William Saroyan found little in life simple or free from ambiguity. Although his prose often gives the sense of effortless bonhomie and improvisatory ease, he achieved such spontaneous expression at the hard cost of constant work and careful artistry. His relation to his Armenian heritage and the genocide of his people was also complex, yet in his response to the tragedy of his people, he ultimately was faithful to his affirmative vision of life and his belief in the basic goodness of humanity.

Born in 1908, Saroyan was seven at the climax of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. On the one hand, he registered with anger and horror “the pain and the grief of our torn land” (as he wrote in “The Death of Children”), yet he also asserted a Franciscan love and acceptance of the universe: he could not condone hatred.¹ He remained committed to pacifism throughout the Thirties, as his story collections from The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934) to Little Children (1937), Love, Here Is My Hat (1938) and The Trouble with Tigers (1938) demonstrate. His love of peace can also be seen in The Time of Your Life (1939), a story literally set in a deeply Franciscan San Francisco, where the vice-squad cop Blick symbolizes the forces of evil and Hitler-like repression, threatening the mood of tolerance which reigns in that zany, wonderful, fantastic bar. Saroyan also did not serve as a soldier in World War II; rather he worked as a non-combatant in London and during this period wrote his anti-war novel The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946) which underscores his contempt for the military and its hierarchical structure.

Thus the Armenian Genocide would confront Saroyan with a central problem: how could he remain loyal to his vision of human brotherhood and love in the face of undeniable suffering and tragedy? From his earliest stories such as “70,000 Assyrians” to a novel from his middle period, Rock Wagram, to his posthumously published plays Bitlis and Warsaw Visitor, Saroyan continually defined and redefined his relation to the Genocide. He, however, remained true to see each individual human as an individual rather than engaging in racism in his response to the tragedy of his people.

Saroyan's relation to his Armenian heritage is an important element of his autobiography, Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who. He describes his childhood in Fresno as a kind of colony representing Armenia in microcosm: “And here, all through the town, were the Armenians, from Bitlis, Van, Moush, Harpoot, Erzeroum, Trabizone, and Diarabakir.”² His parents, Armenak and Takoohi, were from Bitlis (Baghesh), west of Lake Van.³ According to Robert Melson,

[t]he massacres of 1894-96 began in August in Sassoun, a community in the vilayet, or province of Bitlis; here Armenian peasants, possibly encouraged by agitators, resisted the depredations of Muslim Kurdish tribal pastoralists and were set upon by regular troops and Hamidye regiments.⁴

The first massacres of the 1890s thus began in the very province where Saroyan's parents were born: Bitlis. It is no wonder then that Saroyan would associate the genocide with his earliest memories as a child growing up.

Saroyan early in his career memorialized his feelings about his father and his relation to Lake Van, Bitlis, and to Armenian traditions:

Lake Van, O inland sea my father saw
With stinging eyes and steadfast blurring stare
Our hearts unite in race's filial prayer
His blood to mine restores that fearful awe
He felt as he from homeland's shore turned west,
Smothering harsh and violent farewell.(5)

From the beginning, then, he associated his father directly with the Lake Van region, with his own poetic longing to remain true to the “filial prayer” of his Armenian ancestry, with the “harsh and violent farewell” his father and thousands of other Armenians were compelled to make to their homeland.

When Saroyan began to write the short stories which were to make him famous, his memories of his parents' roots in historical Armenia and the Genocide became central preoccupations. When the boy-narrator of “The Death of Children” meets Gourken, who comes from Van, Armenia, he feels a mystical sense of kinship with him: “And there was another who came quietly like a shadow, and he became my brother, whom I loved even more than I loved my brother Krikor. …”⁶ The sense of racial kinship between the two Armenian boys is tender and profound: they even speak in Armenian to one another. But after a few years, the narrator's mother tells him:

[“]Do you know that little boy, Gourken, who came from the old country? He is dead.[”] And she showed me a photograph of him that had been printed in the Asbarez and she read the account of his life, and it was then that, standing in our house, I could feel a form of my life turning inward with this boy to return to memory, and it was then that I stood without a brother and felt the living death in me.⁷

This death takes place during Saroyan's childhood (age seven or eight), hence at the height of the Genocide (1915). It is a horrible metonymy: Gourken's death is the Armenian genocide. The story is one of Saroyan's most beautiful and is narrated in that hushed, muted, Walt Whitmanesque mood of death which is common in Saroyan's early stories: as though in touching death he is touching the most profound and painful poetic mystery. The tears come: there is a kind of flow to their rhythm and a kind of ease. Saroyan says there is a loveliness in dying, more perhaps than in living: death is the greatest beauty, the holy teacher, because death brings humans into the finest unison, and love is the only other way to this unison, this exchange, this coming-into-oneself-as-another. For Saroyan we are all lovely in death.

In “The Armenian and the Armenian,” Saroyan ends the story his most famous declaration about the Genocide, now immortalized on posters hanging in many Armenians' homes:

Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years after, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them.⁸

The emphasis here is on the physical destruction of the 1915 massacres: the march through Deir Zor in the Syrian desert, the destruction of churches, and forced starvation. Yet stress is also placed upon survival—on the fact that twenty years after the Genocide, in 1935, Saroyan in his travels encounters two Armenians meeting in a beer parlor who essentially reconstruct history and the race simply by speaking their language and thus recreating themselves. They have survived, and through them so has the race. It is this dialectic between death and life, destruction and creation, extermination and survival which the Armenian Genocide symbolizes in Saroyan's work.

In another story from Inhale and Exhale, “Antranik of Armenia” the boy character has heard all about the Turks from his grandmother. The narrator reveals Saroyan's own struggle in coming to terms with the Genocide:

The Turk is the brother of the Armenian and they know it. The German and the Frenchman, the Russian and the Pole, the Japanese and the Chinese. They are all brothers. They are all small tragic entities of mortality. Why do they want them to kill one another? What good does it do anybody?⁹

Like Beethoven, Saroyan believed Alle Menschen sind Brüder: all men are brothers, and hate cannot be the proper response to hate.

In “70,000 Assyrians,” Saroyan links the fate of Armenians during the Genocide to that of another famous early civilization—the Assyrians. This was a symbolic link Saroyan would make later in his career in the novella “The Assyrian” (1950) and in “Calouste Gulbenkian” in Letters from 74 Rue Taitbout (1972). The narrator tells us of the atmosphere during the Genocide during his early years in Fresno:

I remember the Near East Relief drives in my home town. My uncle used to be our orator and he used to make a whole auditorium full of Armenians weep. He was an attorney and he was a great orator. Well, at first the trouble was war. Our people were being destroyed by the enemy. Those who hadn't been killed were homeless and they were starving, our own flesh and blood, my uncle said, and we all wept. And we gathered money and sent it to our people in the old country. Then after the war, when I was a bigger boy, we had another Near East Relief drive and my uncle stood on the stage of the Civic Auditorium of my home town and he said, “Thank God this time it is not the enemy, but an earthquake. God has made us suffer. We have worshipped Him through trial and tribulation, through suffering and disease and torture and horror and (my uncle began to weep, began to sob) through the madness of despair, and now he has done this thing, and still we praise Him, still we worship Him. We do not understand the ways of God.” And after the drive I went to my uncle and I said, “Did you mean what you said about God?” And he said, “That was oratory. We've got to raise money. What God? It is nonsense.” “And when you cried?” I asked, and my uncle said, “That was real. I could not help it. I had to cry. Why, for God's sake, why must we go through all this God damn hell? What have we done to deserve all this torture? Man won't let us alone. God won't let us alone. Have we done something? Aren't we supposed to be pious people? What is our sin? I am disgusted with God. I am sick of man.”¹⁰

This mood of lamentation, of trying to find the reason for the Armenians' suffering is yet another issue raised by the Genocide which Saroyan confronts. Theodore Badal, the Assyrian of the story, causes the narrator to ponder the links between the fate of the Assyrians and the Armenians:

Seventy thousand Assyrians, a mere seventy thousand of that great people, and all the others quiet in death and all the greatness crumbled and ignored, and a young man in America learning to be a barber, and a young man lamenting bitterly the course of history [italics added].¹¹

Saroyan points out the Armenians' need to construct a theodicy—a vindication of the justice of God in ordaining or permitting natural and moral evil.

From the time of Gregory of Narek's Book of Lamentations to the present day, the Armenians have sought reasons for their suffering. We are reminded in the quotation above of the response to the recent earthquake (1988) in Armenia when a similar rationale was provided: was the earthquake a punishment? Or have the Armenians been singled out for suffering as a means of spiritual purification? Perhaps this signifies the specialness of the Armenians as God's chosen people—they are being tested in the crucible of pain and suffering in order to make them God's equal in cosmic greatness and sensitivity. Like Job in the Old Testament, the Armenians are being tested, are stricken with all manner of affliction as proof of their heroic status, of their uniqueness in God's eyes.

The grief expressed by Theodore Badal, by the Armenians in Saroyan's stories, is part of this ritual of self-purification, of catharsis and possible redemption. According to Leonardo Alishan, the tendency towards lamentation was

adopted like “sin” and “martyrdom” from the Judaic tradition by the Christian one. … It gives vent to unexpressed, pent-up emotions of grief that one has failed to express through the concepts of either sin or martyrdom. … This genre has been employed by Armenians in general and the poets in particular. Actually, with rare exceptions, the majority of poems written by Armenians on the genocide, directly or indirectly, fit this genre most properly.¹²

Saroyan was not officially Christian like T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, or C. S. Lewis, but it could be argued he was Christian despite himself for his Presbyterian roots (his father Armenak was sponsored for immigration by William Stonehill, a Presbyterian minister, after whom William Saroyan was named) filter through into the hymns sung at the piano in The Human Comedy by the Macauley family and in the Armenian Christianity invoked in the novel Rock Wagram. Armenia was, as my own grandfather never tired of reminding me, the first Christian nation.

Yet Saroyan rejects martyrdom. We remember the lines from “The Armenian and the Armenian”—go ahead and see if you can kill this race. Saroyan celebrates human beings, and suffering is not to be wallowed in—it should lead to new life. He does not want to be trapped in trauma. A dead father, poverty, the orphanage—such a history would have crippled a less powerful spirit, yet Saroyan himself survived and insists his people also must survive. Love, for Saroyan, must triumph over death, as the narrator of “70,000 Assyrians” declares:

I think now that I have affection for all people, even for the enemies of Armenia, whom I have so tactfully not named. Everyone knows who they are. I have nothing against any of them because I think of them as one man living one life at a time, and I know, I am positive, that one man at a time is incapable of the monstrosities performed by mobs. My objection is to mobs only.¹³

This passage echoes the phrase in “Antranik of Armenia”—what good is it to hate the Turk? Saroyan posits that it is only masses of people whipped up by evil leaders who can convince individuals to commit the atrocities of genocide: the individual Turkish person cannot be his enemy.

In the novel Rock Wagram (1951), Saroyan connects the themes of fatherhood and the Genocide and madness. Upon reaching middle age, Rock Wagram (Arak Vagramian), the novel's main character, voyages into a new interior landscape in which both personal tragedy and the terrible history of his race converge. Rock's “madness” is in a profound sense the badge of his “Armenianness”—he has a crazy streak because he is Armenian, and the Armenians are mad because of the cumulative effect of centuries of suffering climaxing in the Genocide. In the offices of the Armenian newspaper Asbarez in Fresno, Rock and his cousin Haig drink a toast “[t]o the Armenians, whoever they are, and to their language, whose majesty we all know, lost as it may be forever.”¹⁴ The themes of loss, death of the father (Rock's father committed suicide at age thirty-seven), madness, and the tragic Armenian experience are powerfully and dramatically connected. In Warsaw Visitor, a play published after Saroyan's death, we find him comparing the Armenian and Jewish genocides. In Act 2, Scene 6, we read in regard to Auschwitz and Buchenwald:

… the Jewish dead are different from all of the other dead murdered by the rest of us—oh yes, we did it … it was not just the Germans, it was not just Hitler and his big fat skinny sick brilliant stupid clever dirty partners who always always only followed orders, as they kept saying at the Nuremberg trials—it was us, old boy, us, us, and I mean us.¹⁵

Again, Saroyan confronts the Armenian Genocide simultaneously with his encounter in Warsaw with the experience of the Jewish Cemetery and the Holocaust. Just as he cannot hold the “individual” responsible for what the “mob” commits, here he asserts that it was not just the Germans who were guilty, but “us”—the whole human race.

In conclusion, Saroyan was profoundly concerned with the Armenian Genocide from his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, to his last published posthumous works. His psychological response was perhaps conditioned by the early loss of his father, thus trapping him in the mourning stage of grief which prevented him from exteriorizing his feelings.

Yet the question of “forgiveness” is also to be understood in terms suggested by Roger Smith:

In any case, before forgiveness can take place, there must be an acknowledgement of wrong, an expression of contrition, and positive steps to overcome the effects of the wrong inflicted in the past. But Turkey has refused to acknowledge the genocide, has shown no compassion for its victims. …¹⁶

Is this the case with Saroyan? Perhaps as with the death of his father and his early years in the orphanage, his trauma and grief were such that he was not able to deal with the Genocide in terms of hate because there was no acknowledgment, thus no possibility of forgiveness. His father was taken from him, his childhood was taken from him with no explanation, and the Armenians were slaughtered with no explanation.

Yet Saroyan's profoundest article of faith was that love is superior to hate, and his desire to see human brotherhood triumph was ultimately more important to him than “revenge” perpetrated upon the Turkish people. He could not “forgive,” he did not forget, but neither did he ever give way to hate. That, perhaps, was always his ultimate message as man and artist.

Notes

1. William Saroyan, “The Death of Children” chap. in Inhale and Exhale (New York: Random House, 1936), p. 140.

2. Id., Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 6.

3. Id., My Name Is Saroyan, comp. James Tashjian (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), p. 21.

4. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 44. The Hamidiye irregular calvary was organized by Sultan Abdülhamid II from among the Kurdish tribes for the purpose of attacking Armenians.

5. Saroyan, My Name Is Saroyan, p. 24.

6. Id., “The Death of Children,” p. 140.

7. Ibid., pp. 141-142.

8. Id., “The Armenian and the Armenian,” chap. in Inhale and Exhale, p. 438.

9. Id., “Antranik of Armenia,,” chap. in Inhale and Exhale, pp. 261-262.

10. Id., “70,000 Assyrians,” chap. in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 35.

11. Ibid., pp. 39-40.

12. Leonardo P. Alishan, “An Exercise on a Genre for Genocide and Exorcism,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 345-346.

13. Saroyan, “70,000 Assyrians,” p. 38.

14. Id., Rock Wagram (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951), p. 101.

15. Id., Warsaw Visitor; Tales from the Vienna Streets: The Last Two Plays of William Saroyan, ed. Dickran Kouymjian (Fresno: The Press at California State University, Fresno, 1991), p. 133.

16. Roger Smith, “The Armenian Genocide: Memory, Politics and the Future,” in Hovannisian, Armenian Genocide, p. 5.