Books in Brief: Last Rites

Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan as Chronicled by His Son, by Aram Saroyan (Morrow, 176 pp., $10). After I had read this book about an “emotional miser” who hated his wife and children, sealed his loose change into Mason jars, and left his sizable fortune to the William Saroyan Foundation where it couldn’t be touched even if some member of his family were dying of terminal cancer (as he was), I dug back into my correspndence of 1938-40 to see whether there was any resemblance to the Bill Saroyan I had known, sweettempered, outgoing, witty, generous, and so unegotistical that he called me an “expert” for editing some pieces he had been kind enough to send me for free. I saw no resemblance and I remembered none. Of course he might have been setting me up for some advantage he hoped to gain from my modest editorial eminence, but that was hard to believe. Then what had happened to the Armenian-American shortstory writer and playwright over those forty years? What had turned the carefree poet into a heartless ogre? Adulation by the Armenians who treasured this primitive genius as their sole cultural asset? Fame followed by neglect? A childhood trauma, as his son insists: getting even with his parents, who had inadvertently abandoned him at age three, by abandoning and vilifying his own family? Hard to believe again. Yet his son, Aram, is a compelling writer who makes his own anguish over his father’s cruelty believable. There is a moving reconciliation at the deathbed, but then Aram’s bitterness returns and he excoriates his father in the final paragraphs for leaving his estate to the public. With his family already provided for, was that heartless? The puzzle remains. And if it ever is to be solved, it will have to be by some non-familial biographer.

SR

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Selden Rodman

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Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan as Chronicled by His Son, by Aram Saroyan (Morrow, 176 pp., $10). After I had read this book about an “emotional miser” who hated his wife and children, sealed his loose change into Mason jars, and left his sizable fortune to the William Saroyan Foundation where it couldn’t be touched even if some member of his family were dying of terminal cancer (as he was), I dug back into my correspndence of 1938-40 to see whether there was any resemblance to the Bill Saroyan I had known, sweettempered, outgoing, witty, generous, and so unegotistical that he called me an “expert” for editing some pieces he had been kind enough to send me for free. I saw no resemblance and I remembered none. Of course he might have been setting me up for some advantage he hoped to gain from my modest editorial eminence, but that was hard to believe. Then what had happened to the Armenian-American shortstory writer and playwright over those forty years? What had turned the carefree poet into a heartless ogre? Adulation by the Armenians who treasured this primitive genius as their sole cultural asset? Fame followed by neglect? A childhood trauma, as his son insists: getting even with his parents, who had inadvertently abandoned him at age three, by abandoning and vilifying his own family? Hard to believe again. Yet his son, Aram, is a compelling writer who makes his own anguish over his father’s cruelty believable. There is a moving reconciliation at the deathbed, but then Aram’s bitterness returns and he excoriates his father in the final paragraphs for leaving his estate to the public. With his family already provided for, was that heartless? The puzzle remains. And if it ever is to be solved, it will have to be by some non-familial biographer.