Swans.com
March 9 2009
William Saroyan’s Where The Bones Go
by Charles Marowitz
Book Review
Saroyan, William: Where The Bones Go, edited by Robert Setrakian, The
Press at California State University Fresno, 2002, ISBN 0-912201-36-3,
141 pages
(Swans – March 9, 2009) William Saroyan was an early love. I
discovered him when I was a teenager and the love affair remained hot
and heavy for some fifteen years. The bait that I swallowed whole was
the short story collection, The Flying Young Man On The Flying
Trapeze. It seemed to me that Saroyan was the only writer I had come
across who was able to dramatize and decipher the grains of sand that,
in some arcane but translatable language, contained all of life’s
secrets. While other writers wove tales, created suspense, developed,
then resolved conflicts, Saroyan seemed to be stubbornly ethereal —
communing with a deeper consciousness that bypassed the mundane, and
yet often used the mundane as a starting point for revealing life’s
mysteries.
But when I moved to England, I was razzed by Oxbridge-educated
literary friends for admiring such a soppy, sentimental, trivial, and
Pollyanna-like writer. My reverence for the enchanting Armenian, I
must confess, lapsed as I was wooed away by writers such as Gide,
Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, etc. But occasionally, the old love rekindled
and I found myself not only re-reading the early works but actually
directing the British premiere of Saroyan’s The Cave Dwellers and,
thrill-of-all thrills, actually corresponding with the holy man
himself.
Referring to the dramatists who were nudging him off the pedestal on
which he had been placed in the late 1930s and ’40s, Saroyan wrote in
a letter dated March 29, 1961:
…the time is coming when the greatest dramas will be laughable,
parodies almost, to the human race in general. Now the theatre belongs
to a kind of specialist who is actually very backward. Tortured plays,
tortured audiences; well, when the audiences aren’t tortured, as we
must presume they shall eventually become, a whole new order of drama
has got to come along; Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet et al are
serving that new order well by making the old as sick as it is
possible to be an hour or two before death itself. Genius and trauma
are the cliché partnership, but there are other partners for genius —
but not now, maybe, and that’s a little of the reason my stuff can
annoy some people terribly. They see all in themselves and around them
as sickness and impending death, and they have got to be impatient
with anything else…
This, of course, was Saroyan the Outsider speaking, a writer whose
plays such as Sam Ego’s House and Jim Dandy, Fat Man in a Famine were
rejected by the main stream critics who regularly looked back fondly
to the early award-winning works like The Time of Your Life and My
Heart’s In The Highland as freak successes by a writer who obviously
was fixated in another period — another style — and had little or
nothing to say to the Swinging Sixties or beyond. But the gentle,
probing, humanistic outlook that enriched those early works could just
as readily have been found in the later, rejected plays, if the times
hadn’t had such a low estimation of their wayward sentimentality.
Where The Bones Go, Saroyan’s posthumous prose work, was undertaken in
his last years, when he was suffering from prostate cancer and looking
death in the eye. The manuscript was uncovered ten years after his
death in l981 and represents the work of a man who, having maintained
all of his life by assembling words to convey his insights about the
human condition, was addicted to writing and used it to sustain what
little there remained of his life. To the last breath he took, Saroyan
was playfully Saroyanesque, and Where The Bones Go is full of short,
terse, whimsical prose that virtually never descends into
self-pity. Saroyan’s most passionate love affair was with life itself
and it sustained him, as he revered it, to the very end of his days.
The book, a fragile l40 pages, masterfully edited by Robert Setrakian,
is divided into seven sections, beginning with Saroyan’s meditation on
death that, of course, plunges him into celebratory memories of
life. There are short essays on writing, music, films and theatre,
memories of Fresno where he was born and raised and whose influences
he never forgot, as well as a section of obituaries in which he
recreates people such as Nelson Rockefeller, Charlie Chaplin, Walter
White, James Joyce, Leonard Lyons, etc. Everywhere, in each brief
flurry of recollection, the Saroyanesque sense of wonder and whimsy
shines through, enlivening the most ordinary events and recalling
people he knew or wished he had known. There is a touching, vulnerable
reverie over a suppressed love for a lovely young understudy in The
Time of Your Life and reflections on commonplace subjects such as his
weakness for Fig Newtons and stuffed grape leaves.
Everywhere, Saroyan celebrates the ordinary, the inane, the
overlooked, and the commonplace — seeing all of these as elements in
a multifarious tapestry, which would be part of our every-day life, if
only we had the insight to recognize it. Sprinkled through its pages
is the author’s impregnable bond with Armenia; an historical
rootedness that he can never shake off. It is as if everything that
Saroyan was, and every word he ever wrote, was in some way fashioned
by those Armenian roots; a land that, although virtually obliterated,
Saroyan manages lovingly to recreate.
To someone who loved life as devoutly as Saroyan did, death appears as
a hideous atrocity that makes one loathe its inevitability. Once, when
asked about his profession, he replied: "My work is writing, but my
real work is being." Thankfully, that celebration of "being" permeates
every page of Where The Bones Go and, so long as the books, the plays,
and the stories survive, Saroyan can be said to have outwitted his
nemesis, death.
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