Talking About William Saroyan

William Saroyan was a name I had heard of but without knowing anything of the man other he was a writer. Through the interlibrary loan program I did get a collection of Saroyan's work into Fort Dix FCI. Thing is I don't have the notes on that book with me but I had time on my hands and wanted to see what I could find on the internet concerning him. I needed a break from typing up my adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."

What I need to say is Saroyan knocked me over with his style which was enthusiastically alive. Even though I cannot claim like James Mustich that Saroyan inspired me to be a writer, he did point how stop being a musty writer.

 James Mustich wrote specifically:

By making so much of his writing about its own performance, by animating it with the brio and intoxication that fuels the imagination, by not looking back to second guess himself but rushing headlong into the next story or drama, Saroyan filled my adolescent soul with a sense of possible vocation that has haunted me ever since.

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The urgency of utterance, the liberty of creativity, made Saroyan’s early work crackle like fireworks; sometimes it was breathtaking, sometimes just a fizzling without definition, but it was always colorful, and it made the promise of a writing life seem like a dream one could make come true. There have been periods across the years when I was close enough to realizing it—with a small pile of pages as evidence—that I am glad I chased it, however intermittently.

Mustich thinks Saroyan a children's writer while I do not. Maybe childlike in his idealism but even then I am not comfortable with making that judgment. Perhaps he will always be a young voice thanks to all his energy. That I feel comfortable with.

Gerald  W. Haslam of Sonoma State University gave me a bit of an explanation of why I knew Saroyan's name but nothing more:

FEW AMERICAN WRITERS tumbled as dramatically from critical acclaim as did William Saroyan. There were many reasons, not the least of which was his personality. Because, as Saroyan's son Aram has argued, the writer came to personify "what might be called the mythic potential of his particular social-historical moment," Saroyan's self-centered, sometimes abrasive character became perhaps more important than his writing in the eyes of some. William Saroyan was, during the first half of his career, as much a public figure as an artist, and the confusion of those two roles made it easy to ignore his literary accomplishments once his notoriety faded. In fact, the artist's psychological contradictions are finally much less important than the quality of his art and, from his first published volume (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, 1934) until his last (Obituaries, 1979)-both of which were cited as among their years' best books-Saroyan was an authentic, singular American genius. He was also, as Bob Sector has pointed out, "his own biggest fan."

I Mary McCarthy 's "innocence" as quoted by Haslam:

Saroyan straddled the worlds of high and folk culture. He was an artist of unique and powerful gifts, marred by an apparent lack of discipline, but one who moved both regional and ethnic expression to new heights.

Mary McCarthy, writing in Partisan Review in 1940, pinpointed a source of both Saroyan's greatest art and perhaps some of his problems with the literary establishment. "He still retains his innocence," she observed,. . . that is, he has had to fight off Ideas, Movements, Sex, and Commercialism. He has stayed out of the literary rackets-the Hollywood racket, the New York Cocktail-party racket, and the Stalinist racket, . . . What is more important, the well of inspiration, located somewhere in his early adolescence, has never run dry.”

When he died on May 19, 1981, in Fresno, Saroyan had won both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Time of Your Life (the first writer to be so doubly honored), an Academy Award for The Human Comedy, and the California Gold Medal for Tracy's Tiger. William Saroyan emerged as a writer during the Great Depression, while America was in the throes of a national loss of faith and questioning of values. Although many critics had trouble accepting his optimistic, original stories, readers did not. He was powerfully pro-human. He talked and wrote about the human spirit. That Saroyan also did such things as turn down his Pulitzer Prize certainly did little to raise his stock among insiders. His behavior, like some of his writing, seemed downright unliterary. As novelist Herbert Gold wrote following Saroyan's death, "He didn't want to be the greatest Armenian-American writer in the world. He wanted, very boyishly, just to knock everyone's eyes out with beauty and fun and delight."

And even more the description from the FAQ page for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing:

The award honors the Saroyan literary legacy. What is the Saroyan legacy or style?

Saroyan’s literary style is characterized by originality, stylistic innovation and what is often described as an “exuberant humanism”. It is this exuberance and desire to move art in new directions, rather than relevance to the particulars of Saroyan’s common settings or themes, that Saroyan Prize judges will be seeking. Of course, any artist’s work is best understood through direct experience, and judges for the Saroyan prize will make their choices based on their personal experience with Saroyan’s writings.

 We could use more humanism in these days of Trump. We could stand some enthusiasm for living amongst our writers as well as our readers. I am too old to throw off all the cynicsm I have collected over the years, but what about you? Go read Saroyan and see if he doesn't point a different route than, say, Cormac McCarthy.