[In the following essay, Bedrosian examines three of Saroyan's early works, contending that the sense of self-sufficiency Saroyan portrays in his fiction is permeated with a sense of isolation and loneliness due to the personal circumstances of his own life.]

In one of his numerous autobiographies, William Saroyan once wrote of his dead father's failure to express the emotional truth of his life through aborted literary attempts. Now, over a year after his own death, these words offer one of the aptest commentaries on Saroyan's writing as well:

He hadn't made it. But as if as a special favor to me he had kept a record of it, of the failure, the loss, and the finality. …

In a sense the writing was my own, and I didn't like it. It just wasn't tough enough for the truth of us, of this world, and I wished it had been.¹

What we discover in the work of this most famous and prolific of Armenian-American writers is a lifelong tension between the forces of good-humored acceptance and the more insistent voice of his own experience as the orphaned son of an Armenian immigrant. For as Saroyan frequently informs his readers, his father didn't do him any favor by dying of an appendicitis attack when the boy was only three. Subsequently his mother was forced to find work as a live-in maid and placed her four children in a San Francisco orphanage, where for the next five years William's chief exposure to family and ethnicity depended on occasional weekend picnics overlooking the Bay. It was only after this initial uprooting that he came to what critic Howard Floan has identified as his “best materials,”² “Fresno, home, family, and difference.”³ Instinctively relating his own knowledge of homelessness to his first encounter with Armenian music, Saroyan found the sources of a resilient philosophy:

It was different. Even so, wasn't it mine even more than any other song I had ever heard or had ever whistled? Wasn't it more deeply mine? It seemed to be. Well, walk, walk, walk, walk, wounded homeless, unkillable homeless, well, walk, walk, walk, walk.⁴

This passage is pivotal in understanding Saroyan's relationship to his ethnic group, an affinity based less on the shared values of communal life than the common experience of “wounded homelessness,” of belonging to a dying race, of having been abandoned by one's father into a world devoid of security and rest.

This was an attitude he had portrayed movingly in his 1934 short story, “Seventy Thousand Assyrians.” Here Saroyan depicts the Assyrians as the one ethnic group whose claim to world attention fell even below that of the Armenians, a people who can't “even dream any more” about an independent existence as Arabs kill them piecemeal on their native grounds and intermarriage subverts their distinctive identity in America. The moral of this bittersweet tale is that the fragility of his national ties has freed the humble Assyrian barber to join the race of man, “the part that massacre does not destroy.”⁵ Stripped of any chauvinistic pride, Theodore Badal is “himself seventy thousand Assyrians and seventy million Assyrians, himself Assyria, and man, standing in a barber shop, in San Francisco, in 1933, and being, still, himself, the whole race.”⁶ But though the punctuated cadence ends this story on a note of proud self-sufficiency, we have to heed Saroyan's earlier caution to the reader: “Readers of Sherwood Anderson will begin to understand what I am saying after a while; they will know that my laughter is rather sad.”⁷

It is true. Saroyan's laughter is sad, because the “tougher truth” of his family's and ethnic group's struggles stands at the back of his celebrations of earthy Armenian homelife, where flat bread and sun ripened grapes may nurture individual quests into a chancy world, but can't lighten the journey. Throughout, the thrust of Saroyan's life and art came from a radical existentialism, isolated from communal solace. It was an orphan's creed, sinewy and street-wise, marbled with a rigidity that rejects self-pity and forgives slowly.

The sharp edges of this worldview emerge most painfully in three works of fiction Saroyan wrote in mid-career in the early 1950s: a novella entitled The Assyrian, and two novels, Rock Wagram and The Laughing Matter. Expressed with increasing intensity through these works is the sense that the melancholy that plagues the “dying race”—whether Armenian or otherwise—has seeped into the protagonist's soul, where it can only find a healthy outlet in swift motion—flying, gambling, racing. When at rest, the main character finds himself in spiritual limbo, unable to adopt the ethos of his ancestors and equally incapable of creating a viable personal code. Thus in the middle of his writing career Saroyan returned to the theme of his earliest short story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” (1933), in which the young man's refusal to be saved from starvation by the Salvation Army coupled with his steady motion to the end forms his chief claim to heroism. But, whereas the daring young man was only responsible for his own life, the middle-aged protagonists of the later period face crises of family life, where the models of their ethnic past remind them of their domestic shortcomings. With each successive work, we find the ethnic group serving a dual function, not only mirroring the central character's spiritual uprootedness, but exhorting him to pursue family ideals beyond his grasp.

In The Assyrian, the novella that begins the 1950 collection of stories with that name, Paul Scott re-examines the profiles of his life as he prepares to meet his approaching death. What little we know of his life falls into the typical Saroyan pattern: Scott is a zestful gambler, deriving from the swift throw of the dice a keen sense of personal freedom, the satisfaction of beating the odds against defeat, of riding through inner turmoil on a tide of luck only confident timing and daring can compel. He has come to Lisbon, Portugal on another gamble, climaxing a lifelong search for an elusive connectedness and transcendence. In the process of following his brief meditation on his past amidst the backdrop of this gracious city, where civility soothes his restlessness, the reader finds the key to Scott's character in the constant push against constraint, social and otherwise:

He had always gone too far, but he had always come back, too. He had always plunged overboard, and then taken a swim, sometimes silently, desperately, knowing that he was struggling for his life, for another chance to find out how far he could go, struggling silently and proudly; sometimes indifferently, scarcely struggling at all, apparently only waiting.⁸

But the cost of compulsively defying boundaries can be disease. Early in the story, Scott traces the root of his malaise to “bitterness about himself”: “He knew he didn't care about anybody else in the world, not even [his daughter] if the truth were told, he cared only about himself, and always had” (p. 18). In both these passages, the repetition of “always” underscores Scott's isolation as a form of now-instinctive self-protection.

The anger and shame of Scott's self-recognition will recur in the later works, accompanied by the central character's ambivalent tie to his ethnic heritage, wherein the members of a small, dying race urge family bonding. In The Assyrian, Paul Scott has responded to his call, having early on sided with “the tired side,” “the impatient and wise side,” hidden in him like a life spring until he reaches puberty. He has even learned the strange language “as if it were a secret shared by only a handful of people miraculously salvaged out of an extinct race” (pp. 17-18). He ends his description of adolescent self-discovery with the same paradoxical notion that marks “Seventy Thousand Assyrians”: “He began to understand how superior he must be to most other people in that his very race was finished and had no need to clamor for irrelevant rights of any kind” (p. 18). But the skeptical reader can't help but respond, “What is more relative than the term ‘irrelevant’?” For though Scott feels pride at the Assyrians' miraculous escape from extinction, the relief hasn't lifted him emotionally. Like Theodore Badal, the melancholic Scott confronts himself as essentially alone, asking himself “How does anybody have a friend?” (p. 21)

Before he leaves Lisbon, Scott dines with a fabulously wealthy Assyrian, an old man of 91. The meeting between the two men shows that the spiritual fatigue ascribed to the ethnic group is as much projection as actual description: one doesn't have to renounce life with one's people. Thus we find in Curti Urumiya a man vigorous in appetites, as mentally alert as ever, fully aware that the game of life—like the game of intrigue surrounding his business moves—should at least amuse. Unlike Scott, seeking freedom from his “tiresome” self, the old man radiates psychological well-being, relishing the hours like the delicacies his Greek cook prepares daily. Accordingly, he views his ethnic identity as an aesthetic dimension of his life and rebuts Scott's disavowal of specific national ties (“Being alive is nationality enough for anybody”) with vital self-assertion:

… the other little bit sometimes, in some cases, seems to make being alive just a little more fun. For instance, I have for many years felt that I have … outwitted the foolishness of life, and I must confess it makes me very happy. I mean, I survived, although my race didn't.

(p. 56)

Reinforcing this notion of ethnicity as an aesthetic value, the two men's use of Assyrian reminds us of the modern re-enactment of an ancient religious rite. The deepest spiritual communion these two wanderers “of the same family” can achieve is to speak their common language. Like priests respectful of ritual time, they reach “a silent agreement that they [will] begin to speak that language without test or preparation, at the proper moment” (p. 50). As they taste the sounds of the old tongue, rescuing each word like a precious relic from the sea of modern European languages around them, we witness the closest analogue to a religious ceremony in this existential space. But since these secret words no longer symbolize ideals applicable in the contemporary world, the language is ultimately reduced to the status of an artifact, briefly uniting connoisseurs like once functional art, without permanently bonding them.

Significantly, it isn't long after this that, feeling death twinges and the old restiveness, Scott ignores a doctor's orders to stay put and boards a plane going east. He carries into death the same willed loneliness that's always urged him “to be done” with the social pretenses, to keep moving:

He'd had it and he was satisfied. “I never gave a shit for any of it anyway,” he thought. “There was always a little rhythm anyway, and there still is. I got out here all right, and I'll get on the plane all right, too, the same as the other travelers going east, and I'll get there, too.”

(p. 77)

Published a year after The Assyrian, in 1951, Rock Wagram picks up many of the same concerns as the earlier work, but locates them in a more specific ethnic context. As Nona Balakian briefly notes of this novel, Rock Wagram “is one of Saroyan's darker works, reflecting his own uneasy passage from the Old World of his beginnings to the competitive world of Hollywood and New York.”⁹ Rock's “uneasy passage” is most noticeably reflected in his name change from Arak (literally meaning “swift” in Armenian) Vagramian to accommodate his acting career. The shift in social identity has deprived this second-generation Armenian of the old security of Fresno family and friends, and has placed him in a milieu where he is cautioned against assuming easy friendships.

In the tradition of the Saroyan picaresque (and American heroes in general), Rock is perpetually on the road, charting the American landscape, seeking contentment in hurtling through “a dream of cities, money, love, danger, oceans, ships, railroads, and highways.”¹⁰ But whereas in the earlier work Paul Scott pursued his independence of family matters, Rock constantly defines himself in terms of the domestic ideal: “A man is a family thing. His meaning is a family meaning” (p. 282). Yet falling into the overriding pattern, when it comes to embodying this ideal, Rock fails. His relationship to his estranged wife is only an intenser version of Scott's marriage; here, the non-ethnic spouse is personified as a beautiful, money-hungry, frivolous bitch, who can't keep faith with her husband's simple code of love and trust.

As if to cushion Rock's marital failure, we hear one of the Armenian women articulate the immigrant distrust of romantic novelty:

To marry a stranger is perhaps an adventure, but the question is, Can the daughter of people who do not understand us be a true wife to one of our sons? Isn't the eye of the stranger's daughter forever out? [a literal rendering of a common Armenian saying about greed] Is it fitting for one of our sons to marry the daughter of a stranger?

(p. 83)

Nevertheless, we know that Rock's marriage to Ann Ford isn't merely abandonment to momentary passion. An offhand observation he makes one day as he recalls the Armenian women of his youth at church picnics indirectly explains why Rock—and perhaps Saroyan—couldn't have married a nice Armenian girl: “They were like sisters every one of them” (p. 95). As for many ethnics, in-group marriage, while socially prudent, would have smacked of friendly incest. Furthermore, though Rock himself has a hard time forgiving Ann her frivolities, his mother and grandmother adore her, an acceptance of the stranger which not only belies assertions of Armenian xenophobia, but also casts Rock's recalcitrance into relief.

As the novel progresses, we find that Rock's inability to forge a family stems from a deeper stratum of his experience, primarily his uneasy relationship with his now deceased father. This facet of the story reminds us of the central lack in Saroyan's childhood: a flesh-and-blood father. As Armenians, both Rock and Saroyan inherited an ethos in which family bonding was of primary concern and the role of the father critical in maintaining social cohesion.¹¹ Articulating this function, Rock tells Paul Key, the Jewish director who has discovered him:

We have fathers in common. We're fathers ourselves the minute we're born. We get over being sons quicker than any other people in the world. Our sons do, too. We fix our fathers, and our sons fix us … we're fathers at birth because we want enough of us to be around to receive the accidents, just in case an assortment or series of them is going to happen to somebody some day that is going to make a difference.

(p. 154)

Because fathers are “there” to “receive the accidents,” the family is shielded from outer chaos. But how can a man become a mature father without earlier security and discipline as a son?

Witnessing the further disintegration of his family with the death of his mother, Rock resolves to “begin again” by attempting a reconciliation with his wife. But before doing so, he tries to solve the mystery of his father's legacy to himself one more time, taking a poem his father has written on the day of his suicide to an Armenian priest for translation. The poem expresses the bitterness of a man who has watched his son turn away from the ways of the Old Country, a man who “loves no God but man, and especially the enemy, the Turk. The Turk … in his own father, in himself, and in his own son” (p. 269). Here the Turk not only symbolizes whatever threatens the ways of the family, such as alien habits adopted by the children, but in a larger context, whatever is unacceptable in another human being.

Though the priest praises the poem, Rock's reaction indicates his emotional void as a son. For if his father has been hurt by his son's Americanization, Rock has been equally wounded by his father's suicide:

“I'm not going to kill myself about anything,” Rock said, “or anybody, and I'll tell you why. I want my son to know that his father is somewhere in the world, demanding nothing of his son, offering nothing to him so that if ever his son wishes to speak to a friend, his father will be there to speak to.”

(p. 271)

Rock then goes on to encourage hatred of the Turk (“Let the Turk heal himself in the hatred of the family,” p. 273), since hatred—along with love—is the ultimate family feeling, the sign of life energy filling the outer spiritual void.

Rock's determination to not repeat his father's failure continues to the end. Unlike Paul Scott who travels east to die, Rock Wagram concludes his self-exploration on a more positive note: “I don't like to work for money, but I'm going to try to do it. I'm a father, and I haven't any choice any more, that's all” (p. 300). Yet despite this promise, the ending returns to the larger Saroyan pattern, for Rock finds himself alone, on the road, clutching the token of love (a fake coin Ann Ford has given him stamped with the ironically misspelled, “I lovea you”), rather than touching the warm reality of human intimacy.¹²

The Laughing Matter, the darkly ironic novel that completes this sequence, intensifies and makes more explicit the tensions of the previous two works, especially with regard to the passions that split the ethnic husband from his wife. Set amidst the autumn vineyards of Fresno which Saroyan knew well, the story broods on the extent to which an unforgiving pride can ruin a family. Hearing from his wife that she is pregnant with a child not his own, Evan Nazarenus reacts with an icy rage whose every breath punishes. But as with the earlier stories, the reader can't fully understand Evan's anger without connecting it to a moribund heritage which has saddled him with a burden of “pride and loneliness.” Describing his father's destiny in America to his brother, Evan bitterly comments:

What did the old man do? He comes to America, works hard, after three years sends for his wife and son. They come, another son is born, he thinks he's going to have the family at last that he's always wanted, a lot of boys, a lot of girls, all of them well, their mother well, their father well, but two years after his wife reaches America she's dead, and he doesn't want to look at another woman. He can't. He becomes a sad old man in a silly little cigar store in Paterson, New Jersey, living for his sons. You know what's happened to you Dade. And here it is happening to me, too. What for, Dade? What'd he do wrong? What'd you do wrong? What'd I do?¹³

Evan's questions restate the concerns of the previous protagonists even more specifically. Early loss of parental bonding and the dissolution of family ties due to cultural assimilation have left him without an emotional anchor. As a result, Evan's inability to reach out and embrace the unborn child denotes his own poverty of self, a self he's never learned to love. He thus answers his wife's plea that he accept the illegitimate child with: “I would love the stranger. I would love without pity … but where is there in my own stranger's heart the means and nature of such love? Where is it, Swan?” (p. 165)

As in Rock Wagram, members of the ethnic group both defend and admonish the central character. Here, after Swan commits suicide, Dr. Altoun suggests that the instability of the marriage stemmed from her being non-ethnic: “With one of us, it would take a great deal to end a marriage” (p. 232). On the other hand, Evan's brother Dade supports the wife's behavior. He insists that by leaving her alone long enough to fall into adultery, Evan has reneged on his primary duty, to be at the center of his family: “The family is all there is. Fool with the family and you've finished everything” (p. 228). As a gambler who has learned from his own domestic losses, Dade reiterates the Saroyan belief that we invent truth as we go along, and the choice between pride and love is as arbitrary as the toss of a coin: “Flip for it … To be kind, or to be proud. That's what it comes to” (p. 121).

Though Evan's “call” is in the conditional—“I'll love you if you have an abortion”—passages of great descriptive simplicity present Saroyan's ideal of family life with allegorical dignity. In these vignettes, the narrative assumes a soothing symmetry that symbolizes the perfection neither Evan nor any real family can ever achieve. In the following example, we see the parents take their children to church, an exercise in family ritual:

It had large stained-glass windows that Red and Eva wanted to see from the inside, and seemed to all of them in appearance most nearly what a church ought to be. It was built of wood, painted white, had a nice steeple, and when they reached it the bell was ringing. … A woman was playing something on the organ. The windows were beautiful pictures, one mainly in blue, one mainly in red, one mainly in green, and one mainly in yellow. The light that filled the place had all of these colors in it. The place was both dazzling and peaceful.

(p. 149)

But since such moments stand for an ideal Evan can't sustain, they give way to the opposite extreme in melodrama. As the novel comes to a close, the action speeds up and the complications increase to the point that Elizabeth Bowen commented in a review that “too much happens, with too great rapidity and too violently … accordingly one loses the sense of magnitude.”¹⁴ Swan's pregnancy and later suicide not only spoil the symmetry of Evan's family vision, but initiate a series of tragedies: Evan accidentally wounds his brother who subsequently dies; Swan's alleged lover commits suicide, leaving documents that clarify the innocence of the relationship; and just as Evan finally decides to act responsibly toward his children and drives swiftly home, a tire explodes on his car and motion comes to a halt. He is trapped by matter itself:

… something began to laugh. He had no way of knowing if it was himself, his life, his father's life, his wife Swan's life, his brother's life, the smashed junk of the automobile, or the smashed junk of matter itself laughing.

(p. 253)

The ending thus enacts a waking nightmare for Saroyan, in which he faces the most painful issues of his life and places the faults that plague him onto the whims of chance: “It was one accident after another, ending in laughter” (p. 253).¹⁵

Coming to the end of this short series of fiction, one suspects that Saroyan's personality was much more complex than his oft-expressed pseudo-philosophy of love and brotherhood would lead us to believe. In recent excerpts from a biography Aram Saroyan has written of his father, we find that loneliness and sparks of viciousness stalked Saroyan's life in fact as well as fiction. His son refers to episodes in which Saroyan's rage at early loss found its prime target in his wife and children: “This unfreezing—which was always accompanied by screaming—of his arrested-at-three-years-old emotional life.”¹⁶ He recounts another incident in which he discovers a note left by his father on his typewriter: “The only person I have ever really loved is Saroyan, and all that I really love now is the little of Saroyan still left in me” (p. 87). And to round out the picture, he describes the protectiveness of the Armenians toward one of their own:

In the early days, after a blowup with my mother, he would run to the Armenians, who embraced him and sympathized with him and all but gave him the crown and scepter because it would be impossible, after all, that this wonderful man, this poet of people and light and laughter and fruit and bread and water, this profound and beautiful soul was not being taken advantage of viciously by this girl, who was not even an Armenian but Jewish. A gold digger, perhaps.

(p. 87)

What emerges from these memories is the portrait of a man who could not get close to others, who after the end of his marriage consigned his sexuality to the “threat-free, almost impersonal domain, of the call girl” (p. 87) and resisted intimacy with his children. In short, Aram Saroyan spots the same irony in his father's life that lies at the heart of his writing: that “one of the most loveable father figures of American letters” (p. 118), the poet of the family, was himself totally inadequate to the demands of family life.

With regard to Saroyan's writing, this biographical perspective supports the notion that many of his excesses—his gushy sentimentality, facile worldview, smug self-confidence, and sloppy writing¹⁷—were often masks for an underlying ambivalence, even a cynicism, about the value of anchoring art and relationships in disciplined thought and behavior. Genuine sentiment needs no exaggeration, but does depend on a fine emotional tuning sensitive to others. Accordingly, some critics have charged that the novel is Saroyan's least successful genre, for he had little interest in character for its own sake.¹⁸

Nevertheless, we know from his portrayals of Armenians elsewhere, notably stories and vignettes of his own family in Fresno, that Saroyan could depict his people with all the color and spirit they demand, with admirable faithfulness to individual personality.¹⁹ But, as noted, in this fictional sequence he keeps describing the ethnic group as “dying,” possibly a vague recognition of Armenia's long history of persecution; the dwindling numbers of Armenia's surrogates, the Assyrians; or the corrosive effects of assimilation into this culture. Yet beyond this minimally valid tag, there isn't much that is particularly Armenian or Assyrian or halfway “ethnic” about the characters in any of these stories, if by those terms we mean a detailed and accurate delineation of a specific people. They are merely props for the central character's introspective battles, bearing foreign-sounding names, sometimes suspicious of outsiders or quaint in speech, patient with whatever fate brings, but leaving us hard-pressed to identify them as Armenian, Assyrian, or whatnot.

Elsewhere too, in the broader context of Armenian-American literature in general, the portraits of Armenians in novels such as Emmanuel Varandyan's The Well of Ararat (1938) or Peter Najarian's Voyages (1971) or short stories such as Karl Kalfaian's “Juno in the Pine Ring” (1975) highlight the deficiencies in the Saroyan works discussed here. In each of these pieces, the author carefully probes his characters' psyches and demonstrates the dynamic interaction between ethnic self-awareness and other facets of human identity. Despite the diverse settings and time frames in these works, at no point does the reader need the label “Armenian” to identify the characters; their dilemmas and modes of response, the social and moral contexts in which they shape their lives, announce their ethnicity. Most significantly, though the burden of Armenian history is either explicitly or implicitly acknowledged in this fiction, the protagonists do not define themselves in terms of a dying heritage. On the contrary, the authenticity of the main character's Armenianness is demonstrated most forcefully when he satisfies the distinctive claims of his family without surrendering his own individuality.²⁰

And finally, to refute another critical defense brought to Saroyan's aid, his disregard of character does not always denote an allegorical intent, just as his frequent refusal to deal with evil does not neatly transform him into an affirmative writer.²¹ Indeed, it seems more accurate to say that his preoccupation with anger and denial simply blocked interest in persons and social forces removed from his struggles. The profile of Saroyan's career thus resembles the motions of the trapeze artist in whom he first projected his symbolic self, hurtling between the poles of a flabby acceptance of the “All” and a self-punishing denial of intimacy, occasionally achieving a fragile balance in works such as My Heart's in the Highlands, where trust and faith lighten the impoverished lives of an ethnic family. Throughout this dialectic, Saroyan's descriptions of family and ethnicity mirrored his fluctuating and ambivalent loyalties. For though Saroyan identified with the orphaned independence of the Armenian people, he also knew that the axiom that had insured their survival was the truth he found toughest to embody: “Fool with the family and you've finished everything.”

Notes

1. William Saroyan, Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (New York: Pocket Books, 1963), pp. 36-37.

2. Howard Floan, William Saroyan (New York: Twayne, 1966), p. 68.

3. Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, p. 81.

4. Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, p. 81.

5. William Saroyan, “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” in The Saroyan Special (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948), p. 16.

6. “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” p. 16.

7. “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” p. 10.

8. William Saroyan, The Assyrian, in The Assyrian and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), p. 35. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

9. Nona Balakian, “Writers on the American Scene,” Ararat, No. 69 (1977), p. 17.

10. William Saroyan, Rock Wagram (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951), p. 25. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

11. One of the dominant themes that emerges in a comprehensive study of Armenian-American literature is the central role of Armenian fathers in welding the family, both in the Old Country and in America. The critical nature of this position is integrally related to the role of the Armenian family in the Ottoman Empire, a social bond that came to resemble a fortress after centuries of persecution. For a fuller discussion see Richard LaPiere's “The Armenian Colony in Fresno County, California: A Study in Social Psychology,” Diss. Stanford 1930, pp. 81-82.

12. Rock's token reminds us of the shiny copper penny the hero of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” clutches before slipping into death. The penny with its clearly legible “In God We Trust” stands for the same duality that challenges Rock, the tension between hope and ironic disbelief that only a gamble on life can release.

13. William Saroyan, The Laughing Matter (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), p. 73. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

14. Elizabeth Bowen, “In Spite of Words,” New Republic, 128 (March 9, 1953), 19.

15. Floan comments that while Saroyan's subject matter and style are often naturalistic, his characters' immunity to environmental forces sets him apart from the mainstream naturalism (William Saroyan, p. 44). In The Laughing Matter, however, we find that even this barrier falls as a malevolent chance catches up with Evan.

16. Aram Saroyan, “Daddy Dearest,” California, July 1982, p. 87. Subsequent references to this article appear in the text. Aram Saroyan's biography of his father has recently been published under the title, Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan by William Morrow & Company.

17. John Brooks in a review of Rock Wagram spoke for many when he wrote, “[Saroyan's ruminations] are full of painfully obvious statements tediously and insistently repeated, full of self-contradiction and cancelings-out, full of the beery adoption of meaningless words as temporary pets—full in short of sloppy writing.” The Saturday Review, 24 March 1951, p. 13.

18. This weakness in characterization was one Saroyan was aware of. Floan recounts an anecdote in which a friend brought Saroyan's social myopia to the author's attention, to which he replied: “I have been at work trying to correct this unfortunate condition, but I haven't made it … I can't excuse it, I can't find an explanation for it, I know I do nothing rude deliberately” (William Saroyan, p. 150).

19. A prime example of Saroyan's ability to vividly paint character is a short sketch of his grandmother in Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, pp. 120-21. The description of the old Armenian woman giving a bath is full-blooded and authentic.

20. For a fuller discussion of Armenian-American literature, see Bedrosian, Margaret. “The Other Modernists: Tradition and the Individual Talent in Armenian-American Literature.” Diss. Univ. of California, Davis, 1981.

21. For example, Floan concludes his study by stating, “Instead of a literature of denial or of anger, [Saroyan's] is one of affirmation” (p. 155). But clearly on the basis of these three pieces of longer fiction, such an assertion has to be carefully qualified.