Hello Out There

William Saroyan: 1908-1981

The story goes that in 1934, while a guest at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, Publisher Bennett Cerf was informed that "a young man who says he is the world's greatest author is in the lobby." Replied Cerf unhesitatingly: "Tell Mr. Saroyan to come right up." Playwright William Saroyan was still rambunctiously self-assured a few days before cancer killed him last week in Fresno, Calif. "Everybody has got to die," he said, "but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case."

It was an interesting case. Saroyan was born in Fresno, son of Armenian refugees who fled the Turkish massacres at the beginning of the century. He knew the wrench of separation and the insular poverty of California's little Armenias: Saroyan's early years were spent in an orphanage after his father died and his mother had to work full time. Like the young bringer of good news and bad in his screenplay turned novel The Human Comedy, Saroyan began his working life as a telegraph boy. When his short story The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze won an O. Henry Award in 1934, the message was clear: a literary career had been launched.

The impressionistic paean celebrated "the superficial truth of streets and structures, the trivial truth of reality." Subsequent early stories offered the kind of warming uplift that a Depression-stricken nation wanted to hear. But there was a scratchier side to this earthy romanticism. In 1940 the playwright rejected a Pulitzer Prize for the Broadway hit The Time of Your Life on the grounds that business could not judge art. As a Hollywood scenarist he squabbled with studio heads and cut a raffish, boisterous figure Gambling and drinking contributed to the breakup of his marriage and the decline of his fortunes. In 1958, owing $50,000 in taxes, he moved to a working-class neighborhood in Paris. During the '60s, he wrote gloomy memoirs under the titles Not Dying and Don't Go, but If You Must, Say Hello to Everybody. His novel Boys and Girls Together (1963) took a bleak view of marriage.

Postwar critics showed little enthusiasm for Saroyan's tart sentimentalism and the anxious vitality of his plays. Yet the ease and charm of many of his stories will continue to inspire young writers. It is a legacy beyond criticism.

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