A Son Named Aram, a Father Named Bill

This year, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has reissued “My Name Is Aram” by my father, William Saroyan, a book with whose eponymous central character I’ve been mistakenly identified all my life.

To begin with, I’m 46 and the new Modern Classics edition marks the 50th anniversary of the book’s original publication. Then, too, it’s a book in which the writer looks back at a childhood still earlier in time, recalling in an elegiac mood the Armenian immigrant community in Fresno, circa World War I.

As I explain to readers who believe they’ve happened on the real-life model for Aram, this is a book about my father’s childhood. And yet that’s not quite the case either. Here is the opening of the book’s celebrated first story, “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse”:

“One day back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every imaginable kind of magnificence, and life was still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up by tapping on the window of my room.

“ ‘Aram,’ he said.

“I jumped out of bed and looked out the window.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw.

“It wasn’t morning yet, but it was summer and with daybreak not many minutes around the corner of the world it was light enough for me to know I wasn’t dreaming.

“My cousin Mourad was sitting on a beautiful white horse.”

If there is another single page of prose that better evokes the wonder and mystery of childhood, I would love to know about it. What makes the book even more remarkable--and “My Name Is Aram” as a whole lives up to the promise of its opening--is the fact that its author spent the years from before he was 3 until after his eighth birthday in the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland, Calif.

This was a consequence of the death of my father’s Armenian immigrant father, Armenak Saroyan, at age 37 in 1911. A gentle, handsome man who wrote poetry, Armenak was an ordained minister in the Armenian Church. But he found no parish in Fresno that would sustain him and his family, and discovering himself a cast-off in the new world, he became a chicken farmer--and not long after, evidently broken in spirit, died of peritonitis.

He left his wife, Takoohi, with four children--the youngest, my father, was the only one born in America--and no means of support. She put her children into the orphanage and took work as a domestic. Five years later, with the help of her younger brother, she was able to take her children back from the orphanage and bring them to a little home in Fresno.

The name of Takoohi’s younger brother was Aram. This man, Uncle Aram as he was widely known, was for my father a source of endless delight and inspiration and, equally, exasperation. A loud, importunate, powerful man, he had arrived in the new world at 12 , young enough to learn the ropes without an already developed “old world” sensibility to hamper him, as it would seem to have hampered Armenak. Uncle Aram became a criminal lawyer, famous in Fresno for emotional courtroom summaries that sometimes won cases for the guilty.

When Aram’s nephew, Willie, back from the orphanage and selling papers after school to help out at home, expressed at a relatively early age an interest in writing, the lawyer was loudly disdainful. When at 20 my father quit his job as the youngest manager of a Postal Telegraph office in the country to devote full time to writing, Uncle Aram tried to throw him bodily out of his own house until Takoohi stopped him.

When, in 1934, the publication of his first book, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories,” made the 26-year-old William Saroyan an international literary sensation, very likely no one was more astonished than Uncle Aram, suddenly eclipsed by his lowly nephew, who overnight had become the pride not only of his immediate family but also of the entire Armenian race. Interviewed at the time about his newly famous relative, Aram remarked impatiently: “Willie? Willie was nervous “--a response my father would remember with amusement years afterward.

How had the young writer, who had dropped out of school before finishing the eighth grade, achieved so swift and unlikely an ascent? In these first stories he had found in the national disaster of the Depression a dark cheer and camaraderie, a bittersweet poetry that seemed to catch the national psyche by surprise. By making light of what had up to then held everyone in gloomy thrall, the writer became for the 1930s a figure comparable to what F. Scott Fitzgerald had been for the 1920s, the literary equivalent of a movie star.

“I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work,” begins one story with characteristic panache. Six years and six more story collections later came “My Name Is Aram,” in which he did more or less the same thing for the childhood of a poor immigrant Armenian boy in Fresno. He made a prose bouquet of youth and comedy and sweet melancholy out of what had been more grim and desolate than any reader might have guessed.

And the name on the cover of the book was Aram, a foreign name that now became famous and beloved in America not because of Uncle Aram, whose celebrity was a local thing, but because of the once-disdained literary gift of his nephew Willie. Indeed, the year “My Name Is Aram” was published, 1940, was also the year my father at 32 won the Pulitzer Prize for his play, “The Time of Your Life”--and turned down the award along with its $1,000 honorarium. “Commerce has no business patronizing art,” his wire to the award committee stated with chilly economy.

For me, it’s hard not to see in this celebrated act a symbolic nose-thumbing by the young artist at the whole American officialdom that hadn’t cared whether he was alive several years earlier, and more personally at his surrogate father, Uncle Aram. The orphaned son of the failed poet-preacher had made good on a bet Armenak had lost, and when his chips came in, he didn’t need the establishment’s pat on the back or the check that came with it. In turning down the Pulitzer Prize, he made evidence in life of what he seemed at the time determined not to show in his art--his darker side.

In 1943 came “The Human Comedy,” his most popular book, which in now identifiably “Saroyanesque” fashion rendered the home-front experience during World War II more heart-warming than the writer himself would later feel entirely comfortable with. That same year, Saroyan married a beautiful and witty 18-year-old New York debutante named Carol Marcus.

At the time of their marriage, he was unaware that his bride’s early background was similar to his own, if not quite a bit worse. An illegitimate child who never had known her father, Carol was boarded in a series of foster homes until her young and beautiful mother made a fortunate marriage and brought her daughter--now 8 years old, the same age Saroyan got out of the orphanage--home to Park Avenue.

The marriage of Bill and Carol was a disaster. It was almost as if Saroyan married a human incarnation of one of his own stories in which enchantment held sway over unspoken tragedy. The two married and divorced each other twice in eight years, after which Saroyan, embittered and with the years of his greatest fame behind him, went on for the rest of his days alone. He died of cancer in 1981 at 72.

As I grew up with the name in the title of his most famous story collection, I grappled with a complex legacy of poetry and bitter personal failure, of public legend and private reality not easy to sort out. Although he was known for his celebrations of close-knit family life, these had been written before his own efforts at marriage and a family failed; the man I knew could be both forceful and warm was also cutting and insistently remote.

When he died, he left a will that effectively disinherited both my sister, Lucy, and me, as well as his three grandchildren. Its terms perpetuated the cycle, orphaning two succeeding generations as he had been orphaned. Even so, in his hospital room not long before he died, my daughter, Cream, and I had a more healing visit with him than I would have dared to imagine.

At the end, in the room at the Veterans Administration hospital in Fresno, the poet marked irrevocably by the death of his father was alive and well. In his final days, confined to his bed, my father seemed very nearly to be playing with the biggest of all riddles.

“I’m letting go,” he said at one point during our visit. “Well, somebody said maybe that’s not the right thing to do. And I said--’Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know.’ I’m grappling with the mystery of . . . what . . . is .”

His eyes that day were the large, wide-open eyes of a child, a boy like Aram who after a whole lifetime was still looking with wonder at something as profound and astonishing as a beautiful white horse.

Saroyan’s books include “Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan” and “William Saroyan,” a literary biography.