The promising and, in the end, horrifying career of William Saroyan is a case study in the limits of raw talent. Talent Saroyan undoubtedly possessed, and in abundance. But he refused to refine it or develop it, refused to educate or to discipline himself, scorned the role of apprentice, scorned any role, in fact, but that of genius. As a result his early and meteoric success was succeeded by a long, humiliating, inevitable decline. As John Leggett points out in his grimly fascinating new biography, by the time Saroyan was in his mid-thirties he was already a burnt-out case.  

He could look back on three of his impressive assaults on the entertainment world: on publishing, on Broadway theatre, and on Hollywood. For each there had been a spectacular debut, shimmering with the promise of a major discovery, followed by an overreaching, then a fizzling disappointment, a falling out with close associates, and final alienation. It was a rocket’s trajectory—and a short one.

For a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Saroyan rode a tidal wave of literary fame. His early short stories had earned him an outsize reputation as an iconoclastic original, possibly the American writer of his generation. “I have read them with my eyes, ears, nose,” Kay Boyle commented on first encountering the stories; Saroyan, she felt, was “terribly, marvelously good … more alive and funnier than anyone else”. In 1939, his annus mirabilis, Saroyan had three plays running on Broadway simultaneously, won (and refused) a Pulitzer Prize, and reveled in the succès fou of his short fiction. The charming My Name is Aram was published the following year; The Human Comedy, novel and screenplay, crowned his triumph.

The world called Saroyan a genius, and he was only too happy to concur. What had passed for cockiness when he was young quickly revealed itself as hubris. The paranoia he had once been able to control got wildly out of hand; everyone who was not a hundred percent with him was against him. Therefore he rebuffed many talented, experienced would-be mentors: Whit Burnett of Story magazine; Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer of Random House; the directors Harold Clurman and George Abbott; the old theatrical hands Lawrence Langner and George Jean Nathan; and the executives and writers at MGM. He conspicuously lacked both humility and, more importantly, restraint, an underrated but vital quality in literature.

Saroyan was self-destructive on an epic scale, a monster of narcissism who let his outsize ego blight and finally devour his life. Leggett relates the sorry tale with a kind of stoic determination to face the worst, but he is not entirely without sympathy for his subject: one feels that he started out a Saroyan enthusiast and was driven to disgust somewhat against his will. Saroyan had some good qualities, after all. For all his faults he was, as one friend wrote, “a dedicated pacifist, a ridiculer of the goose-step, a foe of peonage and patronage. He was impatient of dissimulation, generous and charitable and was respectful of all religions.”[1] Just as whimsy and self-pity mar his good work, his bad work is usually alleviated by a lifelong, and perfectly correct, contempt for human pride and pretension.

[H]e began to think of really comical things everywhere, the whole town, the people walking in the streets, trying to look important, but he knew, they couldn’t fool him, he knew how important they were, and the way they talked, big business, and all of it pompous and fake, and it made him laugh, and he thought of the preacher at the Presbyterian church, the fake way he prayed, O God, if it is your will, and nobody believing in the prayers, and the important people with big automobiles, Cadillacs and Packards, speeding up and down the country, as if they had some place to go.

Like J. D. Salinger, Saroyan wrote blistering excoriations of phoniness; like Salinger, too, he had very little to offer in place of phoniness, except for an idealized innocence that, one suspects, can be pretty phony in its own right.

Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, in 1908. His parents, Armenak and Takoohi Saroyan, had arrived in America three years earlier, fleeing the genocide in their native Armenia. Armenak died in 1911, leaving Takoohi unable to provide for her four children. She placed them temporarily in an orphanage and took a job as a domestic: Bill, as he was now called, was three. He spent the next five years in the orphange, until his mother was finally in a position to make a home for the family.

Bill was an unwilling schoolboy: the hatred of institutions and rules that drove him to an emotional breakdown during his army years in World War II was already evident in early childhood. He helped support the family by selling papers and, later, working as a Postal Telegraph Messenger, like his character Homer Macaulay in The Human Comedy. At the age of eighteen he left Fresno High School without a di- ploma.

In his early twenties Saroyan began to produce a stream of short stories, often two in a single day. They were remarkably original: conversational, direct, superbly colloquial. They were also sentimental, even mawkish on occasion, but this unfortunate tendency was masked, at least at this point, by the strength and assurance of Saroyan’s narrative voice. It was only with time and an evident failure to mature that Saroyan’s sentimentality began to be seen as a flaw rather than a benison. As early as 1941 Wallace Stegner was complaining that Saroyan was a complete romantic whose “conviction that love conquers all makes him difficult to argue with. One can only disagree.” And in 1948 James Agee made a rather brutal but not unfair summary of Saroyan’s career up to that point:

Saroyan is an entertainer of a kind overrated by some people and underrated by others—a very gifted schmalz-artist. In the schmalz-artist strength and weakness are inextricably combined—the deeply, primordially valid, and the falseness of the middle-aged little boy who dives back into the womb for pennies. The schmalz-artist requires more belief, more wishful thinking on the part of his audience, than better artists would require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist’s most difficult love affair. At his best, Saroyan is a wonderfully sweet-natured, witty and beguiling kind of Christian anarchist, and so apt a lyrical magician that the magic designed for one medium still works in another. At his worst, he is one of the world’s ranking contenders for brassy, self-pitying, arty mawkishness, for idealism with an eye to the main chance, for arrogant determination to tell damnably silly lies in the teeth of the truth.

But back in the 1930s Saroyan’s strengths were far more evident than his faults. In 1934 Random House published a collection of the best tales, under the title The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. It made an immediate impression on the literary world, even climbing onto the New York best-seller list—a rare achievement for a book of short stories—and Saroyan became an overnight star.

The effluence of Saroyan short stories did not slow down, and the author bombarded Random House with new material, presenting Cerf with second, third, fourth and fifth collections. The editor, however, was dismayed by the uneven quality of the work and unwilling to publish. He urged the restless author to settle down and write a novel, but Saroyan didn’t seem to have one in him, and in any case he lacked the discipline to provide a novel’s structure. Cerf and Saroyan inevitably fell out, and Saroyan began what was to become a lifelong dance between various publishers, to whom, what with his creative ups and downs and his incessant demands for loans to finance his frenzied gambling sprees, he generally brought more pain than gain.

Saroyan was one of those compulsively feckless artists who kid themselves into believing that financial necessity can be a spur to creativity. This is how he justified wagering, and losing, enormous sums—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in a single night—on feverish trips through Nevada or the Riviera. As a result he was, although one of the best-paid writers of his time, perpetually in debt to friends, family, publishers, and the IRS. Far from being a spur to creativity, poverty inspired much of his shoddiest and most careless work.

Saroyan’s brief but complete conquest of the Broadway theater began with My Heart’s in the Highlands, a gentle, appealing play he adapted from one of his short stories: it was the surprise hit of the 1939 season. It was followed later the same year by The Time of Your Life, which he wrote in five days (a typical gestation period for a Saroyan play). This drama, in which the audience is made privy to the hopes and dreams of the various barflies who frequent a city saloon, was a major hit: it won a Pulitzer Prize, although its author, citing his dislike for institutional patronage of the arts, turned the honor down. The play was taken at face value as an amiable, good-spirited fantasy, but for those who care to look for it there is a dark side, well verbalized by Leggett, who sees the central character of Joe the bartender as an unsavory alter-ego for Saroyan himself: “a striking self-portrait of a man who sees himself as spectator and manipulator, a vessel of knowledge, wealth, and power, a benevolent despot to his dependents, a man who sees friendship as dominance.”

Saroyan’s Broadway success fizzled out almost as quickly as it ignited. He was to write many more plays, but none ever gripped the public imagination as these first two had done. And in fiction, only My Name is Aram and The Human Comedy lived up to the early promise. One fault, perhaps, lay with the very distinctiveness of Saroyan’s voice: it was the voice of an innocent, unspoiled America, the America that would perish with World War II. The post-war world was a more complicated place than the trademark Saroyan simplicity and goodwill could encompass, but Saroyan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn any new tricks. His wife Carol (now the widow of Walter Matthau), whom he married and divorced twice and with whom he played out an insane folie à deux for sixteen years, understood the routine well.

Bill had the mentality of a matinee-idol. He was like an actor who’d made a great success of a certain role in his youth and, when he goes on to summer stock in his later years, still relies on what worked for him in the past. He plays the part they all loved him as in every play he’s in, no matter what the play is, and when the old ladies come backstage, he’s got the robe and ascot on. But he’s ruined the entire play because he’s not an ensemble player, he’s a star. That’s what Bill did in his writing. He always gave himself the same star part, used the same words, had the same problems. It was the world against the poet. The poet against the politician. And because he had gone on record as loving humanity, he didn’t have to be nice to the people in his life.

“Didn’t have to be nice” is a wild un- derstatement. Saroyan was a world-class, king-sized, copper-bottomed Shit, with a capital S. John Leggett, like many literary biographers, seems to have an aversion to discussing his subject’s vagaries in terms of mental illness, but Saroyan appears to have been, as well as a compulsive gambler and a devouring egomaniac, a clinical paranoic. He was an appalling father who did his best to subsume his children and destroy their confidence; a domineering friend; and an impossible client to his long-suffering agent and publishers. By the time he reached old age his enemy list was longer than Richard Nixon’s, and included most of the people he had once counted as friends.

But the most bizarre part of Saroyan’s story is his marriage. Carol Marcus was seventeen (or, by her own account, sixteen) when they met; Saroyan was thirty-four. She had been born illegitimately to a fifteen-year-old beauty, Rosheen, who put Carol and her younger sister into foster care until she was able to hook a rich and indulgent husband. Then the little girls, removed from their foster families and adopted by their new stepfather, were given a louche Café-society education by Rosheen, with the object of handing them off as soon as possible onto rich, successful (and by definition older) men.

The story of Carol’s launch onto the marriage market along with her bosom buddies Oona O’Neill (later Chaplin) and Gloria Vanderbilt (later Stokowski) has been told by Carol Matthau herself in her memoir Among the Porcupines (1992) and by her son Aram Saroyan in Trio (1985). It makes horrifying reading: Carol had in effect been taught to sell herself to the highest bidder while simultaneously being spoon-fed by her mother and everybody around her an impossibly romantic notion of marriage as Undying Love. The Saroyans’ relationship was hurricane-strength and mutually abusive. He tried to turn her into a old-style Armenian wife, refusing to let her see or telephone her friends; she, with entirely different ideas, spent all the money he was finding it increasingly hard to earn on bankrolling her high-octane social life and budding acting career. They drank and fought continually; when, on occasion, they separated, the sinister Rosheen would show up again in the role of Pandarus.

The Saroyans’ first marriage ended when it was disclosed that Carol, as Saroyan had long suspected, was Jewish. He then cloaked his anti-Semitism in a pose of injured innocence, claimed that he could never live with someone who had deceived him on so fundamental an issue, and removed himself. Their subsequent remarriage in 1951 was brief, for Carol had by now grown up and was beginning to realize that there were other men out there, men just as famous as Saroyan but richer and infinitely easier to deal with.

The twilight of Saroyan’s career was a long one, but it was prolific: he doggedly cranked out work, bad or mediocre, to the bitter end. He was not much of a novel writer, perhaps because his ego got in the way of his imagination; as Leggett says, “He lacked the heart to create characters. He resented them, and he suspected it was because the more urgent job was to recreate his own character.” Nothing he wrote in his last twenty years had much success, but some of it is worth reading, if only to experience real, honest-to-God bile. For once Saroyan finally stopped being a romantic, he channeled pure anger onto the page. Boys and Girls Together (1963), for example, a bitter railing against Carol and her friends, who appear under only the most perfunctory of disguises, is not a particularly good book but it is fascinating nonetheless. Other straightforward memoirs, like Here Comes, There Goes You Know Who (1961), Obituaries (1979), or Places Where I’ve Done Time (1972) contain, between their thick strata of self-justifying bullshit, veins of honesty that make them not entirely negligible. But although the Saroyan name retained a certain luster, his readers were ever fewer and farther between. He died in 1981, creatively and spiritually bankrupt, having disinherited his children and alienated his friends.

What went wrong? “Was it loss?” Leggett asks. “Had the bright bird of his talent flown away into the war clouds of 1941? Or was it the form? Were the novel’s demands for structure, character and patience too much for his impulsive skills? Or was it the times? Had these earlier triumphs been relatively simple ones—his own youthful concept of self as a heroic, disenfranchised David taking on the Goliath of an inhibiting, misleading, establishment-ridden society?” The answer, of course, includes all three. But there is also a fourth reason: a fatal limitation in talent and vision that was already present when he was at the height of his powers. As Brooks Atkinson, always Saroyan’s hardest and most perceptive critic, remarked, nowhere in Saroyan’s plays is there a single “instance of a love that is a union and represents a surrender of self. As an egoist Mr. Saroyan may not know that such a thing exists but as an artist he ought to take it on faith.” Only Saroyan’s self was real to him: the rest of the world he saw, and portrayed, as a series of caricatures.

Notes
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1. My Name is Saroyan, by James H. Tashjian; Coward McCann, 391 pages. Go back to the text.