3 Ways to Read Joseph Heller on His Birthday (Excluding Catch-22)
By Matt Staggs
Joseph Heller, Miami Bookfair International, 1986
Happy birthday to Joseph Heller! The master satirist would have been 90 years-old today on May 1, 2014. While Heller’s best known contribution to the world of literature was his darkly comedic anti-war novel Catch-22, he wrote nearly a dozen other works, including novels, screenplays, and memoirs.
A native of Brooklyn, New York, the author was born in 1923 to Lena and Isaac Heller, a Russian immigrant couple of limited means already raising a teenaged son and young daughter from Isaac’s previous marriage. Tragedy struck in 1929 when Isaac died unexpectedly following a medical procedure. Heller was only five at the time, but memories of his father’s death and memorial services remained with him through the rest of his life.
Heller joined the Army when he was nineteen years old, and flew sixty missions as a B-25 bomber pilot over the Italian Front. While he often described the majority of these sorties as "milk runs," the reality was that many of them were quite dangerous. Like his father’s death, Heller’s war experiences left an indelible mark on his writing career.
After returning home from the war, the young veteran entered college and earned a masters degree in literature from Columbia University. Heller found academia boring, and after a short stint as a teacher he took a job as an advertising manager for Time magazine. He continued to work in advertising until the publication of Catch-22 in 1961.
This future literary classic met mixed critical reception and won no major literary awards. The counterculture loved it, though, and when the Vietnam War began Catch-22 joined Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five as must-reads among the anti-war set.
Heller and Vonnegut became lifelong friends after they met at a literary conference in 1968. Vonnegut had also served in World War II, and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. Vonnegut had been in the city of Dresden when it was firebombed by the Americans, an experience that was later fictionalized in Slaughterhouse Five. Beyond the obvious tie of mutual service, the two men shared the same morbid sense of humor.
Both Vonnegut and Heller were restless and occasionally unhappy men. Vonnegut was prone to episodes of clinical depression, and while Heller may not have suffered from the same ailment, even his friends sometimes wondered about his emotional well-being. In 1979, Godfather author Mario Puzo, a longtime friend, told the New York Times’s Barbara Gelb that Heller seemed "determined to be unhappy":
"Joe is afraid to be happy; if he's happy, he gets unhappy," Puzo says. "Control over his feelings is important to him. He's so concerned about controlling his life, he can't have fun. Actually, I can even see him changing into a wild man, but it would be in a very controlled sort of way."
Catch-22 brought Heller fame, but it also cast a long shadow over the rest of his career. The critics had warmed to it in the years since its publication, and compared every new novel Heller wrote to his first. Heller became famous for responding "Who has?" to a critic who asked why he had not written anything as great as Catch-22.
Heller continued writing until his death by heart attack at age seventy-six. While Catch-22 will always remain his best-known work, the author left behind many books worth reading. Here’s a few of them.
Something Happened (1974)
Something Happened is a stream-of-consciousness narrative told from the point of view of Bob Slocum, a businessman who seems to have it all but has come to hate every aspect of his existence. As Slocum prepares for a promotion, he wonders what happened to his life and how it all went wrong. Roiling in a constant state of bitterness and despair, Slocum is as frustrated with his own shortcomings as he is with others. He isn't always likable, but readers may find themselves growing sympathetic toward him despite that.
Vonnegut described the book as black humor with the humor removed, and said that it would be recognized in time as a great novel. He’s right. Still, readers expecting something like Catch-22 may be blindsided by the slow-burning angst of Something Happened.
God Knows (1984)
Heller turns his attention to religion in God Knows, a fictional retelling of the life of the Biblical King David that owes more to Mel Brooks (a friend of Heller’s) than holy scripture.
On his deathbed and faced with mounting pressure to declare an heir to his throne, an elderly King David revisits his early years and muses over his relationship with God -- from whom he has demanded an apology. That, if anything, should convince cautious readers that they’re not going to be reading a "religious" story, in as much as they’ll be reading a story about religion -- a funny one, at that.
Heller’s King David zings off one liners with the confident patter of a practiced comedian, and no one escapes his acerbic wit -- even God himself. God Knows is a hilarious farce that will be well received by those among us who have ever sat in a church or synagogue quietly praying that the hands on the clock would move just a little bit faster.
No Laughing Matter (1986)
In 1981, Heller became paralyzed due to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a mysterious auto-immune disease in which the body attacks parts of its own nervous system. Unable to care for himself, Heller was hospitalized for over a year until he was well enough to begin the difficult process of rehabilitation. Following his recovery, Heller -- along with his friend and caregiver Speed Vogel -- wrote No Laughing Matter, a memoir about his experience with the disease.
Despite the title, No Laughing Matter contains plenty of laughs, both at Heller’s own expense and others. Humor was an integral part of Heller’s recover, and in alternating chapters, he and Vogel recall the good-natured teasing and camaraderie that got him through the worst of his illness.
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