Catch 22

Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller – review

Two views of Joseph Heller, the Coney Island satyr, explore life after a bestselling novel

Ian Sansom
guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 November 2011 22.55 GMT


'Always the hero or the goat' … Joseph Heller in 1996. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

At the end of his autobiography, Now and Then: A Memoir (1998), Joseph Heller sums up: "I have much to be pleased with, including myself, and I am. I have wanted to succeed, and I have … My appetite continues hearty, and is complemented by a sterling digestive system that almost never lets me down ... I have sufficient income and money to go on living as well as I want to ... I am in love with my wife," and "still find other women appealing." At least he was honest. Money. Fame. Women. Good food and plenty of it. He got what he wanted. And now he gets what he deserves.


Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life Was a Catch-22
by Erica Heller

Heller owed it all to one novel, published by Simon & Schuster on 10 October 1961; copies cost $5.95, in a print run of 7,500. Erica Heller, in her memoir of her father, calls it simply "the book". Tracy Daugherty, in his biography (Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller, Robson Press, £25), traces the trajectory towards its publication: how Catch-22 became catch-22. Erica is concerned more with the consequences: how Catch-22 became a catch-22.

From Daugherty we learn the facts. Heller was born and raised in Coney Island. "The only thing about America that interests me is Coney Island," Freud is famously reported to have remarked, and Coney Island in the 1930s was absolutely Freudtastic: gaudy, messy and magnificent; the subconscious of America. Heller left school, worked at some dead-end jobs, was drafted, and ended up flying 60 bombing missions, as bombardier, in Italy between May and October 1944. In 1945 he married Shirley Held, after some sly matchmaking by Shirley's mother. He went to the University of Southern California on the GI Bill, and then to New York University, studied writing, did an MA at Columbia, won a Fulbright, spent a year in Oxford, taught at Penn State, moved back to New York, and got into advertising, working as as copywriter. He drank a lot of martinis. Made some money. And then, in the early 1950s, he started serious work on a war story, based on his own experiences, that he called Catch-18.

Daugherty traces the development of Heller's style, which was part literary, part Borscht Belt spiel, and aimed entirely at the mass market. Everything he learned from writing copy on Madison Avenue he applied to his novel: "He strove for greater precision, clarity, punch." Heller jotted down phrases and ideas and scenes on index cards. He managed to get a few things published, got an agent, then an editor, Bob Gottlieb. With Gottlieb, he went to work on his novel as if it was an ad campaign for Remington Rand. Gottlieb compared them to surgeons: "You just cut it open, deal with the offending organs, and stitch it up again." With the novel in good shape, Gottlieb then came up with the revised title (Leon Uris was about to publish a novel called Mila 18).

Yossarian Slept Here fills in the picture, with its portrait of Heller family life BC (Before Catch), and AC (After Catch). They lived at the Apthorp, a famous New York apartment building. "The beauty parlour was just beneath our windows ... on hotter days when windows were thrown open ... what blew in was the sulfurous smell of ammonia mixed with peroxide. No matter what my mother served us for dinner, it smelled as if it were getting a permanent." AC, the family moved into a larger apartment. Heller got himself a fancy dog, a Bedlington terrier that he named Sweeney. He was drowning in royalty cheques. The catch? "Along with success," Heller later admitted, "come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide." And, simply, acting like an arse. Friends ceased inviting him to dinner. Asked why, one of them told him: "Joe, if I wanted to invite a 'celebrity', I would have invited Frank Sinatra."

At the height of his success Heller was capable, according to Erica, of eating two dinners, and polishing it off with two pints of ice-cream. On trips back to Coney Island, he'd treat himself to pea soup, a hot dog, fries, pizza, chow mein on a roll, and a hamburger with onions: he was, in several senses, a hollow man. He "took his meat, and his meals, unabashedly seriously"; everything else he treated as a joke. He had everything, but it wasn't enough. Maybe it was his experience in the war. Maybe it was because his father had died when he was four years old, though neither Daugherty nor Erica make much of the fact. Erica concludes simply that Heller was "indecipherable". Daugherty says the only thing he was missing was "his sense of himself".

Anyway, something had to happen: Something Happened happened, Heller's second novel, published almost 15 years after Catch-22. Erica describes it as "569 pages of hilarious but mordant, caustically wrapped, smouldering rage". If Catch-22 was Heller's frustrated, wayward, unruly denunciation of war, Something Happened was his denunciation of family life. It was too much for Shirley. As their relationship broke down, Heller tried to convince Erica that her mother was crazy, that all the stuff about his affairs with other women was just in Shirley's imagination. He insisted: "'I will never leave your mother! Never! ... Even if I can't write or sleep or function, I still won't leave her.' And then about a month later he left her." First came the messy divorce. Then Heller fired his agent, and eventually, left his publisher and editor, in search of ever bigger bucks. He got sick, married his nurse, wrote more novels, none of them as as good as Catch-22, was estranged from his children, and Shirley was reduced to becoming a waitress for a catering company, serving at parties in the Hamptons where years earlier she would have been the guest. Daugherty remarks that on a bombing raid, the bombardier "was always the hero or the goat". Heller was much bigger than that. He was the hero and the goat; the Coney Island satyr.

• Ian Sansom's Mobile Library series is published by Harper Perennial.