Joseph Heller thinks Catch-22 makes him America’s greatest novelist. What more can a man achieve? Well, he could try and be a bit nicer, writes Lynn Barber
Everyone told me beforehand that I would love Joseph Heller, and, of course, I already loved his writing. I belong to the generation that wore “Yossarian Lives!” badges on anti-Vietnam marches: Catch-22 was our Bible. Although it was written in the 1950s about World War II, it seemed to have been written for Vietnam.
Meeting Heller then would have been like meeting God, and even now – when he is 74 and long past his best as a writer – I sit up straighter when his terrible rasping Brooklyn accent comes on the phone. “Do you like food? Do you like clams? We’ll talk, th en go to this restaurant that has the best clams.”
He instructs me to take the jitney from Manhattan to Armagensett, Long Island, and he will meet me at the bus stop. When I get there, it is pouring and there is no one to meet me and no shelter. There is a church but it is locked. I curse Joseph Heller f rom the bottom of my heart.
He is full of apologies when he arrives 15 minutes later, but I’m not sure; I’m sure I saw him drive past earlier. I think he thought it was a good joke to let me wait a while. He is one of those loud-laughing, wisecracking, back-slapping, supposedly “jo vial” characters who always, in my experience, have a heart the size of a pea.
Later, he decided he liked me and switched into flirtatious mode and even kept urging me to miss my jitney home, but I felt as you do with a dog that has once nipped you on the ankle – “Yeah? You wag your tail now, but I’m not fooled.” Anyway, he drove m e back to his house on Long Island, with a short sightseeing detour to the rain-lashed beach.
“My wife likes the beach, she likes seeing all the children. I don’t do children.” Then on to his house – a pretty and presumably very valuable bit of real estate, with a guest cottage in the garden where he writes.
His wife was on the phone upstairs so I didn’t meet her until later – we talked in the kitchen. He told me I was to correct his English when I quoted him (I won’t, though) and he said: “Can I take it that you’ve read all my novels?” I lied and said yes. Actually I skipped Picture This, which even his publishers prefer to forget: it is no longer listed in the front of his paperbacks.
He is the hardest of all the great American novelists to place, partly because his oeuvre is so small (only six novels) and also because Catch-22 is that freakish and impossible thing – a “cult” novel that has sold more than 10-million copies. Some cult!
His second novel, Something Happened, though agreed by all critics to be his masterpiece, was far too dark to be popular. Personally, I have a soft spot for his third novel, Good as Gold (which his first wife’s divorce lawyer described as “The Mein Kampf of marriage”), but it is more conventional than the others.
After that, it is downhill all the way – his last novel, Closing Time (1994), got a $1-million advance on the strength of calling itself a sequel to Catch-22, but it was a mess.
He is also hard to judge on stylistic grounds. There are no dazzling passages of fine writing. He achieves his effects by repetition and accretion, circling round and digging deeper, like the process of psychoanalysis, so that by the end you know his pro tagonists so well you feel you have lived inside their brains.
That is why his new autobiography, Now and Then, is redundant. He has written it all already, and much more successfully, in his novels. And he has said often in interviews that he is no good at facts.
I get the impression that his heart was never in it – the chapters have titles like “On and On” and “And On and On” and “And On and On and On”, which is exactly how you feel.
We know about his growing up in Coney Island from Closing Time; his Jewishness from Good as Gold; his war experiences from Catch-22; and his early career in advertising from Something Happened. We know from almost every novel that he was an unfaithful hu sband and an unfond father.
And he wrote a non-fiction account, No Laughing Matter, of his 1982 brush with Guillain-Barre syndrome (a paralysing disease) during which he fell in love with his nurse, Valerie Humphries, and divorced his wife, Shirley, to marry her.
So Now and Then is an orange from which we have already sucked the juice. If you have not read Heller, don’t start here – start with Catch-22 or Good as Gold. Then take a deep breath and read Something Happened.
Still, we must talk about Now and Then because that is what he is plugging and he is a great believer in publicity. He said he decided to write it because he couldn’t think of an idea for another novel after Closing Time, but he had some leftover writing about Coney Island which he thought he could develop.
“I had all these words, and I was set to mind thinking about my past and, lacking an exciting idea for a novel, I began blocking this out. It was not a task; it became almost a form of psychoanalysis. I mean, recalling so many things about family life an d friends which had gone from my mind completely, it was an enjoyable experience. Often painful, recalling certain details.”
But his recall is never total. He can never really remember his father’s death, when he was five, which was obviously the key event, the “something happened” in his life. (“Something did happen to me somewhere to rob me of confidence and courage.”) His f amily never spoke about it and nor did he – they were not much given to emotion. He writes in Now and Then that, “I am walking proof of at least p art of [Sigmund] Freud’s theories of repression.”
He had psychoanalysis when going through his divorce, but he regards it as a failure because he could not recall anything before he was six years old. All he remembers of his father’s funeral is that an aunt gave him a dollar, and since then he has assoc iated money with life, and the absence of money with death. He used to say that he would commit suicide if he ever went broke.
Nor does he write about what made him a writer, or how he developed as a writer. He remembers being hugely impressed by Dos Passos’s USA when he was at school (though he doesn’t think it stands up now), but it wasn’t till he went to college after the war that he could read Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Up till then, he’d only read contemporary novels and, “They tend to have a great deal of plot and they move very quickly. And it turns out, my novels have very little plot and they don’t move quickly – that’s not a matter of aesthetic judgment so much as my author’s personality and my imagination.”
But he didn’t put all that in his autobiography: “My feeling is that there is nothing unusual about my career. Had I written what I think of as a full autobiography, I would have said more about that and more about my children, my marriage, more about th e individual experiences, but it’s not that kind of book. Above all, I wanted this to be a book in which I come through as modest.” Can he be seri ous?
He says it with a straight face, but it could be another of his tricky, deadpan jokes. Modesty and Joseph Heller do not belong in the same sentence. He is outrageously egocentric – however much you might ask about his wife or his children or his views on other novelists, he always brings the conversation back to himself.
There was a delicious moment when I asked whom he considered the greatest American novelist of the 20th century: I mentioned Ernest Hemingway, he mentioned William Faulkner. But he was growing tetchier and tetchier as the discussion continued – obviously I had forgotten the main candidate – and finally he came out with it: “I would say that Catch-22 has remained highly regarded since 1960 so it ma
y be the novel that still has life and worldwide respect and readership.”
It is a source of annoyance to him that Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize and he didn’t. “I would like to get it – God knows I deserve it – but I don’t expect to get it. But, on the other hand, if I get it, I won’t be that surprised!”
When people tell him he has never written another novel as good as Catch-22, he replies, jovially, “Who has?”
But actually he is certain that his second novel, Something Happened, is his best. “I think it’s the deepest book in terms of effect upon readers, and I also think it’s the most difficult book of mine to have been able to have brought off successfully – I want you to correct my English when you quote me – because it’s a book about boredom, ennui, monotony, hopelessness, and to write a book about t hat and create the feeling, not merely state it, and yet to have the book be interesting was not an easy thing to do.”
It took him 13 years to write – he was 50 when it was published and only then could he afford to give up teaching English. He used to worry terribly about money, because he is a painfully slow writer and also, “I was always at the mercy of my imagination – if I did not come up with something to write, I would not be able to write. Other novelists choose a subject – they choose Lee Harvey Oswald or
Pablo Picasso – but I just can’t write like that.”
But then, two years ago, he had to have a spinal operation and went over his finances beforehand and realised that he was very well-off and could stop worrying.
He is not a “natural” writer, not a wordsmith. He reckons to write only about 250 words a day and plans each tiny segment while he pounds on his treadmill in the morning.
“It’s not easy, emotionally, but I want to get three handwritten pages done and if I do those three pages then I’ve got the equivalent of a typewritten page. And once I’ve done that I usually can’t go much beyond it. I don’t have the language. I know how I want to proceed but I don’t know what the transitional phase should be.”
Days afterwards, looking back, he felt … “I don’t have that. It does not flow.” He realised early on that he could never “do” realism as he didn’t observe – “I don’t notice the colour of your eyes and if you asked me what the colour of your scarf is, I couldn’t tell you.”
But he also seems to lack the easy command of vocabulary that most writers take for granted – he talks of “running out of words” or not being able to find the word he wants.
He got very excited when I asked if he was an oppressive parent, and said, “Oppressive! That’s another word I wanted to use – I couldn’t find it.”
He once told Martin Amis that, “There’s some kind of psychological quirk in me which still has me feeling I’m not a writer, not at home with literary language.”
Similarly, ideas for novels come slowly – he never even thinks about the next novel until he has published the present one and even then an idea might not come to him. He says he “hopes” to start another novel soon and he has had a few ideas but they are unsatisfactory – “I have the sense that I’ve written them before. They’re amusing ideas – amusing openings to books – but I don’t think I can wri
te them.”
He has long wanted to write a sex novel from a woman’s point of view, and has already thought of the title, A Sexual Biography of my Wife, but he has no idea of the content. “I don’t know what really intimate thoughts pass through a woman’s mind. It’s no t simply a matter of how a woman feels the first time she’s masturbating … Most women don’t want to talk about it, they deny that they ever did it …”
There is a rather uncomfortably long pause. Am I supposed to do my bit for literature and give him a description? Instead, I agree fervently: “Right.”
He once rebuked an interviewer for calling him a “womaniser”, explaining that “a womaniser is someone who is passionately attracted to women. I wasn’t.”
But if he wasn’t attracted to women, why did he sleep with so many? “I’ll tell you why. First of all, there were not that many. And second, it was part of the male culture. It was not a sexual drive, it was just … I was in New York City working in an a tmosphere where men did that, we’d have parties and a couple would go into a room together. I think twice I fell in love – it lasted a year – I ne ver had a wish to end my marriage, and when summer came and I went away with my family for the summer that was usually the end of it, a very peaceful ending.
“Those were what I would call affairs, the others were just individual sexual encounters. It was a delightful phase, it mostly started after Catch-22, and I felt very good about myself. Looking back, I don’t feel so good about it because the effect on my wife was devastating. I regret much of the outcome. On the other hand, I enjoyed very much the experiences and if I had to do it all over again,
I don’t know which I would do.”
He says his wife Shirley never accurately detected his affairs, but she knew he was unfaithful. Still, the marriage tottered on for 35 years until 1982, when he fell in love with his present wife, Valerie, who was his nurse. In the end, he filed for divo rce.
He never spoke to his first wife again, though he sent her flowers when she was dying. “Conversation was impossible between us, that’s one of the reasons we separated.”
Significantly, perhaps, his son and daughter are still unmarried in their 40s – he says it’s because, “they don’t relate as openly to people as I do”. Perhaps it’s because he set them such a bad example?
“Not me! They had a mother, too, and they had a grandmother who was a tyrant.” But he agrees that he was probably an “oppressive” parent and that fatherhood was not his thing.
There are some truly harrowing scenes between father and daughter in Something Happened, the father clearly loathing the daughter and making no allowance for the fact that she is a child. He says dismissively: “I don’t relate to children particularly, or even young people any more – there’s no basis for conversation.”
I ask what attracted him to his present wife, Valerie, and he says: “Well, you’ll see when she comes down. She’s attractive. She was my day nurse, she was single and it developed. One thing I say which is amusing but true is that we were intimate before we were friendly.”
Soon afterwards, Valerie joins us – slim, elegant, probably in her late 40s. Unfortunately, she seems to be boiling with rage. She ignores me and says to him: “You know what – we have some things to discuss!”
It seems she has just read his publicity tour itinerary and doesn’t like it – not enough free time between the US and Europe. Then she announces: “I’m hungry, I’m starving,” so we pile into two cars and go to the restaurant in Easthampton.
Previously, I had asked if his wife still treated him like a patient and he says: “Does that answer your question – is she bossy? She’s as bossy as can be!”
Over lunch, I asked Valerie what he was like when she was nursing him, and she says: “Different. He was a very happy person, very agreeable, even though he was almost paralysed, he was very happy and he really did not realise that he might not recover. T he doctors said, ‘You’ll be fine,’ and he believed it. A lot of times, when people are sick, there is a different personality to when they are wel l.”
Heller butts in: “When I met her in the hospital, I was flirting.”
Valerie: “And now he flirts with everybody else!” Heller: “We’ve been married over 10 years. I’m sure my character has changed, and she has changed to an extraordinary degree – barely tolerable!”
Had she heard of Joseph Heller before? “Yeah, but I didn’t know what he looked like. I thought he looked like Norman Mailer!”
She had never read any of his books. “I was so busy, I had no time. After we were home from the hospital, then I read the books. I remember running down the stairs when I was reading Catch-22 and I said, ‘You wrote this? You’re crazy! I can’t believe you wrote this!'”
Heller remarks, menacingly: “You may have noticed she talks more rapidly than I do …”
Valerie immediately responds: “Have you ever heard his daughter speak? She speaks in entirely slow motion. I’ve never heard anyone speak like that in my life. Never. It’s very strange to me. Real … slow.”
Heller comes back: “What she’s saying is that she talks rapidly, and I get irritated by people who talk rapidly.”
The whole lunch is like this; I’m never sure if they’re joking or rowing, but there are strange undercurrents whirling through the meal.
I ask for a glass of wine. “Look at the size of that glass!” she says. It is a standard wineglass. “You’ll never drink all that!” I could easily drink a tanker, the effect of the Hellers together is so unhingeing. When I talk to him, she gets annoyed, wh en I talk to her, he does.
The only way to appease them both is to talk about England – they both like it. He went to Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship in 1949 and is very proud of the fact that he is now a visiting professor of his old college, St Catherine’s, though he admits th at disliking young people is a bit of a disadvantage.
He also turns up regularly for literary festivals and says he enjoys such junkets, “for vanity, excitement. I enjoy very much having expenses paid, and being a centre of attention if not the centre of attention.”
Later, driving me back to the bus stop, he burbled fondly about Valerie as if they hadn’t just been verbally beating each other to a pulp – maybe it’s their normal form of conversation. He says she gets lonely out on Long Island; he does, too, but he’s g ot his work. Their neighbours are mostly rich businessmen whom he finds, he says, very egotistical.
“Really?” I choked. “Some people might say you were a bit egotistical.”
“Do you mean egotistical, or self-satisfied?”
Actually, I meant egotistical, but he went on, “Well, I am satisfied and I’ll tell you why. I’m well into my 70s, I’m in good health, I have a nice personality, I can live comfortably. It doesn’t mean I don’t go into periods of depression and anxiety – l ike now, waiting for reviews to come out, wondering even what you’re going to write about me – but I’m no longer anxious about things like money, and I’m no longer really anxious about sexual activity – that’s in the past.
“I wish I was younger, I wish I was as virile as I was, and I wish I was ambitious, I wish I had as much energy – but all those things waned with age. Consequently, I feel I’m in retirement and I have been in retirement for about 10 years. There’s none o f the pressure of ambition and ego telling me to write. So, yes – I’m very content and complacent now.”