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Saroyan and me
Prize-winning writer recalls his mentor.
Fresno Bee
By Mark Arax
August 7, 2005
The 2005 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing was announced
July 19 and Mark Arax of Fresno and Rick Wartzman of Los Angeles
were the recipients of the nonfiction category for their book, "The
King of California." This is Arax's acceptance speech at Stanford
University. At the risk of sounding parochial, I drove here today from
Fresno, up Highway 99, past the grape fields and peach orchards, past
the farmworkers picking in the 107-degree sun, some of them literally
dying of heat stroke in this harvest. As I drove by Uncle Melik's old
pomegranate orchard, I couldn't help but think of a summer just as
hot and brutal 25 years ago when I said goodbye to the San Joaquin
Valley and headed to New York City for grad school.
My heart was set on being a writer, but everyone in my family thought
it best that I pursue the law -- everyone but my grandfather, Aram
Arax. He was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, a young poet with
the last name of Hosepian who took the pen name Arax from our mother
river, which poured down from Mt. Ararat. When he arrived in Fresno
in the summer of 1920, my grandfather wanted nothing more than to
continue his writing. But he did what all poets do when they land
in the Valley. He got down on his hands and knees and began picking
potatoes and then bell peppers and then grapes. Sixty years later,
his grandson wanted to be a writer and damned if he was going to see
that dream succumb to the idea of one more lawyer in America.
So he hatched a plan. He would take me, on the eve of leaving for New
York, to visit his old friend, the one man who might set me straight.
I picked him up and we drove to two tract houses side-by-side in
west Fresno. They looked like all the other tract houses except
the front lawn was waist high with weeds and filled with mint. The
old guy inside picked the mint every day to put in his yogurt. We
knocked on the door, and I will never forget the boom of his voice
from the kitchen. "Come on in fellow Fresnans, fellow Armenians,
fellow writers. I'm just finishing lunch."
The door opened and I could see right away that William Saroyan wasn't
quite the lion I remembered. He was thinner and more pale.
Only the mustache seemed as ferocious. The living room where he invited
us to sit was a lovely clutter. A big Formica table with his typewriter
stood in the middle surrounded by piles of books and free-form art he
had drawn in crayon and pen, pieces of glass and twine he had picked
up from that morning's bicycle ride, rocks and pebbles he collected
to remind himself, he told us, that art should be simple.
It was a 105 outside and the room felt like a blast furnace. He said he
liked to perspire when he wrote and feel the cool of air conditioning
only at night, in bed. He opened the window to let in some midday
air. On the ledge, he had placed a recorder with which he taped the
sounds of night -- hours and hours of nothing punctuated by the buzz
of a fly, the chirp of a robin.
We were there a good hour, but I don't recall much of the
conversation. What comes back to me now, a quarter century later,
are the silly questions I peppered him with.
"I don't know if I have the stomach for the life of a writer," I told
him, surveying the room." He laughed a big belly laugh. "Please don't
judge a writer by these surroundings. There is no formula for being
a writer. It's what you are and what you're going to be and what's
going to happen."
"But the way you live seems important."
"It's only important to find what works for you. You must be alone
and have a place to write. So it's lonely sometimes, but it isn't
abject loneliness. Rather a kind of majestic one, a kinship with
larger things."
Did being a writer, a real writer, mean there would be no time for
wife or children?
He was too kind to laugh again.
"Not if it's the right marriage. Not any more than any other
intensely felt profession. Maybe less. I was married to the same
woman twice. Walter Matthau has her now. Thank God."
He said he wrote using 300 words of the English language -- no more.
Count them. And then in my exuberance, I asked a question that no
writer, mediocre or mighty, ought to be asked. Would he kindly
provide me with a reading list -- the great books of American
fiction? On the back side of an envelope from his publisher, he
scribbled wildly. "Mark Twain, our best." "Edgar Lee Masters for the
'Spoon River Anthology.' Sherwood Anderson, for 'Winesburg Ohio.'
Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe's 'Look Homeward Angel.' "
Even himself, though he seemed almost apologetic for suggesting it.
"Let's include Saroyan. 'Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in There
Forever,' even though that's not the title I chose."
Grandpa said it was time to go, and Saroyan showed us to the front
door. Then from behind his back, like a magician, he produced a copy
of his latest book, "Obituaries." "Here," he said. "This is for you.
For New York City. Don't be put off by the title. It's not about
death at all. It's about living."
When I got in the car, I opened the book and on the first blank page,
to my surprise and delight, Saroyan had penned a note. I read it
to Grandpa.
"For Aram Arax, grandfather, and to Mark Arax, grandson. Fellow
Armenians. Fellow Writers. It is a track. It is a profession. But
most of all writing is being alive. Continued good luck, Bill Saroyan."
Pop nodded his head and smiled. Then he laughed and said. "You would
have thought the jackass could have turned on the air conditioning
a while."
I returned to the Fresno heat a decade later to write a memoir,
"In My Father's Name," about my grandfather and his journey out of
genocide and the unsolved murder of his son, my father, when I was
15. And I returned in 1997 to tackle the King of California. I was
sitting in my back yard with my close friend and colleague, Rick
Wartzman, explaining how I had begun a book that was going to take
me 10 years at least. It was the story of how the South came West,
how the Boswells and other plantation owners had left Georgia and
Virginia, chased out by the boll weevil, and grafted their Dixie
onto a corner of California. Jim Boswell, a Stanford-educated cowboy,
had sucked dry Tulare Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of
Mississippi, and carved out the richest cotton patch in the world.
Rick and I joined forces that night and we ended up writing something I
swore I would never write -- a book with footnotes, 100 pages of them.
On behalf of Rick and myself, I want to thank Stanford University,
librarian Michael Keller, the Saroyan Foundation and its director,
Bob Setrakian, and the judges for this honor. I guess you now know
why this prize is so special for me. And I want to thank Bill himself
for telling me, on our very first visit when I was 18, that I could
never bring paper or pen inside his house.
"Notes are crutches," he explained. "If you're going to be a writer,
you have to see things. And you can't very well see things if your
face is stuck in some notebook."
Mark Arax is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
Prize-winning writer recalls his mentor.
Fresno Bee
By Mark Arax
August 7, 2005
The 2005 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing was announced
July 19 and Mark Arax of Fresno and Rick Wartzman of Los Angeles
were the recipients of the nonfiction category for their book, "The
King of California." This is Arax's acceptance speech at Stanford
University. At the risk of sounding parochial, I drove here today from
Fresno, up Highway 99, past the grape fields and peach orchards, past
the farmworkers picking in the 107-degree sun, some of them literally
dying of heat stroke in this harvest. As I drove by Uncle Melik's old
pomegranate orchard, I couldn't help but think of a summer just as
hot and brutal 25 years ago when I said goodbye to the San Joaquin
Valley and headed to New York City for grad school.
My heart was set on being a writer, but everyone in my family thought
it best that I pursue the law -- everyone but my grandfather, Aram
Arax. He was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, a young poet with
the last name of Hosepian who took the pen name Arax from our mother
river, which poured down from Mt. Ararat. When he arrived in Fresno
in the summer of 1920, my grandfather wanted nothing more than to
continue his writing. But he did what all poets do when they land
in the Valley. He got down on his hands and knees and began picking
potatoes and then bell peppers and then grapes. Sixty years later,
his grandson wanted to be a writer and damned if he was going to see
that dream succumb to the idea of one more lawyer in America.
So he hatched a plan. He would take me, on the eve of leaving for New
York, to visit his old friend, the one man who might set me straight.
I picked him up and we drove to two tract houses side-by-side in
west Fresno. They looked like all the other tract houses except
the front lawn was waist high with weeds and filled with mint. The
old guy inside picked the mint every day to put in his yogurt. We
knocked on the door, and I will never forget the boom of his voice
from the kitchen. "Come on in fellow Fresnans, fellow Armenians,
fellow writers. I'm just finishing lunch."
The door opened and I could see right away that William Saroyan wasn't
quite the lion I remembered. He was thinner and more pale.
Only the mustache seemed as ferocious. The living room where he invited
us to sit was a lovely clutter. A big Formica table with his typewriter
stood in the middle surrounded by piles of books and free-form art he
had drawn in crayon and pen, pieces of glass and twine he had picked
up from that morning's bicycle ride, rocks and pebbles he collected
to remind himself, he told us, that art should be simple.
It was a 105 outside and the room felt like a blast furnace. He said he
liked to perspire when he wrote and feel the cool of air conditioning
only at night, in bed. He opened the window to let in some midday
air. On the ledge, he had placed a recorder with which he taped the
sounds of night -- hours and hours of nothing punctuated by the buzz
of a fly, the chirp of a robin.
We were there a good hour, but I don't recall much of the
conversation. What comes back to me now, a quarter century later,
are the silly questions I peppered him with.
"I don't know if I have the stomach for the life of a writer," I told
him, surveying the room." He laughed a big belly laugh. "Please don't
judge a writer by these surroundings. There is no formula for being
a writer. It's what you are and what you're going to be and what's
going to happen."
"But the way you live seems important."
"It's only important to find what works for you. You must be alone
and have a place to write. So it's lonely sometimes, but it isn't
abject loneliness. Rather a kind of majestic one, a kinship with
larger things."
Did being a writer, a real writer, mean there would be no time for
wife or children?
He was too kind to laugh again.
"Not if it's the right marriage. Not any more than any other
intensely felt profession. Maybe less. I was married to the same
woman twice. Walter Matthau has her now. Thank God."
He said he wrote using 300 words of the English language -- no more.
Count them. And then in my exuberance, I asked a question that no
writer, mediocre or mighty, ought to be asked. Would he kindly
provide me with a reading list -- the great books of American
fiction? On the back side of an envelope from his publisher, he
scribbled wildly. "Mark Twain, our best." "Edgar Lee Masters for the
'Spoon River Anthology.' Sherwood Anderson, for 'Winesburg Ohio.'
Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe's 'Look Homeward Angel.' "
Even himself, though he seemed almost apologetic for suggesting it.
"Let's include Saroyan. 'Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in There
Forever,' even though that's not the title I chose."
Grandpa said it was time to go, and Saroyan showed us to the front
door. Then from behind his back, like a magician, he produced a copy
of his latest book, "Obituaries." "Here," he said. "This is for you.
For New York City. Don't be put off by the title. It's not about
death at all. It's about living."
When I got in the car, I opened the book and on the first blank page,
to my surprise and delight, Saroyan had penned a note. I read it
to Grandpa.
"For Aram Arax, grandfather, and to Mark Arax, grandson. Fellow
Armenians. Fellow Writers. It is a track. It is a profession. But
most of all writing is being alive. Continued good luck, Bill Saroyan."
Pop nodded his head and smiled. Then he laughed and said. "You would
have thought the jackass could have turned on the air conditioning
a while."
I returned to the Fresno heat a decade later to write a memoir,
"In My Father's Name," about my grandfather and his journey out of
genocide and the unsolved murder of his son, my father, when I was
15. And I returned in 1997 to tackle the King of California. I was
sitting in my back yard with my close friend and colleague, Rick
Wartzman, explaining how I had begun a book that was going to take
me 10 years at least. It was the story of how the South came West,
how the Boswells and other plantation owners had left Georgia and
Virginia, chased out by the boll weevil, and grafted their Dixie
onto a corner of California. Jim Boswell, a Stanford-educated cowboy,
had sucked dry Tulare Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of
Mississippi, and carved out the richest cotton patch in the world.
Rick and I joined forces that night and we ended up writing something I
swore I would never write -- a book with footnotes, 100 pages of them.
On behalf of Rick and myself, I want to thank Stanford University,
librarian Michael Keller, the Saroyan Foundation and its director,
Bob Setrakian, and the judges for this honor. I guess you now know
why this prize is so special for me. And I want to thank Bill himself
for telling me, on our very first visit when I was 18, that I could
never bring paper or pen inside his house.
"Notes are crutches," he explained. "If you're going to be a writer,
you have to see things. And you can't very well see things if your
face is stuck in some notebook."
Mark Arax is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
