity in the publishing world and to the reading public, Catch-22 enjoyed early financial success as an “underground” hit, partly due to an extensive publicity campaign by the publisher. Critical reception was polarized, with critics such as Whitney Balliet decrying the unconventional and repetitive style of the novel in his review for the New Yorker. Others took issue with the unpatriotic attitude of Heller’s deserting protagonist or the irreverent sexual references sprinkled throughout the narrative. Nonetheless, many reviewers heaped praise upon Heller’s first published effort, as Robert Brustein, in the New Republic, proclaimed it to be “one of the most bitterly funny works in the language.”

Soon after it became obvious that he could make a living by the pen, Heller quit his promotions manager job at McCall’s and devoted his full attention to writing. While it took 14 years for Heller to write his next novel, Something Happened (1974), he wrote several dramatic works in the intervening years. In 1967, Heller’s two-act play, We Bombed in New Haven, was produced at Yale. The play contains many allusions to other wars and creates an overall sense of disconnection: The actors play actors who believe they are performing roles as air force servicemen in an unnamed modern war.

The action of the play includes both actors performing roles and scenes where the actors reflect on the roles they are playing, thus highlighting the fictional nature of the work. Here Heller casts a wide net, reflecting upon the fictional nature of war news, the way information about combat is withheld from both servicemen and the public, and voices a strong antiwar message at the height of the Vietnam War. Heller also created a dramatization of Catch-22 in 1971, and Clevenger’s Trial, a one-act play drawn from the eighth chapter of the novel, a flashback in which Yossarian recalls Lieutenant Schiesskopf’s fascination with military parades.

Heller’s second novel, Something Happened, depicts the business world through the eyes of Bob Slocum, who, through dreams and memories, tries to understand what has made him who he is: the “something” that “happened” to him. Through Slocum, a business manager experiencing a midlife crisis, Heller critiques corporate business culture, depicting the vacuous nature and spiritual bankruptcy of upper- middle-class American life. With his next novel, Good as Gold (1979), Heller presents a parody of the American Jewish novel through Bruce Gold, an English professor who aspires to a high-ranking governmental position. Again, Heller depicts the federal government, with all of its political machinations and bureaucratic red tape, to comment upon the absurd nature of contemporary American society.

Next, Heller wrote God Knows (1984), another comic novel, this time one that takes on a subject some considered blasphemous: a first-person biography of King David on his deathbed that is a thinly veiled allegory for the plight of the modern Jew. While writing God Knows, Heller developed Guillain-Barre syndrome (for more information on this rare immune disorder, see http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/gbs/gbs.htm). Eventually Heller became completely paralyzed, suffering with this debilitating condition for two full years before recovery. With his friend Speed Vogel, Heller reflected on this experience in No Laughing Matter (1986), which chronicles his illness.

Five works mark the end of Heller’s illustrious career: Picture This (1987), a meditation on Rembrandt’s Homer Contemplating the Bust of Apollo (to see an image of the painting, search the Internet for a site such as http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/histart/ images/questions/aristotle_bust_homer.jpg), Closing Time (1994), a sequel to Catch-22, which picks up the life of the twice-divorced Yossarian and is set in Coney Island and New York; Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (1998), an autobiographical memoir; and the posthumously published Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000), a novel about an elderly author who tries to write a novel that will be as successful as his earlier work, a plot that mirrors Heller’s writing career.

In addition to enriching our modern lexicon, Catch-22 earned Heller the reputation as one of the most significant American novelists in the second half of the 20th century. As did George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Catch-22 not only spoke to a disillusioned generation but helped form our understanding of the dehumanizing aspects of war; the convoluted, senseless nature of modern institutions; and the absurd nature of bureaucratic doublespeak.