ing missions. They die of old age even in Sweden (though they usually make it a little past 57).
In line with his striking statement about the condition of his psyche these days, Heller offered some insights into his method of writing.
In brief, it's very slow      which is why he said he doesn't count on completing more than one more novel if he doesn't live to be more than two score and 17.
It took him seven years to finish Catch-22 and, at the current rate, he will have invested something like ten years in Something Happened. Of course, with all the money his first novel is bringing in, he doesn't feel any of the usual pressures to write fast.
He says he never starts writing anything until after he has "thought it through to the end. " Working a couple of hours a day, he says, he averages three or four finished pages a week.
Much of the conversation during his visit naturally revolved around Catch-22. He said some things about the novel that probably are at least of interest to English professors.
"One night I had insomnia and Catch-22 came out of it, " Heller says.   The first two lines of the book just more or less popped into his head, without him even knowing that they were going to have anything to do with war or the military.   He said the book "is really about civilian society" and could just as well have been written about the Boy Scouts or General Motors (or something like that) as WWII.
Asked if he would make any changes in the book if he had it to do over, he said he would make no major ones just three minor things.   He would emphasize more that Germany was collapsing when Yossarian deserted ("even though I already said it about five times") and that Yossarian didn't expect to make it to Sweden, even though he said he did.   Instead, he is to be a fugitive in Rome perpetually under hot pursuit but "still alive and healthy. " Heller couldn't remember the third minor change at the time.
He said he had made Yossarian an Assyrian because, when he wrote the book, he thought the Assyrian race was extinct (and only found out later that there were still as many as 40, 000 somewhere).   But if Yossarian had been the last survivor of his race, the finality of his prospective death would have been emphasized.
A lot of people asked Heller about his politics.   He in turn talked about them a lot, but it's still hard to say where he's definitively at.
He's not a liberal, at least, as one might expect of a financially successful, middle-aged author.   He didn't hesitate to tell the Coliseum crowd, when asked,  that he thought attempts at working through the system were "doomed to failure. "
He also said he thought the recent domestic bombings were probably having more effect than anything else. He expressed further interest in non-
fatal attacks on property a couple of times during the evening.
He seems .basically to identify with the New Left, whether out of commitment or fashion, but it's hard to say exactly what he does believe because, as he himself concedes, he makes rash statements.   Once, be admitted, he advised a young .woman he had never seen before to go cut sugar cane in Cuba and didn't think any more about it until she wrote him saying she needed money to get home.   He sent it.
At some point during the small-group conversation in the apartment we ended up at, he expressed admiration for the political efforts of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave.
Someone inadvertently put him on the spot by casually observing that "more famous people should do things like that. "
Heller, somewhat inebriated for real by then, responded by saying he intended to use his remaining years to be as happy as he could possibly be.   "I don't really care what kind of world my children get, and I don't think anyone else does either. "
He had said earlier that he had intended no political implications when he wrote Catch-22.   "I've never been particularly political until the last couple of years, " he said. "I'm slightly more political than I was, but I don't even know if 'political' describes it accurately. . .1 don't trust societies, any society. "
He also said he doesn't expect a revolution in the U.S. because no revolution ever succeeds without the support of the army, and he could foresee only the opposite here.   On the other hand, he says he doesn't expect a military dictatorship, although a police state is something he doesn't rule out.
Some loose ends:
On being a celebrity -- "For about a year I enjoyed being a celebrity --before I realized I was seeing the same people, going to the same parties.   And I didn't want to break up my house by having affairs with second-rate models and third-rate actresses " it was getting pretty boring in terms of conversation. "
On youth culture -- "There's much about the youth culture I like, but not all of it. " He thinks many of the big youth-oriented movies have been bad and questions some of the literary preferences -- Brautigan and Hesse, for examples.
On a paraphrase of a Catch-22 quote which, in turn, was a paraphrase of a General Motors executive's quote     Asked, "Would you say what's bad for the country is good for Joseph Heller? " he replied, "I_ think so. "
As Heller was entering the student apartment for the last session of the evening, he encountered at the foot of the stairs a placard which said in big red letters, FUCK WAR AND PIGS. He hesitated slightly.   The thought occurred that he might be wondering what the hell kind of place we were steering him into.   We went on in-blue-tail fly/11
side and he gazed briefly but intently at the abundant psychedelia surrounding him in the dim light.
He asked who had made the sign and was told that it was an SDS thing. "Oh, you have an SDS here? " Then he seemed to relax as he found himself a seat.
Later he said he hadn't expected to "find anything like this in Lexington, Ky. " and remarked on his amazement at always seeming to be able to find "people like myself" no matter where he went.   Even in Kentucky.
There were only a total of seven people there and perhaps the crowd swelled to as many as 12 at various times, so informal conversation prevailed.   Heller had some of the Scotch he had bought and also another more local intoxicant which most everyone else preferred.
The conversation ranged widely: more about other writers and his own writing, whether computers could think or suffer (Heller said they couldn't), cops, politics, the guy who played his arm on the Johnny Carson Show, the nature of humor (Heller said it was an expression of anguish), the grass vs. booze issue, a hermaphrodite named Dennis, determinism (he believes in it), how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and so forth.
It was here that Heller got acquainted with Shreveport, Louisiana's own Sam Mason, a true people's musician recently-turned-computer science-student, who is the writer, composer and performer of such legendary lyrics as "I Love You So Fucking Much I Can't Shit. " Sam told Heller how much he had enjoyed Catch-22 and added, by way of compliment, "Hell, I reckon I've only read four books in my life."
Heller wanted to know how he had happened to read Catch-22 among the four.
Sam explained that the first book he had read was given to him by a friend because it was about trains, and Sam liked trains.   He read and liked it, so his friend asked if he liked planes.   Sam did, so he gave him Catch-22.
This was at the point when the first jet was due to come to Shreveport. Sam caught a train in Shreveport to take him to Texas, where he was to board the jet for the return trip. He took the book along and said he read it "between eating and digging on the train" then later on the short but historic plane ride.
The other two books Sam said he had read were Ayn Rand's The Foun-tainhead (presumably because he also likes architecture) and something called Don Quixote USA. "Yeah, I really dug Catch-22, " Sam told Heller.   "It didn't bog down in the middle like Ayn Rand. "
Heller, who by this time was beyond his initial skepticism and laughing uproariously, said, "People in New York wouldn't believe what I'm hearing now. "
Prior to coming to the apartment, Heller had said he would only stay
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