Saroyan’s Literary Quarantine

At bedtime my 8-year-old daughter climbs under her covers. I click in a cassette tape and turn down the light. The old, worn tape scratches and warbles. After a long buzz, a throat clears and, in a deep, resonant voice, vaguely accented, he begins:

“The speaker is William Saroyan, at his home in Fresno, California. . . . “

And so, dead more than 15 years, one of California’s greatest writers will read my daughter to sleep. He will read chapters from “The Human Comedy,” his most popular novel, and short stories from “My Name Is Aram,” stories about growing up in the San Joaquin Valley amid hard times and Armenian immigrants.

“One day,” he reads, beginning “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse,” one of his most magical stories, “back there in the good old days when I was 9 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.”

Here I peer through the darkness at my daughter. Her eyes are wide open and gleaming. She, too, sees the horse. I hope the tape will hold together through one more performance. I haven’t seen it stocked in stores for years.

*

One need not have been raised in Fresno to appreciate Saroyan, though I suppose it helps. Certainly he, better than anybody, captured the valley’s strange texture: the mishmash landscape of farm, town and deserts; the jostling of so many different peoples, all a bit bewildered at finding themselves thrown together.

“Standing at the edge of our city,” he wrote, “a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness and loneliness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing. . . . Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of jack rabbits.”

Certain Fresnans never forgave Saroyan for his harsher observations about the old hometown. The more political Armenians complained he wasted too many words on the human comedy, and not enough on the tragedy of a lost homeland. That he wrote so personally, and from the heart, gave literary critics their target: He was, they scolded, an undisciplined sentimentalist, mawkish.

“I don’t think my writing is sentimental,” he protested, “although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.”

For whatever reasons, Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine. Few of his titles are in print. He’s barely taught in schools. His own plans for literary legacy--a writers-in-residence program, posthumous publication of many works--have been scrapped or stalled. They did name a theater after him in Fresno, the one thing he expressly requested not be done.

*

Those who remain under the Saroyan spell can only hope that the world will come around. His work simply seems too extraordinary, and universal, to be cleared from the shelves, and for what? The next O.J. as-told-to? One flame-keeper is Jacqueline Kazarian, a niece who restored Saroyan’s hillside home here and turned it into a museum of sorts. She gives tours as a way “to keep his name out there,” and she takes comfort in the counsel of a friendly bookstore owner:

“She told me not to worry. His writing was so good it will resurrect itself someday.”

This seems more than possible, listening now as Saroyan reads “The Pomegranate Tree.” It’s a fable about a boy, the storyteller, who helps a homesick uncle plant a secret orchard in the desert outside Fresno. Sadly, the noble project fails.

“About three years later,” Saroyan reads, his voice now sounding weary, “I drove out to the land and walked out to the pomegranate orchard. The trees were all dead. The soil was heavy again with cactus and desert brush. Except for the small dead pomegranate trees the place was exactly the way it had been all the years of the world.

“We walked around in the orchard for a while and then went back to the car.

“We got into the car and drove back to town.

“We didn’t say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.”

This passage still can bring a catch to my throat. I turn to see if it holds the same power over my daughter. She is fast asleep, dreaming of white horses, I imagine.