Fresno Finally Throws Wake for Literary Lion

Twenty years after he uttered one of the great parting lines--”Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”--the ashes of writer William Saroyan were buried Sunday in the town where his genius first sprang.

The roundabout nature of his final journey, which came amid Fresno’s first Saroyan Festival, would have delighted the author and playwright to no end. Never short on confidence, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar, Saroyan figured he was too out-sized to be kept in one place.

Half his ashes were shipped in 1982 to a memorial in Armenia, and the other half sat in obscurity in an urn on a chapel shelf here. Now on a springlike day filled with the sweet smell of apricot blossoms, those ashes were laid to rest in a grave beside the railroad tracks on the outskirts of town.

It was a fitting spot for Fresno’s most famous native son, whose writings put the town on the world map but also poked fun at it.

All around Ararat Cemetery were the markers of the Armenian immigrants he brought to life in his short stories (“My Name is Aram,” 1940), novels (“The Human Comedy,” 1943), plays (“My Heart’s in the Highlands,” 1939) and songs. Here were cousins who stole beautiful white horses and farmers who swore they were poets and mothers who could feed a houseful of strangers with one chicken and five ripe pears.

His son, Aram, and daughter, Lucy, who had spent years trying to come to peace with their father’s life and legend, listened with a handful of his old friends and dignitaries as the priest of the First Armenian Presbyterian Church prayed over the black granite headstone.

Saroyan, of course, had written his own epitaph:

“In the time of your life, live--so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world but shall smile at the infinite delight and mystery of it.”

This town, which still isn’t quite sure what to make of Saroyan, dead or alive, had spent the previous two days celebrating the work of its greatest export, if you don’t count the raisin. The ongoing 2-month-long festival of theater productions, philharmonic concerts, museum exhibits and literary talks is an attempt to revive a writer who rose to soaring heights in the 1930s and ‘40s but has long since fallen out of critical favor.

It is also a way for Fresno, spreading out into the mass form of Wal-Marts and McDonald’s it now shares with every other city, to find a way back to its past.

For his few friends still living, the community’s bow to the exuberant Armenian with the walrus mustache and deep belly laugh is years past due.

They have never quite forgiven city fathers for refusing to keep a treasure trove of unpublished manuscripts and memorabilia that secured Saroyan’s place as one of America’s most prolific writers and pack rats. After years of gathering dust, the collection was shipped away in boxes, first to UC Berkeley and then to Stanford University.

The sheer volume--from his frayed shoelaces to his mustache clippings to the pebbles he collected on his furious bike rides through town to the words that never stopped pouring out of his Royal typewriter--takes up more than 250 feet of shelf space.

The collection of another California literary lion, John Steinbeck, whose 100-year birthday is being celebrated this month in his hometown of Salinas, measures a mere 20 linear feet.

Like so many Armenians, the Saroyans had come to this land of grapes and peaches in 1908 to escape the pogroms of Ottoman Turkey. Saroyan’s father, Armenak, a minister and frustrated poet, died when William was 3. Death would become one of the central obsessions of Saroyan’s work.

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really sleep,” he once wrote to aspiring writers. “Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

High school couldn’t contain him, and he dropped out at 15, continuing his education at the public library, bedazzled by Edgar Lee Master’s “Spoon River Anthology.” When he wasn’t reading, he was walking the ditch banks and fields, discovering the eternal struggle between the horned toad, which was trying to hold on to his world, and the farmer, who was trying to engineer a new one.

“Fresno had a great early appeal for me,” he wrote. “It had a fine smell of dust, of the desert, of rocks baking in the sun . . . of leaf and blossom and fruit.”

By 18, he wanted nothing more than to leave its small town “rot and decay and ferment.” He moved to San Francisco and then bought a one-way train ticket to New York City. He proceeded to write a short story every day in a bursting, spontaneous style.

A Difficult Start in New York City

Just as swiftly came the rejection letters from magazine editors. Who was this cocky kid who dared to riff a whole page on the miracle of breathing?

Holed up in the Mills Hotel, he considered calling it quits but had only $50, too little for the train fare home. On New Year’s Day 1929, he wrote to his best pal, Yep Moradian, about his desire to return to a simple life of pruning vines:

“Xmas brought me the flu; fever 104; burning hot in sweat; no friends; too homesick to want to die; had dreams for four days and nights of home and the old scenes and meals. I am positive now that I am a God damn fool.”

His fever broke, and he turned it into a story about a poverty-stricken young writer with only tap water and Proust to fill his belly. The publication of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” in 1934 was the break Saroyan needed.

For the next 15 years, his work was everywhere--in short stories and novels, on Broadway and on records, including the hit song by Rosemary Clooney, “Come On-a My House,” which he wrote in the idiom of an Armenian woman trying to entice a guest with figs and dates and nuts and cakes.

“Saroyan was a lot more than a short story writer,” said Bob Setrakian, a local farm boy who became a San Francisco businessman and heads the foundation overseeing Saroyan’s legacy. “He worked in all the art forms and drew and painted almost every day.”

Setrakian said it was bad enough that some of Saroyan’s finest stories were out of print and he couldn’t interest a single publisher in the boxes of never-before-seen manuscripts. But then to realize that so much of Saroyan’s life and work was unknown to the people who should know him best--the residents of Fresno.

So Setrakian shared the idea of a festival with local impresario Larry Balakian. Before he knew it, Balakian had signed on more than 29 nonprofit organizations and scores of volunteers.

Winemakers at Cal State Fresno bottled a 2000 vintage Saroyan Syrah. The nation’s first bus “graphically wrapped” in the visage of a writer, the “Saroyan bus,” hit the streets last week.

There was no attempt during the festival’s opening weekend to slap varnish on Saroyan’s complex legend. Whether it was a museum exhibit or a literary symposium, he was portrayed with all his conceit and vices and desire to “hang in there and wrestle death to a draw, at least.”

At a reception to honor her old friend, Roxie Moradian, Yep’s widow, recalled when Saroyan was one of the most talked about writers in the world. The self-doubt of the fatherless boy, who grew up in a town that barred Armenians from country clubs and elite subdivisions, seemed vanished.

This was a Saroyan who bragged that he could write an entire play in three days and then wrote the Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Time of Your Life,” in six days. He ended up rejecting the prize because the play was “no more great than anything else I have ever written.”

What he never quite mastered was family life. He married Carol Marcus, a New York debutante, and they had two children together. They divorced, remarried and divorced again before she wound up with actor Walter Matthau.

In his later years, estranged from his children, Saroyan split time between Paris and Fresno. Broke from playing the ponies and roulette tables and owing the IRS a debt no writer in his 50s could pay, he turned inward to a life of documenting every external facet of his existence.

When he finished eating a can of green beans, for instance, he would neatly take off the label and sign the backside with the year, month, day and hour. He did the same with his Metro tickets from France, playing cards, typewriter ribbons, rocks he picked up off the streets.

“I think Saroyan’s last gesture, while seemingly mad, was really the final selfless act of a writer. By putting his signature to the items of everyday life, he was documenting everyday life,” said Aris Janigian, a professor of Humanities at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Half His Ashes in Fresno Since 1981

Saroyan died in 1981 at 72, and his ashes, at least half of them, have sat in Fresno’s Chapel of Light in a golden urn inscribed, “Author and Humanitarian.” Aram Saroyan said it was only right that his father’s remains come to rest in Ararat Cemetery, where he used to wander the grounds in the rain, talking to the headstones.

On a bright, cloudless Sunday, about 20 friends and family huddled around a huge black stone imported from India. A hole had been dug among the names Garabedian, Simonian and Krikorian.

“Welcome home, dear friend, dear writer,” said Kevin Starr, author and California state librarian. “Welcome home to the place that haunted and nurtured you across a lifetime. Be at peace, Bill. Be at peace.”