Joseph Heller

Writer

• Born: May 1, 1923
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: December 12, 1999
• Place of death: East Hampton, New York

Novelist and playwright

Heller’s novels have enriched a long line of Jewish satirical writing, directed at institutions and society as a whole. His novel Catch-22 made significant antiwar statements that resonated with readers.

Areas of achievement: Literature; theater

Early Life

Joseph Heller (HEHL-ehr) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish parents. His father, Isaac Donald Heller, was a delivery driver, whose first wife died not long after their arrival in the United States, leaving a boy and a girl. Isaac married again, to Lena, a seamstress, but she died when Heller was only five years old. The family was impoverished, and bilingual in Yiddish and in English.

Heller attended Abraham Lincoln High School, the same school as playwright Arthur Miller, graduating there in 1941. While at school, he decided to become a writer; he unsuccessfully submitted short stories to publications. After high school, he worked for a year as a blacksmith’s apprentice and a filing clerk, before enlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1942. He eventually attended cadet school and trained as a bombardier. He was then commissioned and assigned to the Mediterranean island of Corsica. From there, he flew sixty sorties over France and Italy during a two-year period.

When he was demobilized in mid-1945, the G.I. Bill enabled him to enroll at the University of Southern California. He majored in English and transferred to New York University before graduating in 1948. This was followed by two years at Columbia University for his master’s degree. He gained a Fulbright scholarship and spent some months at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University.

On his return to the United States he worked for Time magazine from 1952 to 1956; for Look magazine from 1956 to 1958; and for McCall’s from 1958 to 1961. At the same time he was writing short stories that were accepted by Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, and Cosmopolitan.

Life’s Work

Heller’s first major publication was the novel Catch-22 (1961), based on his wartime experiences. The initial chapter appeared as a short story entitled “Catch-18” in 1955, but the full novel gestated until 1961. The hardback edition was not an immediate success in the United States, receiving mixed reviews. It did much better in the United Kingdom. The paperback edition, however, took off in 1964, coinciding as it did with the war in Vietnam. Over the course of Heller’s life, it sold some ten million copies and, with the sale of the movie rights, made him a millionaire.

After publication, he decided to leave copy-editing and journalism for teaching and writing movie, television, and play scripts. He taught creative writing classes at City College of New York and later at Yale University. An anti-Vietnam War play, We Bombed in New Haven, appeared in 1967, first performed at Harvard and then on Broadway. A dramatization of Catch-22 was made in 1973, and one episode from the novel was made into a play called Clevinger’s Trial, also in 1973.

A second novel, Something Happened, did not appear till 1974. Although this was also satiric, its subject matter was entirely different. It concerns a middle-aged protagonist, a businessman, whose dreams of love and success have evaporated into a dull mediocrity. The irony of the title is that nothing happens, at least not till the end of the (quite lengthy) novel. Its repetitiveness could be seen as annoying, or the very point Heller is trying to make.

Heller’s next novel, Good as Gold (1979), has a Jewish protagonist, an English professor, who is inveigled into White House politics as a spin-doctor. Heller satirizes Jewish liberals who have compromised themselves in politically successful right-wing politics. The later novels did not have as much impact as his first novel.

A fourth novel was much bolder in its zaniness, God Knows (1984). A biblical King David on his deathbed rambles through his life in the manner of a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, irreverently commenting on his poetry, his son Solomon, and his wife Bathsheba. The book is anachronistic, including references to modern Israel and the Jewish situation. However, the theme is familiar: The male protagonist has lost his way and has no guiding purpose because God no longer speaks to him.

In 1982, Heller divorced his wife of thirty-five years, Shirley, by whom he had two children. Then he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, which left him almost paralyzed. He required two months of intense nursing at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and four more months of rehabilitation at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Friends stepped in to help him through this serious illness, an account of which was written up by Heller and one of the friends, Speed Vogel, as No Laughing Matter (1986). Later he married his nurse, Valerie Humphries.

Near the end of his life Heller again picked up Catch-22 characters. In Closing Time (1994), Heller resurrects Yossarian, his Catch-22 hero, in midlife, working for business tycoon Milo, his erstwhile antagonist, as a public relations consultant. However, few of the other Catch-22 characters appear in this satire of American capitalistic society.

Heller’s last two books were another novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, published posthumously in 2000, and a memoir, Now and Then (1998), which lovingly re-creates a long-disappeared Coney Island and gives an account of his wartime experiences.

Significance

Heller’s significance centers on his antiwar novel, Catch-22. Its biting satire of institutional military ineptness seemed out of place as a comment on World War II, but its exaggeration of anti-Communist war efforts reminded readers of the era of the McCarthy witch hunts, the government effort in the 1950’s to root out Communists and other subversives. The ineptness of the war machine during the Vietnam War proved Heller’s satire was not misplaced. The novel was studied at Air Force training institutions as an example of mindless administration.

Bibliography

Craig, David M. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Vol. 4 in Humor in Life and Letters. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. Traces Heller’s development both thematically and artistically, concentrating on his treatment of human mortality.

Fowles, Anthony. Student Guide to Joseph Heller: The Novels. London: Greenwich Exchange, 2005. A good introductory guide to all of Heller’s fiction.

Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. An early attempt to place Heller in a tradition of American novelists.

Pinsker, Sanford, and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Understanding Joseph Heller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. A thorough study of Heller, covering all of his output and its cultural context.