It may not have won prizes, but Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 , published in 1961, went on to become one of the most loved books of the 20th century, selling more than 10 million copies. The title has found its place in the dictionary to mean any difficult circumstance from which there is no escape “because of mutually conflicting” conditions.
Heller, who had served as a bombardier in World War II, wrote the novel as he pursued a career in advertising. The satirical war story begins with these words: “It was love at first sight.” Set between 1942 and 1944 in the island of fictional Pianosa in Italy, the hero, Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army B-25 bombardier, lands up in hospital with liver pain. The doctors are puzzled by the fact that it isn’t quite jaundice and don’t know how to go about the treatment. Yossarian is happy to be in hospital and decides to spend the rest of the war there. After all, “the food wasn’t too bad, and his meals were brought to him in bed” and the first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell in love with him.
Sane or crazy?
Yossarian spends his time censoring letters written by enlisted men. He is creative with the job, one time blacking out every word except the articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’. The narrator tells us of Yossarian’s mates, Dunbar the Texan, Orr, who undertakes risky operations, and others like the mess manager Milo Minderbinder, group commander Colonel Cathcart and the physician, Doc Daneeka. Yossarian realises that “the enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”
In this Kafkaesque situation, Orr will have to get past a clause in the system, Catch-22, to escape the war alive. He has to be crazy to be grounded; but to have concerns for one’s safety in the face of real and present danger is a sign of a rational mind, so if he refuses to fly, it shows he is not insane. “Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
In the Vintage edition, Howard Jacobson writes that he loved the book precisely for the reasons others hated it — “its looseness, its unruliness, its extravagance, its verbal niceties, its emotional waywardness.... its apparent formlessness.” If those are faults, he says, then hang the virtues. Heller had initially wanted to call it Catch-18 , but was prodded by his publisher to change the title because of Leon Uris’ bestseller Mila-18 .
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
