SOURCE: Nagel, James. “The Early Composition History of Catch-22.” In Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk, pp. 262-90. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Nagel explores Heller's writing process for Catch-22, finding the early draft manuscripts rich with implications for the final published version of the novel.]

In 1978, the Wilson Quarterly conducted a survey of professors of American literature to determine the most important novels published after World War II. To be sure, the result was a most impressive list, but Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was ranked first.¹ Its position in this survey indicates the esteem and seriousness with which literary scholars have come to regard Heller's first novel since it appeared in October 1961. Only two months later, on December 7, 1961, Heller took obvious pleasure in writing to the dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame that “Catch-22 is already being discussed in literature courses at Harvard, Brown, and two universities here in New York City.”² Since Heller had taught for two years in the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University, he was fully conversant with the academy, with both its genuine intellectual stimulation and its professional excesses. Indeed, in the early stages of planning Catch-22, Heller had planned a satiric scene in which Major Major “meets an old drunk at an MLA convention who was ruined by a man who said he liked Henry James.”³ In another section Major Major “was from the winter wheat fields of Vermont and a former teacher of English. Made the mistake of stating publicly that he did not like Henry James,” and there is a suggestion that Major Major “never realized that Proust and Henry James were the same man.” Although these comments did not survive to the final version of the novel, no one would have enjoyed the satire more than Heller's former colleagues in the academy.

Beyond its high regard in universities throughout the world, Catch-22 has become an enormous commercial success as well, selling well over ten million copies in just the first two decades after it was published. Such enormous popularity seems to have come as something of a surprise to both author and publisher, since Simon and Schuster is reported to have ordered a first printing of only 4,000 copies. The financial arrangements, too, suggest modest expectations for all concerned; Heller's advance for the novel was only ＄1,500, ＄750 upon signing the contract and another ＄750 when the manuscript was delivered.⁴ Nor did the novel enjoy immediate success: it did not make the best-seller list in hardbound and did not become an international sensation until the paperback edition was released. Some of the attention paid to the novel was surely due to its satiric treatment of war and to the escalating antiwar feeling throughout the 1960s, what Pearl K. Bell labeled “that passionately antiwar decade and its nay-saying, antinomian, black-comic Zeitgeist.”⁵

It was a fortuitous coincidence, for nowhere in the Catch-22 materials is there any reference to the Vietnam War or anything like it, although the novel and the manuscripts resonate with antiwar sentiments, including a notation Heller recorded in 1955 that Douglas MacArthur, in his seventy-fifth-birthday speech, urged “people to let their leaders know that they will refuse to fight wars.”⁶ But even without the Vietnam War, Catch-22 would have been notable on purely artistic grounds, for writers and literary scholars quickly responded to its robust wit, devastating satire, and complex satiric method that hearkened to the eighteenth century as well as to the twentieth. John Steinbeck, for example, wrote to Heller in July of 1963 to say that he felt peace had become as ridiculous as war and that he found the novel “great” for both its attitude and its writing. Among others, James Jones, himself the author of a highly regarded war novel, wrote to Simon and Schuster to express his sense of awe at the conflict of tragedy and comedy in the book, finding it “delightful” and “disturbing.” Perhaps illustrative of the broad appeal of the novel, actor Tony Curtis wrote to Heller as early as 1962 expressing an interest in doing the movie and calling himself Yossarian.⁷

Despite the enormous popularity of Heller's first novel, and the volume of critical attention it has received in the three decades since it was published, relatively little attention has been paid to the composition history of Catch-22, even though the record of the growth of the manuscripts reveals a great deal about the development of the central themes and devices as the concept grew over the years.⁸ Of particular importance are the early notes and drafts of the manuscript, for they are enormously detailed and complex, often direct in stating Heller's objectives and reservations about what he was doing with his material. Heller's memories of the beginning of his first novel have been recorded many times in interviews, always with the same basic story:

I was lying in bed in my four room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain ‘Someone’ fell madly in love with him.” I didn't have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn't necessarily an army chaplain—he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind, even most of the particulars—the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn't use. All of this took place within an hour and a half. It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you're supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor. That morning I went to my job at the advertising agency and wrote out the first chapter in long hand. Before the end of the week, I had typed it out and sent it to Candida Donadio, my agent. One year later, after much planning, I began chapter two.⁹

The idea was to offer it as the first chapter of a book, and, as a result, it appeared as “Catch-18” in New World Writing later that year.¹⁰

Precisely when the original composition of the novel began has been a matter of some confusion, since Heller has indicated both 1953 and 1955 as the starting dates for the novel, probably referring to different stages in the development of the concept. There are indications in the manuscript, however, that Heller started working on the idea in 1953, trying out many different approaches to the novel before he arrived at the strategy used in the first chapter that was published two years later. By this time Heller had drafted hundreds of note cards outlining virtually every character and incident in the novel along with pages of sketches, conversations, time schemes, and the development of various themes.¹¹ It is clear that by 1955 he had a first chapter to publish but did not have a major section of the novel completed until 1957, when he submitted it to Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster. Gottlieb was only twenty-six at the time, and a junior editor, but he expressed his interest in the project, made some suggestions, and Heller signed a contract the following year. It took him three more years to complete work on the novel. After publication in late 1961, Heller became an international sensation, and Robert Gottlieb became editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf.

The initial composition of Catch-22 is important in several senses. On the simplest, perhaps the most important, level, it records the process of invention of one of the most remarkable novels of the twentieth century. It is no inconsequential body of papers that will reveal the process of significant creation at work, and the manuscripts clearly show Heller suggesting ideas to himself, discarding them, outlining possible structures for the shape of his narrative, trying out absurd conversations that underscore important themes. There is much to be learned about both characters and themes in material that was never published, for the manuscripts often are clear about motivations for various actions that are unclear in the novel, why Yossarian went into the hospital with a false liver ailment, for example. In many instances scenes and speeches in the manuscripts elucidate an episode in the published novel. A world of biographical reference in the manuscripts is largely lost in the published novel (in which the setting and the names of characters were changed): references to the places and people Heller knew during his service in the Army Air Corps in World War II, depictions of some of the men in his unit, some of the notable events that preoccupied them during the summer of 1944. These various documents, written in Heller's hand, provide an invaluable guide to understanding the composition and meaning of a monumental contemporary novel.

One point that should be made at the inception of any discussion of the stages of composition of Heller's first novel is that from beginning to end the title of the book was “Catch-18,” a title with somewhat richer thematic overtones than “Catch-22.” The early drafts of the novel, particularly the sketches and note cards, have a somewhat more “Jewish” emphasis than does the published novel. In Judaism, “eighteen” is a significant number in that the eighteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “chai,” means “living” or “life.” Eighteen thus has a meaning for Jews that it does not have for other people: the Mishnah promotes eighteen as the ideal age for men to marry, and Jews often give personal gifts or charitable contributions in units of eighteen. Thematically, the title “Catch-18” would thus contain a subtle reference to the injunction in the Torah to choose life, a principle endorsed by Yossarian at the end of the novel when he deserts.¹²

It is also clear that the title was changed not because Heller had second thoughts but because a few weeks before the scheduled printing of the novel, Heller's publisher learned that Leon Uris, who had earlier written Exodus, was coming out with a novel entitled Mila-18. A change had to be made, and there was discussion of using “Catch-11” in that the duplication of the digit 1 would parallel the structural use of the repetition of scenes. But “11” was rejected because of the movie Ocean's Eleven and the now familiar concern for using a number already current in the public imagination.¹³ Then Heller found a new title he liked, “Catch-14,” and on January 29, 1961, he wrote to his publisher in defense of it: “The name of the book is now CATCH-14. (Forty-eight hours after you resign yourself to the change, you'll find yourself almost preferring this new number. It has the same bland and nondescript significance of the original. It is far enough away from Uris for the book to establish an identity of its own, I believe, yet close enough to the original title to still benefit from the word of mouth publicity we have been giving it.)” For whatever reason, and legend has it that Robert Gottlieb did not find “14” to be a funny number, the title was finally changed once again, this time to “Catch-22,” recapturing the concept of repetition. Since the central device of the novel is déjà vu, with nearly every crucial scene, until the conclusion, coming back a second time, the title was once again coordinate with the organizational schema of the narrative. As Heller remarked, “the soldier in white comes back a second time, the dying soldier sees everything twice, the chaplain thinks that everything that happens has happened once before. For that reason the two 2's struck me as being very appropriate to the novel.”¹⁴ On this logic, and a decidedly accidental series of events, the phrase “catch-22,” rather than “catch-18,” became the term for bureaucratic impasse the world over.

It did so, however, only because readers found in the novel something they felt was important, a level of humor that was painfully resonant of their own experience, a grim reality that, in the 1960s, seemed all too close to current events. But even these aspects of the novel would not have had much impact were it not for the craft of the book, an artistry won through years of Heller's meticulous attention to the details of his novel. Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of the writing of Catch-22 is that Heller seems not to have discarded anything from the very beginning of composition, as though he somehow knew even from the start what a sensation his first attempt at extended fiction would be. As a result, the Catch-22 manuscripts contain literally thousands of pages of materials, note cards, early sketches, drafts of scenes, outlines of chapters, detailed lists of the appearance of each character in each chapter, outlines of thematic progressions, chronologies in which the events of the novel are measured against actual events in 1944, and hundreds of other pages dealing with proposed scenes and characters. They constitute a truly remarkable creative record, one unmatched in the papers of any other important American novel.

One of the most fascinating stages in the growth of the manuscript is a collection of note cards on which Heller, writing at his desk at work, planned the structure of the novel before composition and then analyzed its contents after the first complete draft.¹⁵ The most important of these is a group of thirty-seven cards, written in Heller's hand, headed “CHAPTER CARDS (outlines for chapters before they were written.)” Based on what Heller has said in a letter, these cards would have been assembled in 1953, at the earliest stage of composition, two years before the “sudden inspiration” that resulted in “Catch-18.”¹⁶

Perhaps the most striking feature of these cards, especially in light of the frequent charges that the novel is “unstructured,” “disorganized,” or even “chaotic,” is the detail of the initial plan. Not only are the main events in each chapter suggested, but characters are named and described, and such matters as structure, chronology, and various themes (including sex and “catch-18”) are set into a complex pattern. Other cards indicate the relationships among events, with key sentences written in. A typical card, about twelfth from the beginning,¹⁷ treats the characters and events for what was projected to be a single chapter:

1. Cathcart's background & ambition. Puzzled by _____ de Coverley.
2. Hasn't a chance of becoming a general. Ex-corporal Wintergreen, who evaluates his work, also wants to be a general.
3. For another, there already was a general, Dreedle.
4. uTries to have Chaplain say prayer at briefing.u
5. Description of General Dreedle. His Nurse.
6. Dreedle's quarrel with Moodis [sic].
7. Snowden's secret revealed in argument with Davis.
8. Dreedle brings girl to briefing.
9. Groaning. Dreedle orders Korf shot.
10. That was the mission in which Yossarian lost his balls.

The section of the published novel that relates to these items now comprises much of chapters 19 (“Colonel Cathcart”) and 21 (“General Dreedle”), with chapter 20 (“Corporal Whitcomb”), unrelated to these matters, interspersed between them. Thus the ten items on the card resulted in roughly twenty-one pages of the novel.¹⁸

The business of Colonel Cathcart's background and ambition now begins in chapter 19 with a description of him as a “slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who lumbered when he walked and wanted to be a general” (Catch, 185). These matters cover a bit over two pages and then give way to item 4 on the card, “Tries to have Chaplain say prayer at briefing.” To demonstrate how closely Heller worked with the note cards, this item had directional arrows pointing up on both sides of it, and, indeed, in execution the matter listed was moved forward in the chapter. This move underscores the logical relationship between the two concerns: “Colonel Cathcart wanted to be a general so desperately he was willing to try anything, even religion …” (Catch, 187). The idea develops systematically: Cathcart is impressed by a photograph in The Saturday Evening Post of a colonel who has his chaplain conduct prayers before each mission and he reasons, “maybe if we say prayers, they'll put my picture in The Saturday Evening Post” (Catch, 188). The humor of the situation progresses as Cathcart's thinking begins to take shape in his conversation with the chaplain:

“Now, I want you to give a lot of thought to the kind of prayers we're going to say. … I don't want any of this kingdom of God or Valley of Death stuff. That's all too negative. What are you making such a sour face for?”

“I'm sorry, sir,” the chaplain stammered. “I happened to be thinking of the Twenty-third Psalm just as you said that.”

“How does that one go?”

“That's the one you were just referring to, sir. ‘The Lord is my shepherd I—.’”

“That's the one I was just referring to. It's out. What else have you got?”

(Catch, 189)

Cathcart's logic leads him to an admission that “I'd like to keep away from the subject of religion altogether if we can” and to the true object of his desires: “Why can't we all pray for something good, like a tighter bomb pattern?” (Catch, 190). But the plan for prayers is abandoned altogether when the chaplain reveals that the enlisted men do not have a separate God, as Cathcart had assumed, and that excluding them from prayer meetings might antagonize God and result in even looser bomb patterns. Cathcart concludes “the hell with it, then” (Catch, 193). Thus the first item on Heller's note card and the elevated matter regarding prayer grew to make up all of chapter 19. The secondary notions of each of these items were moved: Cathcart's puzzlement at _____ de Coverley was delayed to chapter 21, and the revelation that Milo is now the mess officer was placed earlier, in chapter 13, when Major _____ de Coverley promotes him out of a desire for fresh eggs.

The remaining items on the card became chapter 21, “General Dreedle.” This chapter presents two main issues: the first is the string of obstructions to Cathcart's promotion to general, one of which is General Dreedle; the second is General Dreedle himself. In the novel, the chapter develops the topics equally. The balance is enriching: the ambitious colonel trying to get promoted contrasts the entrenched general trying to preserve what he has. Cathcart's problems in the novel reflect precisely what Heller listed as items 2 and 3 on his note card:

Actually, Colonel Cathcart did not have a chance in hell of becoming a general. For one thing, there was ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, who also wanted to be a general and who always distorted, destroyed, rejected or misdirected any correspondence by, for, or about Colonel Cathcart that might do him credit. For another, there already was a general, General Dreedle, who knew that General Peckem was after his job but did not know how to stop him.

(Catch, 212)

Heller demoted Wintergreen from “ex-corporal” in the notes to “ex-P.F.C.” in the novel. General Peckem, called P. P. Peckenhammer throughout the note cards and the manuscript, has been added as a further complication.

The business of General Dreedle, note card items 5 through 9, now occupies the last half of the chapter (Catch, 212-20) with only minor alterations from the notes. “Moodis” is changed to “Moodus”; in the incident of the “groaning” at the staff meeting, Dreedle orders Major Danby, not “Korf,” shot for “moaning” (Catch, 218). Two items are not treated: the business of Snowden's secret was saved for the conclusion of the novel (Catch, 430), where it becomes climactic of the déjà vu technique and the most powerful scene in the novel. Placed where it is now, the further revelation of Snowden's secret, that man is matter, emphasizes the theme of mortality just when Yossarian is most concerned with death and survival.

The second idea not treated, relating to Yossarian's castration, Heller later rejected in manuscript revision. The incident of Yossarian's wound was ultimately moved to chapter 26: Aarfy, called “Aarky” throughout the note cards, gets lost on the mission to Ferrara and, before McWatt can seize control of the plane, flies back into the flak and the plane is hit. Yossarian's wound in the novel is in his thigh, but his first assessment follows the suggestion of the note card:

He was unable to move. Then he realized he was sopping wet. He looked down at his crotch with a sinking, sick sensation. A wild crimson blot was crawling rapidly along his shirt front like an enormous sea monster rising to devour him. He was hit! … A second solid jolt struck the plane. Yossarian shuddered with revulsion at the queer sight of his wound and screamed at Aarfy for help.

“I lost my balls! I lost my balls! … I said I lost my balls! Can't you hear me? I'm wounded in the groin!”

(Catch, 283-84)

Heller changed a terrible reality to an understandable confusion that represents a normal fear in war. In its revised state the idea unites the sexual theme with the dangers of war and the destructive insensitivity of Aarfy. Yossarian's wound also serves the plot in getting him back into the hospital, where the themes of absurdity, bureaucracy, and insanity are explored: Nurse Cramer insists to Yossarian that his leg is “certainly … not your leg! … That leg belongs to the U.S. government” (Catch, 286). It would have been difficult to make this conversation humorous if Yossarian had been castrated. Nonetheless, the relationship of the published novel to the suggestions on the note card reveals that although Heller continued the creative process throughout the composition and revision of his book, the final product is remarkably consistent with his initial conception. The central tone, the key events, the characters (although often with changed names), and the underlying themes are essentially what Heller recorded on a note card eight years prior to the publication of the novel.

Another note card of particular interest is one entitled “Night of Horrors” in the notes and the manuscript chapter derived from it but “The Eternal City” in the published novel. The card contains seven entries, the first four of which concern matters not eventually made part of the chapter. These have to do with the discovery of penicillin (which Yossarian apparently needs for syphilis), Yossarian's attempts to get the drug through Nurse Duckett, and the acquisition of it by “Aarky.” The discovery by Yossarian that the old man in the whorehouse is dead, and that the girls have been driven out of the apartment by the vagaries of “catch-18,” thus would have been the result of his search for a cure. He has come to the apartment in Rome to see Aarky. The villain in this episode turns out to be Milo, as item 7 explains: “Milo is exposed as the source of penicillin [sic], tricking both Aarky & Yossarian, and as the man who infected the girl to create a demand for his new wonder drug. Yossarian breaks with him.” This concept, finally rejected, would have been an interesting but perhaps unnecessary further development of Milo's corruption. It would also have been an overt expression of Yossarian's underlying values, one not in the novel because Milo simply leaves Yossarian in Rome out of a desire to make money from the traffic in illegal tobacco.

This idea and all but one of the other suggestions on the card were finally abandoned or subordinated to what appears as item 5: “Yossarian finally walks through the streets of Rome witnessing various horrors, among them the maid, who has been thrown from the window by Aarky.” It is this concept that ultimately became the heart of “The Eternal City” (Catch, 396-410). Yossarian, in Rome to look for Nately's whore's kid sister, in an attempt to keep her from a life of prostitution, discovers a nightmare world. In the novel Milo shares these generous motives until he learns of the smuggling of illegal tobacco (Catch, 402). What emerges in the chapter is Yossarian's “night of horrors,” his surrealistic walk through Rome at night, in which greed, violence, corruption, insanity, and death, prime themes throughout the novel, converge on his consciousness from all sides, and he is arrested for being AWOL.

There are numerous other note cards as intriguing and significant as these two and several individual ideas that were developed or abandoned after their first conception in the notes. That Snowden will be killed on the mission to Avignon, that in response Yossarian will parade in the nude and sit naked in a tree during the funeral, are all established on a card entitled “Ferrara.” An example of the kind of minor detail that Heller frequently changed is the suggestion on this card that when Yossarian is awarded his medal, still standing naked in formation, “Dreedle orders a zoot suit for him.” Another such revision concerns what is finally chapter 30, “Dunbar” (Catch, 324-33), but is called “McAdam” in the notes. (The name “McAdam,” of course, was later changed to “McWatt.”) The two most dramatic events of the chapter are here suggested: McAdam dives low over the beach, slicing Kid Sampson in half, and then commits suicide. The note card indicates an indefinite “man” as the victim and also suggests that “McAdam kills himself & Daneeker,” which was revised, but the main focus of the published chapter is all there. This card also contains a fascinating suggestion: “Nurse Cramer's family tree traced back to include all known villains in History. She completes the line by being a registered Republican who doesn't drink, smoke, fornicate, or lust consciously & [is] guiltless of similar crimes.”

An entry for chapter 40, entitled “Catch-18” in the notes, reads “in the morning, Cathcart sends for Yossarian and offers him his deal. Big Brother has been watching Yossarian.” The concluding phrase makes explicit an underlying thematic allusion to George Orwell's 1984, one now more subtly beneath the action of the novel. The same card contains the suggestion that Nately's whore will stab Yossarian as he leaves Cathcart's office, which occurs in the novel, and that she will shout “olé” as she plunges the knife in, which does not.

The note for the final chapter, “Yossarian,” contains not only plot suggestions but some interpretive remarks as well. There is a good deal of interest in Yossarian's mortality: “Yossarian is dying, true, but he has about 35 years to live.” Another provocative entry, one rejected, suggests that “Among other things, he really does have chronic liver trouble. Condition is malignant & would have killed him if it had not been discovered.” It is fortuitous that this idea was changed, for Yossarian's trips to the hospital are now linked to his protest against the absurdity of the war and his personal quest for survival; to add to those ideas the serendipitous saving of his life through the discovery of his cancer in a military hospital he has falsely entered would have been to compound too many levels of irony. Perhaps the most important comments on this note card are those relating to the thematic significance of Yossarian's refusal of Cathcart's deal. In the note card, Yossarian discusses the ethics of the deal and his alternatives with an English deserter: “Easiest would be to go home or fly more missions. Hardest would be for him to fight for identity without sacrificing moral responsibility.” The following entry reads “He chooses the last, after all dangers are pointed out to him.”

In the novel, the English deserter has been replaced by Major Danby, who, since he does not appear in the preliminary notes, would seem to be a late invention. The conception of the “fight for identity” has been altered: Yossarian says, “I've been fighting all along to save my country. Now I'm going to fight a little to save myself. The country's not in danger any more, but I am” (Catch, 435). The “identity” motif has been submerged into the “survival” theme, one centered on Yossarian's physical and moral survival. Thus Yossarian can now claim, “I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them” (Catch, 440). In thematic terms, this change is among the most important ideas in the preliminary note cards. What is remarkable about them as a group, however, is how closely they correspond to what Heller eventually published some eight years later. It is a dramatic testimony to the clarity of his initial conception, for, although there were many early changes and deletions, along with alterations in the final version of the manuscript, the finished product is well described by the note cards Heller developed in his advertising office, shaping and defining and trying out his idea in miniature before he actually wrote the first draft.

In addition to the note cards, Heller also worked on a number of other documents prior to writing the first full draft of his novel. One group of these that is particularly important is composed of “plans,” outlines, sketches, brief exchanges of dialogue, summaries of the role of a character, ideas for plot developments, checklists on which Heller indicated that a certain idea had or had not been included in the first draft. These pages, somewhat more than a hundred, allowed Heller more room than did the note cards to expand on concepts and outlines, although to some extent they serve the same function. For example, on the sheet for “Catch-18” Heller recorded his ideas for the permutations of that concept:

• A. Censoring letters
• B. Increases Wintergreen's punishment
• C. Colonel must request transfer
• D. Sanity in soldier
• E. Drives girls out
• F. Will send Nately Back
• G. Deal With Yossarian.¹⁹

Heller had thus decided before he began writing that the matter of “catch-18” would occur at least seven times in the novel. Further, as the outline indicates, the general direction of the recurrence progresses from humor to tragedy, from the business of having Wintergreen dig holes to contain the dirt created from previous holes to the final matter of Yossarian's being trapped in a moral dilemma in which his self-respect and his very life are seriously threatened.

Some of Heller's notations to himself reveal a considerable interpretive intelligence. On a page about Corporal Snark, Milo's first chef in the novel and the character who poisons the squadron with soap in the mashed potatoes to prove that the men have no taste (Catch, 63), Heller records his comments about this relatively minor character. It is clear that Snark is to be thematically opposed to Milo in that Snark cooks for the “art” of his craft and Milo is interested only in the commercial aspects of food. Heller wrote that Snark “would like to forge within the smithy of his soul the uncreated soufflés of the world.” Another entry is particularly ironic: “Spots the significance of Milo's enterprises. An egg, in case the critics have missed it, is a symbol of creation. A hard-boiled egg is the symbol of the creative process frozen. A scrambled egg is the symbol of creation scrambled. A powdered egg is the symbol of the creative process pulverized—destroyed.” No one reading through Heller's plans would doubt that he gave extraordinary attention to every detail of his novel, including the role and thematic impact of every character in every scene. This pertains even in instances in which Heller did not follow his suggestions, as with some of his ideas for Snowden: “Snowden's innards are loathsome things brought up through a crack in the earth. … Snowden's luggage in the bedroom at the enlisted men's apartment … Snowden's secret is that they are out to kill Yossarian.” These ideas, particularly the last, are not implemented in the novel, nor are such related plans as the notion that General Eisenhower and Harry Truman want Yossarian dead.

One of the documents deals with the war novel that Yossarian and Dunbar struggle to write, a matter suggested on a note card and developed in Heller's plans but not incorporated into the final novel. The note cards contained two suggestions that relate to this document: one entry, item 7, suggests that “Yossarian & Dunbar write novel, although Jew won't conform & they still lack a radical” and the second, item 10, indicates a “parody of Hemingway in introduction of attempt to assemble cast for war novel.” In the brief sketches derived from the note-card entries, Heller wrote a half-page developing each idea, the first of which, entitled “Perfect Plot,” begins

now they had just about everything to make a perfect plot for a best-selling war novel. They had a fairy, they had a slav named Florik from the slums, an Irishman, a thinker with a Phd, a cynic who believed in nothing, a husband who's [sic] wife had sent him a Dear John letter, a clean-cut young lad who was doomed to die. They had everything there but the sensitive Jew, and that was enough to turn them against the whole race. They had a Jew but there was just nothing they could do with him. He was healthy, handsome, rugged, and strong, and if anybody else in the ward wanted to make something out of anything he could have taken them in turn, anybody but Yossarian, who didn't want to make anything out of anything. All he cared about was women and there was just nothing in the world you could do with a Jew like that.²⁰

Several matters are of interest in the paragraph, including the suggestion that Yossarian is Jewish, an idea buttressed by Heller's comments in a letter in 1974.²¹ That Yossarian and Dunbar would be writing a novel about war would be thematically awkward in the context of the progressive immediacy of danger and death. The writing of fiction implies remoteness, the vantage of the observer, more than direct involvement. Heller's idea that an outfit with an ethnic distribution would somehow parody Hemingway seems confused, since Hemingway never wrote any novels along those lines. The parody would seem better directed at some of the popular war movies that circulated in the 1950s. Another important dimension to this scene is that Yossarian and Dunbar are in the hospital, implying either that they are ill or wounded or, more likely, that they are feigning illness to escape hazardous duty, a ruse that runs throughout the novel.

Another Heller document, however, explores alternative reasons why Yossarian wants to go into the hospital. On a page entitled “Conspiracy to Murder Him,” Heller outlined some thoughts about Yossarian's growing preoccupation with death:

Grows aware of it with Snowden's death. They were all shooting at him, and when they hit someone else it was a case of mistaken identity. They wanted him dead, there was no doubt about it and there was no doubt that it was all part of a gigantic conspiracy. … Colonel Cathcart wanted him dead. General Dreedle wanted him dead. … Eisenhower and Harry S Truman wanted him dead. It was the one thing upon which even the enemies were agreed. Hitler wanted him dead because he was Assyrian, Stalin wanted him dead because he wasn't. Mussolini wanted him dead because he was Mussolini, and Tojo wanted him dead because he was short and far away and couldn't make himself understood. … The only safe place for him in the whole world was in the hospital, because in the hospital nobody seemed to care whether he lived or died.

This material has genuine comic potential, even in Heller's brief outline of it, although it makes Yossarian's fear of death somewhat more paranoiac than in the novel, where his continuous proximity to death is a matter of circumstance rather than malevolence. Heller's decision not to develop this idea was part of a general pattern of excision of references to real persons. Without the resonance of the names, the humor of the passage is greatly diminished.

Several of the other sketches Heller worked on are also intriguing documents, including a page on which Yossarian, Orr, and Hungry Joe all move the bomb line before the mission to Bologna. This page, entitled “Rebukes Yossarian for moving bomb line,” contains dialogue in which Clevinger argues with his obtuse good sense that Yossarian was unfair to the others in moving the line on the map. In the following paragraph the plot thickened in a way it does not in the novel:

It was another clear night filled with bright yellow stars he knew he might never see again. Moving the bomb line was not fair to the other men in the squadron, men like Orr, who tiptoed out into the darkness and moved the bomb line up an inch, and like Hungry Joe, who moved it up another inch, and the steady stream of all the others, each one moving it one inch so that it was up over Sweden when daylight glowed.

Yossarian alone is culpable in the novel, but this passage establishes the universality of his apprehension in a manner that may have enriched this motif. On the other hand, Heller's ultimate rejection of a scene in which Yossarian explains to the chaplain how much he enjoyed touching Snowden's torn flesh and organs, and how he rubbed blood over himself to impress everyone back at the base, was wisely deleted. In this sketch Heller seems to have been exploring the possibilities of his material, developing ideas before discarding them. The obvious thematic incongruence of Yossarian being pleased by the very death that transforms him would have considerably weakened the Snowden scenes.

There are other related documents that seem to have been written at this stage, after the note cards but before the first draft of the novel. Heller was obviously very concerned about the chronology of the action, not only that it progress in accord with certain key scenes but that these events be consistent with the history of the actual war. At one point he constructed a detailed outline of events in the European theater from 1943 to 1945. He begins in 1943 with the landings in Sicily on June 11 and follows with the Anzio landings in January of 1944, the Normandy invasion on June 6, and the stabilization of German forces in Italy (which necessitated the bombing of transportation lines). He did a separate page on events in Italy between May and August of 1944 (the period of his own bombing missions), outlining the objective of the Italian campaign (“tie down Germans; gain air bases near S. Germany”) and the stalemate in southern Italy that delayed the Allied advance. He particularly notes the taking of Rome on June 4, 1944, D-Day two days later, and the victories in Pisa and Florence. His broad outline continues through 1945 and the Battle of the Bulge, the advance of the Russians on the eastern front, the execution of Mussolini, the crossing of the Po, and the fall of Berlin on May 3.

With the historical facts clear, he worked on the chronological outline of his own narrative, using the closest paper large enough to contain his detailed notations, the blotter on his desk. On this document Heller recorded not only the general events of the novel but, within a grid crossing time values with characters, the action for each character at the time of the central events. Heller's chart would then tell him, as he worked on a given scene, what all of the characters were doing. For example, the entries indicate that when Yossarian is wounded he comes into contact with Nurse Duckett and gets psychoanalyzed by Major Sanderson, Dunbar cracks his head in the hospital, Nately refuses to enter the hospital, Aarky gets lost on the mission, Orr has a flat tire, the Soldier in White reappears, and the old man of the Roman brothel continues to be a mystery. Reading the chart down, Heller could follow the activities of any character he chose; reading it across, he could coordinate their activities and keep a complex chronology straight. In this he did not entirely succeed, but, given the intricate time structure of the novel, he needed a method of organizing the complex events.²²

At some point Heller constructed other documents that also clarify the actions of the characters and the key themes of the novel. Taking their interaction in the plot apart, he meticulously recorded the progression of events involving each character. These documents cover nearly a hundred pages and reveal the painstaking care and detailed attention that Heller gave to the structure of his fiction. Many of these entries contain humorous ideas not in, or submerged in, the novel, one being that Major Major “was from the winter wheat fields of Vermont and a former teacher of English. Made the mistake of stating publicly that he did not like Henry James.” Another entry explores the idea that “Rome was a sort of school for sexual experience.” Other entries explore the “Night of Horrors,” later changed to “The Eternal City,” and others the concept of free enterprise. One outline reveals Heller's plan for the ending, which begins “Yossarian is wounded, recovers, and continues flying combat missions until he completes seventy.” The emphasis is on Nately's whore, how she tries to stab him when he tells her of Nately's death. That sketch takes him through to the end:

Yossarian can lend himself obediently to all Colonel Cathcart's designs and lose his life; he can accept Colonel Cathcart's proposition and lose his character. Or, he can desert, and risk losing both when he is eventually apprehended, as he knows he will probably be. There is no way he can remain a citizen in good standing without falling victim to one dishonorable scheme or another of his legal superior.

In the end, he runs off, closely pursued by Nately's mistress, the embodiment of danger and of a violent conscience that will never leave him in peace.

As these comments indicate, Heller often gave his ideas critical substance even before he wrote the scenes, acting as creative writer and interpreter simultaneously in a manner rarely equaled for detail and insight in American fiction.

The most important manuscript of Catch-22 is a handwritten draft a good deal longer than, but essentially the same as, the published novel. It is complete save for the first chapter, which was published separately as “Catch-18” in New World Writing in 1955, and for chapter 9, which is simply missing from this draft although present in the typescript. This manuscript displays the additions, deletions, insertions, typeovers, misspellings, and informal punctuation of the type normally found in first drafts.²³ It is essentially handwritten, although there are paragraphs and occasionally pages that are typed, indicating, perhaps, some revision simultaneous to the initial composition. Two chapters of the manuscript do not appear in the novel (as a result the numbers of the chapters are different in each case) and hundreds of brief passages were deleted. Indeed, Heller's revisions consisted more of deletion and addition than of alterations in scenes. The pages are numbered sequentially by chapter, although as other pages were inserted, varying numbering and lettering schemes were used to keep order so that pages frequently have several numbers or letters on them. As was true on the note cards, many of the names of characters differ in the manuscript from the novel: Aarfy appears consistently as Aarky; Peckem is known throughout the manuscript as P. P. Peckenhammer. Nately is a more important character in the manuscript than in the novel, and an entire chapter about his family was deleted. One important character in the manuscript, Rosoff, does not appear at all in the novel. But the central point is that Heller's first draft remains remarkably close to what he outlined in his note cards and to the published novel.

There are other matters in the early composition stages that are significant. One of them is that the location of Yossarian's base throughout the note cards and manuscript is Corsica, where Heller himself had been stationed. Pianosa was not introduced until the manuscript and even the typescript had been completed. The manuscript is more detailed than the novel in describing features of the setting, since Heller had been to Corsica himself and knew the topography intimately; there is no evidence that he ever visited Pianosa. Yossarian's unit in the manuscript is also Heller's old outfit, the Twelfth Air Force, whereas in the novel it is the Twenty-seventh, a nonexistent unit. In the manuscript there is a much more “literary” frame of reference than in the final novel, and Yossarian is compared to Ahasuerus, Gulliver, and Samson Agonistes, reflecting Heller's graduate training in literature. The manuscript is also somewhat more sexually explicit than the published version, as in the scene in which Daneeka shows the newlyweds how to make love. In the manuscript Daneeka says, “I showed them how penetration was accomplished and explained its importance to impregnation.” This reference was dropped in the final draft. In a similar vein, the manuscript has more scatological dialogue, so that when Milo maneuvers a package of dates away from his friend, “Yossarian always did things properly, too, and he gave Milo the package of pitted dates and told him to shove his personal note up his ass.” This passage, and this tone, did not survive to publication (Catch, 64).

Another area of frequent revision is the final paragraphs of the chapters, which show a great deal of revision, more than any other section of the manuscript. For example, in the first draft the last paragraph of chapter 7, which concludes a section on Milo's complex investment schemes, reads

the only one complaining was Milo. And the only ones who were happy, as it turned out, were Milo and the grinning thief, for by the time McWatt returned to his tent another bedsheet was gone, along with the sweet tooth and a brand new pair of red polka dot pajamas sent him with love by a wealthy sister-in-law who despised him for what he had been told was his birthday.

Heller crossed all of that out in his manuscript and substituted “but Yossarian still didn't understand.” By the time the novel appeared the passage had become

but Yossarian still didn't understand either how Milo could buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents,

(Catch, 66)

which better conveys the absurd humor.

One way in which the manuscript differs from the novel is that there are more passages of interpretive comment in the first draft, such as a comment in chapter 2 about the Texan. In the manuscript the narrator says

that's what was wrong with the Texan, not that he never ended kneeding [his jowls], but that he overflowed with goodwill and brought the whole ward down trying to cheer it up. He was depressing. He was worse than a missionary or an uncle. ‹The Texan› {He} wanted everybody in the ‹ward› {hospital} to be happy. He was really very sick.

In the novel this passage has been reduced in a manner typical of Heller's changes:

The Texan wanted everybody in the ward to be happy but Yossarian and Dunbar. He was really very sick.

(Catch, 16)

In shortening this passage, Heller also changed its impact, making the Texan's illness ambiguous. The manuscript implies that his unrestrained ebullience and goodwill are so out of keeping with reality as to be pathological; the novel seems to suggest that because he does not want Yossarian and Dunbar to be happy there must be something wrong with him.

Another expository assertion of theme originally opened chapter 3:

Colonel Cathcart wanted fifty missions, and he was dead serious about them. Yossarian had one mission, and he was dead serious about that. His mission was to keep alive. His mission was to keep alive as long as he could, for he had decided to live forever or die in the attempt. Yossarian was a towering one hundred and ninety-two pounds of firm bone and tender flesh, and he worshipped the whole bloody mess so much that he would have lain down his life to preserve it. Yossarian was no stranger to heroism. He had courage. He had as much courage as anyone he'd ever met. He had courage enough to be a coward, and that's exactly what he was, a hero.

This assessment of Yossarian's character is the kind of comment reserved for the other characters in the published novel, with Yossarian's role revealed dramatically. Heller deleted this passage and presented the idea with the remark that Yossarian “had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive” (Catch, 29), a more concise formulation. Heller made scores of alterations in the manuscript along these lines, nearly always with the result of reducing expository comment, compressing a scene without losing the effect, or clarifying the motivation of one of the characters.

Occasionally Heller's original ideas were abstract and the revisions concrete and specific, lending realistic detail where there had been only generality. For example, in chapter 3 Heller had written a passage about

General Peckenhammer's directive requiring all tents in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations to be pitched with entrances facing back proudly toward the future along imaginary parallel lines projected perpendicular to the chain of events that had made the present inevitable.

In terms of the setting of the novel, always very specific, this passage makes little sense and is not humorous. Whatever philosophical value there might be in these abstractions, they do not comment in any important way on Yossarian's situation, nor does the deterministic suggestion carry much thematic weight since if circumstances are inevitable there is little point in protesting against them. Heller's revision works better: it is clear that General Dreedle is angry about

General Peckem's recent directive requiring all tents in the Mediterranean theater of operations to be pitched along parallel lines with entrances facing back proudly toward the Washington Monument.

(Catch, 26)

This version is more deeply comic, with its absurd patriotism motivated by Peckem's unbridled ambition. Dreedle's anger has more to do with his struggle for power with Peckem than with whether the directive makes any sense, although “to General Dreedle, who ran a fighting outfit, it seemed a lot of crap.” On another level it also parodies the regimentation of all aspects of military life.

Some passages had an element of humor but were deleted anyway in the revision of the first draft. In the published novel, “Yossarian shot skeet, but never hit any. Appleby shot skeet and never missed” (Catch, 35). Heller does not do much with this business, although the passage reinforces the general idea that Appleby is capable and very competitive, whereas Yossarian is mediocre and not at all competitive. In the manuscript, however, Heller made more extensive comment:

Yossarian couldn't shoot a skeet to save his ass. The only time Yossarian ever shot a skeet was the time he discharged his shotgun accidentally and shot a whole box full of skeet right out of Appleby's hands ten minutes before the firing was scheduled to begin. Appleby, one of those who never missed, was impressed profoundly.

This incident makes Yossarian's innocence somewhat more dangerous than in the novel, and it also gives Appleby a more generous spirit.²⁴ The joke in the manuscript surpasses that in the novel, but it comes at the cost of making Yossarian a dangerous threat. In the final version he is essentially a life-affirming character fighting for survival in a hostile and threatening world.

Another important revision relates to the conclusion of chapter 8, which contains the scene known as “Clevinger's Trial,” an intense and shocking section in which Clevinger appears before the Action Board for such crimes as “mopery,” “breaking ranks while in formation,” and “listening to classical music” (Catch, 74). The board consists of Lieutenant Scheisskopf, Major Metcalf, and a “bloated colonel with the big fat mustache.” What disturbs Clevinger is not only that he is presumed guilty, in fact must be guilty or he would never have been charged, but that he senses the intense hatred of his superior officers. In the novel, that point is emphasized in the conclusion, in which Clevinger realizes that nowhere in the world, not even in Nazi Germany, “were there men who hated him more” (Catch, 80). This conclusion is sharp and effective, perhaps the best final line in any of the chapters. It is also a major improvement over what Heller had originally written, which was that

these were men who were on his side, who pledged allegiance to the same flag. It was a ruinous, shattering encounter, for that was the one thing Clevinger had not learned at Harvard, how to hate, and the one thing Yossarian could not teach him. They were not the enemy soldiers he had enlisted to fight, yet he was the enemy they had enlisted to fight, and it gave them the decisive advantage in whatever incomprehensible struggle they had plunged themselves into against him.

Although there may be elements of tragic wisdom in this insight, its verbosity diffuses the impact of the shorter and more pointed conclusion. Here, as in many instances, Heller demonstrated his considerable skill at revision, making the concluding paragraph in the novel much better than that in the first draft.

Many of Heller's deletions from the manuscript are essentially compressions retaining the same basic themes and the same attributes of character. The reductions thus have the effect of leaving some matters unstated but nonetheless consistent with the passages that appear in the published version. For example, chapter 8 of the novel begins “not even Clevinger understood how Milo could do that, and Clevinger knew everything,” referring to Milo's ability to sell eggs for less than he pays for them and still make a profit. The manuscript went on to detail various categories of what Clevinger knew:

Clevinger knew who was fighting the war and why, who had started the war and when, who would pay for the war and how, and why the war had to be one [won] and by whom, even though winning the war would mean giving everything back to the same sinful people of poise, power, and pretension all over the world who had helped get it started in the first place, just so they could fuck things up all over again with a brand new one that would make it necessary for Yossarian to dump his wet, warm blood out still one more time in ‹senseless› {meaningless} payment for their headstrong and supercilious blunders. It would all go back to them by default, for they were the only ones willing enough to work full time at getting, keeping, and misusing authority.

In addition to unnecessarily elaborating on an idea inherent in the events, this passage introduces an element of futility in both the war itself and Yossarian's protest. Since everything will revert to its original condition even if the Allies win the war, every level of the action is absurd. In the conclusion of the published novel, Yossarian takes a rather different stance, stating, “I've been fighting all along to save my country.” He clearly feels that it does make a difference who wins; that conflict having been resolved, however, he now must devote himself to saving both his life and his integrity, which explains his desertion. The final portion of the deleted passage, a protest against oligarchy and a call for political activism, remains only by implication.

Some of Heller's deletions constitute a pattern that, in effect, diminishes the role of characters or themes. For example, the triumvirate of Scheisskopf, his wife, and the accommodating Dori Duz is more important in the manuscript than in the novel. Many passages involving Yossarian and Dori Duz were deleted in chapter 8, for example, most dealing with Yossarian's lust and her capacity to tantalize him. In another section Dori replaces Mrs. Scheisskopf in bed so that the wife can go out on the town with Buddenbrooks looking for someone interesting “to shack up with.” Despite the humor in these passages, Dori has less moment than Mrs. Scheisskopf, and Heller diminished her role appropriately in the novel.

Mrs. Scheisskopf gets more attention in the manuscripts than in the published version. Much of what was cut about her, however, contained generalized comments about women that would have introduced tangential issues, and Heller wisely deleted them. For example, he originally wrote in chapter 8 that

like all married women who have been denied the essential childhood advantages of a broken home and a tenement environment, she yearned to be a slut with lovers by the thousand. Unlike all married women, she had the vision, courage, and intelligence to make a gallant try.

Although this passage would have provided a plausible explanation for her promiscuity, it would have done so in a school of red herrings. So, too, a related section Heller deleted. He originally wrote that

she was pleasant and confused, with a misplaced sex urge located somewhere in her frontal lobe in the unyielding nut of some trite and treasured neurosis in which only she had any curiosity. She was the sort who in olden times would undoubtedly have run off with her colored chauffeur. What stopped her from doing it now was her colored chauffeur. He couldn't stand her. He found her too bourgeois.

Beyond the humor in the etiology of her insatiable desire, there are again unfortunate racial and socioeconomic implications in the chauffeur business that had to be deleted. It seems probable that Heller, unfailingly liberal and humane in his personal views, was initially inspired by some stereotypic comic strategies that, upon reflection, were inconsistent with the themes he was developing.

The role of Scheisskopf in this chapter was also reduced somewhat, although not fundamentally altered. There was originally more of his obsession with marching and winning parades, with the men being forced to drill in the dead of night with their feet wrapped in burlap bags to muffle the sound. Heller's style in some of this material took on an anomalous tone:

Not a human voice was distinguishable throughout the whole clandestine operation; in place of the usual drill commands, Lieutenant Scheisskopf substituted the sigh of a marsh hen, the plash of a bullfrog, and the whir of quails' wings on a slumbrous Friday afternoon.

The rhapsodic mood of the passage is inconsistent with the inhumane, even unhuman, ambition of Scheisskopf, who cares nothing for the men in his unit and would gladly nail them in formation if it would help win the weekly prize in the Sunday parades.

Heller also deleted a good deal of material from chapter 10, which deals with an array of matters starting with Clevinger's death in a cloud, the Grand Conspiracy of Lowery Field, and ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen's devotion to digging holes in Colorado, and proceeding through to the ominously escalating number of missions required in Pianosa. There was originally a good deal more elaboration on Wintergreen's prodigious digging, with several pages detailing how he would dig until he could find the match, thrown by a Lieutenant Tatlock (who did not survive to the published novel), at the bottom of a hole. All of this proceeds from the fact that “it was ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen's military specialty to keep digging and filling up [pits] in punishment for going AWOL every time he had the chance.” There was much elaboration in the manuscript on all of this, even to the point that “Staff Sergeants Bell and Nerdlinger set up a bookmaking stand several yards away and gave odds to all comers on how long it would take him to find each match.”

Two other deleted passages in chapter 10 of the manuscript are of particular interest, including one that explains why Milo chose his own squadron to bomb and strafe after he convinced the Germans to conduct the war on a businesslike basis:

Actually, Milo bombed all five squadrons in the Group that night, and the air field, bomb dump, and repair hangars as well. But his own squadron was the only one built close enough to the abandoned railroad ditch for the men to {take shelter there} seek safety there and be machine gunned repeatedly by the planes floating in over the leafy trees blooming in luxuriant silhouette against the hard, cold, ‹spectral› {ivory} moon.

The diffusion of Milo's attack in this passage to the entire Group generates rather different values than the more focused raid on the squadron in the novel, in which the danger and threat to life are immediate and devastating.

But a more important passage was cut from this chapter, one that deals with Yossarian's mental condition as it relates to the Snowden scene. A three-page section in the manuscript was deleted that develops some of the causes of Yossarian's “insanity” as seen by others, in this case Sergeant Towser:

Yossarian had gone crazy twice, in Sergeant Towser's estimation. The symptoms began subtly with a morbid hallucination about a dead man in his tent right after the mission to Orvieto, where the dead man in his tent was really killed, and erupted disgracefully into outright insanity on at least two occasions with which Sergeant Towser was personally familiar, first on the mission to Avignon, when Snowden was killed in the rear of his plane, and again shortly afterward when Yossarian's close friend Clevinger {was} ‹had been› lost in that mysterious cloud.

What is explicitly clear here is that Yossarian is “insane” only because Towser is insensitive to Yossarian's grieving for a lost friend, to his remorse for the death of a man he did not know, to his feelings about the horrible death of Snowden, and to his general sense of the immediacy of death in their lives. There are further explanations in the deleted sections clarifying the point that Yossarian initially discarded his clothes because they were covered with Snowden's blood and that Yossarian's subsequent retreat into the hospital was occasioned by Clevinger's death. In the published novel this event supports other interpretations: for example, that Yossarian took off his uniform to indicate his rejection of his military role.

This section continues from Towser's point of view, and, since Towser works in Major Major's office, it deals with Yossarian's vigorous attempts to confront his commanding officer. A related passage, also deleted, explores Towser's memories of Mudd, the dead man who lives in Yossarian's tent: “He looked exactly like E=MC² to Sergeant Towser because he had traveled faster than the speed of light, moving swiftly enough to go away even before he had come and say so long even before he had time to say hello.” There is more of this on Mudd, including a scene in which Yossarian returns from a mission to discover that the man in his tent has been killed, and all of these passages were deleted. The effect is that the novel now says little about the details of the Mudd incident or the background of how Yossarian came to walk around naked. A perceptive reader has a sense of the motivational line, but it is not as definite as in Heller's first draft.

One incident that Heller revised rather substantially is the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade in chapter 11, an obvious parody of the American loyalty statements of the 1950s and not of military practice in World War II. In the manuscript this crusade targets Communists in the squadron and is not, as in the novel, simply an attempt by Captain Black to discredit Major Major. In the manuscript Black several times asserts that his duty as intelligence officer requires him to identify Communists and to prevent them from examining the bombsights in the planes. Heller repeatedly deleted references to Communism in this section. He also somewhat softened the inconvenience caused to the men by the crusade. He cut out a passage in which the men had to get up at midnight for morning missions and at dawn for afternoon flights because of the necessity to sign so many oaths.

Heller made literally thousands of revisions of this kind as he worked and reworked his material, drawing nearer to publication. In some cases entire chapters were deleted, one involving a calisthenics instructor named Rosoff, who in many ways duplicated Scheisskopf in his excessive zeal for regimentation, and another in which Nately writes home to his father, which shifted some attention away from the theater of war and toward the United States. Many references to actual persons were dropped, including prominent military figures, and the names of men in Heller's unit were changed to avoid any chance of libel suits. But the fact remains that, over the nine years of composition of the novel, the central characters, themes, and incidents that Heller had initially planned in the early stages of the novel remained essentially intact, and in these documents resides one of the most complete, and fascinating, records of the growth of an American classic.

Notes

1. See Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975,” Critical Inquiry 10:1 (1983): 206.

2. See Joseph Heller's letter to Dean Sheedy (December 7, 1961), in the Heller Manuscripts at Goldfarb Library, Brandeis University. Unless otherwise indicated, all manuscript references are to this collection. I am grateful to Joseph Heller for permission to quote from these documents.

3. Joseph Heller, planning document. Prior to actually beginning the composition of the novel, Heller wrote hundreds of note cards and manuscript pages on which he proposed scenes, defined characters, organized the chronology, and outlined the structure of the novel. Unfortunately, such documents are not sequentially numbered and are not organized into a discrete unit, making precise reference to them problematic. I will, therefore, minimize documentation to them in routine cases. Similarly, in composing his manuscripts, Heller frequently deleted sections, started over (using a new numbering scheme), moved material, or otherwise revised in such a way that reference to specific manuscript page numbers is all but useless. Indeed, Heller interspersed numbered pages with lettered pages, sometimes going through the alphabet twice in a given chapter before returning to numbered pages once again.

4. On early sales, see William Hogan, “Catch-22: A Sleeper That's Catching On,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 3, 1962, p. 39; on financial arrangements, Chet Flippo, “Checking in with Joseph Heller,” Rolling Stone, April 16, 1981, pp. 51-52.

5. Pearl K. Bell, “Heller's Trial by Tedium,” The New Leader, October 28, 1974, p. 17.

6. This document is on file in the Heller Manuscripts.

7. John Steinbeck, letter to Joseph Heller, July 1, 1963, Heller Manuscripts. The letter from James Jones is also in this file. Tony Curtis to Joseph Heller, October 16, 1962, Heller Manuscripts.

8. Indeed, three recent books on Heller's fiction ignore the composition history of his work. See Robert Merrill, Joseph Heller (Boston: Twayne, 1987); Stephen W. Potts, Catch-22: Antiheroic Antinovel (Boston: Twayne, 1989); David Seed, The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).

9. Joseph Heller, quoted in George Plimpton, “How It Happened,” New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1974, p. 3.

10. See Heller's comments in Richard B. Sale, “An Interview in New York with Joseph Heller,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 63-74. Joseph Heller, “Catch-18,” New World Writing 7 (April 1955): 204-14.

11. About the beginning date of the book's composition, see Sale, p. 67, where Heller suggests that he started the novel in 1955, and Josh Greenfeld, “22 Was Funnier than 14,” New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1968, 1, where 1953 is given as the beginning date. Some of my comments about the note-card stage of development were previously published, in somewhat different form, in “The Catch-22 Note Cards,” Critical Essays on Joseph Heller, ed. James Nagel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 51-61 (reprinted from Studies in the Novel 8 [1976]: 394-405).

12. On the significance of the number 18, see Melvin J. Friedman, “Something Jewish Happened: Some Thoughts about Joseph Heller's Good as Gold,” in Critical Essays on Joseph Heller, 196.

13. For the discussion of the change of title from “Catch-18” to “Catch-11” to “Catch-22,” see Ken Barnard, “Joseph Heller Tells How Catch-18 Became Catch-22 and Why He Was Afraid of Airplanes,” Detroit News Sunday Magazine, September 13, 1970, pp. 18-19, 24, 27-28, 30, 65.

14. Heller's letters to Alfred A. Knopf are on deposit in the Heller Manuscripts. See Barnard, “Joseph Heller Tells,” 24. Although the manuscript of the novel was entitled “Catch-18” for nearly the entire period of composition, I will refer to the manuscript materials as the “Catch-22” manuscripts unless I specifically wish to indicate the chapter entitled “Catch-18” or the story published under that title.

15. On Heller's writing at his desk at work, see Alden Whitman, “Something Always Happens on the Way to the Office: An Interview with Joseph Heller,” Pages 1 (1976): 77. My comments here closely follow those in “The Catch-22 Note Cards,” 51-61. The note cards are lined, 5″ × 8″ Kardex cards of a type used by the Remington Rand office Heller worked in during the composition of the novel. Heller's comments on the cards are variously in blue, red, and black ink, with occasional pencil notations. The variations in ink would suggest that the planning progressed slowly, during which the implements on Heller's desk changed. The cards might also suggest that some of the planning work was done in the office, whereas Heller has indicated that the writing of the novel was done at home, in the evenings, whenever he felt like it. He did not rush, and the development of the novel was stretched over eight years.

16. Joseph Heller, letter to author, March 13, 1974, p. 2, Heller Manuscripts.

17. Given the disorganized state of the Heller manuscripts, it is difficult now to determine the precise order of the cards and even, in some cases, whether a given card was written before or after the initial draft. All references to the numbers and groups of cards are therefore based on my own judgment of the most likely function of the cards when they were written. Heller's comments to me in conversation about the manuscripts has guided my judgment, but even he was unable to remember precise details after a lapse of many years.

18. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 185-92, 206-20. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Catch.

19. These sheets are not organized or numbered in any coherent fashion, suggesting that they were written at various times and not as a discrete stage of composition. Some pages are not numbered, while others begin the numbering or lettering scheme all over again. The “Catch-18” sheet is numbered 17, which is crossed out, and renumbered 15. The letters on the outline are enclosed in circles, which I do not indicate in my text.

20. This entry is on a sheet entitled “Hospital.” For a more detailed transcription of Heller's paragraphs, see James Nagel, “Two Brief Manuscript Sketches: Heller's Catch-22,” Modern Fiction Studies 20 (1974): 221-24.

21. Joseph Heller, letter to Daniel Walden. I have read this letter but do not have a copy. In it Heller says that he always thought of Yossarian as Jewish. However, in other places Heller has said directly that he wanted Yossarian to be without ethnic identity.

22. For copies of Heller's blotter, I am indebted to Colonel Frederick Kiley of the United States Air Force, who was generous with both his time and materials when I spoke with him in Washington, D.C. Kiley used the blotter for the cover of his book A ‘Catch-22’ Casebook, ed. Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald (New York: Crowell, 1973).

23. I will use the term manuscript to designate the handwritten draft of the novel, distinct from the typescript. Some of the pages of the manuscript have been typed and inserted; some paragraphs were typed with handwriting following, suggesting a revision during the process of composition. In my quotations I will attempt to represent the manuscript accurately, adding only periods to end sentences (sometimes on the manuscript it is not clear if there is a period or not). Throughout my transcriptions, [ ] will be used for editorial interpolations, ‹› to indicate additions made to the text, and {} to denote deletions by Heller.

24. There is a suggestion in the deleted dialogue that Havermeyer and Appleby discuss the incident and agree that Yossarian shot the gun on purpose, which would change the attitude of Appleby.