The creative life of Joseph Heller, author of the comic, anti-war masterpiece Catch-22, who died on December 12th, aged 76, was largely spent trying to prove that it was, on balance, a better thing to live than to die - the hero of the novel, Yossarian, had, after all, "decided to live forever, or die in the attempt".
Catch-22 was published in 1961. Initial reviews were mixed, but within two years it had developed a cult following. Since then it has sold 10 million copies in the US alone, is one of the best-selling novels of the century, and has added a phrase to the language.
Yossarian's war illustrated a world in which the only way out was to go crazy, and to go crazy in such circumstances was proof of sanity. The catch, wrote Heller, "was the process of a rational mind."
Catch-22 was an irreverent, savage and cruel satire. Its outrage was directed at the bland evil of war, the US Army Air Force (USAAF), and the bureaucratic scheming of military nonentities.
After serving in the USAAF during the second World War, Joseph Heller spent the next l6 years writing and rewriting a novel about it. Readers of his novel in the 1960s had a different sensibility, and one which was perfectly attuned to Joseph Heller's dead-pan ironies. It was from Jewish popular culture, from the wisecracking, stand-up borschtbelt comedians in the Catskills, with their angst-ridden Yiddish wit, that he found a tone. Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island, at the far reaches of Brooklyn. The family story was generic: poverty, the struggle of Jewish immigrant parents, and the loneliness of a bristling, intelligent young boy, whose truck-driver father died of a bungled operation when he was five. The war rescued the young men of Brooklyn from the Depression. Joseph Heller enlisted in the USAAF in 1942 and was posted to Italy and combat two years later. He served as a wing bombardier with the rank of lieutenant in the 12th Air Force, and flew 60 combat missions from Corsica. Many of the events he put into Catch-22 actually occurred to him and the men around him.
He married Shirley Held in 1945, and soon began to plan a novel about his experiences. He completed his undergraduate education at New York university in 1948, and sold short stories to Esquire magazine and Atlantic Monthly.
He took an MA at Columbia in 1949, and spent a year at St Catherine's College, Oxford, on a Fulbright scholarship, returning to the US to take up an instructorship in English at the Pennsylvania State University.
He abandoned academic life two years later, spending the next decade working in advertising for Henry Luce's Time, Look and McCall's magazines. The first chapter of his novel appeared as Catch-18 in a literary magazine in 1955, but the success of Leon Uris's Mila 18 in 1960 led him to a happy change of title.
A second novel, Something Happened, appeared in 1974. It was a low-spirited, unheroic look at the conniving corporate executive of the 1960s. The pessimism and harsh restriction of tone of Bob Slocum, the novel's protagonist, were not understood. Readers, still intoxicated by the wild humour of Catch-22, found it disappointing. This pattern was repeated with each of his novels.
In the middle of work on God Knows, he separated from his wife. While staying in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he fell ill. The symptoms were devastating: food tasted metallic and he could not swallow. He found himself unable to raise his arms to remove a sweater or lift a telephone. Diagnosed as the Guillain-Barre syndrome, he expected total paralysis to be followed by death.
He spent two months at Mount Sinai Hospital, followed by four months in rehabilitation. Against the odds, he was capable of regarding his misfortune with good humour. He married Valerie Humphries, a nurse at the hospital, and they moved to the Hamptons on Long Island.
In l994 he wrote a sequel to Catch-22. Closing Time revisited some of the characters of his first novel, 50 years on. Two guys he had known while growing up in Brooklyn, who had served in the war and had tiny parts in the earlier novel, speak at some length of their experiences and post-war struggles with ill-health.
At the age of 75, he who often used personal material in his work, produced a volume of autobiography, Now And Then. Compared to far richer acts of remembrance of Brooklyn by Alfred Kazin, it was thin stuff, scarcely more than a closing note from a man preoccupied with mortality. But then he had good reasons not to take too harsh a view of his life.
Joseph Heller is survived by his wife Valerie and a son and daughter from his first marriage.
Joseph Heller: born 1923; died December, 1999