Cover
About the Book
About the Author
By Joseph Heller
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Preface to Catch-22
1 The Texan
2 Clevinger
3 Havermeyer
4 Doc Daneeka
5 Chief White Halfoat
6 Hungry Joe
7 McWatt
8 Lieutenant Scheisskopf
9 Major Major Major Major
10 Wintergreen
11 Captain Black
12 Bologna
13 Major — de Coverley
14 Kid Sampson
15 Piltchard & Wren
16 Luciana
17 The Soldier in White
18 The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice
19 Colonel Cathcart
20 Corporal Whitcomb
21 General Dreedle
22 Milo the Mayor
23 Nately’s Old Man
24 Milo
25 The Chaplain
26 Aarfy
27 Nurse Duckett
28 Dobbs
29 Peckem
30 Dunbar
31 Mrs. Daneeka
32 Yo-Yo’s Roomies
33 Nately’s Whore
34 Thanksgiving
35 Milo the Militant
36 The Cellar
37 General Scheisskopf
38 Kid Sister
39 The Eternal City
40 Catch-22
41 Snowden
42 Yossarian
Copyright
About the Author
Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923. In 1961, he published Catch-22, which became a bestseller and, in 1970, a film. He went on to write such novels as Something Happened, God Knows, Picture This, Closing Time (the sequel to Catch-22), and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Heller died in December 1999.
About the Book
Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of the bombardier named Yossarian who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy – it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22: if he flies he is crazy, and doesn't have to; but if he doesn't want to he must be sane and has to. That's some catch...
Catch-22
Something Happened
Good As Gold
God Knows
Closing Time
Picture This
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
Catch as Catch Can
The island of Pianosa lies
in the Mediterranean Sea eight
miles south of Elba. It is very small
and obviously could not accommodate all of
the actions described. Like the setting
of this novel, the characters, too,
are fictitious.
TO MY MOTHER
AND TO SHIRLEY,
AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
It was love at first sight.
The first time I saw Joseph Heller I fell madly in love with him.
There was no second time. He was already ill when I met him, slower by all accounts, less animated, more preoccupied with what was happening inside himself. But he was still dashingly attractive in that leonine, Jewish Byronic style, still had his marvellously comic Coney Island drawl, still took in those he talked to, and still looked as far from a high priest of art as any novelist – especially any American novelist – you can name. It was Byron, coincidentally, who wrote ‘One hates an author that’s all author.’ And that was part of the Heller charm – that you smelled the world and all its pleasures on him, and not the midnight oil. He once told Kurt Vonnegut that if it hadn’t been for World War II he’d have been in the dry-cleaning business. Hard to imagine Philip Roth or Saul Bellow saying that, or even Norman Mailer who would surely have stayed in an aggressive line of work and been a prize-fighter or something similar if the writing hadn’t worked out.
Some dry-cleaner Heller would have made! Would he ever have been completely satisfied he’d removed your stain? In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn’t stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he’d made them something else. There are novelists who mind their words – the school of Flaubert – and novelists who don’t – those who inherit the line of interminable telling, of inexhaustibility and seeming garrulousness, that begins with Rabelais and gets a second wind with Dickens. Heller was of the inexhaustible school.
What I think most of us who love Catch-22 love most is precisely what, from the Flaubertian position, is wrong with it. Its looseness, its unruliness, its extravagance, its verbal excess, its emotional waywardness, its impatience with the niceties, whether of expression or of feeling, its repetitiveness, its devil-may-care clumsiness, its hysteria, its tomfoolery, its brutality, its sexual rough-and-tumble, its unembarrassed preachiness, its vacillations, its formlessness, or rather – because Heller knows full well what laws he’s breaking – its apparent formlessness. If those are faults, we say, then hang the virtues.
Positioned teasingly, not to say infuriatingly sometimes, between literature and literature’s opposites – between Rabelais and Dickens and Dostoevsky and Gogol and Céline and the Absurdists and of course Kafka on the one hand, and on the other vaudeville and slap-stick and Bilko and Abbott and Costello and Tom and Jerry and the Goons (if Heller had ever heard the Goons) – Catch-22 was always going to be a problem for the critics. You make it easier for yourself as a novelist if you announce clearly what you are at the outset and don’t deviate. One wishes that he hadn’t, but Heller remained bitter about the reception of Catch-22 to the end, remembering too many of the slights that go with the job, the bad reviews, the slow fuse of appreciation, the absence of awards, as though it had skipped his mind that he was the creator of Yossarian who knew better than any man how lowly to prize a medal or a citation. Maybe, for a novel that was to go on to sell in excess of ten million copies and become one of the most beloved books of the twentieth century, the first notices could have been more enthusiastic, but it was quickly being hailed as one of the greatest satirical works of all time, and even the reviewer who complained that it didn’t seem ‘to have been written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper’, was on to something. For it is no small virtue in a writer to be able to conceal the art of making, to draw your attention from the writing to the matter; and as for giving the impression of shouting the words onto paper, there can hardly be higher praise, since words will not in fact get to paper that way, and only the quietest craftsmanship can convey the illusion of sustained noise.
‘It was love at first sight.’
Few novels of any sort, let alone war novels, begin so beguilingly. Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead opens with stark immediacy, the men in the landing crafts unable to sleep, knowing that in a few hours ‘some of them were going to be dead’. The atmosphere is solemn and still, full of dread.
Catch-22 bursts upon us with superfluous, almost blasphemous mirth, the joke of its being a man with whom Yossarian, like the heroine of some high schlock romance, has fallen madly in love, and a chaplain at that, throwing everything, including credibility, into confusion. Who’s playing games with whom here?
Almost at once the seductive seeming-logicalities which constitute the Catch itself are set in motion. Yossarian is in hospital with a pain in his liver that falls just short of jaundice. If it becomes jaundice they can treat it. If it doesn’t become jaundice and goes away they can discharge him. But so long as it falls just short of jaundice they can’t do anything. This prefigures the conditions for being grounded: that you have to be insane before they will let you fly no more missions, but the fact that you want to fly no more missions is proof that you are not insane. The phrase Catch-22 has passed into the language, to stand for a situation which frustrates you by the paradoxical rules or circumstances that govern it, something that gets you whichever way you move, a sort of existential Sod’s Law, but the meanings which accrue to it in the novel are more various, more subtly absurd, and more universally intractable. In the case of Yossarian’s jaundice, it is as though we are faced with a false syllogism at the very heart of being. You can see the doctors’ point of view. They are caught between indeterminates, a jaundice which hasn’t started and a jaundice which hasn’t finished. It makes perfect sense of nonsense that they are rendered impotent, doctors who cannot doctor. Just as it makes perfect sense that in the circumstances, when you’d expect romance to be the last thing on anybody’s mind, Yossarian should fall head over heels in love with the chaplain. Or that Nately’s whore should say that if he really cared for her he would send her away and go to bed with some other whore. Little by little, or maybe all at once, everything comes to mean its opposite; unreason argues itself into reason, and vice versa, and we cannot see the seams.
If Catch-22 and all the little lesser Catches that support it provide a peep into Kafka’s universe of metaphysical slippage, they are equally reminiscent of Dicken’s Circumlocution Office, where such slippage is institutionalized, where people and their grievances are lost in the service of How Not To Do It, where ineffectiveness, assumed to be a law of nature, is wrought to the level of science. Humming through the novel you hear the great satires on meaninglessness of the past. And yet never do we feel it is ‘literary’. The doctors who scratch their heads over Yossarian’s jaundice, for example, comport themselves like Hollywood comedians and knockabouts; and while it’s true that they become more sinister by the time they get to him in hospital again 500 pages later –
‘Let’s cut him open and get to the inside of things once and for all. He keeps complaining about his liver. His liver looks pretty small on this X ray.’
‘That’s his pancreas, you dope. This is his liver.’
‘No, it isn’t. That’s his heart. I’ll bet you a nickel this is his liver. I’m going to operate and find out. Should I wash my hands first?’
– they are still inhabiting in a tradition of music-hall villainousness. W.C. Fields and Mel Brooks? So what, if they never performed together. They do in Catch-22.
Just as absurdity begets absurdity in Heller’s world, so does character beget character. I love the sense that dawns early in the novel of a sort of perpetual motion of human personality, Orr begetting the young Huple than whom he was smaller, and Huple begetting Hungry Joe with whom he shared a tent, and Hungry Joe begetting… and so on. It is as though there is some infection of fertility in them, as though the very mention of their names is a trigger for the names of those others without whom they cannot be adequately presented or understood. All very well to say that Catch-22 teems with character – almost sniffily one sometimes hears that levelled, with the implication that characterfulness in a novel is indulgence – but a novel doesn’t teem of its own accord. You can no more ‘shout’ the characters on to the page than you can ‘shout’ the words. It takes formidable technical skills to create this sense of humanity lurking in humanity, and to power a narrative by it, but it is a humane achievement too, a making active, to the point where one can no longer bear it, of the dictum that no man is an island, a demonstration that we do not always know where we end and another man begins.
‘They’ve got all my pals,’ Yossarian wails, when there is almost no one left to wail for. No one but himself and Hungry Joe. Only it turns out that Hungry Joe has gone as well, suffocated by the cat he always feared was going to sit on his face and suffocate him while he slept. The blackest of black jokes, waiting in the wings for most of the novel, not to keep it funny but to keep it sad. Proving that in the end, nothing is too ludicrous to eventuate.
‘Mr Heller is a first-rate humorist,’ Vonnegut wrote in a review of Heller’s second novel, Something Happened, ‘who cripples his own jokes intentionally – with the unhappiness of the characters who perceive them.’
Yossarian perceives the joke about Hungry Joe and the cat that sat on his face and suffocated him, and weeps. All his pals are gone. And it’s only as he names them, recalling deadly mission after deadly mission, that we take the measure of his loss.
No mean feat on Heller’s part either, to keep all these missions flying, but the technical triumph of the novel in my view is its management of the narrative in time. You could waste your life trying to see how Heller does this, slithering us from now to then, and back again, conjuring horrors out of a clear blue sky, a sinister memory suddenly sparked off in some treacherously intermediate period or other without a break in whoever’s consciousness, let alone in the punctuation. Technique is only part of it: the novel’s very humanity is implicated in these tide-like surges of recapitulation and re-remembering, as though we approach compassion only fitfully, going back and then going back again, because we can only bear to do it in starts. But also as though, for pity’s sake, we can never do it enough.
Drowning in time, his doubts and depressions overwhelming him from all quarters, time present, time past, and time to come, it is the chaplain who most articulates these compunctions. They make for terrific verbal fun, right enough, his juggling with his insights or are they revelations or are they hallucinations or are they just illusions of illusions – déjà vu or presque vu or jamais vu – causing him to wonder whether he is blessed or mad. As the mood turns more sombre around him, though, he becomes the conscience of the novel, and the spokesperson for the hopelessness which for a while descends on it, his inability ever to recall a time when he had not already met Yossarian and failed him, a ‘foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.’ Not then, not now, not ever.
Which is itself both an echo and a premonition of Yossarian’s failure to help Snowden, the dying bombardier whose suffering we return to again and again, now nearing in on it, now watching it recede, his plaintive cry of ‘I’m cold, I’m cold’ pricking at the novel’s slapstick until it becomes a refrain of the most awful ominousness, the terrible secret hidden in the novel’s past which will at last, else the heart will break, become the novel’s present. The final revelation of the extent of Snowden’s injuries, is hard to take. Gruesome in its anatomical pessimism – ‘Here was God’s plenty, all right… liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch’. Brutal and bitter in its refusal of all spiritual consolation – ‘Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out of a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage.’ Facile as philosophy, maybe, but it’s Yossarian thinking, and Yossarian, like the chaplain earlier, is face to face not just with death but with his own inadequacy before it. ‘There, there,’ is all he can say. A young man, his insides spilt, is freezing to his death, whimpering piteously for help. And ‘There, there,’ is the best Yossarian, no doubt like any of us, is able to manage. ‘There, there,’ as you might say to a child who has burnt his finger. ‘There, there.’ Like eternal plea and counter-plea, ringing through all time – ‘I’m cold, I’m cold’: ‘There, there.’ In the very banality we hear our insufficiency, but also, at the last, our compassion. To the degree that there is so little we can do or say, and to the degree that we are horrified we cannot do or say more, are we human.
After which there is no option left to Yossarian but to make a run for it.
For some readers the overt seriousness which takes over much of the second half of Catch-22 is a disappointment, not to say a mark of failure. I don’t share that view. Yes, there is a certain blunt predictability in the famous Dostoevskyan journey through a Rome become nightmarishness in its senselessness and cruelty, and no doubt the very invoking of Raskolnikov by name gives the game away: there was never need to allude directly to Kafka or Dickens when their influences were integrated and working well. But those scenes apart, the encroachment of a darker sort of comedy is entirely of a piece with the novel’s strategy from the beginning – juxtaposing Yossarian’s love for the bemused chaplain, for example, with the macabre figure of the faceless soldier in his deathly cerements of white, a mere gaping hole in bandages; shading the unmeaningness of farce into the unmeaningness of melancholy; turning the screws on the likes of Milo Minderbinder (corn god, rain god, Imam of Damascus, Sheik of Araby), and Aarfy (good old Aarfy who won’t pay a prostitute but will rape a servant girl) until their preposterousness becomes crime and their crimes horror.
Never a light novel, or what we these days call an easy read, Catch-22 catches us out with comedy, making play with what is never playful, employing the hyperbole of unlikelihood – Major Major Major Major Major, for eternity – until we recognize that the kingdom of unlikelihood has already been realised here on earth, and that it is the world we know. Kafka popularized right enough, Kafka made available to those who would never go near Kafka, but by no means Kafka alleviated.
That the knockabout, too, should turn edgier and more violent is therefore only to be expected. The clubbed and helmeted military police coming to arrest Aarfy for rape and murder are in fact coming to arrest Yossarian for the more serious crime of being in Rome without a pass. Funny still, yes, but it’s getting harder to breathe. And while there remains work for Abbott and Costello in scenes such as the one where Colonel Korn sits swinging his legs on Colonel Cathcart’s desk (‘his sludge-brown socks, garterless, collapsed in sagging circles below ankles that were surprisingly small and white’), in an attempt to persuade Yossarian it’s time they buried their differences and became pals –
‘Sure, pal.’
‘Thanks, pal.’
‘Don’t mention it, pal.’
‘So long, pal.’
– in truth the comedy has become as black as hell. The observation no longer quite so hallucinatory, men and objects grown more defined, their motives deadlier, Korn’s sludge-brown socks and pallid ankles nothing short of ice-clear murderous.
And not to be thwarted, Nately’s whore, devoted to Nately’s memory suddenly, she who couldn’t have been more bored by him alive, determined to avenge his death by assassinating Yossarian on whom she blames it. Part deus ex machina, part avenging angel, part fata morgana, part belle dame sans merci and part Cato, Inspector Clouseau’s indefatigably karate-crazed valet, Nately’s whore waits between every sentence – sometimes without even having the manners to let a sentence finish – to plunge her knife into Yossarian’s heart. In this guise she is an utterly fantastical creation, hyperbole incarnate, whose tirelessness is somehow Heller’s, to the point where you wonder how he can possibly find the energy or the daring to risk letting her strike again. For a moment, though we do not know when the moment will end, it is as though we have entered one of those children’s games where neither party will stop tormenting the other and you feel they will grow old, neither one of them giving way. Never to be eluded, she stabs at Yossarian in the final sentence of the novel, and while the last word is as it were his, as he dodges her and takes off we don’t know where, it’s her spirit we are left with – indomitable, unforgiving, insane and yet reasonable all at once, possessed of a purpose we can no more fathom than we can deflect, like destructive life itself.
HOWARD JACOBSON, 2004
In 1961, the New York Times was a newspaper with eight columns. And on November 11 of that year, one day after the official publication date of Catch-22, the page with the book review carried an unusual advertisement that ran from top to bottom and was five columns wide. To the eye the effect was stupendous. The book review that day, of a work by somebody else, was squeezed aside to the fold of the page, as were the crossword puzzle and all else. The ad had this caption: WHAT’S THE CATCH? And displayed at the top in silhouette was the comic cartoon of a uniformed figure in flight, glancing off to the side at some unspecified danger with an expression of panic.
It was an announcement ad for Catch-22. Interwoven with the text were mentions of praise from twenty-one individuals and groups of some public standing, most connected to literature and the publishing world, who had received the novel before publication and had already reviewed it or commented about it favourably.
Within days after publication, there was a review in the Nation by Nelson Algren (a client of my own literary agent, who had urged him to read it), who wrote of Catch-22 that it ‘was the best novel to come out of anywhere in years’. And there was a review by Studs Terkel in a Chicago daily newspaper that recommended it about as highly.
So much attention to the work at publication was in large part the result of the industrious zeal and appreciation of my literary agent, Candida Donadio, and my editor, Robert Gottlieb, and I embrace the opportunity afforded now to dedicate this new edition to both of them, as colleagues and allies with talents that were of immeasurable value.
The work was not reviewed in the Times on publication. However, it was reviewed in the Herald Tribune by Maurice Dolbier, and Mr Dolbier said of it: ‘A wild, moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating, giant roller-coaster of a book’.
That the reviewer for the Herald Tribune came to review at all this war novel by someone unknown was almost entirely the product of coincidence. S. J. Perelman, much better known and the subject of an interview by Mr Dolbier, was publishing his own book at just about that time. His publisher was Simon & Schuster, mine too, and the editor in charge of his work there was also the same, Bob Gottlieb. In answer to a question put to him by Dolbier about his own reading, Mr Perelman replied that he was very much engrossed in a novel pressed upon him by his editor, a novel called Catch-22. Returning to his office, Mr Dolbier later confessed to me, he found the book already in a pile with others he had decided he would not have time to study as prospects to write about. Had it not been for Gottlieb, there would have been no Perelman, and had it not been for Perelman, there would have been no review by Dolbier.
And had it not been for Dolbier, there might not have been the Times. Two weeks afterward, and probably only because of Mr Dolbier, the book was described with approbation in the daily Times by the reviewer Orville Prescott, who predicted it would not be forgotten by those who could take it and called it: ‘A dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights’.
The rest, one might say is history, but it is a history easily misconstrued. The novel won no prizes and was not on any bestseller list.
And, as Mr Prescott foresaw, for just about every good report, there seemed to appear one that was negative. Looking back at this novel after twenty-five years, John Aldridge, to my mind the most perceptive and persistent commentator of American literature over the decades, lauded Robert Brustein for his superbly intelligent review in the New Republic, which contained ‘essential arguments that much of the later criticism has done little to improve on’, and Mr Aldridge recognised that many in the early audience of Catch-22 ‘liked the book for just the reasons that caused others to hate it’.
The disparagements were frequently venomous. In the Sunday Times, in a notice in back so slender that the only people seeing it were those awaiting it, the reviewer (a novelist who also by chance was a client of my own agent, Candida) decided that the ‘novel gasps for want of craft and sensibility’, ‘is repetitious and monotonous’, ‘fails’, ‘is an emotional hodgepodge’, and was no novel; and in the esteemed the New Yorker, the reviewer, a staff writer who normally writes about jazz, compared the book unfavourably with a novel of similar setting by Mitchell Goodman and decided that Catch-22 ‘doesn’t even seem to have been written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper’, ‘what remains is a debris of sour jokes’, and that in the end Heller ‘wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it’. (I am tempted now to drown in laughter as I jot this down.)
I do not recall that the novel was included in the several hundred books in the Christmas roundup of recommended reading of the Times that year or in the several hundred others picked out in the spring for summer reading.
But in late summer of 1962, Raymond Walters, on the bestseller page of the Sunday Times, which then carried regularly the column ‘In and Out of Books’, reported that the underground book New Yorkers seemed to be talking about most was Catch-22. (The novel probably was more heavily advertised than any other that year, but it was still underground.) Not that much later, Newsweek carried a story to the same effect in a space more than a page wide. And late that same summer, I was invited to my first television interview. The program was the Today show, then a variety show as much as anything else. The interim host was John Chancellor. Mr Chancellor had recently returned from his newsman’s post in the Kremlin, and he had agreed to accept the position on condition that he interview only those people he himself chose to.
After the show, in a bar close by the studio in which I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour than ever in my life, he handed me a packet of stickers he’d had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN LIVES. And he confided he’d been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the executive rest rooms of the NBC building.
Then came September and the paperback edition and with it, finally, an expansion in popular appeal that seemed to take the publishers, Dell, by surprise, despite elaborate promotion and distribution strategies. It seemed for a while that the people there could not fully bring themselves to believe the sales figures and that they would never catch up.
Paperback publishers print in the hundreds of thousands. For this, after an initial release of 300,000 copies, they went back to press five more times between September and the end of the year, twice each in October and December, and by the end of 1963, there were eleven printings. In England, under the auspices of the enterprising young editor there, Tom Maschler, it was that way from the start. Bestseller lists were new and rudimentary then, but Catch-22 was quickly at the head of them.
For me the history of Catch-22 begins back in 1953, when I started writing it. In 1953, I was employed as a copywriter at a small advertising agency in New York, after two years as an instructor in English composition at Pennsylvania State University, which was then a college. Early on, in anxious need of an approving opinion, I sent the opening chapter off to the literary agents I had managed to obtain after publishing a few short stories in magazines, in Esquire and the Atlantic. The agents were not impressed, but a young assistant there, Ms Candida Donadio, was, and she secured permission to submit that chapter to a few publications that regularly published excerpts from ‘novels in progress’.
In 1955 the chapter appeared in a paperback quarterly New World Writing (an anthology that also contained, under a pseudonym, an extract from another novel in progress – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road). There came complimentary letters of interest from a few editors at established book publishers, and I was encouraged to continue with a work I now saw realistically was going to take me a good many years longer than I at first had guessed.
In 1957, when I had about 270 pages in typescript, I was employed at Time magazine, writing advertising-sales presentations by day when not furtively putting thoughts down on paper for my work on the novel at home that evening. And Candida Donadio was establishing herself as a preeminent agent in her own right, with a list of American authors as clients as impressive as any. We agreed it made sense to submit the partial manuscript to some publishers, mainly to obtain a practical idea of the potential for publication of the novel we both thought so much of. She was drawn toward a new young editor she knew of at Simon & Schuster, one she thought might prove more receptive to innovation than most. His name was Robert Gottlieb, and she was right.
While Gottlieb busied himself with those pages, I, with a four-week summer vacation from bountiful Time magazine, began rewriting them. Gottlieb and I met for lunch, mainly for him to gauge my temperament and ascertain how amenable I would be as an author to work with. After I listened to him allude with tact to certain broad suggestions he thought he eventually might be compelled to make, I handed him my new pages with the boastful response that I had already taken care of nearly all of them.
He surprised me with concern that I might take exception to working with someone so young – he was twenty-six, I think, and I was thirty-four. I was more greatly surprised to learn from him later that both he and his closest colleague at Simon & Schuster, Nina Bourne, were intimidated at first by an air of suspicion I projected that I did not know I even possessed. I have not been suspicious of him since, and I doubt very much that Gottlieb, who went on to become the head of Alfred A. Knopf and then the editor of the New Yorker magazine, has ever again been intimidated by anybody.
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 revelling 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. Mr Starnes has passed on. Many 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 of the American edition, 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
IT WAS LOVE at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes, accompanied by brisk and serious Nurse Duckett, one of the ward nurses who didn’t like Yossarian. They read the chart at the foot of the bed and asked impatiently about the pain. They seemed irritated when he told them it was exactly the same.
‘Still no movement?’ the full colonel demanded.
The doctors exchanged a look when he shook his head.
‘Give him another pill.’
Nurse Duckett made a note to give Yossarian another pill, and the four of them moved along to the next bed. None of the nurses liked Yossarian. Actually, the pain in his liver had gone away, but Yossarian didn’t say anything and the doctors never suspected. They just suspected that he had been moving his bowels and not telling anyone.
Yossarian had everything he wanted in the hospital. The food wasn’t too bad, and his meals were brought to him in bed. There were extra rations of fresh meat, and during the hot part of the afternoon he and the others were served chilled fruit juice or chilled chocolate milk. Apart from the doctors and the nurses, no one ever disturbed him. For a little while in the morning he had to censor letters, but he was free after that to spend the rest of each day lying around idly with a clear conscience. He was comfortable in the hospital, and it was easy to stay on because he always ran a temperature of 101. He was even more comfortable than Dunbar, who had to keep falling down on his face in order to get his meals brought to him in bed.
After he had made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. ‘They asked for volunteers. It’s very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I’ll write you the instant I get back.’ And he had not written anyone since.
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation ‘Dear Mary’ from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, ‘I yearn for you tragically. R. O. Shipman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.’ R. O. Shipman was the group chaplain’s name.
When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer’s name. Most letters he didn’t read at all. On those he didn’t read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, ‘Washington Irving.’ When that grew monotonous he wrote, ‘Irving Washington.’ Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn’t censor letters. He found them too monotonous.
It was a good ward this time, one of the best he and Dunbar had ever enjoyed. With them this time was the twenty-four-year-old fighter-pilot captain with the sparse golden mustache who had been shot into the Adriatic Sea in midwinter and not even caught cold. Now the summer was upon them, the captain had not been shot down, and he said he had the grippe. In the bed on Yossarian’s right, still lying amorously on his belly, was the startled captain with malaria in his blood and a mosquito bite on his ass. Across the aisle from Yossarian was Dunbar, and next to Dunbar was the artillery captain with whom Yossarian had stopped playing chess. The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish. Then there was the educated Texan from Texas who looked like someone in Technicolor and felt, patriotically, that people of means – decent folk – should be given more votes than drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists and indecent folk – people without means.
Yossarian was unspringing rhythms in the letters the day they brought the Texan in. It was another quiet, hot, untroubled day. The heat pressed heavily on the roof, stifling sound. Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead. They put the Texan in a bed in the middle of the ward, and it wasn’t long before he donated his views.
Dunbar sat up like a shot. ‘That’s it,’ he cried excitedly. ‘There was something missing – all the time I knew there was something missing – and now I know what it is.’ He banged his fist down into his palm. ‘No patriotism,’ he declared.
‘You’re right,’ Yossarian shouted back. ‘You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. The hot dog, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mom’s apple pie. That’s what everyone’s fighting for. But who’s fighting for the decent folk? Who’s fighting for more votes for the decent folk? There’s no patriotism, that’s what it is. And no matriotism, either.’
The warrant officer on Yossarian’s left was unimpressed. ‘Who gives a shit?’ he asked tiredly, and turned over on his side to go to sleep.
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.
He sent shudders of annoyance scampering up ticklish spines, and everybody fled from him – everybody but the soldier in white, who had no choice. The soldier in white was encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze. He had two useless legs and two useless arms. He had been smuggled into the ward during the night, and the men had no idea he was among them until they awoke in the morning and saw the two strange legs hoisted from the hips, the two strange arms anchored up perpendicularly, all four limbs pinioned strangely in air by lead weights suspended darkly above him that never moved. Sewn into the bandages over the insides of both elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar. A silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear, stoppered jar on the floor. When the jar on the floor was full, the jar feeding his elbow was empty, and the two were simply switched quickly so that the stuff could drip back into him. All they ever really saw of the soldier in white was a frayed black hole over his mouth.
The soldier in white had been filed next to the Texan, and the Texan sat sideways on his own bed and talked to him throughout the morning, afternoon and evening in a pleasant, sympathetic drawl. The Texan never minded that he got no reply.
Temperatures were taken twice a day in the ward. Early each morning and late each afternoon Nurse Cramer entered with a jar full of thermometers and worked her way up one side of the ward and down the other, distributing a thermometer to each patient. She managed the soldier in white by inserting a thermometer into the hole over his mouth and leaving it balanced there on the lower rim. When she returned to the man in the first bed, she took his thermometer and recorded his temperature, and then moved on to the next bed and continued around the ward again. One afternoon when she had completed her first circuit of the ward and came a second time to the soldier in white, she read his thermometer and discovered that he was dead.
‘Murderer,’ Dunbar said quietly.
The Texan looked up at him with an uncertain grin.
‘Killer,’ Yossarian said.
‘What are you fellas talkin’ about?’ the Texan asked nervously.
‘You murdered him,’ said Dunbar.
‘You killed him,’ said Yossarian.
The Texan shrank back. ‘You fellas are crazy. I didn’t even touch him.’
‘You murdered him,’ said Dunbar.
‘I heard you kill him,’ said Yossarian.
‘You killed him because he was a nigger,’ Dunbar said.
‘You fellas are crazy,’ the Texan cried. ‘They don’t allow niggers in here. They got a special place for niggers.’
‘The sergeant smuggled him in,’ Dunbar said.
‘The Communist sergeant,’ said Yossarian.
‘And you knew it.’
The warrant officer on Yossarian’s left was unimpressed by the entire incident of the soldier in white. The warrant officer was unimpressed by everything and never spoke at all unless it was to show irritation.
The day before Yossarian met the chaplain, a stove exploded in the mess hall and set fire to one side of the kitchen. An intense heat flashed through the area. Even in Yossarian’s ward, almost three hundred feet away, they could hear the roar of the blaze and the sharp cracks of flaming timber. Smoke sped past the orange-tinted windows. In about fifteen minutes the crash trucks from the airfield arrived to fight the fire. For a frantic half hour it was touch and go. Then the firemen began to get the upper hand. Suddenly there was the monotonous old drone of bombers returning from a mission, and the firemen had to roll up their hoses and speed back to the field in case one of the planes crashed and caught fire. The planes landed safely. As soon as the last one was down, the firemen wheeled their trucks around and raced back up the hill to resume their fight with the fire at the hospital. When they got there, the blaze was out. It had died of its own accord, expired completely without even an ember to be watered down, and there was nothing for the disappointed firemen to do but drink tepid coffee and hang around trying to screw the nurses.
The chaplain arrived the day after the fire. Yossarian was busy expurgating all but romance words from the letters when the chaplain sat down in a chair between the beds and asked him how he was feeling. He had placed himself a bit to one side, and the captain’s bars on the tab of his shirt collar were all the insignia Yossarian could see. Yossarian had no idea who he was and just took it for granted that he was either another doctor or another madman.
‘Oh, pretty good,’ he answered. ‘I’ve got a slight pain in my liver and I haven’t been the most regular of fellows, I guess, but all in all I must admit that I feel pretty good.’
‘That’s good,’ said the chaplain.
‘Yes,’ Yossarian said. ‘Yes, that is good.’
‘I meant to come around sooner,’ the chaplain said, ‘but I really haven’t been well.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Yossarian said.
‘Just a head cold,’ the chaplain added quickly.
‘I’ve got a fever of a hundred and one,’ Yossarian added just as quickly.
‘That’s too bad,’ said the chaplain.
‘Yes,’ Yossarian agreed. ‘Yes, that is too bad.’
The chaplain fidgeted. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ he asked after a while.
‘No, no.’ Yossarian sighed. ‘The doctors are doing all that’s humanly possible, I suppose.’
‘No, no.’ The chaplain colored faintly. ‘I didn’t mean anything like that. I meant cigarettes … or books … or … toys.’
‘No, no,’ Yossarian said. ‘Thank you. I have everything I need, I suppose – everything but good health.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘Yes,’ Yossarian said. ‘Yes, that is too bad.’
The chaplain stirred again. He looked from side to side a few times, then gazed up at the ceiling, then down at the floor. He drew a deep breath.
‘Lieutenant Nately sends his regards,’ he said.
Yossarian was sorry to hear they had a mutual friend. It seemed there was a basis to their conversation after all. ‘You know Lieutenant Nately?’ he asked regretfully.
‘Yes, I know Lieutenant Nately quite well.’
‘He’s a bit loony, isn’t he?’
The chaplain’s smile was embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say. I don’t think I know him that well.’
‘You can take my word for it,’ Yossarian said. ‘He’s as goofy as they come.’
The chaplain weighed the next silence heavily and then shattered it with an abrupt question. ‘You are Captain Yossarian, aren’t you?’
‘Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family.’
‘Please excuse me,’ the chaplain persisted timorously. ‘I may be committing a very grave error. Are you Captain Yossarian?’
‘Yes,’ Captain Yossarian confessed. ‘I am Captain Yossarian.’
‘Of the 256th Squadron?’
‘Of the fighting 256th Squadron,’ Yossarian replied. ‘I didn’t know there were any other Captain Yossarians. As far as I know, I’m the only Captain Yossarian I know, but that’s only as far as I know.’
‘I see,’ the chaplain said unhappily.
‘That’s two to the fighting eighth power,’ Yossarian pointed out, ‘if you’re thinking of writing a symbolic poem about our squadron.’
‘No,’ mumbled the chaplain. ‘I’m not thinking of writing a symbolic poem about your squadron.’
Yossarian straightened sharply when he spied the tiny silver cross on the other side of the chaplain’s collar. He was thoroughly astonished, for he had never really talked with a chaplain before.
‘You’re a chaplain,’ he exclaimed ecstatically. ‘I didn’t know you were a chaplain.’
‘Why, yes,’ the chaplain answered. ‘Didn’t you know I was a chaplain?’
‘Why, no. I didn’t know you were a chaplain.’ Yossarian stared at him with a big, fascinated grin. ‘I’ve never really seen a chaplain before.’
The chaplain flushed again and gazed down at his hands. He was a slight man of about thirty-two with tan hair and brown diffident eyes. His face was narrow and rather pale. An innocent nest of ancient pimple pricks lay in the basin of each cheek. Yossarian wanted to help him.
‘Can I do anything at all to help you?’ the chaplain asked.
Yossarian shook his head, still grinning. ‘No, I’m sorry. I have everything I need and I’m quite comfortable. In fact, I’m not even sick.’
‘That’s good.’ As soon as the chaplain said the words, he was sorry and shoved his knuckles into his mouth with a giggle of alarm, but Yossarian remained silent and disappointed him. ‘There are other men in the group I must visit,’ he apologized finally. ‘I’ll come to see you again, probably tomorrow.’
‘Please do that,’ Yossarian said.
‘I’ll come only if you want me to,’ the chaplain said, lowering his head shyly. ‘I’ve noticed that I make many of the men uncomfortable.’
Yossarian glowed with affection. ‘I want you to,’ he said. ‘You won’t make me uncomfortable.’
The chaplain beamed gratefully and then peered down at a slip of paper he had been concealing in his hand all the while. He counted along the beds in the ward, moving his lips, and then centered his attention dubiously on Dunbar.
‘May I inquire,’ he whispered softly, ‘if that is Lieutenant Dunbar?’
‘Yes,’ Yossarian answered loudly, ‘that is Lieutenant Dunbar.’
‘Thank you,’ the chaplain whispered. ‘Thank you very much. I must visit with him. I must visit with every member of the group who is in the hospital.’
‘Even those in other wards?’ Yossarian asked.
‘Even those in other wards.’
‘Be careful in those other wards, Father,’ Yossarian warned. ‘That’s where they keep the mental cases. They’re filled with lunatics.’
‘It isn’t necessary to call me Father,’ the chaplain explained. ‘I’m an Anabaptist.’
‘I’m dead serious about those other wards,’ Yossarian continued grimly. ‘M.P.s won’t protect you, because they’re craziest of all. I’d go with you myself, but I’m scared stiff. Insanity is contagious. This is the only sane ward in the whole hospital. Everybody is crazy but us. This is probably the only sane ward in the whole world, for that matter.’