Proud to Be Great

HERE COMES THERE GOES You KNOW WHO (273 pp.)--William Saroyan--Simon & Schuster ($5.95).

In the early 1930s, Americans were being saturated with "tough" writing: Studs Lonigan swaggered the streets of Chicago, Hemingway's bulls and men met with grace under pressure, Popeye had his will of Temple Drake, and Erskine Caldwell's degenerates roistered on Tobacco Road. Upon all this hardness, rawness and ache, a volume of stories descended almost like a balm in 1934: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, by a young man of 26, William Saroyan. The book was a mixture of love and pity and humor: pity and humor for everyone, especially bums and prostitutes, and love for life, no matter how preposterous. If it was writing that perhaps lacked bite, at least it did not gnash its teeth; if the prose was not exactly muscular, it had plenty of heart, and the heart, as everyone knows, is an involuntary muscle which cannot (and need not) be flexed.

Since 1934, Saroyan has turned out generous quantities of short stories, novels, and at least one distinguished play (The Time of Your Life). At his best, when dealing with small boys, Armenian Americans, and poets without portfolio, he has won himself a modest but lasting place in our literature; at his worst, whenever he gets involved in Issues or Ideas (both with capital I's), he falls flatter than Bahgh-arch, the Armenian flat bread. There is a third capitalized I that has proved fatal to Saroyan: the plain, unsimple I of his boundless ego.

It is this and his considerable tax debt that are responsible for Saroyan's new book, Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, which the publishers hopefully label "an autobiography," but which belongs to a genre somewhere in between Bulfinch and Paul Bunyan (the latter, judging by the final -yan, perhaps also of Armenian extraction).

Arrival of Myself. The book consists of 52 vignettes, a number that may have dual significance: it was the author's age at the time of writing and the pieces could be taken as Dr. Saroyan's Sunday sermons for the new year. The writing, at any rate, is that of a Sunday writer, but one who can do a fairly good take-off on William Saroyan, improving on his original by means of a slight admixture of avant-garde spice.

The result is apt to read like this: "I began a moment ago by implying there was something to say, something to be said, something to have said after half a century since the arrival of memory in my life, since the arrival therefore of myself into it. I have tried to say, I have meant to say, I have believed I might say, but I know I haven't said, and while it doesn't trouble me, or at any rate not violently, as it would have troubled me thirty-five years ago when I wanted to say everything in one swift inevitable book it also doesn't please me, and I feel that I must try again."

The vignettes ramble through Saroyan's life in no particular order, but they tend to bunch up at both ends, thus dealing mostly with his childhood and puberty and the present, i.e., his early 50s. Running through them all are those two great mythic figures, The Tax Collector and William Saroyan The Universal Genius. "My plays are the human race. And most of the plays of the other playwrights aren't." "My own [writing] which nobody's writing will outlive . . . will be discovered again and again. It will speak ... as long as any writing speaks to anybody." "To sum up, I am great, and I am proud to be great. It is quite a responsibility."

The Great Lover. Here and there, a bit of the old good Saroyan peeps through. In a lengthy meditation on the personality of numbers: "3,000 hasn't got that little extra something that is the difference between a great piano player like Richter, for instance, and a poor piano player like my cousin Hoosik, who is actually a lawyer." Or: "You are never under any circumstance to speak discourteously to your mother, as that is not only unAmerican, it is un-Chinese." But the old, pure, wonderfully hammy love for all humanity is lacking. And there is a new note of peevishness. Herewith, a list, probably incomplete, of Saroyan's pet hates: actors, Sherwood Anderson (in his later years), bankers, Bernard Baruch, bestsellers, great men, school principals, insurance policyholders, lawyers, Mount Rushmore, New Yorkers, playwrights (Saroyan excluded), psychiatrists, Shakespeare (not altogether), Shaw (ditto), tapioca, teachers, the world.

There are, of course, those (Saroyan included) who will remind any detractors what a great lover of humanity Saroyan is, all the same. One thing is certain: with a lover like this, humanity needs no enemy.

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