Just One Catch (38 page)

In July, Maschler sent Joe a note: “We sold just over 800 copies last week … and we have ordered yet another reprint.… I don't suppose we shall ever catch up with S & S but, to use an English understatement, we are not displeased.”

On November 20, in the
Manchester Guardian,
W. J. Weatherby said:

It is hard to imagine [Heller's] book being a best seller even five years ago, and we can only conjecture as to why it has proved so much in keeping with the general mood now when the Cold War is still with us. It may be that the only way we can live indefinitely in this state of tension, with this kind of reality, is to be coldly, even cynically, realistic about it. Just as the poor man must face reality every day whereas the rich man need not, so perhaps now we must face the reality of war whereas before the nuclear threat we could be fooled by the romance of it.

Writing in the
Evening Post,
Anthony Burgess was even blunter: Britain had no illusions about its ability to control the next war. “The thesis of ‘Catch-22' can only be universally valid when the whole world has been absorbed into the American Empire,” he said.

Gottlieb and Bourne rushed ads into the
New York Times,
saying, “Come on! Don't let the English beat us! Overnight, while America slept, Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
has become #1 bestseller in England. Come on Yanks! To your booksellers! Help close the Catch-gap! Onwards and upwards! Over the top! Let's go!”

In August 1962, when Candida Donadio sold the
Catch-22
film rights to Columbia Pictures for $100,000, with a $25,000 option for a treatment or first-draft screenplay, Joe took a leave of absence from
McCall's,
ostensibly to prepare a chronology of events and narrative time line for the movie studio. Few of his magazine colleagues expected to see him return. One of his former bosses, Herbert Mayes, told a reporter, “Heller's a hell of a good publicist. Sorry we lost him. What I'd like to know, though, is how he got the time on my time to write that book.”

Joe spent the rest of the summer and early fall drawing up a chart of the novel's action for the movie people and making notes for a possible dramatic adaptation to be performed on Broadway—the producer David Merrick had suggested this idea. “I don't know yet whether I'll do the play or turn it over to someone else, but I will probably do the film script,” he told the
New York Times.

He also enjoyed himself. “It was wonderful for Joe,” said Bob Gottlieb. “I've never known a writer who took a more innocent and marvelous, happy, wholesome joy in his success. He really appreciated it. It had been a long time coming. And he loved it. He loved being the author of
Catch-22.
”

He was invited to parties where he met actors and writers, critics and professors. He was so thrilled to be included in these gatherings, he was slow to realize many people had come to meet him. Some of Gottlieb's colleagues felt embarrassed by Joe's frank delight in his good fortune, and they complained that his attitude was unseemly (especially around other writers, comfortably miserable in their anonymous cocoons). “They had an idea that I was supposed to look like Thomas Wolfe, with this aura of suicidal melancholy,” Joe quipped. Gottlieb brushed away his colleagues' complaints. Let the man celebrate his success. He knew how to handle it.

“Both [success and failure] are difficult to endure,” Joe reflected years later. “Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.… Luckily, I was thirty-eight and pretty well set in my ways when
Catch-22
came out. I had a good job and a nice apartment. If I'd been, say, twenty-seven and living in a cold-water flat, my marriage would have broken up, I would have bought an estate in East Hampton I couldn't afford and, to pay for it, I would have started a second novel too soon.”

*   *   *

“
CATCH-22
is taking off!” Joe told Alice Denham. He had stopped by her apartment one afternoon.

“I'll drink to that,” she said. She poured him a scotch and they toasted.

“Guess what?” Joe said. “I quit work. I'm writing a film script. For good money. I'm hot, hot!”

“Joe, that's fabulous.” Denham's writing was going nowhere. She had begun to think the literary world was a “boy's club.”

“Man, is Shirley relieved,” Joe said. “Greenbacks, at last. I'm meeting writers I've always wanted to know. Like Algren.”

“Wow, introduce me, bigshot.”

For all his bluster, “Joe Heller was always a good guy,” Denham wrote. “He didn't have an ounce of pomposity. He was macho, of course, but he was a buddy of sorts, bursting with high spirits and fun.” Everybody liked him—“he was that sort of guy.”

That day, he shocked her by admitting he'd been “celebrating life”—he'd “[s]pent too much time with a lady friend this afternoon.” “So Joe played around, like so many others,” Denham wrote. “Somehow I['d] thought he had a rockbound marriage.”

And he
did,
according to the double standards he'd learned in the military and corporate offices.

She remembered he had once consoled her after she'd had an affair with David Markson, which ended badly. Joe asked her if she wanted children, if she really wanted to be faithful. She had to be honest with herself, he said. “You don't want to be married [now], Alice,” he told her. “You want romance. That's different.… You're an adventuress. Don't knock it.”

On that occasion, she wrote, he counseled her that “[w]hen people want to get married,
only then
do they look around for a permanent mate. It starts with wanting marriage.”

“Is that what you did?” Denham asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “You look at people differently. I'd been through the war. I wanted to settle down.”

*   *   *

“A MATTER
has been troubling me that I feel I should bring to your attention.” So began a letter received by Simon & Schuster in mid-May 1962. “It has to do with the appearance of my name, Robert Oliver Shipman, in the novel
Catch-22.
”

Mr. Shipman went on to say he was a member of the faculty at the Pennsylvania State College at the time Joseph Heller taught there. As “in the case of the chaplain in
Catch-22,
I was married and the father of three small children,” he said; “in the United States Army [I held] the rank of captain, the same rank indicated as being held by the chaplain in
Catch-22.
”

Given these similarities, the appearance of his name in the book embarrassed him, he said: “I find it difficult to believe that the use of the name … can be attributed to mere coincidence.” He said he had no wish to humiliate Mr. Heller. He hoped the matter could be handled quietly and privately, but he wanted the name removed from all subsequent editions and reprints of
Catch-22.

On May 18, Joe wrote a long and cordial letter to Mr. Shipman, assuring him the “matter was entirely coincidental.” “I can no more explain why I used the name Robert Oliver Shipman than I can explain [my other choices] … except that in every case the basic intention was to
avoid
using the name of any person I had ever met or heard of. As a matter of fact, the name was originally R. C. Shipman (a fact you can verify in New World Writing 7, 1955, where the beginning of the book first appeared) and the ‘c' became an ‘o' as a result of an initial typing error that was allowed to stand, since the difference was of no consequence.” Nevertheless, Joe said, he understood Mr. Shipman was troubled. “[W]ith a great deal of sadness” he would “accede to [his] request” if Mr. Shipman continued to insist. The problem was, “it will probably be impossible for me to find a seven-letter substitute that will have the same symbolic connotations that the name has as a word. For another, there is the feeling that Chaplain Shipman already has a literary identity for the many people who have already read the book and the many critics who have written about it. And for another, I like to think that the book will be read, discussed, and written about for several years to come, and I feel sorry for those graduate students who will read the book in one version and find themselves discussing it with professors who have read it in another.”

Shipman remained politely unmoved.

For the sixth S & S printing, and all following editions of the novel, the name would be changed (though Shipman lives on in certain British paperback reprints). For the right new name, Joe returned to Penn State in his mind. He recalled the plucky young boxer, the perpetual underdog, Tapman (and, for good measure, added an extra
p
to the name).

On August 6, 1962, Paula Diamond, a literary agent, sent Joe a note: “Eek, I've just picked up the Dell [paperback] reprint. Who is that Tappman person and what have you done with R. O. Shipman? Are there
no
eternal verities?” Joe responded that, after wrestling with the problem “as Jacob wrestled with the angel,” he had “capitulated” to Mr. Shipman like a “coward.”

Mr. Shipman, who went on to serve as the assistant dean in Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, had a final exchange with Joe in April 1963. He wanted to say “how well I think you substituted for the name of the chaplain … particularly the effectiveness with which you retained the seven-letter symbolism of the surname.” He had read with enjoyment in the
New York Times Book Review
that more than 800,000 copies of the paperback edition had sold since its release in September 1962. “Warm congratulations to you and this splendid success,” Mr. Shipman said. “I am delighted to see a writer of your obvious competence and caliber being rightly recognized and rewarded.”

Joe replied he was glad that “no permanent resentment exist[ed]” and thanked Mr. Shipman for his “kind feelings.” He added, “To date, I have received but two queries regarding the change of name, which proves my fears that legions of Ph.D [
sic
] candidates would be thrown into confusion, were groundless.”

*   *   *

“THE SUCCESS
of [
Catch-22
in paperback] in the first few months was astonishing,” said Don Fine, Dell's editor in chief. He had purchased rights to the novel from S & S and Pocket Books for $32,000. “This was a book lovingly and carefully prepared by Bob Gottlieb. But the book did not take off in hardcover.… I remember when I sent the contract information to Bill Callahan [Dell's vice president in charge of sales], he wrote to me saying, ‘What the hell is a
Catch-22
?' I wrote back and said, ‘It's a World War II novel.' We ‘packaged' it so it could pass as a big important World War II [book].… We had an aviator's head—not very good art—for the cover instead of [Paul Bacon's] dangling man, which was the trademark of the hardcover. It would have destroyed the paperback with that on the cover. And this was the magic of paperback publishing in those days. We didn't have any television spots. We probably didn't have much point-of-sale stuff. But people read it. Young people read it and war veterans read it and goddammit, it worked! The paperback public took over this book and made it a very big success.… This was the way books got talked about and became household words.”

“[A] nation-wide sensation at $5.95[,] now complete and unabridged at 75¢,” proclaimed the paperback cover. The
Catch
craze began.

“Not since the
Catcher in the Rye
and
Lord of the Flies
has a novel been taken up by such a fervid and heterogeneous claque of admirers,”
Newsweek
announced in October 1962. “The book obviously inspires an evangelical fervor in those who admire it.… It has already swept the cocktail-party circuit where
Catch-22
is the hottest topic going and Joe Heller himself is the hottest catch.”

Joe appeared on NBC's
Today
show with interim host John Chancellor, projecting congeniality, confidence, and an adman's smoothness. He talked about the universality of his characters and said, “Yossarian is alive somewhere and still on the run.” After the show, “in a bar close by the studio in which I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour than ever in my life,” Joe said, “[Chancellor] handed me a packet of stickers he'd had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN LIVES. And he confided he'd been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building.”

Eventually, similar stickers appeared on college campuses along with copies of the paperback. Professors assigned the book, using it to discuss not only literary modernism and World War II but also current American policy in Southeast Asia, which dominated the news more and more. “[T]he war that I [was] really dealing with was not World War II but turned out to be the Vietnam war,” Joe told an interviewer.

“I don't think I'll ever recover [from reading this novel],” one university teacher wrote to S & S. “But before I die of
Catch-22,
I will do everything to keep it alive.… I'll write
Catch-22
on every surface I can find.” Soon, Yossarian graffiti stamped campuses and cities, side by side with the stickers. The most popular slogan was “Better Yossarian than Rotarian.” Yo-Yo went as many places as Kilroy ever had.

Publishers Weekly
reported, “[At] the University of Chicago students [are] buying up second-hand Army field jackets and sewing on Yossarian name tags.” In November 1962,
Esquire
's editor, Arnold Gingrich, said, “The young people … tell me that the college students are still reading ‘Catcher in the Rye' … [but] coming up fast is ‘Catch-22.' … Call it, if you like, the resistance movement—their revolt against authority, against organizational conformity, against the materialistic, affluent society.”