Just not Catchy Enough

It was sad to read of the death of Joseph Heller, author of the famous satirical war novel, Catch-22.

This was the book which Heller himself said asked the question: "What does a sane man do in an insane society?" It didn't give the answer, of course, but the series of non-answers posed in its central quandary of circular logic was enough to be going on with for many years. Readers delighted in the notion of an inescapable dilemma, and many took it as a metaphor for life itself. The huge success of Heller's novel - after a slow start - also posed the question: how does a writer follow up a first book which is so successful? The unspoken answer to this was: with great difficulty.

Nothing Heller wrote after his great satire had anything like its impact. He himself was conscious of this (though the $2 million he made from God Knows and Picture This helped ease the pain), and to people who would say to him that he still hadn't written anything as good as Catch-22, Heller would respond "Who has?"

It is not true that Heller, when asked if he always replied to questions with another question, said "What makes you think that?"

The original title of the big book was Catch-18, but Heller had to change the title because the popular writer Leon Uris had written a book called Mila 18.

I ought to know. While young Joe Heller was still growing up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, I myself was well advanced on my manuscript of my first novel, tentatively called Catch-19.

This was a complicated saga focusing on the fairly ordinary dilemma of a writer who has had absolutely no success at all - but has hopes of building on failure. In the very ordinariness of my book dwelt its extraordinariness. This was the Catch-19 of the title. But it was too far ahead of its time. Publishers queued up in droves to turn it down. Finally I printed it myself, published it myself and sold it myself.

Within a month, I had secured 34 sales. In publishing terms I firmly believed it was a "sleeper" - a book whose brilliance would dawn on people only gradually, just like that of Catch-22.

I believed its fame would spread by word of mouth, that commercial considerations and the tawdry values of the marketplace would be defeated.

Soon, word-of-mouth knowledge did indeed spread. Gradually the books I had sold were returned to me, some with rude notes. Within weeks I had them all back, bar one. Thanks, Auntie Marge. The book slept on, and so did I. Then I re-drafted the manuscript. I reversed the chapter order. I moved the introduction to the back of the book. I burnt the whole thing. I rewrote it. Newly entitled Catch-20, the manuscript was now a book full of answers. Answers to what? - asked potential publishers in their dull fashion. To as-yet-unformulated questions, I told them. They had no imagination. To them, the concept of Catch-20, a global dilemma which would remain unsolved until the publication of Catch-21, meant nothing.

I tried to point out that what I had created was a universal shorthand for a perfectly ordinary man - or a woman, if necessary - trying to make his or her way through an even more ordinary universe. It was no use. They thought I was getting at them. They thought it was a dull book about dullness and dullards.

What they failed to realise was that because of their activity, or rather, their inactivity, I was succeeding in building on failure. By publishing Catch-20, they would have ruined my career plans. They had played right into my hands. When I relaunched my manuscript as Catch-21, everything was finally in place. I had a gallery of characters and situations so ordinary, sane, sensible and dull that no reader could fail to fall asleep before the end of the first chapter, and (I hoped) wake up to the knowledge that a literary breakthrough had been made.

The central dilemma faced by my thoroughly banal and characterless characters was that because nothing could ever go wrong for them, they could never know if things were going right.

Then, in 1961, along came Joseph Heller's dazzling Catch-22 to steal my thunder.

bglacken@irish-times.ie