A Literary History of the American West

William Saroyan

FEW AMERICAN WRITERS tumbled as dramatically from critical acclaim as did William Saroyan. There were many reasons, not the least of which was his personality. Because, as Saroyan's son Aram has argued, the writer came to personify "what might be called the mythic potential of his particular social-historical moment," Saroyan's self-centered, sometimes abrasive character became perhaps more important than his writing in the eyes of some. William Saroyan was, during the first half of his career, as much a public figure as an artist, and the confusion of those two roles made it easy to ignore his literary accomplishments once his notoriety faded.

In fact, the artist's psychological contradictions are finally much less important than the quality of his art and, from his first published volume (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, 1934) until his last (Obituaries, 1979)–both of which were cited as among their years' best books–Saroyan was an authentic, singular American genius. He was also, as Bob Sector has pointed out, "his own biggest fan."

Another factor in the Fresno native's fall from critical grace was the adversarial relationship he had developed with critics. He wrote in 1940:

. . . I acknowledge the partial truth and validity of every charge brought against my work, against myself personally, and against my methods of making my work public. What is lacking in their criticism is the fullness and humanity of understanding which operates in myself, in my work, and in my regard for others. . . . Consequently, it is difficult for them to make sense in themselves that which is complicated and unusual for them. What should enlarge them because of its understanding, drives them more completely behind the fort of their own limitations.

Little wonder he was a prime candidate for literary ostracism.

Today, with the author's personality no longer a factor, Saroyan's work is enjoying critical reevaluation. His work, not his ego or pugnaciousness or reclusiveness, is at issue, and it stands up very well indeed. As David Kherdian recently observed:

His writing had a quality of innocence and eagerness and wonder about a moment–any moment of living–that made us feel more alive ourselves–more alive, that is, than we actually were, but for this very reason it made us yearn and stretch and seek a way to grow.

And H. W. Matalene has asserted that "the place of William Saroyan in the history of the American theater still seems as secure as he always told us it would be."

After World War II, the Californian fell with a thud out of critical fashion. Not only were the books he published slammed, but his earlier achievements were ignored or slighted, making him a kind of literary non-person. Even in his native West his accomplishments were neglected; he was not listed in the annual bibliographies published by Western American Literature, although much of his best writing was set in the West. My Heart's in the Highlands,The Time of Your Life, and Hello Out There, Saroyan's three finest plays, employed distinctly western settings and tones, as even negative critics acknowledged. William Saroyan was very much a writer of his time, of his place, and of his dynamic cultural blend, Armenian-American.

Add to those distinguished dramas stories such as "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze," "The Pomegranate Trees," and "Seventy Thousand Assyrians,"novels The Human Comedy, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, and Tracy's Tiger, as well as memoirs such as The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, Not Dying, and Obituaries, and it appears that few twentiethcentury American authors produced a richer, more diverse body of work. Saroyan straddled the worlds of high and folk culture. He was an artist of unique and powerful gifts, marred by an apparent lack of discipline, but one who moved both regional and ethnic expression to new heights.

Mary McCarthy, writing in Partisan Review in 1940, pinpointed a source of both Saroyan's greatest art and perhaps some of his problems with the literary establishment. "He still retains his innocence," she observed,

. . . that is, he has had to fight off Ideas, Movements, Sex, and Commercialism. He has stayed out of the literary rackets–the Hollywood racket, the New York Cocktail-party racket, and the Stalinist racket, . . . What is more important, the well of inspiration, located somewhere in his early adolescence, has never run dry.

When he died on May 19, 1981, in Fresno, Saroyan had won both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Time of Your Life (the first writer to be so doubly honored), an Academy Award for The Human Comedy, and the California Gold Medal for Tracy's Tiger. William Saroyan emerged as a writer during the Great Depression, while America was in the throes of a national loss of faith and questioning of values. Although many critics had trouble accepting his optimistic, original stories, readers did not. He was powerfully pro-human. He talked and wrote about the human spirit. That Saroyan also did such things as turn down his Pulitzer Prize certainly did little to raise his stock among insiders. His behavior, like some of his writing, seemed downright unliterary. As novelist Herbert Gold wrote following Saroyan's death, "He didn't want to be the greatest Armenian-American writer in the world. He wanted, very boyishly, just to knock everyone's eyes out with beauty and fun and delight."

Born in Fresno in 1908, Saroyan was placed in an Oakland orphanage at the age of three following the death of his father, a poet and ordained minister. Four years later, his family reunited and returned to Fresno where he grew up. Experiences that would later resurface as rich literary material in such books as Little Children (1937) and My Name Is Aram (1940) marked the remainder of Saroyan's childhood. He worked at odd jobs, rubbing elbows with a lively group of people of all ethnic types, developed earthy rural values, and was always assured of the support of his extended family and the Armenian community. He did not graduate from high school.

Small wonder that Saroyan's work evidences little social or intellectual pretension. He has also refused to be limited; in "Seventy Thousand Assyrians" his protagonist says: "I am an Armenian . . . I have no idea what it's like to be an Armenian . . . I have a faint idea what it's like to be alive. That's the only thing that interests me greatly." That is, while everything he writes is influenced by his Armenian and poor, small-town and western heritage, that influence emerges from within rather than being imposed from without. When he tells his truth well enough, it is everyone's.

In 1928, while working in San Francisco, Saroyan published a story in Overland Monthly and Outwest Magazine and decided to make writing his career. Six years later his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, was published. It was a fresh, zany, ironic, and highly individualistic collection. "Try to be alive," the author advised in his preface. "You will be dead soon enough." If the collection exhibited many of the considerable strengths that were to mark Saroyan as a cutting-edge artist unconcerned with established literary forms, many of those same innovative tales were viewed by critics as undisciplined. Saroyan's response to Eric Bentley's complaint about careless writing perhaps sums up his attitude: "One cannot expect an Armenian to be an Englishman."

Whatever its source–the writer's ethnicity, his San Joaquin Valley upbringing, his distrust of established tastemakers–Saroyan showed during the 1930s a vivacity and originality that seemed exactly correct for those grim times. "I cannot resist the temptation to mock any law which is designated to hamper the spirit of man," he wrote in an early story. Critics of that period, burdened by polemic proletarian positions or still awakening to the power of naturalism, didn't know how to treat this brash westerner; Nona Balakian asserts, Saroyan was "inevitably misunderstood or belittled."

By the beginning of World War II, Saroyan estimated that he had written more than five hundred tales. His craft progressed so that not only great talent but considerable skill marked his writing, and he began to evidence a profound sense of place in his fiction. Increasingly in his writing–especially in the superb My Name Is Aram–Saroyan returned to Fresno and California's San Joaquin Valley for both setting and subjects. In so doing, he produced some major western American literature. Howard Floan, noting the artistic growth these valley stories demonstrated, points out that in his early tales the young people of Saroyan's stories had been essentially undiluted projections of himself. In Little Children and My Name Is Aram the writer uses such characters to greater effect, for the stories are not self-centered, "they are about the immigrants of Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley, the people recalled from his boyhood days whose images gave him the impetus to extend himself beyond the lyricism of his early tales to the more dramatic later ones. . . . If Saroyan had not discovered the literary uses of Fresno and the Valley, he could not have given us the best of his short stories–nor his plays." He was, then, very much a western writer.

Saroyan's plays demonstrate even more clearly than his stories the importance of the oral tradition and his ethnic heritage in his work. He explained:

Everything I write, everything I have ever written, is allegorical. This came to pass inevitably. One does not choose to write allegorically any more than one chooses to grow black hair on his head. The stories of Armenia . . . are all allegorical, and apart from the fact that I heard these stories as a child. . . I myself am a product of Asia Minor, hence the allegorical and the real are closely related in my mind.
In fact all reality to me is allegorical. . . .

When in 1939 he converted a short story, "The Man with the Heart in the Highlands," into the play My Heart's in the Highlands, he demonstrated not only his comfort with spoken language, but his allegorical bent. The play was successful and even his detractors agreed that the Californian had provided a radical departure from usual theatrical fare. Both George Jean Nathan and John Mason Brown considered it the finest Broadway play of the 1938–39 season.

The following year Saroyan produced one of the classic plays of the modern American theatre, The Time of Your Life. It confirmed what the author's earlier dramatic work had hinted, that he was as original and irreverent on stage as he was in print. Balakian points out that "nothing quite so informal and spontaneous had happened on the American stage before Saroyan came along." Audiences were well advised to attend Saroyan's remarks about allegory if they sought to understand his dramas. The theatre became a major outlet for Saroyan's work. The Beautiful People, Jim Dandy: Fat Man in a Famine, and The Cave Dwellers (his last Broadway production, in 1957), among others, all illustrated his quest, stated earlier in a short story: "If I want to do anything I want to speak a more universal language, the heart of man, the unwritten part of man, that which is eternal and common to all races."

From the beginning–as early as the publication of "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze"–Saroyan evidenced a freedom from conventional literary modes of reality that marks him today as an early exemplar of what has been called Magical Realism. Merged levels of consciousness, powerful intuition, an insistence upon what is perceived rather than what is expected, little concern for chronological time, these and other elements led Edmund Wilson to praise "These magical feats" which he said "are accomplished by the enchantment of Saroyan's temperament, which induces us to take from him a good many things that we should not accept from other people." Another giant of American criticism, John Mason Brown, proclaimed that "Saroyan has managed to widen the theatre's horizons by escaping from facts and reason. . . ." Saroyan himself explained his gift this way:

. . . I do not know a great deal about what words come to, but the presence says, Now don't get funny; just sit down and say something; it'll be all right anyway. Half the time I do say it wrong, but somehow or other, just as the presence says, it's right anyhow. I am always pleased about this.

During World War II, the Californian produced two of his most successful novels, The Human Comedy and The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, the latter a picaresque version of army life with a somewhat hard edge which Wilson admired. The former book began as an award-winning screenplay, over which Saroyan battled with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, trying to buy it back, then retreated to write a play, Get Away Old Man, that dramatized the conflict. It opened on Broadway in 1943. If Saroyan got the final word, MGM seems to have managed the final laugh: the play flopped.

Following the war, Saroyan went into a critical tailspin. Disillusioned by his military experience–he served in the Army–tax problems, and the collapse of his marriage to Carol Marcus, his mood and literature darkened. By his own admission, he drank too much and gambled too much. "Three years in the army and a stupid marriage had all but knocked me out of

the picture and, if the truth is told, out of life itself." His son's biography, William Saroyan (1983), offers the other side of the story.

He gradually brought his drinking and gambling under control, and once more began producing high-quality work. But, critically at least, it was too late. As Matalene points out:

. . . One senses that critics have been less interested in discovering and teaching Saroyan's message than they have been in congratulating themselves for having been so democratic as to have admitted to the canon of recognized literature the work of an uneducated, penniless Armenian from Fresno–at least for as long as he seemed amusing.

He no longer seemed amusing, and he was dropped like the outsider he always was, one of the less savory and defensible episodes in American literary history.

During the final years of his life he produced several probing, sometimes delightful memoirs, the first of which, Not Dying (1963), led Herbert Mitgang to observe in The New York Times: "A hardboiled romantic, Saroyan shows that he can be more in the vanguard than many of the official literarymap personages in Esquire; that he'll be around long after this year's hipsters have become next year's squares."

Often Saroyan's mood was morose in his later works; he seemed preoccupied by death. Of Not Dying he observed, "I haven't laughed once in the writing of this book."

William Saroyan had always been concerned over the degree to which artificiality dominates reality in human experience, a situation he thought literary critics apotheosized. Ironically, in the biography which offers his ex-wife's and his children's perspectives on the author's life, Saroyan's son Aram asserts that the truth of his father's character remains obscure, while "his legend, dating back to the earliest part of his career, continues to dominate popular consciousness of both his literary career and public image."

A more balanced assessment of Saroyan has been offered by his friend and associate James H. Tashjian, editor of The Armenian Review. "No question: William Saroyan was a battlefield on which Ormuzd and Ahriman fought relentlessly–good versus evil," he wrote in his preface to My Name Is Saroyan (1983), explaining:

. . .There is little question that Saroyan's personal conduct was in direct contradiction of his father's rigid code–Saroyan gambled and gamboled, he was flaky and notoriously unreliable, he drank heavily on occasion, wenched and was twice divorced–all mis-virtues. . . . But he was, at the same time, a dedicated pacifist, a ridiculer of the goosestep, a foe of peonage and patronage. He was impatient of dissimulation, generous and charitable. . . and was respectful of all religions.

William Saroyan was a flawed, passionate man, a complicated mixture of virtue and vice whose great talent magnified all aspects of his personality. Tashjian makes one other major point, observing that "Saroyan is only `enigmatic' to those who cannot . . . understand what his Armenian heritage meant to him."

Both Aram Saroyan and Tashjian agree that a major element in William Saroyan's makeup was the early death of his father, Armenak, a subject he returned to, both directly and indirectly, throughout his literary career. It "forged in him a basic Oedipal urge–to find the father who had left him," Tashjian points out. "This was to grow into a veritable passion in his manhood. It colored his thoughts and his career." Perhaps the most touching of such work is "Armenak of Bitlis" (Letters from 74 rue Taitbout, 1969), which recounts a visit to his father's grave in San Jose, then leads the author to recount a sterile meeting with his own son in New York. It is a powerful piece that illustrates well the writer's continuing abilities.

Sham remained a continuing theme. Early in his career Saroyan had lamented the influence of tastemakers such as literary critics this way:

It's wonderful to get up in the morning and go out for a little walk and smell the trees and see the streets and the kids going to school and the clouds in the sky. . . . This is a nice world. So why do they make all the trouble?

Late in his career, once he had become somewhat reclusive, his tone changed. "Can a society which has thrived on lies be expected to survive?" he asked. He answered himself this way: "Possibly, but the people of that society can't be expected not to be grotesque." In some places, his style turned preachy and verbose.

Still, flashes of the old spirit surfaced. In a 1978 interview with Herbert Gold, Saroyan remarked, "I'm growing old! I'm falling apart! And it's VERY INTERESTING!" He worked out of one of two tract houses in Fresno which he had bought in the 1960s–he also kept an apartment in Paris–and rode around his hometown on a bicycle. An eleven-year-old neighbor remembered, "Isaw him ridin' with no hands and everything, lots of times." He was a great favorite of neighborhood children, and they were favorites of his.

Bella Stumbo, in the Los Angeles Times, added that "He refused all interviews with the press (on the grounds that the `knotheads' asked him stupid questions), and even turned down invitations to the White House in later years." Shortly before his death, Saroyan called the Associated Press to leave a posthumous statement: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

Following Saroyan's death, a memorial service was held in Paris. His Holiness Vazken I, the Catholicos of all Armenians, eulogized the author, calling him "the prodigy of the nation, the vehicle through which three millennia of Armenian experience was perhaps most perfectly expressed." The Catholicos concluded by observing that "William Saroyan's writing, his humanism, speaks not just about or to Armenians but to all people."

As usual, Saroyan himself merits the last word. The final sentence of the final volume published during his lifetime, what Herbert Gold calls "his wonderful late book, Obituaries," reads: "I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another?"

GERALD W. HASLAM, Sonoma State University

Selected Bibliography

Saroyan has been the subject of an exhaustive bibliographic study by David Kherdian; it is definitive up to 1964. A volume in the Twayne United States Authors Series, written by Howard Floan, provides both biographic information and critical assessments of Saroyan's work. See also James H. Tashjian's interesting preface to My Name Is Saroyan. The Floan book and the Matalene article listed below both contain annotated bibliographies of secondary articles on Saroyan. What follows is intended only to supplement them.
Balakian, Nona. "Writers on the American Scene." Ararat, Winter 1977, 15–25. Points out Saroyan's position as the preeminent Armenian-American writer.
Floan, Howard. William Saroyan. New York: Twayne, 1966. The most complete examination of Saroyan's art yet published. A good place to start.
Foster, Edward Halsey. William Saroyan. Boise: Boise State University, 1984. The finest short survey of Saroyan's career, stressing his singular perspectives and his distinctive voice: "Saroyan was one of the few welcome breaks in that grey literary landscape. . . ."Also draws interesting parallels with "beat" writers.
Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Saroyan: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. The best available version of Saroyan's life and times. Strangely organized but well written, it points to three traumas as major in the author's life: his father's death, his marriage to Carol Marcus, and his induction into the army which knocked him off his literary pinnacle. A major book.
Gold, Herbert. "Conversation with William Saroyan." California Living (Los Angeles Herald Examiner), Dec. 9, 1979, pp. 8, 10, 30. An intimate portait of the mature Saroyan. Fascinating.
. "The Fervency of William Saroyan."San Francisco Focus, November 1984, pp. 69–74. An intimate, insightful article–as good as any ever published on Saroyan–this essay also served as an Afterword to a limited anniversary edition of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, issued by Yolla Bolly Press.
. "It Is Right That You Should Not Die. . ."Review (San Francisco Examiner/ Chronicle), May 24, 1981, p. 9. This touching eulogy makes a good companion for the Kouymijian article, for it stresses the author's final years.
Kherdian, David. A Bibliography of William Saroyan, 1934–1964. San Francisco: R. Beacham, 1965. Indispensable list that needs to be updated.
Kouymijian, Dikran. "A Letter to Saroyan." International Herald Tribune, June 5, 1981, p. 24. A revealing eulogy that discusses Saroyan's life and work in Paris, especially his later years.
Matalene, H. W. "William Saroyan." Dictionary of Literary Biography 7 (1980). A comprehensive reassessment of Saroyan's career, with emphasis on his position as a major playwright. Excellent bibliography of both primary and secondary sources.
Saroyan, Aram. William Saroyan. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. A painful biography, one that reveals as much about its author as about its subject. Of little literary value.
What follows is a list of Saroyan's books published after Kherdian's bibliography appeared. Books are listed chronologically and contents other than fiction are indicated in the titles.

One Day in the Afternoon of the World. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.
After Thirty Years. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.
Short Drive, Sweet Chariot. New York: Phaedra, 1966.
Look at Us; . . . . New York: Cowles Education Corporation, 1967.
I used to believe I had forever, now I'm not so sure. New York: Cowles, 1968.
The Man with the Heart in the Highlands and Other Stories. New York: Dell, 1968.
Letters from 74 rue Taitbout; or, Don't go, but if you must, say hello to everybody. New York: World Publishing Company, 1969.
The Dogs, or Paris Comedy, and Two Other Plays. New York: Phaedra, 1969.
Inhale & Exhale. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972, ©1936.
Places Where I've Done Time. New York: Praeger, 1972.
Sons come and go, mothers hang in there. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Chance Meetings. New York: Norton, 1978.
Two Short Paris Summertime Plays: Assassinations, & Jim, Sam & Anna. Northridge, California: Santa Susana Press, 1979.
Obituaries. Berkeley: Creative Arts Books, 1979.
Births. Berkeley: Creative Arts Books, 1983.
My Name Is Saroyan. Edited by James H. Tashjian. New York: Coward-McCann, 1983.
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Covelo, Calif.: Yolla Bolly Press, 1984.
The library at California State University, Fresno, contains a William Saroyan Archive.

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