William Saroyan, II

 I do not think of Saroyan as a childish writer. Not any more than I think of Kurt Vonnegut as a childish writer. Saroyan does make me think of Vonnegut - both write with a humanist bent and both write in a way that mauls genre.

Well,Iam an Armenian. Michael Arlen is an Armenian, too. He is pleasing the public, I have great admiration for him, and I think he ahs perfected a very fine style of writing and all that, but I don't want to write about the people he likes to write about. Thos epeople were dead to begin with. You take Iowa and the Japanese boy and Theodore Badal, the Assyrian; well, they may go down physically, like Iowa, todeath,or spiritually, like Badal, to death, but they they are of the stuff that is eternal in man and it is this stuff that interests me. You don't find them in bright places, making witty remarks about sex, and trivial remarks about art. Youi find they will be there forever, the race of man, the part of man, of Assyria as much of England, that cannot be destroyed, the part that earthquake and war and famine and madness and everything else cannot destroy.

 Essential Saroyan (Santa Clara/Heyday Books , 2005); "Seventy Thousand Assyrians,;" pp. 15-16

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... I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have  been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever. And I know that each who lives upon the earth is no more than a tragic entity of mortality, let him be kind or beggar, I would like to see them awaken to this truth and stop killing one another because I believe there are other and finer ways to to be great and brave and exhilitrated. I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death. What difference does it make what the nation is or what political theory governs it? Does this in any way decrease for its subjects the pain and sorrow of mortality? Or in any way increase the strength and delight? 

p. 39; "Antrank of Armenia"

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 ... I know everybody in that Prison Camp and everybody outside of  it who heard Wynstanley could not resist the truth and beauty he brought out of his trombone - and they were all the same in the presence of that truth and beauty, so what's all this talk about some people being no good by birth, and others being very good by birth, and others being air to middling by birth? What kind of talk is that?

 p. 53; Chapter 9: John Wynstanley of Cincinnati, Ohio, Puts on a Strawhat and Plays the Trombone, Enchanting Enemy and Friend Alike from The Adventures of Wesley Jackson

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Intelligence is arriving into the fable of the life of amn. It isn't necessarily welcome, though, certainly. Not in most quarters. In order to be a little less unwelcome it must be joined by humor, out of which the temporary best has always come. You simply cannot call the human race a dirty name unless you smile when you do so. The calling of a name may be necessary and the name itself may be temporarily accurate, but not to smile at the time is a blunder that nullified usefulness, for without humor  there is no hope,and man could no more live without hope than he could without the earth underfoot.

p. 185; "A Writer's Declaration"

 Take a look at his Declaration in full and see if it does not still apply.

sch

3/6/20