SOURCE: Balakian, Nona. “The Broadway Years.” In The World of William Saroyan, pp. 242-52. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Balakian describes Saroyan's years in Broadway, focusing on critical reception of his works, Saroyan's reaction to his critics, and brief overviews of his most successful productions.]

I began to see! I didn't used to see. The street cars going by had people in them suddenly. There had always been people in street cars, but now they were beautiful people.

—Saroyan, The Beautiful People

“This man Saroyan will be the death of us yet,” was how Brooks Atkinson began his review of Saroyan's third play to be produced on Broadway within thirteen months. Love's Old Sweet Song, called by the playwright “a theatrical entertainment,” had opened at the Plymouth Theatre on 2 May 1940 after a brief out-of-town run the month before. What had puzzled the Times's critic was how with all its “beguiling improvisations”—and the towering presence of Walter Huston in the role of “an amiable charlatan”—“nothing had been accomplished.” In a patronizing way he had used before with this playwright, he both acknowledged Saroyan's “inventive” and “original” gifts and complained of the play's “platitudinous” message. “Sooner or later,” his review concluded, “Saroyan will have to put his mind to work.”¹ This was not unlike the verdict he had reached about The Time of Your Life. After praising Saroyan for (among other things) “his extraordinary gift for writing about human beings,” he had stated, “nothing much of significance is accomplished in [the play].”² It was shortly thereafter, with the fourth production of a Saroyan play, The Beautiful People, that Mr. Atkinson would attach the word “mindless” to Saroyan's theater in general. Because it was uttered by that venerable critic, the word or its equivalent would be forever batted about in any discussion of Saroyan's dramatic work. Needless to say, the playwright was never shy about doing battle on this score and he held his own on more than one occasion.

What Atkinson's sudden outburst reveals in retrospect is how limited a grasp he had of Saroyan's theater. Though he had initially recognized his talents, Saroyan would forever remain for him that “enchanting” and “good-humored” fellow who “charmed” us with his fables. But that he should try to deal with “ideas”? In a corrosive Sunday Times piece, titled “Saroyan at the Bat,” he latched onto Saroyan's introductory pronouncements to the volume of his three plays and mincing no words, stated, “His mind is shallow and unsettled and he sounds off like a sophomore.” Referring to him variously as “the ebullient Armenian,” “the enthusiastic newsboy,” and “Cosmic Bill,” he declared that Saroyan was “at his worst in any discussion of ideas.” The deepest cut came at the end:

Out of his natural ebullience, hospitality, decency of outlook and impudence he can improvise charmingly on the theme of life and recover some of the lost innocence of the world. The great works in drama require greater capacities—like O'Neill's knowledge and depth of feeling and O'Casey's experience, mind and passion.

Saroyan's reply the very next Sunday in Atkinson's own column drew blood in its own archly circuitous way:

Having no mind to speak of in the opinion of many, it is awkward for me to call upon whatever else has been doing my thinking for me, but at the same time, this is, I regret, necessary.

Then, matching Atkinson's bluntness,

I hesitate to say this but I sincerely believe that whatever “mind” may be, Mr. Atkinson has a good deal less of it than I have.

Taking up each point of the critic's attack, he persuasively shows up his literal-mindness and even catches him in a superficial reading of the Bible. Finally, with that typical mixture of high-minded humility and bravado he had used in turning down the Pulitzer Prize five months earlier, he lands on a morally superior plane:

One doesn't simply write plays, or short stories, or novels, or whatever it happens to be. One lives, one accepts living, one believes in it, one is honest with one's self and with others, and so on and so forth.³

In the remaining three years of Saroyan's affiliation with Broadway, he would have many more admirers than detractors, but it was the rare critic who would get beyond the surface of his work. Not that the guidance he offered them was of much help. One can only commiserate with the Broadway critic-on-the-run looking for clues amid a morass of disingenuous autobiographical asides that couch his thoughts. Even an attentive reader, with some background in Saroyan, grasps at straws to get to the heart of the matter.

And there were other obstacles. While no one doubted that Saroyan was going against the tide, the “tide” itself had grown indistinct with the introduction of new concepts. There was Surrealism and Freud; there was “the new reality” of the moderns giving birth to a rebellious, new metaphysics—none of it yet residing in the American theater but infiltrating the critic's language, if not his imagination, via literature and the arts. Many of Saroyan's short plays were called “surreal,” as was My Heart's in the Highlands, and found wanting as such. One Freudian critic in the late 1940s, W. David Sievers, in a book titled Freud on Broadway, contended that “William Saroyan represents a compromise position between the demands of the practical theatre and the cry of André Breton for automatic writing.”⁴ His analysis of Saroyan in Freudian/surreal terms proved a futile endeavor: there was little to be gained in having the playwright's fable overtones translated into “childish wish-fulfillment” and much to lose in turning “the preoccupation with food” in My Heart's in the Highlands into “oral regression.”⁵

What would further complicate matters was that in a climate of war the theater was becoming less receptive to experimental work, inclining once again toward the “drama of ideas.” The most successful innovator in the theater since Maxwell Anderson, Thornton Wilder was turning away from poetic fantasy: his 1938 play, The Merchant of Yonkers (later to become The Matchmaker and Hello, Dolly) was a conventional farce, and his 1942 hit, The Skin of Our Teeth, would camouflage its Pirandelloesque fantasy with a heavy varnish of parody and mordant irony. With the “tide” now absorbing such cerebral and impassioned playwrights as Lillian Hellman and Robert Sherwood, it would take nothing less than a cocky playwright to try returning to the theater “the element of play.” Still, Saroyan had enough sense to know that it would be the height of folly to repeat in his third play these aspects of his work that identified him as a spinner of fairy tales. Thus his strategy was not unlike Wilder's. Though by his own estimation Love's Old Sweet Song was “a sort of sequel to My Heart's in the Highlands, it came off more like a genial spoof of it. Whatever the play's ultimate intent (and in this case Saroyan had taken the precaution to direct it himself), it was palpably a mix of romantic comedy and broad farce that all but mocked Johnny's plaint in the earlier play that “something is wrong somewhere.” Writing to Nathan, he had explained that he was inspired by a recent visit to his home town, and while he knew that it was “not the great work I figure I'll be writing one of these years. … I believe it is a very good play of its kind.”⁶ But the verdict on Broadway far from matched his belief, and the play folded after five weeks.

Apart from Brooks Atkinson, Love's Old Sweet Song created problems for the critics who were looking for the familiar Saroyan trademarks and, not finding them, either blasted the play or lapsed into double-talk. A special case in point was The New Republic's critic, Stark Young, who had once let the orthodoxies of dramaturgy go by the board to accommodate the new drama of Saroyan that “wants mood in the theatre to serve as the equivalent to melody in music.”⁷ But detecting “rambling technical defects” in the new play, he urged the playwright to write in “theatre terms.” Confusing the issue, however, Young went on to acknowledge Saroyan's “relish for the theatre as such,” adding, “At this stage of the game, it is a certain innocence in Mr. Saroyan as to what is hackneyed theater and what is not … That sometimes lends the play its charming and loveable qualities.”⁸ A little later, in a reassessment of Saroyan's theater, he would call this same play “a fragment from a torn surrealistic valentine,” and conclude, “It has all those slipshod slightly balmy qualities which those who do not admire Mr. Saroyan are fond of ascribing to his plays.”

Clearly, Young's confusion lies in his unwillingness or inability to take Saroyan seriously as a playwright. For while he confesses that he enjoys Saroyan's plays, he will not accept the fact that he achieves his effects outside dramatic conventions. He does not so much as wonder whether there exists a strategy beyond the writer's “charm” that enables him to escape the usual limits of dramatic action. Young's slapdash view of Saroyan's work, together with his preeminence as a drama critic, would present a major stumbling block to the playwright's ultimate dramatic fortune.

It must also be pointed out (if I may stray here a bit longer) that among the critics in general, curiosity about Saroyan continued to center on his personality rather than on what he himself had hailed as “the new American theatre.” In the reams of newsprint expended on him, there was scarcely a mention of his extensive early association with avant-garde writing. Despite continued references to his “surrealism,” it did not occur to anyone to review his closeness to the new writing and to see its relation to his most “difficult” play until now. (It was a closeness he would retain to the end of his life). I have previously mentioned his affiliation with The Booster in Paris, as well as his impressionistic work, “The Slot Machine,” which appeared in the magazine transition. It was because Saroyan thought of himself as a trailblazer that he had insisted (against the advice of his editor) on including “experimental stuff” in his second book, Inhale and Exhale. Freedom of form and composition had been among his initial aims as a writer, and indeed it was through the encouragement of another little magazine, Story, that he had developed his original concept of the short story.

But to be an experimentalist in the theater of the 1940s was quite another matter—as Saroyan would discover soon enough. Ideology was back in a new guise, thickly entwined this time with aesthetics and a new metaphysics that bore a distinctive foreign stamp. In Europe, innovators in the theater were not satisfied merely to extend the borders of the imagination or, deranging the senses, to plumb an interior reality. They sought at the same time a special rhetoric to express the new Zeitgeist on the Continent on the eve of World War II.

For a very long time the new philosophies of Existentialism, Marxism and Neo-Nihilism would reverberate loud and clear in the modern European theater. But the innovations of a Sartre, Camus, Brecht, Ionesco, or Beckett would—not surprisingly—cross the ocean with some difficulty. With their essential antagonism toward the “bourgeoisie,” these literary writers would perforce alienate the main staple of theater audiences (i.e., the middle class) in America. As objects of contempt and ridicule in the works of a Brecht or Ionesco, this large segment of society was deemed unequal to comprehending the modernist's vision. Looking back, it seems ironic that even as the world waged war for more than half a decade to protect the freedom of the individual, the new philosopher/artist was veering away from the individual to formulate a composite and somewhat remote portrait of Humankind. And because modern life had grown so fragmented, the center, they foretold, would no longer “hold.” To recognize life's absurdity would henceforth become the height of sophistication. You could decide to wait and become a believer of sorts—as Beckett's theater would demonstrate a bit later. But the life envisioned for modern man in a play like Waiting for Godot was just as bleak and cheerless as if he had stopped believing altogether.

Given this set of circumstances, it is not hard to see why Saroyan would flounder at first in his urge to be free in the theater. Although he fell in line with the avant-garde in his rebellion against the “well-made play” and the banalities of the conventional theater, he would resist turning his back on the homespun “normalcy” of his own middle class. He would revel in chastising its materialism and poking fun at its pomposities, but his brand of humanism would not allow him to lessen his expectations of the “common man” or dilute by an iota his respect for the “ordinary” joys and struggles he experienced. Some of his faith would diminish with time, but he would be religious, as a poet is religious, valuing the particular moment alongside the eternal realities.

In Love's Old Sweet Song the rage to be “innovative” is almost overpowering. More secure now in his comic vision and no longer needing to coast on his past fame, Saroyan is ready to prove he is a more worldly chap that some have supposed. Turning once again to the tinsel-surfaced world of vaudeville, he mingles parody with paradox as he fastens on a fine point about love. He approaches the theme obliquely in his introduction to the play: “All kinds of love … are regard of self,” he writes. “Doing good things is the ultimate selfishness.”⁹ It was this statement that had led Atkinson to call Saroyan an egoist, one apparently unacquainted with “a love that is a union and represents a surrender of self.” But Saroyan had insisted: “It so happens that I know all about it and believe it is the ultimate selfishness. Only unrealistic thinking could change it from selfishness to heroism.”

Where Emerson long ago had observed: “Beauty is its own excuse for being,” Saroyan was now adding, So is Love. Like beauty, love seeks no reward beyond the pleasure it brings the lover. If this sounds perverse and a bit Nietzschean, it may be because what often passes for love lacks the element of self-fulfillment. In a society that identifies love with ethical conduct, connecting it with good works, philanthropy or social service, it is hard to see it in its pure form before it gets confused with altruism.

With an eye that is “simultaneously naive and sophisticated” (as he puts it), Saroyan focuses here on two kinds of love: romantic love, as spawned and perpetuated by Hollywood, and a universally acclaimed “humanitarianism” that manifests itself as social consciousness. By juxtaposing the two he creates an atmosphere of incongruity that readily melds the comic and, for that matter, “the naive and the sophisticated.” The playwright is learning that with crafty handling foolishness and laughter (so easy to identify with “everyman”) can often be more effective catalysts than a sermon or a credo. So Saroyan piles on the foolishness and laughter with a vengeance throughout the three acts.

First to appear on stage, in a setting that features an “old-fashioned house” in a small town in California, is a romantic lady who appears to be in her early forties. Smelling and then cutting some roses in the yard, she starts singing a nostalgic song about “the years, the years, they come and go.” She sits on a rocking chair on the porch with a love-story magazine in her hands. She is the “Ann Hamilton” who is being paged by a postal telegram boy who then promptly introduces himself as “Georgie Americanos,” adding for anyone's interest that he is the son of a wrestler from Smyrna, that he is a “radical” and reads philosophy. The telegram he insists on reading aloud has been sent by “Barnaby Gaul,” who says he loves Ann and is on his way to woo her.

This telegram we soon learn is a fake—a hoax played on Georgie by a fellow messenger boy. But the truth remains undisclosed to the susceptible lady, who vaguely remembers the unknown suitor as a passerby of some twenty-seven years ago. At the mention of the world “love” she is catapulted out of her small world. When presently an imposing, red-haired, middle-aged gentleman arrives (played in the original cast by Walter Huston), he is introduced by Georgie as “Barnaby Gaul.” He is, of course, no such person but (as we learn later) a carnival huckster who happens to be singing the very song (“Love's Old Sweet Song”) that Ann remembers the stranger whistling in the dim past.

Though taken aback at first, “Barnaby Gaul” is in no time ensnared into accepting his fated role. A mutual need for “romance” draws the strangers together, and in the ensuing dialogue they mourn the absence of love in their lives. Ann voices her regret for the lost years. The intensity is operatic:

The years moved away … the roses bloomed and faded … the song died … the children I wanted were never born.

And Barnaby Gaul explains how love evaded him:

There were wars … there were famines … disasters at sea … and wherever a man stood his heart was not there.

In the hands of a present-day writer the scene would be full of innuendoes about the sex drives of the middle-aged. But for Saroyan, the sentimentality and pathos only affirm the inviolability of the romantic dimension. If an old truth seems laughable now, it is only because society chooses to see it in that light. To make his point, Saroyan abruptly clips the lyric mood, turning what might have been a Jeannette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy duet into gently ironical commentary. The two sentimental songs composed by Paul Bowles for the end of their scene—“The Years” and “Of All the Things I Love”—are poignant in essence but become less than romantic when viewed in the context of an ulterior comedy of errors.

Then, in the middle of Act One, the play makes a quick transition into outright parody. Sweeping aside all signs of romantic comedy, it ventures boldly into a travesty of the widely subscribed to model of contemporary realism—the Okies of Grapes of Wrath fame. All fourteen members of the Yearling family turn up on Ann Hamilton's lawn announcing that they have come to “rest a spell”—that is, until the birth of the latest offspring in three months. They are followed by a newspaper reporter (Oliver) who is trying to write a novel about them, and a lady Life magazine photographer (Elsa), both of whom are troubled by the absence of gloom and doom on the scene: these are obviously not classic Steinbeck characters.

Even though, like the Joads, the Yearlings claim to have traveled in an old Ford from their home state of Oklahoma, they are not about to cave in. Ranging in age from four to nineteen, the children are a rowdy bunch as they scurry around the house, pillaging and devouring everything in sight. The violence gets so out of hand that before the curtain comes down on Act One, Barnaby Gaul flees for his life, with the lovelorn Ann in pursuit.

The wild and wacky exploits on stage are accompanied by a sprightly banter. The experience of writing radio one-acters and ballet plays has helped Saroyan gain close rapport with the mass mind, and in the scenes involving the aggressive Yearlings, he displays an unsuspecting facility with popular quips and barbs. When Oliver warns Cabot Yearling that they are violating private property, adding, “Of course, after the revolution,” Cabot retorts, “You stay away from us, with your God-damn propaganda. We voted for Roosevelt.” And when Cabot tells Georgie that they are “Migratory workers,” the boy snaps back, “Well, why don't you work? Or migrate?” The verbal absurdity reaches its peak when a young man selling subscriptions to Time magazine takes center stage to recite—like the litany of saints—a long list of names on the magazine's masthead, while the Yearlings listen entranced.

Behind all the horseplay is Saroyan's attempt to turn the much-exploited Depression syndrome around. Oliver objects that he cannot write his novel about these disposed farmers because they lack the noble traits he has been made to expect of them; having personally suffered violence from one of the Yearling children, he is readier to think of this crew as “white trash.” Yet, how explain Cabot Yearling's ability to size up his situation?

The contradiction is not wholly unreasonable in view of Saroyan's belief that the character of man is neither steady nor predictable. Or, as Elsa puts it, “You write as you want the world to write in the first place, and forget all these little complications.”¹⁰ When she then goes on to lecture Oliver—“If you want the world to be better, be better yourself”—Oliver drops the whole matter, orders her to shut up, and tells her he loves her. As he wards off one of the pesky children standing in his path, he shouts at the whole crew, while holding on to Elsa,

To hell with the people in the house. Let God take care of them, the same as ever. To hell with art! To hell with propaganda! … I love you, so shut up and let's try to live.

It is impossible to miss in this “live and let live” outburst a desperate sense of betrayal in a much touted “humanitarianism.” It is expressed by Cabot himself when he is badgered by Oliver's endless questioning. As this unwilling “victim” puts it,

It's … like never being able to lie down and sleep in the afternoon, without somebody waking up a body to ask if we know how to read or not, or if we want better working conditions.

Cabot even denies being “unfortunate,” as Oliver would have it. “Unfortunate? I've got my driver's license,” he corrects him. To which his wife adds: “We don't want nothing from nobody—hardly … We aim to shift for ourselves, the same as ever.”

Beyond the attempt to correct Steinbeck's theatrical sentimentality in the handling of character is Saroyan's need to disabuse his audience of certain commonly held beliefs: that Americans instinctively honor private property; that the press is responsible in its search for the truth—and that the illusion-dispatching huckster is a less useful member of society than the fact-dispatching reporter.

In one scene the two are set side by side, with Barnaby Gaul comparing his trade to that of the magazine salesman who has just sold a subscription to Time to the illiterate Cabot. Denying the salesman's charge that he is all “nonsense,” Barnaby retorts,

You are nonsense. I only dwell in a world of nonsense. I have neither degree nor diploma, and yet it is not you who goes with tidings of hope. I heal the wounds of people. I instruct them in courage and fortitude, not you.

Mostly, he says, “I destroy death in the living.”

Barnaby's sympathies are with the homeless. Though he is half in love with the woman whose house has been invaded, he tells the interlopers,

I know this house is yours, no less than hers. … [T]here is nowhere for you to go. I go where I please, but when there is homelessness, I am not separated from any part of life.

“Here in this front yard,” he declares with a great display of bravado, “I must wage with others the war in Europe, even.” Not unlike the wealthy young loafer Joe, he has the humanitarian instinct and has come to the conclusion that if he can “cure” nothing, he can at least “do no harm.” “With these bottles [of patent medicine] I carry to the people that which they need most. Faith.” When the salesman scoffs that he does not need medicine but only wants back the dollar he took from him, the huckster replies, “You would reject Jesus, I believe.”

The rest of Act Two reads like a trivialization of the melodramatic events at the close of The Grapes of Wrath. In a silly competition between Cabot and his son to repose on the mother's lap, the father is clubbed by the boy with a baseball bat and is presumably killed. With no forewarning, two of the girls are carried off by a talent scout who comes by and offers the mother an advance on their future earnings! Equally at random, a farmer arrives looking for workers to employ, and he is followed on the scene by a sheriff who comes to arrest the trespassers. To everyone's bafflement, the son suddenly announces he has murdered his father. To cap it all, before the curtain falls, Barnaby returns to find the house on fire—fortuitously in time to save the little girl who has been caught inside.

The final act returns us to an equilibrium in life à la Saroyan. In an oriental setting, Georgie Americanos's family plays host to the lovers. Georgie has steered Ann to his home where she is greeted by Pericles and his son Stylianos, one very silent and philosophical (grieving over his lost home in Smyrna), the other a gruff and strong wrestler who believes “the whole world is a man's home.” They assure everyone that “everything's going to be satisfactory.”

Seeing Georgie again on the premises of Ann's house has reminded Barnaby that Ann has been abandoned. He tries justifying his decision to depart on the grounds that he is a “traveler” at heart, but presently comes around to the realization that he is “a fraud” in more than one sense, denouncing his claim to be a traveler “in search of oneself.” Then, as if in contradiction to his self-censure, he instinctively runs to save the child in the burning house.

But before Ann and Barnaby (whose real name turns out to be Jim Greatheart) can fall into each other's arms, the Americanos family must certify that the self-castigating huckster is worthy of Ann. “I gonna teach you manners,” Stylianos tells Barnaby as he spins the large man around “in a full-nelson.” Soon Barnaby is conceding that he is indeed in love with Ann. Despite his idiosyncratic ways with playing cards and patent medicines, the Greeks decide he is a “philosopher” and a “Christian.” Even before the Yearlings reappear to testify that Barnaby's “5-Star Multi-Purpose Indian Remedy” has saved Cabot's life, Ann returns and promptly falls into Barnaby's arms. She is not a bit concerned to learn her house has burned down, and is all too eager to adopt the child Barnaby has saved when the child shows preference for the lovers over her own family.

In the final scene in which the Greeks' hospitality matches the Armenians' in My Heart's in the Highlands, Barnaby lines up the Yearling children (“each child a genius”) for the singing of a ballad, announcing,

Beyond this platform and across the street is the world. What will happen to each child as it wanders into the world only God knows, but now each child is a genius.

Georgie is saluted as the postal telegram messenger who carries the only message worth carrying—Love. But Saroyan's newest self-image is reflected in Barnaby's parting words describing himself:

I like people, but I don't like the disgrace they've fallen into. The only way I know how to do anything about it is to set up my suitcase in the streets, get behind it, and talk to them.

Notes

1. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 3 May 1940.

2. See Brooks Atkinson/William Saroyan discussion of his “mindlessness” in “Preface” to Love's Old Sweet Song in Three Plays, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1940.

3. Saroyan, Razzle Dazzle, 1942, 179.

4. W. David Sievers, Freud on Broadway, New York: Hermitage House, 1955, 245.

5. Ibid., 247.

6. George Jean Nathan's assessment of Saroyan, his originality compared to “ten dozen other playwrights,” and the regrettable shoddiness resulting from too-rapid writing is contained in his article “Saroyan” in The Magic Mirror, edited by Thomas Quinn Curtis (New York: Knopf, 1960).

7. Stark Young, The New Republic, 12 May 1941, 664.

8. Ibid.

9. This and all subsequent quotations concerning this play, in answer to Brooks Atkinson, come from a rebuttal essay printed as “Preface” to the published version of Love's Old Sweet Song in Three Plays, 7.

10. Love's Old Sweet Song, 51 (Elsa speaking).