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Saroyan was a pop-culture icon in heyday

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  • Saroyan was a pop-culture icon in heyday

    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
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