Catch 18? How Three Classic Books Got Their Titles
by Ernie on 20/11/07 at 10:18 am
A classic by any other name
Excerpted from an article in the Telegraph
Why is Joseph Heller’s famous “Catch” called “22″? Why is Bertie’s manservant called Jeeves? And why does the postman always ring twice (in a book that has no postman)? In these fascinating extracts from his new book, Gary Dexter reveals the story behind the stories. Illustrations by David Juniper
Catch-22 has passed into the language as a description of the impossible bind . . .
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Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. “Is Orr crazy?”
“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.
“Can you ground him?”
“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”
“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.
“No. Then I can’t ground him.”
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
Orr is crazy, and can be grounded, but if he asks to be grounded he is sane—and he can only be grounded if he asks. Joseph Heller complained that the phrase “a Catch-22 situation” was often used by people who did not fully understand what it meant. Given the mental contortions of the catch, this is not surprising.
He even described receiving a letter from a Finnish translator, which said (in Heller’s paraphrase): “I am translating your novel Catch-22 into Finnish. Would you please explain me one thing: what means Catch-22? I didn’t find it in any vocabulary. Even assistant air attache of the USA here in Helsinki could not explain exactly.” Heller added: “I suspect the book lost a great deal in its Finnish translation.”
There are no catches 1 to 21, or 23 onwards, in the book. There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Like the final commandment left at the end of Animal Farm, Catch-22 is an entire rule book distilled into one lunatic decree. Its very uniqueness meant that Heller had to think carefully before naming, or numbering, it. And his choice was? Catch-18.
In the Second World War, Heller was a bombardier with the 12th Air Force, based on Corsica, and flew 60 missions over Italy and France. Yossarian in Catch-22 is a bombardier flying the same missions. Rotated home in 1945 and discharged as a first lieutenant with an Air Medal with five oak- leaf clusters, Heller took a degree at New York University, then an MA at Columbia, before working in New York as an advertising copywriter.
In 1953 he began writing a book called Catch-18, the first chapter of which was published in the magazine New World Writing in 1955. When, three years later, he submitted the first large chunk of it to Simon & Schuster, it was quickly accepted for publication, and Heller worked on it steadily—all the time thinking of it as Catch-18—until its completion in 1961.
Shortly before publication, however, the blockbuster novelist Leon Uris produced a novel entitled Mila 18 (also about the Second World War). It was thought advisable that Heller, the first-time novelist, should be the one to blink. Heller said in an interview with Playboy in 1975: “I was heartbroken. I thought 18 was the only number.”
Read the rest of the article here:
