Catch-22 Week: Not Quite Caught Up

Not Quite Caught Up

by Pam Balluck

"Catch-22" has been a cultural catchphrase since Joseph Heller’s novel was released, during my infancy, to a reading public referred to as “post-war” (the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War), though America was already in Vietnam. Nearly a decade later, in my adolescence (with the U.S. still in Vietnam), the film adaptation starring Alan Arkin wasn’t exactly a hit, next to Patton and M*A*S*H, but Heller’s WWII bombardier and Catch-22 regained momentum, and they continue to influence us in the 21st century. Catch-22 is here to stay as part of our lexicon, our vernacular--what to call a dilemma in which the solution to one problem senselessly causes or insolubly frustrates the solution to another, and you can’t win for losing.

I was an English graduate student in my early 40s negotiating the composition of my reading list for doctoral exams at the University of Utah when I had to come to terms with the fact that I’d been using this expression--Catch-22--most of my life (was even crazy about a guy with a dog named Yossarian in the ’80s) yet had never read the book. I bought a new paperback of Heller’s novel, but it somehow got elbowed off my exams list and onto the stack of unread books teetering at my bedside. When I finally plucked it out for pleasure, I pushed my way through only nine of its 42 chapters, stopping on page 113. I admit this with shame;  I used to pride myself on the fact that I wouldn’t put a novel down for good until the end.

But Catch-22 is a very black comedy about war, and I--in the midst of George W. Bush’s presidency--just didn’t have the patience or sense of humor for the insane reasoning Yossarian is subjected to.

I owe Catch-22 a full reading.  For now, I’m not up to it.  It’s not that I’ve dumped the book, per se. I’ve called a time-out. (It’s not you, Catch-22, you classic number-one bestseller, it’s me!)

Apparently, my conscience won’t leave this alone.  On my last two road trips from Salt Lake City--to and from California; to and from Montana--I had the audiobook version with me but opted to listen to other books instead and returned the CDs of Catch-22 to the library at trips’ ends.  Maybe it’s because I still feel invested in 113 pages of dog-ears, highlighted passages, and margin notes.  Maybe it’s because, near the end of Obama’s first term, we’re still digging into and still pulling out of Bush’s infuriating wars.

At home, the spine of Heller’s novel still stares at me from the shelf, daring me to find my way back to it...and when I do, to start over, if not fresh, on page one.

Pam Balluck was born in New York, raised in California and Montana, and lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches writing at the University of Utah.  Her creative writing has appeared in such publications as Western Humanities Review, The Southeast Review, Quarter After Eight, Square Lake, Jabberwock Review, Pank, Barrow Street, Night Train, Avery Anthology, Freight Stories, and is forthcoming in Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories and Prime Mincer.  A version of this article, "Not Quite Caught Up in Catch-22" first appeared in the Bookshelf section of the Summer 2007 Continuum, in which the editors of Quarterly West discuss "books they've picked up and put down (sometimes more than once), and why they intend to get to that last page...one of these days."

Catch-22 Week: Heller's Day in Hell

Snowden dies.

That's not too big of a spoiler for those of you who haven't read Catch-22.  Joseph Heller tells us in Chapter 4 that Snowden will die on the floor of a B-25 during a bomb run and it's a singular event--the singular pivot of the novel--to which he will keep returning again and again like a needle bouncing back and forth across the scratch of a record.

By the time we finally arrive at the full description of the gunner's death in Chapter 41, we're prepared.

....Or maybe we're not prepared.  Maybe we, like Yossarian who gives Snowden first aid, are unable to handle the sight of the gaping wound ("was that a tube of slimy bone he saw running deep inside the gory scarlet flow behind the twitching, startling fibers of weird muscle?") and we run from the book for the toilet, clapping a hand over our mouth.  The scene is hard to stomach.  After all the laughter in the preceding pages, it's a nauseous punch to read of Yossarian cutting open Snowden's flak suit and seeing (hearing) the slithery plop of Snowden's guts hitting the metal floor "in a soggy pile."

If the scene is vivid, intense and visceral, it's only because its author was typing the movies which played inside his own head.  On August 15, 1944, 2nd Lt. Joseph Heller, a bombardier in a B-25, flew a mission which would be seared in his memory and later be processed through the mill of his imagination onto the page.  Now, all these decades later, Heller's day in hell is seared into the consciousness of anyone who has read Catch-22.

Two nights ago, I had the opportunity to talk to an undergraduate class at the University of Montana as part of the Montana Writers Live series.  I read a deleted chapter from Fobbit about a drunk soldier in Iraq who steals a humvee and goes on a joyride through Baghdad.  I explained it was based on an incident which actually happened while I was serving with the 3rd Infantry Division in Baghdad in 2005: a U.S. soldier had, puzzlingly, turned up in the morgue of an Iraqi Police station after his body was recovered from a wrecked humvee on a downtown street.  But, I cautioned, my imagination filled in a lot of the gaps: "It's like I plugged the facts into an amplifier, ran the cables to these massive eight-foot speakers, then turned the volume up to 11."

I'm not sure how much Heller's imagination amplified and distorted those moments in the back of the B-25, but in his excellent new biography, Just One Catch, Tracy Daugherty makes a convincing case that the Snowden scenes don't stray too far from Heller's reality.  In fact, the experience so influenced the author's post-war life and writing career, Daugherty made the decision to open the biography with an account of that August day in 1944.  Here's the scene as he paints it:

      As he had done thirty-six times before, he took a last pee by the side of the runway (there were no bathrooms aboard the B-25), and then slid down the narrow tunnel beneath the cockpit to the bomber’s Plexiglas nose cone. The tunnel was too small for a man wearing bulky equipment; he was forced to park his parachute in the navigator’s area behind him. Up front, in the glass bowl (the crew called it the “hothouse”), he always felt vulnerable and exposed. He found his chair. He donned his headset so he could talk to comrades he could no longer see in other parts of the plane. The wheels left the ground. Now he was alone, in a blur of blue.
      As his squadron began its approach to the Rhone, German anti-aircraft guns let loose and flak filled the air. A bomber in another squadron got "holed.” A spark, a flash. The plane lost a wing. It dove. No parachutes.
      Hurtling through space, the man in the glass cone watched the shining metal fall. A minute later, he was steering his plane. His pilot and the co-pilot had taken their hands off the flight controls. It was time for him to drop his bombs, and so, to assure a steady approach to the target, he commanded the plane’s movements using the automatic bombsight, steering left, steering right. For about sixty seconds, no evasive action would be possible, just a sure zeroing-in.
      Almost. Almost. There. He squeezed the toggle switch that released the bombs. Immediately, his pilot, Lieutenant John B. Rome, banked up, away from the target. Rome, twenty, was one of the youngest pilots in the squadron, with little combat experience. The co-pilot, fearing this green kid was moving too fast and about to stall the engines, seized the controls and the plane went into a sudden, steep dive, back to an altitude where it could be holed by curtains of flak.
      In the nose cone, the man who had overseen the bombs slammed into the roof of his compartment. His headset jack pulled loose from its outlet and began whipping about his head. He heard nothing. He couldn’t move. "I believed with all my heart and quaking soul that my life was ending and that we were going down, like the plane on fire I had witnessed plummeting only a few minutes before,” he remembered. “I had no time for anything but terror.”
      Just as quickly as it had begun its descent, the plane shot upwards, away from the flak, one moment yo-yoing into the next: a vanishing yet interminable instant. Now he was pinned to the floor, looking for a hand-hold, anything to grasp. The silence was horrifying. Was he the only crewman left alive? Was he alive? Would this never end, or had everything already ceased?
      He noticed the jack to his headset, lying free near his chair. He plugged himself back in and a roar of voices pierced his ears. “The bombardier doesn’t answer,” he heard someone shout. “Help him, help the bombardier.” “I’m the bombardier,” he said, “and I’m all right,” but the very act of asserting what should have been obvious made him wonder if it was true.

Daugherty tells us the real-life Snowden was a young gunner named Frankel, someone Heller barely knew--but someone he would never forget, as it turned out.  We see a nearly identical replay of that scene in Chapter 22 of Catch-22, which begins like this:

      That was the mission on which Yossarian lost his nerve. Yossarian lost his nerve on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts, and Snowden lost his guts because their pilot that day was Huple, who was only fifteen years old, and their co-pilot was Dobbs, who was even worse....Huple was a good pilot, Yossarian knew, but he was only a kid, and Dobbs had no confidence in him, either, and wrested the controls away without warning after they had dropped their bombs, going berserk in mid-air and tipping the plane over into that heart-stopping, ear-splitting, indescribably petrifying fatal dive that tore Yossarian's earphones free from their connection and hung him helplessly to the roof of the nose by the top of his head.
      Oh, God! Yossarian had shrieked soundlessly as he felt them all falling. Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! he had shrieked beseechingly through lips that could not open as the plane fell and he dangled without weight by the top of his head until Huple managed to seize the controls back and leveled the plane out down inside the crazy, craggy, patchwork canyon of crashing antiaircraft fire from which they had climbed away and from which they would now have to escape again. Almost at once there was a thud and a hole the size of a big fist in the plexiglass. Yossarian's cheeks were stinging with shimmering splinters. There was no blood.
      "What happened? What happened?" he cried, and trembled violently when he could not hear his own voice in his ears. He was cowed by the empty silence on the intercom and almost too horrified to move as he crouched like a trapped mouse on his hands and knees and waited without daring to breathe until he finally spied the gleaming cylindrical jack plug of his headset swinging back and forth in front of his eyes and jammed it back into its receptacle with fingers that rattled. Oh, God! he kept shrieking with no abatement of terror as the flak thumped and mushroomed all about him. Oh, God!
      Dobbs was weeping when Yossarian jammed his jack plug back into the intercom system and was able to hear again.
      "Help him, help him," Dobbs was sobbing. "Help him, help him."
      "Help who? Help who?" Yossarian called back. "Help who?"
      "The bombardier, the bombardier," Dobbs cried. "He doesn't answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier."
      "I'm the bombardier," Yossarian cried back at him. "I'm the bombardier. I'm all right. I'm all right."
      "Then help him, help him," Dobbs wept. "Help him, help him."
      "Help who? Help who?"
      "The radio-gunner," Dobbs begged. "Help the radio-gunner."
      "I'm cold," Snowden whimpered feebly over the intercom system then in a bleat of plaintive agony. "Please help me. I'm cold."
      And Yossarian crept out through the crawlway and climbed up over the bomb bay and down into the rear section of the plane where Snowden lay on the floor wounded and freezing to death in a yellow splash of sunlight near the new tailgunner lying stretched out on the floor beside him in a dead faint.

I'll leave you with this last excerpt from Daugherty's biography:

      The [Simon and Schuster] lawyers asked Joe to detail how much of his book was based on fact.
      Joe responded, accurately, that the people, place, and events in his novel were "extensions of the possible into the fantastic."

I like that idea of the "possible" amplifying into the "fantastic."  If we peek behind the curtain of Catch-22, it's possible to see a young lieutenant kneeling over a bleeding kid named Frankel on the cold, vibrating floor of a B-25.  If we listen closely enough, we might be able to hear, over the roar of the engines, the words already clicking into place in that bombardier's head.

Catch-22 Week: Generation Gap

Generation Gap

By Lisa Peet

Let’s just say it wasn't love at first sight.

As I remember it, 10th-grade English class hadn't been progressing too badly up to that point.  I'm thinking it was March when poor old spaniel-eyed Mr. Horton assigned Catch-22, and until then I had never met a book report I didn't like.  I was a bookish kid from a bookish family, in the habit of answering my father's questions about what I was reading at any given time.  Having to read, digest, and then write my thoughts down had never been a big deal.

Except for the fact that I hated Catch-22.  HATED it.  I don't remember how far in I made it before acknowledging this to myself—10 pages?  25?  But my distaste was for the book was thorough and paralyzing.  I did not like Heller's one-two punchline structure.  I did not appreciate his endless moral ironies, nor his ironic morality.  I thought naming a character Major Major Major Major was an eye-rolling bit of slapstick.  And I couldn't stand that weaselly Milo Minderbinder.  I'm not sure I read far enough in to hate Captain Aardvark, but I certainly would have.

While I was usually game to read anything, this book stopped me in my tracks, and I staunchly decided there was no way in the world I was going to spend another minute with it, even with a report on it due in two weeks.  So I swallowed my pride and did the bad thing: I bought the CliffsNotes.

And oh, the shame.  That was a line I'd always imagined I'd never cross—fine for other people, maybe, but not for a smart kid like me.  Like a lonely man paying for a prostitute, when the bookstore clerk slid that bumblebee-striped booklet across the counter, I was deeply humbled.  But neither could I bring myself to finish the book.  I got my report written over the course of a tortuous, chain-smoking all-nighter, relieved that I'd never again have to cross paths with Catch-22.

At 18: After Hellerfail, giving Nabokov a try

You know where this is going, right?  Twenty years later, my boyfriend at the time declared it his favorite novel in the world, and infatuation being what it is, I read it.  And yes, I loved it.  I found the book sly and evilly funny, with Heller hitting just the right dark modern parable notes.  Its circular structure worked for me this time around, as did the absurdist, absurdly-named characters, and the grim game theory that made you want to laugh and cry within the same paragraph.  It was good.

The question is, why did I find it so impossible when I was 15?  I was a well-read kid, comfortable in all sorts of genres, and I had fairly wide-ranging tastes—I loved me some Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Richard Brautigan.  But for some reason, I couldn't find a way in to the Heller.  For a while, my theory was that it was just too cynical for a high school reading assignment.  Yes, teenagers are cynical, but maybe not in the ingrained, internalized way you are as an adult.  A certain amount of misanthropy is mandatory in 10th grade, but much of that is being tried on for size.  Maybe that just wasn’t the right age for the book.

But then my son read it a few years later, when he was 16 or 17, and he thought it was the greatest thing EVER.  Which meant I had to reconsider my own failure with it.

I could, for instance, say Catch-22 was more of a guy's book.  But I don't really believe it falls along those lines—I liked it the second time around, and I've been female all along.  Or I could decide that I had raised a very jaded kid, and that his life had been miserable enough that he could relate to Yossarian's dilemmas, but I the end I couldn’t live with that one either.  When I asked him what he liked so much about the book, he just said it made him laugh.

Ultimately, I think it has a lot to do with when and where your touchpoints fall.  I grew up as part of the blissful interim generation for whom war was not a ready reference.  Nixon began bringing troops home from Vietnam when I was six, and while the last Americans weren't evacuated until I was nearly 12, in our little college town we were shockingly insulated—or at least I was.  I don't remember being encouraged by either my parents or teachers to read the papers, nor do I recall studying current events or discussing them at home.  For years I believed Watergate was the name of a TV show, something with a lot of people being serious that I had no desire to watch.  When I thought of war, I thought of M*A*S*H, and when I thought of a soldier trying to get himself declared unfit for duty I imagined Corporal Klinger, in his goofy pumps and pillbox hat.  It just wasn’t compatible with Heller’s bleak military.

Or maybe it wasn't so much war I was missing as a referent, but bureaucracy.  Mine was one of those unstructured '70s childhoods, with safe suburban streets and parents who were too busy "finding themselves" to pay much attention to what I was up to.  I had to go to school, and at some point every evening I had to report home and presumably stay there, but it was not exactly rich in strictures to chafe against.  So perhaps that's why I wasn't able to appreciate Catch-22 at 15.  It wasn't until I was an office-going, tax-paying, DMV-waiting adult that the wonderfully enraging absurdities of Heller's book finally struck me as funny.

My son, on the other hand, grew up in New York, with a whole playbook of rules concerning what he was allowed to do and when he was allowed to do it.  He rode public transportation to school, he had more homework from first grade on than I’m pretty sure I had in high school, and if you ask him I'm sure he'd say I was on his ass a lot of the time—if not like a drill sergeant, then at least like Lieutenant Scheisskopf.  And the Gulf War began when he was three—he's never known a time when the U.S. wasn't involved in military action somewhere in the Middle East.  It's a different world from the one I grew up in, and then again we're simply different people.  I like to think that if I'd stuck with the book just a little longer that spring semester, I would have found something to make me laugh.

All I can say is that I’m glad I had a long enough life to finally enjoy Catch-22 in its entirety, and appreciate it—and to have had a kid who was able to appreciate it the first time around.  You know I’m hoarding a copy to give to my first grandchild when he or she turns 16, just to see how it goes over.

Lisa Peet is a writer, editor, artist, Information & Library Science student, and proprietor of the literary blog Like Fire.

Catch-22 Week: Kill or Be Killed

Anyone who thinks Catch-22 is merely a frivolity, a slapstick indictment, a howl at conformity, a circus of words (all of which it is), need look no further than the equally straight-faced scenes to be reminded of the bitter intent of the novel.  Joseph Heller could be spit-take funny in one paragraph, but chillingly sober in the next.  He had a point to make and he did it not only with jokes and circular repartee, but with convincing arguments for pacifism.  You can see why Catch-22 was especially popular among readers of the Vietnam War era.  It wouldn't be out of the question to find someone burning a draft card in the morning then spray-painting "Yossarian Lives!" on the side of an Army recruiting office that night.

As we continue to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this landmark novel, I thought I'd share another of my favorite passages--this time from Chapter 12.  Spray-paint not included.

To improve his reputation, Colonel Cathcart has ordered his squadron to make a crucial, potentially-fatal, bomb run to Bologna. Yossarian sneaks into the operations tent and moves the bomb line on the map in hopes the military planners will scrub the mission.   He's later caught and philosophically tries to argue his way out of his military responsibility to fly the mission.

      "But I'm going to be killed at Bologna," Yossarian pleaded. "We're all going to be killed."
      "Then you'll just have to be killed," replied ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen. "Why can't you be a fatalist about it the way I am? If I'm destined to upload these lighters at a profit and pick up some Egyptian cotton cheap from Milo, then that's what I'm going to do. And if you're destined to be killed over Bologna, then you're going to be killed, so you might just as well go out and die like a man. I hate to say this, Yossarian, but you're turning out to be a chronic complainer."
      Clevinger agreed with ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen that it was Yossarian's job to get killed over Bologna and was livid with condemnation when Yossarian confessed that it was he who had moved the bomb line and caused the mission to be canceled.
      "Why the hell not?" Yossarian snarled, arguing all the more vehemently because he suspected he was wrong. "Am I supposed to get my ass shot off because the colonel wants to be a general?"
      "What about the men on the mainland?" Clevinger demanded with just as much emotion. "Are they supposed to get their asses shot off just because you don't want to go? Those men are entitled to air support!"
      "But not necessarily by me. Look, they don't care who knocks out those ammunition dumps. The only reason we're going is because that bastard Cathcart volunteered us."
      "Oh I know all that," Clevinger assured him, his gaunt face pale and his agitated eyes swimming in sincerity. "But the fact remains that those ammunition dumps are still standing. You know very well that I don't approve of Colonel Cathcart any more than you do."  Clevinger paused for emphasis, his mouth quivering, and then beat his fist down softly against his sleeping bag.  "But it's not for us to determine what targets must be destroyed or who's to destroy them or--"
      "Or who gets killed doing it? And why?"
      "Yes, even that. We have no right to question--"
      "You're insane!"
      "--no right to question--"
      "Do you really mean that it's not my business how or why I get killed and that it is Colonel Cathcart's? Do you really mean that?"
      "Yes, I do," Clevinger insisted, seeming unsure. "There are men entrusted with winning the war who are in a much better position than we are to decide what targets have to be bombed."
      "We are talking about two different things," Yossarian answered with exaggerated weariness. "You are talking about the relationship of the Air Corps to the infantry, and I am talking about the relationship of me to Colonel Cathcart. You are talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive."
      "Exactly," Clevinger snapped smugly. "And which do you think is more important?"
      "To whom?" Yossarian shot back. "Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."
      Clevinger sat for a moment as though he'd been slapped. "Congratulations!" he exclaimed bitterly, the thinnest milk-white line enclosing his lips tightly in a bloodless, squeezing ring.  "I can't think of another attitude that could be dependent upon to give greater comfort to the enemy."
      "The enemy," resorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live."

Catch-22 Week: The Chaplain's Family

For all but 12 days of 2005, I was separated from my wife and three children by an ocean, two continents, and the sprawl of a battlefield.  I was in Iraq helping the United States and its allies prosecute the war against terror and make the world safe for children to once again play in the streets without fear of being blown up.  My family, separated by so much time and space, spent their days in Georgia trying to fill the father/husband vacuum as best they could.  Unlike soldiers in previous conflicts, I had the luxury of near-instant communication through email and the weekly phone call filled with an ocean-roar of static.

Still, I worried.

Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder, it makes it freak the fuck out!  Because I couldn't be there to protect them from everyday hazards like falling tree limbs while raking leaves in the front yard, or food poisoning from the Chinese take-out left in the refrigerator for far too long, or blue bolts of lightning shooting through an upstairs bedroom while my boys played Xbox (something which actually did happen), I fretted.  My mind was knotted with worst-case scenarios and eaten by dark fantasies.  I was tortured not with thoughts of my own death by an enemy's mortar but theirs by a whizzing lawnmower blade come loose from its bolts.  So, when it came time for our weekly phone call, the relief hit me like a huge, powerful, warm wave and there were times I almost broke down and cried right there in the call center on Camp Liberty as I heard my sweet wife's voice coming through the static.

What I'm trying to tell you is, I can really, really relate to this passage from Chapter 25 ("The Chaplain") in Catch-22:

      The chaplain’s wife was the one thing in the world he could be certain of, and it would have been sufficient, if only he had been left to live his life out with just her and the children. The chaplain’s wife was a reserved, diminutive, agreeable woman in her early thirties, very dark and very attractive, with a narrow waist, calm intelligent eyes, and small, bright, pointy teeth in a childlike face that was vivacious and petite; he kept forgetting what his children looked like, and each time he returned to their snapshots it was like seeing their faces for the first time. The chaplain loved his wife and children with such tameless intensity that he often wanted to sink to the ground helplessly and weep like a castaway cripple. He was tormented inexorably by morbid fantasies involving them, by dire, hideous omens of illness and accident. His meditations were polluted with threats of dread diseases like Ewing’s tumor and leukemia; he saw his infant son die two or three times every week because he had never taught his wife how to stop arterial bleeding; watched, in tearful, paralyzed silence, his whole family electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard socket because he had never told her that a human body would conduct electricity; all four went up in flames almost every night when the water heater exploded and set the two-story wooden house afire; in ghastly, heartless, revolting detail he saw his poor dear wife’s trim and fragile body crushed to a viscous pulp against the brick wall of a market building by a half-wined drunken automobile driver and watched his hysterical five-year-old daughter being led away from the grisly scene by a kindly middle-aged gentleman with snow-white hair who raped and murdered her repeatedly as soon as he had driven her off to a deserted sandpit, while his two younger children starved to death slowly in the house after his wife’s mother, who had been baby-sitting, dropped dead from a heart attack when news of his wife’s accident was given to her over the telephone. The chaplain’s wife was a sweet, soothing, considerate woman, and he yearned to touch the warm flesh of her slender arm again and stroke her smooth black hair, to hear her intimate, comforting voice. She was a much stronger person than he was. He wrote brief, untroubled letters to her once a week, sometimes twice. He wanted to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pages with desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need and with careful instructions for administering artificial respiration. He wanted to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearable loneliness and despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of the children or to cross a street against the traffic light. He did not wish to worry her. The chaplain’s wife was intuitive, gentle, compassionate and responsive. Almost inevitably, his reveries of reunion with her ended in explicit acts of love-making.

December 18, 2005

Catch-22 Week: Touching Down

Touching Down

by Roy Scranton

The last time I read Catch-22 was in Kuwait, on environmental leave from Baghdad—I can’t remember now whether I was coming or going.  It was a strange limbo, either way, raining in the desert, waiting for a flight, blissfully suspended between home and the war.  It was like nothing counted there, nothing mattered.  Since all I had to do each day was wait, then show up to formation to find out I had to wait some more, it was even more of a vacation than actually being on leave.

Back in America, nothing seemed right.  I missed my rifle.  I missed my buddies.  Nobody knew or understood what was going on in Iraq, and when people thanked me I wanted to ask them “What for?”  I got back just before Christmas, and among the lines of cheering supporters who greeted us at Dallas-Ft. Worth, an old man in a Santa suit handed us chocolates.  I changed out of my DCUs as soon as I could, drank a beer, and eyed the crowds nervously.

The war, of course, was as surreal as Heller paints it—Milo Minderbender had taken over the whole thing, just like Yossarian said, from the huge dining halls to the mercenaries protecting visiting senators.  Oil money paid the insurgents to place IEDs, while KBR, Blackwater, and countless others got fat off American contracts.  But what Heller missed was how surreal it was to come back: how it wasn’t just that the war was good American business, but how good American business was the war.

In Kuwait, though, headed for America or headed back to Baghdad--I can’t remember which--it was like flying over the thing.  Caught, yes, in the stupid bureaucratic machine, but lifted, airy, floating.  Freed from the roadside bombs, random fire, supermalls, and supermarkets, I spent every day going nowhere, shuffling through the chow hall, wasting money at Subway, lying reading on my cot in a tent full of bored, listless soldiers, circling around and around in the cold wind blowing over Snowden.

Roy Scranton's poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in New Letters, The Massachusetts Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Theory and Event, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He has an MA from the New School for Social Research and is currently earning a PhD in English at Princeton.  Visit his website here.

Catch-22 Week: "Emotional pretzels"

A first-time novelist is a sensitive creature, like one of those fragile fish you bring up from the deepest, darkest ocean trench.  There is a good chance it will dissolve in sunlight or, more likely, explode under pressure.  I should know.  I'll be one of those pale, anxious trench-dwellers when my first novel hits bookstores next year.

Before that comes the most fragile of fragile times: the moment the debut novel lands on book critics' desks.  I should know.  I've been reviewing books for more than a decade and I know the weight a careless adjective can carry.  (Not that I'm Michiko Kakutani, but I like to think one or two of you out there are maybe paying attention to my opinions.)

In early October 1961, Joseph Heller sat in his New York City apartment waiting for the reviews of Catch-22 to start trickling in.  The Simon and Schuster publicity machine had already pulled out all the stops, sending copies of the unpublished book to potential blurbers.  Art Buchwald sent a telegram from Paris: PLEASE CONGRATULATE JOSEPH HELLER ON MASTERPIECE CATCH-22 STOP I THINK IT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST WAR BOOKS STOP SO DO IRWIN SHAW AND JAMES JONES.  Harper Lee opined that "Catch-22 is the only war novel I've ever read that makes any sense."

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In the September 11 issue of Publishers Weekly, Simon and Schuster took out a full-page ad which said, in part, "The growing ferment of interest in Catch-22 confirms our faith that Joseph Heller's outrageously funny, powerful, totally original novel will be one of the major publishing events of the fall."

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Studs Terkel gave it an enthusiastic rave review:  "Page after page, you will howl, you will roar.  You may even fall off your chair as I did.  Suddenly you will sit up and mumble:  'What's so funny?'  To call it the finest comic novel of our day is faulting it.  To call it a surrealistic commentary of our time won't do either.  Is it any more surrealistic than the neutron bomb, guaranteed to damage neither brick nor metal and merely kill man?"

But then....

The New York Times Book Review assigned the novel to a writer named Richard G. Stern.  Here is his review, in full, as it appeared in the October 22, 1961 issue:

      "Catch-22" has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility. A portrait gallery, a collection of anecdotes, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes, some of them finely assembled, a series of descriptions, yes, but the book is no novel. One can say that it is much too long because its material--the cavortings and miseries of an American bomber squadron stationed in late World War II Italy--is repetitive and monotonous. Or one can say that it is too short because none of its many interesting characters and actions is given enough play to become a controlling interest. Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.
      If "Catch-22" were intended as a commentary novel, such sideswiping of character and action might be taken care of by thematic control. It fails here because half its incidents are farcical and fantastic. The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.
      As satire "Catch-22" makes too many formal concessions to the standard novels of our day. There is a certain amount of progress: the decent get killed off, the self-seekers prosper, and there is even a last minute turnabout as the war draws to an end. One feels the author should have gone all the way and burlesqued not only the passions and incidents of war, but the traditions of representing them as well. It might have saved him from some of the emotional pretzels which twist the sharpness of his talent.

Ouch.  Even fifty years later, I can feel the sting of the barb.

In his biography of Heller, Just One Catch, Tracy Daugherty writes "Joe could quote it bitterly, word for word, three decades later.  'I didn't think [my family and I] would ever smile again,' he told David Straitfeld of New York magazine."

Even so, Joseph Heller could take consolation in the fact that within only a few short years his was a household name.  As for Richard G. Stern, who remembers him today?*  The note at the bottom of that New York Times review states "Mr. Stern is the author of 'Golk' and other books."

"Golk"?  Who's ever heard of "Golk"?  It's not like it has its own entry in The American Heritage Dictionary, now does it?

Sometimes, when they're hardy and tough enough, writers don't burst from the pressure or dissolve in the hot sunshine of hard criticism.


*I realize I'm being unfairly hard on Mr. Stern and freely admit I've never read any of his books, many of which have been praised by readers and critics.  I'm merely trying to make a point here about how critics aren't always right.  Or, who knows, maybe Mr. Stern still feels the same way about Catch-22.  More's the pity if he does.

Catch-22 Week: A Novel With Character(s)

Among other things, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a long parade of characters.  I don't have an exact count but I'm guessing it's something close to a Osmond Family Thanksgiving guest list.

At times, it resembles--intentionally, I'm sure--a vaudeville stage show with wisecracking acts running in from the wings to take center stage for a few minutes before the next comedian bolts in to take the spotlight.  This makes sense, given the fact that the young Joseph Heller was a frequent vacationer in the Catskills of upstate New York, the Borscht Belt comedy circuit for yuk-em-ups like Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor, Buddy Hackett and Mel Brooks (who became Heller's lifelong friend).  Slapstick reigns supreme throughout Catch-22 and it's easy to trace the lines from Heller's novel all the way back to the Catskills resorts.

Austin Pendleton (Col. Moodus) and Orson Welles (Gen. Dreedle) in Mike Nichols' film version of Catch-22

Catch-22 is structured around people more than it is linear plot.  Most of the characters get their own chapters which are, by their nature, episodic and little more than 10-page vignettes.  Very, very funny vignettes, I might add.  You can't not love the way Heller serves his characters to us on platters of jiggling Jell-O.

For the first-time reader, however, it can be disconcerting and a little confusing.  Never fear, I'm here to introduce you to a few of the main players.  Here we go:

At the middle of the center of the vortex, there is Yossarian, the bombardier who is convinced "somebody was always hatching a plot to kill him," either directly (by shooting at his plane) or indirectly (by forcing him to fly missions).  He was "a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not.  He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt."  Though he often pleads insanity in his vain attempts to get a Section 8, his is the voice of sanity (at least from our perspective) throughout the novel.  If Heller has an alter ego in the novel, Yossarian is it.

There's Milo Minderbinder, mess officer and war profiteer: "Milo was Sir Major Milo Minderbinder in Malta....Milo had been knighted, commissioned a major in Royal Welsh Fusiliers and named assistant Governor General of Malta because he had brought the egg trade there....Milo was Vice-Shah of Oran. Milo was not only the Vice-Shah of Oran, as it turned out, but also the Caliph of Baghdad, the Imam of Damascus and the Sheik of Araby. Milo was the corn god, the rain god and the rice god."  Milo represents the black heart of capitalism, at one point calling in a bomb-strike on his own camp because he stands to make a profit with the Germans.

There's Havermeyer who likes peanut brittle and lives by himself in a two-man tent where he shoots field mice with a .45.

There's Colonel Cathcart, the group commander and the bane of his men's existence:  "Maybe sixty missions were too many for the men to fly, Colonel Cathcart reasoned, if Yossarian objected to flying them, but he then remembered that forcing his men to fly more missions than everyone else was the most tangible achievement he had going for him....perhaps sixty combat missions were not nearly enough and that he ought to increase the number at once to seventy, eighty, a hundred, or even two hundred, three hundred, or six thousand!"

There's Major Major Major Major, "the long and bony squadron commander, who looked a little bit like Henry Fonda in distress" and who dove out his office window every time someone in his squadron came to talk to him (usually about reducing the number of missions).  "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.  With Major Major it had been all three."

There's General P. P. Peckem, "a general with whom neatness definitely counted."

There's Doc Daneeka who "brooded over his health continually" and had "mournful pouches under both eyes."

There's Chaplain Tappman, an Anabaptist from Kenosha, Wisconsin and the object of affection in the novel's first sentence ("It was love at first sight"): "...the chaplain was almost good-looking, with a pleasant, sensitive face as pale and brittle as sandstone."

There's Hungry Joe who "was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake."  He claims to be a Life photographer and is always trying to get women to disrobe so he can make them famous (in fact, he was a Life shutterbug before the war, but nobody believes him).

There's Huple, a fifteen-year-old pilot who lied about his age to get into the Army and who shares a tent with Hungry Joe.  He has a cat that likes to sleep on Hungry Joe's face, nearly suffocating him every night.

There's Chief White Halfoat, "a handsome, swarthy Indian from Oklahoma with a heavy, hard-boned face and tousled black hair, a half-blooded Creek from Enid who, for occult reasons of his own, had made up his mind to die of pneumonia.  He was a glowering, vengeful, disillusioned Indian who hated foreigners with names like Cathcart, Korn, Black and Havermeyer and wished they'd all go back to where their lousy ancestors had come from."

There's Captain Flume, the public relations officer who lives in self-imposed exile in the forest outside the base after Chief White Halfoat threatens to slit his throat from ear to ear.  The chaplain runs into him one day while walking in the woods: "A pair of captain's bars ulcerated with rust hung on the man's ragged shirt collar.  He had a hairy, tar-black mole on the underside of one nostril and a heavy rough mustache the color of poplar bark."

There's Major ______  de Coverley, "an ominous, incomprehensive presence."  It's not until page 212 that Heller lets us know why there's a blank space in his name: "Everyone was afraid of him, and no one knew why.  No one even knew Major _____ de Coverley's first name, because no one had ever had the temerity to ask him."  His only official duties are pitching horseshoes, renting apartments for the soldiers on R&R, and kidnapping Italian workers.

There's Captain Aardvark ("Aarfy" to those who know him): B-25 navigator, social climber, rapist, and murderer.  Without a doubt, the most unlikeable character in the novel.

There's General Dreedle, the wing commander: "a blunt, chunky, barrel-chested man in his early fifties.  His nose was squat and red, and he had lumpy white, bunched-up eyelids circling his small gray eyes like haloes of bacon fat."

There's Colonel Moodus, General Dreedle's inept son-in-law.  It's no accident his name sounds like "Doofus."

And there's more where they came from.  I haven't even mentioned the Soldier Who Sees Everything Twice, the C.I.D. man who catches pneumonia, the Texan from Texas "who looked like someone in Technicolor," Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, and the Dead Man in Yossarian's Tent (his name is Mudd).  And more, so many more.

While not all the members of Catch-22's population are fully-formed or successfully-realized on the order of, say, a Charles Dickens novel, Heller is wildly successful at establishing not just literary figures, but personas who manage to come to life off the page in very real fashion.  Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, for instance, have pop-culture significance well beyond the boundaries of the novel.  Heller's imagination has spun creations who make us laugh in just the short space of a few well-chosen descriptive words.

I should also say I'm also a little pissed Heller stole some of the great character names.  Colonel Korn, for instance.  Or, goddamn it, Major Major.

On the other hand, I'm still holding out hope I can use Major Woody* sometime in a story.

*The real name of an officer I once served with.  Imagine his dread when, as a captain, he was facing promotion....and then his unutterable relief at making lieutenant colonel.

Catch-22 Week: My First Catch

By the time our plane reached cruising altitude, Yossarian was already naked.  In his memorable act of civil disobedience, the bombardier shed his uniform and climbed a tree to watch Snowden's burial service.  Snowden had been killed in the mission over Avignon and bled all over Yossarian and so now he swore he'd never wear another uniform again so long as he lived.

Japanese movie poster for Catch-22

I looked around the plane as we flew the 7,000 miles from Georgia to Iraq in the Continental Airlines 777 chartered by the 3rd Infantry Division.  Like me, my fellow passengers were all wearing desert-camouflage uniforms.  I prayed to God none of them ever took the notion to disrobe and walk around camp naked.  By the looks of it, however, there were no Yossarians among us.  This was a deadly serious bunch of soldiers, fueled by George W. Bush's rhetoric and, for many of them, the memory of their first time through Iraq two years earlier.  It was Mission Yet to be Accomplished, but by God they were determined to "git 'er done."  These were all go-with-the-grain troops.

I alone seemed to be the dissident on the plane.  I was heading into combat for the first time and, to get myself in the right mindset, I was also reading Catch-22 for the first time.  I had planned it like this: go to war, read the book which mocked war, survive the war through satire.  In truth, Joseph Heller doesn't so much poke a satiric finger at war as much as he does the men who make war.  It's the war machine which comes under such side-splitting scrutiny in these pages.  The tangles of red tape, the complicated cogs of bureaucracy, the nonsensical rules carried out by battalions of buffoons.  You know, the catch, the policy that kept raising the number of missions each time anyone got close enough to qualify to go home.

      There was, of course, a catch.
      "Catch-22?" inquired Yossarian.
      "Of course," Colonel Korn answered pleasantly...His rimless square eyeglasses glinted with sly amusement as he gazed at Yossarian. "After all, we can't simply send you home for refusing to fly more missions and keep the rest of the men here, can we? That would hardly be fair to them....You know, you really have been making things terribly difficult for Colonel Cathcart. The men are unhappy and morale is beginning to deteriorate. And it's all your fault."
      "It's your fault," Yossarian argued, "for raising the number of missions."
      "No, it's your fault for refusing to fly them," Colonel Korn retorted. "The men were perfectly content to fly as many missions as we asked as long as they thought they had no alternative, Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours."

Did I want to get out combat duty?  I'd be lying if I said "No."  Was I about to take off my clothes or wear a dress like M*A*S*H's Corporal Klinger?  No, of course not.  I had a wife and three kids back home to think about.  I would play the part of an obedient warrior--albeit an anxious one heading into the unknown--and follow orders.

But at the same time, I could be subversive in my own small way.  I would read Catch-22 and I would not try to hide the cover.  I lifted the paperback closer to my face, the blue cover with the dangling red soldier-puppet plain for all to see.

No one seemed to care.  The other soldiers on the plane had retreated into the earphones connected to their iPods, their eyes closed to catch the forty winks they'd have a hard time catching once in Baghdad.  Or they sipped their watery Cokes and watched the in-flight movie (Meet the Fockers).  Or they stared ahead at the head-rest in front of them with glassy, distant eyes.

The inside of the plane had been festooned with red, white and blue balloons, crepe paper and drawings from elementary students wishing us the best of luck and to “come home soon after you kill the Iraqis.”

It was January 2, 2005 and if any of us had made a resolution beyond "I will come back with all four limbs attached," we were keeping it to ourselves.  The plane was quiet as a funeral until the assistant division commander for maneuver, shedding all military decorum, walked up and down the aisles wearing a cardboard party hat and blowing a noisemaker.   "Hap-peee New Year!" he cried.   Bits of parti-colored confetti flew through the air, settling on our shaved scalps.  A few of us grinned out of awkward courtesy, then went back to staring at the inscrutable pattern on the head-rest.

I continued reading Catch-22:

It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it—lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them. To die or not to die, that was the question….That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war.

Was it?  Was that the war I was flying toward?  Months from now, would I be cradling a Snowden in my arms while he bled all over my uniform?

No.  As it turned out, mine was not a vile and muddy war.  Unlike most of the others on that chartered jet, I would spend 99.9% of my tour of duty safely ensconced in division headquarters writing press releases which described the blood-soaked death-drenched days of those fighting the vile, muddy war in the city outside the concertina wire.  Mine was a war fought in cubicles, cooled by air-conditioners, and leavened with enough downtime when I could read books like Catch-22.

At the time, sitting on the plane, I had no way of knowing I faced a somewhat cushy future with "three hots and a cot."  To me, war was still the great unknown, the ultimate Fear Factor.  Joseph Heller was painting a picture for me of a life filled with equal parts terror and absurdity.  Oh boy.  I could hardly wait.

I didn't finish Catch-22 during that plane ride.  My mind was too knotted with fear and lack of sleep.  And there was Meet the Fockers, after all.  I got as far as The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice and decided to give it a rest, gently dog-earing the page.

I would come back to Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder, Snowden, Colonel Cathcart and Major Major Major Major many more times in the coming month as I waited in limbo at the division's way-station in Kuwait.  Later, I would read another of the books I'd packed in my duffel bag for the deployment--Don Quixote--and I would have jumbled dreams in which Yossarian attacked windmills with a ten-foot lance.

Throughout my time in Baghdad, there were continual reminders I was living in a Heller of a war.  Going back through my journal now, I find these entries:  "U.S. soldiers responded to an explosion in central Baghdad and discovered that two Iraqis had blown themselves up while constructing a car bomb. I banged out a quick, almost giddy press release with the headline 'Two terrorists vie for Darwin Award.'  Col. Kent later said that was inappropriate and we changed it."  On another day, I received a casualty report for a soldier who was hit with a roadside bomb while riding in a Humvee.  The illiterate report-writer claimed the soldier suffered "a loss of conscience."  And I'm not even going to mention the long email chains in which generals and colonels issued guidance on which words we could and couldn't use to describe those we fought against.  An entire week was consumed with the debate over "terrorists" versus "insurgents."

By the end of my year in Iraq, I was convinced Catch-22 should be mandatory reading for soldiers heading into combat.  We need more Yossarians sitting in a tree, naked and cat-calling the bloated and pompous decision-makers.  Catch-22 is an owner's manual for How to Survive a War with all your senses intact.  Particularly your sense of humor.

Catch-22 Week: "That's some catch"

      There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, that specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of the clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
      "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka replied.

Indeed, Joseph Heller's novel about war and sanity is the best there is.  But don't take my word for it--Heller thought so himself.

As his daughter Erica later wrote: "Whenever he was asked why he hadn't ever again written a book as good as Catch-22, he'd eye his interlocutor as if his or her head were on fire, while delivering his customary stinging riposte: 'Who has?'"

Braggadocio or gut-honest truth?  Either way, it's true no one else has ever written anything quite like Catch-22.  I'm reading it for the second time right now (the first time was when I was on a plane bound for a year's tour of duty in the Iraq War).  This in itself is something of a headline.  I can count on one hand the number of books I've read more than once in my entire life, so it's a testament to Joseph Heller's power to persuade me to laugh aloud reading lines I already know.  In truth, I'm finding Catch-22 even funnier this time around (maybe it has something to do with the fact that my bowels were twisted in knots as I rode into combat in 2005).

Joseph Heller in 1961

Yossarian, Major Major Major Major, Milo Minderbinder, et al, have been making readers laugh for 50 years, but how did it all begin?  The story is an interesting one (or at least it is to me, a novelist whose path to publication of a war satire parallels Heller's at times).

The events of Catch-22 closely mirror Heller's days as a bombardier flying missions from a island off the coast of Italy during World War II.  It's autobiography hooked up to an amplifier then blasted through speakers with the volume turned to 11.  As the author himself later wrote in a note to his editor, the story is "extensions of the possible into the fantastic."

Heller was deeply affected by the toll of war and soon after his return to the United States, he began writing short stories as a way to exorcise some of his feelings (as well as pick up a few bucks from magazines like The Atlantic Monthly and Esquire).  Catch-22 would come later--after his years of working as a Mad Man in Madison Avenue advertising, raising a family in the famed Apthorp building on New York's Upper West Side, and having raucous gourmet meals with his pals Mario Puzo and Mel Brooks.  All along, Catch-22 simmered on low boil in the back of his head.

The novel was hatched one sleepless night in 1953, as Heller told The Paris Review in 1974:

I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.” I didn’t have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind—even most of the particulars....the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor. That morning I went to my job at the advertising agency and wrote out the first chapter in longhand.

He spent the next seven years agonizing over multiple drafts of the novel, writing scenes and scraps of dialogue in longhand on yellow tablets.  It wasn't easy, as Tracy Daugherty explains in his biography of Heller, Just One Catch:

      His colleagues took him for just another adman. His literary agent couldn't make any headway with his work. His mother was probably dying.
      These were the pressures Joe experienced while sitting at his kitchen table in the evenings. He felt not like a prophet, but a clown, a morbid jester. All he could do was shape one slow sentence at a time. They were good sentences.  He believed that, but would anyone else?

Lucky for Heller, he found a champion in Robert Gottlieb, a young editor at Simon and Schuster.  "I...love this crazy book and very much want to do it," he wrote in a reader's report after receiving seven chapters of what was then called "Catch-18" in February 1958.  Gottlieb campaigned hard in order to convince the heads of the publishing house that Heller's novel would be an important entry in post-war fiction, equal in measure to Norman Mailer and James Jones who had already published their great novels The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity.  "It is a very rare approach to the war," Gottlieb said in his report to the company's editorial board, "humor that slowly turns to horror."  Eventually, the board agreed and offered Heller a standard first-book contract: $750 as an advance and another $750 upon completion of the manuscript.

Gottlieb and Heller then set to work editing the reams and reams of typewritten pages, working quietly on what biographer Daugherty called "a literary Manhattan Project."  In an article for Vanity Fair, Daugherty paints the scene:

      Catch-18 had more than doubled in length by the time Gottlieb saw any of it again. The original manuscript had expanded from 7 to 16 chapters, and Heller had added a whole new section consisting of 28 more chapters. The pages were a mix of typescript and legal-size notebook paper covered in Heller's precise and rather crabbed handwriting. Though Gottlieb recalls editing sessions with Heller as "calm," Michael Korda remembers passing by Gottlieb's office and seeing parts of Heller's novel "endlessly retyped, look[ing] at every stage like a jigsaw puzzle as [Heller, Gottlieb, and Nina Bourne] labored over it, bits and pieces of it taped to every available surface in Gottlieb's cramped office. That, I thought, is editing, and I longed to do it."
      Joe prepared a 758-page typescript from this jigsaw puzzle, deleting digressive episodes and expanding other chapters. He and Gottlieb plunged in again. Gottlieb inspected paragraphs for what he called "impoverished vocabulary," and asked Joe to stir things up with more active language. He caught places where Joe seemed to be clearing his throat, dawdling, in Joe's characteristic way, and not getting directly to the point.

So, how did it change from "Catch-18" to "Catch-22"?  Daugherty goes on to tell the story in that same Vanity Fair article:

      And then one day Heller got an urgent call from Gottlieb, who said the title Catch-18 would have to go. Leon Uris was preparing to release a novel called Mila 18, about the Nazi occupation of Poland. Uris was a well-known writer--Exodus had been a huge best-seller. Two novels with the number 18 in the title would clash in the marketplace, and Heller, the unknown, was bound to get the short end of the deal. The number had always been arbitrary, part of the joke about military rules. Still, Heller, Gottlieb, and Bourne had long thought of the book as Catch-18, and it was difficult to conceive of calling it anything else.
      "We were all in despair," Gottlieb recalled. In his office, he and Heller sat opposite each other, spitting out numbers like two spies speaking in code. They liked the sound of "Catch-11": hard consonants followed by vowels, opening up the mouth. Ultimately, they decided it was too close to the new Frank Sinatra movie, Ocean's Eleven. They agreed to sleep on the question of a title and try again later.
      On January 29, 1961, Heller sent Gottlieb a note, bringing to bear all his adman persuasion: "The name of the book is now CATCH-14. (Forty-eight hours after you resign yourself to the change, you'll find yourself almost preferring this new number. It has the same bland and nondescript significance of the original. It is far enough away from Uris for the book to establish an identity of its own, I believe, yet close enough to the original title to still benefit from the word of mouth publicity we have been giving it.)." Gottlieb wasn’t sold.
      [Agent] Candida Donadio would one day attempt to take credit for retitling the book with the name that eventually stuck. The number 22 was chosen as a substitute because October 22 was her birthday, she said. "Absolutely untrue," Gottlieb later told Karen Hudes. "I remember it totally, because it was in the middle of the night. I remember Joe came up with some number and I said, 'No, it’s not funny,' which is ridiculous, because no number is intrinsically funny. And then I was lying in bed worrying about it one night, and I suddenly had this revelation. And I called him the next morning and said, 'I've got the perfect number. Twenty-two, it's funnier than eighteen.'"

Then, late in 1961, it was done.  It was bound, printed, given a price tag of $5.95 and soon began appearing in the hands of readers in the subway, splotched with stains from corned beef sandwiches as office workers hunched over it on their lunch hour, dog-eared and put onto nightstands as the image of Snowden spilling his guts was the last thing the housewife's eyes saw before they closed for the night.  Catch-22 had found its audience, a nation of readers still trying to make sense of war and the new peace.

That autumn's fiction bestsellers included Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy, and Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers.  Catch-22 did not join them on those bestseller lists.  Its reputation grew slowly...slowly but surely.  As of today, the novel has sold more than 10 million copies and can be found tucked into the pockets of hundreds of college students' backpacks at any given moment.

Alan Arkin as Yossarian in Mike Nichols' movie Catch-22

By now, "catch-22" is part of our lexicon, having earned its own space in The American Heritage Dictionary years ago.  For those of my generation and younger, it seems Catch-22 has always been a part of our cultural DNA.  But can you imagine coming across the loopy rhetoric of the novel for the first time in 1961?  How the brows must have first knit in puzzlement and then lifted as the face gave way to laughter when dialogue like this appeared on the page:

      Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"
      "He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.
      "Can you ground him?"
      "I sure can but first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."
      "Then why doesn't he ask you to?"
      "Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."
      "That's all he has to do to be grounded?"
      "That's all. Let him ask me."
      "And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.
      "No, then I can't ground him."
      "You mean there's a catch?"
      "Sure there is a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

If Catch-22 debuted today, surely there would be a swarm of WTFs and LOLs flying around the Twitterverse.  Indeed, it's the LOL novel of all time.  Couple that with the viscera-smeared wartime setting and there'll be plenty of involuntary gasps of "What the fuck?!"

But take a look around.  Almost from the moment the first well-meaning American set foot on Iraqi sand in 2003, the Global War on Terrorism has been a bungle cut from the cloth of Catch-22.  Afghanistan and Iraq both have had their share of General Peckems and Colonel Cathcarts, as well as the Yossarians who cry foul and call their bluff and bluster.  We need to heed the bitter truths of Catch-22 now more than ever.

As we mourn the loss of more than 6,000 servicemembers, we find laughter is the best medicine.  Even sour laughter can be a comfort.  I think, I hope, Joseph Heller would be pleased to see his novel has endured and even gained more relevance in this era when wars seem to be fought on cyclic hamster wheels.

Catch-22 Week: War is funny as hell

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the meanest, saddest, funniest, truthiest novel ever written about war: Joseph Heller's Catch-22.  For five decades, people have been alternately holding their sides and scratching their heads as they read about the World War II Army Air Force crew stationed on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea.  It's not always an easy book to read.  As the best literature often demands, you have to work your way to the pleasures to be found here.  Catch-22 is a novel that flips the narrative structure of the novel on its head as sure as Yossarian is thrown upside down in his Plexiglas bombardier's compartment.  The same events are told multiple times, looping and returning to add another piece of crucial information.  Scenes change abruptly, often in the space between the period ending one paragraph and the capital letter at the start of the next.

Catch-22 is illogical and irrational...and that's just the way the author intended it to be.  Heller refused to play by the rules in this book, inverting expectations at nearly every turn: one minute slapstick, the next minute a hard slap of violence.

Readers love it.  Readers loathe it.

No matter which camp you fall into, I hope you'll join me here all week as I pay tribute to a book whose popular success helped pave the way for TV shows like McHale's Navy and Gomer Pyle, books like Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity's Rainbow, and movies like M*A*S*H and Stripes.  It's also one of the novels which has deeply influenced my own writing.  Truth be told, without Catch-22, there would be no Fobbit.  Joseph Heller gave me permission to let the jokes drop onto the page as I wrote my novel.  I'm not saying Fobbit is as funny as Catch-22--far from it--but I hope readers will find some of the same Yossarianish absurdity pushing the boundaries of good taste when they read of Captain Abe Hornsacker's trials and tribulations in the Iraq War.  War is hell, but it's also funny as hell.

      "Men," Colonel Cargill began in Yossarian's squadron, measuring his pauses carefully.  "You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it."
      Sergeant Knight thought about it and then politely informed Colonel Cargill that he was addressing the enlisted men and that the officers were to be found waiting for him on the other side of the squadron. Colonel Cargill thanked him crisply and glowed with self-satisfaction as he strode across the area. It made him proud to observe that twenty-nine months in the service had not blunted his genius for ineptitude.
      "Men," he began his address to the officers, measuring his pauses carefully.  "You're American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement..."

The first editions of Catch-22 appeared in bookstore window displays on Oct. 10, 1961.  By Thanksgiving of that year, it had sold 12,000 copies.  As Christopher Buckley notes in his introduction to the new 50th Anniversary Edition, "The novel got some good reviews, some mixed reviews, and some pretty nasty reviews....But a number of people fell for it--hard.  To quote the novel's first line, 'It was love at first sight.'  They took it up as a cause, not just a book, with evangelical ardor."

I've been planning this "Catch-22 Week" for the better part of a year and debated on when I should hold it.  Ultimately, I chose this week, rather than the one in October, to honor Heller's masterpiece here at The Quivering Pen.  It only seemed fitting to do so during the week which ends with Veterans Day.

Before I go too much further, I realize there are one or two impoverished souls out there who have never read Catch-22.  I pity you and I weep for your children, knowing they never grew up in a household which rang with laughter.  A house without Yossarian is a dull home indeed.

If you've never read the book but have been thinking about finally getting around it, may I suggest the new 50th Anniversary Edition which has Buckley's introduction and a wealth of supplemental material, including essays by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, and Anthony Burgess, plus rare papers, advertisements and photos from Heller's personal archive.

In the meantime, as a sort of rough Cliffs Notes, here's what you need to know about the book:
1.  Yossarian is a B-25 bombardier (as was Heller himself) who has flown 44 missions and is hoping to reach his quota of 45 so he doesn't have to fly through fields of flak anymore.
2.  However, the military brass keeps raising the number of qualifying missions just as he gets close to his quota (a recurring frustration throughout the novel).
3.  This drives Yossarian insane and he starts looking for ways to get out of combat--admitting himself to the hospital with false afflictions ("Garnett-Fleischaker syndrome"), poisoning the food in the mess hall, and moving the bomb line on the map.
4.  Yossarian is not a coward, he's a self-preservationist.
5.  There's a lot of other stuff like black marketeers, censored letters signed by "Washington Irving" and/or "Irving Washington," plum tomatoes, patients in full-body casts, lonely whores, lonelier generals, and a general lack of respect for authority.
6.  People die and it's funny.  People live and it's tragic.

Am I missing anything?  Yes, lots.  There's no way I can cover every aspect of Catch-22 in this one short week.  I'm not even going to try.  Instead, I hope to talk about a few of my favorite scenes in the book, give you a little publishing history, and introduce you to some of the characters.  In addition, I've asked a couple of friends to talk about how Catch-22 has influenced their lives, so you'll be treated to some delightful guest posts here at the blog.

I hope you'll join me.  It's going to be an crazy week.