LOT Nate D. Sanders, Inc.  /  Autographs, Autograph, Autographed, Document Sig...  / 

452

Joseph Heller TLS

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:1,000.00 USD Estimated At:NA
Joseph Heller TLS
"WINNERS WILL BE NOTIFIED AFTER THE AUCTION ENDS BY THE AUCTIONEER ONCE ALL BIDS HAVE BEEN PROCESSED TO DETERMINE THE WINNER FOR EACH LOT."
Important letter by Joseph Heller, contextualizing one of the best novels of the 20th century nearly 15 years after its publication. In this letter to Professor James Nagel of Northeastern University, Heller intimately reminisces about writing ''Catch-22,'' the novels that influenced his craft, and his military experience as a bombardier (like Catch-22's protagonist John Yossarian) in WWII. Composed on Heller's personal stationery and dated 13 March 1974, lengthy three-page letter reads in part, ''…How did I feel about the war when I was in it? Much differently than Yossarian felt and much differently than I felt when I wrote the novel--and much differently than I would have felt, I think, if I'd had to remain [in] it any longer than I did. In truth, I enjoyed it, and so did just about everyone else I served with, in training and even in combat. I was about nineteen when I enlisted; I would have been drafted three or four months later, and by enlisting I was able to choose the branch of service. What is hard to get across to younger people today is that after the attack at Pearl Harbor, there was virtually no opposition to the war in this country. For the last time in the country's history, possibly the only time, the nation was virtually unfied [sic] in its feeling about a war. I was young, it was adventurous, there was much hoopla and glamour; in addition, and this too is hard to get across to college students today, for me and for most others, going into the army resulted immediately in a vast improvement in my standard of living. Up until the time I enlisted, the best I'd been able to do in the way of a regular job was as a file clerk in an insurance office for $60 a month (a setting, incidentally, for many of the scenes in the new novel) In the army, I made sixty-five or seventy-five dollars a month and had all food, lodging, clothing, and medical expenses paid. There was the prospect of travel and a general feeling of a more exciting and eventful period ahead. Also, I believe I enjoyed a sense of more freedom in the service than before and more freedom than I enjoyed in the long years afterward when I was working in my various offices. The experience was enjoyable until about my thirty-seventh mission--the one to Avignon on which the turret gunner was wounded. On that one I was frightened for the very first time; I was frightened on the twenty-three afterward. By the time they were over, I felt lucky to be alive and wanted out as quickly as possible. After the war, I started college. Also, I married, at age twenty-two. It was a first marriage for both of us and we are married still. I was about thirty when I began thinking about Catch-22. These were the years of the cold war, the McCarthy period, the Eisenhower years, the Korean War, and it was a sensibility shaped by these factors that infused the book rather than my own literal experiences. The literary influences of which I was conscious from the beginning and throughout were Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, to which there is a stronger similarity in the early sections of Catch-22 than I intended (though not so strong a resemblance as Milton Hindus asserts in Mosiac, Spring 1973) and Nobokov's Laughter in the Dark, two books that just by chance happened to come into my hands almost successively. And almost immediately, it seems, the ideas for Catch-22 began parading through my mind. Falkner's [sic] Absolom! Absolom! and The Sound and the Fury, both of which I reread while planning, supplied separate ideas for the structure of different parts (I could specify but would rather not). And always present in my awareness, I believe, was T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which has had more to do, I believe, with shaping not merely the spirit but the structure of novels than is generally recognized. These were works that did, in one respect, or another, serve as actual models. I had office jobs during the day, worked on the novel in the evening, usually from about eight to ten. There were days, perhaps occasional weeks, when I did not work; sometimes I was too tired, other times I just did not want to. As I may have mentioned, I had a publication contract from Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster years before the book was completed. I knew it would be published; I knew I worked slowly; I took my time and tried to make it the best book I could possibly write on that subject at that time. I wrote by hand (but not in 'red ink,' as L/P [Lehan-Patch article in ''Critical Essays on Catch-22''] would have it), rewrote by hand, rewrote again when I typed up sections, penciled in further changes on these typed pages, and then gave the sections to a typist before submitting the sections to my agent who then sent them to my editor. The response from each was invariably encouraging and from both I had a strong feeling throughout that I was not wasting my time. As a result of all this rewriting at the time, there is really only one draft of the book, as there is of my play and of the new book. I did not, as L/P state, I notice now, attend New York University on a scholarship but under the G.I. Bill of Rights. Catch-22 had not been 'fermenting' since 1947; the moment the idea came to me I began putting the first chapter down on paper, and it was this chapter that was published in New World Writing in 1955. None of the dialogue in Catch-22 has the flavor of that year or two I spent as a member of that club…Have I forgotten anything? Cordially, [signed in red ink] Joseph Heller''. Letter on three separate pages measures 7.25'' x 10.25''. Near fine condition.
Sign In to Bookmark Lot