Saroyan And

[ara baliozian]

SAROYAN AND ZARIAN

*****************************

Shortly before he died Saroyan wrote me a letter

asking me to explain Zarian.

He had known him but had been unable

to figure him out, he said.

They were both Armenians,

they were both writers,

and they both shared a contempt for

statesmen, churchmen, and businessmen

(or bosses, bishops and benefactors).

Zarian once wrote to a friend:

"Our politicians have been of no political use to us.

Their greatest enemy is free speech."

He could have added that

our politicians had succeeded only in one enterprise

and succeeded brilliantly too: namely,

in leading the people to the slaughterhouse.

Saroyan on his part,

made no distinction between Churchill and Roosevelt

on the one hand and on the other,

Hitler and Stalin. In his view, all politicians

regardless of nationality and ideology

were in the business of fomenting hatred

and promoting war.

*

Saroyan became an international celebrity

with many novels, short stories, plays and movies to his credit,

unlike Zarian who after a brief honeymoon

was rejected and ultimately ignored

even by his fellow Armenians.

So much so that he may be said to be

the only major Western writer

who left America for the USSR,

where even his application for membership

in the Writers’ Union was rejected.

*

Throughout his writing career

Saroyan idealized his fellow Armenians in his works

(or "stylized" them, as he himself put it in a letter

to the editor of TIME magazine)

and this even at a time when

his Armenian friends and relatives betrayed

and plotted against him.

Zarian too began his literary career

by idealizing his fellow Armenians

but he ended by calling them cannibals.

*

Had Saroyan written about real

as opposed to idealized Armenians,

he may have been a far better writer.

Not as popular perhaps but a better one.

As for Zarian: his fate was sealed

on the day he gave up writing

in French, Italian, Russian and English,

and became an Armenian writer

writing in Armenian for an exclusively

Armenian audience.

[ara baliozian]

THE MOST INFLUENTIAL WRITER

OF THE 20TH CENTURY

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Joyce and Mann may have been better writers

but Saroyan was more influential than both.

Of the many interviews with contemporary writers

that I have read, the name that comes up again and again

in the context of formative influences

is that of Saroyan.

That’s because, like Whitman before him,

Saroyan democratized writing.

After reading him one is intoxicated

by the simplicity, spontaneity and natural flow of his prose.

If Saroyan makes an adolescent say

"If he can do it, I can. There is nothing to it!"

Joyce and Mann make him think:

"I will never make it.

I could never write like that."

*

KILLERS

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The only way to qualify as a writer

in the eyes of some Armenians is

to make it in the odar world,

like Michael Arlen and William Saroyan.

It follows, in their eyes,

neither Khorenatsi, Narekatsi and Shnorhali

nor Zohrab, Zarian and Zorian qualify as writers.

Which also means that our Golden Age

is a fiction of our collective imagination.

What Talaat did to our writers in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire

and what Stalin did in successive waves of purges in Soviet Armenia,

our fat-bellied, Levantinized philistines do

to the entirety of our literature.

*

ARMENIAN SAYING

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"May the snake that does not sting me

live for a thousand years."

*

A CURIOUS DETAIL

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While visiting the Armenian community in Beirut,

writes John Leggett in his recent biography,

Saroyan "noticed that everyone had formidable bad breath."

*

FOSSILS

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In his efforts to defend his party against a critic,

one of our partisan intellectuals

(an oxymoron if there ever was one)

once wrote in one of our partisan weeklies (where else?):

"Our Party has had its share of critics

and it will continue to have them,

but the fact that it has survived for a hundred years

should be proof enough that we are right

and our critics wrong," or words to that effect.

I suspect the Soviets said something similar

when they were celebrating their 50th anniversary

and they too not only ignored but whenever they could

they also silenced their critics.

The Roman Empire lasted longer than a hundred years

and it too ignored its critics.

In his STUDY OF HISTORY

Toynbee gives many examples of institutions

that have survived for millennia as fossils

or as brain-dead entities, and he includes among them

the Armenian Church.

I suspect one reason he did not include our political parties

is that he thought of them as insignificant and irrelevant.

[ara baliozian]

ROCK WAGRAM

**********************

Published in 1951, ROCK WAGRAM

belongs to post-middle Saroyan.

It is not one of his best novels – though

he himself thought it was.

When I first read it as a teenager in an Italian

translation

I thought so too.

Above all I found the frequent references

to Armenians hilarious.

On rereading it today in its original English

these references have lost

none of their enchantment. Case in point.

When Murphy, an Irish friend of Rock Wagram

(Saroyan’s alter ego, an actor

whose real name is Vagramian)

asks if Armenia has an army, Rock replies:

"Six or seven."

"Who do they fight?" Murphy wants to know next.

"Each other?"

To which Rock replies:

"Only in time of peace."

In his recent biography, John Leggett tells us

Saroyan’s editor did not want to include

the philosophical reflections that frequently

interrupt

the plot line which already contains

many divagations and secondary characters.

Saroyan disagreed and had his way.

Saroyan could not suffer fools, critics and

editors

even when they were right.

When I first read the book,

I thought of these reflections (which are set in

italics)

as original and sometimes even deep.

Today they sound more like the homilies

of a senile preacher.

If you haven’t already read ROCK WAGRAM,

give it a try provided you do some judicious

skipping here and there,

now and then. For every boring page you will be

rewarded

with a hugely entertaining paragraph or line.

[ara baliozian]

MORE ON SAROYAN

****************************

Saroyan fascinates me. Perhaps because

he was everything I could never be.

An international celebrity in his twenties,

he knew everyone who was someone

in Hollywood and New York.

Charlie Chaplin was a close family friend.

So was Marlon Brando -- John Leggett

in his recent biography eve suggests that

Brando had an affair with Saroyan’s wife,

and later, when she grew up, with his daughter.

In his thirties Saroyan fell madly in love

and married with a teenager; after two children,

he divorced her, and remarried and redivorced her all over again.

In his old age, this preacher of universal love

could not stand the sight of his own children

and portrayed his wife as a mercenary, vain,

silly, opportunistic nymphomaniac in need of psychiatric care.

A compulsive gambler all his life,

he would borrow money from family, friends,

relatives, producers and publishers.

Since he neglected to pay his taxes,

he had to hire lawyers (and more often than not fire them)

to keep the tax-men at bay.

He bought and sold property in Fresno,

San Francisco, New York and Paris.

Nothing slowed him down.

Hemingway, who was intolerant of the competition,

called him "that Armenian son of a bitch,"

Henry Miller begged money from him,

and in his BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

Truman Capote portrayed him as the hillbilly husband

of the central character (played respectively by Buddy Ebsen

and Audrey Hebpurn in the movie adaptation).

On second thought I do share something with Saroyan,

beside his Armenian identity: hiatal hernia.

But whereas I have given up smoking and drinking

(including coffee and tea) he never did.

Once, when in a Saroyanesque devil-may-care

life-is-wonderful mood, I had a drink,

I ended up at the emergency with severe chest pains

mimicking a heart attack and

after an agonizing wait of five hours

was administered five morphine shots.

Ever since then I haven’t touched the stuff

and I doubt very much if I will ever feel

Saroyanesque enough to repeat that transgression.

[ara baliozian]

REREADING SAROYAN

********************************

During the last few days

I have been rereading Saroyan – mostly the diaries

and memoirs of his final phase.

Speaking of the Beat generation

(which was greatly influenced by Saroyan

and about which his son, Aram Saroyan, wrote a book)

Truman Capote once remarked that

theirs was not writing but typing.

There is a great deal of typing in Saroyan too

but even when he types

Saroyan is more readable than most writers,

including Capote.

Again and again Saroyan speaks of his fondness for reading,

visiting libraries and bookstores and buying used books

for a few pennies each. Once, I remember,

he even wanted to buy books from me,

and more particularly books that I had reviewed

in the Armenian-American press.

Anything would be welcome, he said,

and mentioned as examples a Leskov biography

and a book of conversations with Olivier Messiaen,

translated into English by Felix Aprahamian

(whom he identified as an old friend).

In my reply I explained that

I had given up buying books

and that the books I reviewed

(including the two mentioned above)

came from the public library.