PUBLIC RESPONSE

Catch-22 did not make the best-seller lists in America when it was first published. On the other side of the Atlantic, the British publishers Secker & Warburg turned it down as being too American right before Simon & Schuster released it in the States. However, another publisher in England, Jonathan Cape, due in large part to the director Tom Maschler, picked it up and released it in the Spring of 1962. Within a week of its publication, Catch-22 became a bestseller in England, ahead of novels by Iris Murdoch and J. D. Salinger—quite a different response than its lukewarm reception in America. Eller suggests the following as a reason for the discrepancy:

Heller's sharp and intense satire of American attitudes made it easier for the British to see the funnier side of World War II. British critics were better able to handle this issue than their American counterparts—at the time, differing cultural perceptions about the Cold War may have been the key. … From the English perspective, a satirical romp through World War II offered insight into the postwar American culture.⁷⁹

Simon & Schuster quickly tried to take advantage of the British reaction to Catch-22 and placed an ad in the New York Times Book Review to prompt American readers to catch up to their British counterparts. Sales rose in response, and then remained steady through 1962, when Dell decided to publish a softcover or paperback version. Heller wanted the paperback to come out on the first anniversary of the hardback version, so Dell postponed shipments until this date arrived. The hype surrounding the delayed shipment helped to boost the paperback sales. As Eller points out:

Finally, Catch fans could soon point at sales which appeared to be record setting by any standard. By mid-November, Dell claimed that Catch-22 had been the number one best-seller in paperback for the previous three weeks. In December, Dell put that claim on a new series of promotional pieces, and announced sales totaling 800,000 in the first eight weeks of publication. The phenomenal rate decreased after Christmas, but remained steady and strong; by April, the Dell edition had sold 1,100,000 copies of the 1,250,000 in print.⁸⁰

After the publication of the paperback version, Catch-22 seemed to catch on at college campuses and started to appear regularly as required reading in English classes. In 1962, Newsweek was reporting “The Heller Cult,” since the “book obviously inspires an evangelical fervor in those who admire it.”⁸¹ College students wore Army field jackets with nametags that read “Yossarian.” The anti-establishment theme caught their attention—especially as it related to the business and military establishment—and fed into their opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. As Heller explained in a 1975 interview: “‘As I've said, Catch-22 wasn't really about World War Two. It was about American society during the Cold War, during the Korean War, and about the possibility of a Vietnam.’”⁸² Bumper stickers that read “Better Yossarian than Rotarian” also began to appear, and after Heller's appearance on the Today show, the show's host at that time, John Chancellor, even created a “Yossarian Lives” sticker.

HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS

In a 1979 interview, Heller stated:

I don't for a second believe that a novel influences behavior in a significant way. However, some people say Catch-22 did have that effect to a degree. In the mid-'60s, sales of the paperback of that novel began increasing in relation to the Vietnam War and the protest against the war. So possibly it helped shaped attitudes.

I know a lot of people in Vietnam carried around copies, but I don't think it influenced their actions. It just confirmed their opinion that: “This is crazy! I don't know why we're here. And we'd better watch our superior officers because they can be as dangerous to us as the people out there.” That turned out to be true.⁸³

Despite Heller's initial views on the subject, Catch-22 certainly played a role during the Vietnam protests. Overtly about World War II, the novel's “Pianosa is closer to Danang than Sardinia,” although Josh Greenfeld, writing in 1968, did not think the novel was necessarily as contemporary as it seemed:

Re-reading Catch-22 it struck me that its origins and ambience lie in between the forties and the sixties—in the decade when Heller conceived and wrote it. For if the fifties can be characterized as the age of acquiescence, when whispered demurral amounted to near-heroic protest in the face of Senator McCarthy's assault on the left (strange to recall that Joseph Welch and Edward R. Murrow were our heroes), then Catch-22 belongs more to that decade than to the present one, when active protest has re-emerged in such relatively extreme forms as draft resistance and military desertion.⁸⁴

This is an interesting point of view considering that Yossarian's final revolt is indeed an act of desertion, but Greenfeld also takes exception with this argument and states that the ending is a “fifties cop-out” in which Yossarian basically learns a lesson through his experiences in war.⁸⁵ This is undoubtedly true; however, the lesson still expresses itself as desertion. And a lot of soldiers apparently deserted in Vietnam after reading Catch-22.⁸⁶ Thomas L. Hartshorne counters Greenfeld's argument and draws close comparisons between Yossarian's actions and those of the sixties protesters. He states that “the goals of the protest movements of the early sixties were limited, concrete, and realizable. The strategy was to choose a target which one could hit, to fight a battle one could win.”⁸⁷ In other words, Yossarian was choosing a method of protest that he could accomplish successfully.

Hartshorne goes on to say:

From this perspective, Catch-22 seems almost to be a handbook for the protest movements of the early 1960's. The distinctive feature of these movements was not that they were directed toward new goals, based upon new ideologies, or addressed to the solution of new problems, but rather that they employed new styles of protest: the sit-in (not entirely new but never employed in the widespread fashion of the sixties), freedom rides, direct action, nonviolent resistance, the community organizing of the early years of the SDS, the idea of participatory democracy. At the same time, there was a tendency to avoid explicit ideological commitments and the discussion of long-term blueprints for the wholesale reconstruction of society. The goals of the movements were immediate and concrete: the integration of a particular lunch counter or waiting room, bringing people in a particular neighborhood together in order to achieve specific improvements in the neighborhood.⁸⁸

Yossarian's protest sparked the protest of others. He inspired others to resist the insanity of the establishment. Aldridge would agree:

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.⁸⁹

The book's influence was obviously pervasive among protesters, but it even caught the imagination of the Supreme Court. Heller explains:

Catch-22 has been mentioned in a Supreme Court decision. It's when the chaplain is taken down to be interrogated. And they say, “We accuse you of crimes we don't know about. How do you plead?” And he says, “How can I plead if you don't tell me what they are?” And they say, “How can we tell you if we don't know about them?” That was quoted by Justice Powell in a decision.⁹⁰

Heller himself had always been politically outspoken. In a 10 September 1968 New York Times article, Israel Shenker made these comments:

Mr. Heller is convinced that the sons of important people are not going to Vietnam. ‘Sons-in-law don't count,’ he insists. ‘They're expendable, especially [President Lyndon] Johnson's. The problem is: How can Johnson get out without accepting the stigma of defeat or without admitting he miscalculated shockingly. We did not go into World War II—as somebody should remind Dean Rusk—until after Pearl Harbor.’⁹¹

So it is not surprising that his novel should have such political and historical ramifications and reflections. He saw World War II as a necessary war that we fought for something—“for the survival of millions of people”; but Vietnam was a war against something—communism ostensibly, but “culture lag” in reality.⁹² He used World War II as a construct to reflect the moral insanity of contemporary culture. The enemy is not Germany but American government and business. Yossarian's rebellion against such bureaucratic oppression became the rallying cry of a generation.

CATCH-22 THROUGH TIME

The critical and popular response to Catch-22 when it first appeared in 1961 was clearly mixed. In fact, reviews were often diametrically opposed to each other as shown in the excerpts from well-known and well-respected critics. This jumble of responses points to the fact that the novel, perhaps, was ahead of the critics. In other words, literary criticism had to catch up with Catch-22.

That criticism has caught up to the novel is evidenced by the more sophisticated analyses that have appeared after the initial swarm of reviews. Heller has stated that he was “grateful to the hippie generation”⁹³ who were not caught up with convention and helped to popularize his novel despite the negative reviews. Aldridge agrees with the assessment that criticism was not quite up to speed in relation to Heller's novel:

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.⁹⁴

Writing on the 25th anniversary of the novel, Aldridge points out that two parts of the novel that were initially troublesome to critics—Yossarian's decision to desert and the shift away from comedy in the closing chapters—have been re-evaluated and re-interpreted in light of more sophisticated examination as “quite adequately prepared for” in the action of the novel.⁹⁵ For the first point, Yossarian is now seen as resisting the insanity of the bureaucratic world and deserts to express his individualism. For the second point, the novel does not so much shift away from comedy as it allows the consistent theme of horror to take center stage without any release or relief through humor. In the 25 years since the novel's publication, criticism had evolved to the point where it could appreciate the complexities more completely.

In 1986, another event pointed to the re-evaluation of Catch-22. Who could have guessed back in 1961 that Heller would be invited to speak at the United States Air Force Academy? James H. Meredith describes the event:

While many reviewers erroneously considered Catch-22 an all-out antiwar novel, which it is not, the book has been almost standard issue in the literature classes at the United States Air Force Academy. Indeed, the Academy in 1986 was host to one of Heller's triumphant public events, the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Catch-22. To many observers, it was an incongruous event, but to Heller and those who had read his book closely, the connection was a natural one. He was being celebrated by a later version of the same military establishment he had triumphantly satirized twenty-five years before, and Heller enjoyed the irony.⁹⁶

The English Department of the Academy even had t-shirts made with Yossarian sitting naked in a tree looking at the Cadet chapel in the distance.

In the 25 years since that celebration at the Air Force Academy, criticism has made even greater strides in reassessing the novel. Since Heller has written more novels, comparisons can now be drawn with his other works so that he, too, can be re-evaluated as a writer. Craig, for example, sees a recurrent theme in Heller's body of work: that of the death of a child. After the deaths of all the young boys in Catch-22 (Snowden, Kid Sampson, Clevinger, etc.), Yossarian wants to save a young girl—Nately's whore's kid sister. He wants to stop the cycle of particularly senseless and wasteful death. He wants to take responsibility for her and save her. As Craig postulates:

There is no reason to think that future Heller novels will not continue to tell the dead child's story. And no reason to think that Heller will not continue to wrestle with the problem of “Catch-22 Revisited,” the story which moves him, which impels him to tell the story he cannot tell. It is after all a story of death, not life, and the death of a child—if not rendered in the transcendent myths of religion—ends without the consolation of the end. So Heller will continue to revisit Catch-22, the place of “[his] war,” and to enact the ritual of telling, not telling, and suppressing the telling of the death of children.⁹⁷

Heller felt the death of children to be the supreme waste. In “Catch-22 Revisited,” he retells a particularly moving account from a father about a young life that was in actuality a living death:

Then it came, in French, in a choked and muffled torrent of words, the answer to the questions I hadn't asked. He began telling us about his son, and his large eyes turned shiny and filled with tears.

His only boy, adopted, had been wounded in the head in the war in Indochina and would never be able to take care of himself. He could go nowhere alone. He was only thirty-four years old now and had lain in a hospital for seven years. ‘It is bad,’ the man said, referring to the wound, the world, the weather, the present, the future. Then, for some reason, he said to me, ‘You will find out, you will find out.’ His voice shook. The tears were starting to roll out now through the corners of his eyes, and he was deeply embarrassed. The boy was too young, he concluded lamely, by way of apologizing to us for the emotion he was showing, to have been hurt so badly for the rest of his life.⁹⁸

Heller clearly felt the same about the victims in his novel. Now, after 50 years, Heller's book was no longer narrowly interpreted as simply being antiwar, but valued as the satire against mindless and dehumanizing institutions, such as the military and big business, as well as a statement against the consequences of such wasteful mindlessness, evidenced most bitterly by the death of children. His novel transcends the limitations of a small Italian island during World War II with a timelessness that is as unfortunately true for society today as it was in 1961.