A Home for a Literary Giant’s ‘Junk’

Some of those who knew William Saroyan have objected to the Saroyan Foundation’s recent decision to consolidate the California writer’s huge collection of manuscripts and memorabilia at Stanford University. The collection, they say, should have remained in Saroyan’s hometown of Fresno and at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, where he spent many fond hours with the late James D. Hart, his friend and the director of the Bancroft Library.

Saroyan, who lived from 1908 to 1981, had in fact given Hart the first shot at creating an archive. Hart’s team, however, took only 10% of a collection that Saroyan had wanted under one roof.

Hart’s staff probably made a wise curatorial decision, for Saroyan had accumulated a physically if not financially hefty estate in what he himself admitted was a neurotic attempt to immortalize himself: “The more junk I have,” he once remarked, “the safer I am. Death will have to find its way through the clutter.” Hart’s curators had to make their way through everything from jars of pebbles to trunks of broken clocks, from phone books filled with dated drawings to envelopes of clippings from his famous walrus mustache.

A cousin of Saroyan, Ruben Saroyan, has lamented that the elite Stanford University is the last place this writer, who was drawn not to the landed class but to spiritually uprooted California immigrants, would have wanted his belongings to rest: “Bill would never have approved of Stanford.... Bill felt a real connection to Fresno and the Bancroft.”

But Saroyan was a man of open spirit and generous heart. As he wrote in his first novel, “The Human Comedy” (1943), “If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and he is then no longer a thief.” Now, his trust has given to Stanford, allowing us all to be curators, sorting through the wheat and chaff of this most iconoclastic writer’s life.