Origin: "Catch-22"

[RickJay]

The term "Catch-22" describes a situation you cannot escape because of circular logic. As we all know, the term was the title of a Joseph Heller novel about an Air Force pilot who tries to get out of duty on a section 8, but the Air Force reasons that if he's trying to get out of duty, he cannot be insane, since it's the sane thing to do. Catch-22.

But where does the term originally come from? Why is it the title of Heller's book?

[Saltire]

Heller originated it. As I recall, the book describes the various rules about getting out of combat, and that each one has a catch to it. The twenty-second catch was the one where requesting to be kept from combat due to insanity is an inherently sane act.

[Dignan]

Yep, Saltire is right, Heller is the one that started it. I also remember reading something (maybe even on this MB, or the book intro, can't remember) that it the original title was Catch-18, or something like that. It eventually got changed.

I think that "Catch-22" is the only catch.

That's some catch . . .

[Cabbage]

Also, just to reinforce the fact that the title was completely arbitrary and invented by Heller, I believe the original, working title of the book was Catch-18; not sure why it was changed, I read it was changed because the publisher was currently publishing another book with the number 18 in the title, but I'm not too convinced of that.

[Bob Scene]

I seem to remember reading an interview with Joseph Heller where he said that he had considered different numbers and decided that "Catch-22" sounded better than "Catch-17" or whatever.

[Tuckerfan]

Originally posted by Cabbage
Also, just to reinforce the fact that the title was completely arbitrary and invented by Heller, I believe the original, working title of the book was Catch-18; not sure why it was changed, I read it was changed because the publisher was currently publishing another book with the number 18 in the title, but I'm not too convinced of that.

Actually, its true. Every now and then, on The Learning Channel, they rerun a "Great Books" program on Catch-22 which includes interviews with Heller. In the interview Heller says that the publisher changed it from Catch-18 to Catch-22 because of a book that was coming out at the same time with 18 in the title. I think it was by Leon Uris, but I don't remember for certain.

[Kyla]

Ask the bookstore person...

...it's Mila 18 by Leon Uris.

Catch-22 is my most favorite book of all.

[C K Dexter Haven]

Confirming Kyla, the other book was Mila 18 by Leon Uris (about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising), so Heller changed the name of his book (and his catch) to 22.

Disagreeing with Saltaire, however: Heller did not list "various rules for getting out of combat." The only catch was catch 22, and it was some catch.

The prime example (and possibly the only one called "Catch 22", although I wouldn't swear to that) was trying to get out of flying more missions by claiming you were insane, but if you wanted to get out of flying missions, then you weren't insane. However, the book abounds with other examples. The basic trick to a Catch 22 is that if you do, you don't; and if you don't, you do. It's the basic bureaucracy snafu.

Unfortunately, I can only recollect one other example at the moment:

- Major Major hates to have to deal with people. So whenever he's in his office, he has his secretary tell people he's out. The only time she can make appointments for people to see him is when he's really not in his office (he sneaks out through the window.) So, when he's actually in his office, the secretary says he's out; and when he's actually out of his office is the only time he's "in."

Despite my memory block, the book is chock full o' such paradoxes, most of them very very funny (while suggesting an underlying chaotic hopelessness as well.) A great book.

[Ukulele Ike]

Originally posted by C K Dexter Haven
The only time she can make appointments...Despite my memory block

Major Majors' secretary, First Sergeant Towser, was a male.

(Not mixing him up with General Dreedle's WAC, are ya?)

[WordMan]

If I remember my trivia correctly, Heller worked on Catch-18 for 9-10 years, after having served in either WWII or Korea, and always believed that it would be a great book. After living with, discussing with other writers, his editor, etc., the name Catch-18 for that long, when a simple timing coincidence put Uris' Mila 18 on the bestseller list right when Catch was coming out, his publisher (simon and schuster, if I recall) told Heller that he had to change the name, and therefore the heart of the book. Heller was despondent, saying that he couldn't believe they were going to take Catch-18 away from him. After a period of inaction when it was clear that Heller could not deal with the change, his editor said "why not Catch-22?" and Heller said the equivalent of a defeated "fine - whatever" and off the book went to make history.

Reminds me of the whole "Wiseguys" issue - Nick Pileggi's book was called Wiseguys, but there was already that TV series of the same name when Sorcese was ready to make the movie, so they had to compromise, after a fight, to call the movie "Goodfellas", only to have that name become more well known...

[minty green]

Heller was indeed a B-25 bombaridier in the Italian theater during the latter stages of WWII. The Snowdon incident was (IIRC) loosely based on something Heller had witnessed, but the novel is otherwise far from autobiographical.

Heller worked on the book for seven or eight years as Catch-18, and the first chapter was even published under that name in a literary magazine a few years before the rest of the book was ready for publication. When the editor saw Uris' Mila 18 was coming out, he knew they needed to change the title of Heller's forthcoming novel to avoid confusion with what was sure to be a bestseller from Uris. Heller was dejected by this unlucky coincidence, but happily took the editor's suggestion of making it Catch-22. He immediately liked the repetitive 2's, and felt that they nicely paralleled the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't nature of the catch.

Mila 18 made it onto the NYT bestsellers list, but it was a long way from a blockbuster. Catch-22 sold slowly but steadily in hardback, then took off a year or so after it was released in hardback, going on to sell tens of millions of copies. Three decades, I devoted a chapter in my master's thesis to Catch-22 and its marketing as popular literature.

As far as I'm concerned, it's the Huckleberry Finn of the 20th century.

[Balance]

Originally posted by minty green
He immediately liked the repetitive 2's, and felt that they nicely paralleled the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't nature of the catch.

So what you're saying, basically, is that he thought it was a catchy title?

I'm sorry. Somebody had to say it.

[minty green]

That's some catchy title, that Catch-22.

And I misspoke in my previous post. I mean to say that sales of the book took off a year or so after it went into paperback.

[Sofa King]

Both my father and I have had the opportunity to meet a number of people who actually served with Joseph Heller in the 12th Air Force during WWII, and we spent a week on a cruise shipwith a pilot who served with Heller in the same wing in Corsica. They knew each other only vaguely.

His stories were both hair-raising and eerily familiar. This particular gentleman had married his sweetheart just prior to entering flight school. His wife told me how they had worked out a code so that the pilot could communicate to his wife how many missions he had flown and how many missions were required to be flown before his tour of duty was fulfilled. The number of missions was constantly raised as the veterans approached eligibility for discharge. He told me it started in the twenties and eventually he flew fifty-five before the pilot wrangled his release. By then the war was over in Europe and he thought he was in danger of being shipped off to the Pacific. Eventually, someone spotted pilot's secret messages to his wife and his postcards started showing up wholly redacted except for his name.

This guy also told my father and I that there actually was an incident where someone--and he had no doubt that it was the quartermaster who was behind it--actually stole most of the parachutes, so that many fliers had to go on at least one mission without them. In a more general way, he told us that virtually every jerk, cheapskate, asshole and murderer Heller writes about in Catch-22 was based in part on either real people or tall tales which circulated around the base at the time. Heller's autobiography later confirmed that statement to be true.

I asked the pilot if the phrase "Catch-22" was ever used around the base in Corsica. He said no, the phrase universally used (it would appear by all Americans serving in Europe in WWII) to denote the military bureaucracy was "chickenshit." When I later learned about Heller's original working title, I couldn't help but note the alliterative similarity between "Catch-18" and "chickenshit." However, I haven't seen anything in print which reinforces my suspicion.

[minty green]

Oh yes, raising the number of missions the air crews had to complete before going home was certainly from reality. Billy Mitchell himself raised the number for the 8th Air Force from 25 to 30 while my grandfather was in a B-24 crew, with the result that he was the only member to survive the war, thanks to a mid-air collision on one of the post-25 missions. I'm not sure where the mission numbers topped out, except that it was less than the 100+ General Dreedle ultimately set in Catch-22.

[Sofa King]

Actually, Minty, absurd as it may seem, 100+ missions is not out of the question for Heller's 340th Bomb Group. Heller himself did 60. The guy I met did 55. Another guy from the 340th, George Wells (bottom of that page), survived the war with 102 missions. Wells appears to have piloted the most bombing missions of any American in the war.

However, that's not hard evidence that the number was set at or above 100. Wells might have been a gung-ho guy who went above and beyond the call.

On a related note, take a look at the list of commanders of the 340th, on this page. See Lt. Col. Adolf Tokaz, who commanded in America and then later in the Med? Could this be Col. Scheisskopf?

Correction to my earlier post: Sicily, not Corsica. Sorry.

[JFMichael]

Here's a nice Catch-22 summary site: http://www.bellmore-merrick.k12.ny.us/catch22.html

[Spavined Gelding]

I don't have the book in front of me now so I can not be sure that I have a full recollection of this. It seems to me that the most troubling theme in the book is the dead pilot in "somebody's" bunk. The idea was that a replacement pilot had reported in and gone off on a mission without unpacking his gear. He never came back and his stuff just sat there unclaimed. There is something both sad and real about this.

As an aside, as a staff officer I was constantly messing around with army regulation which were published in loose leaf binders. Changes to the regs were published as new pages to the binder and were designated as "change __ to AR___." Some times the change numbers got into double and tipple figures. Catch 22 has always resonated in my mind as Change 22.

[robertfhm]

I remember Heller at a book signing saying that when he was looking for the name of the Catch he wanted it to be a number in the teens and eighteen in the only "teen" number that starts with a vowel.

[minty green]

Sofa King: So because there was a colonel in Heller's group, that must mean he's Col. Scheisskopf? Am I missing something?

Sure, it's possible to spend all day speculating about whether characters in the book were suppposed to represent actual people. But it ought to take a lot more evidence than just the fact that some guys in the Army were out to make a buck or promote their own careers at the risk of other people's lives. Such people existed in every unit in the armed forces, not to mention everywhere else in America, which is one of the reasons the book was so popular.

[OttoDaFe]

It's been many years since I last read Catch-22, but . . .

I distinctly recall that towards the end of the book, someone in authority tells Yossarian the real meaning of Catch-22: "We can do anything you can't stop us from doing."

Does anyone else recall this, or has a quarter century of dealing with computers (starting with EAMs that you "programmed" by wiring a punchboard) finally taken its ultimate toll?

"It's the brain drain--his brain is draining."

[Sofa King]

Well, in the book, Scheisskopf is a totally incompetent training commander who then shows up in the field to rain still more chaos on Yossarian.

Scheisskopf is German for "Shithead."

Adolf Tokaz is a real-life training commander who then shows up in the field to command the 340th. His competence is not known to me.

But someone before me must have noticed the similarity between "Tokaz" and "tuchus", the Yiddish word for "ass."

I just thought it seemed pretty familiar.

[Sofa King]

Hebrew, dammit. Not Yiddish.