KING PACK RAT : The Necropolis of William Saroyan

The more junk I have, the safer I am. Death will have to find its way through the clutter.

--WILLIAM SAROYAN, “NOT DYING”

UPON HIS DEATH in 1981, William Saroyan left two houses in Fresno, an apartment in Paris and his sister’s house in San Francisco, all of them full of personal effects. There was nothing unusual in this. Authors are expected to leave behind archives for study. Saroyan, though, went a touch further. He created a foundation in his own name, bequeathing all his future earnings to finance studies of William Saroyan. This was egocentric enough, but what was unusual wasn’t his will but what he left to that foundation.

Besides thousands of pages of daily diaries, hundreds of novels, stories and plays, Saroyan saved his first typewriter, his 1929 and 1931 Fresno library cards, used typewriter ribbons, jars of spare change and pebbles, trunks of seaside rocks and broken clocks, phone books filled with timed and dated drawings, boxes of junk mail and envelopes of his mustache clippings.

And since the Fresno-born Saroyan skyrocketed to fame during the Depression as a short-story writer, became a prize winner as a dramatist during the 1940s and worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and Europe throughout the ‘50s, his estate is more than just a monument to self-documentation or a warehouse of precious heirlooms. The archive contains daily accounts in journals and complete correspondence with all his many famous acquaintances. For American literature, the estate has been called “a trove to rival the storehouse of Charles Foster Kane.” As a historical record, the archive is regarded as “immensely valuable” by Barlow Der Mugrdechian, a professor at the Center for Armenian Studies at Cal State Fresno; already work has begun on an examination of the last 20 years of Saroyan’s life, when he was a frequent guest in Soviet Armenia, retracing his family’s roots, investigating the Armenian Diaspora and writing his autobiographical essays on the immigrant experience.

Saroyan understood the multicultural importance of his huge, self-appointed task. Leaving his royalties to underwrite studies of his writings made financial sense--the archive was too bulky for most university libraries to store, let alone to pay to catalogue (a task now in progress at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library). When the cataloguing of the literary manuscripts is finished, sometime next year, scholars chosen by the Saroyan Foundation will set to work. An authorized biography will be written, followed by the publication of collected letters. After that, presumably, a lemming frenzy of Ph.D. candidates will blanket the remains. As one historian has pointed out, the collection’s rich variety of theatrical and film information alone guarantees that it will be used by a multitude of scholars, some with only peripheral interest in the writer.

When Peter Howard, a nationally known rare-book dealer, was called in by the executors to appraise the literary portions of the Saroyan estate, its size and variousness was puzzling, because it was clear that Saroyan didn’t collect this for his own or anyone else’s gain. One of Saroyan’s more mysterious habits was churning out thousands of drawings, but to Howard’s extensive knowledge, only a few books decorated with his art have ever been on the market. Unlike other artists, who often gift their less fortunate friends with salable items or shore up their own finances with sales of selected memorabilia, Saroyan hardly ever let any go.

What was the master plan for all the other stuff ?

HOWARD’S STORE IS CALLED Serendipity Books, and it is located in a former shop for home brewers and wine makers on University Avenue in Berkeley. The vague aroma of cork and barley malt syrup lingers in the air, but now thousands of books line the walls and fill the rooms of the large building.

A tall, balding man with a slight stoop, Howard wears loose, comfortable and unremarkable clothes. He is given to quick shifts of mood, and has other passions besides collecting books. During the spring and summer, he sometimes dons a San Francisco Giants baseball cap or windbreaker. When he can’t be at the ballpark (or when there’s an away game), he listens to the Giants on the radio. Scattered around Serendipity are various sports souvenirs: a wooden statue of a batter with moveable arms, a photograph of the Wilson, Kan., team for 1914 and a framed photograph of a young, confident and handsome Saroyan smiling down at an inflatable plastic baseball bat.

With more than 200,000 books in his store, Howard clearly is someone in touch with the habits of accumulation. But when the subject of the Saroyan archive comes up, even he is amazed at the size of the man’s holdings.

For an appraisal catalogue, Howard was required to list, describe and price all the printed and literary portions of Saroyan’s estate, and, he says, “it took 5 1/2 months. The first portion I was given came in 207 boxes, each box one cubic foot. My catalogue totaled 336 pages.”

“Without a doubt, Saroyan was accurate in his assessment of the problems that would follow from his death,” Howard says dryly. “Saroyan compulsively kept things that in the normal course of events other people would have discarded. Used typewriter ribbons, mustache clippings, his first typewriter and the occasional drawing that he executed to ward off the gloomies or insomnia in unfortunate times. He was capable of drawing on anything.”

Saroyan noted the time he started and finished the pictures that he drew on the endpapers of cheap books, telephone books and junk-mail flyers. This habit dated from early in his career, when these doodles and drawings were saved as peripheral mementos of his inspired moments. The manuscript of possibly his first novel, the unpublished stream-of- consciousness “Trapeze Over the Universe,” was accompanied by 58 pencil drawings and 31 paintings. Howard also finds other patterns.

“He did two types of drawings,” Howard says, “a self-portrait and schematic outline in caricature form, or he would do sort of an abstract-expressionist, rectangular line drawing, either in pencil or in many colors. The curious thing is that then he would retain this for no one else’s pleasure other than his own. Given how many I know that he executed, it’s as if he never gave away any. For any reason.”

It’s not unusual for an artist to save the byproducts of creative moments, along with some of the things that inspired them. But if a writer is very prolific and very famous, with many reviews, articles and fan letters, these things mount up. Interestingly, when Saroyan’s fame receded, his accumulation continued, as did his artistic production.

In 1963, Saroyan claimed that for 20 years he had written one play a year and never took any to Broadway producers. While this might be a defensive comment from a dramatist who was no longer a hot property, Howard comments, “I wouldn’t be surprised if for the last 20 years he wrote a play a day!”

Since plays find their worth on stage, it was hard to understand why a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist would turn out so many, and then allow only a few to be produced. For Howard, a partial answer is found in Saroyan’s compulsion to write.

“He conceptualized almost every imaginative experience that he had. He had a handwritten diary going, and from 1941 on a typed transcript of this diary, which totaled about 30,000 pages at the time of his death. He converted imaginative or observed experience into short dramas as frequently as he did into short stories, often alternating from one to the other. Given the evidence in the archive, this was a constant process.”

Of course, such a stream of works opens Saroyan to the charge of automatic writing, an uncritical megalomaniacal acceptance of whatever came out of his typewriter each morning, such as the flood of manuscripts that blighted Gertrude Stein’s later years.

Howard remains adamant that the archive proves that Saroyan was not simply an idiot savant of American literature, that his work habits were as rigorous as his inspiration was constant. He becomes animated as he describes Saroyan’s methods, and a tinge of awe creeps into his voice. “Any story of Saroyan writing ‘The Time of Your Life’ in three days or a week is certainly to be believed. But I’ve seen the manuscript of ‘The Time of Your Life,’ and he revised when a copy came back from a stenographer and reworked it again when the manuscript was returned. He’d insist on the right to revise any final page proofs from any publication that would send him such. So the creative spurt was almost instantaneous and the revision swift.”

The case is complicated further by the public image of Saroyan as a magnificent goof who relied totally on intuition, like some of his own fictional characters, but this popular idea was not consistent with his actual literary practice.

“The notion that some of these things came clean from his head in their final form was probably exaggerated,” Howard says. “Saroyan was a fast composer, with a very generous and expansive and inclusive temperament. He respected his own productions, however sentimental or however poor in artistic merit. He was perfectly happy to allow the ugly children of his inspiration to survive along with the more perfect.”

AN OBVIOUS STARTING PLACE for Saroyan’s accumulation compulsion would seem to be the four years of his childhood spent at the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland. After his father died, his mother was unable to support the family and placed her children there. In “Saroyan: A Biography,” Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford yielded to the temptation to find a single explanation for Saroyan’s obsessiveness (he was also a compulsive, self-destructive gambler) and wrote, “If there is a ‘Rosebud’ in the life of William Saroyan, an emblematic object like the lost sled of Charles Foster Kane, it is the Coon Jigger.” On his first day in the orphanage, Saroyan’s mother gave him a windup dancing doll on a tin stage to distract him while she slipped away.

By his own account, Saroyan wrote about this incident “six or seven times.” Of course, in grand Saroyan fashion, each version gave different interpretations of the event and its effect on him. In one account this toy symbolized the futility of replacing a mother’s love; in a second it alerted him to the treachery of the world; in a third version, boredom with material things was the end result. But he kept this toy until his death. While the toy was significant to him, its racist nature was not; as an Armenian, Saroyan was quite sensitive to race discrimination.

Whether or not this toy was Saroyan’s “Rosebud,” the orphanage years certainly marked and scarred Saroyan. Howard notes that throughout his life Saroyan received annual reports from the orphanage, and he says that “Saroyan’s bonding to his sister, Cosette, clearly can be traced back at least to that date.”

As his older sister, Cosette functioned as a mother for him during the orphanage years. When Howard examined the things removed from Cosette’s house, the prizes of Saroyan’s youthful fame were there, and Howard “found more signs of an early life, a more openly revealed personal life.” In addition to buying the house for his sister, Saroyan used it to store his working library and signed editions sent by other famous authors.

It could be that Saroyan dragged home the best trophies of his success to his revered older sister, and then the habit got out of hand. It seems likely that their value for Saroyan was reflected in his keeping them with Cosette, while the sheer volume of his Fresno holdings in their haphazard boxes made that accumulation seem rather impersonal and offhand.

But Howard believes that such distinctions are facile. Saroyan’s personal life was also abundantly revealed in the Fresno houses, he says, and he is emphatic that there were “more beautiful letters to his children than any other author I had previously encountered writing to their children.” Moreover, Saroyan’s attachment to his sister goes only so far as an explanation, because as Howard points out, “it is a different matter to explain why he would also pick up stones on a walk and then keep them as well.”

In Lee and Gifford’s biography (which was written without access to the papers now at the Bancroft Library), the author’s Broadway theater friends claimed that his years in the Army during World War II drastically altered his personality. Howard doesn’t see any support for this belief in the archival material. “William Saroyan was more than a match for the Army,” he says. “He didn’t want to be in it, but in a sense I feel that he was probably able to use his creative talents under those special circumstances as well as anyone. He was involved in training films and in the service probably wrote several works that saw light. In 1944 alone, he wrote more than 300 of the most extraordinary love letters to his wife.

“He had enormous success in his early life,” Howard continues. “He had abandoned money or caused it to go away in a variety of ways. I came across all the evidence ever required for the gambling that Saroyan indulged in. A freewheeling fellow in his early days, he led a modest life later on. By his own choice he was in and out of literary society. He was in Hollywood, and he opted out of it with a vengeance. A success on the stage, he insisted on total control; he had total control. He grew weary of fighting with the powers of public theater, I think. He was affected by personal events in his life to such an extraordinary degree that a full-fledged biography will be required to sort out these phases. But from 1950 on, he chose to turn his back on that public way of life and become a much more private person. He certainly had fewer financial rewards from his work, some of that by choice. I don’t think he was overwhelmingly occupied with the notion of earning more and more money.”

In this view, fame and a subsequent disenchantment with fame and money cannot explain Saroyan’s pack-rat habits. Surely a strong bond to his older sister, or the retention of a toy, even one from so obviously a key emotional experience, can’t explain a lifetime of accumulation any more than it can explain Saroyan’s compulsive writing and gambling.

University of California psychologist Dr. Margaret Singer is an authority on obsessive compulsive disorders. She notes that such behavior is not always destructive. In her experience it is not unusual for what she calls accumulators to be “wealthy and sometimes gifted people with a large sense of the world who want to tie it all together and re-experience it. They tend to be self-centered and sentimental. For the truly bright, it’s a way to overcome their loneliness. They can share these things.”

WHILE UNDENIABLY A manic and egocentric writer, Saroyan took his greatest pleasure in celebrating daily life. In a Saroyan anthology, his titles alone seem like a Homeric catalogue of small, potentially lost moments: “A Moment of Prose in Kansas,” “One Hello and One Goodbye” and “A Flash of the Flashlight, and the World-Shaking Question: Joe?”

Saroyan’s aim was to celebrate the poetry inherent in any being, event or thing, the more common the better. The world seemed to provide as generous a number of objects for his celebration as did his own imagination. Yet there’s a kind of torment too, since no self-aware man could ignore the problem of storage and care for this proliferation without contemplating what it means to do so.

As Saroyan wrote of the literary portion of his archive, “There are at least 10 million words of unpublished stuff . . . and someday perhaps a specialist will run through the stuff. And if he happens to be a biographer, I feel very sorry for him, because . . . so much of it is deadpan spoofing (of myself, of the illusion of myself . . . ). But the whole thing gets even more complicated when I point out that sometimes the spoofer is the illusion of myself, while the spoof is myself.”

For Saroyan, the moments he recorded in his prose were equal to the throwaway papers he rescued to decorate with his drawings, and these in turn were equal to the $5 bill washed up on Thornton Beach for his discovery and that he dutifully signed, dated and saved. It is as if Saroyan wanted to challenge the world at its own game of fecundity.

Peter Howard puts the case this way: “The mystery of Saroyan was for me that he was so productive. Even in privacy. That the man, that anyone, could simply produce so much work, none of it particularly disagreeable. The man always wrote with grace, no matter how modest the goal of any particular story. He was an extremely talented and energetic human being.”

Howard sees Saroyan’s habit of endless collection as a “metaphorical act.” “Everyone makes documents metaphors, everyone makes their relationships to things metaphors for their feelings about what their life means,” he says. “Out of (Saroyan’s) orphanage experience he surely evolved a sense of what it was to be an individual human being. All of his literature is about that. And his attitude toward the things that he left about his house was a non-literary statement about what it was to be an individual. And how he felt about that. It’s a very strong statement.”

Saroyan, in his writing, offered his own metaphysical reasons for being a pack rat. In his version, it wasn’t because his mother gave him a toy while leaving him in an orphanage or because of his disillusion with fame or his bad old Army days. Saroyan’s writing fed, and fed on, daily life. His fascination with the world paralleled his creative love and reverence for life.

Discussing why he saved waste paper for drawing, or noting the first few ideas for future works, he wrote: “Time, and something more, has made the scrap of paper and the writing on it a work of natural art. Besides the connection of the words with the work I wrote, the scrap and the writing are a picture, and a deeply satisfying one, because the picture is so unimportant, swift, artless, and at the same time so right and true--because it happened.”