Q: Do you ever anticipate Something Happened going into film? Would you want it to go into film?

A; No. I've made no effort to sell it. My agent has been told not to contact me about it at all until he has a very impressive offer he thinks I'll accept.

Q: Where are you going from here? Any strong ideas?

A: No. Not until I'm a little less busy, and I will be very busy for the next couple weeks. It's a very good feeling, as I've explained to you, it's nice. You really don't believe it's ever going to get printed on time, and them published, and then distributed, then to see it's out in the bookstores, in New York and here, and they're reviewing it. So many things could go wrong: there could be a strike, there could be a war. [He looked at his wife in mock surprise.] What? You're not worried about any of this?

Mrs. Heller: I still can't believe it's finally out.

A: You really don't believe me. With Catch-22 there was a paper strike, there was a copy-editor who misunderstood her instructions and rewrote whole paragraphs and changed the names, and made corrections. She missed the whole style. She'd edited--and very well--William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. She was very good at that. Well, she took Catch-22 and began making it historically correct; putting in dates where I didn't want dates. So all that happened during the four weeks she was working on it, all that was useless. Not only useless, but then I had to take out all her "corrections" and then send it back to somebody else--we wasted a week or two doing that. And then there was a strike after that.

But everything seems to hve gone perfectly with this new book. And you can see that you've caught me in a mood of great emotional elevation: it's going to be successful, I feel I deserve it, and I love it!

After Catch-22 was published I was down to a couple of parties, and some people complained about me to my editors, saying that I seemed to be enjoying my success too much. They had an idea that I was supposed to look like Thomas Wolfe, with this aura of suicidal melancholy.

Q: I'm curious about the autobiography in Something Happened. I understand you spent a couple of years in advertising--how much of Something Happened is taken from your advertising career?

A: It's less than was taken from my war experiences for Catch-22. What I got from that experience was some sense of the corporate operation. It was not mine--I enjoyed my job very much, I didn't stay nearly as long as Slocum does. I never aspired to as much as he does. I was not his age as when he's there. If I had one of my jobs and knew I was going to stay there for twenty or thirty years I might have gotten very depressed over it. But I was writing Catch-22 and knew it was going to be published, and felt I'd get out of there when it was doing pretty food. So it's not autobiographical, but I was able to observe a good many people.

Q: Is that where a lot of the characters come from?

A: No, I wouldn't say that. I don't think any of my characters are based on anyone I knew . . . well, one character in Catch-22 is based on somebody I knew. Hungry Joe is based on a guy who was named Joe Crenkow. But, otherwise characters--they tend to be general types. I tried to get a caricature, especially in the portraits of Catch-22, where you're give as predominant characteristics something that would be recognizable to the audience so they could see that person as being like someone they knew. It's one of the reasons I don't describe anybody too much physically in Catch-22. I tend to give them one or two or three outstanding, peculiar ironies. Then I hope that the reader will be able to fill in the rest of the picture. They were able to do that in Catch-22. I think it's pretty much the same thing for Something Happened. It doesn't attempt to be a complete history--it's not literal realism. If anything, it's psychological realism, and most everything is perceived or determined through Slocum's reaction to them. There's a high degree of what can only be called surrealism in this book; things that you know he's thinking but could not be literally true, even when presented to you literally. Even though he picks up the man-nerisms of the people he's with, it's far-fetched to believe that he'd pick up the limp of a guy he work with and not be aware of what he's doing. So twice he walks into the house and his wife says "You've been with Kagle today." (Kagle is Slocum's limping co-worker). And he says, "How do you know?" So he didn't know he's picking up a limp. Now that, I think, is surrealistic. I think a person might develop a strut or a swagger, that of somebody else with whom he associates, but certainly not a limp. whom he associates, but certainly not a limp.

Q: There's a strange sense of identity in your character. For example, when he picks up a friend's stutter. There's one passage where he's described as four different people.

A: He imagines there's a person living inside his head, then another person who's watching those two, right?

Q: Yet. And one unknown--