Readers Place

Author Q&A

Extracts taken from American Fiction, The Essential Guide – Vintage Living Text:

How and why did you start writing Catch-22?

For me the history of Catch 22 begins back in 1953, when I started writing it. I was employed as a copywriter at a small advertising agency in New York, after two years as an instructor in English composition at Pennsylvania State University. […] Early on, in an anxious need of an approving opinion, I sent the opening chapter off to the literary agent I had managed to obtain after publishing a few short stories in magazines, in Esquire and The Atlantic. The agents were not impressed, but a young assistant there, Ms Candida Donadio, was, and she secured permission to submit a chapter to a few publications that regularly published excerpts from ‘novels in progress’. […] I was employed at Time magazine, writing advertising-sales presentations by day when not furtively putting thoughts down on paper for my work on the novel at home that evening (pp. 4-5 Vintage edition).

What was the public reaction to the publication of Catch-22?

Within days after publication, there was a review in The Nation by Nelson Algren […] who wrote of Catch-22 that it ‘was the best novel to come out of anywhere in years’. And there was a review by Studs Terkel in Chicago daily news-paper that recommended it about as highly […] The work was not reviewed in the Times on publication. However it was reviewed in the Herald Tribune by Maurice Dolbier, and Mr. Dolbier said of it: ‘A wild, moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating, giant roller-coaster of a book’.
That the reviewer for the Herald Tribune came to review at all this war novel by someone unknown was almost entirely the product of confidence (pp. 1-2 Vintage edition)

Was there any adverse reaction?

The disparagements were frequently venomous. In the Sunday Times, in a notice in the back so slender that the only people seeing it were those awaiting it, the reviewer […] decided that the ‘novel gasps for want of craft and sensibility’, ‘is repetitious and monotonous’, ‘fails’, ‘is an emotional hodgepodge, and was no novel: and in the esteemed New Yorker, the reviewer, a staff writer who normally writes about jazz, compared the book unfavourably with a novel of similar setting by Mitchell Goodman and decided that Catch-22 ‘doesn’t even seem to have been written; instead , it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper’, ‘what remains is a debris of sour jokes’, and that in the end Heller ‘wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it’ (p.3 Vintage edition).

What was, or is, your reaction to this?

I am tempted now to drown in laughter as I jot this down (p.3 Vintage edition)

How did readers react to the novel?

Late the same summer [1962], I was invited to my first television interview. The programme was the Today show, then a variety show as much as anything else. The interim host was John Chancellor. Mr Chancellor had recently returned from his newsman’s post in the Kremlin, and he had agreed to accept the position on condition that he interview only those people he himself chose to. After the show, in a bar close by the studio in which I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour than ever in my life, he handed me a packet of stickers he’d had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN LIVES. And he confided he’d been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors of the executive rest rooms of the NBC [National Broadcasting Corporation] building (pp. 3-4 Vintage edition).