The Weekly Standard
February 25, 2008 Monday
Saroyan Turns 100;
The writer who asked, What does it mean to be alive?
Ann Stapleton, The Weekly Standard
BOOKS & ARTS Vol. 13 No. 23
"I? do not know what makes a writer, but it is probably not
happiness," wrote the Fresno-born Armenian-American author and
playwright William Saroyan, who died in 1981.
His father, a failed poet, died of appendicitis when Saroyan was
barely three years old. His mother put her four children into
Oakland’s Fred Finch Orphanage and took on work as a domestic, hoping
to reunite the family one day. She would eventually succeed, but the
process would take five years. Meanwhile, Saroyan was consigned to
the small boys’ ward, where he fell asleep every night to the sounds
of bereft boys rocking themselves and weeping.
As Saroyan’s son Aram noted in Last Rites, about his difficult
relationship with his father, whereas most of us come to a first
perception of the world with a mother and father acting as a buffer
between ourselves and death, Saroyan’s "own link hooked up at the
very moment of the dawning of his rational consciousness not with
father, or mother–but with Death itself." He was "hooked into the
abyss at both ends."
Afflicted with the lifelong emotional effects of his childhood
experiences, and an acute anti-authority complex, Saroyan often found
the intricacies of human relationships painful and mystifying.
According to John Leggett, the biographical author of A Daring Young
Man, it was the "Saroyan social paradox, that he could fill a room
with bonhomie, but people were no more real to him than characters in
a dream."
He quarreled with or disappointed almost everyone who ever tried to
befriend him, including Random House’s Bennett Cerf, MGM’s Louis B.
Mayer, and Darryl F. Zanuck, founder of Twentieth Century Fox. He
told Lillian Hellman that her plays could use some songs to liven
them up, and then proceeded to sing her some possibilities. James
Mason once slapped him for talking nonstop at a premiere. And in a
retaliatory piece for Esquire, Ernest Hemingway, annoyed over a short
story that seemed to mock his work, told Saroyan he wasn’t "that
bright" and that he should "watch" himself.
"Do I make myself clear," he added, "or would you like me to push
your puss in?"
Even Saroyan’s lifelong best friend, his cousin Ross Bagdasarian,
became suspect. While on a boisterous cross-country road trip in a
new Buick paid for with money from Saroyan’s first Broadway success,
the two of them put lyrics to old Armenian folk tunes and came up
with the song "Come On-A My House (I’m Gonna Give You Candy)," which
would become a hit for Rosemary Clooney. But Saroyan, saddled in
later years with heavy gambling debts, found it impossible to forgive
Bagdasarian’s only crime: becoming set for life by creating the
novelty recording act, The Chipmunks.
Saroyan was unhappily married, once for six years and a second time
for a disastrous six months, to the sweet-spirited blonde socialite
Carol Marcus, the inspiration for Holly Golightly in her childhood
friend Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, lifelong friend to
Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona O’Neill, and whose letters from beau
"Jerry" (J.D. Salinger, as it turned out) Carol once plagiarized in
an attempt to write entertainingly to Saroyan. Courted by Orson
Welles, Mel Ferrer, Clifford Odets, Al Capp, and Marlon Brando, among
others, she eventually settled into a marriage of over 40 years’
duration with Walter Matthau, but Saroyan continued to rave about her
and love her from a distance until death intervened.
A self-described "estranged man" ("I am little comfort to myself,
though I am the only comfort I have"), Saroyan lost touch with his
children Aram and Lucy–though when they learned of his final
illness, they effected a tender reconciliation. But if temperament
and early loss conspired to deprive Saroyan of a fulfilling personal
life, in his writing he was determined, like his character who
planted pomegranate trees in the desert, "to make a garden of this
awful desolation."
Saroyan was a writing machine and fearless genre-hopper, achieving
major successes in the short story (The Daring Young Man on the
Flying Trapeze), the novel (The Human Comedy and My Name Is Aram, the
Armenian-American Huck Finn), and the autobiography (The Bicycle
Rider in Beverly Hills, Not Dying, and others). And alongside Eugene
O’Neill and Thornton Wilder he helped to found a truly American
theater, with My Heart’s in the Highlands and The Time of Your
Life–for which he declined the Pulitzer Prize, on the grounds that
institutions and the arts don’t mix.
Prizing spontaneity and distrustful of too much revision, he wrote
swiftly: two stories in a day, a play in one week, and once, three
books in a month. The man who could consume an entire watermelon at
one sitting lived to write, and wrote voraciously, "to save [his]
life." He wanted to learn to write the way the snow was falling on
the streets of New York, "the finest style" he’d ever seen, and the
best of his work comes closer than the efforts of any other American
writer to evoking the strange improvisational genius, the exuberance
and despair, at the heart of an ordinary, lived life on earth.
In Obituaries, the last book he published in his lifetime, Saroyan
expresses fascination with "a strange man in New York in the late
thirties who at the opening of the opera season would go into the
lobby with all of the rich and social people and suddenly stand on
his head while the cameras flashed." The next day the newspapers
would show the man, a kind of innocent who appeared to have no profit
motive for his behavior, "standing on his head surrounded by
astonished dowagers and dandies." Saroyan is very much the
headstand-man of American letters, reminding us to discard the
dark-suited formalities that deaden our responses to the world and
invite the life force in.
"I am not afraid to make a fool of myself," Saroyan insisted, and
this headlong audacity shows itself not only in his
ahead-of-their-time, tenderly ranting, dark-adapted experimental
stories, but also in his daredevil choice of subjects familiarly
symbolic and emotion-laden and dear to the human imagination, and
then breaking the seal of our accustomed blindness to expose the
original depth and eccentricity, the brief, strong flash of light,
beneath.
A case in point is his short story "The Hummingbird That Lived
Through Winter," in which an elderly blind man and a young boy
revive, with a teaspoonful of warmed honey, an ailing hummingbird
trapped in the wrong season. The tale is life-affirming, yes, but
only in a narrowly qualified way that depends heavily for its impact
on the hovering presence of death. Like the unnerving background
sound of the demolition crew coming closer and closer in his play The
Cave Dwellers, in Saroyan, the knowledge that things end is never
very far away.
The two figures and the tiny flicker of intensity that is the
hummingbird are made present to us for only a moment within a minor
bubble of daylight poised against the blackness of eternity. It is
winter to which the bird must return. The man is aged and mortal. And
the boy, too, must choose to act blindly, without ever knowing
whether his love will save anything at all.
Yet life relentlessly presents itself to us, here in the form of
"this wonderful little creature of the summertime," dying "in the big
rough hand of the old peasant" who, in his blindness, must ask the
boy just learning to discern the world, "What is this in my hand?" As
we, too, look down into the tender but only temporary nest the old
man’s palm makes of itself in the air, Saroyan forces us to see the
imperiled being there, "not suspended in a shaft of summer light,"
and "not the most alive thing in the world" anymore, but "the most
helpless and heartbreaking."
In the wild throbbing of this smallest heart, we can feel our own
pulse beat, and by extension, the whole world’s. What is this thing
called life? How can it possibly be? And knowing it will someday
perish, what do we do with it now? Despite all our helplessness, so
much of the world is left up to us. A terrifying responsibility, in
its way, about which Saroyan is wholly unsentimental, yet wholly
encouraging: We must live.
When the boy later asks the old man whether their hummingbird
survived the winter, his answer is the only one he can give: That the
hummingbirds the boy watches in the summer air are the one they
saved.
"Each of them is our bird. Each of them, each of them," he said
swiftly and gently.
In "Why I Write," Saroyan clearly lays out this notion of
immortality: "One of a kind couldn’t stay, and couldn’t apparently be
made to." But "something did stay, something was constant, or
appeared to be. It was the kind that stayed." For Saroyan, the only
thing that can "halt the action" of our disappearance is art, "the
putting of limits upon the limitless, and thereby holding something
fast and making it seem constant, indestructible, unstoppable,
unkillable, deathless." By abetting the escape of the hummingbird
into the imagination of the reader, Saroyan wins the little
hand-to-hand combat with death which is this story. He knew that we
need such victories to help us bear our lives.
The Swiss critic Henri-Frédéric Amiel wrote that dreams are a
"semi-deliverance from the human prison," a concept Saroyan takes as
a given. In The Time of Your Life, he describes the character Joe as
actually "holding the dream," not a sentimentality at all, but a tip
of the hat to the iron reality of our inner lives.
Harry the Hoofer, played by the young Gene Kelly on Broadway, sees
that "the world is sorrowful" and "needs laughter," which he dreams
of providing by means of his awkward, decidedly unfunny, desperate
dance that never stops. The sad clown Harry, whose "pants are a
little too large," whose coat is "loose" and "doesn’t match," is the
perfect type of modern man:
He comes in timidly, turning about uncertainly, awkward, out of place
everywhere, embarrassed and encumbered by the contemporary costume,
sick at heart, but determined to fit in somewhere. His arrival
constitutes a dance.
Harry fails to make the world laugh; his dream goes unrealized. Yet
his blundering movements make the audience want to weep in
recognition of their own inelegant lives, their own ungraceful
losses. The vividness of their own dreams makes Harry real.
When Saroyan’s mother left him at the orphanage, she distracted him
with a little windup toy, a dancing black minstrel that made him stop
crying. Years after he wrote The Time of Your Life, Saroyan would
realize that Harry the Hoofer was that toy brought to life. It is the
genius of Saroyan that the sight of Harry dancing, the very image of
ceaseless exuberance, evokes pity and grief in the onlooker, that the
very thing meant to stop our crying is what allows us to weep for
ourselves and for each other, for the thing we have lost forever and
for all we will never find.
Don’t Go Away Mad, dedicated to his son Aram and infused with the
grief and rage of Saroyan’s divorce and the loss of his children, is
an excruciatingly dark, inverted morality play about hospital
patients waiting to die, reading a dictionary aloud as their
collective last act, and as Saroyan must have been at the time of his
writing, desperately trying to wring some meaning and hope from the
words.
A character called Greedy Reed, glad his abdomen–he reads the word
>From the dictionary–is still intact, unlike that of poor Andy Boy
(another patient for whom Reed, in his belatedly discovered humanity,
prays), considers what he is up against:
I been thinking all my life black the trouble with me, but black
ain’t the trouble with me at all. Lots of good men black. Lots of
good men white, red, or some other color. Color ain’t the trouble
with me or anybody else. Something else the trouble with me. Who fool
around with me this way all the time, make me carry on? Who make me
ornery? Who make me proud of my abdomen right here in this sad place,
at this sad time, Poseyo?
The image of the ignorant, abdomen-proud man seeking the source of
all human dissatisfaction, anticipating his own imminent death even
as he tries, so late, to find a reason to live, is ludicrous and
poignant and passing strange, and a crystal-clear mirror Saroyan
holds up to each face in the audience: "You are still alive, my
friend. In the time of your life, live!" The entwisted particularity
and universality of the image, in service to a truly desperate
affirmation of this life (as Saroyan said of his writing) "is
careless .??.??. but something that is good, that is [his] alone,
that no other writer could ever achieve."
In Don’t Go Away Mad, life and hope and belief are redeemed by way of
a murder, as if Christ, instead of dying on the Cross, had gone out
and killed for our sins. But as genuinely dark as the piece may be,
in its preface Saroyan makes a stand for the real truth of any life,
and for an art that reflects the reality of the psyche’s insistent,
if roundabout, tendency toward its own continued existence:
Despair overwhelms everybody, but for how long? If it is for an
instant now and then, if it is for years now and then, for centuries
now and then, the fact remains that despair is never by itself all of
the story whether in an individual or in an entire people; despair
may dominate, it may qualify and color everything else, but
everything else is also always there; and it would be inaccurate,
though it would make for easier playwriting, to pretend that this
were not so.
This is the statement of a realist. The sun does shine: not every
hour, not even every day, but often enough. The most cynical of men
looks upon his own child’s face and is changed by what it believes of
him. A middle-aged couple kisses, surprised to find themselves, after
so many years, in love. Someone somewhere peers into the abyss and
roars with laughter. Life goes on. And Saroyan the headstand-man
reminds us to "try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all
[our] might," for the simple reason that we "will be dead soon
enough."
It is this knowledge that death will one day take away everything
that makes Saroyan a fine, acute poet of yearning. In his flawless
story "Five Ripe Pears," a young boy cuts class to go and pluck, in
their moment of perfect unstayable ripeness, the pears he has been so
intently willing into their existence that they seem to him, by
virtue of his love for them, to be rightfully his:
Running to pears as a boy of six is any number of classically
beautiful things: music and poetry and maybe war. I reached the trees
breathless but alert and smiling. The pears were fat and ready for
eating, and for plucking from limbs. They were ready. The sun was
warm. The moment was a moment of numerous clarities, air, body, and
mind.
"I wanted wanting and getting, and I invented means," says the
narrator. But of course, the act of concourse that takes place where
pear and daylight and the boy’s yearning inexorably come
together–that unstoppable blossoming of the world in the light of
human attention–is untranslatable, and therefore incommunicable; and
in it, Saroyan accesses the intractable loneliness borne at one time
or another by every human being. The boy can expect no understanding
>From anyone; he is branded a thief and receives a "sound licking with
a leather strap" for he possesses no language in which to mount a
defense of beauty’s power and our helplessness before it:
A tragic misfortune of youth is that it is speechless when it has the
most to say, and a sadness of maturity is that it is garrulous when
it has forgotten where to begin and what language to use. Oh, we have
been well-educated in error, all right. We at least know that we have
-forgotten.
"I know I was deeply sincere about wanting the ripe pears, and I know
I was determined to get them, and to remain innocent," says the boy,
and in that last phrase lies the unassuming power of Saroyan’s
writing. He knew firsthand that "people ain’t necessarily the same in
the evening as they were in the morning." But regardless of his
characters’ circumstances or their actions, for him, they remained
innocent: "If nothing else, drawing into the edge of full death every
person is restored to innocence–to have lived was not his fault."
Wayworn wings. A toy to stop you from crying. Pears. A word that
might explain everything. In William Saroyan, it is not that you can
keep the thing you love from disappearing in the distance, or that
the heart in each of us does not break to watch it go. It is not that
you will never die. But that, "in the time of your life," you must
find a way to live, an imperative both metaphysical and urgently
practical that none of us escapes. And that is the why of it, the
reason to read Saroyan, to read for the reason he said he wrote: "To
go on living."
To be pointed back toward the strange, once-in-every-lifetime miracle
of your own being, while you are still here, "still the brave man or
woman or child of the age, still famous for your breathing
uninterruptedly." To keep dancing like Harry the Hoofer, even in
expectation of the inevitable cessation of all movement. "It’s a
goofy dance," done "with great sorrow, but much energy." But, as
Saroyan wrote, "What a thing it is to be alive."
Ann Stapleton is a writer in Ohio.