SOURCE: "I Want to Live While I Am Alive," in William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being, The University of North Carolina Press, 1983, pp. 28-46.

[Calonne is an American educator and critic. Assessing Saroyan's short story collections published in the second half of the 1930s, he determines that these works reflect an affirmation of life in an inhospitable, divisive modern world.]

For Saroyan, it is clear, living itself is the highest value; he violently opposes any system, belief, or authority which seeks to thwart the unfolding of the individual's inner self. He depicts a modern world which is mired in illusion, which has forgotten the spiritual dimension of experience. In The Trouble with Tigers he describes humanity as "this mangled tribe, this still unborn God"; thus the deepest potentials inherent in life have yet to be realized by many people. The essential divinity of humanity is still tragically submerged, and the function of the artist is to reveal this hidden inner realm. To ignore this divine impulse within is to destroy one's potential for achieving authentic selfhood and psychological maturity.

In the six volumes that appeared after The Daring Young Man, this central idea is revealed in a variety of thematic formulations. Although it would be a distortion to identify each book with the exposition of a single theme, certain general patterns may be discerned. In the seventy-one stories of Inhale and Exhale, Saroyan offers a comprehensive treatment of all the [themes introduced in his first collection], with the addition of pieces written during his travels to Europe and Russia. Three Times Three illustrates Saroyan's deepening concern with the place of art in modern life; Little Children focuses on the world of childhood, while Love, Here Is My Hat presents characters seeking wholeness through relationships. Finally, both The Trouble with Tigers and Peace, It's Wonderful reflect the approach of World War II. In each story collection, Saroyan again directs his attention to the chaos of a turbulent world.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Saroyan's growth as a writer during this period was his exploration of art and its relationship to the process of becoming one's true self. He returns repeatedly to the role of the artist in contemporary society, developing and refining his ideas in a number of different contexts. One of his most powerful portraits of the artistic sensibility came out of personal experience—his meeting with Jean Sibelius in July 1935. In "Finlandia," from Inhale and Exhale, Saroyan contemplates the composer and the genius of his music.

All I wanted was music. No dialectics. Just the simple old-fashioned fury of one man alone, fighting it out alone, wrestling with God, or with the whole confounded universe, throwing himself into silence and time, and after sweating away seven pounds of substance, coming out of the small room with something detached, of itself, alive, timeless, crazy, magnificent, delirious, blasphemous, pious, furious, kindly, not the man, not all men, but a thing by itself, incredibly complete, an incision of silence and emptiness, and then sound and the shapes of things without substance. Music. A symphony.

The experience of great music was to become an integral part of Saroyan's life as a writer, and it is in "Finlandia" that he first explored its aesthetic dimensions. He remarked in Razzle-Dazzle that "I am a writer who is a composer. You will see music in all of my writing—the form and quality of music in all of it." For him, as for Rilke, "Gesang ist Dasein"—singing is being.

In "Finlandia," the artist is depicted creating in isolation, "wrestling with God," achieving the order which is a symphonic work. The composer has created "something detached, of itself, alive, timeless"—a new reality whose harmonious structure makes the disintegrated self whole. Through the composition of music, Sibelius has made contact with a metatemporal realm, with an eternal energy which exists continuously in the present. The narrator/Saroyan feels "closer in spirit to him [Sibelius] than any writer" because the composer moves in a dimension beyond words, beyond the mind's linear, "logical," ideabound limitations. Sibelius lives in being and recreates it immediately in sound, an experience which the writer can only approximate through language. . . .

"Finlandia" is important in Saroyan's development, for it is here that he begins to evolve a coherent aesthetic philosophy; as his career progressed, it became evident that art was central to his quest for meaning and personal wholeness. . . .

For him, as for Nietzsche, art is the highest metaphysical activity of man. It gives us a feeling of connection to power, meaning, truth, holiness—to the deepest hidden reaches of life's mystery. The meaninglessness of the "real world" and the disorder of experience are precisely what he seeks to overcome, indeed to redeem, through art.

In the story "The World and the Theatre," for example, a ten-year-old boy has begun to grow disgusted with the unrelieved pain of the Depression, a time when "there was no work in the packing-houses and everybody was out of work and in need of money and all kinds of people were too proud to go down to the city and get some free groceries and maybe a little money and these people were all starving to death." Rather than endure passively the agonies that surround him, the boy discovers the world of vaudeville: "To hell with the outside, I said. To hell with the streets and all the things I see there. It was warm in the theatre and the stage was flooded with light. The scene was a city block, but it wasn't like any city block I had ever seen. It was like a city on another earth, all bright and fine, full of light, a good place to be and live."

This is the occurrence of the great divide: the realization by the child that art and life, reality and imagination, "inside and outside," are twin, contiguous realms of experience—the world and the theater. The vision of the theater as a fragile, enclosed space protecting the vulnerable temporarily from the unrest outside is a conception of the place of art which . . . pervades Saroyan's dramatic philosophy. For the unnamed boy of this story, the theater is an entrance into an imaginative world which supplies momentarily an affirmative picture of life's unrealized possibilities. Just as Sibelius's music made possible a vision of "the shapes of things without substance," so the theater has opened the boy's imagination to a world "full of light."

In his next book, Three Times Three, Saroyan continued to explore the role of the artist in a difficult time. The story "Baby" is divided into fifteen sections; each gives a brief lyrical sketch of some aspect of the American experience. In section three, Saroyan again divides existence into two realms: "The surface life and the inward one, the inward one waiting patiently for another century. It will come. Horror cannot exist forever. The inward life will lift its broken body out of the nightmare and breathe." The nightmare here is both the Depression and the oncoming fury of World War II, and we meet again the lost of The Daring Young Man: "The street of America is a long street, and the lost who walk along this street are many."

In section eight, the narrator launches into autobiography, and it becomes clear that again we are hearing the voice of Saroyan himself—the young artist who wants to change the world, who wants to see the resurrection of an America now lashed by the tempest of economic and spiritual collapse: "I will show them God in themselves, I said. I will teach them to remember. I will talk to them in the language of revelation." Saroyan identifies the expansive energy of America with his own youthful aspirations as a writer; both are full of unrealized potential, a groping earnestness, and burdened with an awareness that the old world is in its death throes.

The function of the artist in "Baby" is revelatory; he must show a reverence for the miraculous nature of life which pushes outward toward new birth even in the darkest time. . . .

There is also in "Baby" a new, free, syncopated rhythm, a rhythm which was to catch the ear of later American writers.

Sang baby. O maybe. Sang motors and wheels till Saturday night in America, and a hundred thousand jazz orchestras sang So come sit by my side if you love me, and the sad-eyed, weary-lipped Mexican girl silenced Manhattan uproar with soft, velvet-petaled singing of darkness and death, O heart there is no end to the river's flowing. Sang locomotive north through snow to Albany and west to Chicago, O baby maybe.

We hear the freedom of music in this passage, with its alternating onrushing excitement and brief, staccato, elemental sentences. The alliterative use of "s" is also apparent when it is read out loud. This rhapsodic urgency is, as we have seen, a central aspect of Saroyan's literary style. It is the language of being, attempting to catch in its quick energetic movement some of the texture, mystery, and flux of experience. It is the obsession of the artist to "get to the probable truth about man, nature, and art, straight through everything to the very core of one's own being."

Saroyan's desire to achieve unification of the warring opposites of self and world through his paratactic style illustrates his typically Romantic attitude concerning the place of language in the transformation of consciousness. . . .

As we see in "Baby," the artist must express the fluid self in fluid forms. For Saroyan, "a writer is great insofar as he is simultaneously artful and artless, a swift-moving inhabitant of both the inevitable and visible world and the uncreated but creatable, uncharted, invisible, fluid, limitless but nevertheless real other world." This is a precise description of the twin realms outlined in "Baby": the "surface life and the inward life." Although the world the artist depicts is "uncharted" and "invisible," it is nevertheless available to consciousness and must be poetically, lyrically invoked through rhythmic, musical language.

It should be clear, then, why Saroyan became a literary godfather to the Beat Generation, and specifically to Jack Kerouac and his fellow writers. In this early prose, Saroyan was a true innovator, spawning a fresh new style—a fusion of jazz, Whitman, the quick tempo of American life, popular songs, and the oral tradition of Armenian literature. It is precisely this oral, musical dimension of Saroyan's prosepoetry, along with its emphasis on immediate, passionate experience, which appealed so powerfully to the Beats: his words are meant to be heard. It has been pointed out by Lawrence Lipton that Beat literature "is the spoken word committed to writing. It is oral in structure. . . . The printed poem is not the poem. It is only the 'score' of the poem, just as in music the score is not the music. It has to be played back." Literature for both Saroyan and the Beats should be as immediate, visceral, improvisatory, and spontaneous as the experience of hearing great music. It must be realized, like life itself, in performance; then it will breathe. "Baby" is noteworthy both for its stylistic innovations and for its search for the "inward life." Other pieces included in Three Times Three also emphasize that the writer's task is to help both himself and his public attain inner wholeness: "Maybe art is a correction of errors, within the artist, in the world, in man, in the universe." But most important, Saroyan here begins to organize his insights concerning the artistic experience into an organic whole. In "Life and Letters" he considers the relation of "real" time to time as we perceive it when we read a work of literature.

In letters time is not the same thing that it is in life, not the same thing that it is in the universe, time in letters is not daybreak, day, noon, afternoon, evening, and night. In letters time is altogether an inexplicable and magnificent thing, and in so small a thing as a mere short story time can become so tremendous an intensification of experience that the reader, God bless him and keep his eyes unastigmatic, will have lived more richly, more greatly, more swiftly, more meaningfully, and more magnificently than he could ever have had the wit or daring or madness to live in the light of day, in the world.

In the world of literature, our awareness of time is mysteriously altered; "real" time is transcended and our experience is intensified through the artful compressions of the short story form. The successful work of art captures a sense of timelessness, and it is evident here that Saroyan again conceives of literature as an expander of consciousness in the Romantic mode. As we have seen in "Finlandia," he sees art as opening the mind to a more significant realm of awareness, onto a "place of reality" where the self is free joyously to exfoliate. The description of time in short stories applies equally well to his other work—especially. . . to such plays as The Time of Your Life.

Also emphasized is the idea that life for the artist is a continuing process of inner exploration; it is "an inward progression of an inward time, an inward growth of an inward world or universe, an inward purification of the inward identity, and an inward strengthening of the inward body." In reading a great work of art, therefore, our own "inward lives begin to accelerate" in the same way as does the writer's. The writer triumphs over time by creating "the growth of immortality in another." The reader's experience of time is not only "intensified" but also "accelerated" as he makes contact with the same world the writer inhabited at the moment of composition.

"Quarter, Half, Three-Quarter, and Whole Notes" continues Saroyan's discussion of literature and the nature of the creative personality in a series of brief sentences and paragraphs. The isolation of the artist is accepted as a prerequisite for successful inner journeyings: "There is only one way to write a story and only one way to write one sentence and that is to be pious and simple and inwardly isolated; above all things inwardly isolated. When you move through the mob you must move through it alone; otherwise there is a chance that your vision will be blurred."

Samuel Beckett, with whom Saroyan shares many spiritual and philosophical concerns, has also written about the solitude of the artist in his study Proust: "For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude." Saroyan's "inward isolation" is Beckett's "solitude"; it is a solitude in which the artist cultivates an inner strength and resolution of purpose—a strength which may be dissipated through an exclusive immersion in social life.

The creation of integral works of art can come about only when the self has achieved a measure of balance and integration. In "Quarter, Half, Three-Quarter, and Whole Notes," Saroyan uncovers the primary link between life and art.

It is essential for anyone alive to establish a personal method of living and to impose personal limitations: one must possess one's identity fully and vigorously and steadily, if one hopes to dominate time rather than be dominated by it. The year is empty because the moment was empty, and the moment need not be empty. There must be no evasion. Evasion occurs when one performs acts not pertinent to the ultimate object of one's activity in life, which is to achieve personal wholeness, and to give the material world reality and order. A story (or any other work of art) does not occur when one does the actual writing: it began to occur when one began to live consciously and piously. The writing, which is the least of it, follows inevitably.

Achieving "personal wholeness" through writing is directly connected to the level of authenticity the artist has attained. The impulse to live "consciously" and fully again links Saroyan to Whitman, whose poetry charts the continuing process of the self's quest for unity: the world is complete for the man who is himself complete. In addition, to live successfully in time and not be burdened by it one must "possess one's identity fully." In life, then, one transcends time through being in control of the self; in art, time is overcome through the magic of literary construction and technique.

A final piece dealing with the artistic process is to be found in Peace, It's Wonderful. In "The Sweet Singer of Omsk," Saroyan writes another autobiographical story (he mentions himself by name) about his daimon: "I admit it. I am possessed. Most of the time not violently so. But often enough. Not haunted, mind you. The presence is not an evil one. It is often angry and bitter and furious, but most of the time it is warm and friendly and amiable and gentle and courteous, and at times a little gallant, even. It is a good presence, and in varying degrees it is with me always." Saroyan tells us that "very often I do not know what I write, what I say. I simply write, something perhaps more significant than I know, which falls in place by itself, rather strangely."

The "presence" is of course the Muse, and Saroyan echoes the Romantic conception of the artist as a kind of instrument through which the energy and fire of divine creativity are expressed. The artist is essentially passive during this process. Stravinsky has said that "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre du Printemps passed," and it is clear Saroyan feels similarly about his writing. André Gide's remark that "the true artist is always half-unconscious of himself, when he is producing" also comes to mind: at their most inspired, artists are aware that their work is being done for them—by the Muse, the unconscious, the daimon, "the presence." Hence Saroyan writes: "I have always suspected that what I am doing is not the work of one man." The speed with which some of Saroyan's best works were written (The Time of Your Life was finished in six days) supports the notion that "the presence" played a central role in his artistic creation.

The stories so far considered thus contain a coherent exposition of Saroyan's developing aesthetic philosophy. Great art is a process by which the individual can achieve true being: it is a way into expanded states of consciousness. As has been shown, he discounts "outer travelling" for "the more places you reach the more you understand that there is no geographical destination for man." Rather, "home" can best be reached in "the world of one man at a time: the inner, the boundless, the ungeographical world of wakeful dream." It is precisely this "ungeographical world" which many of Saroyan's characters so ardently seek, and from which they are so terribly alienated.

Although Saroyan's advocacy of this inner world is powerful and for the most part convincing, art's absolutions ultimately have little impact on the ceaseless struggles of everyday life. Although art, as we have seen, offers an opportunity for inner wholeness to some of Saroyan's characters—through the music of Sibelius, the pleasures of the theater, or the ecstasy of literature—just as many are cut off, alienated from the true, vital sources of spiritual sustenance. The irony is that the transcendence that they seek often seems accessible only through language, through the splendors and therapeutic qualities of Saroyan's poetic prose. The search for love and wholeness in the "real world" is often frustrating and unfulfilling—the yearning remains unappeased.

"At Sundown" from Inhale and Exhale, for example, is another Andersonian story of youth's longing for love and understanding: "And I remember dimly this strange longing I once had which soon became tragic, quietly in the heart where all great tragedies occur." The incurable loneliness of the human heart is illustrated in many of Saroyan's early stories; his characters must learn to accept the fact that breaking through completely to another human being is an illusory dream. The search for communication leads them to an even deeper awareness of their own essential organic apartness as the grandeur and intensity of romantic expectation are deflated by reality. . . .

The quest for love is closely associated in Saroyan's imagination with the search for home, for a place of rest and calm. Being human means exhausting one's self in the effort to reach home, to be more than "puny and weak and mortal." In "The Trains" from Love, Here Is My Hat, we return to the concept of travel as a metaphor for the journeyings of the human spirit as it seeks serenity. Joe Silvera, a twenty-four-year-old painter, has returned to his hometown of Fresno after an absence of seven years. Yet he does not feel at home, and he spends hours looking out the window, watching the trains come and go.

He would watch for the appearance, far in the south, of the crack passenger trains from Los Angeles. And listen for their cry of arrival: the whistle desolating and full of human anguish, like the ungodly anguish of the heart after possessing flesh and losing spirit; and the last minute haste, the roar, the fire and smoke; and then, almost meaninglessly, sadly, the slow stop, the tentative pause, the swift-ending moment of rest; and then the going again, unlike the movement of the spirit, the train going from city to city, place to place, climate to climate, configuration to configuration. Unlike the going of the spirit, which traveled ungeographically, seeking absurdly magnificent destinations: all places, the core of life, the essence of all mortality, eternity, God. And, he thought bitterly, seeking everything else, in one big bright package.

The human heart is continuously dissatisfied, restless, seeking ultimate consummation. It is not content to arrive at geographical places in time and space; it seeks not the superficial, but the very mystery of existence.

Joe Silvera realizes, with Thomas Wolfe, that you can't go home again. Indeed, he begins to wonder whether home is merely a word signifying nothing, whether his spirit wants a magic which exists outside human existence. . . .

The quest for self-integration through love is often frustrating, for, as Yeats put it, "Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement." In "War and Peace" we meet Sammy, a twenty-year-old San Fransciscan whose pained introversion is rooted in a violent sexuality. He is helplessly attracted to women and afraid of their power over him. Like Sam Wolinsky of "Seventeen," Sammy is wracked by animal need and channels his lust into a love for reading. Sammy's mother worries about his intense self-involvement, and the young man resents her wanting him to be a "good boy. He'd like to tell her he stank from being a good boy." Sammy is plagued by the feeling that he is ugly, a "small evil-looking animal which breathes and wants glory." He leaves the house for the evening and considers visiting a brothel, but, unlike Sam Wolinsky, he holds back, realizing that "he could always buy with money the one thing of life which has its beauty and magnificence in being given." He returns home and immerses himself in Tolstoy's War and Peace, returning to the unhappy womb of his mother's house and to the escape of literature.

Neither Joe Silvera nor Sammy, however, is a special case: they are humanity in microcosm, for they "want what everybody wants and never gets." They desire, as we are told in "The Poor Heart," "the enormity and abundance that isn't ever steadily part of this life." The human heart with its infinite longings and unappeasable appetite for wholeness cannot be satisfied by the things of the material world, and its yearning for a deeper reality is often frustrated. The last story in Love, Here Is My Hat, "Am I Your World?" ends with the sobering words: "It's kind of funny the way a man can stay alive when everything but his body is dead; when everything but comedy is dead and buried, when the whole world is a cemetery." Saroyan's characters do stay alive, however. If many are "so inwardly violent and bewildered, so marvelously lonely," it is because they are poets of feeling whose real inner life depends on the sweet shudder of response felt from another human heart.

This desire of Saroyan's characters to establish communion with themselves and others exemplifies the phrase. . . : I want to live while I am alive. They want life above all things, and the real struggle is not only interpersonal; rather, they are up against the spiritual aridity of their age. Peace, It's Wonderful contains one of Saroyan's most powerful statements on estrangement in the modern world, "Noonday Dark Enfolding Texas." Traveling through El Paso by train, the narrator experiences a wasteland, a landscape devoid of meaning and hope: "It was a dead city, it was part of a dead world, a dead age, a universe dying, aching with loneliness, gasping for breath. That is the thought that frightens you. That makes you want life the worst way." The world is yearning for a new birth, a new consciousness, a new way of being; the omnipresence of death and decay makes the narrator's commitment to authentic living all the stronger.

The story ends darkly with a vision of humanity reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's "hollow men."

I went down to the street and began walking through the beautiful, ugly, dying city. The girls were like the girls of all places, only different. They were Texas, but different from ever before. They were Texas in the sudden darkness of noonday; enfolded in the dark; sealed in the far away dream. One of them was the one I was seeking, and knew she was, so that, even in that desolation, there was meaning at last to write home about. Afterwards, on the train, going away from Texas, rolling out of the dream, I listened to the men in the smoker roaring with the lonely laughter of the living, and suddenly I began to cry, roaring with laughter, because I knew we were all dead, didn't know it, and therefore couldn't do anything about it.

This death-in-life is the ultimate estrangement, the terror of the human soul trapped in static isolation. The real tragedy is that these men (and the narrator includes himself among them) do not realize that they are dead, that their inner selves are suffocating.

For Saroyan, this lack of self-knowledge and absence of authentic communication between human beings leads to the ultimate estrangement: the insanity of political and social upheaval, the idiocy of war. Warnings of impending catastrophe can be found in his earliest work; for example,Inhale and Exhale contains an autobiographical sketch, "The Little Dog Laughed to See Such Sport," which he wrote in London in 1935.

So before the war starts (and everybody alive, from the cab driver to the Professor of Economics, at Columbia, will tell you the war will soon start), I want to tell the world that I am not interested. I am completely bored with the war. It has nothing to do with me. I have no quarrel of such a ridiculous nature, although I have quarrels enough. I want nothing of it. I refuse to accept its reality. Kill yourselves all you like. Do it artfully, with the finest guns and gases invented.

Saroyan was forced finally to "accept the war's reality," although he attempted in books like The Human Comedy and The Adventures of Wesley Jackson to soften its horror. It was extremely difficult for him to acknowledge that death had triumphed over life, that there was a spirit of evil in the world, that his dreams of universal brotherhood had been shattered. The character and mood of his writing changed following the war; he found it more problematical to sustain a poetic and lyrical attitude toward life's possibilities. Just as World War I literally sickened D. H. Lawrence, Saroyan was also finally unable to assert that the war had nothing to do with him.

War is the triumph of a mob consciousness which levels distinctions between people and fails to recognize the sanctity of individual life. InThree Times Three, the failure of the masses to achieve self-realization is discussed. In the introductory note to "Public Speech," Saroyan writes:

I sincerely wish I could believe with the Communists that there is hope for the masses, but I cannot. I honestly believe there is hope for man, for one man at a time, and I honestly believe that, with all the encumbrances of the world, all the viciousness, all the deceit and cruelty, man's only hope of salvation is himself; he is his salvation. God is. . . . The masses aren't ready, I'm afraid, for the shock of genuine knowing, and not spiritually equipped to face the inward tragedy which occurs with genuine knowing. I don't think the Communists are either.

In the text of the piece, the speaker tells his audience that "all who live are born out of flesh, and living is private." Again it is humanity's inner world which Saroyan seeks to celebrate and protect from the encroachment of any system, capitalist or communistic, which denies individual freedom: "I hate all who seek to complicate that which parades the earth in barefoot simplicity: the living of the inhabitants of the earth."

Although Saroyan points out that the majority of humanity is not prepared for true self-knowledge, this should not be construed as an elitist remark. By "genuine knowing," Saroyan means the achievement of authentic being—and by this definition, few of any age can be counted as successful. Yet this stage of development also brings with it an "inward tragedy"—perhaps the knowledge that the quest for balance is a lonely and difficult one. To really grow as a person requires great struggle and anguish; but to remain as one is—static, undeveloped, dead—requires no effort. Political solutions to the problems of inner growth are fraudulent because the struggle for "genuine knowing" is ultimately a private, individual, interior quest.

According to Saroyan, it is precisely this fearful consciousness insisting on the mythologies of nationalism and governments which is responsible for the world's chaos. His anarchic, life-affirming passion reaches a rhetorical climax in "The People, Yes and Then Again No" from The Trouble with Tigers: "This is your world and it is my world, and it is not real estate, and not nations, and not governments; it is this accidental place of mortality; it is this pause in time and space. It is this chance to breathe, to walk, to see, to eat, to sleep, to love, to laugh. It is not financial statistics. It belongs to this mangled tribe, this still unborn God, man." The noblest and best qualities of people are yet to appear; but they will emerge as humanity grows out of psychological and spiritual infancy. If this tribe is "mangled," it yet has a chance to become whole.

Later in his career, Saroyan wrote: "When I speak of the human race I speak of the concealed human race, the still concealed human race, which is trying to come out from under, as it has been trying for a million years or more." The struggle of life is man's struggle to express the limitless potential that lies buried within the individual soul. Life is not a matter of quantifiable data, of "statistics"; there is no algebra of the spirit. Rather, life is a vast mystery which should be revered and celebrated. Because people do not realize this, the human race is yet unborn, still in the womb of evolutionary development.

Humanity's potential for peace and brotherhood and life's awful stark actualities are contrasted in Saroyan's writings of the period. In four of the pieces of The Trouble with Tigers, we sense the oncoming tide of death. In "O.K. Baby, This Is the World," the Fascists make their approach to Madrid; "Everything" discusses the war in China; Mussolini's armies invading Abyssinia form the background of "Citizens of the Third Grade." In "The Tiger," Saroyan states the controlling theme of the book: "The room cold and the moment clear and cold and tragic. The presence. The word, unwritten. The tiger, unseen. Brother, I mean death. The red headline across the emptiness of time."

The war's impact on life in America can also be seen in three stories from Peace, It's Wonderful. In "The Greatest Country in the World," a Czechoslovakian and his fourteen-year-old son quarrel when the boy suggests that Germany will overcome his father's homeland through its superior military capabilities. "The War in Spain" depicts a naive eighteen year old convinced of the romance of combat who leaves to become a soldier. And in "The Best and Worst People and Things of 1938," two men in a bar discuss the tragic state of the world. One nominates Hitler as "Heel Number One of the Year." The ultimate mood these stories convey is aptly and concisely expressed by the Scandinavian longshoreman of "The Monumental Arena": "There is a mistake in some place of our life."

Yet the final story in the book, "The Journey and the Dream," refrains from despair or nihilism and ends in a kind of prayer urging pity and hope. The narrator of the story has been gambling and drinking all night, and in the morning, he tells us that

when I walked into the street I was laughing because it was so good to be in the world, so excellent to be a part of the chaos and unrest and agony and magnificence of this place of man, the world, so comic and tragic to be alive during the moment of its change, the sea, and the sea's sky, and London, and London's noise and fury, and the cockney's lamentation, the King's palace, the ballet at Covent Garden, and outside Covent Garden the real ballet, and France, and the fields of France, and Paris, and the streets of Paris, and the stations, and the trains, and the faces, and the eyes, and the grief, and Austria, and Poland, and Russia, and Finland, and Sweden, and Norway, and the world, man stumbling mournfully after God in the wilderness, the street musicians of Edinburgh crying out for God in the songs of America, dancing after Him down the steep streets, the tragic dream stalking everywhere through day and night, so that when I walked into the street, I was laughing and begging God to pity them, love them, protect them, the king and the beggar alike.

Here is Saroyan's typical fusion of laughter and tragedy, of tears and ecstasy. Man is hungering after spiritual illumination, "stumbling mournfully after God in the wilderness," still estranged from himself and the world. Yet the narrator is also laughing, laughing through loneliness, pain, grief. Finally he hugs the world's chaos to his soul and achieves the joy of acceptance.