Just One Catch (73 page)

Joe did not know Falstein's book. Falstein died in 1995; he could not have missed
Catch-22,
but he never mentioned Joe's book to any member of his family. The rituals and monotonies of war could easily account for the novels' similarities. Joe pointed out “how much war fiction depends on the same elementary variations on themes and characters.” Bob Gottlieb defended him vigorously. “I've never seen, heard, or felt Joe Heller doing anything remotely less than honest during our forty-year relationship,” he said. “It is inconceivable that he used any other writer's work.”

Mel Gussow wrote a persuasive account of the novels in the
New York Times
, exonerating Joe. The “books are widely disparate in approach, ambition, style and content,” he concluded. Still, the flap, coming so soon after assertions by critics that
Closing Time
had taken the shine off
Catch-22,
was another blow.

“What a
nothing
story!” Chris Buckley wrote Joe. “Honestly: do not lose
one
minute's sleep … on this.” Joe responded, “Chris: Stop grieving … [though] absurdly, I find myself in a rage against a man I never knew who died a few years [ago] and was the author of a novel I never heard of!”

*   *   *

IF ANYTHING
, the controversy—which blew over quickly—upped the sales of
Catch-22.
More than ever, the book seemed impervious to critical assaults, literary fashion, and time.

Meanwhile, multiculturalism had become a vital publishing trend. “Ethnic” books flooded the market, promoting diversity while, sadly, seeming much the same. Still, genuine talents emerged. Finally, U.S. fiction began to reflect the mix of blood, belief, and outlook that had blessed the nation—but not many of its books—from the first. Voices readers had not been privileged to listen to before, from ethnic enclaves, from deep within the nation's midst, told of change and the harvests we were likely to reap from it. The names suggested the varied roads these young writers had taken: Julia Alvarez, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Junot Díaz.

Many times, Joe had worked in, and through, changing literary climates. Could he do it once more? He resisted Buckley's requests for new magazine articles. “I'd rather not think about another piece for
FYI
or anywhere else,” he said. “I feel it's time now to begin thinking about another book, and since in my lifetime I've never been able to come up with more than one idea at a time, I'd like the idea I do come up with to be for that one.”

Shortly afterward, he told Buckley he feared “my next and final novel will be about a spent novelist who spends … his [last] years writing travel articles read by few people he knows for a younger novelist like you, in a kind of odd Faustian bargain in which Mephistopholes himself is also prey to the capitalist cool he serves.”

Valerie said
she
would write an article for
FYI.
“Here's how my piece about taking [Joe to Europe] will begin. ‘He didn't want to go. I did. I won.'”

*   *   *

JOURNALISTS
, many discovering
Catch-22
for the first time, came regularly to East Hampton. Joe never ceased to enjoy the attention, but the interviews became ordeals. He didn't handle them as smoothly as he had in the past. For one thing, he was physically uncomfortable sitting in one place for extended periods. He squinted, hunched his shoulders, shifted his haunches. He'd flutter his fingers under a now-flabby chin. He pursed his lips, cleared his throat, bit his nails. Often, he felt frustrated by his slow speech, his inability to articulate crisply what he wanted to say. He had always spoken off the cuff; his apparent nonchalance used to be more calculating than it was now. He was no longer so quick on his feet. Cavalierly, he told interviewers to clean up his grammar when quoting him. They rarely did.

In a pair of late-life interviews with female journalists, he flirted openly, talked freely of the many affairs he'd had, professed his faith in “old-fashioned ideas” about men and women—“strong women have a tendency to create weak men,” he said—and admitted his desire to be “fed [and] … coddled, [as well as to have] things fixed up for [me].”

He seemed to be baiting the women to admit he remained attractive. One day, Erica came across some of his comments in a London paper. She called and said he should be more discreet when speaking of his affairs. The words were hurtful to family and friends. Even if they appeared in foreign publications, the U.S. press was bound to pick them up. He agreed to be more careful.

Valerie talked openly to reporters. In an interview with Lynn Barber in March 1998—the longest and most candid (not to say careless) interview Joe gave in his final years—Valerie and Joe exhibited “strange turbulent undercurrents.” “I'm never sure if they're joking or [arguing],” Barber admitted. “The effect of the Hellers together is … unhingeing [
sic
].” They sniped at each other over travel plans, food, their lives together, his children. “She's as bossy as can be,” Joe said.

“[He used to be] different,” Valerie said. “He was a very happy person, very agreeable. Even though he was almost paralyzed, he was very happy and he really did not realize that he might not recover. The doctors said, ‘You'll be fine,' and he believed it. A lot of times, when people are sick, there is a different personality to when they are well.”

“When I met her in the hospital, I was flirting,” Joe said.

“And now he flirts with everybody else!” Valerie added.

“You have noticed that she talks more rapidly than I do.…”

“Have you ever heard his daughter speak?” Valerie asked. “She speaks in entirely slow motion. I've never heard anyone speak like that in my life. Never. It's very strange to me. Real … slow.”

“What she's saying is that she talks rapidly, and I get irritated by people who talk rapidly,” Joe snapped.

Getting back to flirting, Barber asked Joe if he regretted the affairs he'd had. “[They] were just individual sexual encounters,” he said. “It was a delightful phase. It mostly started after
Catch-22,
and I felt very good about myself. Looking back, I don't feel so good about it because the effect on my wife was devastating. I regret much of the outcome. On the other hand, I enjoyed very much the experiences and if I had to do it all over again, I don't know which I would do.”

Speaking of daughters, there were “some truly harrowing scenes between father and daughter in
Something Happened,
” Barber ventured. “I don't relate to children particularly, or even young people anymore—there's no basis for conversation,” Joe replied.

What did he make of the fact that his children had never married? “They don't relate as openly to people as I do.” Was that because he set a bad example? “Not me!” Joe protested. “They had a mother, too, and they had a grandmother [Dottie] who was a tyrant!”

“But he agrees that he was probably an ‘oppressive' parent and … fatherhood was not his thing,” Barber wrote.

What drew him to Valerie? “Well … she's attractive. She was my day nurse, she was single, and it developed. One thing I say which is amusing but true is that we were intimate before we were friendly.”

When the interview was over, Joe drove Barber to a bus stop so she could catch her plane. He “burbled fondly about Valerie as if they hadn't just been verbally beating each other to a pulp—maybe it's their normal form of conversation,” Barber wrote. He gazed out the window at local landmarks—the boat docks, the bagel store, the tackle shop, and a pig shed with the name Elvis painted in huge letters on its side. He said he felt lonely here. Most of his neighbors were people with whom he had nothing in common, egocentric businessmen. “Really?” Barber said. “Some people might say
you
were a bit egotistical.”

“Do you mean egotistical or self-satisfied?” Joe said. He turned the steering wheel. “I'm well into my seventies. I'm in good health. I have a nice personality. I can live comfortably. It doesn't mean I don't go into periods of depression or anxiety like now … wondering … what you're going to write about me, but I'm no longer anxious about things like money, and I'm no longer really anxious about sexual activity—that's in the past. I wish I was younger. I wish I was as virile as I was, and I wish I was ambitious. I wish I had as much energy.” They had arrived at the bus stop. Barber opened her door. “But all those things”—Joe waved his hand—“waned with age.”

*   *   *

HE COULDN'T HELP
it: He stared at women's butts more than he used to. It wasn't a sexual gaze. It was idle curiosity, flavored with a residue of prurience, like a faint vanilla smell. It gave the experience a sweet, nostalgic spice. It was instinctual, like something barely remembered. When he looked at young people's faces, he couldn't help but imagine their features wrinkled, slack, dry.

His major activity was observing himself observing the world.

*   *   *

IT WAS THE SEASON
of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. People joked, “Hear about the new game they're playing in the White House? ‘Swallow the Leader.'”

*   *   *

JOE SPOKE FREELY
about missing his father, though he'd never known the man. He could not talk about his mother without a sting of tears.

*   *   *

“YOU'VE GOT A DAUGHTER
and a son and you may find yourself … touched very deeply [by
Something Happened
],” Joe wrote Chris Buckley. Buckley was reading the novel for the first time. Joe continued to give him writerly advice: “The life of a novelist is almost inevitably destined for anguish, humiliation, and disappointment.”

As if to underscore the point, he said, “My new novel was not a great hit with Bob Gottlieb and [it was] a puzzlement to Binky [Urban] too, both of whom seem to prefer a different approach to the subject matter and a different novel than the one I have written.” He went on to say, “So I'll be finding a different publisher for this one and a different agent.… Binky and I are still on the friendliest of terms, but you'll appreciate the irony: The book is mainly about a well-known novelist … my … age struggling to come up with a subject for a new novel that will be welcomed with enthusiasm by his editor and his agent. Don't grieve for me: I've been through this many times before, almost every time, in fact.”

Buckley replied, “[M]y heart goes out to you. I know this kind of thing hurts.… Hold on to the fact that you wrote one of the most amazing novels of all time.”

Meanwhile, Joe's son had written a novel, a satirical look at the inner workings of New York's magazine world, in which he'd had considerable experience. While still in the garment business, Ted delivered clothes one day to the
Vogue
offices. He was too scruffy for the snobbish reception staff. When he asked if he could use a bathroom, a secretary told him, “No. We don't have one.” Soon afterward, he worked at
Spy
and
Vanity Fair.
His first assignment, in the late 1980s, was to help organize
Spy
's index for
The Andy Warhol Diaries.
“Every time [Warhol mentioned] a famous name, [I had to] say why,” Ted said. “I would write things like, ‘Halston, cocaine use of.'”

Then he went to work for
Nickelodeon.

Simon & Schuster was interested in Ted's novel. Joe figured he was “going to have a better year as a writer than I'm having.” Buckley cautioned him, “[T]ell Ted—from me—expect the absolute worst. Every interview will begin with, ‘What is it like to grow up the son of the author of
Catch-22
?' [Buckley, the son of conservative commentator William F. Buckley, spoke from experience.] Tell him the only solution to this intractable situation is … roll with it.”

Buckley's comments turned out to be prophetic. “[Ted's] great joy has been diminished already by an item in a … paper insinuating nepotistic preference,” Joe reported. (Ted said, “I sort of have a reputation but it's not my reputation.”)

“[He should] ignore shit like this,” Buckley said. “Writing is the most bottom-line profession there is. Either you can or you can't, and the truth becomes apparent in seconds.… So tell him to kick back and enjoy. He is a novelist.”

In
his
work, Buckley was struggling with the “old dilemma”: Is “serious” writing more significant than satire? “[K]eep in mind it is possible to be both humorous and mordantly serious,” Joe told him. “Have you read the novels of Joseph Heller? If you've not read
God Knows,
do so right now.”

Literary faxing with a colleague was one thing, but because of his recent rejection, and the nastiness Ted was facing, Joe had no desire to go into the city. “What does someone like you or I do at a lavish book party in which crowds of people there seem more important to us than we know they are?” he asked Buckley.

Valerie went to parties without him. “So I walk into the Norman Mailer book party last night and someone pinches my bottom and it's—Valerie! She looked great,” Buckley said. “We had a good catch-up, then she went over and pinched Muhammad Ali's bottom and left with him. She sure gets around.”

Joe shot back, “Valerie has long experience at grabbing attractive men by the crotch … but she won't have sex with black men or Jews.”

On another occasion, Buckley mentioned he'd run into Joe's “old pal” Henry Kissinger. Kissinger “cornered” him at a gathering to “defend his [old] Vietnam policies. I was drunk as a skunk. Amazing twin sensations.”

Joe replied, “The picture of being both drunk and in conversation with Kissinger is appalling.” It was Buckley's birthday. “Steadily … you grow wiser,” Joe said. “But, by the time you figure out what to do with your life, much of it may be over. Happy 46th.”