Catch-22

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.