To begin with, his first novel (Catch-22, published in 1961 and never out of print since) managed to be at one and the same time artistically serious, enormously funny (the correct adverb, I think, since its humor addresses such enormities as war, military bureaucracy, grisly chance, and ubiquitous death), blackly cynical (the novel is part of the canon of what came to be called Black Humor), and yet tremendously popular and influential. How gratifying it must be, for a serious American novelist at the close of the 20th century, to be read by millions of people who don’t happen to be what Thomas Mann called “early Christians”: devoted worshippers of literature. I would envy Joe that, were I the envying sort; in any case, I vigorously applaud.
Second, as anybody who lived through the American 1960s knows, that same novel played a certain role in the history of that decade, when Heller’s Yossarian became a tutelary saint of the anti-Vietnam-war movement. I suspect that even those of us who have no a priori ambition to change the world with our art would be secretly pleased to see reality give way a little bit in the face of our fiction — particularly if the effect is benign, as it certainly was in this instance. Enviable: I applaud.
And third, who among us would not be gratified, even if our writing has no effect whatever on the course of history, to live to see it have at least a small effect on language? Perhaps what I most nearly envy Joe Heller is that his term “Catch-22” has come to be used so often, by so many people of all sorts, whether they’ve read the novel or not, to describe a not-uncommon phenomenon that we didn’t have a ready name for until Joe gave us one. We hear it used in the press, by government leaders here and abroad, by anybody caught in such a catch. Not many authors manage to put their trademark on items of our common vocabulary: I think of Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, Anne Tyler, Joseph Heller — and I applaud.
BUT OF COURSE Catch-22 is only the first book in Heller’s oeuvre. Five-and-a-half others have followed it1 (No Laughing Matter, the non-fictional account of his struggle with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, was coauthored with his friend Speed Vogel): books with characters ranging from Henry Kissinger to God. All are comic, even the remorseless Something Happened and the harrowing No Laughing Matter. None is cheering. Heller truly is a Black Humorist, and his new novel, Picture This, may be the darkest of the lot: entertaining indeed; profoundly skeptical if not flat-out cynical in its views of history, art, and classical philosophy; extraordinary in its subject matter; and (like all of Heller’s books) cunning in its architecture. Its author is passing through Baltimore just now on its behalf, and very generously agreed to stop by Johns Hopkins, which he hasn’t visited for a number of years, and to say hello again to our Writing Seminars.
Welcome back, Joe.
(And au revoir, much-missed comrade.)
Remembering John Updike
Written in 2010 for the John Updike Society’s memorial volume Remembrances of John Updike, edited by Professor Jack De Bellis of Lehigh University.
ALTHOUGH IT WAS not my privilege to be among John Updike’s many close friends, he and I were amiable and mutually respectful literary acquaintances for decades. I enjoyed his so-abundant and eloquent publications, from the earliest fiction, verse, and critical essays right through the touching final items written in his life’s last weeks. We regularly sent each other copies of our books as they appeared, and our several path-crossings were invariably pleasant, often memorable occasions.
Unlike his friend John Cheever, for example, who had no use for the likes of Barth, Barthelme, and other “innovative” fictioneers, Updike was able to admire writing very different from his own finely-honed suburban-American realism (from which he himself ventured boldly from time to time, as in the novel Gertrude and Claudius and his several books for children): He supported my election in 1974 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and later seconded my nomination of the brilliant (and quite innovative) novelist Richard Powers to membership in that august body. In the early 1970s, when I was professoring for a year at Boston University, my wife and I visited John in Ipswich: We strolled the nearby beach with him (New England waters too chilly for us tidewater Marylanders!), and — he having learned that I shared his fondness for playing early recorder music — his friend Peter Davison (poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly) joined us for an evening of Elizabethan trios. That same year, John visited our temporary lodgings near Radcliffe College in Cambridge for dinner with Shelly and me and the poets George and Kathy Starbuck, followed by a spirited but friendly four-against-one argument about the Vietnam war (John granted our objections to it, but supported the administration’s position anyhow). And not long thereafter, when he was living in Boston between marriages, I urged him to have another go at teaching: the same visiting-professorship in fiction-writing at Boston U. that I was currently enjoying and that Donald Barthelme would take an initiatory crack at after the Barths had shifted from Boston back to Buffalo and thence to Baltimore for the remainder of our academic careers. Perhaps to his own surprise, Barthelme found the experience agreeable, and taught regularly thereafter in Houston until his all-too-early death. John, however, recoiled from Academia as had I from the chilly waters of New England: In the early 1960s he’d taught one course at the Harvard Summer School, quite disliked the experience, and (except to fill in for the temporarily indisposed Cheever one day in that same B.U. visiting professorship) never taught another class.
Our relations, however, remained warm, and once I was established in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars I persuaded him to have a go at something else to which he’d been habitually disinclined: John resisted public readings, but when he mentioned in a letter that he was seriously hooked up with a new woman, at my invitation he brought Martha down to Baltimore for what he happily declared to be their first public outing together. He gave a delightful reading at Hopkins that included, at Shelly’s and my request, his story “Lifeguard” (one of our favorites), and we guided the new couple through such standard Baltimore sight-sees as the Inner Harbor area and the haunts of Edgar Allan Poe.
Over the ensuing decades, our connection was limited mainly to holiday greetings (we always relished his Christmas-card verses), first-edition swaps (more from that so-prolific John than from this less-prolific one), and occasional Academy-nomination business. Like many another of his admirers, Shelly and I were annually chagrined at his being passed over for the Nobel Prize in Literature: an award to which he would have done as much honor as it to him. In December 2008 we were dismayed to learn of his illness in what — incredibly! — turned out to be his final Christmas-note, and were much moved some months thereafter to receive from his publisher John’s final three volumesa—the new edition of his Maples stories, the all-new story-collection My Father’s Tears, and his fine last verse-collection Endpoint, with its so-touching final poem “To Martha, on Her Birthday, After Her Cataract Operation”—together with a note from his editor, Kenneth Schneider, addressed to both of us and saying John would have wanted you to have these.
We thank you for that, Mr. Schneider. And even more we thank you, John Updike, for being the miracle that you were — and will remain.