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by Jonathan Kirsch, Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to Book
Los Angeles Times
September 11, 2005 Sunday
Home Edition
BOOK REVIEW; Features Desk; Part R; Pg. 2
WEST WORDS;
Essential Saroyan A Selection of William Saroyan's Best Writings
William Saroyan, edited by William E. Justice Heyday Books/Santa
Clara University: 208 pp., $11.95 paper
Review, is at work on a book about Revelation and its role in
American culture and politics.
SAROYAN is a brand name in American letters. Nowadays, however, the
famous surname appears mostly on the work of Aram Saroyan ("Artists
in Trouble") and his daughter, Strawberry ("Girl Walks Into a Bar").
The founder of the family dynasty, Aram's father, William, is sadly
neglected. When his work is read at all, it is mostly compulsory in
a college survey course or a high school textbook. "For whatever
reasons," observed Peter H. King in a 1997 column in The Times,
"Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine."
William E. Justice, who previously co-edited the lively anthology
"California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century," sets out
to restore the paterfamilias to his rightful place in "Essential
Saroyan," a discerning sampler of the writer's most enchanting and
enduring fiction. "This book is a valentine," Justice confesses. "But
lest you take its sentiment lightly, be warned: it hides a landmine.
It may leave you forever changed."
Time magazine saluted Saroyan at the end of his life for the "ease and
charm" of his stories, but the apparent compliment carries a subtext --
his principal literary crime, according to his contemporary critics,
was a certain sentimentality and even soft-heartedness. But whether
these qualities ought to be regarded as a weakness or a strength
remains in the eye of the beholder.
"The sheer, unabashed \o7adolescence\f7 of the man, with all its
bravado, sentiment, and defiant idealism," writes Justice, "came to
define Saroyan."
Indeed, Saroyan was perfectly capable of the showy gesture, another
quirk that did not endear him to the cooler critics. "As a writer,"
Justice points out, "Saroyan was an athlete." Perhaps the best example
is the challenge he set for himself in 1934 -- Saroyan wrote one short
story daily for a month and submitted each to Story magazine, which
published them. A year later, his first and most famous collection,
"The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories,"
was a bestseller. Its title story opens "Essential Saroyan."
"Horizontally wakeful amid universal widths," he writes in its
beginning passage to describe the phantasmagorical moment when the
protagonist stirs from sleep, "practicing laughter and mirth, satire,
the end of all, Rome and yes of Babylon, clenched teeth, remembrance,
much warmth volcanic, the streets of Paris, the plains of Jericho,
much gliding as of reptile in abstraction, a gallery of watercolors,
the sea and the fish with eyes, symphony, a table in the corner
of the Eiffel Tower, jazz at the opera house, alarm clock and the
tap-dancing of doom, conversation with a tree, the river Nile, the
roar of Dostoevsky, and the dark sun."
Even the reader has to take a breath.
Saroyan was born in Fresno in 1908 and spent five years in an Oakland
orphanage before his widowed mother took back her children. He chose
the Central Valley as the setting of some of his most accomplished
fiction, including his autobiographical novel "The Human Comedy."
Thus, he places his characters in the same public library where the
largely self-taught author acquired his love of reading and writing.
"[E]veryone was hushed, because they were seeking wisdom," he writes of
the reading room. "They were near books. They were trying to find out."
Saroyan celebrated his Armenian heritage with unapologetic pride
of ancestry and a certain self-deprecating humor: "We barbarians
from Asia Minor are hairy people," he writes in "Seventy Thousand
Assyrians." "[W]hen we need a haircut, we \o7need \f7a haircut." His
novel "My Name Is Aram" has been called "the Armenian 'Huck Finn,' "
Justice writes in his introduction. At the end of his life, Saroyan's
ashes were divided between Fresno and Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
Saroyan's famously unhappy marriage to his much-courted first wife,
Carol -- his rivals included Orson Welles, Clifford Odets and Marlon
Brando, and she later married actor Walter Matthau -- is mentioned
only in Justice's illuminating introduction. But Saroyan's deep
embitterment over his service in World War II explains the fear and
anger that boils up in "The Adventures of Wesley Jackson," a wholly
unsentimental antiwar novel that carries some of the same sting as
Joseph Heller's "Catch-22."
"[T]he big-family spirit that comes over a whole country when there's
a War makes me a little suspicious of the people who throw the party
because it seems to me they are always smiling and full of hope and
too quick to be heroic, whereas the fellows in uniform are confused
and miserable most of the time," declares the protagonist. "\o7I'm\f7
scared because I'm in the Army, but what the hell's scaring the people
who aren't in the Army?"
Saroyan acquits himself of the charge of mawkishness in the final
selection, "A Writer's Declaration, a blend of memoir and manifesto
that includes some of the most bracing wisdom one author has ever
shared with his fellow writers. It is worth the price of the volume.
"What advice have I for the potential writer?" he asks. "I have
none, for anybody is a potential writer, and the writer who is a
writer needs no advice and seeks none.... The writer is a spiritual
anarchist as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented
with everything and everybody.... When he's dead he'll probably be
as dead as others are dead, but while he is alive he is alive as no
one else is, not even another writer.... He is also mad, measurably
so, but saner than all others, with the best sanity, the only sanity
worth bothering about -- the living, creative, vulnerable, valorous,
unintimidated, and arrogant sanity of a free man."
Justice insists that Saroyan was "once the most famous writer on
earth" and argues that he belongs in the company of Kahlil Gibran,
Dylan Thomas, J.D. Salinger, C.S. Lewis, the Brontes, Dostoevsky, Jack
Kerouac and Sylvia Plath. Even if the praise is a bit overwrought, the
fact remains that Justice has picked well from Saroyan's life work and
makes the case that the great man is sadly and unfairly neglected. *
Los Angeles Times
September 11, 2005 Sunday
Home Edition
BOOK REVIEW; Features Desk; Part R; Pg. 2
WEST WORDS;
Essential Saroyan A Selection of William Saroyan's Best Writings
William Saroyan, edited by William E. Justice Heyday Books/Santa
Clara University: 208 pp., $11.95 paper
Review, is at work on a book about Revelation and its role in
American culture and politics.
SAROYAN is a brand name in American letters. Nowadays, however, the
famous surname appears mostly on the work of Aram Saroyan ("Artists
in Trouble") and his daughter, Strawberry ("Girl Walks Into a Bar").
The founder of the family dynasty, Aram's father, William, is sadly
neglected. When his work is read at all, it is mostly compulsory in
a college survey course or a high school textbook. "For whatever
reasons," observed Peter H. King in a 1997 column in The Times,
"Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine."
William E. Justice, who previously co-edited the lively anthology
"California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century," sets out
to restore the paterfamilias to his rightful place in "Essential
Saroyan," a discerning sampler of the writer's most enchanting and
enduring fiction. "This book is a valentine," Justice confesses. "But
lest you take its sentiment lightly, be warned: it hides a landmine.
It may leave you forever changed."
Time magazine saluted Saroyan at the end of his life for the "ease and
charm" of his stories, but the apparent compliment carries a subtext --
his principal literary crime, according to his contemporary critics,
was a certain sentimentality and even soft-heartedness. But whether
these qualities ought to be regarded as a weakness or a strength
remains in the eye of the beholder.
"The sheer, unabashed \o7adolescence\f7 of the man, with all its
bravado, sentiment, and defiant idealism," writes Justice, "came to
define Saroyan."
Indeed, Saroyan was perfectly capable of the showy gesture, another
quirk that did not endear him to the cooler critics. "As a writer,"
Justice points out, "Saroyan was an athlete." Perhaps the best example
is the challenge he set for himself in 1934 -- Saroyan wrote one short
story daily for a month and submitted each to Story magazine, which
published them. A year later, his first and most famous collection,
"The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories,"
was a bestseller. Its title story opens "Essential Saroyan."
"Horizontally wakeful amid universal widths," he writes in its
beginning passage to describe the phantasmagorical moment when the
protagonist stirs from sleep, "practicing laughter and mirth, satire,
the end of all, Rome and yes of Babylon, clenched teeth, remembrance,
much warmth volcanic, the streets of Paris, the plains of Jericho,
much gliding as of reptile in abstraction, a gallery of watercolors,
the sea and the fish with eyes, symphony, a table in the corner
of the Eiffel Tower, jazz at the opera house, alarm clock and the
tap-dancing of doom, conversation with a tree, the river Nile, the
roar of Dostoevsky, and the dark sun."
Even the reader has to take a breath.
Saroyan was born in Fresno in 1908 and spent five years in an Oakland
orphanage before his widowed mother took back her children. He chose
the Central Valley as the setting of some of his most accomplished
fiction, including his autobiographical novel "The Human Comedy."
Thus, he places his characters in the same public library where the
largely self-taught author acquired his love of reading and writing.
"[E]veryone was hushed, because they were seeking wisdom," he writes of
the reading room. "They were near books. They were trying to find out."
Saroyan celebrated his Armenian heritage with unapologetic pride
of ancestry and a certain self-deprecating humor: "We barbarians
from Asia Minor are hairy people," he writes in "Seventy Thousand
Assyrians." "[W]hen we need a haircut, we \o7need \f7a haircut." His
novel "My Name Is Aram" has been called "the Armenian 'Huck Finn,' "
Justice writes in his introduction. At the end of his life, Saroyan's
ashes were divided between Fresno and Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
Saroyan's famously unhappy marriage to his much-courted first wife,
Carol -- his rivals included Orson Welles, Clifford Odets and Marlon
Brando, and she later married actor Walter Matthau -- is mentioned
only in Justice's illuminating introduction. But Saroyan's deep
embitterment over his service in World War II explains the fear and
anger that boils up in "The Adventures of Wesley Jackson," a wholly
unsentimental antiwar novel that carries some of the same sting as
Joseph Heller's "Catch-22."
"[T]he big-family spirit that comes over a whole country when there's
a War makes me a little suspicious of the people who throw the party
because it seems to me they are always smiling and full of hope and
too quick to be heroic, whereas the fellows in uniform are confused
and miserable most of the time," declares the protagonist. "\o7I'm\f7
scared because I'm in the Army, but what the hell's scaring the people
who aren't in the Army?"
Saroyan acquits himself of the charge of mawkishness in the final
selection, "A Writer's Declaration, a blend of memoir and manifesto
that includes some of the most bracing wisdom one author has ever
shared with his fellow writers. It is worth the price of the volume.
"What advice have I for the potential writer?" he asks. "I have
none, for anybody is a potential writer, and the writer who is a
writer needs no advice and seeks none.... The writer is a spiritual
anarchist as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented
with everything and everybody.... When he's dead he'll probably be
as dead as others are dead, but while he is alive he is alive as no
one else is, not even another writer.... He is also mad, measurably
so, but saner than all others, with the best sanity, the only sanity
worth bothering about -- the living, creative, vulnerable, valorous,
unintimidated, and arrogant sanity of a free man."
Justice insists that Saroyan was "once the most famous writer on
earth" and argues that he belongs in the company of Kahlil Gibran,
Dylan Thomas, J.D. Salinger, C.S. Lewis, the Brontes, Dostoevsky, Jack
Kerouac and Sylvia Plath. Even if the praise is a bit overwrought, the
fact remains that Justice has picked well from Saroyan's life work and
makes the case that the great man is sadly and unfairly neglected. *
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