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Essay: On The Writer William Saroyan

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  • Essay: On The Writer William Saroyan

    ESSAY: ON THE WRITER WILLIAM SAROYAN
    Herbert Gold

    San Francisco Chronicle
    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg i?f=/c/a/2008/08/01/RVF110V8KO.DTL
    Aug 1 2008
    CA

    Evidently pilfered from his house after his death, a broken cardboard
    box labeled WM SAROYAN, MAN, sat on a shelf in a used bookshop in
    San Francisco. It was a photocopy of the unpublished manuscript of
    "More Obituaries," the book Saroyan was writing as he was dying.

    The bookseller said, "Ten bucks OK with you? Anything else here catch
    your fancy?"

    Saroyan's voice My sixth-grade English teacher in Lakewood, Ohio, put
    her nicotine-stained fingers on my shoulder at the drinking fountain
    and said (a) my composition would have gotten a top grade, but the word
    "grewsome" should be spelled "gruesome," and (b) I really ought to
    read a certain story about a starving writer in San Francisco. "The
    Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" was written by a handsome,
    dark-haired young Armenian. I, too, might someday become a starving,
    dark-haired young writer in San Francisco, even without being handsome
    and Armenian.

    Saroyan's voice, insistent, overflowing with humor, overcoming
    melancholy, wielding the American language with the freedom of a
    boy abandoned to a home for orphans, who read merely everything,
    listened to the babble of voices in Fresno and San Francisco, in the
    fields and barbershops, the streets, taverns and short-order joints,
    fully intended to take charge of his world, which was the only world
    that mattered. He would make it matter to all within earshot. Like
    Mark Twain and Henry Miller, he was an American sport, hiding the
    necessary suspicion of monstrousness under his yelling love and
    optimism. He was merry and bright. Life handed him deep griefs,
    as it does to most of us.

    I didn't see all that at age 12. I grew some.

    Meet and greet More than a few years later, in the '60s, I found myself
    a writer in San Francisco, but had not yet succeeded in starving, darn
    it. One afternoon I was brooding alone in the San Francisco Museum
    of Art, then still in the Veterans Memorial Building on Van Ness,
    when I heard a voice booming, saw that strong-featured, heavy Armenian
    face, now with a bristling mustache, lecturing two children about the
    meaning of the paintings nearby, and incidentally also lecturing -
    hectoring, nagging, informing, bragging - about the meaning of life
    and their proper place in the world. The children were his son and
    daughter. The rich baritone was that of a Personage, a father, a man
    speaking from the depths of imperativeness and soul.

    "Mr. Saroyan, I presume."

    He may have been pleased to find an admirer here on a gray weekday
    afternoon. It's not unusual for writers to be pleased to meet
    admirers. The son, Aram, and the daughter, Lucy, were happy to have
    the meaning of life interrupted for ice cream and cookies.

    Somehow, lonely William Saroyan, adrift after a bitter pair of divorces
    from the same woman, and idle Herbert Gold, also divorced with two
    children, new to San Francisco on a gray November day, became instant
    co-conspirators. He didn't mind my telling him that the teacher with
    the nicotine-stained fingers had both sent me to his first stories and
    also initiated my closest friend into sex. I got the best of the deal,
    although my friend got the bragging rights.

    I asked Bill if he might like to spend an evening with a pair of
    adventurous Mills College girls. (We were younger then; in 1961,
    people still called young women "girls.") For once, he was at a loss
    for words - for about five seconds; and then: "When?"

    The young women arrived at my flat (also known as a beatnik pad). I lit
    the kindling in my fireplace. Bill lumbered up the stairs. I opened the
    door and the draft sent the fire leaping out into the room. Bill said,
    "The tiger is in the fireplace!" and we all sootily pushed flames
    back where they belonged.

    Then he took a sharp look at the young women, literature majors
    at a college for sometimes well-behaved daughters, and instantly
    transformed himself from a beaky Armenian eagle into a nurturing
    Armenian uncle. We walked down Russian Hill to North Beach, a
    family-style Basque dinner at the Hotel du Midi, a lecture about
    the history of the International Settlement and the Barbary Coast,
    a reminiscence about his days as a telegraph messenger boy. He was
    sending us swift spiritual telegrams: Let me be your guide. He seemed
    deeply shocked that we hadn't yet attended to Turk Murphy and his
    Dixieland band, so a visit to Earthquake McGoon's was next on the
    program. In the time of your life, live. That was an order.

    The evening ended late. And then we all swore a solemn oath to meet
    again as soon as possible.

    My woman friend's roommate still regrets, nearly 50 years later, that
    all she got from William Saroyan was laughter, literature, history,
    undying memories. OK, there was a touch of romance, but nothing that
    called for the early-'60s cream and diaphragm, which she confesses
    having tucked into her purse.

    Discovering that Saroyan badly needed money in those days, after his
    bouts of divorce, gambling ("It isn't gambling if you win," he said),
    drinking and neglect of the income tax laws, I invited him to dinner
    at the Brighton Express in North Beach, along with Mark Schorer,
    chairman of the English department at UC Berkeley. Bill was likely to
    charm Professor Schorer, and he did. He improvised a play, casting the
    people in the little restaurant. He invaded the kitchen to interview
    the Japanese American cook as the ingenue love interest. He decided
    God should be played by a horse, the only actor not on the premises.

    Schorer offered a large lecture fee and pulled out his notebook to
    schedule it. Saroyan was enthusiastic. Schorer proposed a date. Bill
    wasn't sure he would be available. Mark asked him to name another
    date. Bill gave the matter some deep thought, and wondered if God
    absolutely needed to be played by a horse. "A lecture," Mark reminded
    him. "When? I need to schedule and request the funds."

    "Tell you what, Mark," Bill said. "I might be driving west from New
    York, on my way back from Paris because the melons are in season in
    Fresno, and I'll send you a postcard and say I'm on my way."

    "No, that won't work. We need to schedule in advance."

    "It'll work fine, Mark. I'll say, 'Hey Mark, how about next
    Thursday?' "

    "No, Bill."

    Saroyan shrugged. He thought hard. "You think we can get a horse to
    behave like God, or do we have to dress up a couple of my cousins
    in Fresno?"

    Again my matchmaking was fruitless. But Bill managed to take a
    gig at Purdue University, which didn't require finicky advance
    planning. Instead of lecturing, he directed an improvised play with
    students he enlisted on the spot. It was West Lafayette, Ind.'s,
    finest theatrical experience of the year. In the off-Indianapolis
    theatrical market.

    The opposite of smart Herbert Gold, trying to make polite conversation
    with a not-brilliant Armenian young woman: "Is it true, as someone
    said, that William Saroyan is the most famous Armenian who ever lived?"

    Not-brilliant Armenian young woman, after careful consideration:
    "I think that's because he's well-known."

    Americans in Paris In Paris, a French publisher with a fine Left
    Bank house and a cook - assets more common among publishers than
    among writers - suggested that I invite some Americans-in-Paris to
    dinner. I thought of Mary McCarthy, the tight-lipped wit, and Saroyan,
    the loose-lipped jokester. There were only two problems. McCarthy said,
    "He doesn't like me." Saroyan said, "She hates me."

    "Come anyway," I said. "Good chow."

    It sounded like a normal Paris dinner party. Unfortunately, Bill
    arrived four hours early, announcing that he had changed his mind
    about dinner, but we could go for a walk instead. We strolled to
    George Whitman's Shakespeare & Company bookshop, looked for Bill's
    books and mine, scheduled a reading for Bill at some Sunday yet to be
    determined. Then, for variety, we visited another bookshop. The statue
    of Diderot poking his finger at the church of St. Germain des Pres. A
    beer at Brasserie Lipp. A sit in the little garden of the Russian
    church at the corner of the Boulevard St. Germain and the Rue des
    Saints Pères. A few complaints about ex-wives. A discussion of the
    melons that grow near Fresno and the red wine and cheese that grow
    all over Paris. ... Bill decided to walk me back to the publisher's
    house. He entered. He smelled the cooking in progress.

    He didn't ask permission to visit the kitchen and lift the tops of
    the pots, peer within, sniff approvingly. "Maybe I'll have dinner,"
    he said. A great writer has the right to change his mind. Tolstoy,
    Herman Melville and Ross Bagdasarian were known to have done so. What
    is hatred between two writers at opposite ends of the literary
    spectrum compared with a fine meal of lamb, couscous, haricots verts
    and beverages not easily available in Fresno, although the best melons
    grow there?

    McCarthy arrived, a bit bustling and nervous. I, too, had enjoyed a
    quarrel with her, although since then we had danced and made up. Even
    Bill seemed edgy.

    So he began to talk. His voice was booming, rich and cadenced. His
    stories, recounted in long, loping run-on sentences, filled with melon
    juice and red wine, love of family and gaiety about disaster, sometimes
    ended with his personal version of Samuel Beckett's despair. "It's
    terrible. It's OK. It's verrry interesting."

    His partial deafness did not prevent his noticing Mary's laughter. Once
    she clapped her hands with glee, like Alice in Wonderland, although
    an Alice-Mary with a mouth full of sharkish teeth. She was happy. The
    publisher and I were happy. Bill was happy. Dissatisfied with his
    children, exasperated by the rhythm of his decline on the literary
    stock exchange, where fickleness of esteem competes with irrelevance
    of opinion, lonely without a lover, aging, sometimes weary, his heart
    was still in the highlands.

    Mary stayed until 1 a.m. After she left, Bill stayed for another
    nightcap, then a post-nightcap nightcap, and rolled down the stairs
    prudently before dawn. It had turned out to be a perfect evening. All
    I needed for breakfast was a container of plain yogurt and two aspirin.

    Bill decided not to do the reading at Shakespeare & Company, but then
    showed up anyway and did a reading. I'm not sure if McCarthy attended.

    An Armenian in Fresno Passionate living is not easy living. The stress
    of being a long-term effervescent boy was wearing the man down. I
    decided to take my son Ari, age 9, to visit Saroyan in Fresno; and if
    he was too tired to see us, we'd just visit an Armenian restaurant,
    buy a few melons, take sightseeing walks among microwaved burritos,
    practice breathing the smog of California's Central Valley. But Bill
    said come on, come on, come onna my house. This was the refrain of a
    traditional folk song he had adapted with his cousin, Ross Bagdasarian.

    We went onna his house. He showed Ari his manual typewriter, his long
    legal-sized sheets of manuscript, his rock collection, his sketches,
    and lectured him about the duties and glory of being a writer. He
    asked Ari about his family heritage, Jewish and WASP, and suggested
    that his own children also had a verrry interesting bloodline,
    Armenian and Jewish. "But everyone has a verrry interesting bloodline!"

    Then he heard from Ari that there was a twin brother. "Verrry
    interesting!" he proclaimed, and announced that he would
    visit San Francisco soon to meet the verrry interesting
    brother-younger-by-five-minutes. A photograph shows Bill, Ari, Ethan
    and Herb, poking our heads through the sunroof of my battered Fiat.

    One of Bill's complaints about his beloved, hated,
    twice-married-to-him, twice-divorced wife, Carol, was that she was an
    addict of the social ramble: too much drinking, too much partying, and
    therefore the next morning he couldn't write enough good words. Then
    followed another evening, another party, and consequently not enough
    words, even if they were good ones. And then another, and maybe only
    one or two hundred good words. "But they were good words! But only
    a hundred good words," he roared. "That's not enough!"

    In his last weeks, he was still writing. Dying of prostate cancer, he
    would need to be rushed to the hospital to be catheterized. And then,
    relieved, he would come back home to finish the day's writing. Bladder
    wrecked, he was still the soulful singer of his undaunted songs of
    yearning. The words in the manuscript of "More Obituaries," labeled
    man, which I found in that used bookstore, were still warm-hearted,
    questing, generous, boiling with life, the death-defying rushing song
    of the old man still soaring and plunging on his flying trapeze.

    A metabolic joy in survival There are peaks and valleys in every
    writing writer's work. Saroyan was one of the writingest of writers. In
    his massive oeuvre, there are times when he is merely poking and
    prodding his voice. But when he finds it, there are high moments
    of humor, generosity, vivid storytelling, evocations of pain and
    pleasure. For example, his shame and grief over a troubled relationship
    with his son can touch any parent; his transparent rage at his wife
    and at himself in connection with her should evoke fellow feeling in
    all who know that the path of spousedom is a rocky one.

    For me, three short pages, Chapter 106, of one of his late books,
    "Obituaries," the rhythm, sly humor and shrugged-off grief, the sad
    recapitulation of the pleasures of simple existence, the exalted
    awareness of mortality, an offhand but measured conviction of moral
    responsibility are a peak of Saroyan's long meditation on the sense
    and responsibility of life. These three pages, which I've sometimes
    read aloud to would-be writers, remind me of "Euthyphro," Plato's
    dialogue on the responsibility of fathers and sons - but with Saroyan's
    unique, wise-ass sideswipes at the whole deal. "Reader, take my advice,
    don't die, just don't die, that's all, it doesn't pay."

    After evoking the sourdough bread and the tea and the good sweet
    butter, which are some of the good reasons for avoiding death, he
    ambles to the point: His friend Johnny Mercer was a great songwriter,
    a singer of them, a wealthy man - but what was really important
    about him was that, after his father died, Mercer paid his father's
    debts. "A great living member of the human race died, and he is gone,
    and don't you do it -"

    Reader, read this chapter aloud. It is full of fun and grief, tricks
    and utter sincerity. Beyond the words, Saroyan's sentence rhythms
    play like great music. If you have tears available, they will flow.

    Elsewhere, not very far away, out of the same mellow, insistent,
    swift American voice, you will find occasions for laughter. Living
    through deep and permanent injuries, but supported by a metabolic joy
    in survival, Saroyan spun like a gyroscope to the edge of the earth;
    and discovering that the world is not flat and he wouldn't fall off,
    despite so much adverse opinion, he danced himself back into the
    crowded carnival midway that is human life.

    San Francisco writer Herbert Gold is the author of many books of
    fiction and nonfiction. His memoir "Still Alive! A Temporary Condition"
    was published last month.

    --Boundary_(ID_dJogh39hNajnGsbga2dRRg)--

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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