As George Clooney’s new adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel comes to TV, Mark Lawson looks at its unlikely path to success – and why Heller thought everyone got it wrong

When Joseph Heller, a 38-year-old New York advertising executive, published his first novel in 1961, an urgent query came in from the Finnish translator: “Would you please explain me one thing? What means catch-22? I didn’t find it in any vocabulary. Even the assistant air attaché of the USA here in Helsinki could not explain exactly.” Within a couple of years – after Catch-22 had become a million-selling paperback in the US and UK, and done well in Finland and most other countries – nobody needed the phrase translated. It is likely to be familiar to those who watch the new six-part TV adaptation on Channel 4, even if they do not know the book.

Heller, however, grouched that most people still didn’t understand. I interviewed the writer, who died in 1999, several times. He was a large, loud man, who loved food: “Hungry Joe”, the nickname given to a character in Catch-22, was Heller’s own army monicker. He had never lost his Brooklyn accent: Martin Amis once remarked that this was the only major American writer who referred to his profession as “litta-ra-chewer”. Across our encounters, there was a running gag in which someone – a diner in a Long Island seafood restaurant, a fan at a literary festival, a BBC executive – would tell Heller their own experience of a “catch-22 situation”. When they had gone, the writer would growl: “That’s not a catch-22. They almost never are.”

Most of the anecdotes were minor domestic dilemmas, along the lines of not being able to find your lost spectacles without your spectacles. Heller was dismissive of such mild diurnal circuits of unfairness. For him, a true catch-22 was perfectly, cruelly illogical, with life-or-death peril, like the one discovered by John Yossarian, a member of a US bomber crew stationed in Italy during the second world war:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to, but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.

This is a passage of comic prose so magnificent that the script of the TV adaptation, co-created and co-directed by George Clooney, simply slices it into dialogue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Hungry Joe’ ... Heller eats a Nathan’s Famous hot dog in Coney, where he grew up. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Heller was a man of considerable self-confidence. At appearances to publicise his later books, readers would often bluntly tell him that he hadn’t written anything as good as Catch-22, to which the reply, after a growly laugh, was: “No. But nor has anyone else.” So he would not have been shocked by either the initial success or the continuing popularity of his first book. What had made him nervous at first was the title. The manuscript on which he worked between 1953 and 1960, fictionalising his own experience as a bombardier in the US air force, was originally called “Catch-18”. But, soon after the book was bought by Simon and Schuster, rival publisher Doubleday announced Mila 18, a second world war novel by Leon Uris. Deciding it was unlikely that two stories of conflict with the same number on their covers would become bestsellers in the same season, Heller’s editor nudged him up or down the abacus. This request appalled and unsettled the author for whom, during eight years of work, “18 had always been the only number”.

Heller’s resistance was partly down to stubbornness, which even his friends identified as a prime quality, but also something subtler. He was one of the wave of male Jewish-American writers who dominated American literature in the second half of the 20th century. But, while readers soon realised the roots of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow from the content of their novels, Heller’s specifically Jewish works came much later, with Good as Gold (1979) and God Knows (1984), comedies respectively about Henry Kissinger and King David. However, one reason that the number 18 seems to have meant so much to him is that it had a literally mystical significance; in Hebrew, where letters have a numerical value, the sum of one and eight can spell “life”.

The Vietnam war created a market for a story that depicted US army commanders as quixotic, paranoid brutes

Heller cussedly continued to prefer the original name, and his concerns seemed to have been justified when, at the hardback stage, Mila 18 made the New York Times bestseller list and Heller’s book didn’t. (Incidentally, in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, set in an alternative postwar Britain, people are reading “Catch-18”.) Once the mass market editions appeared, though, Heller rapidly eclipsed Uris. A key reason is that while Mila 18 was a conventionally solemn war novel, Catch-22 is a daringly dark farce, which anticipated the mood soon to engulf the US.

During the novel’s lengthy gestation – writing in short bursts after work at the ad agency, and at weekends – Heller was confronted by publishers who feared that a story set in the early 40s risked missing its time, seeming irrelevant in prosperous American peacetime. Two members of the same young military generation – Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal – had published novels based on their experiences soon after demobbing: Vidal’s Williwaw was in bookshops by 1946, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead two years later.

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Then, in May 1961, a few months before publication, John F Kennedy secretly escalated US assistance to the South Vietnamese; by the time Catch-22 had become a soft-cover super seller, Lyndon B Johnson was ruinously involved in a war that was vehemently opposed, especially by students. Whether or not Heller’s book would have had equal success as “Catch-18”, it seems impossible that it would have reached such heights without America’s global anti-communist mission creating a market for a story that depicted US army commanders as quixotic, paranoid brutes.

Though devastating in most other aspects, the war in Vietnam was generous to the genre of military black comedy. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – a second world war novel delayed even longer than Catch-22 – was based on Vonnegut’s exposure, as a captured serviceman, to the allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. But, when the book was published in 1969, it appealed to the anti-war sentiment of young people resisting conscription to Vietnam. Similarly, MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker (a pseudonym for Dr H Richard Hornberger and WC Heinz) was published in 1968, 15 years after the end of the Korean war in which it is set, by which time that conflict was almost forgotten. However, first as a 1970 movie and then as a long-running TV series, the story of a previous American imperial folly seemed to be a commentary on the nation’s miscalculations in south-east Asia. So, paradoxically, three of the key Vietnam era fictions – Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22 and MASH – all dramatised much earlier conflicts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anti-war sentiment … Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H (1970) Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/CBS TV

The significance of this is that Heller, Vonnegut, and Hooker, writing at a distance from events, were able to be mordantly satirical about war in a way that would have brought accusations of bad taste to an author writing contemporaneously in such a way about the second world war, Korea, or Vietnam. A work of fiction about a war that never happened – the USA-USSR nuclear war satirically imagined in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove (1964) – also helped to shape the culture in which Catch-22 became a cult.

The TV series M*A*S*H is still popular today, and is partly responsible for the success of conflict-based comedy on TV. As the camera pans across camouflage tents and the sardonically amazed faces of troops given ridiculous orders, Clooney’s new Catch-22 seems to contain a deliberate visual homage to the series. Another predecessor in this respect is Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), which dared to joke about military cruelty and incompetence, and connects directly to the latest Heller adaptation through the casting. Hugh Laurie, who played Lieutenant George in Blackadder’s first world war farce here appears as the deranged Major De Coverley.

The 1970 movie version of Catch-22, directed by Mike Nichols, was badly received by critics and struggled at the box office, encouraging the view that Heller’s novel might be one of those books – Finnegans Wake, Moby-Dick – that defy successful cinematic adaptation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alan Arkin as Yossarian in Nichols’s Catch-22. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

However, the dominant problem in such cases has been the level of compression necessary to fit long, populous books into just one movie: the Nichols Catch-22 runs for 122 minutes. The increasingly popular TV box-set format allows for a much more representative ratio of page count to screen minutes. The screenwriters of the TV series, Luke Davies and David Michôd, have almost six hours.

They fillet and pace Heller’s narrative cleverly, with the biggest structural change coming at the beginning. The novel opens with Yossarian already flying missions from Pianosa, but the TV series begins with a flashback – found in Heller’s eighth chapter – set during the servicemen’s basic training at Santa Ana Military School in California. Lieutenant Scheisskopf, a sadistic instructor who does not appear in the book until later, is on screen from the start, which makes sense as a tactic to win viewers because he is played by Clooney, the cast’s most famous face.

The explanation of the title detonates at the end of the first episode, and Yossarian’s growing mental breakdown is convincingly built up from a horrific encounter with a bloody corpse in mid-air (a straight borrowing from Heller’s own war record).

The sexual politics of the novel have dated; Heller wrote about men who not only casually used sex workers, but referred to them as “whores”, while one of its big one-liners turns on the perceived comic improbability of two men falling in love. As for racial diversity, aside from Yossarian – who is Armenian-American (and is played in the series by Italian-Portuguese-American actor Christopher Abbott) – Heller’s airmen are predominantly white Americans. In that respect, the adaptation strangely stays too faithful to the text. That aside, this televisual retelling justifies the author’s late-career reflection in an interview: “I believe that Catch-22, through some lucky instinct on my part, dealt with matters that are perennial sources of discontent in an advanced society.”

It was not, perhaps, much of a gamble that there would always be wars being fought or threatened somewhere. Screenwriters Davies and Michôd both come from Australia, a country that was significantly involved in the Vietnam war and lost thousands at Gallipoli. In the UK, Heller’s story speaks to the thoughtless sacrifice of life in the 1914-18 conflict, as well as to Tony Blair’s more recent intervention in Iraq. For post-Vietnam generations of Americans, the Catch-22 adaptation will resonate with the Bush wars as well; two of Clooney’s earlier movies, Three Kings (1999) and Syriana (2005), dealt with American foreign policy in the Middle East. But the presentation of deranged authority figures in this adaptation is also clearly aimed at the Trump presidency, especially in Clooney’s verbally and mentally unhinged Scheisskopf.

The cruel rules, irrational circularities, and capricious administration that Heller identified in the US military clearly resonate, too, with readers’ experience of political or corporate bureaucracies in civilian life. Franz Kafka spotted these tendencies in early 20th century Prague, but it was 20th century America that invented, and then spread globally, management as an industry and pseudo-science that has become more Kafkaesque than anything Kafka imagined. So this aspect of the narrative has increasingly resonated with bewildered and beleaguered employees, customers, and voters.

The recent scandal over the retrospective denial of UK citizenship to members of the Windrush generation featured a catch-22 situation that perhaps even Heller would recognise. Those affected were forced to leave the UK when found not to have passports; but they would only have needed to apply for a passport if they had wanted to leave the UK, which they had not.

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Despite Heller’s practised response that no one had surpassed Catch-22, there is an argument that he did so with his second book. After a 13-year genesis that made his debut look swiftly written, Something Happened finally appeared in 1974. Bob Slocum, an advertising executive, experiences in peacetime the illogical authoritarianism that Yossarian witnessed in war, and because of the family incident to which the title refers, suffers a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The corporation that he serves is as barmy as Yossarian’s air force, the tacit link with Catch-22 made explicit by the final line: “Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command.”

When Something Happened appeared, some critics accused Heller of an arrogant ambition to be an American Tolstoy – the first book his War, the second his Peace. The consensus was that he had failed. But, rereading Something Happened and watching the new Catch-22, I became convinced that Heller had succeeded.

• Catch-22 is at 9pm on Thursdays on Channel 4 and on All 4.

•This article was amended on 20 June 2019 to remove a suggestion that the site of the Gallipoli campaign is in Italy.