Saroyan at a Hundred and One

The centenary of an author's birth presents an obvious opportunity for critical reappraisal. Biographies pop up, publishers prettify the spines of in print novels or reissue the out of print. Long time admirers use the occasion to cajole uninformed readers about the treat they've been missing. Detractors get their best shot to debunk the artist and fans in critical reviews. Literary fashion may even welcome the author's work back to popularity like wide neckties. So what do we make of the inaudible reaction to an author who was once so famous that his name was in the dictionary and synonymous with a style? August 2008 saw the hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Saroyan, yet this garnered less celebration than the same anniversary for Ian Fleming. In the 1930s Saroyan was as famous as Hemingway. Celebrated for short stories, he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life, which he wrote in a week. He remained a bestseller into the 1940s with The Human Comedy, which has remained in print over sixty-five years, and he continued to publish until his death in 1981 at the age of seventy-two, albeit with light sales. Why is he forgotten or diminished? Perhaps the epithet "Saroyanesque" is now considered as gooey as molasses, when it was once synonymous with spontaneity? Or maybe his public persona was so outrageously large that the work seems personality-driven and transient, like dance works that die with the choreographer. The newspapers of the 1930s loved him and inflated his brash persona, so perhaps no one wants to imitate a man if the salute would come across as plagiaristic. But William Saroyan's influence has been subtle, filtering through a lineage to Kerouac (who typed the text of On the Road on a single scroll in a Saroyanesque gesture) and on to Vonnegut. The problem is that his greatest stories are forgotten and that his plays were too odd and experimental at the time they appeared. But for some of us, he's as lively and empathic as a friend. True, he did write that "A man and his friends are liars to one another," and like any friend he can grate, talk too loud and too often, pontificate or let us down. Yet at his best he hoists us from dark places, cheers us, relays his own hurt, and sympathizes with ours. He shares his span of moods with force, and yet he blesses the reader with unexpected kindnesses.

Born in Fresno, California, William Saroyan was the son of poor Armenian immigrants, and he never forgot it. His heritage was embraced with obsessive retrospection, sometimes with great humor, often with a despairing recognition of the chronic poverty that forced his widowed mother to put him in an orphanage for his early years. He understands children better than any American author since Mark Twain. The story "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" belies what Saroyan teasingly writes in the opening note to the collection: "I hereby give fair warning that nothing extraordinary is going to happen in it." What happens is that two boys delight in the beauty of a stolen horse and discover their ethics during the ride. This story and two others ("The Stolen Bicycle" and "The Man with the Heart in the Highlands") highlight the greatest of Saroyan's gifts: the understanding that childhood is rife with passions and moral quandaries. We witness the formative moments in the lives of boys, instances that will be forever remembered by the men they will become. The brilliance of Saroyan's narrative skill is that the telling of the tale is all forward motion, while introspection is saved for the tag end; we revel in the ride and then pause as we complete each story, knowing that we have journeyed further than the simple action would imply.

The mush that occasionally seeps in comes whenever children are depicted as innocent. When they show their mettle, sentimentality vanishes. Children are depicted as more assertive than adults, who seem depleted by their poverty. Like grown...