New Zealand Press Association
May 17, 2008 Saturday

SAROYAN WAS A POP-CULTURE ICON IN HEYDAY

Fresno, California MCT – After his acclaimed first book of short
stories was published in 1934, William Saroyan sent a letter to Random
House asking: “Do you think it would help any if I was photographed
swinging on a trapeze?”

Saroyan knew how fame worked. At the peak of his renown, from 1939
through the early years of World War 2, he cosied up to America as a
celebrity who was equal parts literary giant and pop-culture icon.

This self-proclaimed “world’s best author,” who came to prominence
with his short story The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, was a
big deal in a way authors in our contemporary image-oriented society –
a culture tilted toward movies and television – can pretty much only
dream about.

Saroyan’s literary fame has not endured in the way his partisans might
have hoped. He is admired but not widely taught, and most of his
titles are hard to find in chain bookstores, even in his hometown of
Fresno in California. And his pop-culture fame, while perhaps more
lasting than the vapid notoriety bestowed by gossip outlets like TMZ
and People magazine, lacked staying power.

Keep in mind just how well-known this former unruly school kid was at
his peak. His publisher at the time, Bennett Cerf, dubbed him “the
wonder boy from Fresno”.

Even when he eloquently (and very publicly) showed disdain for the
trappings of fame – refusing to accept the Pulitzer Prize and the
$US1000 ($NZ1325) that went with it for his play The Time of Your Life
in 1940, for example – Saroyan gained more notoriety than if he’d
simply taken the money.

Saroyan liked to be recognised for his literary merits as the author
of such acclaimed works as The Human Comedy and My Name Is Aram. But
he also realised, living at a time when the names of serious writers
floated in conversations alongside those of movie stars and
socialites, that people gravitated to the whole William Saroyan
package. All of it added up: the dark and exotic good looks, the
fierce temperament, the loud voice, the stormy marriages and divorces,
the expensive tastes, the precarious finances. And especially the
muscular ego.

“Modesty,” he wrote, “almost invariably accompanies mediocrity and
is usually an inside-out variety of immodesty.”

When publishers wanted to tinker with his precious words, his first
inclination was to change publishers.

Saroyan wasn’t content just to have three plays open on Broadway in a
period of 13 months, as he did in 1939. He wanted to run the theatre,
too. He named it after himself, naturally. The Saroyan Theatre might
not have been the financial success that he’d hoped. But for a time,
he was known as the playwright who had wrested control from the
“money guys” and taken charge of his own destiny.

Saroyan’s desire for control extended to Hollywood, and there,
perhaps, he met his match. When he sold the script for A Human Comedy
to MGM for $US60,000 ($NZ79,595), he assumed he’d direct the movie as
well. The studio chief, Louis B Mayer, who had an even greater
reputation for obstinateness, didn’t agree.

Yet for all the ways that Saroyan burned bridges by alienating
publishers, theatre investors and movie moguls, his celebrated cocky
attitude helped define an image that endeared him to the public.

A 1940 article in Life magazine – one of the great arbiters of popular
culture at the time – painted a glowing portrait of a headstrong,
confident writer taking Broadway by storm.

The article repeated the oft-told anecdote about the publisher
Cerf. In 1934, while a guest at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, Cerf was
informed that “a young man who says he is the world’s greatest author
is in the lobby.” Replied Cerf: “Tell Mr Saroyan to come right up.”

At the peak of his success, with My Name Is Aram a best-selling Book
of the Month Club selection and The Time of Your Life running
successfully on Broadway, Saroyan moved into a suite in the
prestigious Hampshire House Hotel overlooking Central Park, and for a
time, writes Saroyan scholar Brian Darwent, lived “the life of a
millionaire.”

Yet for much of his life, he struggled with debt and a nasty gambling
habit – which only added to his larger-than-life personality.

Key to Saroyan’s image is his humble beginnings in Fresno. He was the
first son in his family of Armenian immigrants born on American
soil. A writer with an outsized personal voice, he produced many works
drawing on his own experiences growing up in the Armenian section of
Fresno. It is in these glimpses of his hometown – of the old Armenian
Presbyterian Church, the Postal Telegraph office, the family house –
that readers came to feel that they knew not only the characters in
his stories but Saroyan himself.

Nothing captures that autobiographical flavour better than Saroyan’s
Homer Macauley, the schoolboy hero of The Human Comedy who made $US15
a week working 4 pm-midnight delivering telegrams. In Follow, you see
a slightly surlier – and more ethnic – interpretation of this
archetypal character in Aram Diranian, the unfulfilled telegraph
clerk.

Homer is youth itself, a ubiquitous folk character and something of a
priest flitting from one American town to the next, “a modern
American Mercury,” writes Saroyan scholar Alfred Kazin, “riding his
bike as Mercury ran on the winds, with a blue cap for an astral helmet
and a telegraph blank waving the great tidings in his hand.”

Yet this wind-riding boy grew up, slowed down, grew old.

Saroyan lived far beyond his relatively few years of intense favour in
the public spotlight. Critical tastes are hard to explain and even
harder to predict: Who can say why Saroyan doesn’t have the name
recognition today of, say, his contemporary John Steinbeck? There is
no arbitration board of literary reputation, no rules of fairness as
to why some authors go out of print and others have entire shelves at
Borders.

But Saroyan himself seemed to recognise the vagaries of fame.

The 1940 Life magazine article – which was not a cover story, showing
that even then there were limits on his celebrity – noted that since
becoming successful, Saroyan returned to Fresno on occasion.

There, the article went on to say, “he is amused by the fact that the
Armenian boys and girls he went to school with have no idea of his
fame. When they ask him what he’s doing there, Saroyan replies that he
is out of a job and `looking for work’.”

What he did with words was work, of course, and he knew it. The most
glorious kind of work: one in which you leave a mark. Although the
headlines and the space on bookstore shelves might diminish, the words
will always remain.

MCT cw