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451

Joseph Heller TLS

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Joseph Heller TLS
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Fascinating and revealing letter by Joseph Heller on the process of writing ''Catch-22,'' events from WWII that influenced ''Catch-22'' and details of his childhood. In this typed letter signed ''Joseph Heller'', the author writes to James Nagel, who had just published ''Critical Essays on Catch-22''; in this letter, Heller corrects a several errors in two of the essays. Lengthy three-page letter on Heller's personal stationery reads in part, ''…In answer to two of your own questions, for example (start underlining), there was no direct influence of Dos Passos or of Stephen Crane's Maggie. I'd forgotten almost everything specific from Dos Passos by the time I started the novel and I've never read anything other than an excerpt or two from Maggie…there was never a decision to title the book Catch-14, and I was a bombardier, but never a navigator. In fact, on one night mission during the army's efforts to give me some training at navigation, I mistook the seacost [sic] for the bank of a river and instructed my pilot to fly across to the other side on the chance I might pick something up that would help me identify where we were. After about an hour of pitch blackness, he lost patience with me, turned on his own, and found his way back to an airfield in Raleigh with just enough fuel left to get us off the landing strip. After that, he stopped talking to me and would say no more than was absolutely necessary. On the tip [sic] overseas…that lasted about two weeks--he had the co-pilot offer me my daily ration of Atabrine tablets. I refused to take them, and by the time we arrived, neither one was talking to me, a situation that was the source of the scene in which Appleby tries to see Major Major to report Yossarian for insubordination. This, by the way, as was pointed out by Colonel Kiley's fifteen-year-old son, was an anachronism of which I was not aware. (Major Major had not yet been appointed squadron commander) All anachronisms of plot were unintenional [sic]; I tried to weed all of them out but missed abut two or three others. Anachronisms of history, however, were deliberate, the purpose being to fuse that period of the war in which the novel was set with the time period in which the novel was written. There are perhaps a dozen, several of them such subtle plays upon events in the newspapers that I suppose all allusive value has by now been lost…Alteo was of no more importance to me than any of the dozens of other teams and social clubs…and I had never heard of the 'Coney Island Renaissance'…Contrary to L/P, Catch-22 was written before The Wax Boom…The Wax Boom was published the following year, and I did not read it until finished copies were available, or bound galleys. I was five when my father died; I do not have 'sisters.' I have one older brother and one older sister; no one in my family was 'possessive' or domineering toward anyone else, and certainly not to me; I was the youngest, and if anything, I was over-indulged. I think a good idea of that period was presented in a reminiscence I wrote for Show magazine called 'The Fun is Over,' a piece about growing up in Coney Island…Catch-22 is not an autobiographical novel, although much of the action and physical details come out of events I witnessed or experienced. A turret gunner in my plane was wounded in the thigh on one of the missions to Avignon and I administered first aid. He was hale and hearty the next day when I visited him in the hospital. That is the extent to which Snowden's death comes out of my personal experience. 'Beansie' was not a model for Milo, while General Motors ('What's good for General Motors is good for the country.') and Exxon were, even though there was no Exxon then. There certainly is now…there was never any pressure put upon me by the publisher to complete the novel. The ending of the book was in mind before I began the second chapter, and there were even handwritten drafts of paragraphs and dialogues for the closing chapters. Probably, there was a draft of the final page and closing sentences; I usually do like to have these final lines down on paper before I really begin. This was true of my new novel, although the final lines were changes in the editing. Martine's essay in your collection is a better bibliography of works published prior to Catch-22 than I would have liked to see prepared--but there it is. There are only two omissions. One is a story called 'McAdam's Log' which was published in Gentleman's Quarterly in December, 1959; the other is 'World Full of Great Cities,' which was first published before 1955 and was later picked up for inclusion in Nelson Algren's anthology of Lonesome Monsters. Both are at Brandeis. A point worth mentioning, I think, is that all but one of these pieces were written while I was a sophomore taking creative writing courses, or earlier. The exception was 'McAdam's Log,' which I began as a senior, I think, and finished about a year later, after doing my graduate work. By that time, I think, I had acquired a good set of critical standards--I'd had no college before the war--and was no longer excited by the stories I'd been writing or was likely to write. I stopped then, for about four years, and did not begin again until I got the idea for Catch-22. I did no writing at all while I was at Penn State (no fiction), and my students did no writing either…'' 4 April 1974 letter has some hand-corrections to the text made by Heller. Measures 7.25'' x 10.25'' on front sides only, and accompanied by original mailing envelope. Near fine condition.
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