Joseph Heller: Catch 22

JOSEPH HELLER: CATCH-22

BY JOHN STAPLETON

I soon worked out that plead as I might for an interview with another of my heroes, British author Doris Lessing, she wasn't going to make herself available just like that for some enterprising journalist from a remote island on the other side of the world. She was off writing a novel somewhere in the north, Scotland, if memory served, and while gracious when I finally met her, at the time transmitted her good will without obliging.

My preparedness to travel north was politely dismissed.

But if you were selling a new book and your writer was in contracted interview mode, a public relations person was happy enough to slot in an aspirant from bumfucknowheresville; or as the English still like to think of Australians, someone from the colonies.

Despite having crossed the first bridge and joined the queue of journalists lining up to interview whatever living legend was in London that week, there were other obstacles to overcome.

Would you like an interview with Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, went down a treat with the now defunct then historic news magazine The Bullettin, which back in the early part of the 20th century had published famous Australian authors, including that most lyrical of Australia's poet-alcoholics, Henry Lawson:

For the Southern Land is the Poet’s Home, and over the world’s wide roam,

There was never till now a binjied bard that lived in a poet’s home, old man;

For the poet’s home was a hell on earth, and I want you to understand,

That it isn’t exactly a paradise down here in the Southern Land,

Old chap,

Down here in the Southern Land.

It had become obvious why I was being slotted in at 9 am to interview people like Anthony Burgess.

I was low down the pecking order. In a busy day of being feted, the morning slots were the least prestigious in crowded schedules.

As I was doing many of the interviews for the Friday review section of Australia's well regarded Financial Review, known for its rigorous journalism, I soon worked out the trick words to get the public relations person onside.

My standard line was: “It's for the Financial Review, the Australian equivalent of the Financial Times.”

The Financial Times, then published distinctively on pale pink newsprint, was one of England's most prestigious newspapers and an organ any PR flack would like their subject to be showcased in. Unlike the leftwing Guardian , at least the readership of stockbrokers, investors and company directors had enough money to buy whatever was being promoted.

I sometimes heard the almost invariably young female public relations person shepherding around the author repeating my phraseology word for word as she explained to the interview subject who I was.

In those days, going through another phase of drinking and partying in the London clubs half the night, I wasn't always at my best at 9 am. But then neither were the authors.

So when it came to Joseph Heller I reacted with mock horror when the public relations woman tried to slot me in at the allotted hour.

Who wants to be interviewed at 9 am in the morning?” I snapped back. “Not me. Don't be ridiculous.”

“But he's got interviews scheduled for every hour of the day,” the PR woman protested. “There's nothing I can do.”

I held my ground.

And thus it was that I came to have lunch with Joseph Heller, the author of Catch 22, one of the most famous novels of the 20th Century.

Joseph never repeated the success of the book whose title entered the English language and is now in dictionaries as a phrase meaning a double trap.

In fact many of Heller’s books were excruciatingly long and rather dull.

But in person he was charm personified.

I arrived at the trendy little French restaurant near Covent Garden nominated by the public relations professional – it got their backs up if you called them girls – ahead of time and sat a little uncomfortably amongst the starched white linen tablecloths, the restaurant yet to fill with the lunchtime crowd.

Nothing to be afraid of.

Interviewing one of the world’s most famous authors was just another incident in an already very crowded life.

Finally, a little later than the appointed hour, the PR woman with Joseph Heller in tow arrived, and I rose from the table to greet them.

They were full of the news that they had just passed an employment agency called Catch-22.

Which of course provoked the obvious question: what it was like to have written a novel whose title had literally entered the English language.

The PR woman didn’t get much of a look in after that; as the conversation sailed across seemingly everything; and the hour and a bit disappeared as rapidly as the meal in front of us.

Nothing to be afraid of.

Except a Catch-22.