And what I still remember most agreeably about him is that he did not ask for an outline or once seek for even a hint of where this one-third of a novel he’d seen was going to go. The contract I received called for an advance of fifteen hundred dollars, half on signing, which I did not need, and the remainder on completion and acceptance.
Probably, I was his first novelist, but not his first to be published; other authors with completed manuscripts came to him in the three more years I needed to finish mine. Probably, I was Candida’s earliest client too. Both were as delighted as I was with the eventual success of Catch-22, and the three of us have been reveling in our recollections of the experience ever since.
On February 28, 1962, the journalist Richard Starnes published a column of unrestrained praise in his newspaper, The New York World-Telegram, that opened with these words:
“Yossarian will, I think, live a very long time.”
His tribute was unexpected, because Mr. Starnes was a newspaperman in the hard-boiled mode whose customary beat was local politics, and the World-Telegram was widely regarded as generally conservative.
To this day, I am grateful to Mr. Starnes for his unqualified and unsolicited approval and bless him for the accuracy of his prediction. Yossarian has indeed lived a long time. The World-Telegram has passed on. Many of the people mentioned in that first advertisement have died, and most of the rest of us are on the way.
But Yossarian is alive when the novel ends. Because of the motion picture, even close readers of the novel have a final, lasting image of him at sea, paddling toward freedom in a yellow inflated lifeboat. In the book he doesn’t get that far; but he is not captured and he isn’t dead. At the end of the successor volume I’ve just completed, Closing Time (that fleeing cartoon figure is again on the book jacket, but wearing a businessman’s chapeau and moving with a cane), he is again still alive, more than forty years older but definitely still there. “Everyone has got to go,” his physician friend in that novel reminds him with emphasis. “Everyone!” But should I ever write another sequel, he would still be around at the end.
Sooner or later, I must concede, Yossarian, now seventy, will have to pass away too. But it won’t be by my hand.
Joseph Heller, 1994
East Hampton, New York
Part Two
Other Voices
ROBERT BRUSTEIN (1927– ) was one of the first prominent critics to weigh in on the literary significance of Catch-22. Nearly a month before the book’s release, he wrote to Simon and Schuster’s Nina Bourne to praise Heller’s masterful dark humor and his ability to penetrate the surface illusions protecting the fundamental evils of our time. Brustein, writing during the early years of his long tenure as theater critic for The New Republic, published the following review in the November 13, 1961, issue.
The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World
by Robert Brustein
The man who declares that survival at all costs is the end of existence is morally dead, because he’s prepared to sacrifice all other values which give life its meaning.
—SIDNEY HOOK
“. . . It’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees,” Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. “I guess you’ve heard that saying before.” “Yes, I certainly have,” mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. “But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.”
—CATCH-22
Like all superlative works of comedy—and I am ready to argue that this is one of the most bitterly funny works in the language—Catch-22 is based on an unconventional but utterly convincing internal logic. In the very opening pages, when we come upon a number of Air Force officers malingering in a hospital—one censoring all the modifiers out of enlisted men’s letters and signing the censor’s name “Washington Irving,” another pursuing tedious conversations with boring Texans in order to increase his life span by making time pass slowly, still another storing horse chestnuts in his cheeks to give himself a look of innocence—it seems obvious that an inordinate number of Joseph Heller’s characters are, by all conventional standards, mad. It is a triumph of Mr. Heller’s skill that he is so quickly able to persuade us 1) that the most lunatic are the most logical, and 2) that it is our conventional standards which lack any logical consistency. The sanest looney of them all is the apparently harebrained central character, an American bombardier of Syrian extraction named Captain John Yossarian, who is based on a mythical Italian island (Pianosa) during World War II. For while many of his fellow officers seem indifferent to their own survival, and most of his superior officers are overtly hostile to his, Yossarian is animated solely by a desperate determination to stay alive: