Joseph Heller: Fool's Gold

...All Heller knows about Washington, apparently, is what he has read in the New York Times, preferably as recounted by Anthony Lewis, whom he twice quotes by name as an authority on the scene...

...As I have already said about the President--and as even newspaper reporters are willing to concede about him and the others--the allegation is precisely contrary to fact...

...In the succeeding 18 years Heller has managed to produce only one unsuccessful novel, Something Happened, and a bad play, We Bombed in New Haven...

...There can be few serious critics who argue that Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance, is a work of art or Kurt Vonnegut a great writer...

...Gold, an obscure English professor at a. second-rate college, is offered his pick of the very highest appointive positions in American governmentmon the basis of a book review...

...It is catastrophic...

...Can he really have spent all that time writing and rewriting his new novel and still come up with so inept a failure in satire ? I doubt that any creative writing teacher in the country (outside, possibly, of the New York metropolitan area) would have let an undergraduate get away with the Lieberman scenes as a first draft...

...He is up at five every morning, takes two sleeping pills and a tranquilizer, and goes right back to bed for as long as he can sleep...

...How did I know the rest would be any good...

...As one might expect from the author of Catch-22, madcap characters and lunatic incidents abound...

...Now it is entirely legitimate, lirerarily as well as politically, for a passionate socialist like Heller to attempt to satirize the views of a neo- (or any other kind of) conservative like Podhoretz...

...But at least it has enough of a basis in literal truth to raise it to the status of burlesque Heller's other political charac rooted in nothing but the autt Perhaps dae worst exampte cipline is Heller's treatment Lieberman...

...John W. Aldridge, who almost 30 years ago wrote an insightful work of criticism called After the Lost Generatton but who followed that up with what is arguably the worst novel ever published in America, an academic horror called The Party at Cranton, regards Heller's portrait of official Washington as "a masterful burlesque...

...But that still leaves open the question of whether such grotesque invention can hope to succeed either as comedy or satire...

...Here is ~,nother example of his utter inability to conceive that others might have legitimate and even principled reasons for differing with him on political questions...

...and except for some family-quarrel scenes that go on too long, the reader is never in danger of being bored...

...Rumor has it that '_ Podhoretz, editor of Cgmmentary and b~te noire of the Netu, Yor~ Review of Books crowd (whose reviewer of the: book, a,professor of English at Rutgers University, says coyly that the character "sounds familiar...

...Now satire, in order to work well, to be truly funny and illuminating, has to stay within reach, or at least sight, of the reality of its target...

...Their reticence is all the more curious because, as satire, it is the most successful piece in the book...

...Fair enough...

...Its effect is not necessarily a consequence of artistic excellence...

...It is hard to think of any other talented writer being as victimized by his own fixed ideas as Heller...

...In Heller's view, then, it .is only greed and selfishness--aoddng And he onnecteil officials ~on what ,litan like ies...

...yet the novel has had that kind of impact...

...Good as Gold" is undoubtedly an important late-seventies cultural event, but it is not a very good novel...

...Why, I wonder, do left-liberal novelists and university professors take such delight in imagining that high federal officials from the President on down are lazy...

...One clue appears in the plot summary...

...795 only an author either childishly ignorant or willfully self-deluded could imagine that a President of the United States is effectively satirized by being portrayed as sleeping most of the time...

...The American Spectator May 1979...

...This, I think, is why the Washington sections of the book are so hopelessly inept...

...At some points in the book Heller appears to understand that if there is not some modicum of literal truth underlying the satiric portrayal, it will strike even an unsophisticated audience as just dumb...

...But his Washington scenes are full of such'claptrap, and the professors of English who have reviewed the book thus far think they are dynamite...

...Karl 0 Zessker Joseph Heller: Fool's GoM Good as Gold is an important late-seventies cultural event and a very bad novel...

...These encomia tell us all too much, I fear, about the critical sensibilities of the reviewers, and they tell us even more about how little these highly educated men know of their own government's workings...

...Nor is Heller's political satire any more compelling...

...My guess is that the big money might well have contributed to the relative success of the second half of the book--and had a disastrous impact on the first half, by relieving Heller of any need to do the hard work of revising and polishing...

...FJvery so often a novel comes along that strikes the literary culture with a consciousness-shaping force...

...You talk," said Gold with eyes narrowing warily, "almost as though you believed in socialism...

...In this case, clearly, it is neither, but only an embarrassing piece of self-indulgence on the part of an author who has decided to subordinate craftsmanship to ideology...

...And it is certainly true that 14 years separated the publication of his first and second novels, and that five years have now passed separating the second from this, the third...

...Leonard Michaels, assures his readers that the novel's "picture of Washington--full of lazy, unprincipled, prurient careerists-- [is] perhaps more valuable to our understanding of our Government than a library of Presidential papers...

...But not content with that, or po-g~sibly not confident about his own satirical powers, Heller portrays Lieberman as personally loathsome--whining, dishonest, physically filthy, gluttonous (he eats by shoving vast quantities of food into his mouth with both hands, and then spews partially chewed bits of food all over himself and his companions), and unredeemably degraded in every respect...

...Why then is it such a silly and disappointing book...

...In the end, he finds the WASP establishment in Washington too unbearably contemptible and his own roots in the Jewish community too deep to tear up...

...Its characters, its attitudes, its turns of phrase enter the stream of thought and language, and millions who have never read the book absorb it all unaware, like an influenza virus...

...And just about the time his fondest admirers had begun to fear that he had succumbed to that most virulent of all contemporary literary diseases, New-York-CocktailPartyitis, and would never be heard from again except in Earl Wilson's column, he regained the front page of the New York Times Book Review with a major new novel...

...That at least is the way it reads...

...A graduate school classmate of Gold's works for the President and contacts Gold with the offer of a high, though unspecified, position in the administration --perhaps as high as Secretary of State, Director of Central Intelligence, or head of NATO...

...if not, you'll merely think it heavily overdrawn...

...Let us not pause to wonder how that kind of behavior comports with Heller's passionately anti-capitalist convictions...

...I need hardly say that so bare and inexpressive a summary can provide little sense of the ornamentation, the Rococo detail of the plot...

...And so of course was Joseph Heller's Catch-22, published in 1961, an antiwar tragicomedy of such astonishing force that it might well have had more to do with shaping the anti-Viemam attitudes of the collegiate population of the sixties than all the pronouncements of George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Noam Chomsky combined...

...One of the incidental characters is "a handsome, silverhaired former governor of Texas with a chiseled cleft in his chin and a reputation for emanating authority," who carries himself with relentless egotism and self-confidence and bullies everyone in sight...

...A Heller partisan might well object that the Lieberman character was not intended as a cartoon of Podhoretz alone and that in any case a novelist needn't be bound by the canons of portraiture...

...Whatever other terrible indictments may be brought against our Presidents of the last 50 years, physical sloth is not only not one of them, it is Utterly contrary to fact...

...Lacking that degree of discipline, it veers off course like a defective shell from a World War One cannon...

...Thus, " Simon & Schuster, $12.95...

...Yet Heller insists that it was worthy of a million-dollar advance...

...Here is one of Gold's students complaining to him about a course: "But I'm not interested in literature...

...And velist get away with them...

...Oh, I do," said Ralph, "with all my heart...

...The two principal lines of action in the novel involve Gold's efforts in Washington to nail down a top-level appointment and his efforts in New York to deal with family problems while gathering material for a commissioned book on the Jewish experience in America...

...The plot has to do with the adventures of Bruce Gold, a 48-yearold Brooklyn-born J ewish professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of several books and articles, all justly neglected except for a book review that has caught the attention of the (unnamed) President of the United States...

...And how lucky we are that most of the country doesn't know that...

...But the professors have nothing to say about the object of Heller's satire with which both they and he are most familiar: the academic, and especially the English Department, scene...

...Bruce Gold...

...Gold pursues the offer ardently though Karl 0 'Lessker, senior editor of The American Spectator, is professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...

...and for reasons I shall try to explain, it is unlikely to have an even modestly consciousness-shaping effect...

...I'm interested in God...

...The American Spectator May 1 9 without ultimate success, and in the course of his pursuit takes up with a tall beautifulblonde Protestant society woman, marriage to whom represents the supreme assimilative achievement for a straying Jew like Gold...

...Meanwhile we see him in the bosom of his large family--a stoic, uncomplaining wife, hateful children, sisters and a brother who are vaguely proud of him but who lose no opportunity to deride him, a demented stepmother, and (Heller's best creation) a savage-tongued tyrant of a father whom everybody urges to move to Florida so they can be rid of him...

...Interestingly enough, Heller himself claims that it takes him "anywhere from four to fourteen years to write a novel...

...How much easier things would be if we nationalized all our basic resources...

...This is the satirical representation of Heller's personal conviction that the people who actually do hold those positions in real life are no better qualified for them than...

...If you're already a John Connally-hater you may find it an amusing caricature...

...t In fact, the second half is greatly superior to the ftrst...

...Though fars unblemished, it contains almost everything that is good in Good as Gold...

...I just "didn't want to gamble...

...If the role of money in all this is equivocal, the role of ideology is not...

...Perhaps Heller has discovered a winning formula for successful novel writing: a huge cash advance to ward off depression and buoy up self-confidence...

...And so the odds against successfully satirizing something one knows nothing about are very great...

...To the contrary, it will probably disappear as completely as Heller's 1974 failure, Something Happened, which it resembles not at all, or as 1977's sensation among the radicalchic set, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, which it resembles greatly in spirit if not in style...

...Salinger's Catcher in the Rye was every bit as influential two decades earlier...

...The exchange is between Gold and his White House acquaintance Ralph Newsome, who says: "Imagine the absurdity of a social order in which the over.production of food becomes an economic catastrophe...

...Indeed, the case could well be made that they have all worked too hard, too frenetically, too sleeplessly...

...I became an English major because the English Department seems to be offering so t Quoted in an interview in New York, March 19, 1979, as justification for leaving his old friend and editor, Robert Gottlieb of Knopf, for his new publisher when Gottlieb declined to give him a "seven-figure guarantee [on the basis of] half of the first.draft manuscript...

...There c'an be few college graduates under the age of 40 who have not read it, and fewer still who don't recognize the phrase "So it goes" as the nonpareil way of expressing the fathomless depths of existential despair...

...here is how he presents the essence of Lieberman's views: He "was all for a totalitarian plutocracy, backed by repressive police actions when necessary--as long as the men on top were good to Jews like himself and let him have a little--and called it neoconservatism...

...Instead, Heller has him "a very early riser...

...And the New York Times Book Review professor of English, Dr...

...and, after a first-ever visit to the grave of his long-dead mother, he returns to his family to begin work on the Jewish experience bookwwhich, the dust jacket and assorted reviewers assure us, is exactly the experience Gold himself has just been going through...

...This is just the sort of character trait an incisive satirist might pick up on, having his President whirling about in a lather of frantic motion, scheming, plotting, haranguing, screwing up without rest or surcease...

...If I hadn't gotten big money for this [first half of the first draft] I might have gone into a depression that would have prevented me from finishing the book...

...And every day I thank my stars that others don't and allow people like you and me to live in such extraordinary privilege...