by John W. Aldridge, professor of English at the University of Michigan
The New York Times Book ReviewOctober 26, 1986
Looking back today at ''Catch-22''- which was published 25 years ago this month- we are able to see that it has had a remarkable, if not altogether unclouded, literary history. It has passed from relatively modest initial success with readers and critics - many of whom liked the book for just the reasons that caused others to hate it - through massive best-sellerdom and early canonization as a youth-cult sacred text to its current status as a monumental artifact of contemporary American literature, almost as assured of longevity as the statues on Easter Island.
Yet it is only in recent years that we have begun to learn how to read this curious book and, as is the case with those statues, to understand how and why it got here and became what it is instead of what we may once have believed it to be. The history of ''Catch-22'' is, in effect, also a significant chapter in the history of contemporary criticism - its steady growth in sophistication, its evolving archeological intelligence, above all its realization that not only is the medium of fiction the message but that the medium is a fiction capable of sending a fair number of frequently discrete but interlocking messages, depending of course on the complexity of the imagination behind it and the sensibility of the receiver.
The truth of this last is attested to in perhaps a meretricious sort of way by the large diversity of responses ''Catch-22'' received in the first year or two following its publication in 1961. They ranged from the idiotically uncomprehending at the lowest end of the evaluative scale to the prophetically perceptive at the highest, and in between there were the reservedly appreciative, the puzzled but enthusiastic, the ambivalent and annoyed, and more than a few that were rigid with moral outrage.
One of the best examples of the many mixed responses was Richard G. Stern's brief but eloquent review that appeared in these pages on Oct. 22, 1961. Mr. Stern saw the book as ''a portrait gallery, a collection of anecdotes, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes'' presented with ''much passion, comic and fervent.'' But ''it gasps for want of craft and sensibility'' and finally it is not a novel. ''Joseph Heller is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.''
Way over at the other end of the critical combat zone were those who were extravagant in their praise of the book and entirely untroubled by its eccentricities of form. Most notable among these were Nelson Algren and Robert Brustein. Algren, writing in The Nation, called ''Catch-22'' ''not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel to come out of anywhere in years.'' Mr. Brustein, in his New Republic review, was so superbly intelligent about the book that much of the later criticism has done little to improve his essential argument. He saw at once, for example, that the Air Force setting in World War II is only the ostensible subject of the book and that Mr. Heller's achievement lies in his brilliant use of that setting as a metaphor or ''a satirical microcosm for many of the macrocosmic idiocies'' afflicting the postwar era in general. Mr. Brustein was also able to foresee what later critics, after considerable equivocation, came to acknowledge: that the descent into phantasmagoric horror, which occurs in the concluding chapters of the book, is not a violation of the comic mode but a plausible vindication of it, since, as he put it, ''the escape route of laughter [ is ] the only recourse from a malignant world.''
Finally, following the same pioneering logic, Mr. Brustein recognized that, given the premises Mr. Heller had established, Yossarian's decision to desert, which has been much debated by critics, far from being a poorly justified conclusion for the novel, is in fact a meticulously prepared-for conclusion. It represents an act of ''invested heroism,'' ''one of those sublime expressions of anarchic individualism without which all natural ideals are pretty hollow anyway,'' if only because it is proof that Yossarian, alone of them all, has managed to remain morally alive and able to take responsibility for his life in a totally irresponsible world. IF responses as appreciative as Mr. Brustein's were a rarity in 1961, one reason may be that most reviewers were locked into a conventional and - as shortly became evident - an outmoded assumption about what war fiction should be. They had, after all, been conditioned by the important novels of World War I and reconditioned by the World War II novels of Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, John Horne Burns, James Jones and others to expect that the authentic technique for treating war experience is harshly documentary realism. The exceptions, of course, were the sweetly hygienic productions of Marion Hargrove and Thomas Heggen, which were comic in an entirely innocuous way and depicted military life - mostly well behind the combat zone - as being carried on with all the prankish exuberance of a fraternity house beer party.
Coming into this context, ''Catch-22'' clearly seemed anomalous and more than a trifle ominous. It was a work of consummate zaniness populated by squadrons of madly eccentric, cartoonographic characters whose antics were far loonier than anything ever seen before in war fiction - or, for that matter, in any fiction. Yet the final effect of the book was neither exhilarating nor palliative. This was a new kind of comedy, one that disturbed and subverted before it delighted and was ultimately as deadly in earnest, as savagely bleak and ugly, as the most dissident war fiction of Erich Maria Remarque, Dos Passos or Mr. Mailer. In fact, many readers must have sensed that beneath the comic surfaces Mr. Heller was saying something outrageous, unforgivably outrageous, not just about the idiocy of war but about our whole way of life and the system of false values on which it is based. The horror he exposed was not confined to the battlefield or the bombing mission but permeated the entire labyrinthine structure of establishment power. It found expression in the most completely inhumane exploitation of the individual for trivial, self-serving ends and the most extreme indifference to the official objectives that supposedly justified the use of power. It was undoubtedly this recognition that the Continued on page 55 book was something far broader in scope than a mere indictment of war - a recognition perhaps arrived at only subconsciously by most readers in 1961 - that gave it such pertinence to readers who discovered it over the next decade. For with the seemingly eternal and mindless escalation of the war in Vietnam, history had at last caught up with the book and caused it to be more and more widely recognized as a deadly accurate metaphorical portrait of the nightmarish conditions in which the country appeared to be engulfed.
Ironically, in the same year that ''Catch-22'' came out, Philip Roth published in Commentary his famous essay ''Writing American Fiction,'' in which he expressed his feelings of bafflement and frustration when confronted with the grotesque improbability of most of the events of contemporary life. In a frequently quoted paragraph he said that ''the American writer in the middle of the 20th Century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.'' MR. ROTH then proceeded to discuss the work of certain of his contemporaries (most notably, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, William Styron and Herbert Gold) and to find in much of it evidence of a failure to engage the American reality - an inevitable failure, he believed, because ''what will be the [ writer's ] subject? His landscape? It is the tug of reality, its mystery and magnetism, that leads one into the writing of fiction - what then when one is not mystified but stupefied? Not drawn but repelled? It would seem that what we might get would be a high proportion of historical novels or contemporary satire - or perhaps just nothing. No books.''
Mr. Roth was, of course, writing out of an era that was particularly notable for unbelievable and often quite repellent happenings. There had been the fiascoes of the Eisenhower Presidency, the costly Korean War, the sordid inquisitions of the McCarthy era, the Rosenberg executions, the Nixon-Kennedy debates. But then, Mr. Heller was writing out of the same era, and what makes Mr. Roth's essay historically interesting is that nowhere in it does he show an awareness or even imagine the possibility that the effort to come to terms with the unreality of the American reality might already have begun to be made by such writers as William Gaddis and John Barth, whose first works had been published by 1961, and would continue to be made by Thomas Pynchon, whose ''V.'' came out two years later, as well as by Joseph Heller in ''Catch-22.''
These writers were all, in their different ways, seeking to create a fiction that would assimilate the difficulties Mr. Roth described. And they achieved this by creating an essentially new kind of fiction that represented an abdication of traditional realism - a form rendered mostly ineffectual because of those very difficulties - and that made use of the techniques of black humor, surrealism and grotesque metaphor to dramatize unreality, most often by making it seem even more unreal than it actually was.
The complexity and originality of the work these and other writers have produced imposed demands upon criticism that have forced it to grow in sophistication and have obviously contributed to such growth in the criticism of ''Catch-22.'' As evidence of this, we need only observe that most of the questions that perplexed or annoyed critics of the novel in the years immediately following its publication have now been answered, and as this has occurred, the size of Mr. Heller's achievement has been revealed to be far larger than it was first thought to be.
Recent studies have shown, for example, that two initially worrisome aspects of the novel are in fact quite adequately prepared for in the development of the action. The first is Yossarian's decision to desert, for which Mr. Brustein's early explanation remains the most convincing and widely shared. The second is the ostensibly sudden transition in the closing chapters from hilarious comedy to scenes of the blackest horror. The more sensitive of later critics have demonstrated - again following Mr. Brustein's lead - that the horror has actually been present from the beginning, but its force has been blunted and, in effect, evaded by the comedy. Through a complicated process, involving countless repetitions of references and details and a looping and straightening inchworm progression, the moment is finally reached in the Walpurgisnacht ''Eternal City'' chapter when the humor is stripped away and the terrified obsession with death, from which the humor has been a hysterical distraction, is revealed in full nakedness. IT has also been demonstrated that the tangled, excessively repetitive structure is a perfectly convincing formal statement of the novel's theme, even of the reiterated double bind of the central symbol, Catch-22. The opening figure of the soldier in white, whose bodily fluids are endlessly drained back into him, the soldier who sees everything twice, the constant raising of the required number of bombing missions, the massive incremental enumeration of detail -all these come together to suggest a world based upon a principle of quantitative evaluation in which more is better and most is best. Yet it is a world in which the accumulated excess of any one element may at any moment be neutralized by the greater accumulated excess of an antithetical element, as the comedy is finally neutralized by the weightier force of terror and death, as the fateful ubiquity of Catch-22 finally eclipses all demands for logic and sanity.
As is the case with many original works of art, ''Catch-22'' is a novel that reminds us once again of all that we have taken for granted in our world and should not, the madness we try not to bother to notice, the deceptions and falsehoods we lack the will to try to distinguish from truth. Twenty-five years later, we can see that the situation Mr. Heller describes has, during those years, if anything grown more complicated, deranging and perilous than it was in 1944 or 1961. The comic fable that ends in horror has become more and more clearly a reflection of the altogether uncomic and horrifying realities of the world in which we live and hope to survive.
The first chapter of ''Catch-22'' appeared in New World Writing, Issue No. 7, in 1955. It was titled ''Catch-18.'' Several years later, while Joseph Heller was writing promotional copy at McCall's magazine as head of a small department called advertising presentations, his agent, Candida Donadio, submitted part of the novel to a few publishers. ''It was never rejected,'' Mr. Heller recalled the other day. ''My editor, Robert Gottlieb, who was then at Simon & Schuster, accepted it. The publishing contract called for $750 on signing and another $750 on acceptance of the manuscript.'' He added, ''Now I get more.''
When the novel came out in October 1961, its title was changed to ''Catch-22'' to avoid confusing it with Leon Uris's novel ''Mila 18.'' Mr. Heller said: ''It got a terrible review in The Times Book Review and The New Yorker. Maurice Dolbier, the book columnist and critic at The New York Herald Tribune, later told me that while he was interviewing S. J. Perelman, Perelman told him that a new book called 'Catch-22' was terrific. Mr. Dolbier gave it a very good review, and afterward so did Orville Prescott in the daily New York Times. The book never made any best-seller list. It was a word-of-mouth success - about 30,000 hard-cover copies were sold the first year. Raymond Walters Jr. wrote a column in The Times Book Review just before it appeared in paperback, saying there was a 'Catch' cult. That helped a lot.'' Mr. Walters noted that ''the British took it to their hearts more quickly than us Yanks,'' and that one week after its publication by Jonathan Cape, the book ''zoomed to No. 1 on their best-seller list.'' Dell brought it out in paperback in October 1962; over two million copies were sold the first year.
Although a World War II novel, ''Catch-22'' also appealed to the Vietnam generation. Mr. Heller said that Dell has sold over eight million copies in the United States, and Corgi, the London paperback house, has sold another two million copies in Britain. ''What happened to 'Catch-22' was rare,'' Mr. Heller said. ''So many good books just fade away.''
The New York Times Book Review 
