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When Joseph Heller died in December 1999 the swathe of admiring and affectionate obituaries that ensued were almost all, in my opinion, guilty of a degree of intellectual laziness. The party line seemed to be that, hitting the jackpot with his first major work, Catch-22, Heller, in retrospect, had come perilously close to being a Don Mcleanesque one-shot wonder, being never again able to match his early masterpiece. For me such a slant did considerable disservice to two, at least, of Heller’s subsequent novels, God Knows and Picture This, which are arguab Where Heller, alas, may be held to have fallen a little from grace and his own high standards is with his last large-scale work, the account of Yossarian in old age approaching his, our all, Closing Time. “Never go back” we are always being told: and this is as true for novelists as ballplayers and once inseparable lovers. The collapse of Closing Time into total surrealism (as opposed to Coney Island reality) is an admission of its bankruptcy - perhaps all our bankruptcies – in the face of death. A legend in his own Springtime, Yossarian would have been better left eternally young, frozen in that moment of complete potentiality when he takes off to join Orr in Sweden. The other work of Heller’s old age exists to bestow a warm retroactive glow upon his exit from this vale of catch-22’s. Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man is probably not a major work and quite likely not a novel: all the same its one hell of a good and illuminating read. To begin with it still has the one-liners. One of Heller’s prime virtues is that he never shied away from regaling the reader with a good, Groucho Marx, bad joke. “Why, he was no more Jewish than you or I” he winks in Picture This. And so in Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man he has goddess Hera describe herself as ‘Junoesque’. More, though, a stocktaking autobiographical audit than a novel, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man is not, by and large, a laugh out loud book. The emotional response it triggers is a longer-lasting warm respect. Here is Heller at seventy-six writing a book about a seventy-six year-old writer trying to write a book. If that sounds a sophomoric premise two prime exhibits for the defence require instantly to be presented. The one is that a two hundred and thirty-three-page work was thereby generated. The other is Raymond Chandler’s chivalrous counter to the knife-throwing literary establishment critics who had just pilloried the foundering Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees. That’s the difference between a champ and a knife thrower. The champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can’t be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn’t just walk off the mound and weep. Heller was, I take it, one of literature’s supreme spitballers. Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man comes fizzing off the page freighted with english. Its protagonist, one Eugene Pota, is a three score plus ten plus novelist who, after a huge initial success for decades earlier with a ‘comic’ war novel and subsequent fame, fortune and follow up work, now has writer’s block. This is an unbearable hair shirt to him. With no interest in hobbyist activities – tennis, bridge, travel – Pota only comes near to a sense of fulfilment when, as he explicitly says, he is defining himself through his writing. Stretched on the rack of not idleness but of vacancy he goes through the torments of all writers whose muse has deserted them. This idea, maybe, or that. This concept. What about this ? Naw! The first had to be better…maybe. Pota’s attempts to kick-start himself into a new book allow Heller to write pastiche variations on Twain, Kafka, Primo Levi and, yes, inter alios, Joseph Heller. For Pota is not so much Heller’s doppelganger as vice versa. Delicately the actual author of the Heller oeuvre inhabits his creature, stands outside him, chats person to person with the reader. Meanwhile all of the briefly optimistic attempts at a new masterpiece dribble away into the sands of their own factitiousness. Heller does not give his alter ego the character of a literary saint. Pota shuns the toil of literary research. He wants his new book to be a major best seller snapped up by Hollywood. If his body isn’t quite, his mind is in sexual overdrive. His concupiscent eye is never still and his mind roves back to old flames and former wives. And yet…one of the most achieved elements in the book is the sense Heller generates of the deep affection between Pota and his long suffering and yet sufferable wife – a wife more than once having the last word, getting the last laugh. As he surveys the prevailing literary landscape Heller–Pota is generous to many a contemporary (and to a fault, I would say). Indeed, one reason he does not pursue certain avenues is that others have traveled them better. But, as well, he cannot but morbidly keep calling to mind the sad old ages of virtually every major American writer since Melville and Poe. Some died in bitter, poverty-stricken anonymity. Some in an alcoholic stupor. No few, more succinctly, in suicide. As inspiration fails to come Pota becomes increasingly convinced that he is, so to speak, terminally stuck outside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again. Friends, his agent, his publisher, his wife give him well intentioned but meaningless advice. And yet – the proof is between the covers you hold in your hands – somehow a book of sorts, this book, gentle reader, does get written. Warts and all the portrait does get completed and the book is a good book having no need of Hollywood. And now, far too belatedly, I must declare an interest. As a third rate (that’s better than fourth rate, Buster) novelist of advancing years I can lay a further autobiographical layer over Heller’s template. I can vouch for the documentary truth in his every wry nuance. And I can honor Heller’s forcing himself back out to the mound to throw, if not his heart, this endearingly authentic ‘confession'— as good an attempt to convey what it is like to be a (proper) author as has been penned. Just the one cavil. Heller’s acronymic protagonist should have bee Eugene Spota. This is a self-portrait. Otherwise, rather than the labored Closing Time, let this final grace note be taken as the true, the far more reader-friendly ‘envoi’ to a lifetime of writing achievement. Let us regard it as Heller’s last tip of the hat, his parting wink, as he soft-shoe shuffled from this stage. Peace to his shade. |
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