It goes unmentioned in his autobiography and has been overlooked by his biographers. But now an academic from Durham university has shone a spotlight on a moment in his career that Joseph Heller tried to gloss over: the script the Catch-22 author penned for a musical comedy about two crooked lawyers who ruled the roost in 19th-century New York.

Heller was approached to write the script for the musical Howe & Hummel in June 1962, before he became a hit with Catch-22, reveals Edmund Richardson, an author and lecturer in classics at Durham university, in Hazlitt magazine. Catch-22, which would go on to sell millions of copies around the world, had been out for nine months, but was not yet setting bestseller lists on fire.

The musical was to be about the lives of the real-life scoundrels William Howe and Abraham Hummel, who practised law in New York between 1869 and 1907. They were known for bribing juries and fabricating evidence, once even representing the plaintiff and defendant in the same case. Their clients ranged from strippers to madams, spiritualists to gangsters; according to a book about the pair, in their prime “it would not have been unusual to see a leading politician, a pickpocket, a Broadway star, a bank robber and a socialite all crowded together into the waiting room of their offices, located conveniently across the street from the city jail”.

Heller was delighted at the riches their stories offered. A letter to the musical’s producer from the novelist, in March 1963, sees him write that his “spirits are soaring with confidence”, Richardson discovered. “It seems, to my taste, at least, as funny a script as I have ever read,” wrote Heller. “I don’t think there is a single scene that does not have at least something valuable in the way of comedy and irony, and there is not one love story, but three! (Don’t make me list them.)” Heller believed, according to the letter, that the musical Howe & Hummel would be “monstrously successful”, adding: “I just hope I haven’t jinxed the damned thing with this letter.”

But the play was never performed and, according to Richardson, only two copies of the script survive today, among the papers of the musical’s composer Harold Rome.

He told the Guardian: “Before I came across Heller’s script, I had no idea that it existed. I’d been working on Howe and Hummel and I was trying to track down everything that had been written about them, when I came across an entry in Yale’s archives, which referred to ‘Howe and Hummel. Book by Joseph Heller’.

“I looked around: no-one had written about this or quoted from it, and just about no-one seemed to know about it. I was pretty sure this had to be a dead end – maybe a project Heller had worked on for a few days and abandoned, or maybe this was the wrong Joseph Heller altogether.

“I got on the train from New York to Yale, pretty sure that this was going to be a short and bitter trip. But then, in the archives, there’s the entire draft script, and the songs, and the music. And heaps of letters from Heller and the producers, just frothing with excitement.”

He added that the script revealed a world “just as askew as Yossarian’s” in Catch-22, in that Heller has taken “the real Howe and Hummel, and made them more conniving and wondrous still”.

“You know, when I swear, that I’ll be telling a lie,” says a witness in the musical. Hummel responds: “We pay a little less for the truth.” In another scene quoted by Hazlitt, the new online magazine from Penguin Random House of Canada, Howe demands: “Where’s my aged mother?” The clerk responds: “I have four aged mothers right here”, to be told: “Send them all inside to begin memorizing testimony. And before the week is over, I’ll need forty-two more!”

There is also a “vulgarly lascivious” dance from a string of half-naked women in Howe’s office, and a love scene in which two criminals try to woo a girl with a song including the lines: “Through baby days I kept thin/ Drinking left-over gin/ From a nipple no one sterilised!” and “From the gold crib in my room/ I watched mum and her groom/ Play games that still leave me surprised!”

“Howe and Hummel are the only heroes fit for Heller’s New York: a city where meaning is so twisted that love songs become confidence tricks,” writes Richardson. “The script was almost ready. It was monstrous and hilarious, a cockeyed thing of beauty.”

By June 1963, production contracts had been signed, but then – the death knell for the musical – Catch-22’s sales took off, along with Heller’s career. He cut off his ties with the production, Richardson writes, and the script and score were eventually laid aside.

“In subsequent years, Heller would rewrite reality as artfully as Howe and Hummel, and erase them from his life. His autobiography spares not a word for the project he devoted so many months to. Scholars and biographers have followed his cues,” writes Richardson, who accessed the manuscript and letters at Yale university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.



“The closer I looked at it, the more it felt like a bit of Heller’s life that was going to be absolutely at the heart of his story about himself – right up until Catch-22 made him into a culture-hero. Then, of course, everything changed. So it felt less like an abandoned draft – one of those projects every writer has, which seems like a great idea until it clearly isn’t – than an abandoned version of Heller himself. And that made me want to tell its story.”

Despite its rough edges, Richardson believes Howe & Hummel could have been the triumph of which Heller dreamed. “But the closest he ever came to acknowledging its existence was when he remarked to George Plimpton that ‘once, I started a musical comedy’.”