Saroyan Turns 100

...Despite all our helplessness, so much of the world is left up to us...

...By abetting the escape of the hummingbird into the imagination of the reader, Saroyan wins the little handtohand combat with death which is this story...

...While on a boisterous crosscountry road trip in a new Buick paid for with money from Saroyan’s fi rst 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...

...As Saroyan’s son Aram noted in Last Rites, about his diffi cult relationship with his father, whereas most of us come to a fi rst 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...

...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 sun was warm...

...How can it possibly be...

...Even Saroyan’s lifelong best friend, his cousin Ross Bagdasarian, became suspect...

...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...

...But that, “in the time of your life,” you must fi nd a way to live, an imperative both metaphysical and urgently practical that none of us escapes...

...I wanted wanting and getting, and I invented means,” says the narrator...

...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...

...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...

...Do I make myself clear,” he added, “or would you like me to push your puss in...

...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 fi nd...

...his dream goes unrealized...

...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...

...His father, a failed poet, died of appendicitis when Saroyan was barely three years old...

...Lots of good men white, red, or some other color...

...And Saroyan the headstandman 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...

...Saroyan is very much the headstandman of American letters, reminding us to discard the dark-suited formalities that deaden our responses to the world and invite the life force in...

...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...

...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...

...Life goes on...

...The pears were fat and ready for eating, and for plucking from limbs...

...A word that might explain everything...

...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...

...It is this knowledge that death will one day take away everything that makes Saroyan a fi ne, acute poet of yearning...

...The Swiss critic Henri-Fr?d?ric Amiel wrote that dreams are a “semideliverance from the human prison,” a concept Saroyan takes as a given...

...But, as Saroyan wrote, “What a thing it is to be alive...

...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...

...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 fi t in somewhere...

...The entwisted particularity and universality of the image, in service to a truly desperate affi rmation 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...

...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...

...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...

...She would eventually succeed, but the process would take fi ve years...

...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 winter to which the bird must return...

...But “something did stay, something was constant, or appeared to be...

...Salinger, as it turned out) Carol once plagiarized in an attempt to write entertainingly to Saroyan...

...In his fl awless 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...

...Each of them, each of them,” he said swiftly and gently...

...and in it, Saroyan accesses the intractable loneliness borne at one time or another by every human being...

...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 fi nal illness, they effected a tender reconciliation...

...Color ain’t the trouble with me or anybody else...

...He told Lillian Hellman that her plays could use some songs to liven them up, and then proceeded to sing her some possibilities...

...The moment was a moment of numerous clarities, air, body, and mind...

...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 fl ash of light, beneath...

...Harry fails to make the world laugh...

...Affl icted 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...

...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...

...Yet his blundering movements make the audience want to weep in recognition of their own inelegant lives, their own ungraceful losses...

...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...

...The two fi gures and the tiny fl icker 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...

...What is this thing called life...

...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...

...A terrifying responsibility, in its way, about which Saroyan is wholly unsentimental, yet wholly encouraging: We must live...

...The man who could consume an entire watermelon at one sitting lived to write, and wrote voraciously, “to save [his] life...

...despair may dominate, it may qualify and color everything else, but everything else is also always there...

...They were ready...

...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 keep dancing like Harry the Hoofer, even in expectation of the inevitable cessation of all movement...

...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...

...The image of the ignorant, abdomenproud man seeking the source of all human dissatisfaction, anticipating his own imminent death even as he tries, so late, to fi nd 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...

...The most cynical of men looks upon his own child’s face and is changed by what it believes of him...

...But if temperament and early loss conspired to deprive Saroyan of a fulfi lling 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...

...He wanted to learn to write the way the snow was falling on the streets of New York, “the fi nest 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...

...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...

...In the wild throbbing of this smallest heart, we can feel our own pulse beat, and by extension, the whole world’s...

...The sun does shine: not every hour, not even every day, but often enough...

...The vividness of their own dreams makes Harry real...

...Saroyan was unhappily married, once for six years and a second time for a disastrous six months, to the sweetspirited 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...He knew that we need such victories to help us bear our lives...

...And the boy, too, must choose to act blindly, without ever knowing whether his love will save anything at all...

...Oh, we have been well-educated in error, all right...

...Each of them is our bird...

...A middleaged couple kisses, surprised to fi nd themselves, after so many years, in love...

...The tale is life-affi rming, yes, but only in a narrowly qualifi ed way that depends heavily for its impact on the hovering presence of death...

...Pears...

...Lots of good men black...

...A toy to stop you from crying...

...Who fool around with me this way all the time, make me carry on...

...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...

...It is not that you will never die...

...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...

...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 refl ects the reality of the psyche’s insistent, if roundabout, tendency toward its own continued existence: Despair overwhelms everybody, but for how long...

...James Mason once slapped him for talking nonstop at a premiere...

...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...

...According to John Leggett, the biographical author of A Daring Young Man, it was the “Saroyan social paradox, that he could fi ll a room with bonhomie, but people were no more real to him than characters in a dream...

...It was the kind that stayed...

...It’s a goofy dance,” done “with great sorrow, but much energy...

...His arrival constitutes a dance...

...This is the statement of a realist...

...BY ANN STAPLETON “I do not know what makes a writer, but it is probably not happiness,” wrote the Fresno-born ArmenianAmerican author and playwright William Saroyan, who died in 1981...

...Someone somewhere peers into the abyss and roars with laughter...

...Who make me ornery...

...Something else the trouble with me...

...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 fl ashed...

...The man is aged and mortal...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...and it would be inaccurate, though it would make for easier playwriting, to pretend that this were not so...

...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...

...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...

...Who make me proud of my abdomen right here in this sad place, at this sad time, Poseyo...

...He was “hooked into the abyss at both ends...

...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 fi rsthand that “people ain’t necessarily the same in the evening as they were in the morning...

...And knowing it will someday perish, what do we do with it now...

...We at least know that we have forgotten...

...Years after he wrote The Time of Your Life, Saroyan would realize that Harry the Hoofer was that toy brought to life...

...In the time of your life, live...

...The boy can expect no understanding from anyone...

...I reached the trees breathless but alert and smiling...

...The next day the newspapers would show the man, a kind of innocent who appeared to have no profi t motive for his behavior, “standing on his head surrounded by astonished dowagers and dandies...