Joseph Heller created an immortal catchphrase courtesy of the most hilarious and angry of anti-war novels. Yet such was the success of that book, he also ended up living his own variation of the predicament it describes.
First published in 1961, Catch-22 made him famous.
Within eight years, director Mike Nichols had assembled a quality cast including Alan Arkin and Orson Welles for the film version. Heller must have been thrilled but the truth is, New York Jew to the finger tips, he was and yet again, he wasn't. Probably because by then, he was well sunk into the 13-year battle which would eventually produce his second novel, Something Happened.
Anyone on the lookout for an unsung American masterpiece need look no further. As a powerful and convincing exploration of one man's petty angst, it is without peers. In that novel Heller writes about parenthood in a way no one else has - either before or since. The intensity of the emotion, and particularly the resentment, narrator Bob Slocum directs at his children can render the reader speechless.
His parenting includes fussing over two of them, while ignoring the third, his severely handicapped son. It is a book about obsessions, doubts, serial deceptions, his contemptuous dependence on his wife and above all his own anger.
Heller's unexpected death on Monday has left an odd hole in the canon of US writers. By his own admission he was not a natural, yet he has outsold Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, the late Bernard Malamud, that gifted gentile John Updike and possibly even his equally smart if artistically labouring Brooklyn pal, the campaigning Norman Mailer.
While Heller certainly had his share of high-speed Jewish humour at the ready, he was not tormented by his religion. When I interviewed him for the second time in 1998, Heller was at his most jovial - quite a contrast to our first meeting - and stressed that on the religious issue, "my approach is that of an American Jew. But I haven't written about the Jewish experience."
The Coney Island Heller grew up in, and recreates in Good As Gold, was dominated by eastern European Jews and, as he added, they were less culturally sophisticated than their German counterparts. They didn't relate at all well to German Jews, he said.
So there was Joseph Heller heading for 75 and being funny, New York funny and honest about the novel that made him and kept him. "I like Catch-22. I'm very grateful to it. How do I feel about it? It's no burden. I'm pleased. I think it'll last." After a while he added: "I wrote a comic book about serious matters." According to Heller he had a good war. "I was 19, it was a great adventure. I got medals, but thy were procedural. Everyone got one after flying five missions." Heller flew 60 as a bombardier based in the Mediterranean. The fun stopped when he found himself staring into a dying man's wound.
His war which lasted 10 months also provided him with a university degree under the GI Bill of Rights. Vietnam changed US attitudes to war though, now there are no heroes. As Heller observed with faint regret: "The second World War was the last time we were the good guys." Asked had his children ever questioned him about his wartime experiences, he shrugged. "They weren't interested."
Death has been staring him in the face for a while. Apart from the dangers confronting any soldier, late in 1981 just as his 35-year-old first marriage collapsed, he contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a condition which left him paralysed. Lifting his arm became impossible. He couldn't even swallow. Had he thought then he would die? "No, I didn't think about death."
He believed he had never fully recovered. In person Heller was big, very physical, with an open-slightly goofy face, topped by a mop of white hair. Small and shrewd, deep-set brown eyes retreated ever further with the years. He made no secret of the fact he chased women, was self-obsessed, selfish and had left his children wary. Then there was his accent - so Brooklyn, it approached levels of cartoon-caricature. His memoir, Now and Then - From Coney Island to Here, is no classic but it does prove that Heller for all his famous tetchiness had no scores to settle.
And tetchy he could be. When I first interviewed him in 1988, he had the pose of a full professor and the arrogance of a king.
That day in 1988 there were no jokes, no benign tales about the shock of reaching old age.
Ten years on he was a delight; inquisitive, modest but certainly not stupid. "I never said I was America's greatest writer." Maybe not, but he might have thought it. The secret to Joseph Heller was how he felt on a particular day was exactly what you got. There was no performance, no other side.