An Irishman's Diary

THE PHRASE “Catch-22” turns 50 this year and is still going strong. In fact, thanks to the banking crisis, which has created a whole new set of lose-lose situations for governments and individuals alike, the expression is more useful than ever. So it’s intriguing to wonder what would have happened had Joseph Heller stuck to his original plan and called the now-famous book “Catch-18” instead.

That was its working title during the long gestation period: from about 1953 to 1961. There had even been an extract published under it. Then, as the finished work headed for the presses, nomenclatural disaster struck in the form of a Leon Uris novel, Mila 18.

Maybe “disaster” is overstating it in the circumstances (Uris’s book was about the real tragedy of the Warsaw uprising). But Heller had become deeply attached to his title, as authors will. And now the publishers were adamant that there was no room on the shelves for two war-themed books featuring the same number.

Repetition was one of Catch-22's themes, as it happened. From Major Major to Yossarian's lame words of comfort to a dying man – "there, there" – characters are doomed to say and do things repeatedly. Even so, books need to accentuate their individuality. And beaten to the market by Mila 18, Catch-18 had to become something else.

Various numbers were considered and rejected. The film Stalag 17, a hit from the 1950s, ruled that number out. The more recently released Oceans 11was another problem, even though 11 fitted the repetitive theme and was actively considered. For a time, 14 was also in the running, but the publishers apparently didn't think it funny enough.

Thus, in the end, they picked the number known to bingo players as "two little ducks". But if this was inherently more comical, the public didn't immediately get the joke. Catch 22was published to mixed notices. The New Yorkersuggested it wasn't so much written as "shouted onto paper". the Times Book Reviewcalled it "an emotional hodgepodge".

Nor did it sell particularly well, at first. Then a word-of-mouth effect set in, combined with some belated critical raves. When the paperback version appeared in 1962 it racked up two million sales in a year and has been doing good business ever since.

The mystery of why certain books take off while others sink was one of the sub-plots of a short-lived controversy in the 1990s during which Heller was accused (decades after the alleged fact) of plagiarising an earlier novel set in the US air force of the second World War. Exhibit A was Louis Falstein's Face of a Hero, published to critical acclaim in 1950 but long since fallen into obscurity along with its author.

While he had lived (he died in 1995), Falstein never complained about Catch 22, of whose existence he could not have been unaware. But others did it for him in 1998. Whereupon tests were conducted by forensic scientists of the literary kind, who eventually cleared Heller, attributing such echoes as existed in the later book to the authors' common wartime experiences.

Although it was already a bestseller by the mid 1960s, there’s a school of thought that Heller’s novel secured its greatness thanks to Vietnam. The author himself claimed that, although he had set the book in one war and written it during another (the Korean), it was an inkling of the next major conflict he had in mind when devising his absurdist plot. In which case the book was both prophetic and well-timed, even if its now-famous title – and the phrase it spawned – was arrived at by accident.nomen

SPEAKING OF THINGS prophetic, it seems apt that Joseph Heller was born on – of all dates – May 1st. Not only that, but he first saw the light in 1923, the year "Mayday" was adopted as a distress call for mariners and aviators, who from then on, like the characters in Catch 22, would be fated to repeat the word in situations of stress.

In fact, the distress signal has nothing to do with the month. It's merely a phonetic rendering of the French " m'aider" as in " venez m'aider" ("come help me"). As such it was first suggested by an airport radio officer in London as an easily understood code-word for emergencies: this being at a time when much of the local air traffic was to and from Paris.

The distress call may or may not (no pun intended in either case) feature during the third annual Larkin Hedge School which starts in Dublin tomorrow and which this year includes a session on the history of May Day. Either way, the exploration in song will run from ancient Celtic rites to the medieval celebrations of May-bush and May-pole and on to

modernity, when the date became a labour holiday and a focal point in campaigns for workers rights.

Reflecting these troubled times for the ship of state, the hedge school is spread over three days: or “Mayday Mayday Mayday” if you will. But the focus is on literature and music rather than politics, an opening address by Michael D Higgins notwithstanding. Other performers include Niamh Parsons, Tommy Sands, and Cathal MacConnell. For information and bookings, e-mail larkinhedgeschool@gmail.com or tel: 01-4066517.