Joseph Heller

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Joseph Heller was born on the 1st of May, 1923, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrant parents from Russia. By the time he died in December 1999, the title of his first novel had entered the English language itself. Not as a book title people might vaguely recall, but as a living phrase that people use to describe the most maddening kind of trap: a rule that defeats itself, a situation where every exit is blocked by the very system that supposedly governs it. Catch-22 became shorthand for that experience. What kind of man writes a book that warps the language permanently? What did it cost him, and what came after? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. From Coney Island to Combat

  ›

  Heller's first attempt at writing came as a teenager, when he sent a story about the Soviet invasion of Finland to the New York Daily News. They rejected it. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, he spent a year cycling through jobs: blacksmith's apprentice, messenger boy, filing clerk. At 19, in 1942, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was at the Italian Front, flying 60 combat missions as a bombardier in a B-25, with the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, 12th Air Force.

  Heller later remembered those early days with complicated warmth. He said the war felt like "fun in the beginning" and that there was "something glorious about it." Coming home, he "felt like a hero." He acknowledged that others found his service remarkable, but he was frank about it: many of his 60 missions were what pilots called milk runs, relatively safe by combat standards.

  The G.I. Bill carried him forward. He studied English at the University of Southern California, then at New York University, graduating in 1948. A year later he earned his M.A. from Columbia. He then spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St Catherine's Society, Oxford, taught composition at Pennsylvania State University for two years through 1952, and briefly worked at Time Inc. before landing as a copywriter at a small advertising agency, where he worked alongside a future novelist named Mary Higgins Clark. In 1948 The Atlantic published one of his short stories; it nearly won the magazine's "Atlantic First" prize.

• 3. The Making of Catch-22

  ›

  One morning in 1953, sitting at home, Heller thought of two sentences: "It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Yossarian fell madly in love with him." Within a day he had envisioned the characters, the plot, and the tone. Within a week he had finished the first chapter. He did not write another word for a year, spending that time planning the rest of the story.

  The opening chapter was published in 1955 as "Catch-18" in Issue 7 of New World Writing. His agent, Candida Donadio, sent the manuscript to publishers when Heller was one-third done. He was not deeply attached to it. If publishers passed, he told himself, he would not bother finishing it. Simon & Schuster did not pass. They paid him $750 upfront and promised another $750 on delivery of the full manuscript.

  Heller missed his deadline by four to five years. The title changed just before publication in 1961, from Catch-18 to Catch-22, specifically to avoid confusion with Leon Uris's new novel, Mila 18. The finished book describes Army Air Corps Captain John Yossarian, who devises multiple strategies to escape combat, only to find that military bureaucracy always outmaneuvers him. Heller summed up the theme plainly: "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?"

  Reviews were split on publication in hardback. The Chicago Sun-Times called it "the best American novel in years" while other critics dismissed it as "disorganized, unreadable, and crass." In the United States it sold only 30,000 hardback copies in its first year. Britain told a different story: within one week of its UK publication, it reached number one on the bestseller lists. When the paperback arrived in October 1962, the novel found its true audience among baby boomers who identified with its anti-war position. It went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States alone, and was listed at number 7 on Modern Library's ranking of the top 100 novels of the century.

• 4. The Film, The Charges, and the Millions

  ›

  The movie rights to Catch-22 were purchased in 1962. Combined with his royalties, the deal made Heller a millionaire. The film did not appear for eight years; directed by Mike Nichols, it starred Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Art Garfunkel, and Orson Welles, and was released in 1970.

  In April 1998, a letter to The Sunday Times raised an unsettling question. Lewis Pollock wrote in to ask about "the amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personnel injuries and incidents" between Catch-22 and a novel published in England in 1951, two years before Heller wrote his opening chapter. That book, by Louis Falstein, was called The Sky Is a Lonely Place in Britain and Face of a Hero in the United States. The Times noted that both novels feature a central character using his wits to escape aerial combat and both include an omnipresent injured airman concealed inside a white body cast.

  Heller's response was straightforward. He said he had never read Falstein's novel and had never heard of him. He noted that his own book had been out since 1961 and found it "funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself, who died just last year." The matter did not develop further into any legal dispute.

• 5. After the First Novel

  ›

  Shortly after Catch-22 appeared, Heller conceived the idea for Something Happened, but sat on it for two years. During that interval he wrote scripts: the final screenplay for the film adaptation of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, and a television comedy script that aired as part of McHale's Navy.

  In 1967 he wrote the play We Bombed in New Haven in just six weeks, though he spent far longer working with producers to bring it to the stage. The play carried an anti-war message aimed at the Vietnam War and was originally produced by the Repertory Company of the Yale Drama School, with Stacy Keach in the lead. After revision it debuted on Broadway starring Jason Robards and was published by Alfred A. Knopf.

  Something Happened finally appeared in 1974. Critics embraced it, and both the hardcover and paperback editions reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Heller wrote five more novels after that, each taking him several years. Closing Time revisited many of Catch-22's characters as they navigated post-war New York. All of them sold respectably; none of them repeated what the first book had done. Heller acknowledged the situation with dry humor. In 1993 he told The Times: "When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"

  His last novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, takes its title as a deliberate reworking of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, as a Young Man. The book follows an aging writer trying to produce one final great work to match his earlier success. It is widely read as Heller's meditation on his own career and the shadow cast by his debut. He finished it shortly before his death, and it was published posthumously.

• 6. The Work Process

  ›

  Heller would not begin a story until he had envisioned both a first line and a last line. The first sentence usually arrived, as he put it, "independent of any conscious preparation." That sentence rarely inspired a second one. He might write several pages before abandoning a particular opening. Usually within an hour of receiving the initial idea, though, he would have mapped out a basic plot and a cast of characters.

  Once he was ready to write, he worked one paragraph at a time, building up three or four handwritten pages before spending several hours reworking them. The strangest feature of his process was the threshold: only when he was almost one-third finished with a novel would he gain a clear sense of what the book was actually about. At that point he would go back and rewrite everything he had already written, then continue forward. He was also candid about the fate of his opening sentences: the finished novel often did not begin or end with the lines he had originally conceived, though he usually tried to work the original opening somewhere into the final text.

• 7. Illness, Friends, and Later Life

  ›

  On Sunday, the 13th of December, 1981, Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a condition that left him temporarily paralyzed. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of Mount Sinai Medical Hospital the same day. He remained there, bedridden, until his condition had improved enough for a transfer on the 26th of January, 1982, to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.

  The illness became the subject of No Laughing Matter, an autobiographical book with alternating chapters written by Heller and his close friend Speed Vogel. The book records the support Heller received from a circle of prominent friends: Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman, and George Mandel among them. One of his nurses during his recovery was Valerie Humphries; in 1987, he married her.

  Heller had been married since 1945 to Shirley Held. They had two children, Erica born in 1952 and Theodore born in 1956, and divorced in 1981. He returned to St Catherine's, Oxford as a visiting Fellow in 1991 and was named an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998 he published a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in which he revisited his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered details about the inspirations behind Catch-22.

  He died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, on Long Island, in December 1999. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature at least twice, in 1972 and 1975. On learning of his death, Kurt Vonnegut said: "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for American literature."