After two decades and more than 8 million copies, its royalties still can’t keep him in Chivas Regal. Joseph Heller’s advance for Catch-22 was $1500: $750 on signing and another $750 on acceptance of the manuscript. Writers of serious fiction in this country do not, traditionally, get rich. If it seems at all unusual that the author of Catch-22 would also pen a sex movie, consider this: he did it for the money. Yet his entire published work consists of three novels ( Catch-22, Something Happened and Good as Gold), one play ( We Bombed in New Haven), one screenplay ( Sex and the Single Girl) and writing contributions to two other movies ( Dirty Dingus Magee and Casino Royale). He is one of the world’s most revered writers. He is a man of many principles, the first of which is flexibility. Unless, that is, chaos knocks on his own door.
He can’t wait to see what happens when it goes. Capitalism is a gone goose, he told me as he let me pick up the dinner check at an elegant Manhattan restaurant. That the System will soon collapse under its own weight is a given, according to Heller.
This is Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, a book that may endure as the final indictment of bureaucracy and the total chaos brought about by the System. He is unrivaled in his burning, single-minded hatred of Henry Kissinger. government than has Pravda, although he does not spurn the rewards of capitalism, even while gleefully predicting apocalypse in these United States. He has probably written more savage criticism of the U.S. He’s as reluctant a hero as you’re likely to find these days, a graying World War II bombardier from Coney Island whose shyness is continually at odds with his fierce pride.
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