Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller
Yossarian Slept Here by Erica Heller
Vintage, Paperback, 288 pages,
ISBN 9780099570080, £8.99
Chris Woolfrey
It takes until page of 127 a 272-page book on the life of Joseph Heller for his daughter to admit that she ‘cannot offer any true and complete accounting of my father’s life and times, especially the good times, circa Catch-22…’. Because Erica Heller attempts the ambitious task of combining a memoir with a biography Yossarian Slept Here loses in good criticism what it gains in readability; too many of the events, and even thoughts of the people about which she is writing (they are people with a relationship to history, not characters, remember) are discussed in an immediate way, as if they were, “happening here and now” rather than being considered part of a reality on which Erica Heller is commenting.
Welcome news then, that even if it is half way through, Heller begins to build her monument to the fallibility of her own memory; as a reader, that final admission, the one that’s always needed to signal a great biography, a proper account of something that really happened, comes tantalisingly close to your grasp. And you really feel it. You really feel as though that level of separation, that critic’s eye which brings with it a well-considered account of a time, people, places, is coming.
But then, here is the sentence in full:
‘I cannot offer any true and complete accounting of my father’s life and times, especially the good times, circa Catch-22, without mentioning that loyal champion of writers and devoted friend to Dad for over thirty years, his Swedish publisher, Per Gedin.’
In Yossarian Slept Here it is a typical sentence: a grand and sweeping concept attached to something relatively pedestrian. That’s no disrespect to Per Gedin. In fact, the relationship between Per Gedin and Joseph Heller, as rendered by Erica Heller, is one of the book’s most interesting threads, exploring in a relatively short space of time what it would be like for a cocksure, arrogant author of an acclaimed bestseller to talk quietly and at length with the man. A man, indeed, who was partially charged with bringing his books to a very different world from the New York meals and meets with the likes of Mario Puzo that was the Heller life.
A life which, despite these opening criticisms, Erica Heller does render very well. After all, she did get a glimpse into the life of arguably one of the 20th century’s most celebrated authors. Who better, for example, to explore the fact that behind the bullish, witty, uncompromising and quick-talking author of Catch-22 there was a man who adoringly wiped the bottom of his beloved dog, Sweeney, regularly brushing his coat and sitting him on his lap like a child? And without his daughter really talking about it, would Heller fans know quite so much about his mother-in-law, a woman who – according to Erica Heller – was so intent that her daughter court the handsome Joseph that she badgered him into it, despite his many adoring female fans, and who was, as the book argues time and again, in many ways like Heller herself?
The narrative has plenty of insightful, funny and poignant moments and anecdotes. Erica Heller, in many ways her father’s child (according to her) seems to have gained some of Joe Heller’s way with words. Her description of her own problems – ‘There is no droll or winsome way for me to write about having cancer. I can only recount what happened and then what happened because of what happened” – are often perceptive, direct. On her father’s interest in mortality in his work, she writes: ‘My father was tone-deaf in most ways, except when it came to whistling past a graveyard. Then he was pitch perfect.’ The chapter on her father’s novel Something Happened is excellent and has the particular feel of somebody who was not only there but also probably in the novel, a novel with ‘years of verbatim conversations in it’, with ‘a dynamic between father and daughter’ that was ‘strikingly familiar’. Called controversial and also his best book, it’s hard to think of a better account of the chapter “My Daughter Is Unhappy” than one by the person it’s probably written about.
Or perhaps she is the worst. While Yossarian Slept Here offers the potential of a tantalisingly intimate account of the Heller lifestyle, it also appears to suffer from the emotional closeness that can cloud the judgement of a person’s character, of interpretations of events. In the book’s opening portion, those about Joseph Heller’s early career and Erica Heller’s childhood, it becomes difficult to separate father Joe’s seeming cruelty from young Erica’s own sensitivity; the bloody-mindedness of the father as portrayed by the daughter, perhaps bloody-minded in her approach to the writing of it.
An admission along those lines is advanced by Erica Heller later in the book but again, the attempt to narrativise the account from the beginning undermines that critical position once it arrives; it’s good that it arrives, but it’s withheld for just a little too long.
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