about this book

From the introduction

By William E. Justice

This book is a valentine. It is not an open valentine, but one that lurks; it sits on a shelf and it waits. Its pages swarm with life and joy, but not without the occasional sting. Between its innocent covers can be found cold watermelons, bicycles, stolen horses, cars, ripe pears, and tigers in a vast parade of locomotion and feasting. Its heroes are Assyrian, German, Japanese, American, and Armenian. But lest you take its sentiment lightly, be warned: it hides a landmine. It may leave you forever changed.

There are certain writers that find us in youth, or in a moment of youth when we’re bent-backed and hoary, who cause a strange and irreversible reaction. Literary people are made this way, almost by accident, by stumbling into a writer, unsuspecting and unknowing, then … Boom! You are tossed in the air, limbs flailing and half-conscious, and when you land in a heap and start counting your fingers and toes, you notice something: you’re no longer just a person. You have become a literary person. A writer, a critic, an enthusiast, a librarian, a diarist, an editor, a propagandist, a publisher, a journalist, or, God help you, a poet. Pick whichever you like, the transformation is the same, families are shamed, the landmine has done its indelible work.

William Saroyan is such a writer.

•   •   •

These human landmines are rare and essential parts of the literary world, but the distinction has its disadvantages. Adults are notorious for repudiating the tastes of their youth, and to the professional critic such authors are vexing. Time magazine wrote at the end of Saroyan’s career that “the ease and charm of many of his stories will continue to inspire young writers. It is a legacy beyond criticism.” Saroyan was plagued by rotten reviews his whole life, and even when Time attempted a compliment, it was backhanded. To be “beyond criticism” is not necessarily a good way to stay in print. Once the most famous writer on earth, Saroyan is currently little known to readers under forty, but he belongs in the company of Kahlil Gibran, Dylan Thomas, J. D. Salinger, C. S. Lewis, the Brontes, Dostoevsky, Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, Heinrich Heine, Madeleine L’Engle, and Arthur Conan Doyle; he belongs among those writers who steal us from youth.

Fellow Armenian David Kherdian eulogized Saroyan as the “poet of childhood” but that label just misses the mark. Saroyan is the poet of adolescence. His is the genius of a youth suddenly noticing the World and trying to swallow it whole. Saroyan is the poet of the time when we know only childhood but we desire everything else. This is the magic, longing, and ease of Saroyan’s best work. It is what makes him the immortal he always wanted to be.

Richard Rodriguez describes the phenomenon perfectly: “His name was William Saroyan. He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told.”

That is Saroyan’s legacy. The man is another kettle of fish entirely.

•   •   •

William Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, to Armenian immigrants in 1908; the century we recently crawled out of had only just begun. Henry Ford had just invented the Model T, the first long-distance radio message was sent, the sun still hadn’t set on the English empire, and the first passenger flight skittered into the air for a whole minute. Saroyan’s father died when he was three and little Willie was taken to an orphanage in Oakland. Five years later his mother was able to bring her kids back. William hated the orphanage with a passionate disinterest and tried to forget his years there completely. It is only noteworthy in regards to Saroyan’s work in its absence. Saroyan’s Armenian heritage, however, manifests itself in his writing in a number of ways, perhaps most strikingly in the novel My Name is Aram, hailed as “the Armenian Huck Finn.” Saroyan found, and was found by, Armenians wherever he went and quickly became a hero and a favorite son. Today, love of Saroyan’s writing is handed down from generation to generation along with famous recipes and stories of their glorious past.

Back in Fresno, Saroyan proved to be an indifferent student, a ravenous reader, and a reliable bike messenger. Fresno at the time was an immigrant town, and Saroyan’s classmates were German, Chinese, Irish, Jewish, Japanese, Turkish, and a whole grab bag of other recent immigrants that made lively if discordant noise of the city streets. This unique California town would come to symbolize the entire United States for Saroyan, and contribute to his steadfast belief that countries, races, religions, and wars were all dross and nonsense and that any politicians, generals, or businessmen who said otherwise were crooks and scoundrels or worse. Moreover, he believed not only that he could shame war and its supporters but that he could cheat death. The sheer, unabashed adolescence of the man, with all its bravado, sentiment, and defiant idealism, came to define Saroyan. Even in his later writings, when they worked, Saroyan sang with the same voice that he had first cultivated as a young man.

Saroyan found his own landmine writer when he was twelve, during a visit to the Fresno Public Library. The author, buried innocently among thousands of other books that would not have done the trick, was Guy de Maupassant. Young Saroyan read with rapt attention the story of a one-legged cripple nicknamed Bell for the way his body swung between his crutches. Bell is chased from home to home, not a bread crust in his belly, until he is finally arrested and dies of hunger. At that moment, when Bell gave up the ghost — kaboom! — William Saroyan, the writer, was born. One year later he dropped out of high school in order to attend a technical school. The most important skill a writer could have, believed young Saroyan, was the ability to type very, very fast. For the first time in his life, he was a top student.

In 1934 America was harried and humbled by the Great Depression, and Europe was already engaged in the insanity that led to World War 11. Saroyan, then twenty-six, undertook a brash and presumptuous stunt. In a feat of sheer literary athleticism he wrote one short story a day for thirty days, mailing each one to Story magazine. A year later the collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, was published. It became a best-seller, and Saroyan was famous. In true Saroyan style, he promptly took a trip around the world, writing stories and impressions at every stop. In the preface of that collection, he wrote:

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

That collection was followed up by several more, and Saroyan’s sudden fame increased.

This would prove to be a charmed time for Saroyan. In six short years he’d written several best-selling collections of short stories and two Broadway hits, traveled the globe, and even worked in Hollywood, though with strained and unsatisfying results. Owing to an intervening world war, a wildly unsuccessful marriage, and the steady march into middle age, Saroyan, though he continued to publish until the end of his life, would never recapture the ease and pleasure of those years.

Saroyan’s Fresno youth had been a golden time. Though hardly a pampered existence, his life had been filled with adventure and drama. He was surrounded by immigrants, farmers, laborers, small businessmen, and bums, and he moved among them, delivering telegrams or selling papers, almost as an equal. It was the strength and hidden nobility of these people that piqued Saroyan’s curiosity and became the material for his best work. In contrast, the life of a celebrity surrounded by other celebrities, moguls, and critics, moving from Paris to London to New York to San Francisco as the mood took him, failed to make him happy and provided little material worth writing about. There is a lesson there for young writers.

The depressing times that follow will go quickly. In 1942, at thirty-four, he was drafted into the United States Army and married a teenaged New York debutante. Although World War II is now commonly thought of as the “good war,” Saroyan went bitterly. His friend and fellow writer John Steinbeck offered to pull some strings for him so he could stay out of the war, but, strangely, Saroyan declined. He didn’t see combat but was shipped off to London and stayed there during the bombardment, by that time leaving behind not only a young wife but also a son, Aram.

When the Army asked Saroyan to write a cheering story of the American soldier in London, Saroyan created Wesley Jackson, who did not want to be a soldier at all and whose primary response to the war was fear:

The minute a War starts everybody seems to forget everything he ever knew — everything that’s worth a hoot — and shuts his mouth and keeps it shut and just groans with agony about the lies he hears all over the place all the time.

The Army was not amused by the overall tone of the novel and suppressed it. The Adventures of Wesley Jackson was not published until after the war was over.

For Saroyan, the army was another orphanage. His movements were controlled, he was separated from his loved ones, and his inherent singularity was despised and ignored. Aside from The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, Saroyan didn’t write at all during his enlistment and was discharged a bitter, broken man.

Furthermore, his marriage was failing apart, despite the birth of another child, this time a daughter. Both parents were probably to blame. Saroyan was moody, jealous, and irresponsible. His wife, Carol, was young, spoiled, and ambitious. Before, during, and after her marriage to Saroyan she was courted by, among others, Orson Welles, Clifford Odets, Al Capp (creator of “Lil’Abner”), and Marlon Brando (who later dallied with Lucy, Saroyan’s daughter) before finally marrying Walter Matthau, after divorcing Saroyan not once but twice. These rarefied dramas were a far cry from the life of plucky immigrants in Fresno, and they ill-suited Saroyan. It was a tumultuous and ugly time that resurfaced whenever he saw his children; Saroyan’s feelings toward them vacillated between total adoration and repulsion.

Though he went on to write some of his best work after 1945, including “Tracy’s Tiger,” Saroyan never recovered from his service in World War II or his failed marriage. His writing became more and more self-referential, even to the point of publishing journals and travel diaries, and the quality varied greatly. Although some of the writing is as lucid and moving as his early work, it is clear that many of his books were rushed through in order to pay off his gambling debts: he was known to lose as much as sixty thousand dollars in a single day.

Saroyan, whose career began with a literary stunt, ended it with another. From his final hospital bed he sent a statement out on the AP wire: “Everybody has got to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?
[Break]

He died in May of 1981. Ronald Reagan was president, the Columbia space shuttle had its first successful launch, and Pac-Man was taking the country’s youth by storm. The world he grew up in and wrote so touchingly about was all but forgotten. After his death, half of his ashes were sent to Fresno, California, and the other half to Yerevan, Armenia, to be enshrined in the Pantheon of Greats.

As a writer, Saroyan was an athlete. His stories often feel like the work of a grand acrobat or a daredevil escapist. His prose is not studied. His plots are not intricate. His stories are not proper stories. They ramble, exclaim, and take strange detours. In many ways, they resemble dice games, with sudden turns of luck and surprising, even unlikely, combinations of events and characters. His plays, too, are strange and unconventional creatures, including The Time of Your Life, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940. These traits do not make him a difficult writer, however. In fact, few can be read so easily.

Saroyan invented his very own style, without shaping or molding by universities, and brought an unerring sense of life to the written word that beguiles and captivates. For this alone, that he wrote stunningly in a voice wholly his own and without precedent, he should be admired and studied. The literary world today could use more of his brash intensity, experimentalism, and intolerance of compromise.

Saroyan set out to challenge the world. He felt proud, untamable strength in his writing and muscled his way into literature. To read him is to feel an almost physical exuberance.

We need writers who refuse to grow up. Who else will ensnare unsuspecting youths and transform them? How else will we keep this literary world going? Some of the more tiresome adults, many critics among them, believe they have no further use for adolescence, but they are mistaken. For though Saroyan’s defiance may be immature, and though his ambitions childish, his angry questions to the world remain unanswered. No one else is even asking them. Saroyan was always aware that his concerns would be ignored by certain people, and answered them thus:

I’m asking for sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for. I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments. I see life as one at a time, so many millions simultaneously all over the earth. Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all else is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength …. But a baby is a baby. And the way they cry, there you have the brotherhood of man, babies crying.

And now, without further ado, high above the ring to my right, he flies through the air with the greatest of ease…