Many of the 26 stories in William Saroyan’s 1934 debut collection – reissued this month with an introduction by Stephen Fry – take place in Depression-era San Francisco and explore the experiences of ordinary people trying to get by. California-born, the son of Armenians who fled the genocidal Ottoman empire, Saroyan draws on his own heritage. His narrators are often struggling young writers, such as the protagonist of the title story, who lives on a diet of “bread and coffee and cigarettes” and laments the lack of “weeds in the park that could be cooked”.
Despite the focus on poverty, there is an ebullience to Saroyan’s punchy prose. Take this opening to Seventy Thousand Assyrians: “I hadn’t had a haircut in 40 days and 40 nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work.” The story gets to the heart of Saroyan’s literary aspirations that echo throughout the collection – the desire to “speak a more universal language… eternal and common to all races” in order to “show the brotherhood of man”. And what better riposte to Donald Trump’s harsh border policies than Saroyan’s vivid snapshots of migrants whose harsh working conditions in vineyards and barbershops helped the US to prosper.
As well as characters “wanting more of life than there was in life to have”, Saroyan writes about the enjoyment of simple pleasures, about the dependability of art in precarious times, the consolations of public libraries and the escape music provides.
Saroyan was admired by Joseph Heller, Arthur Miller and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. His story Seventeen, portraying one boy’s uneasy transition into adulthood, calls to mind The Catcher in the Rye. Saroyan’s visceral description of alienation, rage, feelings of violence combined with a “strange tenderness” arrived some years before Salinger had conceived Holden Caulfield. Aspirin Is a Member of the NRA could have been written about the numbing properties of opioids today. Saroyan mixes compassion and humour to terrific effect in this resonant collection.
