An abandoned king of the Central Valley

He had been one of the most celebrated writers in America in the 1930s and ‘40s, a short story master who won a Pulitzer Prize on Broadway and an Oscar in Hollywood for the screenplay for “The Human Comedy.” His style was so unmistakable -- he once did a whole page riff on the miracle of breathing -- that his last name became an adjective. Saroyanesque. The ebullient Armenian thought nothing could dim his light. But by the spring of 1981, as he lay dying in his tract house in Fresno, William Saroyan was alone and forgotten.

He had long ago divorced the only woman he loved and was estranged from their two children. He had lost so much money at the roulette table and race track -- at one point in the 1940s his debts topped $100,000 -- that he became a kind of literary panhandler. Death always had been a central obsession of his work. “Not Dying” was the title of one memoir. “Obituaries” was the title of another. “Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might,” he once wrote. “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.”

Now prostrate cancer riddled his body, and the 72-year-old Saroyan kept toying with the idea of suicide. Yet each day, he dragged himself out of bed and trudged to the old Royal typewriter that sat on a draftsman’s table in the middle of his cluttered living room. There he stood, as was his writing practice, and began to fill blank paper with words -- some lousy, some mediocre and some as funny and razor-sharp as anything he had ever written.

In those last months, he wrote more than 337,000 words, a memoir he variously titled “Adios, Muchacho” and “Etc. Etc. Etc.” After his death, literary executors rifling through the boxes in the little house on Griffith Way couldn’t believe the output of his final years. Long after the New York publishing world had finished with him, long after the college professors had stopped teaching him, Saroyan and his typewriter kept clattering, millions and millions of words.

When it came time to catalog his shorts stories, plays, memoirs, journals, novels and essays, published and unpublished, the girth of the Saroyan collection dwarfed that of Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. He didn’t stop at words. He painted hundreds of free line drawings and made a life’s work out of documenting the smallest facets of his existence. When he finished eating a can of green beans, for instance, he would peel off the label and sign the backside with the year, month, day and hour. He clipped and saved his mustache hairs and collected rocks and twine from his bicycle rides through town.

What fueled these compulsions isn’t clear. Was Saroyan building a great wall against mortality? Was he performing the last act of a writer convinced that the minutiae of his life would someday be of value to biographers? Or had his gaze turned so inward that it grew into a sort of fetish or maybe even madness?

Unfortunately, these are among the many questions unexplored or given scant attention in “A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan” by John Leggett. A New York-bred editor, writer and teacher, Leggett boasts a literary sensibility from Andover and Yale that Saroyan, schooled at the public library in Fresno and the bars and whorehouses of San Francisco, would have found ironic.

Although Leggett never comes right out and says it, the reader feels the weight of a biographer who has spent a decade with a subject he thoroughly dislikes. At times, Leggett allows his burden to turn into bile. If his book is built on a single theme, it is the notion that Saroyan, forever the ragged dropout, envied every polished person he encountered, and this envy masqueraded as hubris and ultimately doomed Saroyan to the fate of a B-list writer.

By way of disclosure, I came to Leggett’s book with more than the usual interest. I grew up in Fresno and my grandfather and Saroyan were friends of sorts. Once or twice, I drove the author home after an evening of too much food and Russian vodka at my grandparents’ house. I was a college kid trying to puzzle out the world, and Saroyan treated me with affection and genuine interest. I wasn’t in such awe, however, that I didn’t see his grandiosity or wonder about his eccentricities. On the window ledge near his typewriter sat a recorder with which he taped the sounds of night -- hours and hours of nothing punctuated by the buzz of a fly, the chirp of a robin. In the end, his generosity notwithstanding, I found him too much to grasp.

A 1984 biography by Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford ended with a moving deathbed reconciliation between the author and his son, Aram, but the book as a whole lacked heft. Leggett certainly recognizes the richness of an immigrant journey that traces the loud and touchy Saroyans as they land in America and scratch out a living amid the horned toads and irrigation canals of the San Joaquin Valley, only to discover that their prized son wants to be a writer. Soon after, he soars to fame.

But Leggett, author of the well-regarded biography “Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies” about the premature deaths of writers Ross Lockridge and Tom Heggen, takes a short cut with Saroyan. He chooses not to rely on letters or extensive interviews or any of the other usual tools of biographical excavation. Instead, his 462-page book draws heavily on the “huge and candid” journal that Saroyan kept from 1934 until his death in May 1981.

This might seem an engaging possibility, especially when the diarist is a writer as spontaneous as Saroyan. Yet Leggett has mined the journal in a way that completely eliminates Saroyan’s booming voice. What we get are Leggett’s weary paraphrases of the author and playwright, a recitation of his movements on any given day -- from the royalty check he cashes to the gambling debts he incurs.

Instead of delving into the internal world of a writer who falls victim to his vices and a genius that comes up short, Leggett busies himself with the many contortions of a marriage turned tragicomedy. Willie Saroyan and Carol Marcus are quite a pair. She is barely 17 years old, a New York City debutante who wipes off her lipstick with $50 lace hankies, when they meet. Leggett’s tedious prose picks up a notch when he describes the glittering world of Carol and her best friends Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona O’Neill, playwright Eugene’s daughter and later the wife of Charlie Chaplin. The Saroyans marry and divorce twice, and when Carol finally leaves him, she ends up with Walter Matthau.

Leggett does a nice job tracing Saroyan’s Armenian roots, the history of a tribe 2,500 years old that prospered in eastern Anatolia until the 1915 genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks. What he fails to consider is the one place that shaped the author more than any other place, his hometown of Fresno, the raisin village in a vast valley where peasants from all over the world had come to work the farm fields. It was here, in a city that barred Armenians from country clubs and houses in certain upscale neighborhoods, that Saroyan came face-to-face with a new country’s hate. A little hubris helped him survive.

In the end, Leggett tallies the good and bad of Saroyan’s life and pronounces it a failure -- a man who put his work and vices ahead of wife and children, hawking third-rate stories to dig himself out of a mountain of gambling debt, consigning himself to the scrap heap of America’s lesser writers.

Is this a fair summing up? As a writer, Saroyan never produced a heavyweight novel. The longer form seemed to run contrary to his extraordinary gifts, the short bursts of perfect energy, the need to finish one story so he could move onto the next. And yet this seems like a trifle. If you read his best short stories -- and there are plenty of them -- or the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Time of Your Life,” another thought occurs: Most great writers fall out of favor, some for long periods, and it seems a decent bet that Saroyan will one day fall back in.

As for his children, time has brought a healing. Last spring in Fresno, during the first ever Saroyan Festival, Aram and Lucy Saroyan gathered at Ararat Cemetery with a handful of friends to bury the ashes of their father, 20 years after his death. They prayed over a huge black granite headstone -- the epitaph written by Saroyan, of course -- and his son recalled the years of estrangement. “It’s funny,” he said. “All the detritus that seemed so important is now gone. What I remember about Pop is pure gold.” *