Two book jackets and a still from The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring Lana Turner

Catch-22 (1961)

Catch-22 has passed into the language as a description of the impossible bind…

“Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. ‘Is Orr crazy?’

‘He sure is,’ Doc Daneeka said.

‘Can you ground him?’

‘I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule?…

‘And then you can ground him?’ Yossarian asked.

‘No. Then I can’t ground him.’

‘You mean there’s a catch?’

‘Sure there’s a catch,’ Doc Daneeka replied. ‘Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.’”

Orr is crazy, and can be grounded, but if he asks to be grounded he is sane — and he can only be grounded if he asks.

There are no catches 1 to 21, or 23 onwards, in the book. There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Like the final commandment left at the end of Animal Farm, Catch-22 is an entire rule book distilled into one lunatic decree. Its very uniqueness meant that Heller had to think carefully before naming, or numbering, it. And his choice? Catch-18.

In the Second World War, Heller was a bombardier with the 12th Air Force and flew 60 missions over Italy and France. Yossarian in Catch-22 is a bombardier flying the same missions. Rotated home in 1945 and discharged, Heller took a degree at New York University, then an MA at Columbia, before working in New York as a copywriter. In 1953 he began writing a book called ‘Catch-18’, the first chapter of which was published in the magazine New World Writing in 1955. When, three years later, he submitted the first large chunk of it to Simon & Schuster, it was quickly accepted for publication, and Heller worked on it steadily — all the time thinking of it as ‘Catch-18’ — until its completion in 1961.

Shortly before publication, however, the blockbuster novelist Leon Uris produced a novel entitled Mila 18 (also about the Second World War). It was thought advisable that Heller, the first-time novelist, should be the one to blink. Heller said in an interview with Playboy in 1975: ‘I was heartbroken. I thought 18 was the only number.’

A long process of numerical agonising began in which the author and his editor Robert Gottlieb, worked their way through the integers looking for the right formula. ‘Catch-11’ was one of the first suggestions, but was rejected because of the film Ocean’s Eleven. When 22 came up, Gottlieb felt that it had the right ring.... Heller took two weeks to be persuaded.

But the journey from 18 to 22, although tortuous, was worth making. The reason is this: 22 has a thematic significance that 18 and most of the other choices do not. The doubling of the digits happened to emphasise a major theme of the book: duplication and reduplication. In Catch-22 everything is doubled. Yossarian flies over the bridge at Ferrara twice; his food is poisoned twice; there is a chapter devoted to ‘The Soldier who Saw Everything Twice’; the chaplain has the sensation of having experienced everything twice; Yossarian can name two things to be miserable about for everyone to be thankful for.... The mad pairing reaches its apotheosis in the catch itself.

Doubling is thus a stylistic device suggestive of the qualified nature of reality. Nothing is singular, unblurred or unambiguous. The title, with its doubled digits (two representing duality, itself doubled to make 22) conveys this in a way that ‘Catch-18’ could never have done.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)

James M. Cain was the writer responsible for some of the classic ‘tough-guy’ novels of the 1930s and 1940s: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Serenade, The Embezzler and others. The tough-guy novel dealt with the aimless lives of the drifters and hustlers of the Depression, and was characterised by fast-paced action, seedy backdrops, laconic dialogue and plenty of violence and sex. On the opening page of The Postman we meet Frank Chambers being thrown off a hay truck outside an inn. Soon he is running his eye over Cora Papadakis, the wife of the inn’s proprietor…

“Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up the dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.” A few pages later Frank takes matters in hand. The lovers perceive that the murder of the husband will help things along, and accomplish it around page 45. They are immediately arrested. Once in custody they betray one another, but are released after some shady dealings. They try to rebuild their lives, but Cora dies in a car accident. Frank is arrested for her murder, and writes the last sentence of the book just as he is about to be hanged.

The book’s title was originally ‘Bar-B-Q’ (there is a sign offering ‘Bar-B-Q’ outside the inn) but Cain’s publisher, Alfred Knopf, disliked it and asked for a change. Cain came up with The Postman Always Rings Twice, which Knopf disliked even more, but Cain would not be budged a second time.

According to Cain, the title came about as a result of a conversation with a screenwriter, Vincent Lawrence. Lawrence plotted out his screenplays around a device he called a ‘love-rack’, which Cain interpreted as a device whereby the characters are tormented by obsessive desires which drive the plot. Cain described how one day Lawrence was telling him how nervous he had been after mailing his first play to a producer:

“Then he said, ‘I almost went nuts. I’d sit and watch for the postman... and then when I left the window I’d be listening for his ring. How I’d know it was the postman was that he’d always ring twice.’

He went on with more of the harrowing tale, but I cut in on him suddenly. I said: ‘Vincent, I think you’ve given me a title for that book.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Postman Always Rings Twice.’

‘Say, he rang twice for Chambers, didn’t he?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘And on that second ring, Chambers had to answer, didn’t he? Couldn’t hide out in the backyard any more.’

‘His number was up, I’d say.’”

This would be the end of the story behind The Postman Always Rings Twice were it not for the fact that there is no postman in the book, no doorbell, and no ring. Cain was speaking metaphorically. The ‘postman’ was fate, nemesis, retribution, divine justice; and the parcel that awaited Frank was the recorded delivery of his own demise.

It is hard to believe that The Postman Always Rings Twice would have been filmed with Lana Turner and John Garfield, and later with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, had it been called Bar-B-Q.

My Man Jeeves (1919)

My Man Jeeves (1919) was the first Wodehouse book with Jeeves in the title. But Jeeves the gentleman’s personal gentleman — possessor of the secret of how to make a perfect cup of tea and serve it precisely as his master is waking up — first made an appearance in the story Extricating Young Gussie in the Saturday Evening Post of September 18, 1915. He had only two lines.

Wodehouse said in the introduction to the anthology The World of Jeeves (1967): “It was only some time later, when I was going into the strange affair of The Artistic Career of Corky, that the man’s qualities dawned upon me. I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter.”

The Artistic Career of Corky was a later title for the story Leave it to Jeeves, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of February 5, 1916. In it, Jeeves shimmers into the plot in a fully fledged Jeeves-like manner, and sets about helping Bertie’s artistic pal Corky out of a fiancee-related jam.

One tale has misled some into thinking it features the debut of Jeeves. This is Jeeves Takes Charge, a short story published, again in the Saturday Evening Post, on November 18, 1916, more than a year after Extricating Young Gussie. Bertie has discovered his regular valet in the act of stealing his silk socks. The agency then sends a new man…

“‘If you would drink this, sir,’ he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. ‘It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite....’

‘You’re engaged!’ I said, as soon as I could say anything.

I perceived clearly that this cove was one of the world’s wonders, the sort no home should be without.

‘Thank you, sir. My name is Jeeves.’”

Jeeves, then, was born in 1915 or thereabouts, during the first battles of the First World War. Wodehouse was working in the New York theatre at the time. Before he left permanently for America, however, he went to a cricket match in Cheltenham. And this was where war, cricket and Jeeves met and coalesced. Percy Jeeves was, by all accounts, a good player. An attacking right-hand bat, medium-fast bowler, he played first-class cricket from 1912 to 1914; 1913 was the season when he began to distinguish himself. It was also the year in which Wodehouse, a keen cricket fan, saw him play at Cheltenham.

Several decades later, R.V. Ryder, the son of the Warwickshire club secretary, wrote to Wodehouse to ask for confirmation that the Jeeves of literature really was named after the Jeeves of cricket. Wodehouse replied: “Dear Mr Ryder. Yes, you are quite right. It must have been in 1913 that I paid a visit to my parents in Cheltenham and went to see Warwickshire play Glos on the Cheltenham College ground. I suppose Jeeves’s bowling must have impressed me, for I remembered him in 1916, when I was in New York and just starting the Jeeves and Bertie saga, and it was just the name I wanted...”