Joseph Heller

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Ramona Koval: When I spoke with Joseph Heller in New York I asked him first if he enjoyed the fact that the expression 'Catch 22' had well and truly been absorbed into the wider lexicon, as a term synonymous with absurdity and a sort of tail-chasing illogicality?

Joseph Heller: It gives me immense pride of course at this late date, and I can feel a sense of personal pleasure every time I hear the phrase or see the phrase. And it did emerge in the course of writing the first novel Catch 22 in which things are very hard to make sense of, particularly in a war situation and a post-war situation, Catch 22 is really a post-war novel and most of the attitudes and confusions that appear in it occurred to me as a result of conditions after the war, rather than my own experience in the war. I've forgotten your question, but I'm proud of having written Catch 22, I'm proud of the phrase, and the phrase becomes used more and more frequently as time goes on, which indicates there is a timelessness to the term and to the situation that made Catch 22 so relevant.

Ramona Koval: Did you always find throughout your life, even when you were growing up in Coney Island before you joined the army, did you find life absurd then? Did you find you had a vision of life that was different from other peoples', did you find it ridiculous?

Joseph Heller: It would be very instructive and impressive to say yes, but the answer is no. I don't know what I was thinking of before I began writing Catch 22. I do think my personality, like yours and like everybody's, doesn't change much with the years, we are who we are very early. But without consciously dwelling on the meaning of life I was pretty much the way I am, I always had what would be called the sense of humour, wisecracking, practical jokes, always a kind of perverse way with the wisecracks and jokes. I didn't think much about society, I didn't think much about anything then as a child. There was not that much to think about.

Even in the army I didn't think much about politics, I didn't even recall hating the Germans even when they were shooting at me. It wasn't until after the army when I was 22 years old and began attending college that I began thinking critically. But the humour was there and when I recall some of my early short stories - a few were published a few weren't -- many of the elements that found their way into my later work were already present, a fusion of the realistic, the level politically with the fantastic. The real and the fantastic are frequently blended together in short stories.

Ramona Koval: Although you said in your book Now and Then that the short stories you were writing when you were studying literature after the war in this period were plotted extravagantly, I'm quoting you now, and often were resolved miraculously by some kind of ironic divine intervention on the side of the virtuous and oppressed. So what happened to your outlook and your sensibility that evolved, if we can use a Darwinian term, into a book where the exploiters triumph, the good and deserving get nothing, the Milo minder benders get everything?

Joseph Heller: What happened is that my attitudes evolved in a Darwinian sense, and realism is realism, and what happens does happen, and what does happen in life is that the virtuous usually do not triumph, and those who are triumphant usually lack virtue, too often they lack conscience, and it's the difference between being very young and having a belief in the miraculous, and being a little mature and educated and knowing there is no such thing as the miraculous.

Ramona Koval: But there must have been a point, because we're talking about you've been to the war, you've come back, you've started to go to college, you've had all those experiences that shaped your growing up, your maturing into a man from a boy, and something has happened from the moment that you're writing those short stories and suddenly this vision, this darkness comes upon you.

Joseph Heller: I don't think so. The darkness present in the short stories fiction has to deal with somebody in trouble, and it ends happily, although even short stories, my short stories it did not end happily. What happened with Catch 22, my subsequent novel, is to move away from the fictitious cloud what we think of an extravagance fictitious clouding, and come closer to realism, reality of life, and to rely more on the stylistic approach to fiction than on the unusual content — the miraculous ending, the happy ending.

I do think in all my books you'll find my sympathies are still with the oppressed, the exploited, and my antipathies are towards those who are selfish and egotistical and who disregard the problems of heroes or my sympathetic characters. I don't think those attitudes have changed, I think what did occur was a maturing of my attitude toward fiction, or what fiction should be, or could be.

Ramona Koval: And what should it be?

Joseph Heller: It could be what Joseph Heller's novels have been, in which John Updike's novels have been to him, and to Gore Vidal's novels have been to him. We're all different from each other. What we think of the serious authors, Australian and American, our books are very very much different from each other. I could not write a Phillip Roth novel, he could not write a novel of mine, neither one of us could write a Saul Bellow novel or a Patrick White novel, and we do have a view of what storytelling would be the wrong word. What novel writing should be, they deal realistically with the conditions of your life.

My political novel was written long before there was a Clinton scandal, that was in Good as Gold. I'm kind of sorry I did it because if I had still to do I would do it, and it would be more pertinent than it was.

Ramona Koval: But you have this way of writing things years before they happen, and then they happen and then it is extraordinary when you turn back and you think what year was this published? And you realise it was published long, long, long ago. Good as Gold, if you followed what you were saying there, I mean I think everybody would have to be an anarchist, I mean nobody could believe in presidential power or political power or the people who seek power I mean could they? I mean what are you trying, are you going to create a revolution?

Joseph Heller: I can't create a revolution in this country. We don't organise well. And unfortunately I think it may be the best of all possible worlds, our political system, it's terrible, and it gets worse with each election. But if you asked me to sort of conceive or construct an alternative I could not do it. I did not believe that the people in Washington were as vindictive or as absurd or stupid for the most part as represented in Good as Gold, and yet today we know they are and they have been and this includes even the president. It's very very hard to think of them seriously. We have to take what they do seriously, our congressional leaders, our two political parties which both deteriorated ideologically to a terrible extent. But I mean they are the government, it's unfortunate but we do need some form of government.

I did find with my novel Closing Time which is a more serious approach to very much the same subjects that all my novels are, that in European countries they recognise the conditions discussed as being identical to their own, particularly in Britain and in Germany. In Sweden to a small extent. But the realisation that comes about, large parts of television too, the education, that a government is only a government of human beings and not superior human beings. These human beings who succeeded in politics the way other people succeed in athletics, but they're only human beings.

Ramona Koval: In Closing Time you have a president who if I remember correctly has a nickname called 'little prick'?

Joseph Heller: Yes I call 'the little prick'. And it's a nickname of which he seems to be very fond himself, and it's an appellation that could be applied to a number of our presidents then and since. The model for that was the potential president Quayle, vice-president Quayle, and many of the dialogues come from interviews he gave in which there are dialogues. I would not hesitate that is to think of presidents since by that name, including the president. Clinton is not small, he's not little, I think he's a big prick, and I don't mean that sexually, I think he's very clumsy and in many ways stupid by underestimating drastically the intelligence of the American people, and is criticised by almost everybody.

But that's American political system. We do have freedom, I mean I have the freedom to write, I have the freedom to talk to you and say what I want about big pricks and little pricks, and the feeling that I'm not going to be punished for it, penalised, it's one of the very good things about the US. I imagine Australia too, you can say almost anything about a public figure without fear of being sued or imprisoned.

Ramona Koval: In his novel Closing Time Joseph Heller created a world that exists in the port authority bus terminal under the streets of New York City, where the poor and the miserable and the homeless live their lives. Over the Coney Island-style amusement park which exists at an even lower level. Here the super-rich of the city decide to hold a lavish society wedding, simply because no-one has ever thought of it before.

Joseph Heller: That's typical of New York societies to go to American society. We have more millionaires than ever before, we now use a term billionaire freely because there's so many people who have billions, particularly in the new money, they live very extravagantly and publicly. So even right here in New York City you can find the most abominable poverty living almost cheek by jowl with these extraordinary lavish wasteful expenditures. In Closing Time I decide to put them all into one building. The description of the bus terminal is I have been told extremely accurate. There are homeless people living there, there's prostitution, there's runaway girls, there's drug addiction, there are transvestites there, and amid that there are two-hundred-thousand people who come and go to work everyday, for the large part untroubled by it and unmolested. The only thing missing from the bus terminal would be the very rich, because they won't travel by bus. So what I did was I moved a wedding, a prototype of which had taken place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I moved that into the bus terminal so that wedding could take place. So you could have in a surrealistic way, almost all levels of what I would think it was New York society.

The wedding itself was taken from a wedding reception at the Metropolitan Museum. I took the menus there, and I just multiplied the amount of flowers -- if there were a hundred dozen roses I made it a million roses and all the rest. But this is again a Helleresque view of a reality, exaggerated to emphasise a number of things.

Ramona Koval: There also seems to be every book you've ever loved, authors that you've admired, figures in history, everybody seems to be down there — Ashenbach from Death in Venice, there's a character called Joey Heller...

Joseph Heller: In Closing Time I did try to fuse a number of worlds, the literary world, so there are characters from literature with a number of authors, Kurt Vonnegut appears in the book as Vonnegut. Literary characters there, The Good Soldier Svejk , and Ashenbach, and then in the underworld, or that exists under the bus terminal you have a large number of dead authors divided into sections, or the authors, those who were drunk and those who were sober, those who were depressive. And it was astonishing to me how many well known authors, European and American have had breakdowns of one sort or another. Something in the literary life which is potentially very dangerous, I would try to discourage children from seeking it or marrying into it, you'll allow me to say that my son just had a novel accepted for publication.

But there is something in literary life that leads inevitably, almost inevitably to an unhappy ending. I don't know what it is. Anyway I did try to get that into Closing Time. So when the cataclysm that takes place at the end or might be taking place at the end, it is the whole world, it's not just the downtrodden, the exploited, it's the very wealthy world but everybody else.

There are two endings to the book just as largely two novels in that one book. One is the typically romantic, happy, unrealistic fictional ending in which the character is coming up from safety into a world that maybe under attack to keep a date with a woman he loves, I think I describe the unrealistic belief that they would live happily for ever after. And then the other ending is with the realistic figure called Sammy Singer who is largely based on my own life, and he is same age as 70 or so, flying to Australia on a vacation, his wife has died, he's desperately lonely, and he knows his life is going to be coming to an end if not that day, then in the next five or ten years just the way Joey Heller today knows that his life is going to be coming to an end, if not today then in the next ten or 50 years.

Ramona Koval: I hope not today.

Joseph Heller: Not today and not during this interview.

Ramona Koval: Time is very important in this novel too, because you play with time, you go backwards and forwards. You said that lately you've given up reading Wittgenstein and Sartre and philosophy. But in recent years you've been borrowing into neo-Darwinism, and you've got an interest in quantum mechanics and physics. And I wonder whether you're interested in time-space?

Joseph Heller: No not at all. In fact I still don't understand what's meant by the time-space continuum, or what's meant by time as a dimension. I've tried to grasp the meaning of existentialism, and I see that word as an adjective very often in newspapers now, the existential experience — I've no idea what it means.

I've always been interested in science. I think what I say is I've given up trying to understand Sartre and Wittgenstein or quantum mechanics. I can't get anywhere with physics that deep. But science does interest me in a superficial way. I'm interested in news about astronomy. I think I do say in Closing Time but only in sentences the world has gotten very much bigger than we ever imagined it to be in terms of time, in terms of space. At the same time very much smaller than we ever imagined it to be in terms of viruses and the quarks and the fragments of an atom.

Ramona Koval: What about neo-Darwinism? What interests you about that?

Joseph Heller: I can't explain it. I'm just interested in the explanation. Possibly it's my cynicism, the feeling that we are much more proud of ourselves than we have a right to be and that almost everything that happens to us physically is pre-determined. And there is now another field that interests me, not to the extent that I'll ever understand it, and that's called evolutionary psychology. The fact that how we feel, how we think, even what we do is out of our hands, including our character, our personality. And there's an interesting chapter in the book Conciliance by EOWilson where beyond my understanding but chapter three fascinated me because he deals with the conclusions of people who specialise in the brain, and he points out what seems to be obvious that we have no control of our own brain and the brain exists before we do, and everything in the brain comes as a result of your genetic inheritance and experience. The brain processes in ways we can't control and everything you and I do is a brain expressing itself and we've had no control over it.

Ramona Koval: No choice in what we do? No moral choices?

Joseph Heller: No. The conclusion of that is there is no such thing ever as a moral choice or free will. Not the slightest possibility. There is a young philosopher at Oxford named Galen Strawson — his father's a more famous philosopher -- but he's writing papers on arguing that's impossible to demonstrate that any decision anybody can make that can be made freely. And it's hard to refute him.

And I know you don't like hearing it, and certainly, Jews don't like hearing it, and Christians don't like hearing it, and psychologists won't hear it, but the inference of what I'm saying is that the very words I'm using now to say this are not words I'm choosing to use, my brain is choosing to use them and I can't control my brain.

Ramona Koval: But your brain controls you.

Joseph Heller: The brain controls you too doesn't it?

Ramona Koval: No heart?

Joseph Heller: No, the brain controls the heart. People can be brain dead and live a long while and live without love, if they're brain dead.

The way science ethics thought is going, apart from the physical quantum theory which can be measured, there is evolutionary psychology, and it seems almost obvious that if the body developed the brain developed at a certain point morality had to without our being able to control it. There's something of a large debate among neo-Darwinists you probably notice about what's called altruism in a part of animals where an individual gives up its life so more can survive. And whether it's really altruism or whether it's the genes finding a way to protect more of the genes by having one individual animal or organism sacrifice itself.

Ramona Koval: But critics of Wilson say that you know people aren't ants and that the problem with Wilson is that he extrapolates from social insects to people.

Joseph Heller: Well I can't argue the point. I'm not a social theorist, I'm not a biologist, I can only tell you what Wilson and others do argue in that field of socio-biology. I could not bring myself to think as you can't and as your listeners can't, that we have no control over what we say or what we do, over what our personalities are like. We can't bring ourselves to believe that. But just because we can't believe it does not mean that it isn't so.

Ramona Koval: You spent a lot of time in analysis too which you write about in Now and Then, and you say something pretty funny which is that you think that the only people who can really benefit from analysis are those who seem to be, have absolutely no need for it.

Joseph Heller: I do think most psychoanalysts would agree with that now, and would have agreed with it ten or twenty years ago when they stopped taking on patients with severe cases of psychosis for example. And the psychoanalysis seems to be going through a downturn in esteem anyway as a procedure for therapy. I didn't spend a lot of time in it, I think it was a period of two and a half years of interrupted therapy, and I suppose I did benefit but not to the extent that he thought I would when I went into it. I went into it largely to keep myself composed during a matrimonial breakup that eventually led to a divorce, but I do think psychoanalysts will tell you they need a pretty strong personality to undergo psychoanalysis. It cannot be somebody who's unconcentrated or is too easily given to emotional distress.

Ramona Koval: So what did it do for you?

Joseph Heller: It kept me busy, it gave me some place to go for two and a half years I was there, and it gave me somebody to quote my arguments with my then wife. She had a serious of psychotherapists and she was telling me what they were advising her and how they were condemning me so I thought I'd get one of my own.

Ramona Koval: And you kept him amused though. You write about how you sometimes went in there and told jokes through all the sessions.

Joseph Heller: Well I would dream jokes, and we tried very hard to get into what was a Freudian situation four times a week of complete free association. We can seldom achieve that. I can seldom achieve it, I just like to talk and make jokes and dream dreams that he would approve of.

Ramona Koval: And what did it do for your writing? Did you find that it helped or did it hinder? Did you use the kind of part of your brain that would go to invent?

Joseph Heller: No I don't think it had any effect on my writing, I don't think the war itself had any effect on it. Then I had this disease in 1981, Guillain-Barre syndrome, I don't think it had any effect on my writing. I don't think I've used it to any extent. We're talking about the psychoanalysis, almost nothing I've learnt from it I've used since. There were many surprises, I mean the way dreams would correspond to our meetings, the way they would change, and instances of forgetfulness on my part, but the surprises became amusements about what was happening and what was going on in my head and other peoples heads. I don't think I used it. I don't like realistic books, so even though I deal with real situations my novels are not realistic in that they construct, they're mainly mentally rather than emotionally.

Ramona Koval: But you get inside characters heads and you create very very real characters and that requires some understanding of the human condition.

Joseph Heller: Oh I do have an understanding of the human condition, a political situation and all the rest. On the other hand my books don't lend themselves to movies and they tend to violate basic laws of fiction writing. In Catch 22 you don't know anything about Yossarian and there are almost no what we call three dimensional characters. Something happened in the second novel, I invest in the character, the first perfect character with more knowledge about himself than a person would normally have. I don't try to represent fictional characters, they're real people.

The difference between the classical novel, I'd say a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Dickens in which the details of a person's speech, his dress, his occupation are essentially the composition of the novel - I moved away from that, I and others have moved away from that attention of realistic details of realistic situations in society. I don't think there's much need for it anymore now that we have television and photography. It's not just me, I mean a novel itself has moved into what was called modernism, and post-modernism, I don't know what post-modernism is. I suppose maybe I'm a post-modernist.

Ramona Koval: Well I think Something Happened is a very post-modernist novel which was written when in 19...?

Joseph Heller: It was published in 1974, yes.

Ramona Koval: Where we start a novel and then we go and then we start another novel and another one and another one and we've got a whole series of different subjects that the main character is taking up with.

Joseph Heller: Yes but there is a difference between the classical novel which would begin in the 19th century, continue to the 20th century, and the type of novel that's written now. Now the old-fashioned novel still exists and is still the most frequently published type of novel, the novel of once upon a time and the story is presented as though it actually did happen, whereas, in my novels, I think even in Catch 22 I attempt to make the reader understand that this didn't happen the way it's being presented. And in Good as Gold I refer to the novel as a novel itself, I think if something happened I may do that as well, and in closing time I introduce myself as a kid by my name. The idea is to almost sublimely enter into an agreement with the reader, this is the book I'm writing and you're not to take it all that seriously as an accurate representation of the way people, or even as the way the Jewish family is in Good as Gold or the people of Washington.

Ramona Koval: In God Knows, which is your book about King David and the Old Testament, I mean for somebody who's not interested in religion much you know you really read the Old Testament very very closely and you retell so many things.

Joseph Heller: There was so little religion in the Old Testament. I don't think the Jewish religion began until the bible and the Old Testament was finished. I think it was first put down during the Babylonian captivity. There was almost no religion in the Old Testament, no Jewish religion as we know it, and certainly not through the period of David. They don't talk about holidays, and if there's a celebration about they have a parade, do at their temples whatever's done with temples blow the trumpets and kill a few animals. So King David is Jewish and the Old Testament is a Jew, but I was not that interested in the Jewish religion, and there's not much religion in God Knows, it's a very modern, contemporary morality. And as I say there's not much religion in the Old Testament.

If God says to Abe we're going to make a covenant, that if you think that's religion then it's there, and does God ever talk to David? I'm not even sure if he did, yes he does...

Ramona Koval: No, no, no David's not talking to God, remember, David's annoyed with God and he's stopped talking to him.

Joseph Heller: Yes but there is one time in the Bible when God gives him a strategy for battle, fetch a compass around the enemy and ambush him or what. And I said that's the last time God talked to David. But God talks to David, that's not religion, you've got much more of that in oriental religions.

I'm not interested in religious practices. I do mention something about crucifixion. I mention the Michelangelo statue of David, that he's uncircumcised there. But that's a comment I make, and he has me standing naked in public, if he knew how we Jews felt about nudity he never would have done it.

Ramona Koval: Do you feel, at the age of 75, as if you've attained wisdom now?

Joseph Heller: No. The only wisdom I think I've attained is the wisdom to be sceptical of other people's ideology and other people's arguments. I tend to be a sceptic, I don't like dogmatic approaches by anybody. I don't like intolerance and a dogmatic person is intolerant of other people. It's one of the reasons I keep a distance from all religious beliefs. I think in this country and in Australia too there's a late intolerance in most religions, an intolerance, a part that could easily become persecutions.

We have some ultra-orthodox Jewish sects here in New York and I fear them as much as I would fear a Nazi organisation.

Ramona Koval: What about goodness? Do you believe there's a place for that?

Joseph Heller: Oh of course. I am very soft-hearted and sentimental in all my books, my characters are if they're being exploited or threatened the characters are fairly good-natured people, and the people who are bothering them I was ruthless as the natural elements would be. Certainly I like kind people, I like good people, I like humorous people. I'm distressed by suffering, not to the point where I'm going to go into sulk about it. I mean what happens in the Balkans is terrifying but there's a realisation, I'm talking now about Kosovo in Bosnia and the things that go on in the Middle East with Israel and the others, and in Afghanistan with the Taliban and the others - it's too awful to contemplate as a reality. But there's also a feeling that nobody can do anything about it, and that to me is getting back to the Darwinian approach. There's not much anybody can do about anything, about many of the major problems today.

Ramona Koval: This question really is about memory, and long memories and reviews, and I was amused to read in Now and Then that you still remember the bad reviews that there were. There were good reviews of Catch 22 but there were some bad reviews of Catch 22, and you haven't been able to forget them.

Joseph Heller: I wouldn't want to try and forget them. I can remember the good reviews and they were many, and they came out over an extended period, often in unexpected places, a political columnist for a newspaper the World Telegram, which was republican reactionary, so suddenly they wrote a whole column for Catch 22 beginning with how it will live for ever. So we had those. I could have quoted those in Now and Then but that would be kind of boastful, it was merrier to introduce to the vitriolic ones. And when I talk to an audience often I will quote from those very bad reviews about Catch 22. I can be good humoured about it now because Catch 22 has endured, but I don't think I would have been that good a sport if the book had just dropped away. They were very upsetting when they came out — the two I used — the New Yorker and the Sunday Times — they were extremely upsetting, first because they afflict the ego, but secondly they had a very negative effect on the sale of the book and the acceptance of it.

Ramona Koval: Another literary question that you talk about is the fact that you think it's a kind of habit of yours to take a long time getting round to beginning a book.

Joseph Heller: Yeah that's been true of Catch 22 and of all my novels. I begin very slowly and tentatively and I believe with each of my books, not until they are about a third done did I get a clear vision of what the book really was about, and then I went back and would begin rewriting that first third or fourth, and then that continuing to the end. And my books tend to begin very slowly and accelerate towards the middle and the end which may be a good thing. I know with motion pictures and plays that's a desirable effect, you have to begin slowly. But I'm very tentative in my books when I begin. They're almost always too big for me to comprehend when I'm starting out, and when I start putting it on paper then I can see where it's excessive or out of proportion, and then when I go over it again I try to make it conform to its proper boundaries.

Ramona Koval: Do you laugh a lot when you're writing?

Joseph Heller: I don't laugh a lot when I'm writing. Sometimes when I reread what I've written after a space of weeks I will laugh. But if I'm writing something funny I can appreciate it. When the idea occurs to me I'm probably smiling to myself. I'm not laughing because writing is hard work, talking is a cinch. Thinking is fairly easy, putting words down on paper so that they will reflect what I had in mind is a very painstaking process, you can't be funny just by saying a joke, you have to lead up to it.

I knew when I had one conversation with Mike Nichols the screenwriter making Catch 22, I sensed they were going to be in trouble, that it was going to be very much more difficult for them to reproduce the whole book than they thought it was. And one of the things that occurred to me, they liked a certain chapter, I forget which one it is, and myself I was thinking that chapter's funny only because of what builds up to the final lines, and in a motion picture I knew there's no room for extended dialogues. And one of the last things they had to take out was that chapter. There were two occasions when that happened, but it's very hard to build up a good joke. But wisecrack is one thing, but you get three wisecracks in a row they're not going to be funny to a reader, there has to be a sense of the narrative progressing I think.

Ramona Koval: Just on the point of goodness, in Closing Time you write of Yossarian, because of course Closing Time is a revisiting of Catch 22, or looking at what happens to the characters so many years later. You say 'he had learned from a lifetime of skepticism that a conviction, even a naive conviction was in the last analysis more nourishing than the wasteland of none.'

Joseph Heller: Yes, it's again one of the things I have to acknowledge even though I myself can't have beliefs, unquestioning beliefs anything, I do recognise that I would be better off if I did. And it's easy to see to know friends of mine who are deeply religious, they're usually the parents of friends of mine and Catholic, how content they are with their existence, and their religious belief as they get old and as they get infirm they seem to be untroubled by the extinction of their existence. I think somebody who's a fervent republican, a democrat, communist, anarchist, even these people who are opposed to abortion passionately they have something to believe in. I don't think it's virtuous, but I think it's much better to be able to believe in something and have a conviction about life and an afterlife than to have none.

Ramona Koval: And this is 'Catch 22' isn't it?

Joseph Heller: Yes it is. I mean in Something Happened I think someone once said I wish I could believe in God again. In one of TS Eliot's poems he talks about the people outside the church who wish they could come in to pray but can't. We'd love to be able to believe in God and to know. But to believe is not to say I wish they were, but to have a conviction there is a God and an afterlife and he looks after us and this is just temporary, it'd be lovely to have that firm belief. But I don't have it and you don't have it and very few people do have it.

Ramona Koval: Do you believe in love?

Joseph Heller: I believe in love but I have a view about love which I believe very very strongly in love. But I don't think it lasts. It lasts and then the rules change. I believe there's no experience of life, not even getting a good review for a novel, it's continuing exhilarating you see the first stages of a love experience. And at least twice in my books, I think King David says if the chance to fall in love ever comes again, grab it, and it's the advice I give to you and to your audience and to myself. Although the chances grow less as the years go by.

Ramona Koval: Joseph Heller, speaking to me in 1998 in his Manhattan apartment, one year before he passed away at the age of 76. And that interview was first broadcast on Radio National's Books & Writing program in 1999.

Publications

Author: Joseph Heller

Title: Catch 22

Publisher: Vintage, 2004

Description: ISBN 9780-0994-7046-5

Title: Closing Time

Publisher: Scribner, 2003

Description: ISBN 9780-7432-3980-6

Title: Now and Then – From Coney Island to Here: A Memoir

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Description: ISBN 9780-7432-4008-6