With the newly revised typescript in hand, Heller and Gottlieb made further revisions in the text. After a series of editorial sessions, Heller shortened the typescript by about 150 pages. The typescript, now heavily revised and partially retyped, became printer’s copy for the Simon and Schuster galley proofs. Before the text was actually set, Heller worked with Gottlieb on some final cuts, including the original chapter 23 (“The Old Folks at Home”), a digressive flashback to conversations between Nately and his capitalist father.
A page from the submitted typescript, with revisions by Heller.
Heller’s working relationship with Gottlieb was the catalyst that finally reduced the complex narrative to a manageable scale; but the chemistry did not carry over to the copy editor assigned to Catch-18. For weeks, Heller found himself locked in a syntactic struggle of wills:
[Gottlieb] assigned the book to a copy editor who immediately began rearranging my sentences and paragraphs. . . . She apparently had an aversion to what I think might be called compound predicates. For example, if I wrote “He struck a match and lit a cigarette,” she would change it to “He struck a match and he lit a cigarette.” It was even worse when she got to sentences like “‘Get out,’ he said, foaming at the mouth.” This she would change to “‘Get out,’ he said, and he foamed at the mouth.”5
Re-editing the book back into Heller’s own conversational idiom took about six weeks in early 1961, and led to a delayed release date. Before the copyediting problem, Heller and Gottlieb had been on track for a late-summer release; after the delay, Heller was given his choice of mid-October 1961 or January 1962. He opted for October, putting the novel on the threshold of the holiday marketing season.
This delay led to even more unexpected trouble through a bizarre coincidence of titles. In January 1961, Leon Uris’s new novel, Mila 18, was announced for summer publication; given Uris’s best-selling reputation, a new title for Catch-18 was inevitable. For two weeks in January, Heller and Gottlieb tried a number of new titles. Catch-11 was promising—the vowel following the consonants in “Catch” had the right sound, but the title had an extra syllable; besides, it was too close to Frank Sinatra’s new movie title, Ocean’s Eleven (1960). Heller came up with Catch-14 next, and tried to convince Gottlieb that it was the right number in a letter dated January 29, 1961:
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 was not happy with 14—the central concept of the novel was “Catch-18,” and for everyone at Simon and Schuster, it had been “Catch-18” for more than three years. After a halfhearted attempt at accepting Catch-14, Gottlieb had a late-night flash of conviction and came up with the title which has long since passed into the language: “22, it’s 22! And I remember calling up Joe and saying, ‘It’s funnier than 18!’ But of course the fact is that no number is funnier than any other number, it’s complete self-delusion. But once we were convinced it was funnier, then it became funny.”6 Both Heller and Gottlieb soon realized just how well the new title represented the structure of events in the novel—the soldier who saw everything twice, Yossarian’s disastrous second target pass during the Bologna mission, and the chaplain’s déjà vu are key examples of the novel’s doubling structure. But all this came later—as Gottlieb observes, “We were just desperate publishers looking for a title.”
Catch-22 was published on October 10, 1961, but an aggressive marketing campaign was already reaching beyond reviewers to a wide circle of writers, literary critics, and even to competing publishers. The day after publication, advertising manager Nina Bourne and Bob Gottlieb published “What’s the Catch?” a full-page five-column ad in The New York Times recapping the intellectual fan mail that was streaming into Bourne’s office. A second, full-length two-column ad appeared in the November 3 Times, and after Christmas short, eye-catching bullets by Morris West, Kenneth Tynan, and Nelson Algren appeared every few days under the paper soldier logo designed for the dust jacket by Paul Bacon. Six months after release, a status report on the emerging “Catch Craze” appeared across an entire page and a facing column of the April 29, 1962, New York Times Book Review. But this ad was different—most of the columns documented a new wave of letters from grassroots American readers who discovered Catch-22 through the word-of-mouth endorsements that were beginning to create a long-term market for the novel.