Appreciating William Saroyan

 While in prison, when I decided that I would try to be the writer friends and family expected me once to become, I set myself the task of filling in the holes of my literary education. I drew up reading lists from other people's lists (particularly Entertainment Weekly's "100 Best Novels of All Time"), the prison's leisure library card catalog, and the library's copy of Books In Print. William Saroyan was a name I knew. What I knew of him was The Human Comedy. What I read was a collection of his short stories. He knocked my head around. If I can ever get my prison journal up on this blog - I am having trouble even making notes like this - there will be a discussion of what I read. 

Today, I got my email newsletter from The Millions with this headline: Here is My Heart: The Frailty and Hope of William Saroyan. I had to check it out. While Henriette Lazaridis does not discuss his work in strictly literary terms, I think she gets at what makes Saroyan worth reading.

 My husband took the book from me that day and held it just as gently as I had. He listened to what I had to say — about my father and about the lovers who cannot eat and about my heart — and understood. Now there are two copies of Saroyan’s book in the house. Mine sits on my desk beside my laptop, and his copy rests on his nightstand. Not reading matter, it’s more of a reminder, perhaps to both of us, of how important it is to offer without knowing what the outcome will be.

In that vulnerability lies the beauty of Saroyan’s work. It is simple. It is basic. It doesn’t lay claim to any grander place in literature, nor does it deserve one. It is, sometimes, all we need. A little book, an offer, a question. Did you eat?

Perhaps Saroyan has passed from fashionable, but the fashionable forgets all too often to be simple, to be heartfelt. I know I do.

My memory is also of a writer who turned the short story inside and out and played with the form. There was an exuberance, a life, in how he told his stories.

sch 11/15