Books: Cyclone Coming?

THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE—William Saroyan—Random House ($2.50). Last week a new writer appeared on the U. S. horizon. Not much bigger at first sight than a man’s hand, this portent promised a change of weather to come, perhaps even a cyclone. All that had happened was a book of 26 “stories” by one William Saroyan, 26-year-old U. S.-Armenian. But readers of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze opened their eyes at his Preface: “A writer can have ultimately, one of two styles: he can write in a manner that implies that death is inevitable, or he can write in a manner that implies that death is not inevitable”; opened their eyes wider & wider at this doom-implying youngster as they read further. To readers accustomed to a well-defined short-story tradition, Author Saroyan’s subjective soliloquies may seem impertinently irrelevant to the price of eggs. His unconcern with plot is enough to drive contrivers of well-made stories mad with resentment. All Author Saroyan tries to tell about is “the truth of my presence on earth.” In his own person or in thin disguise he writes about barber shops, bawdy houses, cold rooms in Manhattan or San Francisco, pawning his typewriter, finding a little brown snake in a park, being kept after school because he had laughed at the teacher, a bum who was still too dignified to sell dirty postcards. At times he seems as inept an introspective fumbler as Sherwood Anderson at his silliest, but at others he gets nearer the gist of the matter than Anderson at his most inspired. Though Saroyan has a contempt for cleverness, literariness, his searching simplicity sometimes accomplishes cleverness’ own job. Saroyan sometimes uses the impressionistic patter of his day, but plain readers will feel themselves most directly addressed in such straight words as these: “At three in the morning you are apt to come upon strange specimens of life, men made frightening by capitalism. They appear to be monsters, and merely to be in their presence horrifies; yet they speak English, they were born of women, they have names, they belong to the family of man. It is possible to speak to them. The one with whom I spoke was thirty-five. He said his name was Jones. He said he walked at night and rested during the day, standing up. He said it was easy; he had been doing it for years. He was not a Communist. I asked, and he said he was not. He was more afraid of me than I of him. His name was not Jones; he could think of no other at the moment. My question startled him, and his mouth fell open, increasing the horror of his face, the dirty beard, the haunted eyes, the filth, and the very long lower teeth. I felt great love for him, even though he was ugly with the vilest ugliness of man, ghastly sexual ugliness: anger, amazement, and the desire to kill or rape, in his eyes.” The Author. William Saroyan’s father was a professor in his native Armenia; as an immigrant in Manhattan, he rose to be a janitor. Author Saroyan was born in the Fresno vineyard district of California, whither his father had gone to try his luck farming. Educated at public schools and libraries, by odd jobs and semi-starvation, William Saroyan began to write in his teens. But, says he, “I am not a writer at all. … I write because there is nothing more civilized or decent for me to do.” When, last winter, his first story was accepted by Story, Author Saroyan deluged the editors with one, sometimes two manuscripts a day. Says he: “I have no idea what it is like to be an Armenian or what it is like to be an Englishman or a Japanese or anything else. I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive. This is the only thing that interests me greatly. This and tennis.”