A Deadly Serious Lunacy

...He sure is...

...Not that the jokes, by and large, aren't both fresh and funny—especially the grisly ones...

...Sample dialogue between Yossarian and his friend Doc Daneeka, the crabbed, self-pitying, powerless medical officer: "Is Orr crazy...

...One of its definitions goes, "they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing...

...Nor will I find it easy to forget "ex-Pfc...

...At the moment, of course, Absurdity as a literary or theatrical device is not only respectable but fashionable...

...You mean there's a catch...

...There is only a string of sometimes overlapping, sometimes disconnected, events, some as outrageously lunatic as an early Marx Brothers film, some as realistic and sickening as anything ever written about the strange things war can do to the fragile bodies and minds of a lot of once-healthy young animals in uniform...

...contributor, "New Yorker," "Commentary" As the theater lately has discovered, or rediscovered, when the artist deals with human experience at those levels which are almost literally worse than death, the resources of naturalism prove pitifully inadequate...

...Then why doesn't he ask you to...

...Joseph Heller's novel, Catch-22, lives up almost completely to its ecstatic notices...

...There is almost no plot to speak of, at least until the very end, by which time practically everyone you care about, with the exception of the hero, is dead or missing...

...Having served my time both on the other side of the globe and as close to the ground as I could get, I don't know whether the term "Catch-22" is an authentic piece of Air Corps folklore or the author's own happy invention...

...But, as the central symbol of his characters' predicament, it serves his purpose with devastating precision...

...The book's "hero" is Captain Yossarian, engaging, stubborn, lecherous, saintly, and excruciatingly sane as he flails back at the system symbolized by Catch-22...

...Then I can't ground him...

...Anybody who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy...

...And while fashion creates the hazard of attracting opportunists, it also makes it possible for the occasional work of genuine originality and power to find a far wider audience than someone like Nathanael West did in his time...

...Despite its determination to be as unreliable as possible about that particular war and why it might have been fought, it manages to reduce such fine, naturalistic war novels as those of Norman Mailer, James Jones or Irwin Shaw to mere talented journalism, and their portrayal of the bumbling or malevolent high brass into a positive whitewash...

...It is his ambitious but lazy assistant who is responsible for that moving and time-saving form letter to the next-of-kin, which reads: "Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr...

...So he hastily furnishes one, involving his startled hero in one of those soul-searching conflicts between conscience and self-interest which used to be so popular on live TV...

...Can you ground him...

...I sure can...

...And the luckless flyers forced to abandon their plane in the waters off Marseilles, who find that their Mae Wests wouldn't inflate because their mess-officer, the remarkable Milo Minderbinder, had stolen the carbon-dioxide capsules to make ice cream sodas for the officers' mess...

...The alternative, requiring not only a high order of poetic vision but also a willingness to shock, to challenge, to spit in your audience's eye, is what goes currently under the label of the Absurd...

...and Mrs...

...But first he has to ask me...

...And the "licensed psychiatrist" who accuses Yossarian of being immature, "with a morbid aversion to dying" and "deepseated survival anxieties...

...Sure there's a catch...

...That, however, is a minor quibble against a novel which, on almost every page, offers such felicities as: "There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war...

...Another far from atypical character, I suspect, is the sweet and crushingly ineffectual chaplain, who "used to think it was immoral to be unhappy...

...For the last 30-40 pages Heller seems abruptly to have been persuaded that even a novel as original as his would be better for some sort of a plot, preferably in chronological order...

...Because he's crazy...

...This encompasses farce, gibberish, surrealism and even that sub-branch of show-business called "sick humor"—all with good, honorable roots reaching back to Aristophanes, Homer, Cervantes, Swift and just about every other writer, painter or poet who ever had the audacity to attempt works of art out of the meaningless deaths, tortures and degradations some men undergo at the instance of others...

...It is a sprawling, hilarious, irresponsible, compassionate, cynical, surrealistic, farcical, lacerating and enormously readable account of what happened (though it couldn't have, really...

...Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for...

...Catch-22...

...They" are Heller's preposterous (perhaps just a shade too preposterous) colonels and generals, a gallery of childish, senile, vain, malicious, frightened incompetents playing a paper-helmet war for the gratification of their corkscrew egos and titanic insecurities, for some nebulous form of social or commercial advancement, little exercises in one-upmanship between rival brass, or simply to get themselves written up in the Saturday Evening Post...

...Catch-22 is the principle which keeps the half-crazed and exhausted bomber crews of the unspeakable Colonel Cathcart's squadron flying a quota of missions outrageously raised each time they are about to reach it...

...That's part of the rule...

...He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had...

...not quite that way) to some American flyers on a small island in the Mediterranean during the Italian campaign of World War II...

...There is Colonel Cathcart, the one who keeps raising the number of missions, and before a particularly nasty one exhorts his men to be sure and make tight bomb patterns in order to produce "a good clean aerial photograph he won't be ashamed to send through channels.' All the disclaimers in the world will not convince me that this man is fictitious...

...Wintergreen, the elusive mail clerk, who is "probably the most influential man in the whole theater of operations...

...No...

...There is also Doc Daneeka, bitterly resentful of the impending collapse of the German armies because it means he will be sent to the Pacific...

...Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action...

...At times, however, Heller's brilliant and original comic vision, as well as his splendid rage at the homicidal and suicidal stupidity with which wars may be fought at the headquarters level, is somewhat weakened by his evident delight in his own cleverness...

...But first he has to ask me to...

...And then you can ground him...

...It is very well done and all but, in contrast to the rest of the book's splendid contempt for such niceties, I find it a little on the square side...

...But it soon becomes apparent that most of his characters can be summed up in terms of a joke, which might make them easy for a reviewer to describe, but greatly limits their ability to grow, develop, or expose themselves to revelation...