The other day I was writing about the situation of nineteenth-century philologists. They could not teach their subject in universities without possessing a degree in it, but degrees in it would never exist until they taught the subject in universities. This, rightly I think, I designated a Catch-22 situation. But it is a genuinely deadly matter in its text of origin. Doc Daneeka can ground fliers if they are crazy, but they have to ask him first. But if they ask him they are not really crazy, since it is no mark of sanity to be prepared to go on suicide missions. This is Catch-22, says Doc Daneeka. What is the punishment for cowardice? Death. What is cowardice? The desire to avoid death. Wherever you look in the U.S. Air Force you are up against anomaly, the subversion of logic which is nevertheless a form of logic.
The Americans are fighting the Nazis in Italy, but the Nazis are not permitted to be the targets of the comic bitterness. The enemy is on this side of the fence. Any veteran serving man will recognize the truth beneath Heller’s mad satire. There was always enough to hate in one’s own army; there was no space left to feel abhorrence of the enemy, which was primarily the concern of newspaper-fed civilians. Our detestation of the Nazi system we were trying to overthrow has been very much a retrospective business, as has been the discovery of the incredible horrors the Nazis perpetrated. Soldiers sympathize with soldiers, whatever side they are on, and reserve their loathing for professional top brass and jingoistic civilians. It was always like that. Nevertheless, the reader of Catch-22 has to feel a little uncomfortable when an American airman bombs his base on behalf of the Nazis, and the squeamish may question whether satire is appropriate to a book about a war waged for the ridding of humanity of the worst scourge of the century. It is best to transfer the action to some mythical zone where war is gratuitous and unjust, and then to accept the wild comedy as the only possible literary response to a stupid and coldblooded military machine.
The cynicisms are well chosen. A mess officer steals the carbon dioxide capsules from the fliers’ Mae Wests to make ice cream sodas for the officers’ mess. A stock letter is sent out to next of kin: “Dear Mrs, Mr, Miss or Mr and Mrs—; Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action (cross out whatever is inapplicable).” The victimization of the conscripts and the monstrous egotism of the high command are treated with a lightness which in itself is a mode of heroism. Yossarian only wishes to survive, and, quite as much as La Chartreuse de Parme or War and Peace, Heller’s hilarious novel is dedicated to the desire of the ordinary man to live through the madness and come through alive. The curious and heartening thing about Catch-22 is that the vis comica does not get in the way of the presentation of real human beings. Even the monsters of the top brass are all too horribly human.
Mike Nichols made an unsuccessful film of Catch-22—unsuccessful because it had to portray horrors in full bloodinesses, exploiting the visual to the limit and forgetting that Heller offers us a verbal experience. The horror of the book is expressed less through images than through the perversion of thought and language: there is no horror worse than madness. I was a colleague of Heller’s at City College in New York—we were both Distinguished Professors—when Nichols’s film and Kubrick’s film of my novel A Clockwork Orange appeared, and we were both able to point to the unfilmability of works based on the impact of literary style. At that time Heller seemed to be suffering from the very American ailment of Writer’s Block (which European writers locate only in film studios) and seemed unready to attach his satirical technique to postwar civilian America. With Something Happened and Good As Gold, Heller has demonstrated superbly that his chief theme as a novelist is the universal twentieth-century madness which can only be expressed in the absurdist collapse of verbal communication. One would have thought that so metaphysical a mind and so subtle a technician could never achieve wide popularity, but the immense success of Catch-22 has shown that a distinguished work of literature can sometimes reach a very wide audience indeed. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of this remarkable novel is worthy of celebration, and I am happy and proud to be one of the celebrants.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (1949– ), a prolific and wide-ranging Anglo-American journalist, valued the prescient cultural insights of Catch-22 in much the same way that he has always valued the show-trial revelations of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and the geopolitical extrapolations of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. His salute to Joseph Heller’s powerful gift of satire and enduring stoicism, published just after Heller’s death, is reprinted from the December 15, 1999, issue of The Nation.