To create, stated Henrik Ibsen, means to set judgment upon one's self. This romantic definition of creativeness does not cripple the need of classical balance. By applying Ibsen's definition of creativeness, William Saroyan's works explain much of himself. They reveal an extrovert using writing as a means for his most intense expression; thus he can keep pace with a pragmatic and incongruous world which is rather indifferent to the carefree design of an imaginative fervor. Born thirty-five years ago in the Fresno section of California, in a home close to a vineyard district, and brought up in Armenian immigrant surroundings, possessing a background that knew strangeness, sorrow, poverty, and joy, his growth was conditioned by emotions and experiences which, without the assistance of his native tenderness, combined with a religious heritage, might have made him a clever cynic in an age of elbow-philosophy and unscrupulous indirectness. Even so, his dexterity and boisterous temper sometimes bring him to the level of destiny's court jester or to that of an emotional materialist of the moment; and the hullabaloo or the sheer claptrap of his art and the fact that he is likely to be the Baron Münchhausen of intimate pleasures strengthen one's doubt in his absolute sincerity. His fertile though repetitive imagination should be exhausting to himself; he never runs the risk of being objective. His positive attitude is related to the glory of living. The tone of many of his sketches echoes the voice of the traditional European feuilleton; the kind of sketchy short story that Continental newspapers used to publish for the superficial inspiration and entertainment of the readers. Saroyan's "modernity" does not make them less trivial. On the other hand, their suggestiveness makes them artistically somewhat more authentic, though not necessarily more genuine. For example, in one of his better stories, entitled "The Pomegranate Trees," one encounters the following dialogue:

Pomegranates, my uncle said, are practically unknown in this country.

Is that all you're going to plant? I said.

I have in mind, my uncle said, planting several other kinds of trees.

Peach trees? I said.

About ten acres, my uncle said.

How about apricots? I said. . . .

This is, indeed, mannerism with the pretense of naturalness. The "I said" tires one with the same results with which a snob of simplicity ceases to be funny after a certain time. Saroyan suggests a verbal game that makes fun of unaffectedness.

From all this, as a general statement, what conclusion should one reach as to the outstanding traits of this writer? He is an overrated or belittled romanticist; an actor, sometimes a ham actor, impressed with his own histrionic emotionalism, his own parody, but also an uplifter, a moralist who does not dare to preach. He rationalizes the chill of life with a deceiving tenderness; it is like introducing an oriental lantern into an occidental darkness. In his book entitled The Modern Short Story, the English writer H. E. Bates aptly states: "Saroyan is the Eastern carpet-seller in a foreign country armed with the gift of the gab, a packet of psychological conjuring tricks, and a bunch of phoney cotton carpets from which, unexpectedly, he now and then produces a genuine Ispahan." Edmund Wilson in his "The Boys in the Back Room" recognizes the illusionism of Saroyan, in the following manner: "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." There is warmth in this writer, a communicative emotional heat. Yet his enthusiasm for goodness and sweetness and spiritual nobility is coupled with a confusing irony—his most important gun against a conventional world. Sometimes he has a discerning eyesight; whatever foresight he has it is that of the self-advertiser, the clowning funmaker whose objective seems to compel a colorless and cruel world to succumb to the joyfulness and ingeniousness of a man by the name of William Saroyan.

In referring to Saroyan's romanticism, one is right in asking whether it is exciting because of its artistic merit or because of its too often dwarfish originality. He does not give the impression of an uprooted writer; yet he does not give the impression that he is a writer with roots. His assumed world in which his contrived characters move is only seemingly unassuming. A grimace is likely to be an aggressive defense mechanism. His gadabout sensitiveness seems the godchild of pride which uses humility and irony for self-realization. He is the Jacobin who plots not against an existing government but against a life that postpones joy and happiness. In his play, The Time of Your Life, the following is said: "In the time of your life, live so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches." He speaks like a holy Epicurean, and it is important to see the physiognomy of the oppressed spirit in these words; of the spirit that inherited memories of persecution and humiliation, and in whom the reality of freedom (with all its American trimmings) initiated the kind of courage that made him fall in love with life as he thinks it should be lived. He goes to extremes of affirmation, because he thinks that current life in its negation of happiness is even more extreme. His maudlin or nervy infallibility is manifested in glibly expressed advices that he likes to offer to people. It is like playing dice with the obvious. In the postscript of his Three Plays, entitled "The One Easy Lesson," Saroyan uses the following cheerful plain talk: "Eat simple food and drink the kind of liquor you seem to like most, and if you see a pretty face, smile and let her know there's still love of poetry in the world. Don't study the books, unless you are still under twenty. If you are under twenty, study all the books, but don't forget yourself." One could quote pages from other writings of Saroyan which are as adolescent in their pretentiousness; their dominant characteristics are generalities which show about as much wisdom as if some one would say that water is wet. This reminds me of the diluting method of this writer; there are few "best-seller" writers anywhere who can make of a thin plot or of a superficial situation a story or a situation of "meaning" in the same manner as it is done by Saroyan. He has a rather quantitative than qualitative talent; too frequently it seems like a travesty of vitality.

Saroyan's romantic outlook consists of three salient motives and manifestations. There is a puzzling Eastern inheritance related to his family, to his childhood, and indirectly to immigrant life in general; there is his definite relationship to our American civilization, as an American without the trace of a foreign accent; and there is his narcissism, his lollipop emotionalism, and his ironic shrewdness which seems the acid test of his immunity to theories, to class discrimination, and to other cumbersome interferences of a practical world. Unfortunately, there is little progress in the maturing judgment of this writer; there is too much disregard of good taste as an artistic and psychological attribute; there is childish indifference to greatness in others, for example, by naming his first novel The Human Comedy, considering what this title means to Balzac.

William Saroyan, a cross-breeding of sincerity and twistedness, is especially significant as a sentimentalist in comparison with his American contemporaries who are "hardboiled" writers. Sherwood Anderson's grotesque sense of intimacy affected him; but today's writers of nonconforming evil and ruthlessness seem outside the orbit of his art. Critics have pointed out that Saroyan's uncompromising attitude about the goodness of human nature is his most conspicuous romantic trait. Even his nonsense sometimes suggests a tender and gentle sense. His affinity with common humanity shows that a wounded heart can make evil useless and goodness useful.

The paradoxical Saroyan understands the activity of silence; he understands how important truisms are in the life of little people. In this respect he implies some relationship to Chekhov, with the difference, however, that the Russian writer represents maturity in the very best sense of the word, whereas Saroyan's interest in oversimplified psychology shows his incurable adherence to a youthful storm-and-stress level of the mind. Nevertheless, here and there, he knows how to articulate silence in an almost musical sense, indicating sensitiveness that is moving in its effect. For instance, in his sketch entitled "And Man," one meets a faithful expression of youthful loneliness. Of course, by its very nature, a quotation is incomplete in relation to the complete impression of a work of art; yet the following paragraph should prove Saroyan's aptitude for articulating silence.

During the summer I sometimes stopped suddenly before a mirror to look at myself, and after a moment I would turn away, feeling disgusted with my ugliness, worrying about it. I couldn't understand how it was that I looked utterly unlike what I imagined myself to be. In my mind I had another face, a finer, a more subtle and dignified expression, but in the mirror I could see the real reflection of myself, and I could see that it was ugly, thick, bony, and coarse. I thought it was something finer, I used to say to myself. I hadn't bothered before about looking at myself. I had thought that I knew precisely how I looked, and the truth distressed me, making me ashamed. Afterwards I stopped caring. I am ugly, I said. I know I am ugly. But it is only my face.

The sketch begins with the admission that the confessor was fifteen and ends with the following utterance of self-mastery:

I had seen the universe, quietly in the emptiness, secret, and I had revealed it to itself, giving it meaning and grace and the truth that could come only from the thought and energy of man, and the truth was man, myself, moment after moment, and man, century after century, and man, and the face of God in man, and the sound of the laughter of man in the vastness of the secret, and the sound of his weeping in the darkness of it, and the truth was myself and I was man.

He learned "to walk through the silence of the earth," and, in fairness to the author, it must be said that in this sketch and in some others his cultivated sentimentality functioned with emotional authenticity and made of his self-centeredness, of a purely human fact, an artistic reality. But even these citations fail to reveal a flawless artist; unnecessary words hunt each other, and their pathos violates creative discipline, and they also suggest a forced note of frankness.

Often his romanticism echoes up-to-date bohemianism; he is lavish in his romantic identification with those who ridicule life's gloom with love. Murger's Rodolphe and Mimi reappear in the world of an American avant garde writer; this writer of uncritical impulses is less "modern" than an automobile or an airplane, despite the confusion that he caused on the American stage and on the American literary market place and despite his flirtation with expressionism and surrealism.

Saroyan is a prolific writer. He is passionately in love with publicity, with humanity, and with himself. A zigzag brightness of the spirit illuminates the output of his writings; sometimes it is intoxicating brightness. Yet he writes too much; too much sunshine makes clouds desirable. Too much twinkling of the eye makes one wonder whether one can see. Of the seventy-one stories and sketches in Inhale and Exhale, many are nothing but extended aphorisms and parables. He simplifies moods or situations; but that is precisely what epigrams do. He does not seem to know the difference between slapstick comedy and real mirth; his lack of self-criticism might be interrelated to his lack of composition. His drifting imagination co-operates with the acrobatic gleams of self-consciousness; his spontaneity is limited because of a problematical reasoning intelligence. The burlesque performance of his writing is often pointless because there is no focusing intelligence to support it. He uses the method of hackney originality; after writing a short story, he transforms it into a one-act play and finally into a lengthy play. Other writers did this too; Arthur Schnitzler, for instance, Anatole France, and Luigi Pirandello. As a matter of fact, it does not indicate inferior inventiveness because a writer uses a theme in various genre; in Saroyan's case, however, so much writing is but subtle or shouting bluff. It does not result from the writer's incapacity to do a better job but from the same psychology that one finds in ardent gossipers; even without rumors they cannot stop talking. Saroyan is gossiping about goodness, and this seems the main reason why he monopolizes the publishing and theatrical world with an uncritical gusto.

The prolificness of Saroyan and his writing technique imply an unstableness, owing to the fact that he is the son of immigrant parents. Saroyan is neither a pessimist nor an optimist. He is the symbol of a conflict conquered by selfcentered and projected happiness, but unconquered in the tiring effort of "belonging" externally to the American world. The happiness that he consciously and spontaneously spreads prevents him from being a searcher of truth in a philosophical sense; but the very fact that he refers to his Armenian origin in a willy-nilly manner, the very fact that his imaginative expressions had to accept an American coloring in order to be recognized as American contributions to literature, signifies the same kind of selfconsciousness that one has when one wears a new suit for the first time. Saroyan is not class-conscious, but he is conscious of an America that was a host to his parents, who were Armenian immigrants. He wants to have the ease and freedom of an American host; hence the hospitality of his too numerous publications and plays, and hence the zeal to be unique, to be original, to be interesting even in manner, which is, after all, the technique of substance. He is, indeed, like a host who entertains his guests with all sorts of tricks because he is afraid they might leave his place too soon.

The pity and absurdity that emanate from his sketches, stories, and plays seem to require the kind of verbal pyrotechnics which critics and the public associate with his art. I said that Saroyan is not uprooted but that he has no roots either. He is creating his own roots while he creates his own art. Probably it is due to this immense task that there is scarcely ideological or artistic growth in his work. The arabesque characteristics of Knut Hamsun's Hunger or the mosaic richness of the early stories of Maxim Gorki were significant substantial and technical phases in the evolution of these writers. But the spiritual naïveté and craftiness of Saroyan and his experimentalist technique, his perspective as an artist of writing, have not changed very much since The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze appeared, and this was in the year 1934. What was then youthful remained youthful; what was artistically ripe remained artistically ripe; what was irritating remained irritating; and what was sophomoric and meaningless remained so.

Because Saroyan is an artist, though a minor one, in his indignation against an ugly world and in his attachment to goodness he does not follow the directive of sentimental righteousness. He is not a crusader; he is essentially an unchained lyricist (not a poet), who cannot dismiss the cruelty of the world with a light gesture and who cannot accept the aberrations of politicians and other poker-faced pillars of society as inevitable debaucheries of human fate. He sees goodness from the inside. It is mobile goodness; its energy is not that of an ostentatious or hysterical reformer but that of a soul recognizing beauty in Homo sapiens. Children and adults, dreamers and failures of humanity, raconteurs and timid people, tramps, "wise guys" and practical citizens, sailors, saloon-keepers, and escapists, live in this merry-go-round world of Saroyan. His sensibilities are not complicated; his judgment is an imaginative sequel to a commonplace existence. His purposeful vagueness has occasionally the charm of measured spontaneousness and playfulness.

Saroyan often stands on his head and thus looks at the world; he can be droll and dull, but it is really not difficult to understand him. He may not be able to suggest everything he would like to suggest; this improviser of stories and plays may not be strong in structure-building, but he offers warmth and color that is sometimes trustworthy. In his notes about his plays he says: 'The message of each play comes from the world—which the writer regards as the only and therefore the best place known to man. The comedy, tragedy, absurdity and nobility of these plays come from people whom the author regards as beautiful." One may argue about this omnipotent recognition of beauty in human nature, but one cannot deny the writer's ability to make of his ethics the kind of psychological experience which, precisely because of its meagerness of ideas and because of its temperamental glow, might give the movies an opportunity to supply the audiences with better pictures. Audiences, like women, enjoy flattery; Saroyan's flattery has at least a certain artistic quality.

He shares his subjectivity with everybody; he can talk in terms of the people though he talks about himself. "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" is the story of a poverty-stricken young writer; what makes him distinct is his relationship to Saroyan, his appealing Armenian rambling in an American metropolitan community. It is rather difficult to pick a significant part from the pensive and wild sentences of this story, but this should suffice:

He rose in an elevator to the seventh floor, moved down a hall, and, opening a door, walked into the office of an employment agency. Already there were two dozen young men in the place; he found a corner where he stood waiting his turn to be interviewed. At length he was granted this great privilege and was questioned by a thin, scatterbrained miss of fifty.

Now tell me, she said; what can you do?

He was embarrassed. I can write, he said pathetically.

You mean your penmanship is good? Is that it? said the elderly maiden.

Well, yes, he replied. But I mean that I can write.

Write what? said the miss, almost with anger.

Prose, he said simply.

There was a pause. At last the lady said:

Can you use a typewriter?

Of course, said the young man.

All right, went on the miss, we have your address; we will get in touch with you. There is nothing this morning, nothing at all.

In his collections of stories and sketches, in Inhale and Exhale; Peace, It's Wonderful; Love, Here Is My Hat; Little Children; Three Times Three; The Trouble with Tigers, there is much poor, downright bad material. However, some of his short romantic stories, despite the silly explanatory notes of the writer, reach the readers' hearts. They are presumptuous, they are screwy, they have a kidding quality, they are lively. Even their emptiness seems to be hunting for feeling.

Saroyan has an aptitude for unexpected titles. Women's hats, sometimes, make their heads interesting. It has been said that if Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner had been called The Old Sailor, the fame of the poem might have suffered. Saroyan's inclination for unusual titles is undeniable. His My Name Is Aram, a collection of fourteen stories and sketches, is partly in demand because of the intriguing title of the book. The stories, similarly to other stories of Saroyan, deal with boyhood memories, with relatives, but also with friends and strangers. The environment of the tales is the Armenian district in Fresno, California. In these stories Saroyan shows us fools and practical people, distorted and delightful characters. The following "confession" is revealing: "As to whether or not the writer himself is Aram Garoghlanian, the writer cannot very well say. He will, however, say, that he is not, certainly not, Aram Garoghlanian." This teasing statement seems organically related to the "practical joker" in Saroyan.

If he would only learn how to revise his work. This applies to his first novel, The Human Comedy (this time he failed as an expert in catchy titles), as well as to his plays. Saroyan's pleasure in having written The Human Comedy is evident on every page. It is the wartime story of a California family by the name of Macauley. The adults and the children of the family are, in a psychological sense, known to the reader from earlier stories. Mrs. Macauley, Homer, who at the age of fourteen is very much in the stream of life, his boss, the manager of the telegraph office, the operator, Grogan, Ulysses, the four-year-old brother of Homer, and the rest of the characters are convincingly human. There is deus ex machina clumsiness in the novel; there are defects that defeat the purpose of coherence and psychological inevitableness; it is a sketchy novel, humorous, gentle, though on the border line of sentimentality, in parts definitely trite.

His plays, the one-acts and the longer ones, are the kind of dramas and comedies that one cannot sit through quietly; one either leaves the theater or is grateful for a queer and amusing evening. His Razzie Dazzle volume contains sixteen short plays, with an introductory note by the writer. Lope de Vega wrote over a thousand plays, but most of them were rejected by posterity. Saroyan has to watch his prolificness. His best plays are published in two volumes, entitled Three Plays: First Series and Three Plays: Second Series, The final evaluation of My Heart's in the Highlands, of The Time of Your Life, or of The Beautiful People has not been made. There are critics who consider Saroyan's plays cockeyed or extravagant; others consider them whimsical, lovable, extraordinary. In my opinion there is a great deal of affected honesty and obscureness in these plays; but the good qualities of Saroyan are also observable. Some of the plays seem mere attempts at newness—épater le bourgeois in twentieth-century America. In the Preface to The Time of Your Life Saroyan proclaims this credo: "A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its own values." How romantic a definition! It almost suggests the caricature of an aesthetic creed because it has been so often stated.

In summing up the artistic and psychological significance of William Saroyan, it seems logical to ask whether his preoccupation with singing, loving, bustling common sense, and nonsense indicates a real concern with the fundamentals of human nature. He is still a young man; this broadcaster of human sentiments and whims is still principally a promise rather than a realization, though part of his work has some creative merit. Despite the mobility of his spirit, he has a static idiom; despite his strongly personal tone, he suggests universal appeal, for which he has not as yet found his form. Will he find it? I do not say that he should polish his expression, but I would say that he should find his expression. For the time being he has not found it. Is he searching for it, or is he satisfied with the ease with which moods dance on the floor of his imagination?

He must learn how to grow up without betraying his childlike wonderments. He is in the army now; his virginal conceit of the heart might be affected by it, and I mean favorably. Inasmuch as the army means discipline, it is possible that this experience will also generate in him the need of artistic discipline. Of course, it is possible that in his deepest self Saroyan always recognized the need of creative discipline but that he lacked the ability to make use of this awareness. Leibnitz' Best World of All Existing Worlds induced Voltaire to write Candide; Saroyan is not Voltaire, neither is he Ella Wheeler Wilcox, but he is an agent of artistic sensibilities which sometimes permit him to reach the object of a more or less reliable creative expression.

Sic itur ad astra. Vergil's path to greatness seems unknown to him; yet he is eager to examine imponderables in his own fashion, therefore in harmony with that classical tradition of literature which sacrifices temporariness for eternal verities. In his mind he is an Armenian regionalist, born and reared in California, enjoying the wide horizons of the American scene; throughout his work one senses the potential qualities of a romantic sensibility, reduced, however, to the experience of exaggerated and exaggerating self-love which confuses and interferes when the detachment of creative understanding and conscientiousness is required.