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William Saroyan (1908-1981) |
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American author whose stories celebrated optimism in the middle of trials and difficulties of the Depression-era. Several of William Saroyan's works were drawn from his own experiences, although his approach to autobiographical facts can be called poetic. His advice to a young writer was: "Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell." Saroyan worked tirelessly to perfect a prose style, that was full of zest of for life and was seemingly impressionistic. The style became known as 'Saroyanesque.' "The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy—the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops. He does not conform for the simple reason that there is nothing yet worth conforming to. When there is something half worth conforming to he will not conform to that, either, or half conform to it. He won't even rest or sleep as other people rest and sleep. When he's dead he'll probably be dead as others are dead, but while he is alive he is alive as no one else is, not even another writer." ('A Writer's Declaration,' The William Saroyan Reader, introduction by William Saroyan, third printing, 1965, p. 497; first published in 1958) William Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, the son of an Armenian immigrant. His father moved to New Jersey in 1905 – he was a small vineyard owner, who had been educated as a Presbyterian minister. In the new country he was forced to take farm-labouring work. He died in 1911 from peritonitis, after drinking a forbidden glass of water given by his wife, Takoohi. Saroyan was put in an orphanage in Alameda with his brothers. Six years later the family reunited in Fresno, where Takoohi had obtained work in a cannery. In 1921 Saroyan attended the Technical School in order to learn to type. At the age of fifteen, Saroyan left the school. His mother had showed him some of his fathers writings, and he decided to become a writer. Saroyan continued his education by reading and writing on his own, and supporting himself by odd jobs. At the San Francisco Telegraph Company he worked as an office manager. A few of his early short articles were published in The Overland Monthly. His first collected stories started to appear in the 1930s. Among these was 'The Broken Wheel,' which was written under the name Sirak Goryan. It was published in the Armenian journal Hairenik in 1933. As a writer Saroyan made his breakthrough in the Story
magazine with 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze' (1934),
after the popular song. The protagonist is a young, starving writer who
tries to survive in a Depression-ridden society. "Through the air on the flying trapeze,
his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God,
or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed
objectively for strength to make the flight with grace." (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, New York: Random House, 1934, p. 21) Saroyan's character has some connections to Knut Hamsun's penniless writer in his famous novel Hunger (1890), but without the anger and nihilism of Hamsun's narrator. The story was republished in Saroyan's bestselling collection, and with its royalties Saroyan financed his trip to Europe and Armenia, where he learned to love the taste of Russian cigarettes. He also developed a theory that "you may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself." (Not Dying by William Saroyan, with drawings by the author, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963, p. 9) Many of Saroyan's stories were based on his childhood, experiences among the Armenian-American fruit growers of the San Joaquin Valley, or dealt with the rootlessness of the immigrant. The short story collection My Name Is Aram (1940), an international bestseller, was about a young boy, Aram Garoghlanian, and the colorful characters of his immigrant family. It has been translated among others into Finnish. As a playwright Saroyan's work was drawn from deeply personal sources. He disregarded the conventional idea of conflict as essential to drama. My Heart in the Highlands (1939), his first play, was a comedy about a young boy and his Armenian family. It was produced at the Guild Theatre in New York. Among Saroyan's best known plays is The Time of Your Life (1939), set in a waterfront saloon in San Francisco. It won a Pulitzer Prize. Saroyan refused the honor, on the grounds that commerce should not judge the arts, but accepted the New York Drama Critics Circle award. In 1948 the play was adapted into screen, starring James Gagney. The Human Comedy (1943) was set in Ithaca, in California's
San Joaquin Valley, where the young Homer, a telegraph messenger,
becomes a witness of sorrows and joys of small town people during World
War II. ""Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead. Maybe
it's a mistake. Everybody makes a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else.
The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong."" (Ibid., pp. 38-29) The story was bought by
MGM and made Saroyan's shaky financial situation more secure.
Louis B. Mayer had purchased the story for $60,000 and gave
Saroyan $1,500 a week for his work as producer-director. After seeing Saroyan's short film, Mayer gave the direction to Clarence Brown. The sentimental final sequence of the Oscar-winning film, starring Mickey Rooney and Frank Morgan, has been called "the most embarrassing moment in the whole history of movies." (The Story of Cinema: A Complete Narrative History from the Beginnings to the Present by David Shipman, preface by Ingmar Bergman, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986, p. 583) Before the war Saroyan had worked at one point on the screenplay of Golden Boy (1939), based on Clifford Odet's play, but he never gained much success in Hollywood, although his screenplay for The Human Comedy won the an Oscar for Best Original Motion Picture Story. The film was also nominated for best picture, best director, best cinematography and best actor. Saroyan also published
essays and memoirs, in which he depicted the people he had met on travels in the
Soviet Union and Europe, such as the playwright
George Bernard Shaw, the Finnish composer Jean
Sibelius, and Charlie Chaplin. Saroyan met Sibelius in 1935, after
returning from the Soviet Union, but he did not get an interview, just
whiskey and cigars. As a result of mocking Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoo in a little passage in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, Heminway responded in an article he sent to Arnold Gingrich, Esquire's editor: "And we've seen them come and go, Mr. Saroyan," he wrote. "Better ones than you, Mr. Saroyan. . . . . You want to watch yourself, Mr. S., that you don't get so bright that you don't learn. . . . Also your ear isn't so good. And a good ear in a writer is like a good left hand in a fighter. Do I make myself clear?" (A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan by John Leggett, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, p. 44) The feud between the writers was not settled; hostilities opened in the wartime London. During World War II Saroyan joined the US army. He was stationed in Astoria, Queens, but he spent much of his time at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan, far from the Army personnel. In 1942 he was posted to London in as a part of a film unit and narrowly avoided a court martial, when his novel The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946) turned out to be pacifist. Saroyan was well acquainted with the San Francisco night life, and
had enjoyed multiple short lived "affairs" or one-night
stands. According to a story, when a woman in Hollywood refused a
late night telephone invitation to his bed, Saroyan was reportedly to
have asked, if she had a sister who would comply. In his
mid-thirties Saroyan married the seventeen-years-old Carol Grace;
they had two children, Aram and Lucy. Carol was blond, voluptious and
witty, her mother was Russian and step-father of German-Jewish origin. Saroyan dedicated Dear Baby (1944), a collection of stories, to his wife.
She claimed in her memoir, Among the Porcupines (1992), that she inspirated the Holly Golightly character in Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). After the birth of Lucy in 1946, Saroyan's marriage began to fall apart. When Carol revealed that she had lied about her background, she was actually illegitimate and her mother was Jewish, Saroyan divorced. They briefly remarried in 1951 and divorced. "Suicide was suicide, divorce was divorce. I flipped a coin, and it came up divorce," Saroyan wrote long after. (Saroyan: A Biography by Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005, p. 254) Lucy made a career as an actress and photographer. Aram became a poet, who published a book about his father. Carol married later the actor Walter Matthau. It did not improve Saroyan's financial situation that
interest in his novels declined and he was criticized for
sentimentalism. Freedom, brotherly love and universal
benevolence were for him basic values, but with his idealism Saroyan
was considered more or less out of date. However, he wrote
prolifically. "How could you you write so much good stuff and still
write such bad stuff?" asked one of his readers. In 1952 Saroyan
published the first of several book-length memoirs, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills. In the title novella of The Assyrian, and Other Stories (1950) and in The Laughing Matter (1953) Saroyan mixed allegorical elements within a realistic novel. The plays Sam Ego's House (1949) and The Slaughter of the Innocents (1958) examined moral questions. They did not gain the success of his prewar works. The Paris Comedy (1960), The London Comedy (1960), and Settled Out Court (1969) premiered in Europe. A number of his plays, now housed at Stanford University with his other papers, have never been performed. Saroyan worked rapidly, hardly editing his text. Much of his earnings he spent in drinking and gambling. From 1958 the author lived mainly in Paris, where he had an apartment. In the late 1960s and the 1970s Saroyan managed to write himself out of debt and create substantial income. William Saroyan died from cancer on May 18, 1981, in Fresno. "Everybody has got to die," he said on his deathbed, "but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?" (quoted in 'A Last Saroyan Story' by Peter H. King, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 19.1991) Half of his ashes were buried in California, and the rest in Armenia. For further reading: William Saroyan by Howard R. Floan (1966); My Name is Saroyan by William Saroyan and James H. Tashjian (1983), William Saroyan: A Study of the Short Fiction by Edward Halsey Foster (1984); Saroyan: A Biography by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee (1984); Willie & Varaz: Memories of My Friend William Saroyan by Varaz Samuelian (1985); William Saroyan: The Man and the Writer Remembered, ed. by Leo Harmalian (1987); Critical Essays on William Saroyan, ed. by Harry Keyishan (1995); William Saroyan: A Research and Production Sourcebook by Jon Whimore (1995); The World of William Saroyan by Nona Balakian (1998); A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan by John Leggett (2002); William Saroyan: Places in Time by Janice Stevens and Pat Hunter (2008); The Construction of Fiction through Personal Experience in the Work of William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac: The Autobiographical Component of Literary Experience by Jody Spedaliere (2018) Selected works:
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