Saroyan
and me
Prize-winning writer recalls his mentor
By Mark Arax
The Fresno Bee, Sunday, August
7, 2005
At the risk of sounding parochial, I drove here today from
Fresno, up Highway 99, past the grape fields and peach orchards,
past the farmworkers picking in the 107-degree sun, some of
them literally dying of heat stroke in this harvest. As I
drove by Uncle Melik's old pomegranate orchard, I couldn't
help but think of a summer just as hot and brutal 25 years
ago when I said goodbye to the San Joaquin Valley and headed
to New York City for grad school.
My heart was set on being a writer, but everyone in my family
thought it best that I pursue the law -- everyone but my grandfather,
Aram Arax. He was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, a young
poet with the last name of Hosepian who took the pen name
Arax from our mother river, which poured down from Mt. Ararat.
When he arrived in Fresno in the summer of 1920, my grandfather
wanted nothing more than to continue his writing. But he did
what all poets do when they land in the Valley. He got down
on his hands and knees and began picking potatoes and then
bell peppers and then grapes. Sixty years later, his grandson
wanted to be a writer and damned if he was going to see that
dream succumb to the idea of one more lawyer in America.
So he hatched a plan. He would take me, on the eve of leaving
for New York, to visit his old friend, the one man who might
set me straight. I picked him up and we drove to two tract
houses side-by-side in west Fresno. They looked like all the
other tract houses except the front lawn was waist high with
weeds and filled with mint. The old guy inside picked the
mint every day to put in his yogurt. We knocked on the door,
and I will never forget the boom of his voice from the kitchen.
"Come on in fellow Fresnans, fellow Armenians, fellow
writers. I'm just finishing lunch."
The door opened and I could see right away that William Saroyan
wasn't quite the lion I remembered. He was thinner and more
pale. Only the mustache seemed as ferocious. The living room
where he invited us to sit was a lovely clutter. A big Formica
table with his typewriter stood in the middle surrounded by
piles of books and free-form art he had drawn in crayon and
pen, pieces of glass and twine he had picked up from that
morning's bicycle ride, rocks and pebbles he collected to
remind himself, he told us, that art should be simple.
It was a 105 outside and the room felt like a blast furnace.
He said he liked to perspire when he wrote and feel the cool
of air conditioning only at night, in bed. He opened the window
to let in some midday air. On the ledge, he had placed a recorder
with which he taped the sounds of night -- hours and hours
of nothing punctuated by the buzz of a fly, the chirp of a
robin.
We were there a good hour, but I don't recall much of the
conversation. What comes back to me now, a quarter century
later, are the silly questions I peppered him with.
"I don't know if I have the stomach for the life of a
writer," I told him, surveying the room." He laughed
a big belly laugh. "Please don't judge a writer by these
surroundings. There is no formula for being a writer. It's
what you are and what you're going to be and what's going
to happen."
"But the way you live seems important."
"It's only important to find what works for you. You
must be alone and have a place to write. So it's lonely sometimes,
but it isn't abject loneliness. Rather a kind of majestic
one, a kinship with larger things."
Did being a writer, a real writer, mean there would be no
time for wife or children?
He was too kind to laugh again.
"Not if it's the right marriage. Not any more than any
other intensely felt profession. Maybe less. I was married
to the same woman twice. Walter Matthau has her now. Thank
God."
He said he wrote using 300 words of the English language --
no more. Count them. And then in my exuberance, I asked a
question that no writer, mediocre or mighty, ought to be asked.
Would he kindly provide me with a reading list -- the great
books of American fiction? On the back side of an envelope
from his publisher, he scribbled wildly. "Mark Twain,
our best." "Edgar Lee Masters for the 'Spoon River
Anthology.' Sherwood Anderson, for 'Winesburg Ohio.' Faulkner,
Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe's 'Look Homeward Angel.' "
Even himself, though he seemed almost apologetic for suggesting
it. "Let's include Saroyan. 'Sons Come and Go, Mothers
Hang in There Forever,' even though that's not the title I
chose."
Grandpa said it was time to go, and Saroyan showed us to the
front door. Then from behind his back, like a magician, he
produced a copy of his latest book, "Obituaries."
"Here," he said. "This is for you. For New
York City. Don't be put off by the title. It's not about death
at all. It's about living."
When I got in the car, I opened the book and on the first
blank page, to my surprise and delight, Saroyan had penned
a note. I read it to Grandpa.
"For Aram Arax, grandfather, and to Mark Arax, grandson.
Fellow Armenians. Fellow Writers. It is a track. It is a profession.
But most of all writing is being alive. Continued good luck,
Bill Saroyan."
Pop nodded his head and smiled. Then he laughed and said.
"You would have thought the jackass could have turned
on the air conditioning a while."
I returned to the Fresno heat a decade later to write a memoir,
"In My Father's Name," about my grandfather and
his journey out of genocide and the unsolved murder of his
son, my father, when I was 15. And I returned in 1997 to tackle
the King of California. I was sitting in my back yard with
my close friend and colleague, Rick Wartzman, explaining how
I had begun a book that was going to take me 10 years at least.
It was the story of how the South came West, how the Boswells
and other plantation owners had left Georgia and Virginia,
chased out by the boll weevil, and grafted their Dixie onto
a corner of California. Jim Boswell, a Stanford-educated cowboy,
had sucked dry Tulare Lake, the largest body of fresh water
west of Mississippi, and carved out the richest cotton patch
in the world. Rick and I joined forces that night and we ended
up writing something I swore I would never write -- a book
with footnotes, 100 pages of them.
On behalf of Rick and myself, I want to thank Stanford University,
librarian Michael Keller, the Saroyan Foundation and its director,
Bob Setrakian, and the judges for this honor. I guess you
now know why this prize is so special for me. And I want to
thank Bill himself for telling me, on our very first visit
when I was 18, that I could never bring paper or pen inside
his house.
"Notes are crutches," he explained. "If you're
going to be a writer, you have to see things. And you can't
very well see things if your face is stuck in some notebook."
Mark Arax is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
