Just One Catch (42 page)

He refused advertising. This freed him to throw rocks at America's prevailing mythologies. At first, he had only six hundred subscribers. He kept the magazine afloat with his own money, earned by freelancing. He spoofed religion, blacklisting, military expansionism, and nuclear fears (“Atoms for Peace,” Ike called A-bombs, in a line that could have come from
Catch-22
).

Krassner printed a
FUCK COMMUNISM
poster, which outraged the Left
and
the Right (no one could tell where the satire was aimed). He interviewed Lenny Bruce as well as George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi party. The Rockwell interview opened with a note to readers: “When canceling your subscription please include your zip code.”

In time, Krassner's audience came to him. “What [our] readers had in common was an irreverence toward bullshit. Except their own, of course,” he said. As the magazine found its footing, it combined satire with incisive investigative reporting. In 1972, with financial backing from John Lennon and Yoko Ono,
The Realist
would produce a special issue documenting the Nixon administration's improprieties in far more depth than the mainstream media had attempted.

One of Krassner's earliest “Impolite Interviews” was with Joseph Heller. Krassner recalled, “I had gone to my first literary cocktail party in my capacity as editor of
The Realist,
” at about the time
Newsweek
ran its profile of Joe in 1962. “When I met Heller, he asked if I'd read his book. I said I was in the middle of it, but [later] admitted that I had lied to him and didn't have the book. As a result, he sent me a copy with a note: ‘You don't have to read
Catch-22,
you write it every month.' So then I requested an interview and read the book very carefully to prepare my questions. I learned much from his answers about the structure and modus operandi of satire.”

Whereas
Newsweek
had covered the novel's popularity and Joe's growing celebrity, Krassner focused on the novel's critique of society. In the interview, Joe insisted
Catch-22
was “quite an orthodox book in terms of its morality.” He went on: “I think anything
critical
is subversive by nature in the sense that it does seek to change or reform something.… [T]he impetus toward progress of any kind has always been a sort of discontent with what existed.… But it doesn't necessarily follow from that, that people would take exception to [the book].” He affirmed his belief that “people, even the worst people, I think are basically good, are motivated by humane impulses,” and he swore he was “more concerned with producing a work of fiction—of literary art, if you will—than of converting anybody or arousing controversy. I'm really afraid of getting involved in controversy.”

“Are you serious?” Krassner asked.

“Oh, yes,” Joe replied. “I'm a terrible coward. I'm just like Yossarian, you know. It's the easiest thing to fight—I learned that in the war—it
takes
a certain amount of courage to go to war, but not very much, not as much as to refuse to go to war.”

In response to critics' charges that his characters were interchangeable, lacking real
selves,
Joe said, “People die and are forgotten. People are abused and forgotten. People suffer, people are exploited,
right now
; we don't dwell upon them twenty-four hours a day. Somehow they get lost in the swirl of things … so [I had] a definite technique [in mind], at the beginning of the book particularly, of treating people and incidents almost in terms of glimpses, and then showing as we progress that these things do have a meaning and they do come together.”

Finally, he said, “I regard [
Catch-22
] essentially as a peacetime book.… [W]hen this wartime emergency ideology is transplanted to peacetime, then you have … not only absurd situations, but … very tragic situations.”

Following the interview, Joe “pretended he had taken the subway to our meeting,” Krassner recalled. Later, he learned Joe had hailed a cab. “I thought [that] was revealing,” Krassner said, “[but] I never thought that his identification with the counterculture and [his] desire for financial success were in the least mutually exclusive.” The times they were a-changin'; everyone was trying to negotiate the seams.

*   *   *

“WE MOVED
to [a] much larger apartment in the [Apthorp] building right before 1963,” Ted Heller recalls. “I remember watching Oswald get shot in that apartment, live on TV. Most nights we ate in but we had a practice of going out on Sundays. We either went to a place called Tony's (Italian) on West 79th Street or a Chinese place called Eastern Gardens somewhere in the 80s or 90s on Broadway (neither place is still extant). Eastern Gardens was, as I remember, not on street level but on the second floor and was very old school: red checked tablecloths and silver metal serving dishes with the tops on them. The bartender and the maitre d' at Tony's knew my father and called him Giuseppe. The bartender's name was Flavio and he knew that my father liked a Beefeater martini straight up, extra dry, with a twist.”

On weekdays, Shirley cooked at home. She was glad the new apartment came with a washer and dryer.

By 1963, among the biggest-selling Dell paperbacks were
Catch-22
and Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
(“… the housewife-mother … [is] the model for all women; [this mystique] presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in the here and now, as far as women are concerned”). At the time,
Paperbound Books in Print
had no Women's Studies category. The “women's” line included books on beauty, cooking, and child care—though Benjamin Spock was still considered the national baby guru, and had the royalties to prove it. “Give up Dr. Spock? I'd rather give up my husband,” said one woman in a UPI survey seeking to determine if Spock's growing political activism had eroded his readers' confidence.

Spock's political consciousness, like that of most men of his (and Joe's) generation had not yet widened to include feminism. “I think that when women are encouraged to be competitive too many of them become disagreeable,” he was quoted as saying.
Newsweek
declared that menstruation was a “natural restriction” keeping women at home, and faulted American housewives for not accepting their destinies with “grace.”

“Men went mad,” Joe had written in one of the nation's bestselling books.

“[W]omen['s] … lives [are] confined,” Betty Friedan claimed in another.

 

13.
Bombs

BACK ON
Corsica in 1966, on assignment for
Holiday
magazine, Joe realized the mission count was still being raised. As ten-year-old Ted hung out a car window, gazing with “sour … irritation” at his dad's wartime haunts, Joe understood
his
missions were over, but his son's “military service was still ahead”: “I could have clasped him in my arms to protect him.”

Joe predicted his narrator in
Something Happened.
“[My son's] terror … [is] more dreadful than any I have ever been able to imagine,” says Bob Slocum, the narrator father. “I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze.” He smothers his boy in his zeal to save him.

Nothing so dramatic happened on the return to Corsica, but Joe's impulse to shield his son, and its switch in the novel to murderous terror, suggests something crucial about his fiction-making process—a subject for later. For now, while Joe and his family walked the hills of Corsica, let's note: Joe didn't die as a child (surrounded by arcades simulating the noise of war); his father did. Joe didn't die in the war; army brothers did. In revisiting his past—and celebrating his continuing vitality—he felt something he would later imagine as hastening a child's death.

Sacrifice and honor, the liberated and the fallen: In a sense, these military tropes, which Joe first encountered as a boy reading the
Iliad,
defined his life view and mature fiction.

“Is this what we came to see?” Ted grumbled one day, gazing at gravel and dirt on a flat Corsican patch.

“The airfield was right here,” Joe explained to his son. “The bombers used to come back from Italy and France and land right out that way.”

“I'm thirsty,” said Erica, fourteen.

“It's hot,” Shirley said.

Ted said, “I want to go back.”

Joe told him they weren't returning to the hotel. They were moving on to another spot.

“I mean back to New York!” Ted said. “I'm not interested in your stupid airfield! The only airfield I want to see is John F. Kennedy!”

From the first, the kids had been excited but wary about the trip. “Up until [this] time, we hadn't … really been anywhere and suddenly we were packing to go on the S. S.
Rafaello,
[one of its earliest] voyage[s], in first class, pretty heady stuff,” Erica says. Before leaving the States, she had asked her father why the family couldn't go to Italy by car. At the time, Joe was paying to send her to the New Lincoln School, a progressive private school in Harlem, and he wondered if the money was worth it. “My brother and I played Ping Pong across the Atlantic,” Erica recalls. “My always beautiful mother was now splendidly glamorous, dressed up for dinner and suddenly looking like some enchanting actress or a Tzarina. My father begrudgingly wore a tux to dinner every night and was the life of the party: sardonic, bored and faintly irritable, but still somehow a delight to all around him. The young Italian waiters in their spanking white jackets all giggled a bit when my mother spoke to them and I caught one, once, blushing while trying … to look down her celery-colored evening gown as he bent to serve her baked Alaska.”

Holiday
had assigned Joe to write about the old Alesan Air Field, to note the changes in people and places, and relive his experiences. The kids were bored by his talk of the past. “There [was] nothing [left],” Joe conceded. “It's almost … as though there had never been a war.” The mountains were higher than he remembered, the landscape rougher, the dangers he had faced more intense than he had realized at the time. The cab rides, on steep, winding paths in reedy, dry hills spooked his wife.

At Ile Rousse, a summer resort where the army had built a rest camp in Joe's day, teenaged girls and boys from Paris, Marseille, and Nice lounged about or swam, listening to Nancy Sinatra, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones on a jukebox. Up and down nearby beaches, fancy new cottages lined the shore: This could have been Fire Island. Only now and then did Joe catch a glimpse of something familiar: a bar on the road to Cervione, a mountain village, where pilots and bombardiers used to drink warm, bitter wine. Now the place, much brighter than it used to be, served Coca-Cola, and Joe's kids delighted in the
gelato allemagne,
the German ice cream he ordered for them there. “Don't drink the water,” Shirley warned them. At one point, Joe wrote, a “shy, soft-spoken young man stepped toward us hesitantly,” wishing to honor this American who had fought to liberate Italy. He “begged permission to give us a
cadeau,
a gift, a large, beautiful earthenware vase from the small pottery shop from which he gained his livelihood,” Joe said. “It was touching, sobering; I was sorry I had nothing with which to reciprocate.”

Joe was curious to see the town of Pietrasanta and to inspect its bridge. For years, he had not been certain he had hit it with his bombs. Recently, in New York, an acquaintance, the film producer Al Brodax, said he'd visited Pietrasanta. The villagers assured him the bridge had been ruined in the war.

Joe couldn't tell. The bridge had been small, sturdy, and smooth. Destroyed, it would have been easy to repair.

The family stayed at the Hotel Byron in Forte dei Marmi nearby, where the sculptor Henry Moore was also staying at the time. He went out in the mornings to Cararra, a white-marble quarry, to select pieces for his work. Erica recalls the Byron as a “little jewel of a hotel.” She loved the “salty breezes” and the hotel chef's “salsa pomodoro, still the cleanest, freshest taste I know.” On the beach, striped chairs stood in rows on the sand; every afternoon at three o'clock, a stooped, toothless man came around, wearing bright red sandals, selling “bambaloni balls of crisp, fried dough, dusted with sugar, hot in your hands, ambrosia in your mouth,” Erica says.

In Florence, she and her mother bought earrings while Joe sat with his son in sidewalk cafés, scribbling, pondering, recalling his war. He remembered that, on his thirty-seventh mission—the one to Avignon—he'd learned the lead navigator had once been a history teacher. Flying over Europe, he'd recognized places he had read about. At one point, as the bombers made their way to France, he announced excitedly over the intercom, “On our right is the city of Orange, ancestral home of the kings of Holland and of William III.” “And on our left,” came the worried voice of a radio gunner, “is flak.”

In Siena, Frederick Karl, Dolores, and their kids joined the Hellers for the Palio, a spectacular citywide horse race. In Rome, Joe perused the streets, recalling how American soldiers used to justify their visits to prostitutes here. Their money helped poor girls obtain the necessities of life, they said: For only thirty-five dollars (a couple of afternoon visits), a woman could get a nice pair of shoes. Frequenting brothels was a form of humanitarian aid.

As a young man on R & R, Joe had skipped the museums and architectural tours. Now, the city's art and history overwhelmed him. He was especially touched by Michelangelo's fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. “It is the best motion picture ever made,” he wrote. “There is perpetual movement in its violent rising and falling, and perpetual drama in its agony and wrath. To be with [it] is to be with Oedipus and King Lear. I want that wall.” He dreamed of transporting and refashioning it in the Apthorp, turning his apartment into a Hall of the Great Dead.