I’d forgotten what a terrific writer William Saroyan is. As someone who has haunted, worked in, and owned bookstores throughout his life, of course I had encountered Saroyan’s name and gleaned from some of his titles that he was proud of his Armenian heritage.
But what drove me finally to seek out his work was a viewing on TCM some years ago of a moving wartime drama called “The Human Comedy,” in which Mickey Rooney, surely giving one of his best performances, plays a high school student who moonlights as a telegraph delivery boy, helping to support his family after the death of his father, while his brother is away at war.
The cast also includes Frank Morgan (a.k.a. The Wizard of Oz), Donna Reed in one of her early roles, and Van Johnson, who for once doesn’t annoy the hell out of me. It’s a heartwarming film that delivers. A really beautiful slice of Americana. Sentimental? At times, but I think its tears are well earned. There’s an awful lot of “aw shucks” wholesomeness, but I’m not against that. I don’t know if I’d put it on the same shelf as “The Best Years of Our Lives” or “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it definitely exudes that same quasi-mythic sense of community and basic American decency.
Saroyan himself didn’t like what Hollywood did with the film, but he was, after all, the writer and understandably proprietary. Also, he had been nudged out of the director’s chair by Louis B. Mayer, after it was found Saroyan’s original screenplay would have pushed the running time to 4 hours. In response, Saroyan went home and immediately adapted his treatment into a novel, which was rushed into publication before the film could be completed and became a runaway bestseller.
It’s always been a bit of a mindbender for me to realize that so many of these figures who attained success during the 1930s and ‘40 were still basically middle-aged by the time they reached the 1970s. It’s crazy, for instance, to think that my grandfather, who served in World War II, turned 60 in 1975. So it was that I always thought of Saroyan as the outlandlishly mustachioed celebrity he was at the time he appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show” (with Veronica Lake and Leonard Maltin) in 1971. It’s hard to reconcile it with the handsome, dark-eyed, alternately exuberant and melancholy, earthy and unwaveringly independent writer of the 1930s and ‘40s.
Once upon a time, Saroyan was taken very seriously as a major voice in American fiction. He wrote acclaimed novels, plays, and short stories. And the power and personality of his individual voice never aged. It is still potent in the story collections he tossed off late in life, if perhaps tempered by accrued wisdom (but not always). At times, he can be positively Vonnegutesque, so I suppose it should have come as no surprise to learn that Vonnegut wrote a tribute to Saroyan that was delivered at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters the year after Saroyan’s death in 1981. Vonnegut, who had never met the man but clearly admired his work, characterized Saroyan as “the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists.”
On the last day of a Princeton Public Library book sale in October, I returned to run my eye over the picked-over inventory to see what I might have missed and maybe pick up a few deals from among the orphans during the half-price closeout. Imagine my delight, when I espied a crisp, leather-bound Franklin Library edition of Saroyan’s “Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” from 1976, with illustrations by Al Hirschfeld, marked $10 – $5 half-price. This was especially exciting as it happened to contain Saroyan’s account of his meeting with Jean Sibelius. Sibelius, of course, is one of my favorite composers. He was born on this date in 1865.
Somehow, at some point, I had learned about this literary anecdote and have had my eyes open for “Jean Sibelius at Home in Jaarvenpaa” [sic] ever since. Basically, the writer at 27 pops into a record shop in Helsinki in 1935 and requests a recording of “Finlandia,” a piece of music with which he had come to strongly identify for personal, as opposed to nationalistic, reasons. The clerk pulls a performance and puts it on a turntable, and the two listen transfixed. Reading his enthusiasm, the clerk insists on calling up the composer to ask if it would be okay for Saroyan to drop by. The account is especially interesting in that it offers a bit of a counterpoint to the usual portraits of Sibelius as a solemn recluse.
Here, he’s hospitable and good-humored. Saroyan is surprised by the composer’s “boyish and boisterous courtesy” and whisky is consumed. (Saroyan, however, declines the offer of a fine cigar.) But it isn’t long before he detects a sorrowful undercurrent in his host’s character that he recognizes from another of his personal favorite pieces by the composer, the “Elegie” from “King Christian II,” which the writer references in at least two other stories in the collection.
The meeting grows awkward as Saroyan mentions “Valse triste,” one of Sibelius’ most successful works, but one for which the composer was screwed out of enormous royalties, thanks to an early agreement with his publisher. In the silence that follows, Saroyan is glad to have retained a taxi, which is waiting for him outside. Still, he is so buoyed by the experience of meeting Jean Sibelius that he decides to write a story about it as soon as he gets back to his room. This he also calls “Finlandia.”
It was only in reading “Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” last week that I learned of the existence of this earlier Sibelius-related short story. This I have been unsuccessful in obtaining prior to the writing of this post. It appeared in Saroyan’s book “Inhale and Exhale” and was subsequently collected in “The William Saroyan Reader.” Sadly, I could find neither on the shelves of Princeton’s Labyrinth Books or Barnes & Noble (no Saroyan represented at either store, as a matter of fact), and the Princeton Public Library only had “The Human Comedy” and “My Name is Aram.” So I have a copy of “The William Saroyan Reader” on order from a seller on eBay.
(Parenthetically, at some point within the last few years I also picked up a good used copy of “My Name is Aram,” which I had passed over many times, even when I had it on the shelf in one of my own shops, not realizing how very interested I would be to read it until my conversion experience with “The Human Comedy.” That said, I have yet to get around to it. It’s in one of the stacks on my desk.)
“Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” is a like a collection of vignettes, entertaining free-associations spanning some three or four pages recollecting some aspect of Saroyan’s world, whether it be his boyhood in Fresno, his experiences in Hollywood in the 1930s, or the sights and sounds of New York City’s 57th Street. Some of the other artists and celebrities of whom Saroyan records his impressions include Jack Benny, Paul Bowles, Marc Chagall, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, Ernest Hemingway, Miriam Hopkins, Walter Huston, Gypsy Rose Lee, H.L. Mencken, Marilyn Monroe, George Jean Nathan, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, George Bernard Shaw, George Stevens, Gloria Swanson, and Darryl Zanuck (with a cameo by Humphrey Bogart). And he doesn’t pull any punches. If he finds someone lacking, he lets you know. He really didn’t like Will Rogers or Harold Clurman or Louis B. Mayer. Mostly, though, he’s pretty genial and matter-of-fact, often with a touch of empathy, or at any rate, humanity glowing beneath the surface.
I have since discovered that Sibelius is not the only classical composer with whom Saroyan had associated. He also collaborated with American composer Alan Hovhaness, who shared his Armenian ancestry. (Hovhaness was also an ardent Sibelius enthusiast, who kept up a correspondence with the Finnish master.) Together, they wrote the song “Bari, Bari” and Hovhaness composed incidental music for Saroyan’s play “Jim Dandy.” After Saroyan’s death in 1981, half his ashes were interred in the Komitas Pantheon in Armenia near the grave of Aram Khachaturian, whose artistry Saroyan had also lauded. Komitas himself is celebrated as the founder of an Armenian national school of music.
Clearly, Saroyan possessed a fierce ethnic pride, but the United States, after all, was the country of his birth, and despite early hardship (his mother was so poor that after his father died he lived in an orphanage for five years), he loved America, and he wrote warmly about the people of different ethnicities and backgrounds he grew up with.
For reasons he perhaps never fully understood, he felt a close affinity with Sibelius, living in the remote north, “a giant in the world, and not just the world of music, a giant in the world of mystery, of legend, of universal human meanings.”
A roundabout salute, then, to Jean Sibelius on the 160th anniversary of his birth!
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Sibelius, “Elegy” from incidental music to “King Christian II”
Alan Hovhaness, “Bari, Bari”
Selection from Hovhaness’ incidental music to Saroyan’s “Jim Dandy”
Veronica Lake and William Saroyan on Dick Cavett
“Finlandia”
