1981_09 Hye Sharzhoom Newspaper September 1981

              Page 6
Hye Sharzhoom
September, 1981
A Tribute.
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Dear Bill,
Paris, May 25,1981
If cormorants might have their "heavenly tide" as you once speculated right
here in Paris in Days of Life and Death
and Escape to the Moon while describing
the death of such a bird you witnessed
once on the beach at Malibu, so too there
is probably a special "heavenly public
library" for writers, especially for book-
crazy Armenian-American ones from
Fresno, California. Surely such a heavenly library would receive the Herald
Tribune or you would not have considered going there for such a long time
as eternity in the first place. I know you
will be pleased to read a letter sent from
your own fifth-floor walkup, 74 rue
Taitbout, Paris 9eme. (I resisted the
temptation to write on some of the perfectly mint Hotel Scribe or Le Crillon
stationary which you were so fond of
accumulating.) It must be poetic justice,
as the saying is, after the thousands of
letters you wrote to friends and sometimes perfect strangers all over the
world, that you should receive a few,
at least one, from the Paris address you
made famous.
In the apartment everything is just
fine — all the hats, the Tribunes neatly
stacked though yellowing, your collected
stones and pebbles, those under water
in jars, those wrapped in napkins in
jars, the rest on the mantels and the
balcony — in short everything, systematically disorganized as you left it. The
hallway is dustier than usual because of
a renovation on the second floor, but the
climb up those five flights of unvarnished wooden steps distracts the mind
differently from floor to floor and at the
top it's catching one's breath, as you
used to say, that is the immediate preoccupation, not the dust. May has been
rainy and cold, rainier than any May I
can remember in Paris, heavy rains too
like those winter downpours in Fresno.
But a week ago on the 18th, the day you
suddenly left Fresno and the "whole
voyald" for the last time, it was wildly
sunny and the flat was particularly
luminous. Not much mail has piled up
since Krikor Atamian sent you the last
batch in early April, mostly the usual
flyers and cards from plumbers advertising emergency service and locksmiths
offering added security.
Your Paris agent took care of those
bills you were concerned about, and announced that Flammarion expects to
release the French translation of the
Adventures of Wesley Jackson in
October; maybe I mentioned that in an
earlier letter, but since you seem never
to be more than casually interested in
such details, you probably did not
comment in your reply. Arpik called
from Haratch to say that the "Arts and
Letters" supplement for the month of
July would be devoted to William
Saroyan. (I am not sure if she knows you
immortalized her and the only Armenian
daily in Europe in that yet-to-be-performed and unpublished play you wrote
in exactly 30 days a couple of Junes ago
in Paris and quite exceptionally let my
students at Fresno State read last fall.
I am sure on the other hand, she will be
pleased when she discovers that the
entire dramatic action takes place right
in her editorial offices on rue d'Haute-
ville.)
I finally met your lawyer friend of
twenty years, Aram Kevorkian, after his
return from seeing you in Fresno in mid-
April. His news was good and bad, sad
but sometimes laughing news too, the
fusion or confusion of a proper Philadel-
phian's first impression of Fresno and
what he discovered would be the last of
you. (I understand even better now why
you insisted on giving me your own keys
to the apartment over my protest that I
could use the set with Atamian; you
already knew the ulcer was more than
just an ulcer.) Aram said, at your request he played Bach, some of your old
favorites, while visiting with you on
West Griffith Way — exactly the first
thing he did on your pianola ("remarkably in tune") when we came up here to
number 74 a fortnight ago. He remembered you had bought that player piano
a block down the street, precisely as he
recalled the purchase of the apartment
itself in 1960 from a realtor friend who
was to show you various.places for sale
after you had decided to settle in Paris.
Like your brother Henry in the "Broken
Wheel," your earliest published story I
seem to recall, justifying his very first
extravagance — an enormous cake —
by saying he thought it looked just- right,
you too, seeing all that sky and light on
the top floor thought the same and said
to the bewildered agent, "I'll take it!"
over his protesting, "But Mr. Saroyan,
I have many other apartments to show
you so that you can choose the one you
like best." But you, "I like this just fine;
I'll take it."
Here it is exactly 21 years later to the
day; Aram didn't tell me that, no, you
did, indirectly at least. For among the
letters, manuscripts, clippings in the
locked file cabinet, which, with your
paintings and some books, you wanted
me to ship to Fresno State for what will
be a William Saroyan Archive, part of an
Armenian National Museum, I found an
old book, one not written by you, so
of course I looked at the title: The
Cornertown   Chronicles   by   Kathleen
Knox, New York, 1880. Inside the front
cover was the short inscription that explained why, unlike the thousands of
other books piled everywhere in these
four rooms, it was under lock and key:
"My first day here, May 25, 1960.
William Saroyan." It occured to me that
21 years at this address is the longest
you have been at any of the 'places
you've done time' as you once put it,
even longer than your early interrupted
years in Fresno, or the later ones there in
San Francisco and New York. During
these past decades I guess Paris was
more your home than anywhere in the
world, though you will always be associated with Fresno, or rather Fresno
with you.
Your friends Kevorkian and Atamian
have finally met, and in true Armenian
fashion found out quickly that they are
nearly related. During his first trip to
America, more than 30 years ago,
Krikor stayed at the Kevorkian house in
Philadelphia, arguing for 19 straight
days about the ultimate destiny of Armenia. Not only that, once in 1963 or
1964, Aram remembers going with you
to what he thinks must have been
Atamian's tailor shop, not the new one
on rue La Fayette, but the original one
around the corner from Taitbout on
Chateaudun, to get a new suit made.
He repeated in French what you had
already told Krikor in the Bitlis dialect of
Armenian you were famous for, not to
make the jacket too short. Of course each
time you emphasized that point, you
were assured that it would not be too
short, but just right. When you finally
got the suit, the jacket was predictably
too short and you were in a state. After
fuming that you could never wear it,
Aram apparently said to simply return it
and be refunded, but you replied, "I
can't do that to Krikor. Don't worry,
I'll write a story and get more than my
money back." And curiously enough Bill,
by what accident of fate I do not know,
but almost directly underneath Ms.
Knox's book of 1880 was a carbon of
"One of the 804 Armenian Tailors in
Paris" you wrote a decade later. But
that's still not the end of the story.
The other day when I suggested to
Atamian that he call Kevorkian because
they may have already met long ago
during the purchase of a certain suit,
the jacket of which was somewhat short,
he replied, "Dickran, mdig ere (listen
here), that suit, that suit, do you know
what Saroyan said to me about that
suit? He wrote from Fresno that he had
worn it on some TV show and everyone
commented, "Bill, that's a great suit;
you' ve never looked so elegant.' "
There is no end to the stories people
tell me about you, as I am apt to tell
them some of the things you did in
Fresno during your final autumn. No
doubt they will all become part of some
Saroyan legend of myth. However, the
most important point of this letter is to
let you know that yesterday, Krikor,
Aram and Angele and I were altogether
with hundreds of your other Paris friends
(Arpik was there too) at the Armenian
church on rue Jean Goujon for a requiem
service in your memory performed by
none other than His Holiness the Catholicos of All Armenians, Vazken I, here on
a pastoral visit from Holy Etchmiazdin.
And though I know you wanted no
religious service whatsoever in Fresno,
Paris is not Fresno and I recall how
warmly you used to speak about your
meetings with Vazken in Armenia. On
this first Sunday after your material
departure from earth — your death, they
called it in all the obits — he wanted
personally to eulogize you in your
adopted hometown. There was already
to be a service in honor of those who died
at Sardarabad in May 1918 during the
heroic struggle which stopped the Turkish army from taking the Ararat valley
and completing the genocide started in
1915, as you remembered hearing about
at age ten back in Fresno. Everyone
seemed visibly moved when the Catholicos turned from SARdarabad to SAR-
oyan, beginning with the metaphor used
in the obituary on the back page of
Le Monde, signed by your old friend
John Hess (he also did the one in the
Herald, if you were wondering), comparing you to a geyser, "Exploding,"
said His Holiness, "all the time with
stories and everywhere he went,
bursting with laughter." He also called
you the prodigy of the nation; the vehicle
through which three millenia of the
Armenian experience was perhaps most
perfectly expressed, for the tormented
history of a people forced into exile
coincided exactly with 'the time of your
life,' you, the orphaned writer of an
orphaned nation. The Catholicos concluded, "William Saroyan's writing,
his humanism, speaks not just about or
to Armenians but to all people about
all people."
Afterward we went to Aram's house
near place Maillot where he played the
same Bach selections he rendered for
you more than a month before in Fresno:
the Air for the G String, the first prelude of the Well Tempered Clavier,
Jesu, Joy of Man's Desire, and the inverted canon from the Art of the Fugue.
We met his wife and endless children
and grandchildren, who, like your own,
are half and quarter Armenian with a
good share of the rest of the nations of
the world mixed in as you were so proud
to point out.
Oh, I almost forgot, your mint is
coining up once again all over the balcony, a bit late because it has been so
cold, but robust and dark green in at
least four or five of the pots out there. I
still don't understand why you planted
it in plain, gravely sand, but that crazy
Saroyan mint loves it. The water level in
the two plastic buckets you left out last
September to measure the accumulated
ra|nfall during your annual winter
migration is exactly 16.8 in the yellow
and 16.1 centimeters in the blue one.
I know you will appreciate that exact
detail.
Your friend,
Dickran
© D. Kouymjian, 1981