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Saroyan's downfall his own best friend; his own worst enemy

Sunday, November 24, 2002

By Roger K. Miller

In short stories, plays, novels, essays and memoirs, William Saroyan exuberantly proclaimed a philosophy of the decency of ordinary people, life as something to celebrate and hope as mankind's salvation.

	A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan By John Leggett Knopf. ($30)

But that's not the way he lived.

John Leggett, who -- if the endnotes are any indication -- spent more than a decade researching and writing this biography, is fascinated by Saroyan, sympathizes with him and admires his limited literary achievements but not his personal qualities.

Saroyan's many shortcomings made him, Leggett writes, "the kind of man we might cross a busy street to avoid."

First, though, introductions are in order. William Who?

Leggett, whose books include "Ross and Tom," a dual biography of the one-hit authors Ross Lockridge and Thomas Heggen, concedes in his introduction that mention of Saroyan's name typically brings only questioning stares.

Once it was not so. Beginning in 1934, with the publication of his first collection of stories, "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze," and continuing for several years thereafter, he seemed the literary man to beat.

In 1939 alone, three of his plays were on Broadway at once -- one of them, "The Time of Your Life," won the Pulitzer (which Saroyan rejected) and Drama Critics' prizes. In 1943, he won an Oscar for the screenplay of "The Human Comedy," which he immediately turned into a best-selling novel.

Saroyan was born in 1908 in Fresno, Calif., into an Armenian-American family so poor that, after the death of his father, his mother put her four children into an orphanage for a time. Leggett identifies the orphanage experience and Saroyan's Armenian heritage as the wellsprings of the "gusher of energy" that produced so much work.

Much of this generally commendable biography is based on the "huge, candid journal" Saroyan kept from 1934 until his death in 1981. Details of his life before then are skimpy and apparently drawn mostly from his autobiographical stories, but it does seem clear that the traits that would hobble his personal and artistic lives manifested themselves early.

He was as much an overbearing as daring young man. Once he got his foot in the door, Saroyan all but assaulted the literary world with his self-assuredness. He was arrogant and careless and, in general, he behaved badly.

His ingratitude was exceeded only by his hubris, Leggett writes. "He believed in his innate superiority."

Unwilling and unable to take advice even from those who could have helped his career, he was perpetually inclined to blame others, including the audience, when his plays flopped.

For example, in panning "The Son," New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson said, "Mr. Saroyan seems to be taking the world to task for a creative failure within himself, and the spectacle is not a pretty one."

He was married to, and divorced from, the same woman twice -- Carol Marcus (who later married Walter Matthau). His relationship with his two children, Aram and Lucy, grew more sour as they grew older until, months before his death from cancer, he disinherited them.

World War II was the turning point. Drafted as a private, the only fighting he did was with the Army itself -- to the brink of court martial -- though he had a cushy job and his superiors indulged him as a famous writer.

While other writers, like his friend Irwin Shaw, scrambled for combat assignments for the experience, he dismissed such experience as worthless to a writer.

Saroyan's innocent world and his exceptional promise became a casualty of the war, Budd Schulberg wrote in a 1960 Esquire article. Yet he pressed on, Leggett says, "even when he knew he had lost his way." Immune to discouragement, he heard no voice but his own, which was both his central flaw and his life preserver.

"The Saroyan story, so gallantly begun, becomes a tragedy of rage and rejection," the author concludes. His writings are not so much sentimental, as the general assessment has had it, but angry.

Far from being the genial extrovert of one of his plays or stories, Leggett says, he admitted that "people were never entirely real to him," and in middle age came to the "realization that he knew scarcely anyone he liked, nor did he want to."

In 1962, Time magazine, though his perennial adversary, grudgingly granted him "a modest but lasting place in literature." For a writer, a modest number of whose many works remain in print, that prescient prediction seems a fitting assessment.

Roger K. Miller is a retired journalist who lives in Wis-consin.