Catch-22(220)

by Philip Toynbee

When I began reading Catch-22 I thought it was a farcical satire on life in the United States Army Air Force. Later I believed that Mr. Heller’s target was modern war and all those who are responsible for waging it. Still later it seemed that he was attacking social organization and anyone who derives power from it. But by the end of the book it had become plain to me that it is—no other phrase will do—the human condition itself which is the object of Mr. Heller’s outraged fury and disgust.

A reviewer must always keep an anxious eye on the state of his currency. If he announces too many masterpieces he risks inflation (though it is sometimes forgotten by some of us that the cowardice of perpetual crabbing receives its own kind of punishment). It does not seem many weeks since I was proclaiming that Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is one of the great English novels of the century; and not long before that I was urging that attention should be paid to the magnificent and neglected talent of William Gerhardi.

But at the risk of inflation I cannot help writing that Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon. For the fact is that all my successive interpretations of this book now seem to me to have been accurate, even if the earlier ones were also incomplete. The book has an immense and devastating theme, but this theme is illustrated, as it should be, by means of an observed reality.





Reality Inflated


I am not suggesting that Catch-22 is a realistic account of life in the wartime air force of America or any other country. The method of satire is to inflate reality so that all its partially concealed blemishes turn into monstrous and apparent deformations. The effect of good satire is to make us laugh with horror. And this means that the social and personal evils which are being satirized must have been there, and must be felt by the reader to be there even while he is laughing at the results of the satirist’s inflating imagination.

Here is an example. Among the vast number of hallucinatory characters in Catch-22 there is an officer called Milo Minderbinder who devotes all his time to infinitely elaborate commercial enterprises in the Mediterranean field of operations. At one point he bombs his own airfield in exchange for a promise from the Germans of the cost of the operation plus 6 percent. Several of his friends are killed, but Milo is much too valuable to be reprimanded, let alone punished, by the American authorities.





Murderous


Utterly impossible? No doubt; yet when I was stationed on the northeast coast in 1941 the new concrete dragon’s teeth on the beach began to corrode away after only three months. It was found that the contractor had built brittle shells of concrete and filled them with sand. Yet when I expressed outrage at this murderous piece of cheating it was explained that the man was of too much local importance for any action to be taken against him. His behavior had, indeed, been less dramatic than Milo’s; but was it any less flagrant or appalling?

In the same way the frightful Colonel Cathcart of Catch-22 cares about nothing except keeping in well with his superiors at any price. To do so he continually increases the quota of missions which his men must fly before being sent home on leave. The original number was forty, but by the end of the book it has reached eighty.

We may reasonably guess that higher authorities would have prevented this from happening, even if the flyers themselves had not achieved some sort of resistance. Yet I haven’t the least doubt that many a colonel in the armies involved would have behaved like Colonel Cathcart if he had believed that he could get away with it. Was Haig’s behavior very different at the third battle of Ypres?

If Catch-22 has any continuous theme it lies in the tireless efforts of Yossarian, the Assyrian-American hero, to evade combat duties. The book defends the right, indeed almost the moral obligation, of men to be physical cowards. It is pointed out, for example, that the brave almost always involve others in their senseless and unfeeling cooperation with the forces of war. The man who has the courage of his physical coward-ice is the only kind of man who will eventually make war impossible by refusing to play any part in it at all.

This is, in fact, the position which Yossarian—one of the most sympathetic heroes in modern literature—finally arrives at:



“From now on I’m thinking only of me.”

Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile, “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.”

“Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”



Exactly; and it is clearly Mr. Heller’s fervent hope that everyone will, in the end, feel that way.





Raging Pity


This is an arguable attitude, I suppose, though I have never been able to think of much to be said against it. But though it places Mr. Heller in a very strong satirical position it would not, by itself, have enabled him to write a great book. He has done this because he is a man of deep and urgent compassion whose raging pity is concerned with the nature of human existence itself no less than with specific and curable iniquities.