To preserve his sanity against the formalized lunacy of the military mind in action, Yossarian had to turn madman. Yet even Yossarian is more the patriot than Sgt. Minderbinder, the business mind in action. Even Yossarian has to protest when Minderbinder arranges with the Germans to let them knock American planes down at a thousand dollars per plane. Minderbinder is horrified—“Have you no respect for the sanctity of a business contract?” he demands of Yossarian, and Yossarian feels ashamed of himself.
Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II. The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity are lost within it. That the horror and the hypocrisy, the greed and the complacency, the endless cunning and the endless stupidity which now go to constitute what we term Christianity are dealt with here in absolutes, does not lessen the truth of its repudiation. Those happy few who hit upon Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian will find that what Southern said with some self-doubt, Heller says with no doubt whatsoever. To compare Catch-22 favorably with The Good Soldier Schweik would be an injustice, because this novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.
STUDS TERKEL (1912–2008) had not yet developed the literary prominence that marked the final decades of his long career when he wrote one of the first Midwest reviews of Catch-22. He was a prominent Chicago radio interview host, and his fascination with characters and human interaction is apparent in his review, which appeared in the November 26, 1961, Chicago Sun-Times.
There’s Always a Catch, Especially 22
by Studs Terkel
As the old Italian woman wailed at Yossarian, the bombardier, “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” Yossarian, a bad soldier Schweik, tries in wondrous ways to stop them. “Them” is the Military Mind. “Them” is the nutty world of war.
Yossarian, dangerously sane, is scared equally of those crazy strangers who keep firing flak at him just because he’s dropping bombs on them and of Col. Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of combat missions. Yossarian seeks to endure in bewildering manner and fashion: inventing a mysterious liver complaint, seeing everything twice, walking backwards, standing in formation quite naked, deserting.
You will meet in this astonishing novel, certainly one of the most original in years, madmen of every rank: Major Major Major, on whose unwilling frame the gold leaf is pinned because of his unfortunate resemblance to Henry Fonda; Doc Daneeka, who is declared dead despite his high temperature; Hungry Joe and his fistfights with Huple’s cat; ex-Pfc. Wintergreen, who has more power than almost anybody.
Most remarkable of all performers in this circus of hilarity and horror is Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer. He is the classic apostle of private enterprise. He bombs his own airfield when the Germans make him a civilized offer of cost plus 6 percent.
Things look bad for Milo what with everybody accusing him of treachery and things like that until he opens his books. There’s a reasonable profit for everybody. You see, everybody shares because everybody is a member of Milo’s syndicate. Even the enemy.
Anyway, there is such a thing as sanctity of contract and when Milo becomes righteously indignant, who can blame him? He is a revolutionary thinker who seeks to take war out of the hands of government. He believes private enterprise can do it better.
Page after page, you will howl, you will roar. You may even fall off your chair as I did. Suddenly you will sit up and mumble: “What’s so funny?” To call it the finest comic novel of our day is faulting it.
To call it a surrealistic commentary of our time won’t do either. Is it any more surrealistic than the neutron bomb, guaranteed to damage neither brick nor metal and merely kill man?
Kafka, Schweik, the Marx Brothers, all these come to mind. Lewis Carroll may be even closer. Alice’s adventures were no more outrageous than Yossarian’s.
If Joseph Heller writes no other book, he will be well remembered for this apocalyptic masterpiece. There is only one catch . . . and that’s “Catch-22.”
PHILIP TOYNBEE (1916–1981), son of the historian Arnold Toynbee, was a prominent mid-century British intellectual and a longtime literary critic for the London Observer. His early anti-establishment views and his own success with experimental forms of fiction underlie his June 17, 1962, Observer review of Catch-22, which traces Heller’s satire all the way to the tragicomic core of the human condition.
Here’s Greatness—in Satire