125. Consistency in Joseph Heller

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"Joseph Heller consistent? The author of Catch-22? Nah, it was his inconsistency that made him famous. You never knew what Yossarian (his fictional double) was going to do. One day he was blacking out all the adjectives in enlisted men's letters, the next day all the articles. One day he was all for defeating Hitler and the next day he was deserting the Army and going to Sweden. That, random impulsiveness, is what made him so attractive — and got Catch-22 voted the seventh best novel of the 20th Century."

I know, but the consistency I am referring to is different from all that. It's a consistency of character. In Catch-22 Yossarian is a beast to women. They're either prim nurses you "grab by the snatch" or "wonderful tomatoes" you "should have been screwing." That's the way it is with his whole animal-house gang. Amusement when the nurse tries to get away and irritation when a fellow officer quits on a tomato without giving her to a buddy is all they feel. In a recent biography (Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller, by Tracy Daugherty) we see that Heller was a beast to women all his life.

"You're taking the man to be the same as the fictional character."

Yes, just as his daughter Erica does in her recent book, Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life was a Cath-22. To her he's Yossarian and he's got all Yossarian's callousness. She thinks she sees herself belittled in one of his books and asks, "How could you write about me that way?" "What makes you think you're interesting enough to write about?" he replies.

"But that's just his daughter's report, of one incident. It could be biased and the incident could be exceptional."

Could be, but then there's what he said to his wife when she asked him why, after 39 years of marriage, he was leaving her. "Because you are old and fat and ugly," he said. That's reported from outside, on good authority. What we see in the life is what we see in the novel: consistent, juvenile, '50s-male beastliness.

"OK, this novelist was a bastard. But that shouldn't disturb me. I'm an English professor, I know that a lot of novelists were bastards, and I know that that shouldn't make any difference in the value we put on their novels."

But this bastardly set of values is right in the novel, front and center, up for admiration.

"True, but they're expressed by a character who feels pity for all the prostitutes suffering at the hands of American soldiers in Rome, and for all the abused wives and children back home, and all the miserable people everywhere. Doesn't that make him a lesser bastard?"

No. It only makes him a contradictory bastard. If his humane feelings were genuine they'd be consistent. His expressions of pity, all in abstractions, all at a distance, are clearly phony. They make a claim for humanitarian credit that only sentimental people will honor — you know, people who don't care whether or not feelings are consistent, the ones who so love the feeling of the moment that they quit thinking.

"So all those professors who put Catch-22 on their reading lists, and made it the subject of symposia, and backed those who made it number seven, have quit thinking?"

They've quit thinking the way academics are supposed to think. Those who take Socrates as their model must always respect logical connections — part with whole, premise with conclusion, principle with practice, cause with effect, ends with means.

"Always?"

Always. Even as they teach literature. Poets claim to be "large," they "contain multitudes," and therefore, according to Walt Whitman, they can very well contradict themselves. Professors wanting to escape from logic can claim the poet's license, but they won't get it from Socrates. They know that. That's why they so often go to other philosophers.

"Who issues such licenses?"

Not scientific philosophers. Not British philosophers. Not continental philosophers, even — except maybe down at the tail end. Absurdists issue licenses. They're the ones English professors took Catch-22 to right away. If reason is "useless" and logic has been "dethroned" then you can go back to class with your license. If anybody objects let them go to Sartre and Camus, who will show them the larger (existential) permit.

"You mean English professors were still driving on those licenses in 2000, when they backed Catch 22 for seventh place?"

Who knows? You can see the beliefs implied by an intellectual's word-choice but that's a long way from guessing what's behind them. Thomas Powers writes (in the 8 March London Review) that Norman Podhoretz changed his mind about Catch-22 because it "had done 'moral, intellectual, and spiritual harm' by undermining support for American military endeavors Podhoretz happened to back." Happened to back. There's the belief: values are random, some backed by this person, others backed by that. No sign that values can be rationally ordered, no recognition that one of the values is the value of defeating Nazi Germany, nor that it might be a shared value, nor that there might be rational justification for it. It's just one of the values that Podhoretz, at the moment, happens to hold.

That's a pretty close fit with Yossarian's beliefs. And I think it's a close fit with the postmodern philosophies appealed to to defend those beliefs. I can see and know that. Whether Powers has those philosophies in mind, though, whether he would acknowledge and defend them in a classroom, that's something I don't know about him (or, indeed, about any of the public intellectuals writing in the LRB), and can only guess at.