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"This author was determined," says the apparently autobiographical narrator of Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. "He often appropriated as his own personal infirmity the concluding words of the unnameable voice in Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable, 'I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.'" And on his last day on Earth, Joseph Heller was still polishing this, his last and strangest novel. It is essentially an essay about a writer who's exactly like him--old and stuck for an idea for his next book. Seeking inspiration, he chats with his wife, his editors, and his friends, and floats one high-concept scheme after another.
How about a novel about the gangsters who ran Coney Island, the enchanted land of his childhood? Nah, too much plot to concoct. Perhaps he could update a classic: Tom Sawyer as a Harvard MBA, or Kafka's The Metamorphosis transposed to Manhattan. When these don't pan out, Heller takes a stab at mythology, done in the manner of his old pal Mel Brooks. Here Zeus's wife complains about his flagging ardor:
I try to put myself in Leda's place. It could be kind of thrilling, I guess, being overpowered by a huge male swan, especially after realizing it was Zeus.... I'd like to see him take the trouble to surprise me like that, even once. But that doesn't happen. He won't waste tricks like that on me. He never does, he knows he doesn't have to. When he comes to me it's never with anything new, it's always just the same, always just the same old god.Increasingly desperate, the author tries out titles on his friends, and A Sexual Biography of My Wife stirs some interest. Still, his tentative fictions don't grab you the way the novel's sad, searing reminiscences do. When Heller--I mean, the narrator--has a tearful reunion with his adulterous old flame (who's now stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease), or asks another female acquaintance whether she regrets turning down his long-ago offer of romance, we get a privileged glimpse into the private mind of a very public author. "I want to cap my career with a masterpiece of some kind," the narrator tells his editor. This poignantly discursive book is not a masterpiece, but Joseph Heller did go on trying to the end. --Tim Appelo
254 pages, Hardcover
First published June 12, 2000
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1393 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Heller
80 books3,159 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Joseph Heller was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. He was nominated in 1972 for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Joseph Heller was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. He was nominated in 1972 for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 125 reviews
October 15, 2017
That questionable comma aside, Heller’s last and posthumous novel is a winner—a bitterly candid portrait of an over-the-hill, clapped-out and confused senior novelist struggling to settle on one idea for his farewell feature. Heller’s Pota is a cranky soul who swoops down on various ideas, most of them retreads of Greek myths, biblical stories, Mark Twain homages, and Kafka reworkings, and wrestles with his dwindling powers. His intention of writing ‘A Sexual Biography of My Wife’ creates marital conflict, and the novel’s finest sections are when Pota is ruminating on his relationship (not in most uxorious terms), and sparring with his unimpressed editor. It is safe to assume that Heller had started the various snippets we read throughout the novel, and devised a clever way of stringing them together by including snarky commentary on them. The result is a fairly fragmentary, unapologetically chatty, and extremely amusing novel where Heller truly has the last laugh at his own expense.
October 24, 2011
So the young man left home, became an artist [writer], wrote a bestseller which became a film, then grew old. In his old age, he tries to write another bestseller as a fitting encore to his career but couldn't seem to find the inspiration for it. That's Joseph Heller in this book. Like James Joyce's , this looks semi-autobiographical also, but with Heller's inimitable funny style.
There is the narrator [Heller] and the protagonist Eugene Pota [the modern, and aged, Stephen Dedalus]. Heller finished this book [his last] just before he died in 1999, aged 76. Several decades after his famous Catch-22 was published and which he was not able to match again with his subsequent works. Towards the end, you will learn where Heller got the name "Pota"--Portrait Of The Artist, POTA.
The narrator, however, tells the story not so much of Eugene Pota but really about Pota's various attempts to write one great novel again, in the twilight of his life, before he dies. So here we have titles to these imagined novels, tentative first chapters, revisions of the same, plots and its twists and turns, but Pota never got to finish any of them. So this novel really has its principal characters Pota's imagined and unfinished novels. A novel about novels.
Pota's attempts to write this one, last great novels were hilarious. He thought of writing one where Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer would be in a contemporary setting, one with a Harvard degree and wearing Armani suits, but later rejected it saying that this parody "was definitely not going to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of the world, or his race, whichever." So what about the modern Tom Sawyer as a novelist? He had his Tom Sawyer travelling far and wide then to meet his literary heroes, to inspire him in his literary career, only to stumble into this "Literature of Despair", his heroes ending up poor, crazy, bankrupt, sick, lonely, alcoholic and killing themselves. The tragic ends of famous writers like Jack London [alcoholism, kidney disease, a rumored suicide, died poor], Stephen Crane [died heavily indebted at age 28], Joseph Conrad [severe nervous breakdown, mental collapse], Edith Wharton [married a drunkard/wastrel who plundered her inheritance], Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain [lonely, wife and three children died ahead of him], Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [moods of extreme melancholy after his wife's death], Emily Dickinson [a recluse who never married], Edgar Allan Poe [penniless, alcoholic, paranoid, perhaps drug addicted, fell into a drunken delirium in a street then died 3 days later in a hospital:], Herman Melville [died in poverty and obscurity, his own family thinking he had gone insane], William Faulkner [alcoholic, died from injuries after a drunken fall from a horse], Ernest Hemingway [blew his brains out], James Joyce [heavy drinker with a falling-down-drunk-in-the-street capacity], Tennessee Williams [pill-popping drunkard, choked to death on the cap of a bottle of pills he was trying to take], J.D. Salinger [a genuine and resolute recluse], Thomas Pynchon [recluse, never photographed or seen in public], Jerzy Kosinsky, Richard Brautigan, ross Lockridge, Thomas Heggen [all suicides], Mario Puzo [Prozac addict]. Pota then abandoned the Tom-Sawyer-as-a-Novelist novel. He likewise had ideas of novels about the Greek gods, human anatomy, the biblical Isaac, with his modern take on them. But still not enough inspiration or energy to go on and finish them. What about a sex book [at age 76]? His friends and publisher liked his title: A Sexual Biography of My Wife. But his current wife doesn't like it and he feels he does not know much about, nor does he have the resources to make a research on, sex from the woman's point of view. He did manage to write the first chapter, however, which started with the protagonist's statement: "Last night my Lord returned from the wars and pleasured me thrice with his boots on."--a take on a similar quote attributed to the Duchess of Marlborough except that the duchess claimed she was pleasured only twice, not thrice.
Oh, what a happy, happy read!
There is the narrator [Heller] and the protagonist Eugene Pota [the modern, and aged, Stephen Dedalus]. Heller finished this book [his last] just before he died in 1999, aged 76. Several decades after his famous Catch-22 was published and which he was not able to match again with his subsequent works. Towards the end, you will learn where Heller got the name "Pota"--Portrait Of The Artist, POTA.
The narrator, however, tells the story not so much of Eugene Pota but really about Pota's various attempts to write one great novel again, in the twilight of his life, before he dies. So here we have titles to these imagined novels, tentative first chapters, revisions of the same, plots and its twists and turns, but Pota never got to finish any of them. So this novel really has its principal characters Pota's imagined and unfinished novels. A novel about novels.
Pota's attempts to write this one, last great novels were hilarious. He thought of writing one where Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer would be in a contemporary setting, one with a Harvard degree and wearing Armani suits, but later rejected it saying that this parody "was definitely not going to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of the world, or his race, whichever." So what about the modern Tom Sawyer as a novelist? He had his Tom Sawyer travelling far and wide then to meet his literary heroes, to inspire him in his literary career, only to stumble into this "Literature of Despair", his heroes ending up poor, crazy, bankrupt, sick, lonely, alcoholic and killing themselves. The tragic ends of famous writers like Jack London [alcoholism, kidney disease, a rumored suicide, died poor], Stephen Crane [died heavily indebted at age 28], Joseph Conrad [severe nervous breakdown, mental collapse], Edith Wharton [married a drunkard/wastrel who plundered her inheritance], Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain [lonely, wife and three children died ahead of him], Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [moods of extreme melancholy after his wife's death], Emily Dickinson [a recluse who never married], Edgar Allan Poe [penniless, alcoholic, paranoid, perhaps drug addicted, fell into a drunken delirium in a street then died 3 days later in a hospital:], Herman Melville [died in poverty and obscurity, his own family thinking he had gone insane], William Faulkner [alcoholic, died from injuries after a drunken fall from a horse], Ernest Hemingway [blew his brains out], James Joyce [heavy drinker with a falling-down-drunk-in-the-street capacity], Tennessee Williams [pill-popping drunkard, choked to death on the cap of a bottle of pills he was trying to take], J.D. Salinger [a genuine and resolute recluse], Thomas Pynchon [recluse, never photographed or seen in public], Jerzy Kosinsky, Richard Brautigan, ross Lockridge, Thomas Heggen [all suicides], Mario Puzo [Prozac addict]. Pota then abandoned the Tom-Sawyer-as-a-Novelist novel. He likewise had ideas of novels about the Greek gods, human anatomy, the biblical Isaac, with his modern take on them. But still not enough inspiration or energy to go on and finish them. What about a sex book [at age 76]? His friends and publisher liked his title: A Sexual Biography of My Wife. But his current wife doesn't like it and he feels he does not know much about, nor does he have the resources to make a research on, sex from the woman's point of view. He did manage to write the first chapter, however, which started with the protagonist's statement: "Last night my Lord returned from the wars and pleasured me thrice with his boots on."--a take on a similar quote attributed to the Duchess of Marlborough except that the duchess claimed she was pleasured only twice, not thrice.
Oh, what a happy, happy read!
April 9, 2025
One of the world’s most under appreciated novelists. So much more than Catch-22.
February 7, 2017
Eugene Pota is a novelist in his mid-seventies whose commercial and critical success has never managed to reach the heights of his first novel, which made his name and is considered an all-time classic (I can't possibly think where Heller got the idea for that character). He's aware that he's probably only got one more book in him and he wants it to be his masterpiece, damnit!
This novel tells the story of his struggle to write that one last book and features the opening pages of several abortive attempts to forge his final masterpiece.
As I hinted above, this novel is, while not quite autobiographical, very much drawn from Heller's own frustrations and, as such, has a distinctly bittersweet flavour to it. This being Heller, of course, it's also very funny. This one was tugging my emotions in all sorts of different directions, often simultaneously.
If, like me, you've only ever read Catch-22, you could do worse than to check this one out.
This novel tells the story of his struggle to write that one last book and features the opening pages of several abortive attempts to forge his final masterpiece.
As I hinted above, this novel is, while not quite autobiographical, very much drawn from Heller's own frustrations and, as such, has a distinctly bittersweet flavour to it. This being Heller, of course, it's also very funny. This one was tugging my emotions in all sorts of different directions, often simultaneously.
If, like me, you've only ever read Catch-22, you could do worse than to check this one out.
October 11, 2018
'"Well, Paul, I'll confess. I'd sure like to do a book with a good chance for a movie sale."
"We don't do things for that."
"We sure do want it to happen, though."
"We don't say so." '
This meta tale about a successful author trying to write his last book chronicles a year of creative frustrations. So many books started and abandoned, promising ideas which don't extend beyond few pages, inspirations forced out of life and constant comparison with his earlier books. Oh so cheeky!
Pota - the author (later as Portait of the Author) in his 70s, is driving his wife Polly crazy when he is not writing. And worse when he starts and then stops. Told in first person, the book does a into the mind of Joseph Heller. He parodies his own books graciously passing them as Pota's books. He weaves in the biographies all the great authors who died penniless or depressed after initial success which is a compelling case.
There are parts of creative brilliance and experimentation which are vintage Heller. Like when he tries to retell Kafka's Metamorphosis set in New York whose protagonist is a wall street guy. Or when he ponders about other authors - Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy right till Julian Barnes , John Grisham and Tom Clancy! The Tom Sawyer, as a novelist was also informative.
The other core tease of his bestseller formula book "The Sexual biography of my wife" without a story and then it's various versions till it ends up a Greek history was where I thought it could have been better. The writing process isn't easy at all.
I would probably recommend this book to every author who has seen some success and losing his/her mind with the question "Is that all I have?"
"The modern successful author is never entirely secure in his position and never totally at ease not knowing that he will be judged as good in the future as he has been in the past"
"We don't do things for that."
"We sure do want it to happen, though."
"We don't say so." '
This meta tale about a successful author trying to write his last book chronicles a year of creative frustrations. So many books started and abandoned, promising ideas which don't extend beyond few pages, inspirations forced out of life and constant comparison with his earlier books. Oh so cheeky!
Pota - the author (later as Portait of the Author) in his 70s, is driving his wife Polly crazy when he is not writing. And worse when he starts and then stops. Told in first person, the book does a into the mind of Joseph Heller. He parodies his own books graciously passing them as Pota's books. He weaves in the biographies all the great authors who died penniless or depressed after initial success which is a compelling case.
There are parts of creative brilliance and experimentation which are vintage Heller. Like when he tries to retell Kafka's Metamorphosis set in New York whose protagonist is a wall street guy. Or when he ponders about other authors - Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy right till Julian Barnes , John Grisham and Tom Clancy! The Tom Sawyer, as a novelist was also informative.
The other core tease of his bestseller formula book "The Sexual biography of my wife" without a story and then it's various versions till it ends up a Greek history was where I thought it could have been better. The writing process isn't easy at all.
I would probably recommend this book to every author who has seen some success and losing his/her mind with the question "Is that all I have?"
"The modern successful author is never entirely secure in his position and never totally at ease not knowing that he will be judged as good in the future as he has been in the past"
November 2, 2007
The more I read of Heller the more I come to feel that the popular wisdom, which says that he only wrote one good book, Catch 22, is incorrect. Portrait is an excellent book with as chaotic a narrative as one might hope for from Heller. The story of an old author who desperately wants to write a book that will achieve real critical and popular success to match or top his first great book, is obviously based on Heller's real experience. Intensely personal in tone, the story is told through the old man's conversations with his friends and his wife, and through his attempts to start one new idea after another before giving up on each in disgust. The narrator provides yet another level for the book, occasionally discussing the characters with the reader, and demonstrating clearly his power over the characters, dismissing whole aspects of their lives and personalities, or explaining how they are like so, but if he chose they could become like something else.
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June 22, 2020I am still trying to figure out why this book doesn’t work for me when Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 does. In essence each is the same kind of novel: a story of how the story itself came to written focusing on the trials and tribulations of the author in getting to the beginning, let alone the end. Heller more or less does exactly what his narrator says he’s trying to do; Powers (again as usual) doesn’t really have his narrator explain the intended/imagined function of the fiction until near the final paragraph. Perhaps it’s just that I believe Powers’ narrator to be a literary conceit all the way through (despite his being named Richard Powers), whereas I find Heller’s narrator (unnamed) to most likely be Heller himself. It’s going to need some thought.
March 11, 2025
Reminds me of those YouTube video essays that destroy your opinion of someone you used to like
September 12, 2011
I was really looking forward to reading another book by the author of Catch 22. I was really disappointed. This book reads exactly like what I believe it is, a collection of notes about potential book ideas, thrown together and published as a book, probably only because he is the author of Catch 22. The only semblance of a story is about an old author (um, Heller), who had previously had a huge best seller (um, Catch 22), and then, in his old age, wants to write one more book, but can't come up with an idea. That's basically the book. And yes, it is as boring as it sounds. Brief glimpses of potential glory include Heller's insights about life as an author, "find[ing] it just about impossible to think of another occupational group with the same incidence of severe unhappiness and distress among the most famed and accomplished figures." Um, I can think of at least one other occupational group he should have looked into. And, describing his main character's attitude toward women, which I can only suspect is at least similar to his attitude about women, he said: "[h]e loved women and always had, the idea of them, the way they dressed and looked, the smell and sound and shape of them. And there were now so many he met and saw he felt he would like to fall in love with, at least for a while, and so little time left." There is really no arguing with that.
January 5, 2013
Хелър е голя�� писател и страхотно образован мъж, за когото литературата е поле, обработвано от мнозина. Без да приема себе си като пътя, истината и живота, той е напълно наясно със силните и слабите страни на останалите, приели писането за своя съдба. С точните доза документалистика и ирония, той разказва за пътя на Марк Твен, Джек Лондон, Хенри Джеймс, Джоузеф Конрад, Хемингуей, Емили Дикинсън, Кърт Вонегът... В този смисъл "Портрет на твореца като стар" е роман, който ще допадне на любопитна и четяща аудитория, защото изобилства със сурова фактология, поднесена по необичаен начин.
Главният герой, Пота (самият Хелър, без съмнение), се намира в залеза на живота си, но все още не е готов да постави финалната точка в професионален план. В търсене на различната, ненаписана от никой друг книга, той преминава през различни вдъхновения, основни персонажи и проблеми. За да осъзнае, че е време за почивка.
Хелър пише като когото си поиска и едновременно с това никога не претопява себе си в чужда стилистика. Неговият единствен проблем лежи назад във времето и се нарича "Параграф 22". Осъден цял живот да бъде сравняван със собствения си дебютен роман, той се доказва като достатъчно упорит и самоуверен мъж, който знае, че има и други истории, които чакат да бъдат разказани. И ги разказва добре - нестандартно и запомнящо се.
Главният герой, Пота (самият Хелър, без съмнение), се намира в залеза на живота си, но все още не е готов да постави финалната точка в професионален план. В търсене на различната, ненаписана от никой друг книга, той преминава през различни вдъхновения, основни персонажи и проблеми. За да осъзнае, че е време за почивка.
Хелър пише като когото си поиска и едновременно с това никога не претопява себе си в чужда стилистика. Неговият единствен проблем лежи назад във времето и се нарича "Параграф 22". Осъден цял живот да бъде сравняван със собствения си дебютен роман, той се доказва като достатъчно упорит и самоуверен мъж, който знае, че има и други истории, които чакат да бъдат разказани. И ги разказва добре - нестандартно и запомнящо се.
September 23, 2019
This chap wrote a book that was so good that its title ended up in everyday English usage as a more polite term for a shit sandwich.
It was quite a book, probably one of the best books written in the 20th century. It was so good the Netflix series has George Clooney in it. It was also his first book but he wrote other books that were good but didn't sell as well.
I mean to say that if anyone else had written these books they would probably wouldn't do too badly from them, but they wouldn't have had the career the bloke who wrote Catch 22 had.
This was Joseph Heller's last book.
He asks, can a writer whose most famous work was his first achieve those heady heights with his last? What if he has a number of bloody good ideas but they're just false starts? Why did so many famous writers die in penury, in misery or by suicide? Is it related to why he can't he think of an idea for his last book that is just as good as his first? Why, fuck it, why?
This was an insight and anyone who has made a million false starts and filled their waste paper basket to overflowing can empathise. I, however, have no sympathy because I will never write anything as good as Catch 22. Probably 'nor will anyone else.
Suck it up you rich, successful, dead prick.
It was quite a book, probably one of the best books written in the 20th century. It was so good the Netflix series has George Clooney in it. It was also his first book but he wrote other books that were good but didn't sell as well.
I mean to say that if anyone else had written these books they would probably wouldn't do too badly from them, but they wouldn't have had the career the bloke who wrote Catch 22 had.
This was Joseph Heller's last book.
He asks, can a writer whose most famous work was his first achieve those heady heights with his last? What if he has a number of bloody good ideas but they're just false starts? Why did so many famous writers die in penury, in misery or by suicide? Is it related to why he can't he think of an idea for his last book that is just as good as his first? Why, fuck it, why?
This was an insight and anyone who has made a million false starts and filled their waste paper basket to overflowing can empathise. I, however, have no sympathy because I will never write anything as good as Catch 22. Probably 'nor will anyone else.
Suck it up you rich, successful, dead prick.
July 8, 2011
Good, but simply not amazing. Heller's wit shines through in this work, and in this aspect it is virtually on par with Catch-22. However, the plotline is often incoherent, bouncing from idea to idea. I also personally didn't like Pota very much, as a character. A short read, I didn't feel like this was a waste of time, and there were some parts that I honestly enjoyed (many of the quips between Hera and Aphrodite, for instance.) As an artist myself (musical, primarily, rather than writing) I can sympathize with the frustration that arises from a lack of ideas. But Heller doesn't convert the scattered ideas that he has into something overly memorable.
November 11, 2008
Not the greatest book in the world or by Heller, but I still read it twice. Maybe because they stock it at my local library. A good way to read an artist's biography, a genre I usually never touch.
July 3, 2022
This is right down there with William Gaddis' later stuff as "old man mimics his earlier style, yet is completely devoid of any vitality."
April 30, 2024
man, I really wanted to love this
conceptually, I love the idea - focusing on the creative process of an old writer who never recreated their lightning in a bottle “masterpiece,” and who now approaches their final chapter that will be their legacy is so interesting (and very clearly reflective of the author)
It just kind of whimpers out, unfortunately
So many sections of the book are failed starts to books that our main character writes and, intentionally or unintentionally, they are bad and not fun to read
Reflecting on Catch-22 a bit, I’ve realized Heller was simply exceptional at writing scenes, dialogue, and characters. Still true here, my absolute favorite parts in this book was watching Pota interact with the people in his life, with his conversation with an ex-wife being a particular stand-out.
Unfortunately, I’ve also now realized that I’ve never loved Heller’s prose or the internal monologues of characters. This is unfortunate, as this felt like 80% of the book, especially the failed drafts sections.
It’s sad, since I can tell there’s a lot to be analyzed here. Pota is canonically a self-insert (makes lines like “why do women love you so easily” very funny), so there’s this fascinating triple-layered “what is the subtext that this failed book has towards Pota, and therefore towards Heller” and trying to parse the misdirects from the insights.
That’s why I didn’t skim the failed book sections - I felt like the purpose was to gain insight towards who Pota was as a creator by analyzing his work. But MAN, did they feel like homework
I think there’s something valuable to find in here, I just have no desire to do it
Finally, while maybe a bit presumptuous, it was clear that Heller deeply reflected upon his legacy and literature as whole and how he would be remembered
I greatly appreciated insights of this throughout the book, from the misuses of the phrase Catch-22, to tongue-in-cheek lines like “no matter what I release, there will be reviews in the paper saying ‘it’s okay, but it doesn’t reach the same heights as his magnum opus’”
Ultimately, I can’t help but feel Heller got the last laugh. While not the best book I’ve ever read, I can tell there was something cathartic about this being written.
I wonder if he took joy in the fact that the failed book sections kind of sucked, knowing that he didn’t have to edit those deeply. I wonder if he giddily made jabs at editors and writers and himself, knowing the line between Pota and himself was blurred.
In a book that is so reflective on how others perceive our art and trying to find the perfect end to a lifetime of creating, I wonder if part of the reason this book exists was to let go of these expectations and write something on your own terms.
conceptually, I love the idea - focusing on the creative process of an old writer who never recreated their lightning in a bottle “masterpiece,” and who now approaches their final chapter that will be their legacy is so interesting (and very clearly reflective of the author)
It just kind of whimpers out, unfortunately
So many sections of the book are failed starts to books that our main character writes and, intentionally or unintentionally, they are bad and not fun to read
Reflecting on Catch-22 a bit, I’ve realized Heller was simply exceptional at writing scenes, dialogue, and characters. Still true here, my absolute favorite parts in this book was watching Pota interact with the people in his life, with his conversation with an ex-wife being a particular stand-out.
Unfortunately, I’ve also now realized that I’ve never loved Heller’s prose or the internal monologues of characters. This is unfortunate, as this felt like 80% of the book, especially the failed drafts sections.
It’s sad, since I can tell there’s a lot to be analyzed here. Pota is canonically a self-insert (makes lines like “why do women love you so easily” very funny), so there’s this fascinating triple-layered “what is the subtext that this failed book has towards Pota, and therefore towards Heller” and trying to parse the misdirects from the insights.
That’s why I didn’t skim the failed book sections - I felt like the purpose was to gain insight towards who Pota was as a creator by analyzing his work. But MAN, did they feel like homework
I think there’s something valuable to find in here, I just have no desire to do it
Finally, while maybe a bit presumptuous, it was clear that Heller deeply reflected upon his legacy and literature as whole and how he would be remembered
I greatly appreciated insights of this throughout the book, from the misuses of the phrase Catch-22, to tongue-in-cheek lines like “no matter what I release, there will be reviews in the paper saying ‘it’s okay, but it doesn’t reach the same heights as his magnum opus’”
Ultimately, I can’t help but feel Heller got the last laugh. While not the best book I’ve ever read, I can tell there was something cathartic about this being written.
I wonder if he took joy in the fact that the failed book sections kind of sucked, knowing that he didn’t have to edit those deeply. I wonder if he giddily made jabs at editors and writers and himself, knowing the line between Pota and himself was blurred.
In a book that is so reflective on how others perceive our art and trying to find the perfect end to a lifetime of creating, I wonder if part of the reason this book exists was to let go of these expectations and write something on your own terms.
June 22, 2024
At times charming, at its best insightful about the life of an artist in his seventies—at worst (at least half) the fragments of bad-sounding novels that are never realised.
Nice for me to see that I don’t think the man himself possesses the mindset of Bob Slocum from Something Happened.
And as the blurbs on the book seem to suggest, a master who’s proved himself enough is just mucking around for whatever entertainment might be left in him.
Doesn’t have to be that way though. Some of my favourite living novelists are still testing themselves at least yearly. But it doesn’t have to be THAT way either I guess 😂😂
I would read if you had read everything else by Heller and really really needed some more!
Nice for me to see that I don’t think the man himself possesses the mindset of Bob Slocum from Something Happened.
And as the blurbs on the book seem to suggest, a master who’s proved himself enough is just mucking around for whatever entertainment might be left in him.
Doesn’t have to be that way though. Some of my favourite living novelists are still testing themselves at least yearly. But it doesn’t have to be THAT way either I guess 😂😂
I would read if you had read everything else by Heller and really really needed some more!
January 31, 2020
Somebody somewhere must write a psychological exegesis of this book. It has all the mirth of Heller's breakthrough Catch-22 but subdued and nothing is spared. Fans, the publishing industry, reviewers, and Heller himself come under inspection.
Is it worth reading? Yes, definitely, and not by everyone. Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man fights back. It challenges you (it challenged me). It wants its readers to work. It also saddens if you know Heller's story and the impetus for this book.
And still a good read.
Is it worth reading? Yes, definitely, and not by everyone. Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man fights back. It challenges you (it challenged me). It wants its readers to work. It also saddens if you know Heller's story and the impetus for this book.
And still a good read.
November 1, 2018
I really enjoyed this. Sharp, witty, and self-aware. I loved the insights into the thought processes an author goes through in trying to bring ideas to the page. The book-within-a-book approach allows us to read each of then main character’s failed attempts to write one last commercial bestseller while we separately follow his everyday life.
Heller makes me smile. Love his wit. But Knowing this is semi-autobiographical, and that it is Heller’s final novel, makes this somewhat bittersweet.
Heller makes me smile. Love his wit. But Knowing this is semi-autobiographical, and that it is Heller’s final novel, makes this somewhat bittersweet.
May 9, 2018
Three and a half stars. Some parts were great, other parts not so great.
November 17, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in June 2001.
Heller's final novel, published posthumously, is about an American author in his seventies, struggling to get started on what he expects to be his final novel. He wants to create something by which he will be remembered, rather than something which will be compared disparagingly to his famous first novel, as all his subsequent fiction has been. (As he says, though, you can only burst triumphantly onto the scene once.)
Like the novel to which it makes clear reference, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, there are obviously many autobiographical elements to Heller's tale of Eugene Pota (POTA - Portrait Of The Artist). It is perhaps not intended to be such a general depiction of the nature of the artist (note the title changing "the" to "an"). After all, people in old age are more individual than children and teenagers, simply because they have had more time for their experiences to differentiate them.
The inevitable thing that the reader does is to compare Heller's last novel with his earlier work, precisely what Eugene Pota complains about. It seems to me to be gentler than the earlier novels that I have read, much more resigned to the world even than Closing Time. It is humourous, particularly in the false starts Pota makes toward his final novel, and it is full of ironic references to Heller (at one point Pota complains that he is stuck in a Catch-22, for example). It reads rather like a John Barth novel rather than a Joseph Heller one, and it is certainly much more self-consciously literary in character (which is of course because it is about writing a novel and is part of the joke).
I like Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man. It may lack the fire of Catch-22, the sense that what you're reading is one of the great novels, but it is clever and enjoyable, gentle, funny and accepting old age with dignity and wry sadness. It is probably Heller's most original novel, with (as always) the exception of his first.
Heller's final novel, published posthumously, is about an American author in his seventies, struggling to get started on what he expects to be his final novel. He wants to create something by which he will be remembered, rather than something which will be compared disparagingly to his famous first novel, as all his subsequent fiction has been. (As he says, though, you can only burst triumphantly onto the scene once.)
Like the novel to which it makes clear reference, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, there are obviously many autobiographical elements to Heller's tale of Eugene Pota (POTA - Portrait Of The Artist). It is perhaps not intended to be such a general depiction of the nature of the artist (note the title changing "the" to "an"). After all, people in old age are more individual than children and teenagers, simply because they have had more time for their experiences to differentiate them.
The inevitable thing that the reader does is to compare Heller's last novel with his earlier work, precisely what Eugene Pota complains about. It seems to me to be gentler than the earlier novels that I have read, much more resigned to the world even than Closing Time. It is humourous, particularly in the false starts Pota makes toward his final novel, and it is full of ironic references to Heller (at one point Pota complains that he is stuck in a Catch-22, for example). It reads rather like a John Barth novel rather than a Joseph Heller one, and it is certainly much more self-consciously literary in character (which is of course because it is about writing a novel and is part of the joke).
I like Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man. It may lack the fire of Catch-22, the sense that what you're reading is one of the great novels, but it is clever and enjoyable, gentle, funny and accepting old age with dignity and wry sadness. It is probably Heller's most original novel, with (as always) the exception of his first.
June 30, 2021
Halfway between novel and memoir, this portrait of a sad old author trying to recapture the the spark of his first novel is an all too fitting last novel for Heller. Like a self fulfilling book review, it fails to capture the spark of his earlier books and made me feel sad for him. Success?
January 8, 2010
Joseph Heller definitely went out with a bang. I don't want to compare this with his legendary debut Catch-22 in terms of "greatness", because these two books are really two different matters. But I must say that I was shocked (in a good way) by the fact that Heller wrote something so beatiful and powerful in this stage of his career, when his books were greeted with moderate success from critics and came largely unnoticed by "regular readers".
The title is, of course, evocative: the allusion to Joyce's masterpiece is very fitting because this book also bears many autobiographic details and the authour is also occupied with a very ambitious task - to draw a multilevel portrait of the creator, and in this case not in the times of his formation and flourishing but in the times of creative crisis, when an authour is passionately thirsty with an idea to come out from writer's block with one more book and not only "a somewhat ordinary book", but a brilliant masterpiece.
Interesting thing is that in this book we have a somewhat ambiguous relation between the images of an authour of the book, his main hero - an aging writer Eugene Pota and Heller himself. It is not written from the Pota's point of view though Pota is definitely a main hero with many striking similarities to Joseph Heller in his career, writing style and personality. But it is written from the perspective of an unnamed authour, responsive and deeply sympathetic to the protagonist but also ironic and sometimes even sarcastic. Of course, there are many things deeply accentuated in the book, which show us that Pota's writing block came not only from creative exhausting and inevitable shortcomings of his age, but also from the stereotypes of consumer society unwittingly penetrating into Pota's mind. For example, Pota has an irreproachable literary taste but he is preoccupied with his last novel being made into successful Hollywood movie. At one moment while searching for inspiration he understands that there is no Hollywood cinema hits based on Svevo's masterpiece 'Zeno's Conscience' or on something written by Jorge Luis Borges. I think that for "real Heller" it is the best reason to say to himself "Damn this stupid Hollywood bonzas. They understand absolutely nothing about literature. So I will write my last book for my own delight. And for those who unlike modern society moneymakers can dig real literature no matter how sophisticated it is." But Pota is afraid to confess such things to himself.
'Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man' consists of many started and then thrown away variants of book, of expressly down-to-earth (but also deeply psychological and lifelike) pictures of Pota's everyday life and of meditations on writing, its shortcomings (illustrated on great writers biographies) and the stimuli to write (the main of those stimuli is simply "what can I do more?"). This "minibooks" are sometimes intentionally silly and primitive (not for nothing Heller portrays writer in the state of writer's block), sometimes funny and full of trademark Heller's caustic humour. Sometimes they explore some interesting and nontrivial ideas (how about a book written from the perspective of great novel?), but then Pota (and, I think, Heller himself too) understands that he has no time for such a global plan, or it would be too hard to find a material for such a book in his age, or it would obviously came too close to something already written (if you start every new chapter with different "I-narrator" then it reminds of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", as Pota's favourite agent Erica says). In this sketches and motifs of abandoning them we can take a look at "writer's laboratory" and many of the problems arisen from writing process (and this is very interesting and thought-provoking aspect of Heller's novel). Sometimes the sketch is rethinking of classical masterpieces of world literature in postmodernist kind: for example, Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" in modern New York decorations, and it is valuable because in these passages Heller is revealed not only as a writer but as a reader too (by the way, very refined and clever one). Some of these rethinkings are really innovative and interesting, i.e. Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" with gene as a main hero. But they are come abruptly to an end or even go to nowhere, just as it was planned for illustrating creative crisis.
My only complaint with the book is its infatuation with different erotic and sexual themes, which gave no extra-meaning, bear no esthetical value and obviously vulgarise the whole thing (thank God, only to a lesser extent).
Maybe the most unusual and striking feature in Heller's book is that we can get to know his own opinion on his great predecessors, their problems and, last but not least, their works of a genius. I repeat it again: Heller had exemplary literary taste and his sometimes humorous, sometimes very deep thoughts about treasures of literature are very interesting. Heller shows, for example, deep knowledge of Russian literature: he cites the valedictory poem by the great russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky written before the last one's suicide, he talks about Pushkin's death on duel and about Tolstoy's panic flight from Yasnaya Polyana. When lecturing in University Of South Carolina he appropriately to his own current stance chooses a theme - "Literature of Desperation", so the lecture focuses on existential crises and life misfortunes of great writers, which form something of "great writer's damnation"-kind. I shall not go for details but the fact that this book is deeply intertwined into genesis of modern literature is obvious only from direct allusions (some books and authours are only mentioned, but more often there are profound and unusual reflections on them) which come to mind right now: Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer..", Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist, as a Young Man" (and "Ulysses" as well), Samuel Beckett's "The Unnamable" (the famous quote from which becomes a Pota's credo - of course, I mean "I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on"), Franz Kafka, Fedor Dostoevsky, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, John Updike, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil (both referred to as "not-easy-for-reading"), Albert Camus, John Barth, Henrik Ibsen, Kurt Vonnegut, Maxim Gorky, the whole pantheon of late XIX century North American greats in his effort about short career of Tom Sawyer as a novelist (including Mark Twain, Jack London, Francis Bret Harte, Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Joseph Conrad, John Cheever, Edgar Allan Poe, Malcolme Lowry, Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, J.D. Sallinger, Thomas Pynchon, William Styron and many others. Impressive list, isn't it?
All in all, it is very meaningful, clever written book by brilliant stylist and very talented authour. I know that there are no rumours in Hollywood about the ecranisation of this one but at the end of his life great american writer Joseph Heller gave us an unquestionable masterpiece named "Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man".
The title is, of course, evocative: the allusion to Joyce's masterpiece is very fitting because this book also bears many autobiographic details and the authour is also occupied with a very ambitious task - to draw a multilevel portrait of the creator, and in this case not in the times of his formation and flourishing but in the times of creative crisis, when an authour is passionately thirsty with an idea to come out from writer's block with one more book and not only "a somewhat ordinary book", but a brilliant masterpiece.
Interesting thing is that in this book we have a somewhat ambiguous relation between the images of an authour of the book, his main hero - an aging writer Eugene Pota and Heller himself. It is not written from the Pota's point of view though Pota is definitely a main hero with many striking similarities to Joseph Heller in his career, writing style and personality. But it is written from the perspective of an unnamed authour, responsive and deeply sympathetic to the protagonist but also ironic and sometimes even sarcastic. Of course, there are many things deeply accentuated in the book, which show us that Pota's writing block came not only from creative exhausting and inevitable shortcomings of his age, but also from the stereotypes of consumer society unwittingly penetrating into Pota's mind. For example, Pota has an irreproachable literary taste but he is preoccupied with his last novel being made into successful Hollywood movie. At one moment while searching for inspiration he understands that there is no Hollywood cinema hits based on Svevo's masterpiece 'Zeno's Conscience' or on something written by Jorge Luis Borges. I think that for "real Heller" it is the best reason to say to himself "Damn this stupid Hollywood bonzas. They understand absolutely nothing about literature. So I will write my last book for my own delight. And for those who unlike modern society moneymakers can dig real literature no matter how sophisticated it is." But Pota is afraid to confess such things to himself.
'Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man' consists of many started and then thrown away variants of book, of expressly down-to-earth (but also deeply psychological and lifelike) pictures of Pota's everyday life and of meditations on writing, its shortcomings (illustrated on great writers biographies) and the stimuli to write (the main of those stimuli is simply "what can I do more?"). This "minibooks" are sometimes intentionally silly and primitive (not for nothing Heller portrays writer in the state of writer's block), sometimes funny and full of trademark Heller's caustic humour. Sometimes they explore some interesting and nontrivial ideas (how about a book written from the perspective of great novel?), but then Pota (and, I think, Heller himself too) understands that he has no time for such a global plan, or it would be too hard to find a material for such a book in his age, or it would obviously came too close to something already written (if you start every new chapter with different "I-narrator" then it reminds of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", as Pota's favourite agent Erica says). In this sketches and motifs of abandoning them we can take a look at "writer's laboratory" and many of the problems arisen from writing process (and this is very interesting and thought-provoking aspect of Heller's novel). Sometimes the sketch is rethinking of classical masterpieces of world literature in postmodernist kind: for example, Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" in modern New York decorations, and it is valuable because in these passages Heller is revealed not only as a writer but as a reader too (by the way, very refined and clever one). Some of these rethinkings are really innovative and interesting, i.e. Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" with gene as a main hero. But they are come abruptly to an end or even go to nowhere, just as it was planned for illustrating creative crisis.
My only complaint with the book is its infatuation with different erotic and sexual themes, which gave no extra-meaning, bear no esthetical value and obviously vulgarise the whole thing (thank God, only to a lesser extent).
Maybe the most unusual and striking feature in Heller's book is that we can get to know his own opinion on his great predecessors, their problems and, last but not least, their works of a genius. I repeat it again: Heller had exemplary literary taste and his sometimes humorous, sometimes very deep thoughts about treasures of literature are very interesting. Heller shows, for example, deep knowledge of Russian literature: he cites the valedictory poem by the great russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky written before the last one's suicide, he talks about Pushkin's death on duel and about Tolstoy's panic flight from Yasnaya Polyana. When lecturing in University Of South Carolina he appropriately to his own current stance chooses a theme - "Literature of Desperation", so the lecture focuses on existential crises and life misfortunes of great writers, which form something of "great writer's damnation"-kind. I shall not go for details but the fact that this book is deeply intertwined into genesis of modern literature is obvious only from direct allusions (some books and authours are only mentioned, but more often there are profound and unusual reflections on them) which come to mind right now: Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer..", Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist, as a Young Man" (and "Ulysses" as well), Samuel Beckett's "The Unnamable" (the famous quote from which becomes a Pota's credo - of course, I mean "I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on"), Franz Kafka, Fedor Dostoevsky, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, John Updike, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil (both referred to as "not-easy-for-reading"), Albert Camus, John Barth, Henrik Ibsen, Kurt Vonnegut, Maxim Gorky, the whole pantheon of late XIX century North American greats in his effort about short career of Tom Sawyer as a novelist (including Mark Twain, Jack London, Francis Bret Harte, Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Joseph Conrad, John Cheever, Edgar Allan Poe, Malcolme Lowry, Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Dylan Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, J.D. Sallinger, Thomas Pynchon, William Styron and many others. Impressive list, isn't it?
All in all, it is very meaningful, clever written book by brilliant stylist and very talented authour. I know that there are no rumours in Hollywood about the ecranisation of this one but at the end of his life great american writer Joseph Heller gave us an unquestionable masterpiece named "Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man".
March 4, 2021
❝ A maioria de nós esmorece com a idade, e também com a experiência. O trabalho não se torna mais fácil com a prática e, quando paramos, desaba subitamente sobre o nós o peso esmagador de todo o tempo livre que temos pela frente e que não estamos aptos a enfrentar. ❞
.
Publicado postumamente em 2000. O último livro de Joseph Heller, consagrado escritor norte americano, acabou não fazendo muito barulho em sua data de lançamento. Em comparação com o estrondoso Catch 22(Ardil 22) - seu primeiro romance - foi praticamente ofuscado das livrarias e da boca do público.
Claro, ambos possuem dois objetivos completamente distintos. Mas este aqui pede uma atenção diferenciada, principalmente se você pretende ter a arte como ofício.
Aqui o autor se transmuta em Eugene Pota, um escritor já consagrado por seus antigos trabalhos que está a procura de uma ideia para seu novo romance. Porém, sua idade avançada e suas complicações com a autoconfiança acabam sabotando o escritor em diversos momentos da história, fazendo-o trocar de ideia diversas vezes e acabar dependendo muito da opinião dos amigos e de sua equipe editorial.
O livro acabou dividindo a minha experiência. Por um lado, eu não curti muito o estilo da escrita e nem das situações que somos apresentados. Chega um momento que até o processo de criação das histórias se tornam monótonas e repetitivas, o que sinceramente não agrega para leitura no todo.
Em contrapartida, a mensagem do livro é clara: não devemos perder tempo.
Quando falei no início sobre seguir o ofício das artes é por conta da clara comparação com o próprio título. Se chama Retrato do ARTISTA Quando Velho, não Retrato de Eugene Pota Quando Velho. Aqui é descrito uma lição. É a demonstração do arrependimento e da tentativa de concluir os sonhos no momento de celebrar as conquistas.
Dificilmente recomendo este livro para você se inspirar. Mas, é altamente necessário para lembrar que o seu tempo, artista, está acabando.
.
Publicado postumamente em 2000. O último livro de Joseph Heller, consagrado escritor norte americano, acabou não fazendo muito barulho em sua data de lançamento. Em comparação com o estrondoso Catch 22(Ardil 22) - seu primeiro romance - foi praticamente ofuscado das livrarias e da boca do público.
Claro, ambos possuem dois objetivos completamente distintos. Mas este aqui pede uma atenção diferenciada, principalmente se você pretende ter a arte como ofício.
Aqui o autor se transmuta em Eugene Pota, um escritor já consagrado por seus antigos trabalhos que está a procura de uma ideia para seu novo romance. Porém, sua idade avançada e suas complicações com a autoconfiança acabam sabotando o escritor em diversos momentos da história, fazendo-o trocar de ideia diversas vezes e acabar dependendo muito da opinião dos amigos e de sua equipe editorial.
O livro acabou dividindo a minha experiência. Por um lado, eu não curti muito o estilo da escrita e nem das situações que somos apresentados. Chega um momento que até o processo de criação das histórias se tornam monótonas e repetitivas, o que sinceramente não agrega para leitura no todo.
Em contrapartida, a mensagem do livro é clara: não devemos perder tempo.
Quando falei no início sobre seguir o ofício das artes é por conta da clara comparação com o próprio título. Se chama Retrato do ARTISTA Quando Velho, não Retrato de Eugene Pota Quando Velho. Aqui é descrito uma lição. É a demonstração do arrependimento e da tentativa de concluir os sonhos no momento de celebrar as conquistas.
Dificilmente recomendo este livro para você se inspirar. Mas, é altamente necessário para lembrar que o seu tempo, artista, está acabando.
March 5, 2013
[Reviewed in 2000]
Joseph Heller reportedly finished writing Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man just before his death last December at the age of 76. The novel has been posthumously published with little fanfare. One can only surmise that Simon and Schuster knew the book wasn’t much of a capstone to Heller’s celebrated literary career. The stark black-and-white cover is so unappealing that it seems intended to dissuade readers from even bothering to look inside. Regrettably, there is ample cause to be forewarned. While there are passages as caustic and funny as anything Heller wrote in his lifetime, the narrative is disjointed and gives the unfortunate impression of being an incomplete draft rather than a polished work.
At first, this inchoate quality almost works to the book’s advantage, since it is literally the story of an aging author, Eugene Pota, who has run out of ideas for his next novel. We’re presented with Pota’s discarded plot outlines and excerpts from abandoned stories, along with his dyspeptic rants about writing, growing old, marriage, sex, and adultery. Heller fails in weaving these elements into a larger overarching coherence. Conversely, if his intent was to write a postmodern anti-novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man isn’t unconventional enough to warrant its ragged formlessness. There are listless stabs at a kind of metafictional playfulness and experimentation, but the results are unfocused. The curious revelation that “Pota” is an acronym (it’s no brain teaser) is more likely to be greeted with a baffled shrug than an appreciative smile.
The best satirical piece in the book is prime Heller: a mordant 20-page story titled “Tom Sawyer, Novelist.” The fictional Sawyer steps out from the pages of Mark Twain and declares that he, too, wishes to be a writer. But Sawyer’s creator is unable to offer advice or inspiration. Twain is deeply depressed over mounting debts, a failed publishing company, the death of a son and daughter, and a fickle public that isn’t much interested in his cynical late works like Pudd’nhead Wilson. Undaunted, Tom Sawyer sets off across America in search of a mentor. What he finds instead is a litany of awfulness: the alcoholic Jack London is dead at forty; Joseph Conrad is subject to nervous breakdowns; Herman Melville is toiling in obscurity; Stephen Crane succumbs to tuberculosis at twenty-eight. To Sawyer’s dismay, the American literary scene is nothing but a “mortuary of a museum.” At the end of his travels, his resolve is clear: “Tom Sawyer would no sooner think of a career writing fiction for a living than placing himself in front of an oncoming locomotive or diving headlong from the highest cliff he could find into the Mississippi River.”
Heller’s subjects have varied over the years, but his trademark blend of fatalism and absurdity has remained a constant since Catch-22, his seminal World War II satire published in 1961. His style proved remarkably adaptable, whether skewering middle-class marriage and the corporate workplace in Something Happened (1974), Washington politics in Good as Gold (1979), or the Old Testament in God Knows (1984). Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, however, never locates much of a target for Heller’s gifts. Eugene Pota, like Heller, is a successful writer with a comfortable lifestyle. As we read his cornball sketches—slangy scatological updates of Greek myths, Biblical pastiches, a modern slapstick retelling of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”—we’re left puzzled as to the point of it all. (It’s hard not to suspect that Heller pulled most of this hit-and-miss material from his own reject files.) Nothing appears to be at stake, either artistically or psychologically. The novel’s many self-referential asides are less ironic than merely banal: “This is a book about a well-known, aging 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.” In the case of Joseph Heller’s final work, the lion’s share of “condescension and insult” deserves to be directed at Simon and Schuster. It’s inconceivable that Heller meant the book to be published as it stands.
But even if this is the book he wanted us to see, it clearly hasn’t received the attention of a copy editor. There’s a clever moment when we’re told that one of the characters is facing a Catch-22, but when the identical thing is said about another character ten pages later it’s a pretty good bet that Heller—or a decent editor—would have preferred to excise one or the other of these in-joke references. The first one makes us laugh, and the second one makes us sorry we laughed the first time. There are inexcusable typos, such as the misspelling of writer Jerzy Kosinski’s name. Several of the later chapters seem inexplicably underwritten and dashed-off, suggesting Heller didn’t have the opportunity to sharpen or rewrite portions of the book before he died. In his best work, Heller’s punch lines are like vaudeville spotlights illuminating our crushing fears and petty behaviors. If not in the same league as Samuel Beckett, he certainly shares a similar banana-peel nihilism. At one point, Eugene Pota quotes the famous line “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” from Beckett’s The Unnamable. Although Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man has the jokes and the despair, they seem to cancel one another out instead of combusting into a sublime portrait of human futility. The multiple story lines immerse us in wretchedness without exploring its heartbreak, and the one-liners dissipate our empathy.
There are a few brief moments in which we glimpse the plaintive eloquence that too often eludes Heller throughout the novel. Pota visits two of his former lovers, both of whom suffer from crippling ailments, one woman has severe burns from a boating accident, and the other has contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. Amid jokes about blow jobs and the fervent sexuality of years long gone, Pota’s sorrow finds its core of emotional truth. Adele, the ex-lover with ALS, asks Pota to sit beside her:
“It’s just what I would have done,” Pota tells her, “if you hadn’t done it first.” He’s not the only one. Disheartened readers of Joseph Heller’s sad final literary gasp may feel like shedding a few tears, too.
Joseph Heller reportedly finished writing Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man just before his death last December at the age of 76. The novel has been posthumously published with little fanfare. One can only surmise that Simon and Schuster knew the book wasn’t much of a capstone to Heller’s celebrated literary career. The stark black-and-white cover is so unappealing that it seems intended to dissuade readers from even bothering to look inside. Regrettably, there is ample cause to be forewarned. While there are passages as caustic and funny as anything Heller wrote in his lifetime, the narrative is disjointed and gives the unfortunate impression of being an incomplete draft rather than a polished work.
At first, this inchoate quality almost works to the book’s advantage, since it is literally the story of an aging author, Eugene Pota, who has run out of ideas for his next novel. We’re presented with Pota’s discarded plot outlines and excerpts from abandoned stories, along with his dyspeptic rants about writing, growing old, marriage, sex, and adultery. Heller fails in weaving these elements into a larger overarching coherence. Conversely, if his intent was to write a postmodern anti-novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man isn’t unconventional enough to warrant its ragged formlessness. There are listless stabs at a kind of metafictional playfulness and experimentation, but the results are unfocused. The curious revelation that “Pota” is an acronym (it’s no brain teaser) is more likely to be greeted with a baffled shrug than an appreciative smile.
The best satirical piece in the book is prime Heller: a mordant 20-page story titled “Tom Sawyer, Novelist.” The fictional Sawyer steps out from the pages of Mark Twain and declares that he, too, wishes to be a writer. But Sawyer’s creator is unable to offer advice or inspiration. Twain is deeply depressed over mounting debts, a failed publishing company, the death of a son and daughter, and a fickle public that isn’t much interested in his cynical late works like Pudd’nhead Wilson. Undaunted, Tom Sawyer sets off across America in search of a mentor. What he finds instead is a litany of awfulness: the alcoholic Jack London is dead at forty; Joseph Conrad is subject to nervous breakdowns; Herman Melville is toiling in obscurity; Stephen Crane succumbs to tuberculosis at twenty-eight. To Sawyer’s dismay, the American literary scene is nothing but a “mortuary of a museum.” At the end of his travels, his resolve is clear: “Tom Sawyer would no sooner think of a career writing fiction for a living than placing himself in front of an oncoming locomotive or diving headlong from the highest cliff he could find into the Mississippi River.”
Heller’s subjects have varied over the years, but his trademark blend of fatalism and absurdity has remained a constant since Catch-22, his seminal World War II satire published in 1961. His style proved remarkably adaptable, whether skewering middle-class marriage and the corporate workplace in Something Happened (1974), Washington politics in Good as Gold (1979), or the Old Testament in God Knows (1984). Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, however, never locates much of a target for Heller’s gifts. Eugene Pota, like Heller, is a successful writer with a comfortable lifestyle. As we read his cornball sketches—slangy scatological updates of Greek myths, Biblical pastiches, a modern slapstick retelling of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”—we’re left puzzled as to the point of it all. (It’s hard not to suspect that Heller pulled most of this hit-and-miss material from his own reject files.) Nothing appears to be at stake, either artistically or psychologically. The novel’s many self-referential asides are less ironic than merely banal: “This is a book about a well-known, aging 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.” In the case of Joseph Heller’s final work, the lion’s share of “condescension and insult” deserves to be directed at Simon and Schuster. It’s inconceivable that Heller meant the book to be published as it stands.
But even if this is the book he wanted us to see, it clearly hasn’t received the attention of a copy editor. There’s a clever moment when we’re told that one of the characters is facing a Catch-22, but when the identical thing is said about another character ten pages later it’s a pretty good bet that Heller—or a decent editor—would have preferred to excise one or the other of these in-joke references. The first one makes us laugh, and the second one makes us sorry we laughed the first time. There are inexcusable typos, such as the misspelling of writer Jerzy Kosinski’s name. Several of the later chapters seem inexplicably underwritten and dashed-off, suggesting Heller didn’t have the opportunity to sharpen or rewrite portions of the book before he died. In his best work, Heller’s punch lines are like vaudeville spotlights illuminating our crushing fears and petty behaviors. If not in the same league as Samuel Beckett, he certainly shares a similar banana-peel nihilism. At one point, Eugene Pota quotes the famous line “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” from Beckett’s The Unnamable. Although Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man has the jokes and the despair, they seem to cancel one another out instead of combusting into a sublime portrait of human futility. The multiple story lines immerse us in wretchedness without exploring its heartbreak, and the one-liners dissipate our empathy.
There are a few brief moments in which we glimpse the plaintive eloquence that too often eludes Heller throughout the novel. Pota visits two of his former lovers, both of whom suffer from crippling ailments, one woman has severe burns from a boating accident, and the other has contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. Amid jokes about blow jobs and the fervent sexuality of years long gone, Pota’s sorrow finds its core of emotional truth. Adele, the ex-lover with ALS, asks Pota to sit beside her:
He rose stiffly and crossed the room to join her on the sofa. She extended an outstretched arm to steady him as he turned to seat himself, and he came to rest with his hand inside her thigh. He squeezed gently, rubbing a bit, and left it there. She stared down at his hand for a moment. Then, turning in toward him, she reached her arms around his shoulders, and as they settled together against the backrest, she began weeping noiselessly, making not one sound, spilling tears against his neck that felt ice cold.
“It’s just what I would have done,” Pota tells her, “if you hadn’t done it first.” He’s not the only one. Disheartened readers of Joseph Heller’s sad final literary gasp may feel like shedding a few tears, too.
November 25, 2012
Derailing the road to brilliance for Joseph Heller’s subtly aestheticist Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man
http://ivanlabayne.wordpress.com/2012...
The artist in Joseph Heller’s final book, “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” is the artist who pursues his own craft even at the twilight of his career primarily for himself and not for any bigger social or noble cause. Hence, the anxieties that were made obvious, and at times verged on surfeit in the novel, were harbored for one’s self who more and more feared effacement and irrelevance after once enjoying a flattering peak in the course of one’s career.
At the onset, I proffered tinctures of commiseration to Eugene Pota, Heller’s surrogate in his own novel. Aging and on the decline in terms of written productivity, Pota struggled to produce a novel that could fittingly cap his illustrious career after a consistent slump after his first breakthrough work. The entire novel was in fact dedicated to this entire hardship that otherwise could have gone tasteless if not for the inclusion of interesting drafts from Pota’s attempts at a final novel. Pota likened his dilemma to the classic voice in Beckett’s The Unnamable who typified the intensity of volition coupled with the vitality of action in the statement “I must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on.” Standing at stark contrast is Franz Kafka who discourages going on through his police character in one parable who, when met by someone whose map failed to coordinate with the place he is going around alone, asked the police and notoriously responded, Do not go on.
On the one hand, Pota’s resolute drive and his efforts to materialize it is somewhat admirable, if not amusing at times. From the Sexual Autobiography of his wife to the rewriting of Greek mythology and turning parts of the body into a novel, Pota did not have a scarcity of sound ideas to start with and develop. In the end, as we can correctly expect, Pota was not shown to have finished a novel and Heller need not to do that in his “own” novel. The point about the rigor and the difficulty not just of novel writing but of being a writer in general has been fairly shown. In an identified postmodern manner also, we can say that Heller used Pota to show how the book we were reading was actually made, how this book about the difficulty of writing a book and being a writer has been produced. For purposes of padding a review or notes on this book by Heller, I can still languish on commenting about its satiating self-referentiality. That I would refrain to do however since I believe a more significant point -- a point on Heller’s conception of the “artist” in this novel – needs to be made.
The “artist” in Heller’s novel
Apparently, Heller’s “artist” in the novel, as embodied by Eugene Pota, is one who is most concerned about his craft and how this can propel him to a self-satisfying stature. Having lost the youth and its concomitant prolific power and also the recognition and validation that resulted from those, Pota was pressed to regain a semblance of that production and reception, if not an emulation of it, as he treads the final laps of his career.
As always, one cannot and must not overlook the economic factor that impinges on every decision and action of the author and his characters. Pota was trying to do a “novel that motion picture industry might want,” and here, with the thought of selling the rights to some movie company, we can surmise that Pota also considers the economic assurance a last, successful book can provide for the rest of his life.
Several pages have been allotted to the character “Tom Sawyer” finding first his creator Samuel Jenkins, the real name of Mark Twain, before knowing the dreary process he went through before finally dying in debt and despair. Disappointed, Tom sought to learn the tricks of successful writing career from some of the other renowned authors of the past, among them Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway, only to find out the dampening similarity of their fates and was likewise somewhat discouraged to ever covet such brilliant career in the letters as those writers had.
Pota, and hence in extension, Heller, seemed to be finding ways to preclude such dismal thing from happening to him and this gave him the itch to produce that one last, sealing novel. Here, we can see that the literary artist for Heller is one who develops massive doubts and insecurities in the end as brought by his selfish perseverance to recoup recognition, if not mere economic stability.
In the novel, we can notice also Pota’s insistence on elaborating a new plot, something that no one has even done yet. A very familiar sentiment among writers but perhaps among cultural practitioners in general as well, this provides one crucial hint to the framework Pota is following as he embarked on producing a new novel. This emphasis on a neoteric plot implies a treatment of art as something that must be judged based from its own elements and components. This view disregards altogether the important external factors such as the conditions of production and consumption or reception and the larger social and historical conditions where the artwork, its creator and its readers/audience are all situated, that need to be looked into as we regard what is art and how it becomes valuable.
In other words, the novelty in content which Pota deems necessary for his work to be voted as art and have a chance to be received with affirmation, if not with exaltation, is prepared by an almost hermetic conception of art loosely made famous and recalled in Oscar Wilde and the Aestheticists. This is one key manifestation of the novel which I openly avert for my views of art are diametrically opposed to what the novel carries through its implications.
Ultimately, I believe that art must be valued based both on content and form and one that accentuates novelty of content in itself too much seems oblivious, if not plainly ignorant of existing social conditions that have hardly changed in the recent decades. Or else, one who puts too much premium on his newness of content seems to rely too much on the powers of imagination and not on the credibility of observation and astute analysis of concrete conditions in producing a masterful work.
Apart from its predictable and unchallenging self-referentiality, it is most importantly the
aesthetic principles it subtly forwards that Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man passes me as not just nothing extraordinary but more aptly, a stunted artistic exercise.
http://ivanlabayne.wordpress.com/2012...
The artist in Joseph Heller’s final book, “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” is the artist who pursues his own craft even at the twilight of his career primarily for himself and not for any bigger social or noble cause. Hence, the anxieties that were made obvious, and at times verged on surfeit in the novel, were harbored for one’s self who more and more feared effacement and irrelevance after once enjoying a flattering peak in the course of one’s career.
At the onset, I proffered tinctures of commiseration to Eugene Pota, Heller’s surrogate in his own novel. Aging and on the decline in terms of written productivity, Pota struggled to produce a novel that could fittingly cap his illustrious career after a consistent slump after his first breakthrough work. The entire novel was in fact dedicated to this entire hardship that otherwise could have gone tasteless if not for the inclusion of interesting drafts from Pota’s attempts at a final novel. Pota likened his dilemma to the classic voice in Beckett’s The Unnamable who typified the intensity of volition coupled with the vitality of action in the statement “I must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on.” Standing at stark contrast is Franz Kafka who discourages going on through his police character in one parable who, when met by someone whose map failed to coordinate with the place he is going around alone, asked the police and notoriously responded, Do not go on.
On the one hand, Pota’s resolute drive and his efforts to materialize it is somewhat admirable, if not amusing at times. From the Sexual Autobiography of his wife to the rewriting of Greek mythology and turning parts of the body into a novel, Pota did not have a scarcity of sound ideas to start with and develop. In the end, as we can correctly expect, Pota was not shown to have finished a novel and Heller need not to do that in his “own” novel. The point about the rigor and the difficulty not just of novel writing but of being a writer in general has been fairly shown. In an identified postmodern manner also, we can say that Heller used Pota to show how the book we were reading was actually made, how this book about the difficulty of writing a book and being a writer has been produced. For purposes of padding a review or notes on this book by Heller, I can still languish on commenting about its satiating self-referentiality. That I would refrain to do however since I believe a more significant point -- a point on Heller’s conception of the “artist” in this novel – needs to be made.
The “artist” in Heller’s novel
Apparently, Heller’s “artist” in the novel, as embodied by Eugene Pota, is one who is most concerned about his craft and how this can propel him to a self-satisfying stature. Having lost the youth and its concomitant prolific power and also the recognition and validation that resulted from those, Pota was pressed to regain a semblance of that production and reception, if not an emulation of it, as he treads the final laps of his career.
As always, one cannot and must not overlook the economic factor that impinges on every decision and action of the author and his characters. Pota was trying to do a “novel that motion picture industry might want,” and here, with the thought of selling the rights to some movie company, we can surmise that Pota also considers the economic assurance a last, successful book can provide for the rest of his life.
Several pages have been allotted to the character “Tom Sawyer” finding first his creator Samuel Jenkins, the real name of Mark Twain, before knowing the dreary process he went through before finally dying in debt and despair. Disappointed, Tom sought to learn the tricks of successful writing career from some of the other renowned authors of the past, among them Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway, only to find out the dampening similarity of their fates and was likewise somewhat discouraged to ever covet such brilliant career in the letters as those writers had.
Pota, and hence in extension, Heller, seemed to be finding ways to preclude such dismal thing from happening to him and this gave him the itch to produce that one last, sealing novel. Here, we can see that the literary artist for Heller is one who develops massive doubts and insecurities in the end as brought by his selfish perseverance to recoup recognition, if not mere economic stability.
In the novel, we can notice also Pota’s insistence on elaborating a new plot, something that no one has even done yet. A very familiar sentiment among writers but perhaps among cultural practitioners in general as well, this provides one crucial hint to the framework Pota is following as he embarked on producing a new novel. This emphasis on a neoteric plot implies a treatment of art as something that must be judged based from its own elements and components. This view disregards altogether the important external factors such as the conditions of production and consumption or reception and the larger social and historical conditions where the artwork, its creator and its readers/audience are all situated, that need to be looked into as we regard what is art and how it becomes valuable.
In other words, the novelty in content which Pota deems necessary for his work to be voted as art and have a chance to be received with affirmation, if not with exaltation, is prepared by an almost hermetic conception of art loosely made famous and recalled in Oscar Wilde and the Aestheticists. This is one key manifestation of the novel which I openly avert for my views of art are diametrically opposed to what the novel carries through its implications.
Ultimately, I believe that art must be valued based both on content and form and one that accentuates novelty of content in itself too much seems oblivious, if not plainly ignorant of existing social conditions that have hardly changed in the recent decades. Or else, one who puts too much premium on his newness of content seems to rely too much on the powers of imagination and not on the credibility of observation and astute analysis of concrete conditions in producing a masterful work.
Apart from its predictable and unchallenging self-referentiality, it is most importantly the
aesthetic principles it subtly forwards that Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man passes me as not just nothing extraordinary but more aptly, a stunted artistic exercise.
April 17, 2024
With the exception of Pota's "Literature of Despair" speech (had the conclusion been more uplifting or compelling, it would have made for a truly awesome lecture IRL), this novel was...not great. Main character was an absolute sleazeball, and his writing so poor that it was hard to imagine how he had been popular even before his decline.
Perhaps it's my own fault for having had such high expectations for what the novel would be like. Given what I'd known about Heller's life, and having only read one of his books (Catch-22, his crowning achievement and a definitive work of genius), I expected some profoundly moving story that would tug at my heartstrings and make me reflect on my mortality and the brevity and fallibility of humanity.... But nahhhh.
For the readers out there, I might save you a bit of grief if I tell you from the jump that Eugene Pota is Joseph Heller is Eugene Pota. They are one and the same. By that I mean - if you don't jive with Pota's writing style, then good luck, because the whole narrative is written in exactly the same style as his numerous failed stories.
Let it be known though that I still like Heller. One good book is all it takes to make a man, even if Pota thinks otherwise. Just felt like this novel was lazy.
Maybe if I reread it and took things less seriously, I'd enjoy it way more?
Also - this is only a small peeve, but if I had taken a shot every time someone said "Oh, shit," I would have died of alcohol poisoning.
Perhaps it's my own fault for having had such high expectations for what the novel would be like. Given what I'd known about Heller's life, and having only read one of his books (Catch-22, his crowning achievement and a definitive work of genius), I expected some profoundly moving story that would tug at my heartstrings and make me reflect on my mortality and the brevity and fallibility of humanity.... But nahhhh.
For the readers out there, I might save you a bit of grief if I tell you from the jump that Eugene Pota is Joseph Heller is Eugene Pota. They are one and the same. By that I mean - if you don't jive with Pota's writing style, then good luck, because the whole narrative is written in exactly the same style as his numerous failed stories.
Let it be known though that I still like Heller. One good book is all it takes to make a man, even if Pota thinks otherwise. Just felt like this novel was lazy.
Maybe if I reread it and took things less seriously, I'd enjoy it way more?
Also - this is only a small peeve, but if I had taken a shot every time someone said "Oh, shit," I would have died of alcohol poisoning.
June 26, 2021
Very interesting novel and the perfect length to read slowly but not take forever to finish. There were a lot of interesting short stories as a part of the novel, but the part I liked the best was the narrators brief lecture on the literature of despair. This was an incredible chapter that discussed many of the personal problems and bad endings so many of our literary heroes experienced toward the end of their careers. As Mr. Heller, an author of extraordinary repute himself, reached the end of his life, he too had much to reflect on and decide whether or not he was going to produce one more masterpiece, and it makes sense, since novels don't exist in a vacuum, it is good to reflect that a real person with their own hopes and dreams made what we can enjoy, but there is also a struggle with one's own success and fame that we often never know about.
June 18, 2017
Роман-завещание? Не знаю. Уловка-22 это да. Но не портрет. Даже «Вообрази себе картину» и то было намного лучше. Может быть, сам Хеллер был не такой интересный в жизни, какие были его книги (судя по книжке, в которой он пишет про самого себя) (Кстати, практически к такому же выводу я пришла и в случае с Сью Таунсенд). Видимо так. Очень жаль…
Очень понравилась фраза Геры – я ревнива, потому что сама добродетельна. Логично ))
А еще понравилось – про Тома Соейра и как он ездил по разным писателям, пытаясь разузнать, как заработать писательством.
N.B. Оценку ставлю исключительно из уважения к автору. Если бы не он, поставила бы оценку ниже
Очень понравилась фраза Геры – я ревнива, потому что сама добродетельна. Логично ))
А еще понравилось – про Тома Соейра и как он ездил по разным писателям, пытаясь разузнать, как заработать писательством.
N.B. Оценку ставлю исключительно из уважения к автору. Если бы не он, поставила бы оценку ниже
March 27, 2018
Красив и меланхоличен антироман/изповед; една красива лебедова песен на голям писател за старостта, залиняването на таланта и сексуалното желание, вечното ровене за теми из месото на живота; за самотата на писателското съществуване, алкохолните пропасти, носталгичните спомени на младостта, забравата... Но в крайна сметка Хелър си остава човек изпълнен с оптимизъм, бликащ хумор и намигащ към онова, което идва след края. Прекрасно човешко същество и творец.
Апропо, винаги съм смятал, че Джоузеф Хелър незаслужено не се поставя редом до другите най-големи писатели от еврейски произход – Сол Белоу, Франц Кафка, Филип Рот, Норман Майлър (в този ред). Неговото место е точно при тях.
Апропо, винаги съм смятал, че Джоузеф Хелър незаслужено не се поставя редом до другите най-големи писатели от еврейски произход – Сол Белоу, Франц Кафка, Филип Рот, Норман Майлър (в този ред). Неговото место е точно при тях.
March 16, 2022
This was rather enjoyable! Part novel/part memoir... it offered a unique insight into the mind of an aging Heller, hell bent of replicating the success that Catch-22 brought him. A futile effort, as nothing is as good as Catch-22 (a reread will be forthcoming!). I enjoyed many of the upstart novels Pota put forth, with my favorite being the bit with Tom Sawyer travelling the country in search of a successful novelist who was actually wealthy and happy. This section definitely illuminated the fact that so many of the most talented artists we have known shined for a brief period and disappeared all too soon.
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