This
interview with Joe Heller took place during the week of the publication of Something Happened—a literary event of considerable significance,
because the novel is only the second of the author’s career. The first, of
course, was Catch-22. The fact that it has taken more than a decade to
produce a second work of fiction seems of small concern to Heller, because he
has evolved a definite and unique pattern of work that is not at all determined
by deadlines and other arbitrary demands. He says he always wanted to be a
writer. His earliest story was pecked out on a neighborhood boy’s typewriter
and ultimately rejected by the Daily
News short-short story editor. His career
moved at its own pace. He did no writing during his war years in Italy.
His
first accepted story appeared in The Atlantic (along with a companion piece of fiction by James
Jones) in 1948. Catch-22 wasn’t published until ten years later. Heller has
no illusions about the difficulty of making a living as a novelist. He tells his
creative-writing class at the start of every academic year that even if every
word a writer writes is published, he will almost surely have to supplement his
income, usually by teaching (as Heller does) or perhaps by marrying money. The
exigencies of such a career do not seem to have marked Heller himself. He sits
very much at ease—an impressive figure (his considerable crop of hair seems to
surround his face like a lion’s ruff), trim (he keeps himself in firm shape by
jogging and sticking to a strict diet)—and with the detachment of someone
talking about a third person he begins describing in a voice strong with the
inflections of his native Brooklyn the unique process through which his novels
have come to him . . .
JOSEPH
HELLER
In
1962 I was sitting on the deck of a house on Fire Island. I was frightened. I
was worried because I had lost interest in my job then—which was writing
advertising and promotional copy. Catch-22 was not making much money. It was selling steadily
(eight hundred to two thousand copies a week)—mostly by word of mouth—but it
had never come close to the New
York Times best-seller list. I had a wife and two
children. I had no idea for another book. I was waiting for something to
happen(!), wishing I had a book to start. My novels begin in a strange way. I
don’t begin with a theme or even a character. I begin with a first sentence
that is independent of any conscious preparation. Most often nothing comes out
of it: a sentence will come to mind that doesn’t lead to a second sentence. Sometimes
it will lead to thirty sentences which then come to a dead end.
I
was alone on the deck. As I sat there worrying and wondering what to do, one of
those first lines suddenly came to mind: “In the office in which I work, there
are four people of whom I am afraid. Each of these four people is afraid of
five people.” Immediately, the lines presented a whole explosion of
possibilities and choices—characters (working in a corporation), a tone, a mood
of anxiety, or insecurity. In that first hour (before someone came along and
asked me to go to the beach), I knew the beginning, the ending, most of the
middle, the whole scene of that particular “something” that was going to
happen; I knew about the brain-damaged child and, especially, of course, about
Bob Slocum, my protagonist, and what frightened him, that he wanted to be
liked, that his immediate hope was to be allowed to make a three-minute speech
at the company convention. Many of the actual lines throughout the book came to
me—the entire “something happened” scene with those solar plexus lines
(beginning with the doctor’s statement and ending with “Don’t tell my wife” and
the rest of them) all coming to me in that first hour on that Fire Island deck.
Eventually I found a different opening chapter with a different first line (“I
get the willies when I see closed doors”) but I kept the original, which had
spurred everything, to start off the second section.
INTERVIEWER
Was
it the same process of “receiving” a first line with Catch-22?
HELLER
Just
about. I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when
suddenly this line came to me: “It was love at first sight. The first time he
saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.” I didn’t have the name
Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been
a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was
available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind—even most of the
particulars . . . the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I
eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It
got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I
jumped out of bed and paced the floor. That morning I went to my job at the
advertising agency and wrote out the first chapter in longhand. Before the end
of the week I had typed it out and sent it to Candida Donadio, my agent. One
year later, after much planning, I began chapter two.
INTERVIEWER
Is
there any accounting for this unique procedure?
HELLER
I
don’t understand the process of imagination—though I know that I am very much
at its mercy. I feel that these ideas are floating around in the air and they
pick me to settle upon. The ideas come to me; I don’t produce them at will.
They come to me in the course of a sort of controlled daydream, a directed
reverie. It may have something to do with the disciplines of writing
advertising copy (which I did for a number of years), where the limitations
involved provide a considerable spur to the imagination. There’s an essay of T.
S. Eliot’s in which he praises the disciplines of writing, claiming that if one
is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is taxed to its
utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, however, the chances
are good that the work will sprawl.
INTERVIEWER
Can
you remember some other opening lines?
HELLER
Well,
people have always asked what happened to Dunbar, a character who disappeared
in Catch-22. So I was thinking of writing a novel about him.
The opening line I came up with was obviously cultivated by an advertising
slogan for Bigelow rugs that was widespread at the time: “A name on the door
deserves a Bigelow on the floor.” My variation of it was, “Dunbar woke up with
his name on the door, and a Bigelow on the floor, and wondered how he had got
there. . . .” So it was a novel about amnesia, Dunbar finding himself in a
plush office, not knowing the secretary’s name, or how many people were working
for him, or what his position was—and gradually finding out. It did not work. I
couldn’t take my mind past a certain point.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you have last lines that come along with those first lines?
HELLER
I
had a closing line for Something
Happened before I began writing the book. It was
“I am a cow.” For six years I thought that was good. I had it on one of my
three-by-five notecards. Then I wasn’t all that happy with it, and finally I
discarded it. But it seemed good at the time, and besides, I can’t start
writing until I have a closing line.
INTERVIEWER
Once
you have an opening (and closing) line in mind, what dictates whether you will
continue?
HELLER
I
think writers move unconsciously toward what they think they can do. The two
novels I have written,Catch-22 and Something Happened, I chose to write and write in the way I did
because of an instinctive feeling that I could handle the subject matter and
the method of dealing with each of them. I have certain gifts. I can be
funny—for one half-page at a time, sometimes even more, though I wouldn’t want
to push my luck and try to be funny for ten. I can be humorous in several
ways—with irony, with dialogue, with farcical situations, and occasionally with
a lucky epigram or an aphorism. My inclination, though, is to be serious. But
on the other hand, I cannot write an effective, straightforward, separate
narrative. I can’t write description. I’ve told my editor that I couldn’t write
a good descriptive metaphor if my life depended on it. In Catch-22 there is really very little physical description.
There is very little inSomething
Happened. Bob Slocum tends to consider people
in terms of one dimension; his tendency is to think of people, even those very
close to him—his wife, daughter, and son and those he works for—as having a
single aspect, a single use. When they present more than that dimension, he has
difficulty in coping with them. Slocum is not interested in how people look, or
how rooms are decorated, or what flowers are around.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you find it restricting to tell the novel through the limited persona of Bob
Slocum?
HELLER
It’s
true that I myself could have been much funnier, much more intelligent, much
cleverer with words than Slocum is. But I must limit him, because if he had all
my attributes he wouldn’t be working for that company; he’d be writing Catch-22. Still, even though I can’t have him talk like
Nietzsche or Marcuse, I have unlimited possibilities with him as long as I can
establish the personality of someone who is only sure that he is sure of
nothing. He is utterly unset, undefined, ambivalent. Thus, I can put him into
any frame of mind, have him react from just about any emotional perspective.
The opportunities were not too few but too many.
INTERVIEWER
Yes,
but . . .
HELLER
Besides,
your question suggests that Slocum’s function is to inform. I don’t think, even
as an author, that I have knowledge to give to readers. Philosophers might and
scientists can. It’s possible for me to express something that you can agree or
disagree with, but certainly you will have heard it before. So I don’t think
the “what” distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the “how”—the
aesthetic quality of the sensibility of the writer, his craft, his ability to
create and communicate.
I
don’t have a philosophy of life, or a need to organize its progression. My
books are not constructed to “say anything.” When I was at college, in every
literary discussion there was always such an emphasis on “What does he say?
What’s the message?” Even then I felt that very few authors had anything to
say. What was important to me was “What does it do?” This refutes, of course,
the idea that the message is the objective of a novel. In fact, any “message”
becomes part of the texture, stirred so much that it’s as negligible as a
teaspoon of salt in a large stew. Think of the number of artists who have done
still lifes—a view of a river or a vase of flowers . . . there is nothing about
the choice of subject that is going to startle anybody. What will distinguish
one still life from another is what the artist brings to it. To a certain
extent that is true of the novelist.
INTERVIEWER
What
is your own feeling about Slocum?
HELLER
I
told several people while I was writing the book that Slocum was possibly the
most contemptible character in literature. Before I was finished, I began
feeling sorry for him. That has happened to me before. That’s why there are two
generals in Catch-22. General Dreedle certainly had bad qualities, but
then there were certain characteristics I liked (he was straightforward,
honest, not a conniver), and I found I didn’t want to attribute certain
unsympathetic qualities to him. So I invented General Peckem as a sort of
substitute scapegoat. Very hard to like him.
But as for Slocum, many of my friends to whom I showed the book found not only
compassion for him but strong identification. That surprised me, but I suppose
it shouldn’t have. He is very human.
INTERVIEWER
Does
the reaction to your work often surprise you?
HELLER
Constantly.
And I rely on it. I really don’t know what I’m doing until people read what
I’ve written and give me their reactions. I didn’t know what Catch-22 was all about until three months after it came out,
when people, often total strangers who had no interest in saying the right (or
wrong) things to me, began coming up and talking about the book. It meant
different things to them. I thought the chaplain was the second most impressive
character in the book (after Yossarian). But it turned out to be Milo. Then, it
surprised me that things in Catch-22 turned out to be very funny. I thought I was being
humorous, but I didn’t know I would make people laugh. In my apartment one day
I heard this friend of mine in another room laughing out loud, and that was
when I realized I could be comic. I began using that ability consciously—not to
turn Catch-22 into a comic work, but for contrast, for ironic
effect. I really don’t think authors know too much about the effect of what
they’re doing.
INTERVIEWER
Doesn’t
that bother you . . . that the author (you) has such a tentative grip . . .?
HELLER
No.
It’s one of the things that makes it interesting. I would only be nervous if I
were told that what I’d done was no good and no one would want to read it. I
protect myself from that by submitting the first chapter to my agent, and to my
editor, and, after about a third of the book is done, to other friends. They
can be tough on me.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you have an audience you keep in mind when you write?
HELLER
Since
writing is really performing for people, unconsciously I must have an audience
I’m writing for—someone who is really me, I suppose, with my degree of
sensibility, my level of education, my interest in literature. . . .
INTERVIEWER
What
sort of a discussion do you have with your friends about your work when it’s in
progress?
HELLER
It’s
never a discussion. They simply tell me what they think is good or bad. I do
not always believe them. I try not to talk about it to anyone for years. I
think of writing as private enterprise . . . since so much comes from
rumination. Nothing is more personal than one’s thoughts; I think I’d prefer to
keep it that way.
INTERVIEWER
What
are the best circumstances for this sort of ruminating?
HELLER
I
have to be alone. A bus is good. Or walking the dog. Brushing my teeth is
marvelous—it was especially so for Catch-22.
Often when I am very tired, just before going to bed, while washing my face and
brushing my teeth, my mind gets very clear . . . and produces a line for the
next day’s work, or some idea way ahead. I don’t get my best ideas while
actually writing . . . which is the agony of putting down what I think are good
ideas and finding the words for them and the paragraph forms for them . . . a
laborious process. I don’t think of myself as a naturally gifted writer when it
comes to using language. I distrust myself. Consequently, I try every which way
with a sentence, then a paragraph, and finally a page, choosing words,
selecting pace (I’m obsessed with that, even the pace of a sentence). I say to
myself what I hope to put down on paper, but I hope not aloud. I think
sometimes I move my lips, not only when I’m writing, but when I’m thinking of
what I’m going to be having for dinner.
INTERVIEWER
How
long can you keep at it?
HELLER
I
ordinarily write three or four handwritten pages and then rework them for two
hours. I can work for four hours, or forty-five minutes. It’s not a matter of
time. I set a realistic objective: How can I inch along to the next paragraph?
Inching is what it is. It’s not: How can I handle the next chapter? How can I
get to the next stage in a way that I like? I think about that as I walk the
dog or walk the twenty minutes from my apartment to the studio where I work.
INTERVIEWER
Do
you put these ideas down as they occur to you?
HELLER
I
keep a small sheath of three-by-five cards in my billfold. If I think of a good
sentence, I’ll write it down. It won’t be an idea (“have him visit a brothel in
New Orleans”). What I put down is an actual line of intended text (“In the
brothel in New Orleans was like the time in San Francisco”). Of course, when I
come back to it, the line may change considerably. Occasionally there’s one
that sings so perfectly the first time that it stays, like “My boy has stopped
speaking to me and I don’t think I can bear it.” I wrote that down on a
three-by-five card, perhaps on a bus, or after walking the dog. I store them in
filing cabinets. The file on Something
Happened is about four inches deep, the one on Catch-22 about the length of a shoe box.
INTERVIEWER
Are
there card files for unfinished work—like the Dunbar book you mentioned . . .?
HELLER
No.
I don’t unfinish anything I start, and I don’t start—as I’ve said—until I see
the whole thing in my head.
INTERVIEWER
What
are some of the other sources for material?
HELLER
I
pick up a lot from friends. Mel Brooks. George Mandel. Especially Mandel. He
talked about his experiences in the war. Once, he told me about talking to an
army psychiatrist who asked him about his dreams, and George made one up about
holding a fish in his hand. That’s a bit in Catch-22.
I’ve picked up a lot from him. He had the oddest medical ailment at one time—a
stone in his salivary gland. It’s very rare. And we can conclude that it was a
very small stone. Well, it turns up in the hospital scene
about the mixed-up records in Catch-22. Just a year ago Mandel suddenly became aware that
Schrafft’s no longer existed in New York, and that the World-Telegram wasn’t being published anymore—somehow he hadn’t
noticed—and he said, “My God, soon there’ll be nothing left.” That went down on
one of those three-by-five cards and was used in one of Bob Slocum’s
digressions in Something
Happened. He’s been very helpful.
INTERVIEWER
What
about the influences from your reading?
HELLER
Every
once in a while I can identify an influence. There’s a page and a half in Something Happened that I wrote during my Jamesian period . . . the
use of the word “Ah?” When Slocum tells the psychiatrist he doesn’t have
auditory hallucinations but thinks he smells excrement, the psychiatrist says
“Ah?” a number of times. It’s out of The Ambassadors. The influence is not especially pronounced.
INTERVIEWER
What
about personal contact with contemporary writers? Is that of use?
HELLER
I
don’t think writers are comfortable in each other’s presence. We can talk, of
course, for five minutes or so, but I don’t think we want to socialize. There’s
always an acute status consciousness relating to how high or low a writer
exists in the opinion of the person he’s talking to. I’ve noticed that the
opening gambit in conversation between two writers—and I’m always very
uncomfortable hearing it—is “I like your work.” I’ve heard it so often. It’s so
condescending. What if the person had not done any work? He would not be spoken
to at all. This sort of relationship is peculiar to writers—after all, our
status is never challenged by anyone else, one’s jeweler or a dress
manufacturer. No, I don’t think two novelists who have enjoyed a high measure
of success can exist into their middle years living close to each other if both
continue writing—I don’t believe human nature can accept such a situation. The
fact is there are few people with whom I would want to spend even a full
weekend . . . to be in the same house or on a fishing trip with, unless I knew
them well enough to go off by myself if I wanted to. I don’t want to have to
entertain them. In a novel you can’t spend sixty pages writing about that sort
of relationship.
INTERVIEWER
You
wouldn’t go on a fishing trip with Bob Slocum?
HELLER
No.
INTERVIEWER
How
close is Something
Happened to your own experience?
HELLER
Neither
of my books was intended to be autobiographical. Both were based to a certain
extent on experience—Something
Happened is about someone who works in a company (which I
have done) and who has a family (which I have), but it’s also based to a great
extent on my experience as an observer of other people and a reader of other
writers. It’s an imaginative work, after all—the most important ingredient in
writing fiction is that choice is always available: Who will? What will? I told my wife and children years ago when
they knew what Something
Happened was about that they might think it was
an exposé of their family life, and I told them—truthfully—that it was not
about them. I did not feel (I said this half-facetiously to my wife) that she
was interesting enough, or for that matter, that I myself was, to write a novel
about.
I
have had no experience with a brain-damaged child. But it turns out that the
insecurity Bob Slocum feels not knowing how to deal with it is typical of
parents who do have that experience . . . what’s called
“denial”—the refusal to accept the condition. Every time Slocum starts talking
about the child, he starts digressing—and it’s an accurate reaction.
INTERVIEWER
How
do you compare the two novels?
HELLER
I
think one difference between the two books is that Catch-22 is concerned with physical survival against
exterior forces or institutions that want to destroy life or moral self. Something Happened is concerned very much with interior, psychological
survival in which the areas of combat are things like the wishes a person has,
whether they are fulfilled or not, the close, intimate situations we have with
our children when they’re small and as they grow older, the memories we have of
our relationship with parents asthey grow
older—these are some of the areas of disturbance in Something Happened. Of course, these areas are much more difficult to
deal with than those in Catch-22. Given an Adolf Hitler, or inefficient or corrupt
people, or people without sensibilities, we know what the dangers are, and we
know what we must try to do. There’s a line in Something Happened: “It was after the war that the struggle began.”
INTERVIEWER
How
long did it take you to write the climactic passage about the “something” which
happens at the end of Something
Happened?
HELLER
Two
minutes. It had all been done years before sitting on that deck in Fire Island.
INTERVIEWER
Do
titles come to you easily?
HELLER
There
have only been a few. “Something Happened” turned up in the fall of ‘63 when I
was walking with George Mandel past Korvette’s or Brentano’s and a kid came
running past and yelled over his shoulder to another, “Hey come on, something’s happened”—some sort of traffic accident I guess it must
have been.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve
spoken about music being important while you are working?
HELLER
It
overcomes those noises that might distract me—a leaking faucet, my daughter’s
rock music in the other part of the apartment, or someone else’s radio across
the courtyard. I have tapes. I mostly listen to Bach, his choral music.
Beethoven is OK; he’s great, but Bach, for me, is the best.
INTERVIEWER
What
about the necessary disciplines of writing?
HELLER
Well,
I don’t have social luncheons with people. By not having lunch with people it
means that I do not have two martinis, which usually means the afternoon is not
shot, since all I can do after two martinis is read the newspaper.
INTERVIEWER
Still,
a considerable amount of time . . .
HELLER
I
am a mysteriously slow writer. I say “mysteriously” because there is no
accounting for it. I didn’t start working on Something Happened until two years after that day on the Fire Island
deck. In the meantime I started a musical comedy, wrote the final screenplay
for Sex
and the Single Girl, and then a television thing that
turned out to be a sort of pilot of McHale’s Navy—none of this especially serious stuff. Then the
play We
Bombed in New Haven took
me away—not the writing of it (that only took six weeks) but the time spent
working on the two productions. All this delay turned out to be for the better.
When I went back to the two hundred and fifty pages I’d managed to get down on
paper over those two years, I was able to write the book the way I wanted. I
had learned more, and read more. The original forty pages became a hundred and
twenty pages; the thirty pages of the second section became eighty; the seventy
pages on the wife became a hundred—all of it much different in texture and mood
from what I originally had in mind. It has happened with each novel.
Originally, I didn’t think Catch-22 could be long enough to be more than a novelette.
The addition became not padding but substance with a meaning and quality of its
own. I missed my deadline for Catch-22 by four or five years. I felt that it was the only
book I was going to write, so I wanted to do it as well as I could. Actually, I
wasn’t ever sure I was going to be a writer. When I started Catch-22, I thought writing novels might be a useful way to
kill time. I remember thinking that when I had the book one-third done and my
agent was showing it to editors, that if they all had said, “No,” I would not
have finished the book. I don’t have that narcissistic drive, the megalomania
involved in spending years working on a book that no one is really interested
in publishing. As it happened, there was no difficulty in finding a publisher. Catch-22, by the way, was the first novel I’d ever started.
INTERVIEWER
Has
success changed your attitude about living or writing?
HELLER
I
don’t think so. And one reason is that it came to me so late. I don’t think
it’s good to achieve too much at too early an age. What else can the future
give you if you’ve already got all that your imagination has dreamt up for you?
A writer is only discovered once in a lifetime, and if it happens very early
the impossibility of matching that moment again can have a somewhat corrosive
effect on his personality and indeed on the work itself.
INTERVIEWER
It
seems to be a peculiarly American dilemma.
HELLER
It
stems from a fundamental insecurity that afflicts successful Americans,
particularly those who are self-made and have succeeded in a field in which
there is a high element of risk. They never feel that they deserve their
success, or that it is permanent; in fact, they seem to fear that their next
book is going to cost them everything that they’ve gained . . . sort of like
doubling up at roulette . . . betting on the black five times in a row. Actors
suffer the same way. They can’t believe it when they are successful. They’re
positive that an angel looking like Claude Rains is going to appear and say
that a mistake has been made and “We’re taking it all away from you.” I’m not
immune to it myself. It bothers me tremendously. But I like to think I’m over
the hurdle. If I had finished my two books by the age of twenty-eight, well,
I’d have a lot to worry about. That’s not enough. But two books at age
fifty-one means that the next one won’t be due until I’m nearly seventy. I can
coast for quite a while.
INTERVIEWER
Could
you imagine not starting up again?
HELLER
If
I thought I might never get an idea for another novel—one of those lines
dropping in that provides a whole book—I don’t think it would distress me. I’ve
got two books under my belt now. I would be content to consider that a
lifetime’s work, and I could just putter around and find other things to do.
I’ve been very lucky. I’ve written two books that were unusual and unusually
successful.
INTERVIEWER
When
did you begin writing?
HELLER
I
wanted to be a writer when I was in the sixth grade—of course I wanted to be
one without working at it. I wanted to be published in the New York Daily News, which published one short story a day in those
days, or in The
New Yorker. I remember writing a story about the
Russian invasion of Finland and sending it to the Daily News, which, of course, rejected it. I was eleven years
old. All my writing was imitative of what I was reading: the magazines that my
older brother or sister would bring home; what the circulating libraries
carried out in Coney Island, where we lived—why, I think I can remember Jerome
Weidman’s work in the 1930s better than he does. In 1948, when my first story
came out in The Atlanticand nearly won the “Atlantic First,” I thought I
was pretty hot stuff. About that same time, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead was published, and he was on the cover of Saturday Review. We were about the same age—twenty-six or
twenty-seven—and it put me in my place.
INTERVIEWER
What
about other fields of writing? Have you considered nonfiction?
HELLER
I
don’t do nonfiction well, and since I work so hard at writing, I might as well
concentrate on what I know I can do. I’m too conscious of myself as a writer to
be a journalist. I’m a show-off. When I write, I want people to notice me and
that I’m doing something different from other people. A journalist—at least the
ones I admire—is a writer who can make me forget his involvement so that I can
concentrate on the subject of the piece, not the personality of the author. The
journalist and the novelist have completely different intelligences.
Journalists almost always compose on typewriters. They rarely do more than one
draft. Somehow they think in terms of openings, development, conclusion—all in
almost automatic sequences. I envy that gift. But if I had it, I’d be a
journalist. You can’t have it both ways.
INTERVIEWER
Have
you had any of those first lines come to mind since finishing Something Happened?
HELLER
Dozens!
I think when a book is finished and the editor likes it, and it’s been handed
in, an author goes through a period of nervous craziness. Some writers invest
in Canadian uranium stocks; others change agents or wives or commit suicide.
Some writers hear voices. It’s not a good time in which to trust one’s own
judgment. The author has been too busy and intent. I remember one first line
that came to me during this time was, “The kid, they say, was born in a manger,
but frankly I have my doubts.” It’s not a bad line, but I wouldn’t think a book
would come out of it. . . . I did go further for a while, and I liked the idea,
but it led me ultimately to remember Eliot’s opening line about the Magi coming
to the manger in, I think, “Ash-Wednesday”*—”a cold coming we had of it”—and I
gave it up after that. So I guess I’ll have to wait around for another line to
drop in . . ..
*
The line is actually from Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi.”
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