Catch-22(211)

In spite of praise from an ever-increasing number of critics, writers, and mainstream readers, Heller was about to face a Yossarian-like challenge that would soon force a major change in the text of his novel. He had relied on his own wartime experiences in a Mediterranean-based B-25 bomber squadron for plot elements, but his use of fictitious character names, unit designations, and base locations minimized the potential for lawsuit. In fact, none of the aviators who inspired the characters in Catch-22 ever voiced objection. But in the late spring of 1962 someone not portrayed in the novel threatened a lawsuit because he thought he was. He shared the name of Heller’s “Anabaptist” chaplain, Robert Oliver Shipman, referred to for the most part throughout the novel simply as R. O. Shipman.





The Shipman character had already developed a literary identity, and Heller did not want readers to be confused by different versions of the book. Heller had never known the real Shipman, but the coincidence of name and certain background similarities led to a name change to A. T. Tappman—another seven-letter name that avoided resetting the entire book. This significant change appears in the sixth and subsequent printings of the Simon and Schuster text, and in all printings of the Dell mass-market paperback edition released in the fall of 1962. Later printings of Jonathan Cape’s British first edition also picked up the change, but the Transworld mass-market British paperback has continued to use the original name for decades.

This controversy remained a private matter, and the Simon and Schuster staff soon turned to more public marketing milestones. The house advertising effort culminated a year after release with a full-page eight-column “Happy Birthday Catch-22” ad in the daily New York Times. As with the other ads, it had the unique style that Nina Bourne had learned from Richard Simon himself—the idea of bringing the reader inside the publishing house to learn the story of the novel. It was a personal approach, like writing a letter to a friend, or, as Bob Gottlieb observed, like “bringing the public—bringing the reader in on it. You were talking to people instead of inventing things, coming out with real feelings about a particular book.” The ads—an impossible undertaking at today’s costs—were more heartfelt than calculated, but in the end, the Catch caught on.

And as the word spread, public and academic interest in the novel continued to grow. The postmodern experimental structure was worthy of critical investigation, and the satire engaged students (and professors) who were skeptical of the postwar military establishment. But the chance for Catch-22 to become a contemporary classic, and for the “Catch” phrase to pass into our culture, grew from universal aspects of the plot. As Nelson Algren noted in his June 23, 1962, Chicago Daily News review, Heller’s burlesque of the military leader is also a burlesque of the business leader, or the leader of any bureaucratic machine. Syndicated columnists beyond the book world also came on board for Catch-22, including Richard Starnes, Murray Kempton, and Ralph Gleason. Starnes—a conservative political columnist writing for the conservative New York World Telegram—offered proof enough that the novel’s universal relevance could break through ideological biases. In fact, by overcoming the odds of the publishing business, Heller fulfilled Starnes’s early prognosis for literary immortality: “Yossarian will, I think, live a very long time.”

JONATHAN R. ELLER is professor of English and senior textual editor in the Institute for American Thought, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts (IUPUI). Portions of this essay appeared in his article “Catching a Market: The Publishing History of Catch-22,” Prospects 17 (1992), 475–525.





Notes


1 Sam Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” Playboy (June 1975): 59ff.

2 W. J. Weatherby, “The Joy Catcher,” Manchester Guardian, Nov. 20, 1962.

3 Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1984), 200.

4 A copy of Gottlieb’s editorial report, dated Feb. 12, 1958, is in the Catch-22 Papers, Brandeis University.

5 Richard Greeman, “Joseph Heller Lionized by Critics for His Novel of War and Mankind,” Fire Island News, July 14, 1962.

6 Robert Gottlieb, interview with the author, New York, June 12, 1991. Heller’s slightly different version appears in Josh Greenfield, “22 Was Funnier Than 14,” New York Times Book Review, Mar. 3, 1968. Subsequent quotations by Gottlieb are from the same interview.





Reeling in ‘Catch-22’


by Joseph Heller

The concept of the novel came to me as a seizure, a single inspiration. I’d come to the conclusion that I wanted to write a novel, and moving back to New York after two years of teaching college in Pennsylvania sent the ambition coursing again. I had no idea what it would be about, however. Then one night the opening lines of Catch-22—all but the character’s name, Yossarian—came to me: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”