By Dick Cummins
Dick Cummins is a frequent contributor to this blog. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is working on a memoir.
Enjoyed Eric’s re-reading post about nostalgic literary expectations confronted by the reality of changing tastes in literary craft, theme and genre.
The premise reminds me of my first experience with being in love—not with a book but with a girl in ninth grade. Her name was Gwendolyn and she had a warm finished basement that winter, the “Theme from A Summer Place” low on the radio, still kissing as she pushed me out the door after her mother yelled down the laundry shoot for me to go home, out into the falling snow and slip-sliding away down the hill on my MoPed.
I say this because not unlike Eric’s experience with re-reading Catch-22, a first love of his, though literary, when I hugged Gwen at our 50th class reunion, things had changed too. My sweet and affectionate first love was now a grandmother of five, limping with a touch of gout.
Friends, acquaintances and first loves change on us because that’s what people do. But no book we loved a long time ago has changed really, they just seem different because we’re different.
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be either.
Eric was disappointed trying to reconnect with Catch-22 and I get it. Our little North Park library here in San Diego has a section of books on tape—CDs now of course. I still drive to Arizona and up to LA for business and humming along the freeways I listen to talented actors dramatically reading aloud. Some of the books on tape I had not read before: The Diary of Anne Frank, Margaret Truman’s Murder at the Library of Congress, Elmore Leonard’s When the Women Come Out to Dance, and To Have and Have Not more recently.
Occasionally for old time’s sake, I’d take out old friends too like, Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and at the moment, Revolutionary Road—better dramatically aloud now than my first read in ’64.
Anyway, listening away to Catch-22, like Eric, some of the dialogue began to chafe. Heller’s echolalia device, Lt. Col. Korn and Col. Cathcart repeating each other’s fatuous lines, to make Colonel talk fatuous I guess was the point, but still. Another Heller indiscretion I noticed this time around involved the larding dialogue tags with redundant and repetitious adverbs.
“Shut the hell up, Yossarian!!” General Dreedle shouted intensely, looking around angrily for Major Danby ass to kick.
Did Heller include all these unneeded interpretive tags because his dialogue was not emotionally pitch perfect, or because he was padding up the word count to make his manuscript longer—or just to irritate me now nearly 50 years later?
But this is just quibbling really, as I stuck with it driving across the desert to Phoenix. And then I got to the scene of Milo’s contracting out a bombing raid to the Germans, a raid on his own airbase—by his own squadron—with Minderbinder Enterprises profiting nicely from this prescient economic satire (everyone had a share after all) and there was Heller, hanging the moon again!
So credit where credit is due too: like the first moon landing, Catch-22’s position as the first great satire on war, since Lysistrata, is secure here. But remember, unlike Eric’s re-reading, I was “re-listening,” so could always skip forward a few pages when matured fictional taste dictated.
Also, does it strike anyone that maybe Heller was the satirical Nostradamus of modern outsourcing? I ask because I see most U.S. bridge-building contracts are now with Chinese-based steel companies. So, not “if” but “when” we go to war with The People’s Republic over Taiwan, I guess we’ll just have to contract with the Chinese Air Force and outsource our bombing raids on Beijing—Heller’s ‘60s satirical art meets the global economic irony of 2012?
Good one Joe.
Up next: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
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What have you re-read lately? How did it hold up? Any surprises?
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