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Summary
Summary
Named one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read * One of The Atlantic 's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
One of the funniest books ever written, Joseph Heller's masterpiece about a bomber squadron in the Second World War's Italian theater features a gallery of magnificently strange characters seething with comic energy. The malingering hero, Yossarian, is endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war, and his story is studded with incidents and devices (including the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule that gives the book its title) that propel the narrative in a headlong satiric rush. But the reason Catch-22 's satire never weakens and its jokes never date stems not from the comedy itself but from the savage, unerring, Swiftian indignation out of which that comedy springs. This fractured anti-epic, with all its aggrieved humanity, has given us the most enduring image we have of modern warfare.
This hardcover Everyman's Library edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, a chronology of the author's life and times, and a select bibliography. It is printed on acid-free paper, with sewn bindings, full-cloth covers, foil stamping, and a silk ribbon marker.
Author Notes
American novelist and dramatist Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on May 1, 1923. Heller started off his writing career by publishing a series of short stories, but he is most famous for his satirical novel Catch-22. Set in the closing months of World War II, Catch-22 tells the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who discovers the horrors of war and its aftereffects. This novel brought the phrase "catch-22," defined in Webster's Dictionary as "a situation presenting two equally undesirable alternatives," into everyday use. Heller wrote Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, in 1994. Other novels include As Good As Gold and God Knows. He also wrote No Laughing Matter, an account of his struggles with Guillain-Barr Syndrome, a neurological disorder, in 1986.
Thirty-five years after writing his first book, Heller wrote his autobiography, entitled Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. In his memoirs, Heller reminisces about what it was like growing up in Coney Island in the 1930s and 1940s. On December 13, 1999, Heller died of a heart attack in his home on Long Island. His last novel, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, was published shortly after his death.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
As George Clooney's new adaptation of Joseph Heller's novel comes to TV, Mark Lawson looks at its unlikely path to success - and why Heller thought everyone got it wrong When Joseph Heller, a 38-year-old New York advertising executive, published his first novel in 1961, an urgent query came in from the Finnish translator: "Would you please explain me one thing? What means catch-22? I didn't find it in any vocabulary. Even the assistant air attaché of the USA here in Helsinki could not explain exactly." Within a couple of years - after Catch-22 had become a million-selling paperback in the US and UK, and done well in Finland and most other countries - nobody needed the phrase translated. It is likely to be familiar to those who watch the new six-part TV adaptation on Channel 4, even if they do not know the book. Heller, however, grouched that most people still didn't understand. I interviewed the writer, who died in 1999, several times. He was a large, loud man, who loved food: "Hungry Joe", the nickname given to a character in Catch-22 , was Heller's own army monicker. He had never lost his Brooklyn accent: Martin Amis once remarked that this was the only major American writer who referred to his profession as "litta-ra-chewer". Across our encounters, there was a running gag in which someone - a diner in a Long Island seafood restaurant, a fan at a literary festival, a BBC executive - would tell Heller their own experience of a "catch-22 situation". When they had gone, the writer would growl: "That's not a catch-22. They almost never are." Most of the anecdotes were minor domestic dilemmas, along the lines of not being able to find your lost spectacles without your spectacles. Heller was dismissive of such mild diurnal circuits of unfairness. For him, a true catch-22 was perfectly, cruelly illogical, with life-or-death peril, like the one discovered by John Yossarian, a member of a US bomber crew stationed in Italy during the second world war: There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to, but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. This is a passage of comic prose so magnificent that the script of the TV adaptation, co-created and co-directed by George Clooney, simply slices it into dialogue. Heller was a man of considerable self-confidence. At appearances to publicise his later books, readers would often bluntly tell him that he hadn't written anything as good as Catch-22 , to which the reply, after a growly laugh, was: "No. But nor has anyone else." So he would not have been shocked by either the initial success or the continuing popularity of his first book. What had made him nervous at first was the title. The manuscript on which he worked between 1953 and 1960, fictionalising his own experience as a bombardier in the US air force, was originally called "Catch-18". But, soon after the book was bought by Simon and Schuster, rival publisher Doubleday announced Mila 18 , a second world war novel by Leon Uris. Deciding it was unlikely that two stories of conflict with the same number on their covers would become bestsellers in the same season, Heller's editor nudged him up or down the abacus. This request appalled and unsettled the author for whom, during eight years of work, "18 had always been the only number". Heller's resistance was partly down to stubbornness, which even his friends identified as a prime quality, but also something subtler. He was one of the wave of male Jewish-American writers who dominated American literature in the second half of the 20th century. But, while readers soon realised the roots of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow from the content of their novels, Heller's specifically Jewish works came much later, with Good as Gold (1979) and God Knows (1984), comedies respectively about Henry Kissinger and King David. However, one reason that the number 18 seems to have meant so much to him is that it had a literally mystical significance; in Hebrew, where letters have a numerical value, the sum of one and eight can spell "life". The Vietnam war created a market for a story that depicted US army commanders as quixotic, paranoid brutes Heller cussedly continued to prefer the original name, and his concerns seemed to have been justified when, at the hardback stage, Mila 18 made the New York Times bestseller list and Heller's book didn't. (Incidentally, in Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me , set in an alternative postwar Britain, people are reading "Catch-18".) Once the mass market editions appeared, though, Heller rapidly eclipsed Uris. A key reason is that while Mila 18 was a conventionally solemn war novel, Catch-22 is a daringly dark farce, which anticipated the mood soon to engulf the US. During the novel's lengthy gestation - writing in short bursts after work at the ad agency, and at weekends - Heller was confronted by publishers who feared that a story set in the early 40s risked missing its time, seeming irrelevant in prosperous American peacetime. Two members of the same young military generation - Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal - had published novels based on their experiences soon after demobbing: Vidal's Williwaw was in bookshops by 1946, Mailer's The Naked and the Dead two years later. Then, in May 1961, a few months before publication, John F Kennedy secretly escalated US assistance to the South Vietnamese; by the time Catch-22 had become a soft-cover super seller, Lyndon B Johnson was ruinously involved in a war that was vehemently opposed, especially by students. Whether or not Heller's book would have had equal success as "Catch-18", it seems impossible that it would have reached such heights without America's global anti-communist mission creating a market for a story that depicted US army commanders as quixotic, paranoid brutes. Though devastating in most other aspects, the war in Vietnam was generous to the genre of military black comedy. Slaughterhouse- Five by Kurt Vonnegut - a second world war novel delayed even longer than Catch-22 - was based on Vonnegut's exposure, as a captured serviceman, to the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. But, when the book was published in 1969, it appealed to the anti-war sentiment of young people resisting conscription to Vietnam. Similarly, M A S H: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker (a pseudonym for Dr H Richard Hornberger and WC Heinz) was published in 1968, 15 years after the end of the Korean war in which it is set, by which time that conflict was almost forgotten. However, first as a 1970 movie and then as a long-running TV series, the story of a previous American imperial folly seemed to be a commentary on the nation's miscalculations in south-east Asia. So, paradoxically, three of the key Vietnam era fictions - Slaughterhouse-Five , Catch-22 and MASH - all dramatised much earlier conflicts. The significance of this is that Heller, Vonnegut, and Hooker, writing at a distance from events, were able to be mordantly satirical about war in a way that would have brought accusations of bad taste to an author writing contemporaneously in such a way about the second world war, Korea, or Vietnam. A work of fiction about a war that never happened - the USA-USSR nuclear war satirically imagined in Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove (1964) - also helped to shape the culture in which Catch-22 became a cult. The TV series M*A*S*H is still popular today, and is partly responsible for the success of conflict-based comedy on TV. As the camera pans across camouflage tents and the sardonically amazed faces of troops given ridiculous orders, Clooney's new Catch-22 seems to contain a deliberate visual homage to the series. Another predecessor in this respect is Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), which dared to joke about military cruelty and incompetence, and connects directly to the latest Heller adaptation through the casting. Hugh Laurie, who played Lieutenant George in Blackadder's first world war farce here appears as the deranged Major De Coverley. The 1970 movie version of Catch-22 , directed by Mike Nichols, was badly received by critics and struggled at the box office, encouraging the view that Heller's novel might be one of those books - Finnegans Wake, Moby-Dick - that defy successful cinematic adaptation. However, the dominant problem in such cases has been the level of compression necessary to fit long, populous books into just one movie: the Nichols Catch-22 runs for 122 minutes. The increasingly popular TV box-set format allows for a much more representative ratio of page count to screen minutes. The screenwriters of the TV series, Luke Davies and David Michôd, have almost six hours. They fillet and pace Heller's narrative cleverly, with the biggest structural change coming at the beginning. The novel opens with Yossarian already flying missions from Pianosa, but the TV series begins with a flashback - found in Heller's eighth chapter - set during the servicemen's basic training at Santa Ana Military School in California. Lieutenant Scheisskopf, a sadistic instructor who does not appear in the book until later, is on screen from the start, which makes sense as a tactic to win viewers because he is played by Clooney, the cast's most famous face. The explanation of the title detonates at the end of the first episode, and Yossarian's growing mental breakdown is convincingly built up from a horrific encounter with a bloody corpse in mid-air (a straight borrowing from Heller's own war record). The sexual politics of the novel have dated; Heller wrote about men who not only casually used sex workers, but referred to them as "whores", while one of its big one-liners turns on the perceived comic improbability of two men falling in love. As for racial diversity, aside from Yossarian - who is Armenian-American (and is played in the series by Italian-Portuguese-American actor Christopher Abbott) - Heller's airmen are predominantly white Americans. In that respect, the adaptation strangely stays too faithful to the text. That aside, this televisual retelling justifies the author's late-career reflection in an interview: "I believe that Catch-22 , through some lucky instinct on my part, dealt with matters that are perennial sources of discontent in an advanced society." It was not, perhaps, much of a gamble that there would always be wars being fought or threatened somewhere. Screenwriters Davies and Michôd both come from Australia, a country that was significantly involved in the Vietnam war and lost thousands at Gallipoli, a battle-site that, like Pianosa in Catch-22 , is Italian. In the UK, Heller's story speaks to the thoughtless sacrifice of life in the 1914-18 conflict, as well as to Tony Blair's more recent intervention in Iraq. For post-Vietnam generations of Americans, the Catch-22 adaptation will resonate with the Bush wars as well; two of Clooney's earlier movies, Three Kings (1999) and Syriana (2005), dealt with American foreign policy in the Middle East. But the presentation of deranged authority figures in this adaptation is also clearly aimed at the Trump presidency, especially in Clooney's verbally and mentally unhinged Scheisskopf. The cruel rules, irrational circularities, and capricious administration that Heller identified in the US military clearly resonate, too, with readers' experience of political or corporate bureaucracies in civilian life. Franz Kafka spotted these tendencies in early 21st century Prague, but it was 20th century America that invented, and then spread globally, management as an industry and pseudo-science that has become more Kafkaesque than anything Kafka imagined. So this aspect of the narrative has increasingly resonated with bewildered and beleaguered employees, customers, and voters. The recent scandal over the retrospective denial of UK citizenship to members of the Windrush generation featured a catch-22 situation that perhaps even Heller would recognise. Those affected were forced to leave the UK when found not to have passports; but they would only have needed to apply for a passport if they had wanted to leave the UK, which they had not. Despite Heller's practised response that no one had surpassed Catch-22 , there is an argument that he did so with his second book. After a 13-year genesis that made his debut look swiftly written, Something Happened finally appeared in 1974. Bob Slocum, an advertising executive, experiences in peacetime the illogical authoritarianism that Yossarian witnessed in war, and because of the family incident to which the title refers, suffers a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The corporation that he serves is as barmy as Yossarian's air force, the tacit link with Catch-22 made explicit by the final line: "Everyone seems pleased with the way I've taken command." When Something Happened appeared, some critics accused Heller of an arrogant ambition to be an American Tolstoy - the first book his War, the second his Peace. The consensus was that he had failed. But, rereading Something Happened and watching the new Catch-22 , I became convinced that Heller had succeeded.
Library Journal Review
Two modern giants (LJ 2/15/70 and LJ 11/1/61, respectively) join Knopf's venerable "Everyman's Library." If you've been searching for quality hardcovers of these two eternally popular titles, look no further. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
INTRODUCTION by Malcolm Bradbury 'When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out half a century ago and raged in almost all the world. It was raging more than two years before we even got into it.' So begins Joseph Heller's Closing Time (1994), his later life sequel to his first and still most famous novel, Catch-22, a remarkable story about a piece of that war that raged in almost all the world. Thirty-three years after it appeared, the later book starts by reintroducing us to a number of the characters who have survived the earlier novel, and who now live not just in a postwar but a post-Cold War America, where the triumph of capitalism is complete. This is a story of the struggle of their ageing, the later stirs of their sexuality, the waning of their energies, and the fading of their lives. It ends apocalyptically, but closes with a playing of Mahler's Fifth Symphony--'so sweetly mournful and Jewish,' thinks one of the characters, who admits that these days he much prefers the melancholic to the heroic. And Closing Time is in fact a quirky, bold, sometimes moving revisiting of the characters, and many of the events, of the book we today recognize as a twentieth-century classic. Catch-22 was the American book that--perhaps more than any other of its time--voiced the anxious, absurdist, outrageous reaction of a generation to a dark conflict that had taken American soldiers and airmen to Europe, and concluded not just in the defeat of totalitarianism, but in a victory on behalf of the world of our glossy, often alienating, post-modern affluence. And the book was not just a satire on war but a story of that age of burgeoning affluence and all it brought with it - the grim period of arctic hostilities called the Cold War, the affluent society, and finally the post-modern phase of confident, narcissistic, consumptionist late capitalism in which we, and Heller's elderly survivors of wartime, have ended up. Catch-22 is, first of all, a war novel. And there is little doubt that the war novel, for obvious and tragic reasons, has itself ended up as one of the dominant and shaping literary forms of the troubled twentieth century. It has not only played its part in defining the historical story of the century, but has also shaped the techniques, the flavour, the artistic essence of the modern and modernist novel. In the years after the Great War of 1914-18, the entire sensibility of the horror that had happened seeped into the nature of fiction. This was hardly surprising, for the Great War was a cultural apocalypse. It upturned empires, overthrew entire ruling castes and classes, changed the nature of world hegemony, and had a massive impact on the entire nature of Western and world culture and history. It changed Europe from a bastion of Western civilization into a shattered and unstable modern battlefield, and handed on to unwilling Americans a sense of responsibility for the direction of history. It shattered settled notions of civilization and social order, old hopes for the advance of history, established faiths in humanism and heroism and sacrifice. It also helped create a revolution in artistic and literary forms. It is true that the real avant garde revolt of the modern had begun earlier in the century, in the period between the twentieth century's dawn, the beginning of the calendar of 'modern times', and the great European crisis of 1914. Thus the avant garde experiments of modern painting, writing, architecture and philosophy, and the powerful movements and campaigns that developed them (Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism and so on), mostly came before the war. They upset the classic orders of the arts, broke the frame ofrealism, rendered art neomechanical, fragmentary and abstract. But it took the war itself to ensure the inevitability of their revolt - to shatter traditional forms, enforce the sense of cultural destruction, change the narrative and tone of modern experience. Hence the 1920s strike us now both as an era of postwar crisis and an era of artistic experiment, perhaps the most experimental decade the century has seen. And inevitably one of the essential forms of its expression was the war novel, the novel that either dealt with the facts of war directly or else with its profound consequences. From the wartime years themselves and through into the 1930s, a sequence of novels appeared which came fresh from the experience of the front and the battlefield, directly capturing the life of the troops in the trenches, on whatever side of the eternal mud or barbed wire they happened to be. There were works like Henri Barbusse's realistic and immediate Le Feu (1916), John Dos Passos' idealistic Three Soldiers (1921), Jaroslav Hasek's grotesque, dark-comic The Good Soldier Svejk (1921-3), Ford Madox Ford's massive four-volume epic of war and society, Parade's End (1924-8), Erich Maria Remarque's German epic of the trenches, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ernest Hemingway's very personal story of an American soldier and a separate peace in the Italian campaign, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederic Manning's vivid, disturbing tale of the experiences of an ordinary British soldier, The Middle Parts of Fortune, also called Her Privates We (1930). Such books did not simply recreate the horrific experiences of a war that had taken so many lives, and had so plainly failed to be the war to end wars, or create a world fit for heroes to live in. They also emphasized the revulsion, the futility, the failure, the folly; and often the enemy was to be found not only in the opposite trenches but also on one's own side. But no less important were the novels which, without representing the war directly, showed the profound changes in consciousness, mores and values it had generated. Nearly all the great modernist works showed the power of its effect. The delicate, decadent, belle epoque world of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is transformed by the conflict; the anxious sickness of bourgeois society in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain leads us onward down the mountain and into the European battlefield; the great envelope of consciousness in Virginia Woolf's fiction is repeatedly broken open by the shattering impact of war. It was not merely the experience of those who had served at the front, encountered violence, mechanical death and the pathetic weakness of the human body, or sensed the general futility, that shaped the climate of modern fiction. War had shattered older notions of art, of form and representation; it had transformed notions of reality, the rules of perception, the structures of artistic expression. It fragmented, hardened, modernized the voice of modern fiction, increased its sense of extremity, of irony, of tragedy, passing its critical lesson on into the history of modern fiction, and the whole literary and cultural tradition. Strangely, when a quarter of a century further on a second war broke out in Europe, and then, when Americans and Japanese entered after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, became a Second World War, its impact was nowhere near as great. Rather it produced, especially in Europe, a weary sense of repetition and a feeling of grim inevitability, as if the Great War of 1914-18 had never really ceased. Yet its horrors were even greater, its impact on modern history even more massive. Once more the direction of the world was fundamentally reshaped, the nature of modern consciousness and conscience even more profoundly challenged. The horrific revelations that came at the war's end - the facts of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews perished in the German extermination camps; the hideous impact of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which in turn brought about the realization that a global nuclear holocaust was possible; the sheer scale of destruction in Europe, where endless images of human desolation came from the flattened cities, and where long lines of starving displaced persons and freed prisoners hopelessly wandered a ruined landscape - displayed a new crisis of history. Moreover, the crisis was not over and done with: for forty-five more years, the ruins, the hatreds, the global divisions left by the war were to shadow the uneasy peace that followed. Once again, the war produced war novels, some of them very striking and remarkable: Graham Greene's wartime The Ministry of Fear (1943) and Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy of the German occupation of France, Les Chemins de la Liberté (1945-9), John Horne Burns' The Gallery (1947) about the Italian campaign, and Norman Mailer's The .Naked and the Dead ( r 948), about the war in the Pacific, James Jones' From Here to Eternity (1951) and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (195l), Evelyn Waugh's story of one man's search for a just war, the Sword of Honour trilogy (l952-61 ), and Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy ( r 960- 65). Likewise the Cold War produced its Cold War novels, notably the works of John Le Carré and the fiction that leaked out of Eastern Europe. But though, from their very different viewpoints, such books displayed the crisis of war--the impact of totalitarianism, the horrors of occupation or civilian bombing, the agonies of disappointed liberalism, the ferocity of the campaigns, the vulnerability of individuals, the cultural and moral destruction--they hardly had the same impact as their predecessors. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the modern war that began in 1914-18 seemed never really to have stopped, but simply plumbed new depths of barbarism. Possibly sensibilities were even jaded, for one modern war is grimly like another. There was also the fact that, in the age of totalitarianism before the conflict, many writers in Europe had been silenced or exiled, and some had fled Europe altogether for the United States. And this time the scale of occupation and the impact of great bombing raids had brought the war directly to civilian populations; so had the massive scale of war reporting (some of it by the survivors of previous conflicts, like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos), and this extensive contemporary coverage, verbal and visual, had made the novelist's task in some ways superfluous. It was also argued that the sheer horror of what had happened, above all with the Holocaust, had made literary treatment impossible. 'No poetry after Auschwitz,' said Theodore Adorno, arguing that the enormity and grotesque horror of recent events had virtually blanked out all expression. And nothing seemed over and done with; as East and West jostled for power and position, and the Iron Curtain descended, the future seemed to hold out few prospects for real recovery. As for the novels that did appear, they no longer seemed to possess the surprise, the mythic power or the aesthetic novelty of the fiction of the Twenties; their techniques were vivid, but rarely radical. Indeed the most powerful postwar writing came not so much from those who explored the war directly, but those who captured the mental and moral atmosphere of anxiety, extremity and anguish it had created right across the postwar nuclear age. Hence many of the essential works were books of survivor consciousness or of modern extremity: the Jewish-American fiction of writers like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, or the minimalist fiction of Samuel Beckett, the plays of Ionesco and Pinter. It took some time for two books to appear that did capture not only the horrors of wartime but the climate of absurdity and estrangement that dominated the chilly peace. Each treated the war with a bitter and grotesque humour, a world of the darkest unreality. One of these books was Gunter Grass's grim, incredible comedy of Nazi Germany, absurdly seen from a child's point of view, The Tin Drum ( 1959). And the other was a remarkable dark-comic work from the other side of the Atlantic, meant, said its author, not just as a war novel but 'an encyclopedia of the current mental atmosphere'; this was Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Excerpted from Catch-22 by Joseph Heller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
