How Does a Writer Follow Up a Brilliant Early Success?

Ask any aspiring young novelist: Wouldn’t it be enough to write one good book? A book that’s wildly popular and critically acclaimed, that’s made into a movie and makes you millions? A book that’s funny and serious and startlingly original, that adds an indelible phrase to the language, that will be read long after you’re dead? A book that’s unlike anything in American literature before? Wouldn’t that be enough?

And most, knowing how hard it is to write any book, much less a good one that attracts any attention, would say: Sure, sure, give me that one big hit, and I’ll sit back gratefully and call it a career.

But suppose the good book happens to be your first, as with Joseph Heller and “Catch-22”? It came out in 1961, when Heller was under 40. It survived rejection by a famously long list of publishers, met with puzzled incomprehension, and then, riding a Vietnam-era wave of anti-military irreverence, took off. The movie was made in 1970. Heller pocketed the money. But how could he just sit back the rest of his life? He had a lot of life left, and what was a novelist to do with it but write more novels?

Eugene Pota, the narrator of this novel, which Heller completed just before he died last year, has had a similar career. His big book was his first. He knows that anything he does will be compared to it unfavorably--startling originality is given to few enough writers a single time, and nobody gets it twice. Pota is 76 and has plenty of money. Still, he’d like to cap his career with one final gem.

“Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man” is the story of Pota’s search for an idea for this very book, a digging for the wellsprings of creativity that age and weariness have plugged. It consists of false starts, scenes and chapters that go nowhere, character lists, outlines of unwritten plots. Pota plays with making Tom Sawyer, a “real” person, hunt down his creator, Mark Twain, and other 19th century writers. He plays with the idea of having the Greek goddess Hera kvetch about her unfaithful husband, Zeus.

Pota bounces these notions off his wife, his editor and his agent. He calls up old girlfriends. He takes naps. Everywhere he seeks the inspiration that used to come to him so easily--but he’s stuck.

And being stuck, we’re reminded, is Heller’s perennial theme, the very definition of a Catch-22. His second novel, “Something Happened”--in which nothing at all happens, until the very end--is about being stuck, too, in civilian rather than military life, and its relative failure is instructive. Heller wrote it brilliantly, but it’s claustrophobic and depressing. Without the prospect of being blown to bits at any moment, without those hundreds of characters scurrying around in the background, being stuck isn’t much of a story--and Heller could go through World War II only once.

Pota delivers a college lecture on “The Literature of Despair”--not about the content of American literature but about how writers, sooner or later, all seem to get stuck: depressed, alcoholic, suicidal; even those whose late work is their best, such as Henry James and Herman Melville, are abandoned by their audiences. The point of Heller’s departure from James Joyce’s title becomes apparent: This isn’t supposed to be a portrait of the artist, Heller himself, so much as one of any artist at the end of the line.

Parts of it are funny and insightful--Joseph Heller wrote it, after all. But it’s still a trifle that wouldn’t have been published if someone less famous than Heller had written it. Pota knows this to be true in his case, and Heller, who created Pota, surely knew it as well.