Beschreibung:

HELLER, Joseph. Collection of 6 autograph letters signed and 12 typed letters signed ("Joseph Heller," "Joe Heller," "Joe," or "J.H.") to James Nagel, New York and East Hampton, 28 January 1972 - 28 June 1984. Together 26 pages, 8vos and 4tos, Heller's autograph corrections, personal stationery, original envelopes .
HELLER, Joseph. Collection of 6 autograph letters signed and 12 typed letters signed ("Joseph Heller," "Joe Heller," "Joe," or "J.H.") to James Nagel, New York and East Hampton, 28 January 1972 - 28 June 1984. Together 26 pages, 8vos and 4tos, Heller's autograph corrections, personal stationery, original envelopes . "YOSSARIAN ISN'T JEWISH AND WAS NOT INTENDED TO BE" An important archive of letters in which Heller discusses the writing of Catch-22 , his World War II experiences, and literary influences. Nagel was preparing a collection of critical essays on Catch-22 (which appeared in 1974; followed by another book ten years later on Heller's work generally) and throughout the correspondence Heller is very forthcoming about his artistic choices and literary strategies, as well as biographical details. 4 April 1974: " Catch-22 is not an autobiographical novel, although much of the action and physical details come out of events I witnessed or experienced. A turret gunner in my plane was wounded in the thigh on one of the missions to Avignon and I administered first aid. He was hale and hearty the next day when I visited him in the hospital. That is the extent to which Snowden's death comes out of my personal experience..." 17 August 1972: "Yossarian isn't Jewish and was not intended to be; on the other hand, no effort was expended to make him anything else." 2 May 1974: "There was not for a moment the thought of making Yossarian Jewish. That was a line of development which I did not want to get involved." Several letters touch on his literary influences. 4 April 1974: "there was no direct influence of Dos Passos or of Stephen Crane's Maggie " in Catch-22 , he writes. 13 March 1974: "The literary influences of which I was conscious from the beginning and throughout were Celine's Journey to the End of the Night , to which there is a stronger similarity in the early sections of Catch-22 than I attended." He read Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark at about the same time as Celine's Journey , "and almost immediately, it seems, the ideas for Catch-22 began parading through my mind." Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! and The Sound and Fury both "supplied different ideas for the structure of different parts...And always present in my awareness, I believe, was T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland , which has had more to do, I believe, with shaping not merely the spirit but the structure of novels than is generally recognized." Heller points out that the book is not in the strict sense an antiwar novel. His own experience in World War II was generally positive. 13 March 1974: "What is hard to get across to younger people today is that after the attack at Pearl Harbor, there was virtually no opposition to the war in this country...I was about nineteen when I enlisted...I was young, it was adventurous, there was much hoopla and glamour; in addition, and this too is hard to get across to college students today, for me and for most others, going into the army resulted immediately in a vast improvement in my standard of living... The experience was enjoyable until about my thirty-seventh mission--the one to Avignion on which the turret gunner was wounded. On that one I was frightened for the very first time; I was frightened on the twenty-three afterward..." 4 April 1974: "All anachronisms of plot were unintentional...Anachronisms of history, however, were deliberate, the purpose being to fuse that period of the war in which the novel was set with the time period in which the novel was written..." Later letters touch on Heller's pleasure at the success of Something Happened , and his battles with Guillain-Barr syndrome. An important archive that greatly expands our understanding of Heller's life and work. Together 18 items . (18)