Nasty selfish and sick
David Sexton
NO LAUGHING MATTER by Joseph Heller and Speed Vogel
Cape, £10.95 There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumours of the brain. There was Hodgkin's disease, leuke- mia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There were even diseases of the feet. There were bilious of conscientous body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases that it took a truly diseased mind even to think about them. . .
So Yossarian thought in Catch-22, as he lay healthily in hospital skiving death. In his first two books Joseph Heller wrote so ferociously about the world's unfairness to our hurtable bodies that one might have guessed that this account of his own experi- ence of a nightmarish disease, Guillian- Barre Syndrome, would have brought out the best in him. One would have guessed wrong. No Laughing Matter is just that, a book so bad that one needs to go back to re-assure oneself that he ever did write well.
Guillian-Barre is a rare form of polyneuritis, 'technically a syndrome rather than a disease because no ways exist to verify its presence other than the course taken by the aggregate of its symptoms.' It affects the peripheral nervous system, causing extensive paralysis. No treatment is possible, save keeping the patient alive with respirators and drips until remission occurs. Recovery can take months or years but may then be virtually complete.
In December 1981 Joseph Heller was fit and well: jogging, writing God Knows, divorcing and dining out a lot. One Satur- day while eating 'a hearty second breakfast alone in a neighbourhood coffee shop' he found he couldn't swallow the hash browns he had put in his mouth. 'The rest of the meal, eggs, bacon, buttered toast, and coffee, went down smoothly.' That after- noon he had trouble taking his sweater off; he vaguely thought sweat or static electric- ity was making it stick to his shirt. In the evening he tackled a baked sweet potato as a prelude to going out to dinner and again found himself unable to swallow easily. At dinner his drink tasted queer. On the Sunday he saw his doctor and was taken straight to the intensive care unit of the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
He ended up spending 22 days in inten- sive care, much longer than that in hospit- al. For three and a half months he needed feeding through a naso-gastric tube, and only narrowly avoided a tracheostomy. Not until May 1982 could he leave to become an out-patient. Meanwhile a friend, Speedy Vogel, had taken over his affairs, almost literally. Vogel moved into his flat, signed his cheques, wore his clothes, took his holidays, took out his girls and took up writing to describe it all, in the New York Times and now in alternate chapters of this book. Although he also did a lot of looking after a helpless Heller, Vogel gaily admits that he felt like The Picture of Dorian Gray: 'As he got worse, I got better. As he started to look his age, I started to look more youthful. As he got sicker, I got healthier. As he got poorer, I got to live like a rich man.' Vogel, a former businessman and her- ring taster, writes with ebullient boastful- ness. With Heller, Mario Puzo and a few others, he founded a 'Gourmet Club' dedicated to gross eating in Chinatown. Much of the book consists of bragging by both its authors about what, or simply how much, they have eaten. Heller, it seems, is best known to his friends as 'the most prodigious eater in the world.' While in hospital he met a nurse, Valerie, who, though like him no cook, proved able to eat and eat without stopping. This accom- plishment won his heart. They are now married.
Another appetite displayed is for celebrity. Both Heller and Vogel slaver for it, personally or by association. Celebrities on show in the book include Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman and Mel Brooks. The credentials of lesser luminaries are labor- iously cranked out: `Morty instantly recog- nised Sydney by name as the former foreign correspondent, former foreign edi- tor, and current vice-chairman of the New York Times.'
Celebrity is presumably what has made Heller so pompous or at least persuaded him that it is all right to be so pompous. 'She was impressed by my friends, by their number and variety and by the length of many of the friendships, and she was eager to know more about them', he writes of his wife to be. His prose manages to be simultaneously hackneyed, overblown and contorted with self-regard: 'Like a bolt from the blue came to me the idea for the first in a series of cunning actions ultimately constituting a plot both Mephistophe- lean and successful.' The genuinely in- teresting story of what it is like to suffer a frightening disease suffocates beneath this thick verbiage. When he says being unable to straighten his fingers was 'a mental agony almost indescribable' the reader's agony is acute.
Even from Vogel's admiring account Heller's egotism shines forth. 'His close and dear friends used to commiserate with each other about his exceptional impati- ence, rudeness, insensitivity, selfishness, negativity and general unpleasantness. We liked him. . . but were extremely hard put to explain why.' When a friend met him at a wedding and asked him about his chil- dren he replied: 'What do you care? Do you think I'm going to ask about yours?' When another friend invited him over for a drink he answered: 'Why? Why should I go to your house for a drink? I have my own here.' When anyone asked `How are things?' he would snap 'What's it your business?'
Squaring No Laughing Matter with Hel- ler's best books suggests something worth knowing: that being in touch with such primitively direct selfishness must be part of his equipment as a novelist. Lustfulness, greed, paranoia and contempt for altruism have distinguished his heroes in the past.
In Catch-22 and Something Happened these disagreeable qualities were trans- formed into brilliantly comic novels, which somehow made it seem that we were all like that if we could only admit it. In his own person, untransformed, they are no joke.
After telling us that Dustin Hoffman gave Joseph Heller an electric toothbrush and that Mel Brooks is such a hypochon- driac he takes the Lancet, the book peters out into a resentful record of the legalities of Heller's divorce and the expenses of his hospitalisation. Where the novels critically examined the values of military society and big business, No Laughing Matter is itself the thoughtless product of a culture that mindlessly reveres celebrity.
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