[In the following essay, Calonne remarks on the centrality of ethnicity and diversity issues in Saroyan's work.]

William Saroyan was “multicultural” long before it became the fashion: questions of “ethnic” identity are central to his lifework and his writings are directly relevant to the current fierce debate on university and college campuses concerning what shall be defined as “American culture.” His Armenian heritage sensitized him from childhood to the situation of “minorities” (or what used to be called “foreigners”), to racism and injustice, and characters representing virtually every race are depicted throughout his stories, plays, novels, and memoirs. Armenia's historic role as an intermediary zone between Orient and Occident, its ability to assimilate other cultures yet retain its own unique character, gave Saroyan a perfect vantage point from which to create his own New World. He envisioned an America where racial/ethnic differences were not a barrier to human community, but rather were powerful sources of meanings and values which might contribute towards the making of a new, broader, richer, energetic spiritual and cultural life.

Saroyan's profound awareness of “diversity” is in marked contrast to the work of American writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, or Henry James whose work by comparison is narrow in its depiction of “Americans.” Saroyan was attempting to create an imaginative world which corresponded to his highest vision of human possibility. He celebrated differences, the unique qualities of each individual, and racism is always abjured in his writings as an example of Goethe's famous apothegm: there is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Saroyan was an author who from a young age decided to see the world and made good on his promise: perhaps only D. H. Lawrence was as inveterate a traveler, and like Lawrence, the places where Saroyan “did time” always became the places and peoples of his work as well. His advocacy of “diversity” was not a literary pose: he lived it out in his own experience. In his autobiographical, Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who, he wrote: “I am a poet … the poet … travels because his poetry comes from the world and the people and he needs to see as much of them as possible.”¹ We learn from the book that he has recently travelled to Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bombay, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Paris, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Madrid, Venice, Trieste, Belgrade, Naples, Barcelona, Genoa, Tijuana, Djakarta, Le Havre, Leningrad, Moscow, and Erevan.

And let us consider the various places in which his works were inspired, set, or conceived: The Time of Your Life, San Francisco; The Cave Dwellers, New York City; “The Assyrian,” Lisbon; My Name Is Aram, Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley; Tales of the Vienna Steets, Vienna; The Bicycle Rider of Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills; Warsaw Visitor, Warsaw; “Train Going,” Stockholm; “Yeghishe Charentz,” Erevan; Bitlis, Bitlis; Sam the Highest Jumper of Them All, London; “Finlandia,” Helsinki, Finland; “Malenka Manon,” and “The Black Tartars,” Kharkov, Ukraine; “The Proletarian at the Trap Drum,” Kiev; Hello Out There, Matador, Texas; Sweeney in the Trees, Dublin; “The Egg,” and “The Whistle,” Moscow; The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, London; Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon, Paris; and Papa You're Crazy, Malibu: the man got around. Saroyan made it a point to get to the great cities because these were the cosmopolises, the meeting grounds of cultures from all over the planet. The poet, as he said, needs to know the world, and these were neither “tourism” nor “pleasure trips” (he worked all the time) but rather part of his effort to learn about the “other,” to love the world, to affirm the unity of humanity. From the beginning of his career in 1934 to his death in 1981, Saroyan was “multicultural” to the marrow of his bones, and he would have found the present warfare about which cultures “deserve” to be recognized as rather farcical.

Yet here we are in 1995 and the culture war is now in full swing, or perhaps it is over. Sides have long been taken and positions entrenched: Harold Bloom believes the enemy, that is the “multiculturalists,” have won. But what exactly is at stake in this struggle for the canon? In a recent essay in the New York Times, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written:

Culture is always a conversation among different voices. To insist that we “master our own culture” before learning others—as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has proposed—only defers the vexed question: What gets to count as “our” culture? What has passed as “common culture” has been an Anglo-American regional culture, masking itself as universal. Significantly different cultures sought refuge underground. … To demand that Americans shuck their cultural heritages and homogenize themselves into a “universal” WASP culture is to dream of an America in cultural white face, and that just won't do.²

Well, it didn't do for William Saroyan, either, who now can be seen in retrospect as the first and only American author to insist with such originality, flamboyance, and power that Americans recognize the “others” in their midst: in this, he was far ahead of his time.

“What gets to count as ‘our’ culture?” Saroyan's sixty-plus books are an answer to Gates' question. The idea of culture for Saroyan was an early preoccupation. He was profoundly concerned with American culture, with all its possibilities, and he saw America not as a “melting pot,” but as a country where the “underground” peoples might be brought into the light of day and thus create a true “conversation” rather than the WASP “monologue.” Armenia, for example, was for him an ancient source of sensitivity and beauty which might enrich and refine our American national life. In a letter to Leon Serabian Herald, dated November 7, 1934, he wrote: “I am deeply interested in the growth of an Armenian-American art, because I believe the Armenian consciousness is a rich consciousness, deep-rooted, wise, and strong.”³ America was not yet a culture: it could be civilized, but it would take all of its citizens to do it. (Was it Montesquieu who said America is the first society to go from primitive beginnings to barbarism without an intervening period of civilization?). Americans' optimism needed Armenian tragic consciousness, and ancient old hardness, its “stone boots”⁴ as well as what Mandelstam called the Armenians' ability to tell time by the sundial⁵—to experience the time of our life. America needed to hear all its voices, the conversations of all the “Others” which might make it a real civilization.

In the powerful and provocative essay, “The Hoax of Success” (written in the mid-1950s), Saroyan speaks of an American youth wholly absorbed in the trivial. Children are adrift because

[t]he little unfortunates were reared not by their miserable mothers and fathers but by NBC, CBS, ABC, comic strips, tabloid papers, movies, songwriters, and a whole culture that is pitiful, while it takes pride in claiming to be free, true, liberal, wise, and the greatest culture of all time. Well, material wealth with nothing to go with it stinks. For the people who have no wealth, who are poor not because they have very little money but because they have very little identity, very little character, very little resources, poverty stinks, too. If this nation is going to survive meaningfully, and then perhaps to grow decently, it has got to begin to know and accept enormous deprivation. A twenty-year moratorium on all substitutes for honor would at least be a beginning.⁶

What Saroyan would have thought of the America of 1995 one might shudder to consider.

Saroyan thus sees many aspects of American life as essentially devoid of spiritual values, as a place where there is “no foundation, all the way down the line” (as the Arab intones in The Time of Your Life) and a German philosopher writing about the same time (1955) said some strikingly similar things. Martin Heidegger in Gelassenheit:

Denn man nimmt heute alles und jedes auf dem schnellsten und billigsten Weg zur Kenntnis und hat es im selben Augenblick ebenso rasch vergessen. … Der heutige Mensch ist auf der Flucht vor dem Denken. … Stündlich und täglich sind sie an den Hör-und Fernsehfunk gebannt. Wöchentlich holt sie der Film weg in ungewohnte, oft nur gewöhnliche Vorstellungsbezirke, die eine Welt vortäuschen, die keine Welt ist.

For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly, instantly. … [M]an today is in flight from thinking. … Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world.⁷

What does Saroyan offer in place of this cultureless American society? Does he answer Heidegger's call for a true realm of the imagination, a place uncontaminated by Donna Reed, Mickey Mouse and Arnold Schwarzenegger? Saroyan offers voices in conversation, a community of joy, a world where people speak to one another, and have their being with one another, and listen to the heart's tender truths. He is trying to create a human world where we have yet had none. Humanity is “this mangled tribe, this still unborn God,”⁸ as he puts it in The Trouble with Tigers, and Saroyan's art is dedicated to healing the sick body and soul of humanity and releasing us from what one of his heroes, William Blake, called the “mind-forg'd manacles.”⁹

We can hear those voices already in Saroyan's great early play, My Heart's in the Highlands, where we meet the Czech grocer Kosak and the Scottish trumpeter MacGregor “from the slums of Glasgow,” and the Armenian poet Ben Alexander, his mother, and his son Johnny. It is important that Scotland and Czechoslovakia and Armenia be represented in the play, not because it is “politically correct” but because it is humanly correct. It makes a fuller picture; it gives the color and plenitude and richness we expect of a work of art which shows us life in Fresno, California, in November, 1914. It is the world according to a poet, which is the world Heidegger invoked.

According to Aristotle in his Poetics,

… the poet's function is not to report things that have happened, but rather to tell of such things as might happen, things that are possibilities by virtue of being in themselves inevitable or probable. Thus the difference between the historian and the poet is not that the historian employs prose and the poet verse—the work of Herodotus could be put into verse, and it would be no less a history with verses than without them; rather the difference is that the one tells of things that have been and the other of such things as might be. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry tends rather to express the universal, history rather the particular fact.¹⁰

For Saroyan, the discussion of multiculturalism is conducted not politically, as in our current academic debate. Rather, his work finds its place under the poetic aegis: the poetic is, as Aristotle declared, the means to “express the universal.” Indeed, Saroyan himself would have eschewed a word such as “multiculturalism” because it is the word of a politician, not a poet. In Aristotle's conception, poetry gives us the universal in the guise of the particular: “poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” (dio kai philosophoteron kai spoudaioteron poiesis istorias estin): Saroyan is a poet, not an historian.

Indeed, this knowledge helps us understand Saroyan's earlier animad-versions on wealth and poverty:

[M]aterial wealth with nothing to go with it stinks. For the people who have no wealth, who are poor not because they have very little money but because they have very little identity, very little character, very little resources, poverty stinks too.

Though Ben Alexander, Mr. Kosak and Jaspar MacGregor are poor, they are packed with “identity.” Saroyan's “ethnics” are overflowing with energy, with chutzpah, with the wealth of the poetic soul. Identity is created in the crucible of suffering, through the “enormous deprivation” he thought the new American generation needed in order to grow culturally and spiritually. Saroyan's poetic “foreigners” in some sense have to be poor in order to be rich in the ways he wants “Americans” to be. That old story about the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle is at the heart of Saroyan's conception.

Saroyan was born poor and a poet. If you are poor, and a poet, no one can claim superiority to you based on race or class: you are already superior because you've got the wealth that matters. Hurt into song, your mouth shapes suffering immediately into poiesis. This is an attitude I believe Saroyan carried with him throughout his life: witness his many essays on the poets Eghishē Ch‘arents‘, Dylan Thomas, and Carl Sandburg; his own prose-poetry; and his denial of the Pulitzer Prize because wealth should not patronize art. As a poet you are involved with a truth beyond history and are compelled by your very nature to be more philosophical and more serious. You would refuse, for example, to report the facts as Dan Rather claims to do. You tell the mythos, as Homer did, making Odysseus at once a single, singular man and all men.

In another early play, The Time of Your Life, we discover the Irish longshoreman, the Arab philosopher, the Polish prostitute, the Assyrian pinball player, the Italian bartender, the Black piano player: San Francisco, 1939—another cosmopolis. This is the America Walt Whitman celebrated: democratic vistas. This “multicultural” world of San Francisco is the world of the poetic where people can be. Again, Martin Heidegger's concept of gelassenheit (“letting things be”), or aletheia (the ancient Greek word for truth which Heidegger etymologizes as—letting things stand revealed, letting being reveal itself), would describe perfectly Saroyan's project. This is an “Oriental” rather than Western gift, and we remember in this context all the Armenian uncles, fables, wise men, and allegorical stories from My Name Is Aram to Saroyan's Fables.

Each race, each ethnic group, each human being has something unique to contribute. Thus every character in The Time of Your Life possesses a specific persona, an essence, a charge, a quantum of selfhood which at once “represents” their race and culture, and transcends it: they are part of a larger whole, but they are each unutterably themselves. As Ralph Ellison said, “I am, after all, only a minor member, not the whole damn tribe. …”¹¹

In this connection we should remember the narrator of Saroyan's early story “Antranik of Armenia” who in considering the horrors Antranik is facing in 1915:

To hell with the whole God damn mess, I said. I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are.¹²

This is Saroyan's typical dialectic of self and other, identity and difference: I am both and neither. So too, every person of every race is human first: and then Assyrian, Italian, Black, Arabic. In Saroyan's works, these characters are not “stereotypes”—rather, they incarnate both their own individual selfhood and are representatives of a culture beyond themselves. He lets things be: Saroyan's “ethnics” know how to “dwell in the world” and they know how to live in the mystery.

A character in a literary work is an imaginative creation. He/she is not “real,” yet is asked to be considered real for the time being. An Italian character in a literary work thus is both not a real person and not a real Italian. Yet the minute we are told he is “Italian” (the bartender in Nick's Pacific Street Bar and Entertainment Palace in The Time of Your Life), what are we being asked to consider? The fact that this bartender is Italian is important for some reason, otherwise we would not be so informed. We learn as the play progresses that Nick is tender, kind, emotional, a family man, his mother and daughter appear in the play, he conforms to certain notions one has about Mediterraneans. Yet Nick is also both and neither: both Italian and American and something beyond both—human.

Earlier, I remarked on the centrality of the sensitive, tragic Armenian sensibility in Saroyan's vision of a truly universal America. Yet he was neither a nationalist nor a chauvinist, and it is not only Armenia, but Scotland and Ireland and Africa and Assyria and Japan and Mexico and Russia, and … America needed them all. In a passage from a work composed a few years later, The Human Comedy (1943), Saroyan described a picnic taking place in the San Joaquin Valley:

The little automobile moved along parallel with Kings River near the picnic grounds. On this Sunday afternoon five big picnics were going on—with music and dancing—Italians, Greeks, Serbs, Armenians, and Americans. Each group had its own kind of music and dancing. Spangler stopped the automobile at each group for a minute or two in order to be able to listen to the singing and to watch the dancing. … “Americans! Greeks, Serbs, Poles, Russians, Mexicans, Armenians, Germans, Negroes, Swedes, Spaniards, Basques, Portuguese, Italians, Jews, French, English, Scotch, Irish. You name it. That's who we are.”¹³

This is not a sanitized, all-white, “Americanized” “Leave It to Beaver/Donna Reed/My Three Sons” view of America (the programs I was weaned on during the 1950s and 60s). He is pushing us to include more, to face more, to understand more—so that we might become larger. Who is the “insider,” and what are the values of those who are on the “inside”? Are they worthy of emulation? Or do the despised, the “outsiders” possess the true values?

Here is the center of Saroyan's multicultural poetics. It is a debate about values rather than a debate about power, because Saroyan assumes humans want by nature to become in actuality what they are in potential. What is honored in a country is what is practiced there said Plato, and Saroyan would have us practice honoring our differences. Thus Saroyan constantly places two worlds in dialectic with each other: those with a voice and the voiceless, the peoples who have not been heard. For the ones who have been heard have been heard for a very long time and have made entirely too much noise—nothing worth hearing.

In the radio play, The People with Light Coming Out of Them,¹⁴ Saroyan wrote about his vision of America, about his “propaganda” for world brotherhood. In this play, there is

… the same propaganda that is in all of my work. Namely, to reveal the essential goodness and humble greatness of people—to focus attention on the vast potentiality of all people for being human, for being kindly, and for enduring the experience of living with courage and dignity … by reason of birthright, I am an American. As it is a privilege and an honor to me to be human, it is no less a privilege and an honor to me to be American. I do not believe that anyone loves this land and its people more than I do. And I know that no behavior of any government of this nation or any part of its people, however unpleasant to me, could ever cancel in me my devotion to and faith in the American Republic and the American people. My allegiance is both deliberate and helpless, both intellectual and emotional. But at the same time, as a human being, as a member of the great federation of all the peoples of the world—white and black and yellow and Aryan and non-Aryan and intelligent and stupid and kindly and savage and exploited and unexploited—I have an allegiance to truth itself, without regard for politics, and an allegiance to my own integrity. The inferior, the second-rate, the corrupt, the brutal, the evil are my enemies in myself, in my family, in my neighbors, and in all the peoples of the world; and the good in them, the generous, the noble, the decent, the honest, the gracious and the faithful are my allies.¹⁵

This is 1941, the War is on, and Saroyan gives us the following dialogue:

YOUNG Man:
What's your last name, Mike?
MIKE:
Okagawa: I'll bet you know what nationality that is. Young Man: Since, it's yours, I'd say it's American.
MIKE:
Oh, sure—but when it's my father's, it's Japanese, I guess. He was born in Japan. …
YOUNG Man:
Listen to him, will you? Listen to Mike Okagawa across the street, blowing the trumpet. Isn't that beautiful? That's what I like about this block. All the wonderful Americans living here, doing their work and raising their families and going to school. … Three doors from here is the Ariola family. … There is the strength of this nation, and the hope of the world. Look at the light shining out of those humble houses. … This is a good block. I like it here, because the best in people from all over the world is growing here into the first real nation of the world—the American nation—the nation of human people—the people with light coming out of them.(16)

Well, what do we say about that? That it's cornball? Well, yes it may be cornball, but Saroyan meant every word of it. We see here one result of the fact that he was himself raised in an environment of racism against the Armenians in Fresno. This experience sensitized him to the plight of all “foreigners”—their vulnerability, their position in a society which often used power against them. In the play, the Italians, Japanese, the Black doctor, represent a “nation of human people.” Humans have yet to create a human culture, which is why we have art: the highest metaphysical activity of man, Nietzsche called it. Art exists to make us what we are in potential—to actualize the potential. Thus “multiculturalism” can only mean the effort to create a truly human world for the first time. It can be created only through the sensitive interplay of varying people and their ideas and their identities and their beings. It is a spiritual creation, the result of the spiritual yearnings of human beings. It is not just art and books and ideas, but the actual living moments of humans as they attempt to love and live and create a community of joy.

Multiculturalism may thus be seen as an attempt at recovering man's lost wholeness, when he was yet a unitary tribe. And when Saroyan puts all these races, peoples, ethnicities, cultures on stage, in his stories, in his novels, he is dramatizing that originary unitary state of human being. As the Indo-European languages share a common root, so perhaps does humanity. Thus there is a search for a way to include those who are normally excluded and that connects with Saroyan's oft repeated yearning for brotherhood.

Indeed the “melting pot” was a horrible term which he would have found ridiculous: there is nothing to “melt”—rather each should keep his/her inviolate integrity while belonging to a community of fellow beings. A “multicultural” society is composed of those who have felt the tremors of the soul, the yearning for a better world, who know the alienation of the outsider, the one who has been scorned and kept from the warm orbit of love. The spiritual mission of life is thus for Saroyan inseparable from a certain way of being in the world: he does not separate the ethical, the aesthetic, the quest for beauty from his conception of the deepest destiny of man.

Finally, Saroyan wanted beauty, art, and aesthetics at the center of his multicultural universe. As I invoked Aristotle's definition of poetry earlier, so too Saroyan wanted the poetic at the center, not the political. What we may learn from other peoples are other ways of poetic being. His was a hospitable imagination, where love, friendship, and kindness were the passwords, not ideological slogans. He wanted, not “multiculturalism,” but “multihumanism”: a celebration of the mystery of the other. We remember that Aram Garoghlanian learned much from his Native American friend, Locomotive 38, the Ojibway.

Saroyan sought an inner recovery of meaning and being. No foundation all the way down the line is a litany which signifies our spiritual lostness, our lack of elegance, our lack of wisdom, our alienation from the sources of true interiority. He announced at the beginning of his career in “Seventy Thousand Assyrians” from The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze:

If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man. This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for. I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments. I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.¹⁷

It was a desire which remained in Saroyan's heart to the end of his life.

Notes

1. William Saroyan, Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 243.

2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway? It's Not Just Anglo-Saxon,” The New York Times, 4 May 1991, p. 23; reprinted in The Aims of Argument, ed. Timothy Crusius and Carolyn Channell (London: Mayfield, 1995), p. 527.

3. William Saroyan, letter entitled “My Armenia”; see David Calonne, William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 156.

4. Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, trans. Sidney Monas (San Francisco: George F. Ritchie, 1979), p. 67.

5. Ibid., p. 42.

6. William Saroyan, “The Hoax of Success,” chap. in I Used To Believe I Had Forever, Now I'm Not So Sure (New York: Cowles, 1968), pp. 186-187.

7. Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), pp. 13, 14; idem, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 45, 48.

8. William Saroyan, “The People, Yes and Then Again No,” chap. in The Trouble with Tigers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), p. 164.

9. William Blake, “London,” in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1965), p. 27.

10. Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), p. 54 [1451b].

11. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 139.

12. William Saroyan, “Antranik of Armenia,” chap. in Inhale and Exhale (New York: Random House, 1936), p. 263.

13. William Saroyan, The Human Comedy, rev. ed. (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1980), p. 179.

14. Broadcast by Burgess Meredith on CBS, The Free Company, 23 February 1941.

15. William Saroyan, “The People with Light Coming Out of Them,” chap. in Razzle-Dazzle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), pp. 241, 244-245.

16. Ibid., pp. 257-258, 265.

17. William Saroyan, “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” chap. in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (New York: Random House, 1934), pp. 31-32.