seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com
Responding to email questions about Joseph Heller and his Closing Time and Catch-22, in November 1997.
The zaniness of Catch-22 struck a chord -- trying to make sense out of an insane world. Closing Time felt contrived and far-fetched -- trying to make the ordinary world look insane. It simply didn't work for me. I didn't believe the characters or the situations; and the caricatures did not ring true. He seemed to be trying hard to be funny; but it just wasn't.
I'm a bit prejudiced. I read Catch-22 when I was in college during the Viet Nam War, and it all rang true. Major Major Major was hilarious. All the mocking of bureaucracy and the whacky and tragic consequences.
While I was at Yale, I had a one-semester writing course with Joseph Heller. It was supposed to be a writing class, but wound up more general literary chatter. It turns out that while Catch-22 is set in World War II, it was actually written about the Korean War (cf. Mash), and then came into its own when we got embroiled in Viet Nam. There is something universal about the book, which has to do with the universality, the insane repeatability of war, and the tragedy of pointless impending death in war.
Closing Time feels artificial, in part, because it doesn't deal with war. It tries to show war-like insanity in the world of capitalist business.
Ironically, while inspired by the Korean War and using war as a metaphor (if I remember correctly), Heller's intent was to write about business. (Milo Minderbinder etc.) It was business he was trying to satirize -- war was just his way of make the point, vividly. The result is memorable characters and situations and a book that can be interpreted and appreciated in a variety of ways.
With Closing Time he tries to deal with this old subject of business, but without a metaphor -- simply by gross exaggeration. For me that doesn't work.
Keep in mind that it was back in the fall of 1967 that I had that course with Joseph Heller -- that's a bit long ago to have vivid memories.
(At the last class of the semester -- a party -- he autographed books. The date on the autograph in my copy of Catch-22 is December 14, 1967).
He was living in New York and was commuting to New Haven to work on his play "We Bombed in New Haven" which as going to be performed by the Yale Repertory Theater. This was the first thing he had written in ages. At that point it looked as if Catch-22 was a one-shot miracle. He didn't seem to know how it had happened.
He was an advertising person (I believe). He acted and spoke like Joe Six-Pack. He seemed sincerely surprised and flattered by all the critical attention and avid fan attention that the book was receiving. I don't believe that it had been all that great a success when it first came out. All of a sudden the world had caught up with it -- it was a perfect metaphor for the Viet Nam War and for the bind that college students eligible for the draft were facing. I believe that the movie was on the horizon. I believe he had agreed to the deal but was feeling uncomfortable about it because he would have no control over what was done to the story.
He seemed to be seriously trying to understand what made his book work and how books were written in craftsmanlike fashion, so he could write another one. (If I remember correctly, the book had begun with the first couple sentences -- that was the seed -- the characters had grown from that, and the story-line from the characters. It just happened.)
The classes often ended up as bull sessions. (I believe he was also teaching a class of this kind at another college at the same time. He did ours once a week and the other once a week. But he didn't have much experience teaching and was sort of making it up as he went along.)
I remember one class exercise, where he read aloud to us in class the beginning of a Tolstoy story, one for which Tolstoy had written more than one ending. And he asked us to write an ending for it.
He seemed to feel uncomfortable dealing with classic literature and dealing with a bunch of students who had probably read more literature and read about more literature than he had. The author and the creation were so separate. This book had happened to him, and people kept asking him questions as if he were some literary genius, asking about meaning and structure and intent -- and he really didn't have answers.
But he wanted to have answers and wanted to understand and wanted to write again.
He had done the play We Bombed in New Haven (actually, he intended if it was successful -- and it wasn't -- to change the name for every city in which it was performed, We Bombed in...) on request, on commission (I believe) from Robert Brustein, who back then was the director of the Yale Repertory Theater. He had been prodded and cajoled into it, and he was excited because it was a new experience for him, seeing the play come to live through rehearsals (and realizing, on occasion, technical things that needed to be fixed that he hadn't realized when writing it that became evident when you saw it live.)
He also felt uncomfortable about his lack of knowledge of foreign languages. A friend had told him about Celine's Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, and that there were similarities between Catch-22 and that book, and that Celine's was a "great" book. Voyage... at that time was not available in English translation. So the friend had translated a number of passages for him, and he held that book in exalted estime, perhaps in part because it was inaccessible to him. (It's a very difficult book to translate.)
His novel Something Happened must have been in the works then. (My copy shows copyright dates of 1966 and 1974, so some part of it was probably published in 1966, but we in the class were not aware of that at the time. He was known as a "one-book" author until 1974 when Something came out.) I was never able to fight my way through that one -- despite all the motivation of having met him. It simply couldn't hold my interest. Likewise with all his other books, until Closing Time, but that was a fight as well (whereas I hadn't been able to put Catch-22 down.)
In 1981 when my own novel The Name of Hero came out, I wrote to Heller asking if you could provide a blurb/quote for the dust jacket. He didn't reply. Then I managed to catch a couple minutes with him at the Boston Globe Book Festival and asked him in person. He explained that since he was pushing a book of his own, his agent had advised him not to do blurbs for anyone else for a while. He was friendly but standoffish. I felt very awkward asking for such a favor. That sort of killed any opportunity for conversation. I haven't been in touch with him since.
Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com
Return to the B&R Samizdat Express
<
| Internet Business Showcase: | |||
Dog Training and Pet Care Veterinary, Dog/Cat Veterinarians |
Viatical Settlements RFID Tags, RFID Readers Link Popularity & Link Exchanges |
Hair Restoration for Hair Loss Hair Restoration Plastic Surgery & Surgeons |
Used Cars Guide Homecoming & Prom Dresses Dropship & Wholesale Sources |