William Saroyan has had another affair with his heart, and he calls the little one Dear Baby. It is somewhat underweight (117 pages) and not so lusty as the others have been, but it's a Saroyan, all right. It has the smile on its lips, the lump in its throat, the tear in its eye, and the bag full of tricks—the same old tricks.

The twenty pieces in Dear Baby have been written over a period of ten years. The earliest was published in 1935, the year after Saroyan made the first public announcement of his genius in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. But the book is no publisher's potpourri of things left over after a young writer went to war. On the contrary, it is a special Saroyan potpourri, with each piece newly revised and some retitled. Probably what Saroyan says of one of the sketches (he is disguised, at the moment, as a bald-headed man named Donald Kennebec who has just written the sketch) is also his opinion of the book: "I feel that I have effectively utilized the material; that I have shaped it into a work which, if anything, will enhance my already considerable fame."

While once again Saroyan holds the mirror up to Saroyan, perhaps we can discover what makes him famous. It might be his versatility. In a typical collection like Dear Baby he offers, in addition to several short stories, a dissertation on the innocence of grapes, a travelogue, a humorous and mystical essay, a fable about a financial mouse, a number of symbolic sketches (choose your own symbols), and five rhapsodic soliloquies. And Saroyan is not only versatile but also prolific. His performance has been as various as vaudeville and almost as continuous as the movies.

Yet his fecundity and his versatility are not in themselves the reasons for his fame. In spite of the fact that he has written a great deal, he is really not a writer but a character. I don't mean someone in a book or play (except of course a Saroyan book or play); I mean someone who is called a character by other people. We Americans are so fond of this kind of character that although we prefer a genuine one like Brigham Young, we are willing to accept a synthetic one like Salvador Dali.

Instead of using his books to show us the world, Saroyan has used them to invent a character for himself. That is why most of the people who read Dear Baby will be looking for Saroyan rather than stories, and that is why all the lyric pieces in the book are about Saroyan in the grip of emotion, not about the emotion that grips Saroyan. The writer of successful lyrics gives his feelings form so that they live outside himself. Saroyan's rhapsodic soliloquies are mere lumps of consciousness, poked here and there in a tentative way but not shaped into anything clear and permanent. They are apt to be muddy Wordsworth ("How It Is to Be") or inchoate Keats ("The Hummingbird That Lived through Winter").

Now, as long as some people take pleasure in a phenomenon like Lucius Beebe, I see no reason why Saroyan should be discouraged from being a character, since that is what he wants to be. But while his fame increases, his interesting talent as a writer is obscured. If, for example, it were not part of his act to be the boy philosopher who presents a sentimental education in every paragraph, the title story in Dear Baby might not be an unhappy marriage between Hemingway and Good Housekeeping, and "Sailing down the Chesapeake" might be an excellent piece of fiction.

But perhaps it is unfair to criticize Dear Baby in this fashion. If we must judge it according to the artist's intention, we must judge it as a portrait of the artist. In this book Saroyan has not matured, but he has solidified. Without changing, he has become what he aspired to be. First of all he is conscientiously unpredictable. Because every genius is a paradox, Saroyan has worked for eleven years to be accepted as the arcane Armenian, and in Dear Baby (once again in the character of Donald Kennebec) he celebrates his partial success: "I have at times been spoken of by certain women who follow the course of contemporary literature as enigmatic and unpredictable, but after all I am a writer."

This paradoxical genius is permanently young, and he is careful to show all the contempt of youth for rules and matters of fact. "Now, if hummingbirds come into the world through some other means than eggs," he says, "I ask the reader to forgive me. The only thing I know about Agass Agasig Agassig Agazig (well, the great American naturalist) is that he once studied turtle eggs.". . . The fact that Saroyan has been playing this same disarming trick ever since he started writing may cause some readers to be less amused than they were eleven years ago. But one can't be sure. Many of us like a trick first because it is novel and thereafter because we know what to expect. If this weren't true, what would happen to radio comedians?

Behind the double talk and the boyish pranks and the razzle-dazzle is the real Saroyan, the cosmic kid. While he is pulling our hat down over our eyes he is whispering the secret of the universe in our ears. There's a message in his madness, and the message is that life is love and that wisdom belongs to the heart. In Love, Here Is My Hat, an early Saroyan collection, the boy and girl of one of the stories went to a movie. "It was a lousy movie, and the idea was to prove that love and love alone is what the world is seeking. So it was a good movie too. You could tell how much of it was lousy: the rest of it was good: it was people wanting to be together, so it was good."

This description fits Saroyan's own Hollywood valentine, The Human Comedy, and Dear Baby also, but it overlooks one vital point. In a story or play or movie the idea cannot be separated from its expression. The idea is false if it is presented falsely. That's the trouble with the message from the daring young seer with the sibylline leaves. It is not profound and simple; it is cheap and simplified.

If you are interested in Saroyan, you will find him in Dear Baby. But if you are interested in honest fiction, Dear Baby can't give you anything but love—the kind you can get for a nickel from any juke box.