Catch-22 and its protagonist Yossarian are among my favorite, perhaps even my most favorite, books and heroes. Not that I’ve ever been to war or been shot at like Yossarian. But when I read Catch-22 during a spring break vacation in San Juan during my sophomore college year in 1968, anti-war sentiment coursed through my blood. Joseph Heller’s madcap anti-war treatise, with its Mediterranean Sea island World War II air base absurdly populated by the likes of Doc Daneeka, Orr, Milo Minderbinder, and Major Major and the not really off-kilter bombardier Yossarian who-couldn’t-get-discharged-for-being-crazy-because-you-couldn’t-be-considered-crazy-if-you-wanted-to-be-discharged-for-being-crazy-because-people-were-shooting-at-you-because-you-were-bombing-them were a story and cast unlike any I’d encountered in literature.
So was Heller’s plot construction, repetitively returning to the same narrative of Yossarian’s penultimate bombing mission, filling in more details of the cold encasing the young tail gunner Snowden, of Yossarian’s flight from the terror of a war seemingly without personal end.
I’m not what you would call an educated reader. I don’t analyze plot construction, or character development. I’d never qualify as a good book reviewer. Instead of mining the deeper meanings of an author, his or her history and subtextual context, I’d merely state I liked or disliked a book, that it held my interest or didn’t. Same thing for movies. Sorry, but allegory a là Ingmar Bergman is not my cup of tea.
I read most of Catch-22 on the beach of the La Concha Hotel, with strong sea breezes occasionally blowing pages across the sand from my beat up, spineless paperback copy. It didn’t matter. Catch-22 is the type of book you can pick up and start reading anywhere and immediately become part of its tension and pathos.
I’m nostalgic about Catch-22 because of an article in last Thursday’s NY Times concerning two biographies of Joseph Heller (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/books/books-about-joseph-heller-by-erica-heller-and-tracy-daugherty-review.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=catch-22&st=cse).
A resident of East Hampton, NY, Heller frequently spent time in Barristers, a Southampton restaurant managed by the wife of one of my publishing colleagues. When Lucia heard how much I liked Catch-22 she asked Heller for a signed copy.
I never met Heller, but I proudly display on my living room bookshelf a hardbound special edition of Catch-22 with the following inscription:
For Murray Forester (sic)--
With sincere good wishes to a fellow who finds this among the best novels he’s read. It’s certainly about the best I’ve written.
Joseph Heller
April 23, 1997
Southampton, N.Y.
Showing posts with label Catch-22. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catch-22. Show all posts
Monday, August 1, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
On This day
It's my birthday today. Please, no cards or presents. No Twitter or Facebook shout-outs. (Some of you got up earlier than I did so you already sent me birthday greetings. Thank you. It really is appreciated.) I bring up my birthday because for years I would tell people my birth date was significant because it coincided with the fall of the Alamo.
Now, however, I can relate another momentous occurrence—March 6, 1944, was the first successful daylight bombing attack on Berlin by the 8th Air Force.
The other day Gilda and I, with Gilda's sister Barbara and her husband Alan, visited the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, AZ. It's a fabulous museum, rivaling if not exceeding the new Smithsonian Air & Space Museum outside Washington, DC. What distinguishes the PASM, beyond its diversity of aircraft, are the knowledgeable and personable docents.
As we walked into Hanger #5, known as the 390th Memorial Museum, we were greeted by Richard Bushong. It was March 3. Richard told us 67 years ago to the day he was co-piloting a B-17 bomber on the first attempt by the 8th Air Force to penetrate Berlin's defenses. Bad weather scrapped the mission that day, and the next. But on March 6, the then 20-year-old Bushong and his crew of nine other airmen bombed Berlin. Eight hundred and twenty-one B-17 and B-24 bombers took off from England. Sixty-nine planes never made it back across the Channel. The 390th Bomb Group lost just one bomber while shooting down 27 German fighters.
A lanky Ohioan even at his advanced age of 87, Bushong served in the air force into 1971, flying F-4 Phantom jets in Vietnam. He retired as a colonel.
It is a remarkable experience to listen to history from someone who lived it first-hand. If you've ever seen a war movie of WWII bomber missions (films like Catch-22 or Twelve O'Clock High), you know the side gunners on the planes stood at open cutouts so their guns could swivel easily. With winds whipping by at 190-210 miles per hour, Bushong related, temperatures inside the plane plummeted to 30 to 50 degrees below zero. The crew wore electric suits under their sheepskin jackets and pants to keep from freezing. Just hearing about the cold made me shiver in the warm Arizona climate.
Aside from my birthday link to his historic exploits with the 390th Bomb Group, we share another common date, sad for him, happy for me. While laid up in hospital (a reaction to some bad food), Bushong's plane and crew were shot down. It happened December 16. That's a happy day for my family, the day Ellie was born.
Now, however, I can relate another momentous occurrence—March 6, 1944, was the first successful daylight bombing attack on Berlin by the 8th Air Force.
The other day Gilda and I, with Gilda's sister Barbara and her husband Alan, visited the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, AZ. It's a fabulous museum, rivaling if not exceeding the new Smithsonian Air & Space Museum outside Washington, DC. What distinguishes the PASM, beyond its diversity of aircraft, are the knowledgeable and personable docents.
As we walked into Hanger #5, known as the 390th Memorial Museum, we were greeted by Richard Bushong. It was March 3. Richard told us 67 years ago to the day he was co-piloting a B-17 bomber on the first attempt by the 8th Air Force to penetrate Berlin's defenses. Bad weather scrapped the mission that day, and the next. But on March 6, the then 20-year-old Bushong and his crew of nine other airmen bombed Berlin. Eight hundred and twenty-one B-17 and B-24 bombers took off from England. Sixty-nine planes never made it back across the Channel. The 390th Bomb Group lost just one bomber while shooting down 27 German fighters.
A lanky Ohioan even at his advanced age of 87, Bushong served in the air force into 1971, flying F-4 Phantom jets in Vietnam. He retired as a colonel.
It is a remarkable experience to listen to history from someone who lived it first-hand. If you've ever seen a war movie of WWII bomber missions (films like Catch-22 or Twelve O'Clock High), you know the side gunners on the planes stood at open cutouts so their guns could swivel easily. With winds whipping by at 190-210 miles per hour, Bushong related, temperatures inside the plane plummeted to 30 to 50 degrees below zero. The crew wore electric suits under their sheepskin jackets and pants to keep from freezing. Just hearing about the cold made me shiver in the warm Arizona climate.
Aside from my birthday link to his historic exploits with the 390th Bomb Group, we share another common date, sad for him, happy for me. While laid up in hospital (a reaction to some bad food), Bushong's plane and crew were shot down. It happened December 16. That's a happy day for my family, the day Ellie was born.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
