Remembering Joseph Heller

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22

One of our most beloved authors, Joseph Heller, passed away on this day 16 years ago. Heller was a brilliant satirist, a keen observer of human and societal absurdity, and a spinner of inimitable phrases and puns.

Joseph Heller’s life

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923. He graduated high school in 1941 and then joined the U.S. Army Air Corps shortly after the United States entered World War II. He trained as a B-25 bombadier, flying 60 missions out of Corsicana.

After the war, Heller attended NYU for his undergraduate degree and Columbia University for his master’s degree in English. He moved to England as a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University, and then returned to the United States, where he taught and wrote in various positions.

Heller’s first publication came in The Atlantic Magazine in 1948, after which he went on to have a prolific writing career, publishing several acclaimed novels, articles, screenplays and short stories. In his later years, Heller was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes extreme muscle weakness. He recounted his experience with this illness in his later memoir, No Laughing Matter.

Heller died of a heart attack in his home in 1999, just after the completion of his last novel.

Joseph Heller’s works

Catch-22

Originally slated to be called Catch-18, Catch-22 was Joseph Heller’s first major work, and by far his most famous. Published in 1961, the novel follows Yossarian, a U.S. bombadier off a fictional Italian island in World War II, and his various comic attempts to escape or be dismissed from military service. Yossarian believes that the war is essentially futile, a farce in which everyone simply has a role to play. But this farcical nature makes the war more, not less, frightening, and Yossarian spends the novel battling various bureaucratic nightmares, comically incompetent commanding officers, catch-22s (of course), and his own growing sense of paranoia.

Catch-22 was not an immediate success with audiences or critics, but as the United States became more and more mired in the Vietnam War, the novel gained popularity as objectors coalesced around the novel’s anti-war themes. Today Catch-22 is beloved not only for its ideas on war but also for its unique story structure. The novel presents the same situation from several different perspectives, sometimes with hundreds of pages between the tellings, and the story does not progress chronologically. Heller makes casual reference to events that he’s already mentioned as well as ones he hasn’t, leaving the reader, like Yossarian, to somehow make sense of it all.

Something Happened

Though not nearly as famous as Catch-22, some critics argue that Something Happened is actually Heller’s finest work. (This critic agrees.) Published in 1974, the novel diverges greatly from the style and substance of Heller’s previous work. It follows narrator Bob Slocum, a typical American office worker who seems to have the perfect life and yet faces deep discontent and questions of sanity. Writtern in a Joycian stream of consciousness, the story unravels mostly in Slocum’s mind. A satire of American life and commercial culture, Something Happened is most remarkable for its seriousness, its darkness and its bleakness.

Closing Time

Often considered a sequel to Heller’s most famous work (against Heller’s own protestations), Closing Time circles back to several of the characters from Catch-22, including Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder and the Chaplain. Published over 30 years after Catch-22, Closing Time is set in 1990s New York City, a world in which Yossarian is a twice-divorced nurse-chaser and Milo a billionaire defense contractor. Like its predecessor, the novel presents its story in pieces, partly narrated by Sammy Singer, a minor character from Catch-22, and partly told in third person; its brand of satire is similarly zany and indulgent. As the title suggests, much of the novel focuses on nostalgia for a passing era.

Though many critics and readers were inevitably disappointed by Closing Time, the novel has sold over 10 million copies to date. William Pritchard of the New York Times views the novel favorably: “So rather than thinking of Closing Time as the sequel to Catch-22, I’d call it instead an independent creation in whose best parts the seriousness and the joking are inseparable, as they should be in art.”

In addition to his three most famous works, Joseph Heller wrote the following:

We Bombed in New Haven (1967, play)
Good as Gold (1979)
God Knows (1984)
No Laughing Matter (1986, autobiography)
Picture This (1988)
Now and Then (1998, autobiography)
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000)

Joseph Heller’s impact

As the ubiquity of the phrase “catch-22” attests, we remember Heller for his witty turn-of-phrase, for his bitter and overblown satire, and for his profound studies of war and language. Though Catch-22 has defined Heller’s legacy, the rest of his works are equally memorable for their contemplations on American culture and modern life, as well as for their stylistic and thematic contributions to postmodern literature. Throughout his works, Heller reminds us how language, war, people, and life can be absurd, paradoxical, tragic, and—above all—funny.

Read more about Joseph Heller in his own words in these great interviews with the Paris Review (1974), the Cato Institute (1979) and Rolling Stone (1981).