A Heller of an ending
KATHRYN KOROMILAS  

IT’S A bit of a Catch-22 situation isn’t it? You are an ageing author of universal acclaim, all because of one brilliant novel you wrote years ago, but you can’t quite seem to match that prodigal achievement with anything else you’ve since written - and you really want to go out with a bang. In your long writing career, you’ve recycled every personal experience - your early marriages, your wartime experiences, your childhood memories - as worthy novel-writing material and you’ve also tapped into the wealth of “highbrow” material from historical, biblical or mythological sources, and if you haven’t, someone else - Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Dickens - has. So, what next? Welcome to Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, his final novel before he died at age 76 last December.

In this tale, we follow Heller’s 70-odd-year-old protagonist Eugene Pota’s struggle to come up with the perfect idea for a novel that is probably to be his last before his death, as indeed it must have been for Heller. “This book,” explains Pota to himself (and Heller to us), “is about a well-known, ageing author trying to close out his career with a crowning achievement, with a laudable bang that would embellish his reputation rather than with a fainthearted whimper that would bring him only condescension and insult.”

So, I guess you are wondering, what did the critics say? The New York Times’ May 30 review by Michiko Kakutani begins like this: “… Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man is one of those posthumously published books that form a sad coda to a distinguished career. Fans of Catch-22 and Something Happened can only regret that Portrait was ever published.”

Heller knew this type of review was coming. Indeed, through Pota - who like Heller enjoyed shining success early on in his career - we see a resigned Heller who although widely regarded and widely known for a long “inspired” and at times “brilliant” career, has oft been set aside in the “has-been” bin. As Pota self-pityingly remarks, he has “lived too long and done too well”, he is “prominent, acknowledged, accepted, assimilated and… familiar”.

Familiar indeed. He notes and develops numerous abortive ideas in Portrait, but everything, in some form or another has already been done, even by himself. In any case, he’s too tired to focus on developing and sustaining some of the complicated plots he thinks up - he lacks “leisure or patience for a book ponderous with descriptive details of character and place… descriptive details of place and character take time, deplete energy.”

Depleted yes, but still hungry to achieve some late life success and notoriety (maybe a film contract!) he comes up A Sexual Biography of My Wife. His friends love the idea, his editor is guarded but curious and his wife would prefer not to discuss the issue, though anything is better than having her bored and distracted husband not write at all.

The idea is a fitting one - sex seems to be constantly on his mind as of late but as impotent as he is at sustaining new ideas, he is just as impotent at initiating any such activity with his wife. Indeed, one of the most poignant aspects of the novel is the ageing relationship between Pota and his wife Polly - who became alarmed when she heard “news of the widely publicised development of a male potency pill.” Maybe if there was an equally potent writing pill…

Pota is Heller, there is no doubt about that. And it is nice that Heller allows us into his world, the world of a grand literary figure who is not ashamed to expose his inability to produce another groundbreaking work. The Times may have predictably compared his last work to his first and announced how sad it is that Heller should cap his career with “an anticlimactic book that is, at best, a poor imitation of a novel”, but Heller’s brilliance is precisely in this, his self-satirising final work.
ATHENS NEWS, 01/09/2000