Saroyan
as monstrous narcissist
David Kipen
Sunday, November 10, 2002
©2002 San Francisco
Chronicle.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/10/RV243637.DTL
A Daring
Young Man
A Biography of William
Saroyan
By John Leggett
KNOPF; 462
Pages; $30
There's
a little bit of William Saroyan in every writer, but aggressive therapy
can usually keep
it in
remission. Every writer is, at some level, a quivering lump of gelatinous
goo, equally
ready
to believe the best and worst about his work and often within the same
half-hour.
Famously,
every writer lives in terror that 1) he just hasn't got what it takes or
2) he had
what
it took, but -- sometime between his last decent work and five minutes
ago -- he lost
it.
Where
most writers differ from Saroyan is that they also have at least some vestigial
sense
of proportion,
or, failing that, a renewable lithium prescription. Saroyan had neither.
As a
result,
diving into John Leggett's 400- page biography of him is like having a
complete lunatic
settle
in next to you for a cross-country flight -- and then hearing the pilot
announce that,
because
of weather conditions, he's going to be taxiing all the way to LaGuardia.
A headliner who wound up a footnote, Saroyan was born outside Fresno on Aug.
31, 1908,
the son of Armenian immigrants. By his 20s, he had romanticized a deprived
childhood
into the best-selling short-story collections "The Daring Young Man on
the Flying
Trapeze"
and "My Name Is Aram." Within a few years, he added a similarly beloved
semiautobiographical
novel, "The Human Comedy," and a play in 1939 set in a San Francisco
waterfront
saloon, "The Time of Your Life," which won the Pulitzer Prize.
The great
Central Valley had a very good year with the Pulitzer judges in 1939. Steinbeck
won
a Pulitzer for "The Grapes of Wrath" and, unlike Saroyan, he accepted it.
Saroyan
turned
down the prize, believing that "they should have given it to me for 'My
Heart's in the
Highlands,'
" his first play. He also professed at the time to disapprove of "institutional
support
for the arts."
In retrospect,
this stand might look a lot more principled if Saroyan hadn't spent the
next 40
years
mooching emotional or financial support from everybody he ever knew. This
included
his
wife, children, family, friends, publishers, producers -- anybody he didn't
already owe
apologies
or money to, plus plenty of people he did. The last half of Saroyan's life
reads like
one
long fall from the flying trapeze, ripping through net after net until
his death in 1981.
Perhaps
not since Bob Woodward's Belushi biography, "Wired," has such a spectacular
flameout
elicited so little reader sympathy. Near the midpoint, Leggett gets Saroyan's
pathology
just right when he deepens an explanation of his compulsive gambling:
"He rationalized
that its heavy losses were really blessings, driving him to his typewriter
and
starting
the flow of his creative powers. Despite the pain and remorse of losing,
it delivered,
just
as winning did, a surge of feeling, and satisfied the craving of a man
who, in insulating
himself
against childhood pain, had numbed his senses. . . . As he would later
admit, people
were
never entirely real to him."
Unfortunately,
Leggett draws way too heavily on Saroyan's colossally self- absorbed diaries,
and
soon the book be-
comes
unbearably claustrophobic. If Leggett doesn't take everything Saroyan says
at face
value
-- and, mercifully, he doesn't -- why does he paraphrase it all so voluminously?
This
habit leads, for example, to exhaustive roll calls of every World War II
Signal Corps
officer
who ever evaluated Saroyan's fitness for service. Any judicious biographer
would have
reprinted
one captain's apparently accurate diagnosis -- "egocentric, selfish, conceited,
utterly
lacking in a sense of humor, and paranoid" -- and called it a day.
Through
Leggett's indirect-third-person voice, we also get Saroyan's always astigmatic
assessments
of his own work. Of his reputedly unwatchable foray into short-film making,
we
learn
that "he decided it was at least pretty good, and more likely great." Another
of
Saroyan's
projects "would certainly be an interesting book and probably a readable
one and
just
possibly a great one." One midlife flop is "good, maybe wonderful," another
"important,
possibly
great." He later describes himself as "a good, possibly even a great, writer."
Even if
Saroyan
weren't deluded about most of this -- and Leggett is maddeningly evasive
about
just
how much talent his subject actually had to waste -- it gets old in a hurry.
Saroyan,
on the other hand, got old slowly. He alienated intimates, gambled too
much, wrote
too
fast. Ultimately he died right back where he started, in Fresno, surrounded
by mountains
of old
clippings -- many reportedly from his own toenails. What did his friends
ever see in
him?
What did Leggett? Saroyan must have been an immensely charismatic man to
earn so
much
forgiveness in a single lifetime, but it's a side to him that Leggett hardly
ever shows.
Leggett,
meanwhile, has carved out a fascinating niche for himself as American letters'
premier
anatomist of failure. Twenty-eight years ago he wrote "Ross and Tom," a
widely
praised
joint biography of two other American writers who peaked early, Ross Lockridge
and
Thomas
Heggen. A novelist himself,
once
a New York editor, formerly director of the Iowa Writers Workshop and latterly
of the
Napa
Valley Writers' Conference, these days Leggett lives and writes here in
the Bay Area.
He deserves
tribute for exploring the tragedy of failure in a success- obsessed society.
He
writes
serviceably, and at times even well. But Oedipus, Saroyan's just not. There's
something
stubbornly un-Sophoclean about a hero whose only apparent tragic flaw is
that
he was
a jerk.
Part
of Saroyan's problem -- also Mencken's, whose more successful new biography
was
reviewed
here last Sunday -- is that he was an autodidact. Neither man finished
college.
There's
something to be said, of course, for forming independent opinions, without
benefit
of pedagogy
or syllabi. But Saroyan provides a cautionary example of self-education's
concomitant
drawbacks: a reluctance to change one's mind, to learn from mistakes or,
in
fact,
from other people. Kids, stay in school.
©2002 San Francisco
Chronicle.