1985_02 Hye Sharzhoom Newspaper February 1985

              Page 8
Hye Sharzhoom
February, 1985
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ARMENIAN CULTURE
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to Uncle Willy in Heaven
Strange Uncle Willy to think
of you in heaven with your cigarrette
relaxed between two fingers, gesturing
with accents over the thumb glass
of brandy,
annointing a new idea with laughter
and tears rocking a chair,
exposing the underside
of your moustache:
an Artie island, a moon
when your face comes up for Air;
it's a quiet world
since you left, Uncle Willy
Strange, Uncle Willy, the absent streets
sitting in phrazes
intending to be ended,
or appearing like a shadow
among the best dinners
in town,
a line served in depression
with apples for dessert
It's a closed universe
since you left Uncle Willy:
children find themselves
in corners
smelling of garlic
By James C. Baloian
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Saroyan Review
Continued from Page 4
left her when after six years of marriage he
finally found out she was Jewish. Their
son Aram had said it already. Yet the
credulity of those who knew Saroyan well,
even his Armenian cronies, is stretched to
the breaking point. However much
Saroyan's Uncle Aram of Santa Barbara
may have made anti-Semitic remarks in
the 1920s, Saroyan's lifelong Jewish friends
and acquaintances from Broadway never
talked about it and even in these pages do
not. To imagine that Saroyan, who all of
his life had an almost irritating obsession
to know the origin of every name he came
across—and he wrote about these things
time and time again in stories published
long before he met Mrs. Saroyan—not to
know that a girl from New York named
Marcus with a mother named Rosheen
was not Jewish is just absurd. Saroyan
left Carol Marcus because, as he himself
told us in his post-divorce fiction and
memoires, he suspected her of lying and
infidelity.   On the latter point, Lee and
Gifford probably uncovered more than
they were willing to reveal.
Let's take another example. How is the
intelligent reader to explain this book's
attitude toward Saroyan's military career
and his wartime novel The Adventures of
Wesley Jackson! During his entire life
William Saroyan was vehemently against
violence and war. He made that known
openly even to his superiors in the army.
He was certainly what we would call today
a conscientious objector and yet that word
or its suggestion is never once found in the
book. Wesley Jackson is an anti-war
novel, pure and simple, and the first one
published on World War II. Of course it
was unpopular with the establishment,
that is precisely why thinking persons
should appreciate its gutsy boldness as
well as its humor.
Indeed, this is the main problem in an
often challenging reassessment of the
Pulitzer prize winning writer. The authors
fail to see, or refuse to acknowledge, that
Saroyan was always against the system,
any organized institution, whether the
army, school, Hollywood, the publishing
world, Broadway, especially when they
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deprived people of their individuality.
He gambled all his life and lost most of the
time, but he won a lifelong bet between
himself and the world: William Saroyan
would succeed in the system, while criticizing it, attacking it, telling it where to get
off, mocking it, and finally walking away
from it and still surviving it.
The end of this fascinating literary
construction tries very hard to be more
understanding to Saroyan and even partially succeeds. The price that we as
readers must pay is to envisage him as a
solitary, lonely, pathetic and mean figure
in need of our sympathy. That ending is
the same one that Aram Saroyan chose to
use, and, indeed, Lee and Gifford quote in
extenso from Last Rites.
Those who were close to William
Saroyan in the last years know that he
died at his pace in his time, a man who
lived privately by choice, but was always
full of public bravado, a man who had
thought more about the human condition
than most figures of our time and had
furthermore written it all down, a human
being who in regularly revealing to us in
clear and at times brutal terms his won
deficiencies, died an integral and whole
person with no need for hysterical psycho-
drama to explain his personality to the
rest of us.