Biography of Joseph Heller

Name: Joseph Heller
Bith Date: May 1, 1923
Death Date: December 12, 1999
Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: author

Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller (1923-1999) was a popular and respected writer whose first and best-known novel, Catch-22 (1961), is considered a classic of the post-World War II era. Presenting human existence as absurd and fragmented, this irreverent, witty novel satirizes capitalism and the military bureaucracy.

Heller's tragicomic vision of modern life, found in all of his novels, focuses on the erosion of humanistic values and highlights the ways in which language obscures and confuses reality. In addition, Heller's use of anachronism reflects the disordered nature of contemporary existence. His protagonists are antiheroes who search for meaning in their lives and struggle to avoid being overwhelmed by such institutions as the military, big business, government, and religion. Catch-22 is most often interpreted as an antiwar protest novel that foreshadowed the widespread resistance to the Vietnam War that erupted in the late 1960s. While Heller's later novels have received mixed reviews, Catch-22 continues to be highly regarded as a trenchant satire of the big business of modern warfare.

Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, to first generation Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father, a bakery-truck driver, died after a bungled operation when Heller was only five years old. Many critics believe that Heller developed the sardonic, wisecracking humor that has marked his writing style while growing up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. After graduating from high school in 1941, he worked briefly in an insurance office, an experience he later drew upon for the novel Something Happened (1974). In 1942, Heller enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to Corsica, where he flew sixty combat missions as a wing bombardier, earning an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit Citation. It is generally agreed that Heller's war years in the Mediterranean theater had only a minimal impact on his conception of Catch-22. Discharged from the military in 1945, Heller married Shirley Held and began his college education. He obtained a B.A. in English from New York University, an M.A. from Columbia University, and attended Oxford University as a Fulbright Scholar for a year before becoming an English instructor at Pennsylvania State University. Two years later Heller began working as an advertising copywriter, securing positions at such magazines as Time, Look, and McCall's from 1952 to 1961. The office settings of these companies also yielded material for Something Happened. During this time Heller was also writing short stories and scripts for film and television as well as working on Catch-22. Although his stories easily found publication, Heller considered them insubstantial and derivative of Ernest Hemingway's works. After the phenomenal success of Catch-22, Heller quit his job at McCall's and concentrated exclusively on writing fiction and plays. In December of 1981, he contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare type of polyneuritis that afflicts the peripheral nervous system. Heller chronicled his medical problems and difficult recovery in No Laughing Matter (1986) with Speed Vogel, a friend who helped him during his illness.

Catch-22 concerns a World War II bombardier named Yossarian who believes his foolish, ambitious, mean-spirited commanding officers are more dangerous than the enemy. In order to avoid flying more missions, Yossarian retreats to a hospital with a mysterious liver complaint, sabotages his plane, and tries to get himself declared insane. Variously defined throughout the novel, "Catch-22" refers to the ways in which bureaucracies control the people who work for them. The term first appears when Yossarian asks to be declared insane. In this instance, Catch-22 demands that anyone who is insane must be excused from flying missions. The "catch" is that one must ask to be excused; anyone who does so is showing "rational fear in the face of clear and present danger," is therefore sane, and must continue to fly. In its final, most ominous form, Catch-22 declares "they have the right to do anything we can't stop them from doing." Although most critics identify Yossarian as a coward and an antihero, they also sympathize with his urgent need to protect himself from this brutal universal law. Some critics have questioned the moral status of Yossarian's actions, noting in particular that he seems to be motivated merely by self-preservation, and that the enemy he refuses to fight is led by Adolf Hitler. Others, however, contend that while Catch-22 is ostensibly a war novel, World War II and the Air Force base where most of the novel's action takes place function primarily as a microcosm that demonstrates the disintegration of language and human value in a bureaucratic state.

Heller embodies his satire of capitalism in the character of Milo Minderbinder, whose obsessive pursuit of profits causes many deaths and much suffering among his fellow soldiers. Originally a mess hall officer, Milo organizes a powerful black market syndicate capable of cornering the Egyptian cotton market and bombing the American base on Pianosa for the Germans. On the surface Milo's adventures form a straightforward, optimistic success story that some commentators have likened to the Horatio Alger tales popular at the turn of the twentieth century. The narrative line that follows Yossarian, on the other hand, is characterized by his confused, frustrated, and frightened psychological state. The juxtaposition of these two narrative threads provides a disjointed, almost schizophrenic structure that reasserts the absurd logic depicted in Catch-22.

Structurally, Catch-22 is episodic and repetitive. The majority of the narrative is composed of a series of cyclical flashbacks of increasing detail and ominousness. The most important recurring incident is the death of a serviceman named Snowden that occurs before the opening of the story but is referred to and recounted periodically throughout the novel. In the penultimate chapter, Yossarian relives the full horror and comprehends the significance of this senseless death as it reflects the human condition and his own situation. This narrative method led many critics, particularly early reviewers, to condemn Heller's novel as formless. Norman Mailer's oft-repeated jibe: "One could take out a hundred pages anywhere from the middle of Catch-22, and not even the author could be certain they were gone" has been refuted by Heller himself, and has inspired other critics to carefully trace the chronology of ever-darkening events that provide the loose structure of this novel.

Heller poignantly and consistently satirizes language, particularly the system of euphemisms and oxymorons that passes for official speech in the United States Armed Forces. In the world of Catch-22 metaphorical language has a dangerously literal power. The death of Doc Daneeka is an example: when the plane that Doc is falsely reported to be on crashes and no one sees him parachute to safety, he is presumed dead and his living presence is insufficient to convince anyone that he is really alive. Similarly, when Yossarian rips up his girlfriend's address in rage, she disappears, never to be seen again. Marcus K. Billson III summarized this technique: "The world of [ Catch-22]projects the horrific, yet all too real, power of language to divest itself from any necessity of reference, to function as an independent, totally autonomous medium with its own perfect system and logic. That such a language pretends to mirror anything but itself is a commonplace delusion Heller satirizes throughout the novel. Yet, civilization is informed by this very pretense, and Heller shows how man is tragically and comically tricked and manipulated by such an absurdity."

Heller's second novel, Something Happened, centers on Bob Slocum, a middle-aged businessman who has a large, successful company but who feels emotionally empty. Narrating in a monotone, Slocum attempts to find the source of his malaise and his belief that modern American bourgeois life has lost meaning, by probing into his past and exploring his relationships with his wife, children, and co-workers. Although critics consider Slocum a generally dislikable character, he ultimately achieves sympathy because he has so thoroughly assimilated the values of his business that he has lost his own identity. Many commentators have viewed Slocum as an Everyman, a moral cipher who exemplifies the age's declining spirit. While initial reviews of Something Happened were mixed, more recent criticism has often deemed this novel superior to and more sophisticated than Catch-22, particularly citing Heller's shift from exaggeration to suggestion. In his critical biography Joseph Heller, Robert Merrill described Something Happened as "the most convincing study we have of what it is like to participate in the struggle that is postwar America."

Good as Gold (1979) marks Heller's first fictional use of his Jewish heritage and childhood experiences in Coney Island. The protagonist of this novel, Bruce Gold, is an unfulfilled college professor who is writing a book about "the Jewish experience," but he also harbors political ambitions. Offered a high government position after giving a positive review of a book written by the president, Gold accepts, leaves his wife and children, and finds himself immersed in a farcical bureaucracy in which officials speak in a confusing, contradictory language. In this novel, Heller harshly satirizes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a Jew who has essentially forsaken his Jewishness. As a result, the author draws an analogy between the themes of political powerlust and corruption with Jewish identity. Similarly, Gold's motives for entering politics are strictly self-aggrandizing, as he seeks financial, sexual, and social rewards. When his older brother dies, however, Gold realizes the importance of his Jewish heritage and family, and decides to leave Washington. Throughout the novel, Heller alternates the narrative between scenes of Gold's large, garrulous Jewish family and the mostly gentile milieu of Washington, employing realism to depict the former and parody to portray the latter.

Heller's next novel, God Knows (1984), is a retelling of the biblical story of King David, the psalmist of the Old Testament. A memoir in the form of a monologue by David, the text abounds with anachronistic speech, combining the Bible's lyricism with a Jewish-American dialect reminiscent of the comic routines of such humorists as Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen. In an attempt to determine the origin of his despondency near the end of his life, David ruminates on the widespread loss of faith and sense of community, the uses of art, and the seeming absence of God. In Picture This (1988), Heller utilizes Rembrandt's painting "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" to draw parallels between ancient Greece, seventeenth-century Holland, and contemporary America. Moving backward and forward among these eras, this novel meditates on art, money, injustice, the folly of war, and the failures of democracy. Critics questioned whether Picture This should be considered a novel, a work of history, or a political tract.

Heller's first play, We Bombed in New Haven (1967), concerns a group of actors who believe they are portraying an Air Force squadron in an unspecified modern war. The action alternates between scenes where the players act out their parts in the "script" and scenes where they converse among themselves out of "character," expressing dissatisfaction with their roles. This distancing technique, which recalls the work of Bertolt Brecht and Luigi Pirandello, alerts the audience to the play's artificiality. As in Catch-22, this drama exposes what Heller perceives as the illogic and moral bankruptcy of the United States military. Many critics have also interpreted We Bombed in New Haven as a protest against America's participation in the Vietnam War. Heller has also adapted Catch-22 for the stage, but critics generally consider this work inferior to the novel.

While Heller's place in twentieth-century letters is assured with Catch-22, he is also highly regarded for his other works, which present a comic vision of modern society with serious moral implications. A major theme throughout his writing is the conflict that occurs when individuals interact with such powerful institutions as corporations, the military, and the federal government. Heller's novels have displayed increasing pessimism over the inability of individuals to reverse society's slide toward corruption and degeneration. He renders the chaos and absurdity of contemporary existence through disjointed chronology, anachronistic and oxymoronic language, and repetition of events. In all his work, Heller emphasizes that it is necessary to identify and take responsibility for our social and personal evils and to make beneficial changes in our behavior.

"There was only one catch ... and that was Catch-22," Doc Daneeka informs Yossarian. As Yossarian, the lead bombardier of Joseph Heller's phenomenal first novel, soon learns, this one catch is enough to keep him at war indefinitely. After pleading with Doc Daneeka that he is too crazy to fly any more missions, Yossarian is introduced to Catch-22, a rule which stipulates that anyone rational enough to want to be grounded could not possibly be insane and therefore must return to his perilous duties. The novel Catch-22 is built around the multifarious attempts of Captain John Yossarian to survive the Second World War, to escape the omnipresent logic of a regulation which somehow stays one step ahead of him.

At the time of its publication in 1961, Heller's antiwar novel met with modest sales and lukewarm reviews. But by mid-decade, the book began to sell in the American underground, becoming a favored text of the counter-culture. "[ Catch-22] came when we still cherished nice notions about WW II," Eliot Fremont-Smith recalls in the Village Voice. "Demolishing these, it released an irreverence that had, until then, dared not speak its name." With more than ten million copies now in print, Catch-22 is generally regarded as one of the most important novels of our time. It "is probably the finest novel published since World War II," Richard Locke declares in the New York Times Book Review."Catch-22 is the great representative document of our era, linking high and low culture." The title itself has become part of the language, and its "hero" Yossarian, according to Jack Schnedler of the Newark Star-Ledger, "has become the fictional talisman to an entire generation."

In the New York Times Book Review, Heller cites three reasons for the success of Catch-22: "First, it's a great book. I've come to accept the verdict of the majority. Second, a whole new generation of readers is being introduced to it.... Third, and most important: Vietnam. Because this is the war I had in mind; a war fought without military provocation, a war in which the real enemy is no longer the other side but someone allegedly on your side. The ridiculous war I felt lurking in the future when I wrote the book." "There seems no denying that though Heller's macabre farce was written about a rarefied part of the raging war of the forties during the silent fifties," Josh Greenfeld wrote in a 1968 New York Times Book Review article, "it has all but become the chapbook of the sixties." As Joseph Epstein summarizes in Book World,Catch-22 "was a well-aimed bomb."

In his Bright Book of Life, Alfred Kazin finds that "the theme of Catch-22 ... is the total craziness of war ... and the struggle to survive of one man, Yossarian, who knows the difference between his sanity and the insanity of the system." After his commanding officer repeatedly raises the number of bombing missions required for discharge, Yossarian decides to "live forever or die in the attempt." "Yossarian's logic becomes so pure that everyone thinks him mad," Robert Brustein writes in the New Republic, "for it is the logic of sheer survival, dedicated to keeping him alive in a world noisily clamoring for his annihilation." Brustein continues: "According to this logic, Yossarian is surrounded on all sides by hostile forces.... [He] feels a blind, electric rage against the Germans whenever they hurl flak at his easily penetrated plane; but he feels an equally profound hatred for those of his own countrymen who exercise an arbitrary power over his life."

"The urgent emotion in Heller's book is ... every individual's sense of being directly in the line of fire," Kazin believes. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Inge Kutt views Pianosa, the fictional island in the Mediterranean Sea which is the setting of the novel, as a microcosm of "the postwar world which not only includes the Korean and Vietnam wars but also the modern mass society." "Heller's horrifying vision of service life in World War II is merely an illustration of the human condition itself," Jean E. Kennard asserts in Mosaic. "The world has no meaning but is simply there [and] man is a creature who seeks meaning," Kennard elaborates. "Reason and lan- guage, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless."

Language, as presented in Catch-22, is more than useless; it is dangerous, a weapon employed by the authorities to enslave individuals in a world of institutionalized absurdity, a world where pilots lose their lives because their commanding officer wants to see prettier bombing patterns or his name in the Saturday Evening Post. Language, in the form of Catch-22, is the mechanism which transforms military doublethink into concrete reality, into commands which profoundly affect human life and death. Catch-22, as the novel states, is the rule "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." As Jerry H. Bryant notes in his book The Open Decision: "Only the insane voluntarily continue to fly. This is an almost perfect catch because the law is in the definition of insanity.... The system is closed." In the Arizona Quarterly, Marcus K. Billson III examines Catch-22: "There is no way out of the tautological absurdity of [this] regulation.... The will of authority predominates by the force of language. Man is caught in an unrelenting cycle of oppression and brutality disguised in the convolutions of Catch-22." "Catch-22," Billson continued, "is law deriving its power from a universal faith in language as presence. The world of the novel projects the horrific, yet all too real, power of language to divest itself from any necessity of reference, to function as an independent, totally autonomous medium with its own perfect system and logic. That such a language pretends to mirror anything but itself is a commonplace delusion which Heller satirizes masterfully throughout the novel. Yet, civilization is informed by this very presence, and Heller shows how man is tragically and comically tricked and manipulated by such an absurdity."

The acquiescence of men to language in Catch-22, Carol Pearson observes, is rooted in their failure to find any "transcendental comfort to explain suffering and to make life meaningful.... People react to meaninglessness by renouncing their humanity, becoming cogs in the machine. With no logical explanation to make suffering and death meaningful and acceptable, people renounce their power to think and retreat to a simple-minded respect for law and accepted `truth.'" Writing in the CEA Critic, Pearson cites one of the book's many illustrations of this moral retreat: "The M.P.'s exemplify the overly law-abiding person who obeys law with no regard for humanity. They arrest Yossarian who is AWOL, but ignore the murdered girl on the street. By acting with pure rationality, like computers programmed only to enforce army regulations, they have become mechanical men." This incident, this "moment of epiphany," Raymond M. Olderman writes in Beyond the Waste Land, symbolizes "much of the entire novel's warning--that in place of the humane, ... we find the thunder of the marching boot, the destruction of the human, arrested by the growth of the military-economic institution."

In the novel, the character Milo Minderbinder is the personification of this military-economic system. An enterprising mess officer, Minderbinder creates a one-man international syndicate whose slogan, "What's good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country," is used to justify a series of war-profiteering schemes. Minderbinder forms a private army of mercenaries (available to the highest bidder), corners the market on food and makes enormous profits selling it back to army mess halls, and convinces the U.S. government that it must buy up his overstock of chocolate-coated cotton balls in the interest of national security. Milo's empire soon stretches across Europe and North Africa. "His deals have made him mayor of every town in Sicily, Vice-Shah of Oran, Caliph of Baghdad, Imam of Damascus, and the Sheik of Araby," Brustein notes. Minderbinder's ambitions culminate in one final economic boom. As Olderman observes: "His wealth, influence, and sphere of action become enormous, until he and his profit-seeking are omnipotent and omnipresent. For business purposes he takes gas pellets from life jackets and morphine from first aid kits, leaving the drowning and the wounded without aid, but with the comforting message that `what's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country.' The ultimate inversion comes when Milo bombs and strafes his own camp for the Germans, who pay their bills more promptly than some, and kills many Americans at an enormous profit. In the face of criticism, he reveals the overwhelming virtue of his profit." In the Canadian Review of American Studies, Mike Franks concludes that "for Milo, contract, and the entire economic structure and ethical system it embodies and represents, is more sacred than human life."

"The military-economic institution rules, and the result is profit for some, but meaningless, inhuman parades for everyone else," Olderman writes. Confronted with this "totally irrelevant and bureaucratic power that either tosses man to his death or stamps out his spirit," Yossarian must make a moral decision. Olderman surveys Yossarian's alternatives: "He can be food for the cannon; he can make a deal with the system; or he can depart, deserting not the war with its implications of preserving political freedom, but abandoning a waste land, a dehumanized inverted, military-economic machine."

Yossarian, whose only wish is to stay alive, will not stand still for the "cannon." Kennard recounts Yossarian's second alternative: "[He] is given the chance to save his own life if he lies about Colonels Cathcart and Korn to their superior officers. He will, in accepting the offer, probably act as an incentive to his fellow officers to fly more missions in which many of them may be killed. He is given a chance ... to join forces with the pestilences. After accepting the offer he is stabbed by Nately's whore and realizes that by joining those who are willing to kill, he has given them the right to kill him." Nately's whore, who shadows Yossarian after his fellow pilot Lt. Nately is killed in action, "pops out of every bush and around every corner to attack him because of Nately's death," Olderman writes. "However guiltless Yossarian may be of that one death, he is not guiltless--he has suffered as a victim, but has also been a victimizer. So Nately's whore will follow him forever, a kind of universal principle reminding him that he will always be unjustly beset and will probably always deserve it." In the book, Yossarian sympathizes with his determined pursuer: "Someone had to do something. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up and do something and break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all."

As Bryant notes, "The only way that the circular justification of Catch-22 can be dealt with is by breaking out of the circle." Yossarian's friend Orr had broken free by sailing off into the Mediterranean in a rowboat, bound for neutral Sweden. Guided by Orr's example and by the wisdom imparted by the death of a young gunner named Snowden, Yossarian reneges on his agreement with the colonels and decides to desert. "In the course of the narrative," Olderman says, "occasional references are made to Snowden, ... whose insides are shot out as his plane flies over Italy and who dies in Yossarian's arms. The experience profoundly affects Yossarian. As the narrative advances, the reader is given longer and longer glimpses of the incident. But not until Yossarian decides to try another way of getting out of combat than to agree with Korn and Cathcart do we get Snowden's full story. As the boy whimpers, `I'm cold,' Yossarian, horrified, sees his entrails slither to the floor. There is a message in those entrails that teaches Yossarian, finally, what he must do. The message reads: `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 like other kinds of garbage and he'll rot. The spirit gone, man is garbage.'" Yossarian refuses to discard his spirit; he heads for Sweden, the only place left in the world, he believes, which is free of mob rule. The impossibility of reaching Scandinavia via rowboat does not deter him. What is important is the act, the attempt, not the destination, Ronald Wallace observes in The Last Laugh. As Frank concludes, "The Sweden he aims for is located, perhaps, not so much in the real world as in the geography of the moral imagination." And Yossarian "is still at large," Heller surmises in an interview in the Newark Star-Ledger. "He hasn't been caught."

In the Partisan Review, Morris Dickstein comments: "The insanity of the system ... breeds a defensive counter-insanity.... [Yossarian is] a protagonist caught up in the madness, who eventually steps outside it in a slightly mad way." Heller remarks in Pages that much of the humor in his novel arises out of his characters' attempts to escape, manipulate, and circumvent the logic of Catch-22. Before deserting, Yossarian tries to outwit Catch-22 in order to survive; he employs "caution, cowardice, defiance, subterfuge, strategem, and subversion, through feigning illness, goofing off, and poisoning the company's food with laundry soap," Brustein writes. "He refuses to fly, goes naked, walks backward," adds Olderman.

"Heller's comedy is his artistic response to his vision of transcendent evil, as if the escape route of laughter were the only recourse from a malignant world," Brustein states. "[He] is concerned with that thin boundary of the surreal, the borderline between hilarity and horror.... Heller often manages to heighten the macabre obscenity of war much more effectively through its gruesome comic aspects than if he had written realistic descriptions. And thus, the most delicate pressure is enough to send us over the line from farce to phantasmagoria."

"I never thought of Catch-22 as a comic novel," Heller says in the New York Times. "[But] ... I wanted the reader to be amused, and ... I wanted him to be ashamed that he was amused. My literary bent ... is more toward the morbid and the tragic. Great carnage is taking place and my idea was to use humor to make ridiculous the things that are irrational and very terrible." Dickstein cites the profiteering of Minderbinder as one example of the tragic underpinning of Heller's comedy: "[Milo's] amoral machinations, so hilarious at first, become increasingly sombre, ugly and deadly--like so much else in the book--that we readers become implicated in our own earlier laughter." "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," Nelson Algren states in Nation. As Brustein concludes, Heller is "at war with much larger forces than the army.... [He] has been nourishing his grudges for so long that they have expanded to include the post-war American world. Through the agency of grotesque comedy, Heller has found a way to confront the humbug, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sheer stupidity of our mass society.... Through some miracle of prestidigitation, Pianosa has become a satirical microcosm of the macrocosmic idiocies of our time."

Heller's subsequent novels have continued this "war," extending the field of battle to governmental and corporate life. Good as Gold,Fremont-Smith notes in the Village Voice, is "touted ... as doing for the White House what Catch-22 did for the military," while the absurdity and alienation of the American business community is the focus of Something Happened, the story of Bob Slocum, a middle- level manager who describes himself as "one of those many people ... who are without ambition already and have no hope."

"He is restless," Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., writes of Slocum in the New York Times Book Review. "He mourns the missed opportunities of his youth. He is itchy for raises and promotions, even though he despises his company and the jobs he does. He commits unsatisfying adulteries now and then at sales conferences in resort areas, during long lunch hours, or while pretending to work late at the office. He is exhausted," Vonnegut concludes. "He dreads old age." In the New Republic, William Kennedy analyzes Heller's restless protagonist: "Bob Slocum is no true friend of anybody's. He is a woefully lost figure with a profound emptiness, a sad, absurd, vicious, grasping, climbing, womanizing, cowardly, sadistic, groveling, loving, yearning, anxious, fearful victim of the indecipherable, indescribable malady of being born human." John W. Aldridge describes Slocum as "a man raging in a vacuum." In the Saturday Review/World, Aldridge examines Slocum's plight: "His mental state is shaped by chronic feelings of loss divorced from an understanding of what precisely has been lost.... The elements that are most real in Slocum's life are precisely those that might be considered conducive to peace of mind: material affluence and comfort, abundant leisure time, professional success, satisfactory marital relations, and considerable extracurricular sex with a number of attractive women. Yet these are the primary sources of his suffering because he is forever searching them for meaning and can find none." Aldridge continues: "He is haunted by the sense that at some time in the past something happened to him, something that he cannot remember but that changed him from a person who had aspirations for the future, who believed in himself and his work, who trusted others and was able to love, into the person he has since unaccountably become, a man who aspires to nothing, believes in nothing and no one, least of all himself, who no longer knows if he loves or is loved."

Slocum's loss of meaning is symbolized by his search for Virginia, for the lost dreams of his youth. "As Yossarian kept flashing back to that primal, piteous scene in the B-25 where his mortally wounded comrade, Snowden, whimpered in his arms, so Slocum keeps thinking back, with impacted self-pity and regret, to the sweetly hot, teasing, slightly older girl in the insurance office where he worked after graduating from high school, whom he could never bring himself to `go all the way' with," Edward Grossman writes in Commentary. "He blew it," D. Keith Mano remarks in the National Review, "and this piddling missed opportunity comes to stand for loss in general. He makes you accompany him again and again, and again and again to the back staircase for a quiet feel that never matures." As Mano notes, "Slocum becomes semi-obsessed: telephones the insurance company to ascertain if his ... girlfriend is still employed there, if he is still employed there. And he isn't." Instead, Slocum finds that this haunting figure of a girl, like his own spirit, has committed suicide.

"What he wants now is to want something the way he once wanted Virginia," Kennedy declares. "Why can't some things other than stone remain always as they used to be, he wonders. Sad. What happened is that something happened.... [Slocum] spends the whole book trying to recreate what was and what is, speculating endlessly on what caused the ruin of such glorious innocence, such exciting desire. He has no more desire, only a stale, processed lust."

Clearly, something happened to create such unhappiness. "Something happened indeed," Benjamin DeMott finds, "namely the death of the heart." In the novel, Slocum says he wants "to continue receiving my raise in salary each year, and a good cash bonus at Christmastime ... to be allowed to take my place on the rostrum at the next company convention ... and make my three minute report to the company of the work we have been doing in my department." In the Atlantic Monthly, DeMott attributes Slocum's pain to the fact that "caring at levels deeper than these is beyond him." Melvin Maddocks points out that "it is not what has happened, but what has not happened to Slocum that constitutes his main problem." In a Time review, Maddocks describes Slocum as "a weightless figure with no pull of gravity morally or emotionally" who can love only his nine-year-old son, and then only for "brief, affecting moments."

Slocum's life revolves around his office and home; in both of these worlds he folds, under the weight of external pressures and inner fears, into a helpless state of alienation. "Money and power and the corporation [are] for Bob Slocum what war and death and the Air Force had been for Yossarian," John Leonard notes in the New York Times. Just as Yossarian feared his own commanders and compatriots, so does Slocum, in the more secure confines of the business organization, live in fear of his associates. "He's afraid of closed doors and of accident reports. He's afraid of five people in his office," Jerome Klinkowitz observes. "At home Slocum fears and distrusts his family, although he loves them in his way," Aldridge says. "Slocum's wife is attractive and intelligent but bored and without a sense of meaning in her life. She has begun to drink in the afternoon and to flirt at parties." The Slocums, as Kennedy details, are the parents of "an insecure and nasty 16-year-old daughter whose shins [Slocum] wants to kick, an idiot son he is sick of and would like to unload, another son, aged nine, who is the principal joy of his life and whom he ruins by allowing the company's values (get to the top, don't give your money away, compete, compete) smother the boy's wondrously selfless and noncompetitive good nature." "One cannot but recognize that many of the pressures on Slocum are generated by the nuclear family itself and by the establishments in which the family is trained," Elaine Glover writes in Stand. With the exception of Derek, the mentally retarded son, none of Slocum's family have names, Fremont-Smith points out. "All of them are unhappy in various ways, and Slocum knows it is largely his fault." "Slocum does his deadly best to persuade us, with his tap-tap- tapping of facts, that he is compelled to be as unhappy as he is, not because of ... flaws in his own character, but because of the facts," Vonnegut states.

However much the "facts" may conspire against Slocum, the real pressure is exerted from within. As Heller comments in the Newark Star-Ledger: "All the threats to Bob Slocum are internal. His enemy is his own fear, his own anxiety." According to an America review, "Heller has replaced the buzzing, booming world of an army at war with the claustrophobic universe of Bob Slocum's psyche, where all the complications, contradictions and absurdities are generated from within.... Like Yossarian, Slocum always feels trapped--by his wife, by his children, but mostly by himself." Slocum, who giggles inwardly at the thought of rape and glances over his shoulder for sodomists, confesses, "Things are going on inside me I cannot control and do not admire." "Within and without, his world is an unregenerate swamp of rack and ruin," Pearl K. Bell asserts in the New Leader. "Pathologically disassociated from himself, Slocum is a chameleon, taking on the gestures and vocabularies of whichever colleague he is with; even his handwriting is a forgery, borrowed from a boyhood friend." This disassociation is more than a middle-age malaise; it is symptomatic of a deeper affliction, a crippling of the spirit that leaves Slocum barely enough strength to lament, "I wish I knew what to wish."

As the novel draws to a close, Slocum finally and tragically expresses his love for his favorite son. As the boy lies bleeding after being struck by a car, someone yells, "Something happened!" Slocum rushes towards the child, horrified: "He is dying. A terror, a pallid, pathetic shock more dreadful than any I have been able to imagine, has leaped into his face. I can't stand it. He can't stand it. He hugs me. He looks beggingly at me for help. His screams are piercing. I can't bear to see him suffering such agony and fright. I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze. `Death,' says the doctor, `was due to asphyxiation. The boy was smothered. He had superficial lacerations of the scalp and face, a bruised face, a deep cut on his arm. That was all.'"

According to Playboy,Something Happened "unleashed a fusillade of violently mixed reviews.... Nearly three quarters of the critics viewed Heller's looping, memory-tape narrative as a dazzling, if depressing, literary tour de force." Fremont-Smith, for instance, calls Something Happened a "very fine, wrenchingly depressing" novel. "It gnaws at one, slowly and almost nuzzlingly at first, mercilessly toward the end. It hurts. It gives the willies." In his New York Times Book Review article, Vonnegut finds that the book is "splendidly put together and hypnotic to read. It is as clear and hard-edged as a cut diamond." Maddocks, however, labels Heller's second novel "a terrific letdown," while Grossman believes it is "a lump compared with Catch-22." L. E. Sissman of the New Yorker, who calls Something Happened "a painful mistake," cites a frequent criticism of the novel: "[Heller] indulges in overkill. When we have seen Bob Slocum suffer a failure of nerve (or a failure of common humanity) in a dozen different situations, we do not need to see him fail a dozen times more." Mano asserts that "you can start Something Happened on page 359, read through to the end, and still pass a multiple choice test in plot, character, style.... [It] is overlong, a bit of an imposition."

Slocum's repetitive monologue has been criticized by certain reviewers, but, as George J. Searles points out in Critique, "Slocum, a businessman rather than a man of letters, is by necessity a limited narrator. Although articulate and aware of the fundamentals of language ..., he is not a writer. His mode of speech--and the book has the feel of being spoken, rather than written--is flat, ordinary, and unexciting, and is an accurate reflection of his personality." Caroline Blackwood is uncomfortable with the narrative voice of the story for a different reason. In the Times Literary Supplement, she asks: "Is it possible [that such a man as Slocum] would be capable of viewing himself, his values, his work, and his relationship with his family, with the brutal and humorous introspection of Mr. Heller's central character? ... Slocum asks for an enormous suspension of disbelief. Quite often he appears schizophrenic; the superior wit, insights, and sensibilities of his creator are superimposed so erratically and unsuitably on this commonplace and tiresome man." Schroth, however, finds Slocum a convincing narrator. He writes in Commonweal: "Who can read the paranoid utterances of Robert Slocum ... and not recognize to some degree his own share in the competitive madness and chronic anxiety of American life? ... [ Something Happened is] a book which sums up the spiritual emptiness of the 1970s so excruciatingly that it may be another decade before many critics adequately appreciate it and most Americans can read it with sufficient detachment." Finally, Aldridge believes Heller "has discovered and possessed new territories of the imagination, and he has produced a major work of fiction, one that is as distinctive of its kind as Catch-22 but more ambitious and profound, an abrasively brilliant commentary on American life that must surely be recognized as the most important novel to appear in this country in at least a decade."

Heller's third novel "indicts a class of clerks," Leonard writes in the New York Times.Good as Gold is a fictional expose of the absurd workings of the machinery of government, of a politics reduced to public relations, of a President who spends most of his first year in office penning My Year in the White House, of an administrative aide who mouths such wisdom as "Just tell the truth ... even if you have to lie" and "This President doesn't want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them." Into this world stumbles Bruce Gold, a professor of English who is called to public service after writing a favorable review of the Presidential book. Gold is rewarded for his kind words with a "spokesman" position but yearns for higher duty; specifically, he wants to be Secretary of State, more specifically, he wants to be the first real Jewish Secretary of State (Gold is convinced that Henry Kissinger, who prayed with Richard Nixon and "made war gladly," cannot possibly be Jewish). For his part, Gold chips in by coining such expressions as "You're boggling my mind" and "I don't know," phrases that enter the lexicon of the press conference and earn Gold the admiration of his superiors. As Time's R. Z. Sheppard observes: "[Gold] is no stranger to double-think. A literary hustler whose interest in government is a sham, he does not even vote, a fact `he could not publicly disclose without bringing blemish to the image he had constructed for himself as a radical moderate.'" Gold was schooled in absurdity during his tenure at a New York City university, where he devised a curriculum such that "it was now possible ... for a student to graduate with an English major after spending all four years of academic study watching foreign movies in a darkened classroom." With this experience as a huckster of the academy, Gold, it would appear, is ready for Washington.

In the beginning, Gold flourishes in his new environment, where, according to Sheppard, "catch-22 is now Potomac newspeak." He meets the Important People, elbows his way onto a Presidential Commission, and prepares to exchange his homey Jewish wife for the promiscuous daughter of a wealthy bigot in order to ease his advance to the upper echelons of the Administration. Along the way he is more than willing to endure the anti-Semitic prattle of his potential father-in-law and others, learning, as Leonard says, "to lick the boots that specialize in stepping on you."

Like Something Happened,Good as Gold is "another painful portrait of a bright but almost empty man watching his soul melt in his hands," writes Schroth. "The book is essentially about Jews, especially those like Gold, who wants to escape his identity while exploiting it, particularly by making a lot of money on a big book about Jews," Leonard Michaels comments in the New York Times Book Review. (Gold, despite his ignorance of his heritage, has received a substantial advance from a publisher for a book on "The Jewish Experience in America.") "It is one of the main themes of Good as Gold that Jews violate themselves in their relations with such unreal creatures of their own minds, especially when Jews yearn for tall blondes and jobs in Washington where successful Jews are slaves," Michaels continues. "Gold yearns to escape what he is so that he can become what he isn't, which is precisely what he hates. He nearly succeeds, nearly becomes a Washington non-Jewish Jew, a rich, powerful slave with a tall blonde wife." Gold, unlike other characters in the story, is very much aware of his moral degeneration; a passage from the book reads: "How much lower would he crawl to rise to the top? he asked himself with wretched self-reproval. Much, much lower, he answered in improving spirit, and felt purged of hypocrisy by the time he was ready for dinner." "Unlike Heller's earlier hero, Yossarian, Gold pants to embrace the insanity of our time," Peter S. Prescott observes in Newsweek. "His need for money and the chance to escape his suffocating family prick his ambition."

"He is totally out of sync with his family," Alex Taylor says in the Detroit Free Press. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Darryl Ponicsan explains: "He's got two sons away at college and he's not crazy about them.... He won't let them come home for a weekend. He's afraid of his daughter, who lives at home. He's bored with his wife, Belle. He has an older brother, Sid, who sets him up at every opportunity.... He has four older sisters and their mates harping about, an aged father who admits to having liked him briefly when he was a baby and a stepmother who suffers--if that's the word, and it isn't--insanity, ceaselessly knitting wool and talking just like a Joseph Heller character." Jack Beatty finds that "the scenes of the Golds at dinner belong to the heights of comedy.... These family dinners are torture for Gold. Yet underneath [all the eating] and the practiced taunts, the feverish intimacy of the Gold family, there are some abiding values at work which Heller wants us to recognize and, I think, celebrate." In the New Republic, Beatty sees Gold's brother Sid as an example of such values: "Sid, a prosperous businessman, is no hero; he's just a good man. He hated his father, yet bailed the old man out of his last business, and still pays the bills for his Florida retirement. He resented his smarter kid brother but paid his way through Columbia nonetheless. Sid has done his duty." "The scenes with the family might at first seem disconnected from the Washington scenes," Ronald Hayman points out, "but the pivotal joke is that someone who can fly so high as Gold should be treated with such savage contempt by his family, should be so inept at defending himself, and so incapable of staying away."

In his New York Times article, Leonard elaborates on Gold's dilemma: "What is being proposed is that being brought up lower middle- class Jewish in this country means being humiliated by your own family; that you assimilate, by groveling, a vacuum and a lie; that you have masturbatory dreams of acquiring the power to exact revenge on the father who disdains you; that to acquire such power you will be willing to mortgage every morsel of your capacity for critical discrimination; that you lick the boots that specialize in stepping on you, and hate yourself in the morning." Leonard adds: "Those critics who, over the years, have suggested that [Heller] be more Jewish in his fiction are going to be sorry they asked."

Indeed, Heller's treatment of "The Jewish Experience in America" has aroused criticism, including accusations that Good as Gold is anti-Semitic. According to Sheppard, the book "is a savage, intemperately funny satire on the assimilation of the Jewish tradition of liberalism into the American main chance. It is a delicate subject, off-limits to non-Jews fearful of being thought anti-Semitic and unsettling to successful Jewish intellectuals whose views may have drifted to the right in middle age. Heller, who is neither a Gentile or a card-carrying intellectual, goes directly for the exposed nerve." Lyons observes that "it was not so long ago ... when a book dealing in such cultural stereotypes as Heller employs throughout would have been closely scrutinized by a self-appointed committee of rabbis and Jewish intellectuals to determine whether, on the balance, the portraits presented were `good for the Jews' or `bad for the Jews'.... Such stereotypes are nothing but peasant superstition and ought to be dismissed as such." In Books and Bookmen, Hayman points out that the Gentiles in Heller's satirical novel are "even more obnoxious" than the Jewish characters. "Both, fortunately, are extremely entertaining." But Fremont-Smith asserts in the Village Voice that Good as Gold is not "without offensiveness. It does bore. It is also anti- Semitic. If Heller believes (and I'm willing to think he thinks he does) that everything is rotten to the core, this goes double for the Jews.... The Jews in Good as Gold are uniformly portrayed as snivelling, deceitful, self-aggrandizing, and ambitious beyond their worth: Much, much lower, he answered in improving spirit."

In the novel, Heller depicts Henry Kissinger as the epitome of the "non-Jewish Jew" and examines, as Schroth notes, "the germ of Kissingerism within each of us." "Gold's real tension comes from the fact that his own morality dangles barely a ledge above his enemy's. He knows the corrupting tendency within himself, in every intellectual and journalist to become corrupted by the mere smell of power, to become a Kissinger ... and, worst of all," Schroth adds, "to forsake his heritage, to forget or deny he is a Jew." In the New York Review of Books, Thomas R. Edwards finds that Gold's political aspirations have "one distinct drawback. Gold hates everything connected with Henry Kissinger, sees him as a loathsomely pushy cartoon-Jew and a closet Nazi.... Whatever the merits of this view of Kissinger's character, Gold's assault on his good name ... is exhilaratingly energetic and winning. Its single-mindedness serves the purposes not only of comedy and moral outrage but also gives the novel its structure." Similarly, Jack Beatty of the New Republic comments: "The risk Gold runs in trying to become the first real Jewish Secretary of State is that he will be forced to act like Henry Kissinger, and that would mean his moral destruction.... Good as Gold is a cultural event. A major novelist takes on our greatest celebrity with all the wit and language at his command, and ... a central historical figure [has] been .. intimately castigated by the Word. Score one for literature." Gene Lyons in Nation, however, believes that the attack on Kissinger is only "occasionally funny, [and] often slides over into what seems like simple malice, and pretty much for its own sake.... Satirizing the man by presenting clippings from Anthony Lewis is not very funny or effective. They were much better the first time around." In the end, Gold is finally offered his alter ego's former cabinet position but, as Beatty observes, "is recalled to New York and to himself" by the death of his brother Sid. Like Yossarian, Gold decides to "desert" his absurd world; he refuses the coveted post, choosing instead to preside over the funeral of his brother, the grief of his family, and, finally, the restoration of his own integrity. "He is a man with a profound moral sense," William McPherson asserts in Book World. "Once in a while he is reminded of it, and reminds us."

The critical reaction to Good as Gold has been divided. Edwards remarks that "Good as Gold, if hardly a perfect novel, is continuously alive, very funny, and finally coherent.... Like Heller's other novels, [it] is a book that takes large risks: it is sometimes rambling, occasionally self-indulgent, not always sure of the difference between humor and silliness. But this time the risks pay off.... Heller is among the novelists of the last two decades who matter." The Hudson Review describes it as a "big, ugly book," and Aram Bakshian, Jr., of the National Review calls it "an embarrassing flop.... The best [Heller] has to offer us in his latest novel is fool's gold." Hayman finds the novel is flawed but says that "nothing is unforgivable when a book makes you laugh out loud so often," and McPherson concludes: "When I didn't hate it, I loved it. Joseph Heller, of all people, would understand that." Finally, Mel Brooks in Book World rates Good as Gold as "somewhere between The Brothers Karamazov and those dirty little books we used to read... It's closer to Karamazov."

Five years after publishing Good as Gold Heller produced God Knows, a satiric novel whose tone has been likened to that of a stand-up comedy routine. The narrator of God Knows is the Old Testament's David--the killer of Goliath, poet and singer for Biblical royalty, king of Israel, and father of the wise ruler Solomon (who is portrayed in the book as an idiot). Despite some critics' objections that the book lacks a unifying point, reviewers have overwhelmingly proclaimed it, as does Stuart Evans in the London Times, "a very funny, very serious, very good novel." Picture This, published in 1988, is a reflection on such figures in Western history as Dutch painter Rembrandt, Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato, and twentieth-century U.S. presidents. Similar in tone to God Knows,Picture This revels in anachronisms, mentioning the "freedom fighters" of the war between Athens and Sparta, for example, and of "police actions" in the fifth century B.C. A few of the author's main themes, according to Richard Rayner of the London Times, are that "power and intellect are incompatible, that politicians wage disastrous wars for no good reason, ... and that humanity learns nothing from its mistakes." Rayner adds, though, that "Heller does all this in Picture This and gets away with it most of the time, for the simple reason that he is funny.... He refuses to take institutions seriously; or rather, ... he takes them so seriously they become hilarious."

While working on God Knows during the early 1980s, Heller was stricken with a nerve disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome, that left him paralyzed for several months. Though the author became too weak to move and almost too weak to breathe on his own, he eventually regained his strength and recovered from the often fatal disorder. After completing God Knows, Heller began writing his first nonfiction book, No Laughing Matter, with Speed Vogel, a friend who helped him considerably during his illness. No Laughing Matter tells the story of Heller's convalescence and his friendship with Vogel in sections that are written alternately by the two men. Noting that Vogel's observations "provide comic relief to Mr. Heller's medical self- absorption," New York Times writer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praises the book as both serious and comic. "It was indeed no laughing matter," Lehmann-Haupt observes. "And yet we do laugh, reading this account of his ordeal. We laugh because as well as being an astute observer of his suffering ... Heller can be blackly funny about it." The reviewer adds that "most of all, we laugh at the way Mr. Heller and his friends relate to each other.... [Their] interaction is not only richly amusing, it is positively cheering."

Heller died of a heart attack on December 12, 1999, at his East Hampton, New York home.

Associated Works

Catch-22, Good as Gold, Something Happened (Novel)

Historical Context

The Life and Times of Joseph Heller (1923-)
At the time of Heller's birth:
First issue of Time magazine published
Calvin Coolidge was elected president of the United States
Yankee Stadium opened in New York
First sound motion picture shown
The times:
1930-1960: Modernist Period of American literature
1939-1945: World War II
1950-1953: Korean War
1957-1975: Vietnam War
1960-present: Postmodernist Period American literature
1983: American invasion of Grenada
1991: Persian Gulf War
1992-1996: Civil war in Bosnia
Heller's contemporaries:
Federico Fellini (1920-) Italian filmmaker
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) Russian-born writer
Norman Mailer (1923-) American writer
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-) American pop artist
Bill Clinton (1946-) American president
Selected world events:
1930: Artist Grant Wood painted famous "American Gothic"
1944: G.I. Bill of Rights established
1956: Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird
1965: Black activist Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City
1978: Last Volkswagen "Beetle" rolled off assembly line
1980: Cable News Network (CNN) was launched by Ted Turner
1989: Kazuo Ishiguro published The Remains of the Day
1991: Soviet Union was officially dissolved
1995: O.J. Simpson was found not guilty in double-murder