William Saroyan

William Saroyan: The Man Who Refused the Pulitzer

In 1940 the Pulitzer board gave its drama prize to *The Time of Your Life*, a play with almost no plot set in a San Francisco waterfront saloon. Its author turned the prize down, on the stated grounds that commerce should not be permitted to judge the arts. He kept the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the same play, which suggests the objection was to the money rather than to praise. He was thirty-one, and he had been writing professionally for six years.

Bitlis to Fresno

William Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, on 31 August 1908, the son of Armenak and Takuhi Saroyan, Armenian immigrants from Bitlis in the Ottoman Empire. His father had reached New York in 1905 and preached in Armenian Apostolic churches; he died when William was three. The children were put into an orphanage in Oakland, and it was five years before their mother, working in a Fresno cannery, could gather them home again.

He educated himself. He took whatever work there was, ending up as an office manager for the San Francisco Telegraph Company, and read on his own time. The decisive moment came when his mother showed him some of his dead father's writings; he decided then that this was what he would do. Early pieces appeared in the *Overland Monthly* and in the Armenian journal *Hairenik*. Nothing in the training was literary, and that turned out to be the point.

The Daring Young Man

"The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" appeared in *Story* magazine in 1934. Its subject is a starving writer in the Depression, and its method — a mind observed while it hums along, half-lucid, toward its own extinction — had no obvious American precedent. "Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny." The story made him at twenty-five, and the collection that carried its name established a manner: short, spoken, unedited-sounding sentences, a refusal of conventional plot, and a warmth that his admirers called generosity and his enemies called something else.

The Saroyan Manner

The 1939–1943 run is the body of work everything else is measured against. *My Heart's in the Highlands* and *The Time of Your Life* arrived in 1939, plays in which people mostly talk, drink and are decent to one another. *My Name Is Aram*, a book of stories about a boy in an Armenian immigrant family in the San Joaquin Valley, became an international bestseller in 1940. Then MGM commissioned him, rejected the 240-page treatment he delivered — Louis B. Mayer wanted something else — and Saroyan simply converted the treatment into a novel, *The Human Comedy*, publishing it just ahead of the film. He took the 1943 Academy Award for Best Story anyway.

The Army and Wesley Jackson

He served in the U.S. Army during the war, stationed at Astoria in Queens and posted to London in 1942 with a Signal Corps film unit. The novel that came out of it, *The Adventures of Wesley Jackson* (1946), read to the Army as an argument for pacifism and nearly got him court-martialled. In 1943 he married the actress Carol Marcus; they had two children, Aram, who became a writer, and Lucy, who became an actress. They divorced in 1949, remarried in 1951 and divorced again in 1952. Marcus, who later married Walter Matthau, wrote in her memoir *Among the Porcupines* that Saroyan had been abusive.

The Long Decline

By the late 1940s the drinking and the gambling had taken hold, and he was writing to pay for both — rapidly, barely editing, and losing much of what he earned. The books kept coming for another thirty years: *Rock Wagram* (1951), the memoir *The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills* (1952), *Papa, You're Crazy* (1957), *Boys and Girls Together* (1963), *Obituaries* (1979). From 1958 he lived mainly in Paris. The critical verdict on this long second half hardened early and has not much softened; the question readers kept asking, in one form or another, was how a man could write so much good material and so much bad.

Two Graves

He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979 and died of prostate cancer in Fresno on 18 May 1981, aged seventy-two. His ashes were divided: half buried at Ararat Cemetery in Fresno, half interred at the Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan, among Armenian artists including the composer Aram Khachaturian. It is an unusually literal solution to the problem he had written about all his life. In 1988 San Francisco renamed an alley near City Lights Bookstore William Saroyan Place.

Why William Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a short, extraordinary burst — roughly 1934 to 1943 — and on the fact that the manner invented in it proved portable. Kurt Vonnegut called Saroyan "the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists," the most precise compliment anyone has paid him: before Saroyan, prose that plain was assumed to be unfinished. Stephen Fry calls him one of the most underrated writers of the twentieth century. The specific gift was an ear. Saroyan could write a sentence that sounded like a man talking to himself and still carry a whole emotional argument inside it, and do it without the visible machinery of plot — which is why the Beats and a generation of California writers took so much from him.

The counter-case is severe and largely correct. The gift never developed; it repeated. John Hutchison's summary is exact: whimsy, compassion and a ready smile "were the qualities for which the critics eventually deemed him a lightweight." After the war, his creed of freedom, brotherly love and universal benevolence read as evasion to a culture preoccupied with ideological hatred, and Richard Rodriguez's judgement — that little of the early greatness survives in the later years — is hard to argue with. He wrote too much and edited almost nothing. Saroyan is a genius of manner rather than of thought: he found one voice, and it was a real discovery, and he never found another.

Legacy

What he handed on was permission. The unliterary sentence, the story with no plot, the immigrant childhood treated as a legitimate American subject rather than an ethnic curiosity — all of these were riskier before he did them. His own advice to writers is the fairest summary of what the good work feels like from inside: "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." He wrote for another four decades and never bettered the first ten years, and the first ten years were enough.