[Wilson, considered America's foremost man of letters in the twentieth century, wrote widely on cultural, historical, and literary matters. Perhaps his greatest contributions to American literature were his tireless promotion of writers of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and his essays introducing the best of modern literature to the general reader. In the following essay, Wilson perceives a decline in the quality of Saroyan's fiction after The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other Stories: "[A] columnist is what William Saroyan seems sometimes in danger of becoming—the kind of columnist who depends entirely on a popular personality, the kind who never reads, who knows nothing in particular about anything, who merely turns on the tap every day and lets it run a column."]

The story becomes monotonous; but you have to begin by saying that Saroyan, too, derives from Hemingway. The novelists of the older generation—Hemingway himself, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Wilder—have richer and more complex origins, they belong to a bigger cultural world. But if the most you can say of John O'Hara is that he has evidently read Ring Lardner as well as Hemingway, the most you can say of Saroyan is that he has also read Sherwood Anderson (though he speaks of having looked into a book which he bought for a nickel at a bookstore and which was in Swedish and had pictures of churches). When you remember that Lardner and Anderson were among the original ingredients in Hemingway, you see how limited the whole school is.

But what distinguishes Saroyan from his fellow pupils is the fact that he is not what is called hard-boiled. What was surprising and refreshing about him when he first appeared was that, though he told the familiar story about the wiseguy who went into the bar, and I said and the bartender said and I said, the story was not cruel, but represented an agreeable mixture of San Franciscan bonhomie and Armenian Christianity. The fiction of the school of Hemingway had been full of bad drunks; Saroyan was a novelty: a good drunk. The peculiar spell exerted by his play, The Time of Your Life, consisted in its sustaining the illusion of friendliness and muzzy elation and gentle sentimentality which a certain amount of beer or rye will bring on in a favorite bar. Saroyan takes you to the bar, and he creates for you there a world which is the way the world would be if it conformed to the feelings instilled by drinks. In a word, he achieves the feat of making and keeping us boozy without the use of alcohol and purely by the action of art. It seems natural that the cop and the labor leader should be having a drink together; that the prostitute should be a wistful child, who gets married by someone that loves her; that the tall tales of the bar raconteur should turn out to be perfectly true, that the bar millionaire should be able to make good his munificent philanthropical offers: that they should be really Jack the Giant-Killer and Santa Claus; and that it should be possible to croak the vice-crusader, who is trying to make everybody unhappy, as harmlessly as the devil in a children's "extravaganza."

These magical feats are accomplished by the enchantment of Saroyan's temperament, which induces us to take from him a good deal that we should not take from anyone else. With Saroyan the whole thing is the temperament: he hardly ever tries to contrive a machine. The good fairy who was present at his christening thus endowed him with one of the most precious gifts that a literary artist can have, and Saroyan never ceases to explain to us how especially fortunate he is: "As I say, I do not know a great deal about what the words come to, but the presence is always anxious that I take time out to say something. I say, What's there to say? And the presence says, Now don't get funny; just sit down and say something; it'll be all right. Say it wrong; it'll be all right anyway. Half the time I do say it wrong, but somehow or other, just as the presence says, it's right anyhow. I am always pleased about this. My God, it's wrong, but it's all right. It's really all right. How did it happen? Well, that's how it is. It's the presence, doing everything for me. It's the presence, doing all the hard work while I, always inclined to take things easy, loaf around, not paying much attention to anything, much, just putting down on paper whatever comes my way."

Well, we don't mind Saroyan's saying this, because he is such an engaging fellow; and we don't mind his putting down on paper whatever comes his way. It is true that he has a natural felicity of touch which prevents him from being offensive or tiresome in any of the more obvious ways; and his stories and soliloquies at their best have the quality of the spontaneous songs of one of those songwriters who finds the right melody for his feelings without knowing anything about music. But Saroyan is entirely in error in supposing that when he "says it wrong," everything is really all right. What is right in such a case is merely this instinctive sense of form which usually saves him—and even when he is clowning—from making a fool of himself. What is wrong, and what his charm cannot conceal, is the use to which he is putting his gifts. It is a shock for one who very much enjoyed The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze to go back to reading Saroyan in his latest collection, The Trouble with Tigers. There is nothing in the book so good as the best things in The Flying Trapeze, and there is a good deal that is not above the level of the facility of the daily columnist. In fact, a columnist is what William Saroyan seems sometimes in danger of becoming—the kind of columnist who depends entirely on a popular personality, the kind who never reads, who knows nothing in particular about anything, who merely turns on the tap every day and lets it run a column.

It is illuminating to compare this inferior stuff with the contents of a less well known collection published in California. This volume, Three Times Three, seems to have been consecrated to miscellaneous pieces which the author regards as not having quite come off. The result is something a great deal more interesting than the slick and rather thin stuff of Tigers. One of these pieces, "The Living and the Dead," of which Saroyan rightly says that it is not so good as it ought to be, seems to me, miscarry though it does, one of the best things Saroyan has written. The scene with the Armenian grandmother after the departure of the money-collecting communist is of a startling and compelling beauty. This theme of the foreignborn asserting in modern America the virtues of an earlier civilization is one of the principal themes in Saroyan; whenever it appears—as in the short story called "70,000 Assyrians"—it takes his work out of the flat dimensions of the wiseguy watching life in the bar; and here it is sounded with poignant effect. This is followed by an admirable scene, in which the young man walks out on the street and sees a child crying at a window, and reflects that for "the children of the world eternally at the window, weeping at the strangeness of this place," where the Communist must always look forward to a perfected society of the future, where his grandmother must always look backward to a world that has gone with her youth and that could never really have been as she remembers it, it is natural for them to escape to the "even more disorderly universe" of drunkenness, a state sad enough in itself. But the whole subject, with its three motifs, required a little doing; and Saroyan, as he admits, did not do it. He would have had to be more serious, and he would have had to work the thing out with care; and he knows that he can get away with an almost infinite number of lesser pieces without having their second-rateness complained of.

Kipling said one very good thing about writing: "When you know what you can do, do something else." Saroyan has tackled in his plays something larger and more complicated than his stories; but these plays seem to be yielding to a temptation to turn into columns, too. The three which have been produced and published have many attractive and promising features in a vein a little like J. M. Barrie's; but George Jean Nathan, in the November American Mercury gives rather a disquieting account of no less than five more Saroyan plays which have already been tried out. There was a report that Mr. Nathan had been attempting to get Saroyan to acquaint himself with a few of the classics of the theatre, and it sounds as if the attempt had come to nought.

In the meantime, Saroyan goes on with his act, which is that of the unappreciated genius who is not afraid to stand up for his merits. This only obscures the issue. Most good artists begin by getting bad reviews; and Saroyan has been rather remarkably fortunate. Let him set his mind at rest. Everybody who is capable of responding to such things appreciates what is fine in his work. The fact that a number of people who do not know good theatrical writing from bad do not enjoy Saroyan is no excuse for the artist to neglect his craft. He will be judged not by his personality act or by his ability to get produced and published—which he has proved to the point of absurdity; but by work that functions and lasts.

With his triumph there has crept into Saroyan's work an unwelcome suspicion of smugness. One had always had the feeling with his writing that, for all its amiability and charm, it has had behind it the pressure of a hard and hostile environment, which it has required courage to meet, and that this courage has taken the form of a debonair kidding humor and of a continual affirmation of the fundamental kindliness of people—a courage which, in moments when it is drivento its last resources and deepest sincerity, calls upon its assurance of the loyalties of straight and simple people—Armenians, Czechs, Greeks—surviving untouched by the hatreds of an abstract and complex world. In Saroyan the successful playwright, for whom this pressure has been partially relieved, there seems to be appearing an instinct to exploit this theme of loving-kindness and of the goodness and Tightness of things; and there is perhaps a just perceptible philistinism. If Saroyan, in his latest play, Love's Old Sweet Song, has hit upon precisely the right way to make fun of Time magazine, he has, on the other hand, in his parody of The Grapes of Wrath, come close to the familiar complacency which declares that the unemployed are unemployable. This is the path that leads to Eddie Guest, William Lyon Phelps and Dr. Frank Crane; and let not Mr. Saroyan deceive himself: no writer has a charmed life.