Now and Then is a detailed guide to subway travel and cheap food in 1930s Coney Island, New York. It begins in Coney Island, lingers in Coney Island and, somehow, ends in Coney Island. Its title could have been No Escape from Coney Islandor – because the author also wrote Catch-22 – Catch a Life in Here if You Can. Or, as writer of that other masterpiece, Something Happened Joseph Heller might have called this Nothing Happened Nothing much does.
You can almost hear the rocking chair creaking on the front porch as Old Joe Heller recalls, to anyone who will listen, the childhood of Little Joey Heller. He grew up with his widowed mother, his half-brother and half-sister in “four rooms, looking out on West 31st Street near Surf Avenue”, near Coney’s giant amusement parks.
He knew where to find the best hot dogs and ice cream, but no one told him his brother and sister had a different mother. She had died in Russia before his father emigrated. When he learnt this from a toast at the wedding of his brother, Lee, “I felt victimised, disgraced. My response to rage then, as it chiefly is still, was to break off speaking to the person offending me.”
The person was his father, who was already dead.
Although Joey was five when Heller pere died, Heller did not discover the cause was a bleeding ulcer until he himself was in his thirties. Everyone assumed, as with the maternity of his siblings, that someone else had told him. Old Joe writes: “If anything, the passing away of Mr Isaac Daniel Heller was for me more a matter of embarrassment than anything else.”
And later: “But not only did we not complain much in my family, we didn’t talk much about anything deeply felt. We didn’t ask for much either.”
None of the three grown children would care for the mother when she grew old, and they deposited her in a “Hebrew home for the aged”. Heller’s only reflection is: “The subject never arose, but I would guess that each of us secretly suffered at least some remorse. In our family, we did not talk about sad things.”
When he left for training in the army air corps that he would satirise mercilessly in Catch-22, his mother sobbed only after his trolley car had carried him away. “My mother never mentioned the occasion to me, and I never brought it up with her. Our family tendency to keep disturbing emotions to ourselves has lasted as long as we have.”
He evokes a time when, he writes, the poor didn’t know they were poor, no one locked a door, Italian and Jewish immigrant neighbourhoods overlapped and no whites thought about black people. Much of it is tedious: “The summer would begin officially for us, I suppose, on that day in late June we called ‘promotion’, when we would come running jubilantly home on that last day of school, waving our report cards, me with my A in classwork and B+ in deportment, calling out to everyone who flew by that we had been promoted. ‘Over the ocean/tomorrow’s promotion’ was a refrain we chanted. Another was ‘No more classes/no more books/no more teachers’ dirty looks’.”
He mentions in passing that he took the name of the main character of Catch-22 and Closing Time, Yossarian, from a fellow airman named Yohannon. He does not say why. Other Catch-22 characters – Orr, Major – de Coverley, Hungry Joe – were in the same unit, but he keeps to himself the secret of how and why they evolved into fiction.
There are brief references, no more, to the Guillain-Barre syndrome that nearly crippled him for life and to the nurse for whom he left his wife of 35 years. Again and again he steps towards the brink of some revelation and withdraws. If he wanted to maintain the family tradition of silence, why did he write his memoirs? He admits: “I am walking proof of at least part of Freud’s theories of repression and the domain of the unconscious, and perhaps, in writing this way here and in other things I’ve published, of denial and sublimation, too.”
You want to listen to the old man in the rocker, repeating himself, recalling unrelated incidents and people from childhood, because he is Joseph Heller. And Joseph Heller, one of the great postwar American novelists, deserves respect. “In my book Closing Time I say of a character, Yossarian, that he couldn’t learn to make a bed and would sooner starve than cook,” he tells you in Now and Then. “That is autobiography.”
This isn’t.
