Meet one of my heroes.
May is Jewish American Heritage Month, and this one began in spectacular fashion: the May 1 centennial of the birth of one of the giants of American Jewish culture, author Joseph Heller, born in Coney Island on May Day 1923.
He’s a hero of mine.
Heller was a sharp cookie, a WWII veteran and Fulbright scholar who gave up teaching literature to take a Mad Men-like job at Time-Life in Manhattan as a copywriter for advertisements, while also writing a series of short stories and some sketches toward a first novel, which he planned to call “Catch-18.” He had just started to find his particular and distinct strength as a writer: the brutally dark comedy of illogical logic. The publisher, Simon and Schuster, bought the book and assigned the first-time novelist a first-time editor: Robert Gottlieb. In the days before the word processor, the two of them worked side by side, literally going at the manuscript with scissors and tape. Then word got out that the guy who wrote “Exodus,” Leon Uris, was about to publish a novel about Jewish resistance fighters in Warsaw that would be named after the street address of their secret headquarters, Mila 18. Heller was encouraged to find a new number. He chose one that better captured the novel’s theme of double vision, of seeing things twice: 22.
It got him into the dictionaries not once but twice: the title Catch-22 is now an irreplaceable part of our language, and “Helleresque” joins “Kafkaesque” as a description of the distinct tone of Heller’s logic.
ASIDE
I once hit the library and looked up the (short) review of Catch-22 in Time. By coincidence, across the gutter and on the opposite page, there was a music review about a fresh new 19-year-old vocalist who — like Heller — was hitting the spotlight for the very first time. Her name is Aretha.
What is a Catch-22 anyway?
Slight spoiler paragraph here, if you haven’t read the novel or seen Mike Nichol’s awesome film. Heller plays a double game with the phrase “Catch-22.” It’s cited throughout the novel, but every time it’s cited, it means something different. The common thread, at least early on, is that a “Catch-22” is a set of rules, each of which is entirely sensible in isolation, but which combine in destructively paradoxical ways. But as the novel progressives, and becomes progressively darker, the logic becomes simpler, less comic and more brutal, until the last time it’s cited it says: “Catch-22 says they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” As often happens in Joseph Heller’s writing, what starts as a joke becomes monstrous.
And no, it’s not at all hard to imagine Trump agreeing: he has the right to do anything we can’t stop him from doing.
Meet Yossarian
By 1961, the shelves were pretty crowded with WWII books written by WWII vets, and there was a fertile subgenre of books by Jewish authors — things like Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny,” where nutty Captain Queeg breaks down on the witness stand during a cross-examination by the Jewish character Greenwald — but this clearly wasn’t the direction Heller was going.
The novel’s main character is Capt. Yossarian. Possibly Capt. John Yossarian, but we’re not sure. Yossarian’s background is a cipher — all we know about him is that he’s Assyrian and possibly from Manhattan. He never mentions his hometown, family, or anything at all not directly related to the military. (The poster for the film shows a dog tag giving his first name as Aram, as in the Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian.)
Heller later explained he was going from a 1934 short story by William Saroyan called “Seventy Thousand Assyrians.” That’s available online. It’s written in Saroyan’s naturalistic, open-ended anecdotal style, about a conversation between a man getting a haircut from an Assyrian barber in NYC. Near the end the barber mentions that there only about seventy thousand Assyrians left in the world, and getting fewer.
Not too long after I first read Catch-22, I started to wonder: did Heller chose an Assyrian background for Yossarian as a strategy to make him effectively a Jewish outsider without having to wheel out the cultural apparatus of actually being Jewish or risk falling into the genre of “Jewish WWII story”?
But, as always, there’s a wrinkle. Heller is a tricky guy. We don’t know whether Yossarian really is Assyrian, only that others think he is.
Is Yossarian’s past a cipher because he’s a Jew passing for gentile?
An article in the the Atlantic recently asked a similar question about another famous literary outsider: is Jay Gatsby, the Great Gatsby, who also has a cipher for a past, reinventing himself, actually a black man passing for white?
Is Joseph Heller up to something similar here?
The novel is aware of antisemitism, which shows up in the logically inverted way that Heller gave his name to. There is a military tribunal, and it’s a travesty.
Yossarian had done his best to warn [Clevinger] the night before. “You haven’t got a chance, kid,” he told him glumly. “They hate Jews.”
“But I’m not Jewish,” answered Clevinger.
“It will make no difference,” Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. “They’re after everybody.”
The Sequel
In the 1990s, Heller wrote an underappreciated sequel to Catch-22 called Closing Time. It put the (surviving) characters of Catch-22 into a near-apocalyptic world where an unnamed idiot clearly meant to be Dan Quayle has somehow been promoted to President. He has a big red button on his desk. He wonders what it does.
Yossarian, getting advanced in age, is at one point hospitalized with a heart attack, bringing on a surreal hallucination overlaid with Wagnerian overtones (and Dantean overtones too, because Heller is a sharp cookie, also throwing in a visit from the ghost of William Saroyan). He’s visited in the hospital by a mysterious intelligence agent named Gaffney, about which we know nothing except that he’s Jewish. As part of a spiraling conversation (all Heller conversations are spiraling) they discuss German composers, leaving Yossarian to say:
“They [the Germans] don’t much like each other, do they?” replied Yossarian. “I can’t think of another people with such vengeful animosities toward each other.”
“Except our own?” suggested Gaffney.
“Gaffney, you know too much.”
Is that a (typically indirect) indication that Yossarian is Jewish and Gaffney knows it?
Yossarian later, in better health, imagines writing the hallucination up as a piece for The New Yorker as “a mordant spoof of a Rhine Journey by a contemporary American middle-class Assyrian Siegfried of ambiguous Semitic extraction, which is a contradiction.”
What’s Heller up to?
Well, I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think what he’s up to is this. In Heller, the closer you get to the truth of anything, the more ambiguous and contradictory the subject becomes. And here he’s asking you to ask: what would it mean if Yossarian were Jewish, and hiding it to avoid the Army antisemitism he’s clearly aware of?
That is, he hasn’t made Yossarian Jewish, but intentionally so close to it that the possibility opens up that he is.
One of the things Joseph Heller wants you to know about Yossarian is that he’s almost Jewish.
I’m So ASIDE-ED, I JUST CAN’T HIDE IT
There is, incidentally, another famous literary character who isn’t Jewish but keeps getting mistaken for Jewish all the same. It’s Humbert Humbert, the erudite but sociopathic pederast narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita. At one point he and his daughter show up at a hotel only to learn that, despite his having called ahead, there’s no reservation; the clerk taking that reservation misheard his name over the phone as “Humberg,” and the hotel didn’t allow Jews. One of the pertinent lines even made it into Stanley Kubrick’s movie: when Humbert pulls a gun on Quilty, the latter says, in mock John Wayne tones: “This here’s a gentile’s house. You better run along.”