[If you find a formatting
problem, see my note in the Profile feature of this blog.]
[This entry, as drafted, started
getting as hairy as a big school project; I didn’t want that. So, here is Part
1; Part 2, on three authors as listed at the end of this entry, does
appear—here—on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog. Part 3, on William H. Gass
alone, will appear on this blog, though when is uncertain. A small edit 4/5/13. Important edits are done 4/8/13, especially concerning new end notes; see my other blog, April 8 entry, for a fuller version with these end notes. By the way, added comments in the end notes regarding the Vietnam War are not meant to comment on the current North Korea situation. Edits done 4/23/13 and 4/24/13. Edit 6/10/13.]
There was talk in New York metro
area newspapers a few weeks ago about Philip Roth, who just had his 80th
birthday—and with all that’s said about him recently, one of the most
intriguing things to me—as a reflection of “where’s he at today”—is that he
decided to stop writing—to put a decisive end to his decades of work. What’s
particularly interesting to me, as part of his decision-making on this, is that
he surveyed all he’d written back to about Portnoy’s
Complaint (1969), and decided he was done.
I can understand the idea of
reaching an age where you say, “I think I have to give it up,” though it always
seemed to me that a world-class creative writer was the type who never lost
that itch, to write, and would be motivated to do it until he or she died. But
what’s really notable about Roth is the pedestrian move (he said he made) of
looking through most of his works to see if he’d written all he had wanted to,
or such. That’s like checking to see that you had packed everything you needed
in a big suitcase—but in a context where such a method would seem quite out of
place.
Roth was one of those major
writers from his approximate generation I never got around to reading much of
(I read Goodbye, Columbus; When She Was Good [which struck me as not
the sexual romp that the title may suggest]; and Portnoy’s Complaint). Now, at an age where I have to “prioritize”
what and how much of major novels I’ll try to read, I figure I should make an
effort to read Roth’s The Counterlife
(1986), if nothing else.
But the real focus of this entry
is the set of writers who most inspired me to become a writer—a group I glibly
describe as the “Sons of Joyce”—of world-class Irish writer James Joyce, that
is. I will say some words on each of them, including noting what I think are
their best books, and try to give a sense of why I felt they were good
standards for me to try to meet as a writer. Part of this, of course, is a
reflection of how the sun seems to be setting on their type of writing, at
least regarding what’s published as major literature, to fanfare, by the New York trade houses
today. As it happens, I also met a few of these writers, or had some kind of
correspondence with some of them, and for these, I will include a little
anecdote of this “banal interaction” stuff.
William Gass in the news
Just recently, William H. Gass (the only one of this group with whom I actually had a substantive,
face-to-face conversation), just published what may be his last novel—Middle C. There is a review of it in The New York Review of Books (April 4
issue, pp. 47-48), and another review appeared in the March 24 Star-Ledger (Section Four, p. 7), from an
MCT News Service writer. A review also appeared in the March 31 New York Times Book Review, by writer
Cynthia Ozick. These reviews generally give a respectful bow to Gass, whom some
of us may consider the last major exponent of his (Joyce-influenced) type of
writing in his twilight years (Gass, amazingly to me, is 88).
The reviewer in NYRB (Michael Gorra, who [according to NYRB’s bio info] teaches at Smith
College and recently published a study of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady) characterizes the basic approach of the
whole set of writers of which Gass is the member in current focus via a quote
from one of them, John Hawkes: “I began to write fiction on the assumption that
the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and
having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, [then] totality
of vision or structure was really all that remained” (p. 48).
JAMES JOYCE
How I would characterize James Joyce in his fullest flower, and the most notable characteristic (or one
of them) of his followers whose work I know—i.e., William Gaddis, Gass, John
Barth, and Robert Coover among the names Gorra lists, and I would add Joseph
Heller (of the same generation) and Thomas Pynchon (a younger man)—is this way:
not necessarily representing “psychological realism” of the refined type (of
careful narrative, “issuing from a sober narrator,” directed at depicting a
character in key-nuances detail) that Henry James perfected, but presenting the novel as an expression of a
mind, in all its sharpness and smears and everything else that reflects its exerting
life, both as a disciplined method to describe characters’ ways of perceiving
things and acting, and as a more posturing style of the author’s broader-scope
narrative aims. And the purpose, beyond literary artifice, of this “psychologizing”
is to try to understand and “symbolize” the craziness and fullness of the world
(or, at least, the chaotic U.S.)
and how we experience it today as sincerely beholding grassroots individuals.
Joyce’s supreme achievement, I
think most will agree, is his novel Ulysses
(1922), which is largely about two characters, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish
“drummer” (a kind of salesman) and a young Irish man, Stephen Dedalus, a
talented, up-and-coming type, estranged from his father (and who in a sense
seeks a father figure), who has his own peregrinations about Dublin. The two
men cross paths once or twice as they go through their respective days. They
glimpse all the more-or-less riotous aspects of Dublin (banal, more sublime, and all else),
in a novel that is somewhat structured in the likeness of Homer’s Odyssey, complete with chapters
reflecting the sections of that ancient poem. The novel uses all sorts of fancy
wordplay not just to represent the details of everyday Dublin trivia in a sort of
stream-of-consciousness fashion, but to use wordplay and images to echo certain
features of the Homer poem.
So, for example, in a chapter
that echoes “Aeolus,” which had to do with winds
in the Homer poem, the Joyce chapter echoes the “long-windedness” of
journalistic style, occasionally punctuating what he is narrating with
somewhat-parodying newspaper headlines. The scene also includes, key to its
drama, a stop at a local newspaper office.
Joyce also redefined bounds of
taste in reflecting all sorts of corners of “profane,” everyday life, to the
point where Ulysses got in legal hot
water in the U.S.
The strongly risque aspects of the famous Penelope chapter, representing
Bloom’s wife’s stream of consciousness that focuses quite uninhibitedly at
times on sexual matters—got the book banned for indecency for a time. A court
case overturning a decision made on behalf of the Postal Service (I believe) is
reproduced in the 1961 Random House edition of the novel.
If you are interested in reading
Ulysses, there is a companion book by
an associate of Joyce’s, Stuart Gilbert, titled James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) that takes
you through the novel and explains the allusions to the Odyssey. (Sounds like graduate-level English stuff, doesn’t it?)
Also, if you read Ulysses, the edition published by Random
House in 1961 is acceptable enough. More recently, there were two newer
editions made; one, overseen by the German scholar Hans Walter Gabler, is
deficient in numerous ways that an issue was made about in The New York Review of Books some years ago. The person who pointed
out the deficiencies in the NYRB,
John Kidd, was supposed to edit a better version of Ulysses; I believe it has
been released.
Anyway, that’s some info on the
forbidding-sounding main product of the “granddaddy” of the more modern writers
at issue. Ulysses is something to
read when you’re young and ambitious enough to struggle with it. (I read it in
1986. Yes, these are the type of novels that seem like a historical event you
live through, lovingly or otherwise.) The American writers who were influenced
by it (at least some of them) sometimes wrote tailored to a more modern
(meaning, not necessarily so ambitious) readership, so some of their books could
be more accessible.
Let me start with one of the least accessible of these writers,
William Gaddis, who died in 1998.
WILLIAM GADDIS
Gaddis (1922-98) is
probably the most representative “transition,” within literary history, between
Ulysses (Joyce) and the more modern
disciples of him. Gaddis’s novel The
Recognitions (1955) is considered hugely influential on many modern
writers, even down to people like Jonathan Franzen (see Gaddis’s Wikipedia bio for
info on whom he’s influenced); it certainly seems to have influenced Thomas
Pynchon.
The Recognitions and J R
The Recognitions is known for being about as little read (and even
known about) as it is influential. Gaddis himself even seems to have acknowledged
the aspect of this book’s being unlikely to be much read, in a line at its end;
and as to critics, he gets some sly licks in about specific ones (such as
Maxwell Geismar and Granville Hicks) in his follow-up novel, J R (1975); he also has interesting
remarks about the issue in a 1985 interview in The Washington Post (August 23, 1985). The Recognitions is something to read when you’re young and
ambitious; I’ve read parts of it, and sadly have to say I might not even get to
read all of it, but I am proud to say I own a copy. Its echoes of Ulysses are obvious in its fancy—almost too fancy—wordplay and stylization, as
it thematically looks at the issue of authenticity in its story about a forger
of old paintings. It includes such a range of allusions to old quotes—in all
sorts of languages, including in chapter-start epigraphs—that it seems to
reflect a range of learning that will go over the heads of all but the most
dedicated language-arts professors.
Gaddis’s subsequent novel J R is also difficult to read, but in a
sense it is also more accessible, and reflects (for him) a “lesson learned”—and
actually it symbolizes the career route so many ambitious artists take: you first
have published (whatever it takes) a “work of genius,” when your creative fires
are burning hottest—so Gaddis does his Recognitions,
and Heller does his Catch-22, and
Pynchon does Gravity’s Rainbow…. And
then the reality of life in these yer
Yoonited States kicks you like an ornery horse in the forehead, and you
take time (sometimes years) to recover…and you may make your next most
substantial work come down to Earth a bit, dealing with more everyday life,
even if from a satiric and still cover-many-bases fashion.
So then Gaddis pillories the
American lust for money with J R, and
Heller looks at corporatism and the parallel perversions of family life with Something Happened, and Pynchon finally
comes out with a new novel 16 years after Gravity’s
Rainbow with the American-culture-focused Vineland
(1990).
J R is told almost entirely with quotes from the characters in the
story, with only occasional narrative (done in a sort of Joycean
psychological-realism way) of some concrete event going on. (In this way, it
echoes Joyce’s Ulysses, with Gaddis’s
work having the affectation of setting off quotes at their start with m-dashes,
with occasional interposed indication of the concrete context in which the
quote is made, so subtly woven in that you have to pay close attention to see
what it quote and what is description of non-quote action.) J R is about a crass, greedy boy who
learns the ropes of Wall Street enough to become a big success there, even
while an adult man surnamed Bast, a musician, wrests his way through his
hapless life. (There are numerous other characters, too.)
I recall a little glimpse of Bast
writing a part of a musical score on manuscript paper, or some such, amid all
the other craziness going on, and I’ve thought that’s a good representation of
what it is like to be an artist in today’s hectic, paper-chasing life in this
country. J R was difficult for me to
read—I started it in 1986, stopped, and then did most of the reading of it in
1989—and I was glad to get through it, because I found you feel you’ve
accomplished something as you start to see the arc of the plot after a while.
But it is, in a demanding, noisy-voices way, the most thoroughgoing, rigorously
crafted satire of American money-culture that I think any novelist has ever
attempted, complete with so many quotes from people seeming never able to fully
get their thoughts out.
Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own; final words
Gaddis must have realized—or his
agent convinced him—that he needed to write something more popular and
accessible, so his third novel, Carpenter’s
Gothic (1985), is less than 300 pages, and while told in his by-now
trademark m-dash/mainly-quotes method, it is more of a potboiler, with its plot
moving quickly. But it again has a dark view of American life, including with a
look at a phony preacher modeled on the likes of Jerry Falwell and other TV
evangelists of the time.
For those who want to get a
taste of his method of writing, in a longish version, but who don’t want to
wade through the mammoth extent of J R,
A Frolic of His Own (1994) is
worthwhile. It is a satire of the legal world—which I think would be its
primary hook for some readers—and while it is again in the almost-only-quotes
style, and it is long (500+ pages), somehow it seems more accessible. You seem
to get a grip on the incidents being conveyed more than you did with J R, and Gaddis employs enough different
methods, such as extracting a movie script and legal documents, that the
variety and virtuosity of mimicking various styles seem to hold interest.
The novel is about a rather
clumsy writer of plays, Oscar Crease, finding that an old work of his was
apparently plagiarized for a crass movie about the Civil War. One key part of
the story, driving home some of the more serious meaning, is that the play was
about a Civil War incident where an antecedent of Crease’s had a stand-in for
himself fight in the Civil War—a practice not
rarely done then—and, in fact, there was a stand-in for the same man
representing both sides of the conflict, and they apparently killed each other.
[I think that sums it.] Both J R and A Frolic of His Own won National Book Awards.
Gaddis’s last novel, Agapé Agape (2002) [the accent over the
first Agape should be perfectly
horizontal, not an acute, slanted accent]—the first word is the Greek agapé (pronounced “ah-gah-pay”—all
syllables equally emphasized, I think), a kind of love—with the title thus
meaning “[A type of love] agape [with its mouth open].” It is a very short
novel, in a stream-of-consciousness mode, related to a theme Gaddis had long
been concerned with, the development of the player piano, as a symbol of how
man’s inclination to come up with machinery and systematic solutions for things
intrudes on the prerogatives and spirit of art. This work, very short,
posthumously published, and reflecting (apparently) Gaddis’s own struggle with
the prostate cancer that killed him, is probably for fans only, and sadly
reflects Gaddis’s own grief at the dwindling of his life.
“Banal interaction” note.
I had sent a letter to Gaddis, via his editor Bob Loomis, in 1986, and I found
many years later that this letter had been catalogued in a university record of
his collected papers. An online indicator of this seems to be inactive (see End note 1 [and see update there]).
JOSEPH HELLER
Heller (1923-99) (I don’t care a whole lot
for this Wikipedia article on him) is perhaps the only one of
these writers whom you could actually be a “fan” of, in the sense that his
works seem more accessible than those of the other “Sons of Joyce,” and hence you
can munch them down readily almost the way you would some genre writer or one
who has done a popular series with similar titles. I’ve read all his novels;
the only book of his writings that I do not have is the posthumous collection
of his early short stories.
Catch-22
Catch-22 (1961) is famous and has been taught in university American
literature courses for some years now. I have read it in full at least nine times
since 1979, and I would say it is the American novel published within the last
60 years I have learned the most from, but in later years I would also point
out the deficiencies of it, to be honest about a work and writer I respect as I
do. This book was hugely popular from 1964 to 1968, during the escalation of
the Vietnam War; it sold in the millions by 1980 (probably a result of Simon
& Schuster’s marketing heft/work as much as other factors).
To me, Catch-22 is Heller’s best novel, though some argue that his
subsequent Something Happened (1974)
is better. I can’t agree with this, and I have only been able to read the
latter novel all the way through once, though I’ve read parts more than once. I
think the critical word can arguably be settled to be this: Catch-22 is Heller’s best to those who
develop their identities through crisis (whether or not one has had any
experience of military life), and Something
Happened is the best for those who “find themselves” and have their full
“life metes and bounds” in the corporate world (i.e., an area without so much
crisis).
Catch-22, for me, sparkles with a range of writing styles, a lot of
colorful incident, a look at men under pressure (and bitterly competitive).
Granted, it is not a novel that addresses much, if any, of respectably female
concerns (what war novel is?). I think it’s fairly acceptable to say—based on
some of its themes and what Heller has said—that it’s really about the
dog-eat-dog work world (and the more general sense of American community) of
the 1950s, grafted onto an ostensible memoir-cum-satire of military experiences
during 1944 in the European Theater of World War II. It’s also (politically and
morally) about hypocrisy and the start of Cold War paranoia, as reflected in
such pettifogging matters as the Alger Hiss case (note the vignette about
papers being alleged to be in a tomato, late in the novel); and Richard Nixon,
an instigator of the Hiss matter, of course became an imagination-seizing bete
noir for Heller in the 1970s, with his third novel.
If you are interested in Catch-22, some Cliffs Notes–type aids are helpful. The Monarch Notes guide, published by Simon & Schuster (who also
published Catch-22), is especially
useful. Catch-22 makes rather
derivative use of time-dislocation methods as are to be seen in William
Faulkner, but it turns out—by these study guides’ analysis—that this time
dislocation was effected pretty conscientiously in relation to the real order
of the events the time-dislocation scrambles. Only in one instance is Heller
not consistent: that is, if you mapped out the real-time sequence of incidents
and interactions (i.e., when was the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when was the
mission over Avignon, when was Yossarian sitting naked in a tree, etc.) that
the order of the novel scrambles, you find that a “reconstructed”
representation shows that Heller really did have a coherent “map” of the “real-time”
side of the novel on everything except one incident. (Important: see corresponding blog entry, April 8, End note 2.) This last incident is
alleged to have happened in one temporal context in one part of the novel, and
in another elsewhere. But even if you don’t care to determine the real order
that things happened, and just “go with” the novel’s way of swooping around
with its twisted narrative, it’s a fun and elucidating-enough ride.
It was the funniest novel I’d
ever read when I first read it at age 17, and others you read about have said
similar over the years. If today its humor sometimes seems hackneyed, that’s
because pop culture has absorbed so much of that mode of humor—from the TV show
M*A*S*H (1972-83, which bore obvious
influences of Catch-22) to just about
every pointedly satiric stand-up comic, commentator, pundit, and others who
wish to lampoon some ongoing “serious matter” in a way that “takes the satire
to the next level.”
For those who don’t subscribe to
Heller’s use of Marx Brothers’–type humor in some places, I would suggest—while
this idea may be up for debate—that it merits use in works of high-culture
literature in this way: sometimes certain real events can be so loony that you
might almost say, “This is as if the Marx Brothers [or, where apropos, the
Three Stooges] were doing this.” Indeed, Heller’s premise of having high-level
officers concerned about how the pattern shown in the photo of a bomb-strike
looks to the public actually was echoed in real, similar concerns during the
Vietnam War, which helped the U.S. public (those that embraced literature)
accept the novel as “prescient” or “cognizant” of modern-day horrors in that
time. (Important: see corresponding blog entry, April 8, End note 3.)
The New York Times, in 1999, compared Heller to Mark Twain when
Heller died [I just reread this obit by April 6, and couldn't find the Twain reference, but I remember it being made around that time by a Times writer or someone quoted by the Times...]; maybe this was fair, but I think Twain was truly a genius not just
for uproarious humor, but for his actual ear for the peculiarities of American
speech that really reflects the hardbitten regional folk who uttered this
speech.
By comparison, Heller is
somewhat like a New York area comic who still opted to follow the Joycean
imperative of “try to imaginatively encompass the weird variety of the world”;
but Heller seems to understand not as much as he could of the country folk that
still characterize part of the heart of the U.S. For instance, when in his
follow-up to Catch-22, Closing Time (1994), he seemed to have
little interest in seeing what the character Orr had come to 40 years after
World War II, I found that disappointing; I thought Orr’s being a key to the
novel’s “antihero” Yossarian’s survival, even if Orr was an odd, inscrutable
handyman, might mean that Orr would show to have grown into something Heller
could respect when he did the later novel, and Heller only had him be (for
older Yossarian) an uninteresting worker in a supermarket.
In the end, this novel is one of
the best examples of a 20th-century kind of artistic posture: depicting the conscience, and associated
actions, of one man of some “capacity of soul” in the face of historical
terrors and oppressions. If Joyce had his hero Stephen Dedalus acknowledge
this predicament with the famous quote, “History…is a nightmare from which I’m
trying to awake,” Catch-22 has bombardier
Yossarian address this type of matter initially with vexation, ill-resolve,
silliness, and other “failures to be adult,” but finally with a resolve that,
of course, people are free to criticize as a moral lesson: going AWOL from a
military situation that features superior officers being too willing to put
their men at risk for their own petty career purposes.
[See the longer version of this entry, at my other blog, April 8, for an added paragraph on Heller's play, We Bombed in New Haven.]
[See the longer version of this entry, at my other blog, April 8, for an added paragraph on Heller's play, We Bombed in New Haven.]
Something Happened and Good as Gold
Something Happened (1974) I read in, I believe, 1985, and I found
it interesting then; in part, I was pleasantly surprised that it was as
well-wrought in its fussy style as it was. I found the relationship between Bob
Slocum (the surname perhaps reflecting a trademark Hellerian juvenile play on
words related to a sexual function) and his troubled daughter to be especially
affecting (even though Heller’s daughter Erica later expressed dismay at being
the model for the daughter, along with exchanges she had with him being echoed
in the novel). But in more recent years, I can’t drum up enthusiasm to re-read
the whole novel. Its ruminative style—Time
magazine called it an “angst guzzler,” in a set of automobile metaphors in a
review of Heller’s Good as Gold in
1979—makes the book have the atmosphere, to me, of “sleep air”—you know, the
fetid, close-seeming air quality you get from a bedroom that has had someone
respirating in it all night long. Slocum’s voice is like a self-involved
muttering such as you might associate with a room smelling of “sleep air.” Like
I said, those who realize their identity in the corporate world might esteem
this novel more highly than Catch-22;
I don’t.
Good as Gold (1979) is the only other Heller novel I’ve read
several times, though it wears thin with repeated reads in a way Catch-22 doesn’t. It is about a college
professor, Bruce Gold, who is also a bit of a hustler in publishing
intellectual but non-academic articles in small-circulation magazines, and an
occasional book; his main editors, it seems, are old associates from school
days. In part the novel is a satire—about as blunt and unsparing as Catch-22, but without quite the
imaginative verve—such as of the likes of Jewish conservative Norman Podhoretz
(in the character of slovenly, stridently pretentious Lieberman) (see corresponding blog entry, April 8, End note 4). It also
includes a more jeremiad-type review of the enormously disreputable (per
Heller) side of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon (as an “equally disreputable”
career sine qua non to Kissinger).
But most redeemable in this
novel is its most sympathetic attitude in its look at the experience of Bruce
Gold’s immigrant Jewish family as it had trouble getting somewhere during the
Great Depression and the war years, spawning different members’ ability to make
their way in American society in different ways (whether as a member of the
civil service, or in the more ambitious way of becoming a professor, as Bruce
has). The novel’s true backbone is its plot line of Bruce Gold—remarkably, and
ultimately as a sort of red herring—being extended a possible offer to become a
member of the new president’s cabinet (the president, we would assume, is Jimmy
Carter, but the president is never named, and Heller doesn’t seem to care who
the president is; the occupant of that office is, per Heller, inherently
less-than-genuine); eventually it is suggested to Gold that he can become
Secretary of State, by a former schoolmate, the WASP Ralph Newsome, who is
largely a caricature. It is aligned with this perspective that the novel
occasionally veers into riffs, based on real news items, on the negative sides
of Kissinger, which can seem like an ad hominem string of “shtick” derived from
news clippings. Of course, this relates to a more heartfelt psychological
undercurrent of the novel, which is Bruce Gold’s wanting to have his most
earnestly sought recognition from his father, by means of his most noteworthy
career achievements, and (as a special bonus) being seen as “better than
Kissinger” with respect to the latter man’s government role.
What still interests me the most about this novel is its less
topical side: its handling of the more purely family-related (family history)
themes, especially with some of the absurdism at dinner-table scenes. Even
though I think Heller is a bit synthetic in providing such a large family (I
mean, four older sisters for Bruce,
along with Sid, a curiously baiting, yet ultimately oddly sympathetic, older brother;
and a younger, arguably JAP-like, but winning-enough sister). But I can relate
to the issue of a family that originally came from Europe—in fact, the aspect
of Bruce’s father being “forever [almost maniacally tendentiously] at odds”
with his son (Bruce) rather echoes what my own father suffered from his parents
in the 1950s and ’60s.
This sort of familial situation
(queer psychologically-based dynamics amid historical pressures) as a ground
for fictional treatment—whether satirical or not—is a fertile area, and has
been covered by a wide range of writers, not just Jewish. It even turns up—as
fleeting bits of humorous anecdote—in glimpses as in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), where his Coney
Island family, with their Ashkenazi accents, packed around a dinner table or
enjoying a party, have their innings. In fact, the power of literature to
bridge differences is shown here, where even in Good as Gold I can see a “home” for some fictional treatment of
family issues I know, while my father’s father, the German immigrant (to the
U.S.) Karl Ludwig, probably couldn’t have had much truck with (if they were
real) Bruce Gold’s fictional Jewish family.
One thing that struck me on
reading this novel the first time is that it seemed almost too-boldly
“Jewish-centered.” But on repeated readings, this sense decreased for me.
It is a measure of a roommate of
mine from freshman year at college, Alan L., that he esteemed Good as Gold over Catch-22, and at the time I could understand why: if Good as Gold seemed strikingly (and
almost rudely) Jewish-centered, Alan L. very certainly was this way. Catch-22’s more “culturally ecumenical”
approach—which had seemed pretty clear (and appealing) to me—was not Alan’s
own. Before long I might blog about Alan—which would be a very rich, and not
cozy-for-me, topic.
An important error of interpretation of political reality in a bio on
Heller
Academic Tracy Daugherty’s
biography of Heller, Just One Catch (see
Reference), which I read somewhat
skimmingly through in 2012 (I need to re-read), is very good in many ways, but
it is wrong on one important thing. In the relevant place, it labels Henry
Kissinger as a “neo-con [or neocon],”
the term used in recent years for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others of
their political stripe in the Bush II administration (see Daugherty’s book at
p. 349, where he seems to spell this out pretty elaborately, as if Heller
treated his themes with a modern-day term like neocon in mind).
This is a wrong terminology for
Kissinger, I think, in a very important way: whether or not you want to
lambaste Kissinger as a sometime war criminal (during the latter part of the
Vietnam War [see corresponding blog entry, April 8, End note 5]), Kissinger represented a type of high-level (summit-type), Cold
War diplomacy—with his theory of Realpolitik—that
was a child of its time and a responsible enough way to deal with the dicey
issues obtaining between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. at the end of the Vietnam War
and in the early 1970s. As they say, things look different during the “fog of
war,” and this went for Cold War conditions also. I think Daugherty forgets
this when he limns the themes Heller treated from a more modern perspective of
criticizing (or articulating the arguable meaning of) neo-cons.
Even if, today, we sometimes
second-guess decisions that Kissinger (and Nixon) made on a high state level in
the early 1970s, these men had only a certain field of things perceivable to
them at the time (particularly with the threat of nuclear war, not an issue
during 9/11 and its immediate aftermath), and acted accordingly. And they
certainly didn’t take the manic approach of overturning so many ways the U.S. had
previously proceeded in world affairs as did the Bush II administration, as to
even do away (in about 2002) with the ABM treaty of 1972, a hallmark of
responsible Nixon-era governance. (This kind of more-modern headlong vacating
of that treaty was rather like the way Heller has the immature president
treating a grave issue of war like a video game in his valedictory novel Closing Time, to be considered below—but
who knows how Heller might have written about the Bush II administration, if he
had had the strength in his eighties to do it.)
Another quite un-Kissinger-like
move by the Bush II administration was its going so far as to start planning to
put long-range missiles in former East Bloc countries (quite enabled by the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991), in order to counter the likes of Iran
and North Korea (a plan the Obama administration has more judiciously dialed
back on). This was not Kissinger’s style as to strategy/rationale or manner.
The “neo-cons,” properly
so-called, were the swashbucklers of the Bush II administration who went into
action as fired up by 9/11. (Ironically, from what indications I’m aware of,
Cheney and Rumsfeld, during their time in the mid-1970s Ford Administration,
were more like hacks then than like the seeming daredevils, or “headstrong
executives,” that they appeared by the mid-2000s.)
You can assess Kissinger
negatively some other way; you can certainly assess the Bush II neo-cons
however negative way you want. But the two were very different, including for
reasons of important historical circumstance. I think this sort of thing Heller
would have appreciated quite well. Even if he took imaginative liberties by
pillorying early Cold War paranoia in Catch-22’s
depiction of World War II circumstances, and this really seized the imagination
of Vietnam-era baby boomers, Heller had a scholar’s precision for naming
different things from different eras for what they were, and adapting them for
fictional purposes as “an understood conceit.”
God Knows and post-illness
works
Good as Gold was Heller’s last great novel, I think. Interestingly,
it was edited by Michael Korda, according to Daugherty, as was (per a note in
the novel itself) Heller’s late work Closing
Time. The editor for Catch-22 and
Something Happened was the estimable
Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb also edited Heller’s fourth, God Knows (1984), which I read once, and
which I wouldn’t strongly recommend.
Ostensibly God Knows seems to extend Heller’s attention to Jewish themes
started in Good as Gold, but it is a
rather silly, if entertaining, exercise in shtick reinterpreting some Old
Testament characters and stories (including use of biblical language) with
anachronistic tools used to comic effect. It can be a bit tedious, and we can
wonder after a while, “What is this novel leading to?”
Heller famously came down with
Guillain-Barré syndrome in late 1981, after he had started writing God Knows. It was a sort of saving move
for him to return to completing that novel after he started recovering; but he
was never the same after that illness—it coincided approximately with his
undergoing a divorce action from his wife of a few decades. His later memoir No Laughing Matter (1986), cowritten
with his associate Irving “Speed” Vogel, is very interesting, while it is
gossipy and somewhat pedestrian in style; it recounts Heller’s experience
undergoing his illness and subsequent recover, with help from friends.
His next novel, Picture This (1988), is to me his least
substantial. It is a sort of meditation on art and culture as affected by
matters of economics and affairs of state (if I recall rightly). I think it was
edited by someone named Faith Sales (not that she is to blame for how
unsuccessful it was).
Closing Time, and his last (1990s)
works
His follow-up to Catch-22, Closing Time (1994), is to me his most substantial post–Good as Gold book. It looks at many of
the characters of Catch-22 about 45
years later, and has a lamenting view of the prospects of the world in the face
of possible nuclear war. In this latter regard, it seems more characteristic of
his earliest work, and of the times in which they appeared. To me it is worth
reading, and reflects some of the accrued wisdom of Heller with old age. And
even though it echoes some of the antic word-phrase riffs and style of Catch-22, it is well combed over with
editing by, again, the more popularly oriented Michael Korda. Catch-22 is a fulsome work by an
intellectually generous if angry and somewhat too-bitterly-comic man in his
thirties. Closing Time is a “nicer
old man’s” novel, willing to hand over to readers some of the gifts that come
from a talented writer and especially with old age, but many might feel it is
worth reading once but not more than
once. I have only read the whole thing once.
Heller’s autobiography Now and Then (1998), edited by Gottlieb,
is curiously skimpy. It’s worth a look for fans, but its curious sense of
elliptical-ness is compensated for, perhaps, by comparing it with Daugherty’s
more probing biography.
Heller’s last novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000),
published posthumously and copyrighted by his children, is a sad last screed
somewhat like Gaddis’s last novel. But while Gaddis’s was artful and genuinely
plaintive, Heller’s seems lazy, as if he either didn’t care to do much with it,
or didn’t have time to finish it before he died. It’s worth a read for fans (it
is short and easier on a sentence level than many of his novels), but, again,
probably would be read by them only once.
Heller is an intriguing example
in American letters where his most esteemed, or certainly most popular (and
influential), work is his first novel, about which we can say its most
indisputable feature is that it represents a compendium of literary styles
while examining the place of individual conscience in a world with a cornucopia
of threats, bad faith, entrenched causes for lamentation, and so on. It is what
James Joyce would maybe have done if he decided to embrace popular-type laughs
while writing a variegated treatment of life while faced with looking down the
barrel of a big gun, so to speak.
“Banal interaction” note. I
had correspondence with Heller in 1988, on a mundane copyright matter
concerning Catch-22. I have the
original correspondence in my possession, including his handwriting that’s the
type of someone who learned to write with a fountain (or metal-nib) pen. You
can see his handwriting style on the cover of one of his hardcover books (and
even on Daugherty’s bio’s dust jacket), with the multi-pointed cursive J Heller used in writing his name.
As to the next two entries in the series: Part 2, on John Barth, Thomas
Pynchon, and Robert Coover, does appear on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog; and the last entry, Part 3 on William H. Gass alone, appears as follows: subpart A on my other blog, and subpart B on this blog.
End note 1. The
item of William Gaddis papers at Washington
University in St. Louis that listed correspondence from me
to William Gaddis of July 22, 1986, was locatable in 2008 via this URL. Currently,
this URL doesn’t indicate that a file exists in the relevant library archive. I
have a printout indicating otherwise, for those who are inclined to want to see
it and could accept it being faxed to them. [Update: A pdf of a printout of old Google search results showing a link to this file is viewable here (417 KB); look at the third and fourth items.]
See corresponding blog entry, April 8, for subsequent end notes.
See corresponding blog entry, April 8, for subsequent end notes.
