Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller

In 1961, Joseph Heller, a 38-year-old advertising and promotion executive for McCall's magazine, finally completed the novel he'd been tinkering with in his spare time for the better part of a decade. The book was called "Catch-18," a title that was later increased by four upon publication of Leon Uris' "Mila 18"--Heller's editors didn't think people would buy two novels with the same number.

They needn't have worried.

"Catch-22's" readership started as a small cult--the hardcover edition never appeared on a best-seller list--and expanded geometrically throughout the Sixties. Today, with sales of over 8,000,000 and counting--it sold over 100,000 copies last year alone--"Catch-22" is the biggest-selling "serious novel" in American publishing history.

From the beginning, "Catch-22's" cult included some of the world's most distinguished, and disparate, citizens. Art Buchwald called it a "masterpiece." Philip Toynbee, in The London Observer, said "Catch-22" was "the greatest satirical work in English since 'Erewhon.' " And newscaster John Chancellor printed up bumper stickers that read, Better Yossarian Than Rotarian, referring, of course, to the book's protagonist, an Assyrian-American World War Two bombardier who wanted to "live forever or die in the attempt."

But when Yossarian went crazy, or seemed to, and asked to be grounded, he found there was only one catch: Anyone who was crazy could get out of combat duty. All he had to do was ask. But anyone who asked to get out of combat duty wasn't really crazy and had to keep flying missions.

"Catch-22's" spiraling insanity, which began to seem more and more sane as the Vietnam war dragged on, confused and irritated some early critics. But as readers became accustomed to the book's radical, time-warp structure, the complaints melted away and "Catch-22" passed through the invisible barrier that separates contemporary fiction from literature. And its title, symbolic of all oppressive tautologies, has become a part of our language.

In the fall of 1974, Heller finally released his long-awaited second novel, "Something Happened." The new book, a stream-of-neurosis peek into the head of Robert Slocum--family man, corporate man, psychotic monster--has unleashed a fusillade of violently mixed reviews. Time and The New Yorker hated it. Playboy called it "the worst thing a writing giant can do to his loyal readers." Yet nearly three quarters of the critics viewed Heller's looping, memory-tape narrative as a dazzling, if depressing, literary tour de force.

The impassioned reviews, the mammoth book-club sale and the long, high ride on every national best-seller list indicate that once again Heller has produced a work to be treasured, despised and fought over for years to come.

The youngest of three children, Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. His father, a truck driver for Messinger's Bakery, died when he was five years old. The Hellers lived in a racially mixed residential section of Coney Island and young Joe did odd jobs while attending Abraham Lincoln High School, where he excelled at writing--and little else. After graduation, he became a file clerk at a casualty-insurance company (a job that re-emerged in "Something Happened" as the scene of Slocum's most agonizing sexual disaster).

After Pearl Harbor, Heller worked briefly at the Norfolk Navy Yard. At 19, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. While bombardier Heller was stationed in Corsica with the 488th Squadron, 340th Bombardment Group, he flew 60 combat missions in a B-25 over Italy and France. After his discharge, as a first lieutenant, he enrolled in college on the GI Bill. He was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from NYU, received a master's degree in American literature at Columbia and studied English literature on a Fulbright scholarship at Oxford. While he was still an undergraduate, the most prestigious magazines in the country were eagerly publishing his short stories. By his senior year, he was already considered one of America's most promising young writers.

Then he stopped writing.

He taught freshman composition at Penn State for a few frustrating semesters, then got a job as a "copy and promo" man at a New York advertising agency. For the next ten years, Heller moved both vertically and horizontally in the promotion business: He did one long stint at Time Inc. and ended up at McCall's. During this period, he began writing again. In 1954, he published in "New World Writing" a story called "The Texan," which later became the first chapter of "Catch-22."

The promising Young Turk of 1949 had been forgotten by the time "Catch-22" came out. The book might have been lost in the welter of first novels by nobodies except for the fortuitous accident of an interview with S. J. Perelman, published in the New York Herald Tribune. Perelman, asked if he'd read any good books lately, mentioned a title nobody had heard of: "Catch-22." A spate of critical attention--some passionately pro, some viciously con--followed.

A $15,000,000 film version of "Catch-22," directed by Mike Nichols, was the financial disaster of 1970. Nichols' budget was virtually unlimited (during production, he assembled the world's 12th largest bomber force). But the film sacrificed most of the book's humor in a vain attempt to establish a "story line"--something the novel didn't have to begin with.

Meanwhile, Heller continued to pursue his muse at a leisurely pace. As one close friend put it, "Joe likes to keep the rest of his life open, in case anything comes up." The summer after "Catch-22's" publication, Heller had begun accumulating notes for a new book. Robert Gottlieb, his editor, took out a somewhat premature advertisement: "Joseph Heller is now working on his second novel, 'Something Happened.' Publication date not set yet, of course--but look for it sometime before we get to the moon." As matters turned out, Neil Armstrong took his one small step for mankind long before anything happened for Heller's publisher. As Heller put it, he kept being "interrupted": Throughout the Sixties, he toured the country, speaking and demonstrating against the Vietnam war. He did several short stints as a Hollywood "script doctor" and in 1965 took a two-year sabbatical to write and produce a play, "We Bombed in New Haven." Despite extravagant reviews, it did.

Thirteen years and six lunar landings after "Catch-22," "Something Happened" was published and became an immediate international best seller.

Joseph Heller and Shirley, his wife of almost 30 years, winter in an elegant old courtyard building on Manhattan's Upper West Side and summer on the beaches of Long Island. Their two children, Erica and Ted, are grown and scattered. Along with his writing, Heller teaches fiction at the City College of New York. He makes few new friends, but the old ones seem to last. Some of them, members of what they call the Gourmet Club, have been meeting for dinner in New York's Chinatown at least once a week for the past 13 years. Fellow gourmets include Jules Feiffer, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (when they're in town), novelists Mario ("The Godfather") Puzo and George ("Flee the Angry Strangers") Mandel, playwright Joe ("Fiddler on the Roof") Stein, adman Ngoot Lee, jeweler Julie Green and one Speed Vogel, occupation unknown.

At 52, Heller seems finally to have achieved it all: critical acclaim, popular success, a shucking of the dreaded one-book-author syndrome. So we thought it an opportune time to discuss life, literature and "the Snowdens of yesteryear" with the man whose wacky prescience had foretold a world of Vietnams and Watergates, and assigned writer Sam Merrill (whose "Mason Hoffenberg Gets in a Few Licks" appeared in Playboy's November 1973 issue) to interview Heller.

Merrill reports:

"My first meeting with Heller took place at his summer home in Amagansett, Long Island, a quiet little seashore town about two and a half hours out of Manhattan. When I arrived, Heller was encased in a set of massive headphones, listening to Wagner's 'Götterdämmerung' and reading Dickens' 'Nicholas Nickle by.' While we chatted on the sun deck-- eating Jarlsberg cheese and drinking French-roast coffee--Heller removed his shirt. His chest and legs were firm, tanned, supple. Only his neck looked 52 years old.

"Heller seemed leaner, more wolfish in person than on his dust jackets. And his speech was a curious but thoroughly engaging amalgam. The words--spare, epigrammatic, meticulously considered-- were delivered in unreconstructed Brook-lynese. While he spoke, a toothpick danced magically from one corner of his mouth to the other. He told me he'd learned that trick, employing the treacherous cupped-tongue technique, while giving up smoking in 1955.

"Chewing his nails and squirming around uncomfortably, Heller obviously had trouble sitting still for an interview. Yet he fielded each question patiently, his expression flickering between Stud Poker Gothic and Bittersweet Irony 'Catch-22' Book Jacket Grin. He was a frequent and infectious laugher.

"Pulling out of his driveway that first afternoon, I caught a glimpse of Heller in my rearview mirror. He had begun to jog his daily three miles in a chilly, offshore fog that clung so close to the ground he was visible only from the waist up. The image reminded me of Kid Sampson, the young pilot in 'Catch-22' who was sheared in half by McWatt's propeller.

"Subsequent meetings took place at the Central Park South office/apartment in which Heller wrote 'Something Happened.' His work space was in farcical contrast with his two tasteful homes. A three-foot beer bottle, a broken stereo and a ruptured couch dominated a decor that could perhaps best be termed Flatbush Moderne. It soon became apparent that when Heller is writing, he simply does not see anything else!

"Our conversations started with his own involvement in the events described in 'Catch-22.' "

[Q] Playboy: How much of Catch-22 is based on your own wartime experiences?

[A] Heller: Well, like Yossarian, I volunteered for the Army Air Corps and became a bombardier. But I didn't try to avoid being sent overseas, as he did. I actually hoped I would get into combat. I was just 19 and there were a great many movies being made about the war; it all seemed so dramatic and heroic. I remember my mother weeping as the trolley car pulled away with me on it. I couldn't figure out why she was so unhappy. I felt like I was going to Hollywood.

[Q] Playboy: So you viewed World War Two as a kind of glorious crusade?

[A] Heller: No, but I saw it as a war of necessity. Everybody did. Young people today don't know what it's like to fight in a war that makes sense to anybody. And neither did the people in my parents' generation. World War One and the earlier wars in Europe were as nonsensical as Vietnam. But Pearl Harbor united this country in a strong and wholesome and healthy way.

[Q] Playboy: About his war experiences, Yossarian complains that people he's never met keep shooting at him every time he flies into the air to drop bombs on them. We gather that you didn't feel persecuted.

[A] Heller: At first, I was sorry when nobody shot at us. I wanted to see a sky full of flak and dogfights and billowing parachutes. War was like a movie to me until, on my 37th mission, we bombed Avignon and a guy in my plane was wounded. I suddenly realized, "Good God! They're trying to kill me, too!" War wasn't much fun after that.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like the Avignon mission in Catch-22, when Snowden, the gunner, is killed.

[A] Heller: It is, and it's described pretty accurately in the book. Our copilot went berserk at the controls and threw us into a dive. Then one of our gunners was hit by flak and the pilot kept yelling into the intercom, "Help him. Help the bombardier." And I was yelling back, "I'm the bombardier. I'm OK." The gunner's leg was blown open and I took care of him. After Avignon, all I wanted to do was go home.

[Q] Playboy: Was that because, like Yossarian, you began to suspect you were being sent on missions only to make your superior officers look good?

[A] Heller: No, it was because I began to suspect I didn't want to die. But I was a good soldier and did as I was told.

[Q] Playboy: Did doing what you were told entail anything about which you're particularly sorry now?

[A] Heller: No, but there was one low-level bombing-and-strafing mission I didn't happen to go on. They couldn't find any military targets, so they shot up everything that moved: women, children, animals. The men were in good spirits after that mission.

[Q] Playboy: If you'd gone on that mission, would you have machine-gunned women, children and animals?

[A] Heller: I might have. There's something sexual about being in a big plane, with a big gun and having big bombs to drop.

[Q] Playboy: Aside from Yossarian, some of the other characters in Catch-22 have become cult figures in their own right. Are any of them based on people you knew?

[A] Heller: Just Hungry Joe. His real name is Joe Chrenko and he's now an insurance agent in New Jersey.

[Q] Playboy: Hungry Joe is the one who has screaming nightmares in his tent. Did Chrenko also run around Rome claiming to be a Life photographer so he could take pictures of naked girls?

[A] Heller: Only once.

[Q] Playboy: Did he complain about the way you portray him in the book?

[A] Heller: His only complaint is that I didn't use his last name. He feels it would have helped his insurance business.

[Q] Playboy: How about the rest of the characters?

[A] Heller: They're not based on anyone I knew in the war. They're products of an imagination that drew on American life in the postwar period. The Cold War, really. I deliberately seeded the book with anachronisms like loyalty oaths, helicopters, IBM machines and agricultural subsidies to create the feeling of American society from the McCarthy period on. So when Milo Minderbinder says, "What's good for Milo Minder-binder is good for the country," he's paraphrasing Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Motors, who told a Senate committee, "What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa."

[A] But I resisted the temptation to make Milo a bloated plutocrat stereotype. And I moved away from the other kind of stereotype--William Holden or Tony Curtis as the con man who gets things done. Instead, I gave him a mental and moral simplicity that, to my mind, makes him a horrifyingly dangerous person because he lacks evil intent. Milo uses the credo of the National Association of Manufacturers and the chamber of commerce--but I gave him a sincerity those organizations don't have.

[Q] Playboy: How about Major Major, the timid officer whom nobody can get in to see unless he's officially out?

[A] Heller: He's drawn from the McCarthy period as well. An Army dentist, Captain Peress, had been promoted to major, even though he refused to sign loyalty oaths. Toward the end of the Army-McCarthy hearings, when he had little else to do, Joe McCarthy kept asking who had promoted Major Peress. I took a paragraph straight out of the news reports and slipped it into the chapter about Major Major, who was promoted by an IBM machine. When he becomes suspect because he studied English history--wasn't American history good enough for him?-- people start running around Washington, asking, "Who promoted Major Major?"

[Q] Playboy: And ex-Pfc. Wintergreen, the enlisted man who really runs the Army?

[A] Heller: Wintergreen came out of both my military and my corporate experience. In a large corporation, the way to get ahead is often to get in with mail clerks and secretaries of important people. Careers can be made or broken simply by tearing up certain memos, and in the Army, although I was an officer, the only people I was afraid of were the enlisted men in the orderly room. They could process or not process my requests, take me on or off combat duty. In my dramatization of Catch-22, there's a line that doesn't appear in the book. Wintergreen says, "I was going to cancel the Normandy invasion, until Eisenhower committed more armor."

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to Yossarian, are any other of his experiences like yours?

[A] Heller: His encounter with Luciana, the Roman whore, corresponds exactly with an experience I had. He sleeps with her, she refuses money and suggests that he keep her address on a slip of paper. When he agrees, she sneers, "Why? So you can tear it up?" He says of course he won't and tears it up the minute she's gone--then regrets it bitterly. That's just what happened to me in Rome. Luciana was Yossarian's vision of a perfect relationship. That's why he saw her only once, and perhaps that's why I saw her only once. If he examined perfection too closely, imperfections would show up.

[Q] Playboy: Murray Kempton once wrote that, although Catch-22 is often considered a radical book, the only aspect of Yossarian's behavior that deviates from traditional morality is his "appreciation of lechery." Do you consider yourself a lecher?

[A] Heller: No.

[Q] Playboy: So much for that. Returning to the war for a moment--

[A] Heller: I assume you'll be returning to my sex life later on.

[Q] Playboy: In detail, if you insist. But for now, you said World War Two seemed glamorous to you, like a movie. Don't you think young people during the Vietnam era were more sophisticated than that?

[A] Heller: Wars are still initiated by a certain type of professional soldier whose ambition it is to act out fantasy scenes from war movies, and they're still fought by very young people who have no more exciting life to lead. One very practical reason war seemed glamorous to me was that the standard of living was higher in the Army than in Coney Island. I ate better and had more money in my pocket than ever before. And when I got home, I went to college on the GI Bill. In the face of so many advantages, death seemed like a relatively minor drawback.

[Q] Playboy: But the country was just coming out of the Depression then. America was prosperous when we entered Vietnam.

[A] Heller: Not all Americans were prosperous. The Vietnam war found many blacks and Latins in the same situation I was in after Pearl Harbor. They could see no future in the ghetto; the Army offered travel, education and money.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why the antiwar movement was largely a middle-class affair?

[A] Heller: It's one of the reasons. Middle-class draftees in the Sixties suffered economic deprivation. They could travel all over the world anyway. They were going to college anyway. They had good jobs waiting for them. But, of course, the antiwar movement was ideologically based, also. The people who were aware of how we had stumbled into Vietnam were the ones who wanted us to get out.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by "stumbled into Vietnam"? Don't you see our involvement in that war as based on some reason or idea?

[A] Heller: No, I saw--I see the Vietnam war as an extension of the Cold War that began in the late Forties and ended with the decline of the domino theory soon after John Kennedy's death.

[Q] Playboy: But if the Cold War ended in the mid-Sixties, why did we remain in Vietnam until 1972?

[A] Heller: For no reason at all. That's the point! We often continue believing in things--and this is true of religions as well as ideologies--long after the circumstances that gave rise to the beliefs have disappeared. The belief in stopping communism wherever it threatens to advance simply carried over into another culture long after the reason for the belief disappeared. We weren't fighting communism in Vietnam. We were fighting culture lag.

[Q] Playboy: Eventually, Yossarian deserts an Army that doesn't make sense to him. Do you feel at all responsible for the guys in Vietnam--and apparently there were a lot of them--who went over the hill after reading Catch-22?

[A] Heller: If anyone accused me of being the operative force in any specific desertion, I would deny it. I don't believe one book can shape an attitude or an action. But if I was responsible for people's running away from the war, then I evaded that responsibility consistently.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Heller: Often, while I was speaking publicly against the war, young men would ask me, "What would you do?" or "What should I do?" I always avoided those questions, because it would have been easy for me to give them the answer they wanted: that I wouldn't, and they shouldn't, serve. I, however, was not facing prison or exile.

[Q] Playboy: But Yossarian does desert, and you approve of his action.

[A] Heller: Yes, and I would have gone further than Yossarian. I would have condoned any method of avoiding military service in Vietnam--including the one Yossarian rejects as being corrupt.

[Q] Playboy: You mean publicly endorsing the war in order to be sent home a hero?

[A] Heller: Yes, and others Yossarian doesn't even consider, like using influence or buying a deferment. I don't think anybody should ever be compelled to fight in a war whose objectives he does not endorse.

[Q] Playboy: But to paraphrase Major Major, what if everyone felt that way?

[A] Heller: Then, to paraphrase Yossarian, I'd be a damn fool to feel any other way.

[Q] Playboy: Do you prefer an all-volunteer Army?

[A] Heller: I have no fear that a professional Army is going to be out of touch with civilization. Conscripts have never exerted a softening effect on the military.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still feel, as you did when you were 19, that World War Two was a necessary war?

[A] Heller: The fact that the political and economic survival of this country was at stake is no longer as important to me as it was. But, yes, I still feel it was a necessary war. Catch-22 was criticized because Yossarian justifies his participation in World War Two until the outcome is no longer in doubt. It offended some people, during the Vietnam war, that I had not written a truly pacifist book. But I am not a true pacifist. World War Two was necessary at least to the extent that we were fighting for the survival of millions of people.

[Q] Playboy: You mean the Jews?

[A] Heller: Jews first, then blacks, then the whole sequence of extermination that was operating in Europe.

[Q] Playboy: As a Jew, do you have any special feelings about Israel's survival?

[A] Heller: That's a difficult, confusing question. Emotionally, I have a strong attachment to Israel, even though I've never been there and have no desire to go. A year ago, I was certain Israel would be sold out.

[Q] Playboy: Now you're not so sure?

[A] Heller: Strategically, I'm beginning to understand why this country has stood by Israel for so long. In case any type of mischief becomes necessary, Israel would be the only reliable ally America would have in that part of the world.

[Q] Playboy: When you say mischief, are you talking about a possible oil war?

[A] Heller: If the flow of oil is seriously interrupted, or the price raised again, Western civilization will be out of business. There'll be no alternative but to go in and take the oil--that is, if we still can. But Italy hasn't the navy or air force to take even Libya. France can't do it. Germany certainly can't. England can't. So it would be up to us. And Israel, which was disposable a year ago, would become useful again. We'd need a friendly place to land our airplanes, tie up our boats and see that our soldiers get laid.

[Q] Playboy: Do you suppose an oil war would unite America?

[A] Heller: If you mean in the way World War Two did, no. That war presented a unique set of conditions and I don't think we'll have another war like it--so we might as well give up hoping and resign ourselves to peace. Even in the Revolutionary War, there were huge sections of the population that didn't want to separate from England. I have a feeling they were right, that we'd be better off if we were a part of England.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Heller: We'd have a better form of government. The parliamentary system would be a vast improvement over what we have now. Our Constitution looks good on paper and probably worked quite well with 13 colonies and about 72 registered voters. But now there's too much distance between the citizen-voter and his elected representative. He doesn't know I exist, and I wish he didn't. And with over 200,000,000 people, the Presidency has become a kind of public-relations enterprise for the party in power.

[Q] Playboy: But do you really care about politics? In 1972, you said you hadn't voted for a President in 12 years.

[A] Heller: Then I voted for McGovern.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Heller: Nixon made me do it.

[Q] Playboy: Has that experience changed you?

[A] Heller: Yes. Now I'm never going to vote again--for anybody. The smartest people in Washington are the political reporters. They write about their inferiors.

[Q] Playboy: So, generally, you'd say American politics attracts a low class of people?

[A] Heller: Yes, with one exception. There is a type of person who is occasionally attracted to politics for idealistic reasons and, once elected, does a creditable job. This is the gentleman who already has as much money as he wants and aspires to public office for reasons that have little to do with personal ambition. I may be naïve, but I felt Averell Harriman was in that class.

[Q] Playboy: Would you include Nelson Rockefeller?

[A] Heller: I would exclude Nelson Rockefeller. There's a vicious, emotional quality to his ambition. But I would include Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox. These are people who aspire to high position out of boredom.

[Q] Playboy: So you prefer a sated dilettante to a dedicated reformer?

[A] Heller: Yes, and I feel safer with someone who inherited his money than with a self-made man. I think people like Roosevelt and Harriman and Stevenson are better suited to public office than the "sun-belt" millionaires who surrounded Nixon. The self-made man scares me. He attaches too much importance to his own personal accomplishments and yet is never really secure with people who are born into the highest order of society. Truman was an exception. He wasn't a social climber. Eisenhower was.

[Q] Playboy: Essentially, then, your ideal public official would be someone like Rockefeller or Kennedy.

[A] Heller: But not Rockefeller. Or Kennedy. The Kennedy Administration was like a bunch of spoiled fraternity brats celebrating after having bought a campus election. They cavorted around, pushing each other into swimming pools. I think Johnson was more entertaining than Kennedy--until the Vietnam war escalated and his Administration collapsed. I've been delighted to see how dismally Kennedy's people have fared politically since his death. They were a disagreeable bunch. Even John Kenneth Galbraith seems to be a man without principles-- or, if he has any, they are of only joking importance. Otherwise, he wouldn't be so friendly with William Buckley. You get the impression that although the two may disagree over a minor concern like the world's economy, when they get down to important matters like yachting, they are still in the same club.

[Q] Playboy: What have you got against Buckley?

[A] Heller: I feel sorry for anybody who has to tangle with Buckley. Even though his reasoning is defective, he carries off a debate with so much élan that he makes the argument itself almost superfluous.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Rockefeller will be the next President?

[A] Heller: I don't think he'll let anything stand in his way. Rockefeller is so desperate for success he is in a position of virtually groveling for the Presidency. He has now lost the only favorable quality I ever saw in him: the poise, the aplomb of the gentleman born to wealth.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anyone you'd care to see elected President in 1976?

[A] Heller: No.

[Q] Playboy: How about yourself?

[A] Heller: Oh, no! I believe the Government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. Hence, the term public servant. I wouldn't want to be President, because I wouldn't want to put myself in a menial position.

[Q] Playboy: So you like the notion of a benevolent aristocrat in politics. What about a hard-nosed reformer?

[A] Heller: I don't like the way reformers react to our political process. They have a difficult time realizing they must compromise or remain outsiders.

[Q] Playboy: In other words, they don't become corrupt quickly enough?

[A] Heller: Exactly. A member of a legislative body who does not prostitute his integrity at the earliest possible moment is doing a grave disservice to his constituents. Unless he cooperates with the "inner circle," he'll never get his bills passed and the people who elected him will suffer.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there is a better system of government in the world than the one we broadly call Western democracy?

[A] Heller: No system offers greater personal liberty; the citizens of the totalitarian countries of the left and right enjoy less freedom than we do. But Johnson and Nixon were frightening because they demonstrated that an American President--even in a democracy, without Government censorship--is capable of waging a one-man war. That would not be possible in Russia, which is a dictatorship run by committee, or in China, where there are several powerful men.

[Q] Playboy: Is that power inherent in the Presidency, or did we just happen to elect a pair of megalomaniacs?

[A] Heller: The power to exercise dictatorial control over the military is manifest in the office. A President can make war in a moment of personal panic or insecurity and no one in Congress will stop him.

[Q] Playboy: But Congress claims to have learned its lesson from Vietnam. Wouldn't it now be tougher on a President who asked for war powers?

[A] Heller: If another President faked another Gulf of Tonkin incident, there would still be only about two Senators voting against the resolution, and they'd be tossed out in the next election.

[Q] Playboy: Shortly before his resignation, some people close to Nixon worried that he would push the panic button, try to mobilize the military in his defense. Others described his mental state as "serene." Do you think he was insane?

[A] Heller: I would say no. Nixon had a very powerful sense of his own weakness. He doubted his abilities to an extent that could be called neurotic. Some people who repress their self-doubts overcompensate with a form of egotism. It is interesting that Nixon was never able to do that. His mechanism of repression never functioned well enough, so his self-doubts were always on his mind. He could never convince himself he was a superior person, and consequently was afraid people would observe how weak he felt. At the end, as you say, people in Washington were frightened. There was a suspicion that Nixon was insane. And certainly during his farewell speech, he took leave of what is customarily called sanity. He was not in touch with the situation or with himself. But I believe that was a temporary aberration. The real Nixon was a pathetic, fearful man who spent his life prophesying his own failures and living up to his own prophecies.

[Q] Playboy: His self-doubts aside, do you think Nixon is an intelligent man?

[A] Heller: Throughout Nixon's political career, there is no evidence of any superior qualities. He had little intelligence, no gift for understanding a situation--and hasn't yet left us a single sally or epigram worth quoting.

[Q] Playboy: How about Johnson?

[A] Heller: At least Johnson had a sense of humor. His jokes were apparently very cruel, but they were jokes. And Johnson was shrewd. He had a quality of strength missing in both Nixon and Agnew.

[Q] Playboy: Is that quality of strength evidenced by any political figures today?

[A] Heller: William Simon, Nelson Rockefeller, John Mitchell. Their strengths are apparent.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe public figures show us an accurate portrait of themselves in the media?

[A] Heller: They can't avoid it. I think Gerald Ford, for instance, has lived up to the image he projected while being considered for the Vice-Presidency.

[Q] Playboy: What image is that?

[A] Heller: That of the party hack with very limited intellectual gifts--a family man, team player, Rotarian. Every recent change in American politics has been for the worse and Ford will not prove an exception. A year ago, it was hard for me to imagine anyone worse than Nixon. But Nixon, because of the self-knowledge of his own small nature, may prove to have been less dangerous than Ford, who lacks that self-knowledge. Ford is a lot like Milo Minderbinder. Thinks of himself as a good guy, and God knows what devastation may result from that misconception.

[Q] Playboy: Some of the political changes you mention have come about through assassinations. Do you believe in any of the assassination-conspiracy theories?

[A] Heller: No. But not because I have too high an opinion of human nature to believe there are people in this country willing to develop assassination plots; I'm convinced such people exist. However, I have such a low opinion of human nature that I don't think the conspirators would be capable of keeping a secret. If I were involved in a conspiracy that pulled off a difficult caper, there are a few people I would want to know about it. And each of them would tell one or two more. People are boastful. I could be wrong, but applying the same logic, I told Bob Woodward recently I didn't believe there was really a "Deep Throat," the guy who was the secret informer for his Watergate investigation.

[Q] Playboy: What was Woodward's response?

[A] Heller: He was understandably offended. So I asked him if he had revealed Deep Throat's identity to at least one person who didn't have to know. He said he had, which was a very human answer, and that convinced me my theory was correct. Because that one person, being at least as human as Woodward, would have told one other person, who, in turn, would have told one or two more. The informant's identity would have become public knowledge within days.

[Q] Playboy: Then why would he invent such a character? To lend validity to otherwise unsubstantiated reports?

[A] Heller: I believe Woodward and Bernstein's reporting was better substantiated than they themselves were willing to admit. I believe they had many sources inside the Government, and the best way to protect them all was to create one person who didn't exist.

[Q] Playboy: Woodward and Bernstein are currently stars of the college lecture circuit. That's a role you've filled twice--during the Sixties, as the author of Catch-22 and one of America's leading antiwar spokesmen, and again recently, since the publication of your new book, Something Happened. Do you find that students have changed much since the war?

[A] Heller: For the record, the Vietnam war is still being fought. But if you're asking if college students have changed much since the draft was abolished and most American forces pulled out of Indochina, I'd say there has been a decline in political action and interest.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Heller: There are two conditions that must exist simultaneously to excite political activity in any population. First, the issues must be important and, second, one must know exactly how one feels about them. For college students in the Sixties, the war and the draft met those conditions. Today, though the questions are important, there is no clear-cut sense of what to do about them. So we are back to a normal state of political interest--practically none.

[Q] Playboy: We haven't talked about your own college experience. After you completed your wartime tour of duty and were shipped home--

[A] Heller: Shipped is right. I was so terrified on my last few missions, I made a vow that if I got out of the war alive, I would never go up in an airplane again. The guys who were in a hurry to get home flew back across the Atlantic. I waited for a boat.

[Q] Playboy: How long did your antifiyling vow last?

[A] Heller: Until 1960, when I got stuck on a train for 24 hours. Suddenly, falling out of the sky didn't seem like such an objectionable alternative.

[Q] Playboy: What happened next, after you were literally shipped home?

[A] Heller: I met my wife, got married, entered college on the GI Bill, did graduate work at Columbia and Oxford and began writing seriously. And reading.

[Q] Playboy: After reading something you liked, did you find yourself saying, "I wish I'd written that"?

[A] Heller: No, but with some authors I found myself saying, "I could have written that if I'd thought of it."

[Q] Playboy: For instance?

[A] Heller: I felt I could have written the plays of Clifford Odets. Unfortunately, Odets had already written those plays.

[Q] Playboy: Odets? That's not your style!

[A] Heller: I didn't have my style then.

[Q] Playboy: But you were being published. Even as an undergraduate, your Esquire and Atlantic stories made you one of the country's most promising young writers.

[A] Heller: Those stories were written while I was taking a creative-writing course at NYU in 1946. After the war, everyone who could write dialog was copying Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara, and everyone who couldn't was copying Irwin Shaw. It took more talent to copy Shaw, because he used language better. My stories were as imitative as the rest.

[Q] Playboy: Imitative of whom?

[A] Heller: I was writing New Yorker--type stories, stories by Jewish writers about Jewish life in Brooklyn. By the time I was a senior in college, I'd done a little more reading and I began to suspect that literature was more serious, more interesting than analyzing an endless string of Jewish families in the Depression. I could see that type of writing was going to go out of style. I wanted to write something that was very good and I had nothing good to write. So I wrote nothing.

[Q] Playboy: Did you formally "give up writing," or was it a day-to-day thing?

[A] Heller: I formally gave up writing those trivial stories. In fact, I haven't written a single short story since. But I formally began looking for a novel that I could consider important.

[Q] Playboy: You mean you didn't come home from World War Two with Catch-22 rattling around in your head?

[A] Heller: As I've said, Catch-22 wasn't really about World War Two. It was about American society during the Cold War, during the Korean War, and about the possibility of a Vietnam. I didn't get the idea for Catch-22 until I had read many more writers. Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night was the book that touched it off. Céline did things with time and structure and colloquial speech I'd never experienced before, and I found those new experiences pleasurable. It was unlike reading Joyce, who did things I'd never seen but that weren't pleasurable.

[Q] Playboy: How did Céline's book touch off Catch-22?

[A] Heller: I was lying in bed, thinking about Céline, when suddenly the opening lines of Catch-22 came to me: "It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Blank fell madly in love with him." I didn't come up with the name Yossarian until later, and the chaplain wasn't necessarily an Army chaplain. He could have been a prison chaplain. Ideas of plot, pace, character, style and tone all tumbled out that night, pretty much the way they finally appeared in the book. The next morning, at work, I wrote out the whole first chapter and sent it to my agent, Candida Donadio, who sold it to New World Writing. I was so excited I couldn't wait to begin chapter two.

[A] One year later, I did.

[Q] Playboy: You're not one of the world's fastest writers, are you?

[A] Heller: By the time I began Catch-22, I'd become so slow I suspected that might well be the only book I'd ever write.

[Q] Playboy: Is one of the reasons for your breath-taking lack of speed the fact that you insist on doing all your own editing?

[A] Heller: If it weren't for the fact that I do practically none of my own editing, I'd never finish anything at all. As I submit sections of a manuscript to my editor, Bob Gottlieb, I indicate areas that might be cut. Then we discuss them and a decision is reached. That's the ideal situation for me, because without an editor I could trust, I'd still be in the middle of Something Happened, cutting out a section one week, putting it back the next, getting nowhere. I'm a chronic fiddler.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think this business about lines "coming to you in bed" is rather unusual?

[A] Heller: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: Did Something Happened start out that way, too?

[A] Heller: No, I was sitting in a chair when the opening lines of Something Happened came to me.

[Q] Playboy: And where was that chair?

[A] Heller: On Fire Island. Catch-22 had been out for a while and was doing pretty well but wasn't near the best-seller lists. I wanted to quit my job writing promotional copy, but I had a wife and two kids to support. I wanted to do another novel but had no ideas. I was worried. Then two sentences came to me: "In the office in which I work, there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five is afraid of four people." In a dream, a kind of controlled reverie, I quickly developed the characters, the mood of anxiety, the beginning, the end and most of the middle of Something Happened. And I knew Bob Slocum, my protagonist, intimately. Eventually, a better opening line came to me: "I get the willies when I see closed doors," and I wrote the first chapter around that line. But I kept the original to lead off the second part.

[Q] Playboy: Do your closing lines come to you the same way your opening lines do?

[A] Heller: Yes. The closing line of Catch-22 came to me on a bus.

[Q] Playboy: How about the closing line of Something Happened?

[A] Heller: For six years, I had what I thought was going to be the closing line of Something Happened on an index card. The line was, "I am a cow."

[Q] Playboy: "I am a cow"?

[A] Heller: It seemed good at the time and, besides, I can't start a book until I have a closing line.

[Q] Playboy: Have you a new book in mind?

[A] Heller: Several prospective openings have come to me. But I've been too busy to develop them.

[Q] Playboy: Would you be willing to try out some possible openings on us?

[A] Heller: All right. People have always asked me what happened to Dunbar, a character who disappeared in Catch-22. That question intrigues me, so I considered writing a novel that would begin: "Dunbar woke up with his name on the door and a Bigelow on the floor and wondered how he had got there." It was going to be a novel about amnesia. It went nowhere.

[Q] Playboy: Any others?

[A] Heller: "The kid, they say, was born in a manger, but frankly, I have my doubts." I liked that line for a while, but nothing came of it, either.

[Q] Playboy: Can you produce these on command?

[A] Heller: I have to be bored. I'm going to Mexico for a couple of weeks with the hope of achieving perfect boredom. New York is distracting. I suffer from a nervous impulse that makes me find excuses to call my publisher.

[Q] Playboy: Since Something Happened is one of the biggest money-makers Knopf has ever had, they must always be glad to hear from you. Why would you need an excuse to call them?

[A] Heller: I always need an excuse, because I can never bring myself to reveal the true nature of the call.

[Q] Playboy: Which is?

[A] Heller: To prevent them from forgetting about me.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think that's a somewhat unrealistic fear?

[A] Heller: I don't think so. I also fear that a day will go by in which nobody in the whole country buys a copy of the book. I once mentioned this to the people at Knopf and they laughed, as though such a thing were totally out of the question. But I need constant reassurance that my publisher remembers me and that Americans are still buying books.

[Q] Playboy: Besides striving to achieve perfect boredom, you're teaching. Why? Presumably, you don't need the money.

[A] Heller: I teach fiction writing at City College in New York to students who are either very interested or drop the course. I believe I'm known as a hard marker. Money is no longer a primary consideration, but I enjoy the feedback I get from the better students.

[Q] Playboy: For some reason, we have difficulty relating to the idea that Joseph Heller still grades papers.

[A] Heller: That strikes me as a little fishy, too.

[Q] Playboy: Have you considered giving up teaching so you could spend more time on your writing?

[A] Heller: If I gave up teaching, I would have no time at all for writing. When I was working on Catch-22, I had a demanding job during the day. I was too tired to go out at night, so I wrote Catch-22.

[Q] Playboy: You wrote Catch-22 in the evenings?

[A] Heller: I spent two or three hours a night on it for eight years. I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to Catch-22. I couldn't imagine what Americans did at night when they weren't writing novels.

[Q] Playboy: You're not into TV, then.

[A] Heller: There's nothing I like on television. I used to watch ball games.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a sports fan?

[A] Heller: Not anymore. My wife and I went through a period of going to hockey games. We haven't done that for a while.

[Q] Playboy: When was the last time?

[A] Heller: Nineteen fifty-four.

[Q] Playboy: How about football, baseball, basketball?

[A] Heller: I'm not a football fan, but I was a fan of the football strike last year.

[Q] Playboy: Were you sympathetic with the players' demands?

[A] Heller: I never found out what their demands were. I just like it when things erupt. That's why I was sorry to see Nixon resign. Impeachment, like the football strike, was a pleasant change in the news. Otherwise, it's just laws and wars, winning and losing, elections and touchdowns. I like it better when something happens.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do with your time now if you weren't teaching?

[A] Heller: I'd probably run amuck in Rome. When a writer is between books, he needs responsibility to keep him from making a fool of himself. Authors go through a period of craziness between books. Some invest in uranium stock, others change wives and agents. Some commit suicide. It's worse when you're young. Luckily, I was 38 and pretty well set in my ways when Catch-22 came out. I had a good job and a nice apartment. If I'd been, say, 27 and living in a cold-water flat, my marriage would have broken up, I would have bought an estate in East Hampton I couldn't afford and, to pay for it, I would have started a second novel too soon.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think success is more damaging to a writer than failure?

[A] Heller: Both are difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

[Q] Playboy: In balance, which is more beneficial to one's spiritual health?

[A] Heller: Failure.

[Q] Playboy: Which do you prefer personally?

[A] Heller: Success.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?

[A] Heller: Most of the things I've wanted in life I've either gotten or stopped wanting. Catch-22 fulfilled all my fantasies but two: It didn't make me rich and it wasn't on the New York Times bestseller list. But in critical and popular esteem, it exceeded my wildest dreams.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever tire of reading and rereading your own work?

[A] Heller: No, I learn a lot from reading my work aloud, as I do on college campuses. I read sections of Something Happened at the University of Michigan recently and learned that for it to have remained a best seller as long as it has, it must be reaching a wider, older audience than Catch-22. I got a great response from the students with those passages dealing with Slocum's children. But during parts about his office, about fearing old age, there was silence. The attention was there, but the magic was gone.

[Q] Playboy: During the 12 years it took to write Something Happened, you were no longer working as an adman, so presumably you wrote during the day. What was your schedule like?

[A] Heller: I wrote for two or three hours in the morning, then went to a gym to work out. I'd have lunch alone at a counter, go back to the apartment and work some more. Sometimes I'd lie down and just think about the book all afternoon--daydream, if you will. In the evenings, I'd often go to dinner with friends.

[Q] Playboy: We've heard that you and your friends invented a game called Scapegoat and you played it fanatically while you were writing Catch-22.

[A] Heller: I and a few friends--George Mandel, Mario Puzo and some others--redesigned a board game played with a deck of cards. It's a good gambling game.

[Q] Playboy: Did you, in fact, play fanatically?

[A] Heller: I don't know what you'd call fanatic. We'd stay up all night three or four times a week--

[Q] Playboy: That's what we'd call fanatic.

[A] Heller: We were all writing novels at the time. It was a good release.

[Q] Playboy: Would you tell us how it's played?

[A] Heller: No.

[Q] Playboy: Most writers will do anything for money before they become successful; but you rewrote the screenplay for Sex and the Single Girl after Catch-22 came out. Why?

[A] Heller: For the money. They paid me $5000 a week. I wish somebody would offer me $5000 a week to work on something right now. I'd take it.

[Q] Playboy: Did you work on any other films?

[A] Heller:Dirty Dingus Magee and Casino Royale. Charley Feldman. a nice but very-nervous man, was producing Casino Royale and he traveled all over the country, hiring writers to do various scenes. He wanted to make sure he had enough material. Woody Allen later told me that he and I both did versions of the same scene.

[Q] Playboy: Few film makers have the luxury of choosing the Woody Allen or the Joseph Heller version of a scene. Which one ended up in the movie?

[A] Heller: Neither. Feldman threw them both out.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like working on Sex and the Single Girl?

[A] Heller: It was an enriching experience. Natalie Wood didn't want to do the picture, but she owed it to Warner Bros. on a three-film deal. And Tony Curtis needed the money to settle a divorce. That's what I like best about the movie industry: the art and idealism.

[Q] Playboy: Did you participate in the film version of Catch-22?

[A] Heller: No, because I was experienced enough in film making to have virtually no hope that Catch-22 would become a good film. And if I had participated in making it, I would have been compelled to care how it turned out. So I refused generous screenplay offers.

[Q] Playboy: Did you like the film?

[A] Heller: It was OK, but I can never get the image of Buck Henry, who did the screenplay, out of my mind. I imagine him tearing through a dog-eared copy of the book while moaning, "Oy, vay, there's no plot here!" But when they were getting ready to shoot, I became friendly with Alan Arkin and Mike Nichols. They were so concerned about doing "justice" to the book--which is. of course, impossible in any film--that I found myself rooting for them.

[Q] Playboy: But the picture bombed. Do you think it deserved its bad reviews?

[A] Heller: I think if the same film had been foreign, in black and white, without stars and based on an unknown novel, it would have been a major critical success. This is not a comment on the quality of the film but on the consistency of film reviews.

[Q] Playboy: Do you find that there is an exceptional thrill in seeing your work performed?

[A] Heller: It's intoxicating, misleading. It appeals to the basest parts of one's mental anatomy. I love it.

[Q] Playboy: Your play, We Bombed in New Haven, opened to worshipful reviews. Several critics called it the most important play of the Sixties--

[A] Heller: And the Seventies.

[Q] Playboy: But it was not a commercial success. Why?

[A] Heller: Because it made people feel guilty, made them accessories to murder. People like to walk out of a theater feeling virtuous.

[Q] Playboy: Do you admire the work of any writers in particular?

[A] Heller: Hawkes, Barth, Céline, Beckett, Pynchon, Faulkner, Shakespeare....

[Q] Playboy: You have a pile of Dickens novels lying around.

[A] Heller: This year I'm alternating between one Dickens novel, or biography of Dickens, and one contemporary book. Last year I did that with Jane Austen. The year before that, Henry James.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds as if you're catching up on your schoolwork.

[A] Heller: When I was in school. I had neither taste nor patience. Now at least I have patience.

[Q] Playboy: How, in your view, does contemporary American fiction stack up against that of other countries, other periods?

[A] Heller: The health of American literature is excellent. Unlike the movie business, which cannot make money with serious works, there is enough of a market for good literature in this country to support many novelists who are not commercially minded. I would put Updike, Cheever, Vonnegut, Bellow, Mailer, Baldwin, Roth, Styron, Malamud. Barth, Pynchon and Hawkes in that category. And there are perhaps 15 or 20 more I haven't mentioned, who will never speak to me again. There is a reading public in America that wants good, challenging books. That public is one of our national treasures.

[Q] Playboy: What about the rest of the reading public and the "popular" authors they support?

[A] Heller: There are two kinds of people doing what we'll call popular fiction. One kind is the hack, the producer of quick pornography, quick mysteries--opportunistic books. The hack knows he is writing junk. The other kind may not be an "intellectual" writer but believes that he or she is producing works that are as good as anything that has ever been written. This type of writer puts as much effort into the work as Beckett or Mann or any conscientious writer does. The readers of that type of book are not to be looked down upon, either. They're reading what, to them, is good literature.

[Q] Playboy: What authors would you put into this category?

[A] Heller: I'd rather not mention names.

[Q] Playboy: Oh, go ahead.

[A] Heller: Jackie Susann, Erich Segal, Irving Wallace.

[Q] Playboy: Do you--or did you--know any of them personally?

[A] Heller: I know Irving Wallace. He may not write the type of book I enjoy reading, but he starts work at six in the morning and puts as much effort and energy into his type of book as I put into mine. Anyone who wants to usurp Wallace's position with his particular readers is, literally, going to have to get up pretty early in the morning.

[Q] Playboy: Have you read Love Story or Valley of the Dolls?

[A] Heller: No, but I know people who read Love Story and were moved by it. They might have been embarrassed afterward, but there apparently was something in that book--a legitimate reading experience--that I can almost guarantee was quite difficult for Segal to achieve. The proof is that it is not as easy to imitate these people as it looks. Even Segal himself can't seem to do it. I know a woman who was envious of Susann's success, felt she was brighter, more talented, and tried to write a Valley of the Dolls type of novel. In spite of a lavish advertising campaign, the book did not succeed. The more intellectual writer is likely to have a hack attitude toward that type of story and not spend enough time with characterization and detail.

[Q] Playboy: What about your old friend Mario Puzo? Where does he fit in?

[A] Heller: After two intellectual novels that did not sell, Mario did attempt to write a popular book and succeeded. But The Godfather was not an imitation of any particular author or style, and I don't believe he approached the work with a condescending attitude. Perhaps he is an exception.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever attempted any hackwork?

[A] Heller: When I was an undergraduate publishing in the Atlantic for $200, I figured I might as well publish in Good Housekeeping for $1500. So I tried to write what were then called women's stories and never came close. I'd send off first drafts with the feeling I was doing hackwork, whereas the people who were writing good Good Housekeeping stories were rewriting them eight, ten, 12 times.

[Q] Playboy: Could you select one theme that you think connects all your writing?

[A] Heller: The two novels are so different. I put everything I knew about the external world into Catch-22 and everything I knew about the interior world into Something Happened. But in both books I am concerned with the closeness of the rational to the irrational mind, the location of reality.

[Q] Playboy: Reality is particularly difficult to locate in Something Happened. For example, in the scene in which Slocum discusses his problems with a psychiatrist. Afterward, the reader discovers that there is no psychiatrist.

[A] Heller: Slocum tells the psychiatrist he never has hallucinations. The psychiatrist replies, "What would you call this?"

[Q] Playboy: In mapping that boundary between rational and irrational, you often employ humor. Why?

[A] Heller: I'm inclined to be serious about most matters, yet jokes keep coming to mind. This disturbs me.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Heller: Because humor comes too easily and I'm suspicious of things that come easily.

[Q] Playboy: Your conversation seems similar to your writing, in the sense that it careens between the serious and the farcical. Could this be "the Heller style"?

[A] Heller: Perhaps.... Perhaps there is more truth in that than I realize. I wasn't aware that Catch-22 was a funny book until I heard someone laugh while reading it. The experience was pleasant but also unsettling. As I said, I'm suspicious of comedy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider comedy trivial?

[A] Heller: Yes. I can spend an evening with the best comedian and love every second, have a very good evening, but it's not going to affect me or change my life.

[Q] Playboy: And that's your definition of triviality--whether or not something changes your life?

[A] Heller: A good novel will permanently alter the way I think. Nothing else does that for me.

[Q] Playboy: Earlier, while disclaiming responsibility for soldiers in Vietnam who deserted after reading Catch-22, you said one book couldn't shape an attitude or an action. Now you seem to be contradicting yourself.

[A] Heller: I don't believe one book could convince a "good soldier" to go over the hill. Perhaps one book could convince a soldier who was thinking of it anyway, and perhaps a group of books could, over a period of time, completely change someone's way of thinking to an extent that would be impossible after reading only one book. But one book can change or expand my way of perceiving the world. A comedy routine cannot.

[Q] Playboy: When you say one book, do you mean only fiction, or do you read nonfiction, too?

[A] Heller: I'll read a nonfiction piece about something I'm interested in. I read the newspaper.

[Q] Playboy: Are you interested in New Journalism as an art form? What's your opinion of Tom Wolfe's style?

[A] Heller: I used to read Tom Wolfe in the New York Herald Tribune and wasn't even aware he had a style. He writes about interesting subjects, so his work is interesting. But for me, reading non-fiction is like going to the movies. Trivial.

[Q] Playboy: How much did you and Gottlieb cut out of Something Happened?

[A] Heller: About 150 pages.

[Q] Playboy: And from Catch-22?

[A] Heller: Nearly 100.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of material was it?

[A] Heller: Adjectives and adverbs.

[Q] Playboy:Catch-22 is a big, third-person novel in which you had 60 very different characters to play around with. But in Something Happened, everything is related through Bob Slocum, a psychic cripple. Didn't you feel cramped working through such a limited persona?

[A] Heller: T. S. Eliot said that when one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.

[Q] Playboy: You spent eight years working on a book you thought was going to be called Catch-18, then just before publication, you were told to find another number. Did you take it hard?

[A] Heller: I was heartbroken. I thought 18 was the only number. It took two weeks to select 22. I don't like to rush into things.

[Q] Playboy: When did you know that you'd "made it"?

[A] Heller: Made what?

[Q] Playboy: Status.

[A] Heller: I knew I'd achieved something the first time someone I'd heard of but never met invited me to a party by naming all the famous people who were going to be there and indicated that those famous people were being invited at least partly on the basis that I would be there.

[Q] Playboy: Any other times?

[A] Heller: Yes, when I bought a car recently. I didn't haggle, but if I had, I felt I could have gotten a sizable discount.

[Q] Playboy: Just because you're Joseph Heller?

[A] Heller: No, because I'm a friend of Mario Puzo. I had to go around shaking hands with all the Italian salesmen. Status isn't all gay parties and caviar.

[Q] Playboy: The title of Catch-22 has passed into the language as a slogan, a concept. How do you feel when you see and hear it in everyday life?

[A] Heller: Good, proud. Again, that is something that appeals to one's basest instincts--an appeal I, for one, find irresistible. But I don't always like the people who use Catch-22 or the way it is used. James St. Clair, Nixon's attorney, tried to get away with it before the Supreme Court. He made the argument that you can impeach a President only if you have evidence that he committed a crime, but you can't collect criminal evidence against a President. One of the Justices had to play Yossarian and say, "Wait a minute. You lose me there."

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Catch-22 is a radical book?

[A] Heller: Its structure is more radical than the content. The morality is rather orthodox--almost medieval. With the exception of the aforementioned "appreciation of lechery," the seven basic virtues and seven deadly sins are all in their proper place.

[Q] Playboy: How about Something Happened. Would you consider that radical?

[A] Heller: Yes, but again, only in structure. The first and third person are fused in a way I've never seen before, and time is compressed into almost a solid substance.

[Q] Playboy: Most of the reviews of Something Happened were quite good. But some were terrible.

[A] Heller: Apparently, I don't write books people like a little.

[Q] Playboy: Were the reviews better or worse than you expected?

[A] Heller: Three out of four were favorable--better than I expected. I think most of the negative reviews and most of the positive reviews were good.

[Q] Playboy: How can a bad review be good?

[A] Heller: Most negative reviewers either found the book repetitious or found Slocum not a sufficiently interesting character to warrant such a detailed examination. Those are valid opinions. The reviewers analyzed the book carefully. That's all any author can ask and far more than most authors receive. playboy published the only review I think of as being snotty. It wasn't really a review, just a paragraph that dismissed the book in an insulting way.

[Q] Playboy:The New York Review of Books accused you of overweening ambition. It said Something Happened was a failed sequel to Catch-22, a sort of Everyman in war and peace.

[A] Heller: That review, along with some others, couldn't resist the temptation to compare the two works, taken together, to War and Peace. They said Catch-22 was perhaps the definitive book about war, but that Something Happened was not the definitive book about peace. But it wasn't my hypothesis that Slocum is the Everyman of his generation. In fact, I'd never write a book in which the leading character was not a very distinct personality. I've said many times that I thought Slocum was perhaps the most contemptible character in all literature. Yet people have found him pathetic, even sympathetic. This surprises me. All these reviewers now claim to have loved Catch-22. Where were they when that book came out?

[Q] Playboy: At least The New Yorker was consistent. Its reviewer hated both books.

[A] Heller: Consistency may be overrated as a virtue.

[Q] Playboy: There's never much physical description in your writing. Is it that you don't want to distract the reader or that you think descriptive writing is trivial?

[A] Heller: Neither. I admire writers like Updike and Nabokov and Vidal, who have great powers of observation. I just don't seem to respond to visual stimulus. I once told my editor I couldn't write a good descriptive metaphor if my life depended on it. Every once in a while, I figure I'd better put in some visual description, but a flushed face and white shingles are usually as far as I get. Recently, someone told me my nephew has blue eyes. I said I'd never noticed. The boy is 28 years old.

[Q] Playboy: There is a minor character in Catch-22 named Scheisskopf. At one point, someone refers to him as a Shit-head, with a capital S. Since Scheisskopf is German for shithead, it works like a pun, though it looks as if the capital letter were a typographical error. Was that intentional?

[A] Heller: Yes, and you're the first one to comment on it. I've waited 14 years for someone to pick that up. I've blabbed it to a couple of people myself, but nobody's asked about it.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any other so-far-undetected jokes in Catch-22?

[A] Heller: There is one more.

[Q] Playboy: Any chance you'll tell us what it is?

[A] Heller: No chance at all.

[Q] Playboy:Catch-22 has been translated into all the Western and many Eastern languages. Is there a special pleasure in knowing you are read world-wide?

[A] Heller: Yes, but there's a certain queasiness that goes with it. I can never be sure about what's in those foreign editions. They look like Catch-22, but who knows? I got a rather unsettling letter soon after the book came out. It said: "I am translating your novel Catch-22 into Finnish. Would you please explain me one thing: What means Catch-22? I didn't find it in any vocabulary. Even assistant air attaché of the U.S.A. here in Helsinki could not explain exactly." I suspect the book lost a great deal in its Finnish translation.

[Q] Playboy: You've been married to your first and only wife for nearly 30 years. To what do you attribute this unusually successful marriage?

[A] Heller: I didn't say it was successful. Maybe we just don't quit easily. I know many people whose marriages have ended for reasons that I don't think are serious enough. If everyone were to end a marriage because of disappointments or dissatisfactions or moods or temporary attractions, almost no marriage would survive.

[Q] Playboy: Slocum says he would leave his wife if she had an affair. Would you?

[A] Heller: That falls into the realm of imagined experience.

[Q] Playboy: Can you imagine leaving her?

[A] Heller: I think you may now be slipping into the tendency to assume that a novel is a personal statement rather than a work of literature. Something Happened seems to invite this sort of thing. While my agent, Candida Donadio, who knows me as well as I know myself, was reading Something Happened, she found herself continually saying, "Joe wouldn't do that!" I had to keep reminding her it was fiction. Now that we're back on the topic of sex, I'll have to remind you to ask another question.

[Q] Playboy: OK. In Something Happened, Slocum says he can't run off with a 19-year-old girl because after two hours he won't have anything to say to her. He claims he is unable to fall in love and that is what keeps his marriage together. Is that your feeling, too?

[A] Heller: I would generalize and say that my imagination, like Slocum's, keeps me from making foolish mistakes.

[Q] Playboy: Slocum says his fantasies are worth while only as long as he remains inert. Do you have any cherished fantasies you feel would be ruined if you acted upon them?

[A] Heller: Shirley and I often discuss moving to the south of France. But then I start thinking about getting a new driver's license, and what will happen when it gets cold and we have no one to talk to? And what are we going to do if we want a good piece of salami? I end up realizing that I like to live in a city that I know pretty well, among people I know pretty well, and the only place on earth that fits that description is Manhattan. But the south of France continues to be an appealing fantasy for us as long as we do nothing about it.

[Q] Playboy: Have you any fantasies that are closer to home?

[A] Heller: Well, sometimes I think about moving out of the city, but it always takes the form of going to New Hampshire and living next door to J. D. Salinger. But, of course, if that happened, Salinger would immediately move to Montana. There I'd be, stuck out in the country with nobody to talk to.

[Q] Playboy: You claim you're fond of young people, yet you once locked your daughter out of the apartment. Why?

[A] Heller: That was during my Pizza Period, when I didn't let any people in unless they were bringing me a pizza.

[Q] Playboy: We've heard that you have an insatiable appetite. Is it true that some of your closest friends, members of the famous Gourmet Club, call you The Animal?

[A] Heller: It's not a club and we are not members. But, yes, the nonmembers do call me that.

[Q] Playboy: You are apparently quite an expert on food. In the February Playboy Interview, Mel Brooks, a fellow Gourmet Club nonmember, quotes you as saying that 1000 years ago, there may have been egg in egg creams.

[A] Heller: I belong to the catastrophist school of egg-cream history, whereas Mel is a steady-state theorist. When Mel is in New York, we spend a lot of time together searching for egg creams.

[Q] Playboy: Yossarian was orally fixated and, in Something Happened, Slocum sees the deterioration of American life in terms of food. Nothing tastes as good as it used to. He remembers the day he found out about a former girlfriend's suicide by recalling not his sorrow but the taste of the sandwich he ate afterward. Do you share the oral fixations of your two protagonists?

[A] Heller: Possibly. But I also believe that young people today will never know the taste of a good seeded roll or a mellow roll. They will never know good ice cream, good butter, good whipped cream--the stuff they spray out of cans isn't whipped and isn't cream. This is a legitimate measure of the deterioration of our standard of living.

[Q] Playboy: How did the Gourmet Club start?

[A] Heller: Thirteen years ago, Ngoot Lee, the famous Chinese advertising man, began cooking dinner for a group of us once a week. Then Ngoot became successful and decided cooking put him in a subservient position, so we began going to Chinese restaurants instead.

[Q] Playboy: We didn't know there were any famous Chinese admen.

[A] Heller: Ngoot cunningly hides his nationality by speaking Yiddish.

[Q] Playboy: We've talked about your devotion to food. Are you a drinker?

[A] Heller: Yes, but never alone. If I'm at a party, I'll drink all night. I'm known as a nice drunk. I get very funny.

[Q]Playboy: Do you think most writers like to drink?

[A] Heller: I can't speak for most writers. But most people I know who are writers don't like to drink as much as I do.

[Q] Playboy: Are you into any other drugs?

[A] Heller: No, and I don't think drugs are valuable to a writer. They might distort your perceptions in a way that enables you to see more, but the ability to coordinate what you're experiencing with the very acute discipline of writing will be absent.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have vivid dreams?

[A] Heller: Sometimes.

[Q] Playboy: In color?

[A] Heller: No, black and white.

[Q] Playboy: Have you used your dreams in your work?

[A] Heller: Almost all of Slocum's dreams are my own: ones in which he must get from one place to another and can't; he's in school and has to take a test, but he can't find the classroom. Freud himself had a recurring dream about not being able to pass an exam. When I was teaching at Penn State, I used to dream I was in the classroom with 15 minutes left and I couldn't think of a single thing to say. It was terrifying.

[Q] Playboy: What else terrifies you? Do you believe in hell--or God?

[A] Heller: I don't care if there's a God or not.

[Q] Playboy: What if Ralph Nader came up with a scientific study that proved there was a God and a heaven and a hell? Would that alter your behavior?

[A] Heller: No. The experience of life is more important than the experience of eternity. Life is short. Eternity never runs out.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any special way you'd like to be ... remembered?

[A] Heller: Remembered? In order to understand that question, am I to assume you have euphemistically deleted the word death?

[Q] Playboy: We were hoping you wouldn't notice.

[A] Heller: It is impossible to predict or control how you will be remembered after your death. In that way, dying is like having children: You never know what will come out. In Beckett's Endgame, he asks his parents, in effect, "Why did you have me?" and the father replies, "We didn't know it would be you."

[Q] Playboy: Yossarian wants to "live forever or die in the attempt," and Slocum wants to "outlive the Rockies." Do you fear death?

[A] Heller: I fear death, nursing homes and vaccinations.

[Q] Playboy: Snowden's secret, which Yossarian learned when the young gunner's guts slithered out through a flak wound over Avignon, was that "the spirit gone, man is garbage.... Ripeness was all." Can you bring yourself to contemplate that inevitable transition from spirit to garbage?

[A] Heller: I've come to look upon death the same way I look upon root-canal work. Everyone else seems to get through it all right, so it couldn't be too difficult for me.