An American novelist, playwright and short story writer
The setting of many of Saroyan's stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.
Saroyan wrote over two hundred plays in his lifetime, in addition to numerous short stories, novels, and three autobiographies. Many of his plays were never published or produced during his lifetime, although he did achieve both critical and commercial success for his work during the 1930s and 1940s. Despite the popularity he enjoyed with the American public, critics and scholars during his lifetime often criticized Saroyan for his unstructured style of writing, his deeply personal themes and narratives, and a perceived sentimentality about his optimistic approach to life. Saroyan's stories were full of optimism against the background of suffering during the Depression. Saroyan is known for the free style and intensely autobiographical elements of his works. Saroyan's laughter and optimism are often shadowed by the sadness and isolation of the struggle of immigrants in America. Saroyan presented characters that navigate between the romance and ideals and the unforgiving nature of reality and cultural conflict.
Summary of main features:
1) free style and autobiographical elements;
2) optimistic approach to life;
3) comedies and tragedies of everyday existence;
4) originality, stylistic innovation and exuberant humanism;
5) simple and not very happy characters about whom he wrote with warmth, sympathy and hope for the better;
Laughter and optimism are shadowed by sadness and isolation of the struggle of his people in America.
Laughter
“You want me to laugh?”
He felt lonely and ill in the empty classroom, all the boys going home, Dan Seed, James Misippo, Dick Corcoran, all of them walking along the Southern Pacific tracks, laughing and playing, and this insane idea of Miss Wissig’s making him sick.
“Yes.”
The severe lips, the trembling, the eyes, such pathetic melancholy.
“But I do not want to laugh.”
It was strange. The whole world, the turn of things, the way they came about.
“Laugh.”
The increasing tenseness, electrical, her stiffness, the nervous movements of her body and her arms, the cold she made, and the illness in his blood.
“But why?”
Why? Everything tied up, everything graceless and ugly, the caught mind, something in a trap, no sense, no meaning.
“As a punishment. You laughed in class, now as a punishment you must laugh for an hour, all alone, by yourself. Hurry, you have already wasted four minutes.”
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It was disgusting: it wasn’t funny at all, being kept after school, being asked to laugh. There was no sense in the idea. What should he laugh about? A fellow couldn’t just laugh. There had to be something of that kind, something amusing, or pompous, something comical. This was so strange, because of her manner, the way she looked at him, the subtlety; it was frightening. What did she want of him? And the smell of school, the oil on the floor, chalk dust, the smell of the idea, children gone; loneliness, the sadness.
“I am sorry I laughed.”
The flower bending, ashamed. He felt sorry, he was not merely bluffing; he was sorry, not for himself but for her. She was a young girl, a substitute teacher, and there was that sadness in her, so far away and so hard to understand; it came with her each morning and he had laughed at it, it was comical, something she said, the way she said it, the way she stared at everyone, the way she moved. He hadn’t felt like laughing at all, but all of a sudden he had laughed and she had looked at him and he had looked into her face, and for a moment that vague communion, then the anger, the hatred, in her eyes. “You will stay in after school.” He hadn’t wanted laugh, it simply happened, and he was sorry, he was ashamed, she ought to know, he was telling her, Jiminy crickets.
“You are wasting time. Begin laughing.”
Her back was turned and she was erasing words from the blackboard: AFRICA, CAIRO, the pyramids, the sphinx, Nile; and the figures 1865, 1914. But the tenseness, even with her back turned; it was still in the classroom, emphasized because of the emptiness, magnified, made precise, his mind and her mind, their grief, side by side, conflicting; why? He wanted to be friendly; the morning she had entered the classroom he had wanted to be friendly; he felt it immediately, her strangeness, the remoteness, so why had he laughed: Why did everything happen in a false way? Why should he be the one to hurt her, when really he had wanted to be her friend from the beginning?
“I don’t want to laugh.”
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Defiance and at the same time weeping, shameful weeping in his voice. By what right should he be made to destroy in himself an innocent thing? He hadn’t meant to be cruel; why shouldn’t she be able to understand? He began to feel hatred for her stupidity, her dullness, the stubbornness of her will. I will not laugh, he thought; she can call Mr. Casewell and have me whipped; I will not laugh again. It was a mistake. I had meant to cry; something else, anyway; I hadn’t meant it. I can stand a whipping, golly Moses, it hurts, but not like this; I’ve felt that strap on my behind, I know the difference.
Well, let them whip him, what did he care? It stung and he could feel the sharp pain for days after, thinking about it, but let them go ahead and make him bend over, he wouldn’t laugh.
He saw her sit at her desk and stare at him, and for crying out loud, she looked sick and startled, and the pity came up to his mouth again, the sickening pity for her, and why was he making so much trouble for a poor substitute teacher he really liked, not an old and ugly teacher, but a nice small girl who was frightened from the first?
“Please laugh.”
And what humiliation, not commanding him begging him now, begging him to laugh when he didn’t want to laugh. What should a fellow do, honestly; what should a fellow do that would be right, by his own will, not accidentally, like the wrong things? And what did she mean? What pleasure could she get out of hearing him laugh? What a stupid world, the strange feelings of people, the secretiveness, each person hidden within himself, wanting something and always getting something else, wanting to give something and always giving something else. Well, he would. Now he would laugh, not for himself but for her. Even if it sickened him, he would laugh. He wanted to know the truth, how it was. She wasn’t making him laugh, she was asking him, begging him to laugh. He didn’t know how it was, but he wanted to know. He thought, Maybe I can think of a funny story, and he began to try to remember all the funny stories he had ever heard, but it was very strange, he couldn’t remember a single one. And the other funny things, the way Annie Gran walked; gee, it wasn’t funny any more; and Henry Mayo making fun of Hiawatha, saying the lines wrong; it wasn’t funny either. It used to make him laugh until his face go red and he lost his breath, but now it was a dead and a pointless thing, by the big sea waters, by the big sea waters, came the mighty, but gee, it wasn’t funny; he couldn’t laugh about it, golly Moses. Well, he would just laugh, any old laugh, be an actor, ha, ha, ha. God, it was hard, the easiest thing in the world for him to do, and now he couldn’t make a little giggle.
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Somehow he began to laugh, feeling ashamed and disgusted. He was afraid to look into her eyes, so he looked up at the clock and tried to keep on laughing, and it was startling, to ask a boy to laugh for an hour, at nothing, to beg him to laugh without giving him a reason. But he would do it, maybe not an hour, but he would try, anyway; he would do something. The funniest thing was his voice, the falseness of his laughter, and after a while it got to be really funny, a comical thing, and it made him happy because it made him really laugh, and now he was laughing his real way, with all his breath, with all his blood, laughing at the falseness of his laughter, and the shame was going away because this laughter was not fake, and it was the truth, and the empty classroom was full of his laughter and everything seemed all right, everything was splendid, and two minutes had gone by.
And he began to think of really comical things everywhere, the whole town, the people walking in the streets, trying to look important, but he knew, they couldn’t fool him, he knew how important they were, and the way they talked big business, and all of it pompous and fake, and it made him laugh, and he thought of the preacher at the Presbyterian church, the fake way he prayed, O God if it is your will, and nobody believing in prayers, and the important people with big automobiles, Cadillacs and Packards, speeding up and down the country, as if they had some place to go, and the public band concerts, all that fake stuff, making him really laugh, and the big boys running after the big girls because of the heat, and the streetcars going up and down the city with never more than two passengers, that was funny, those big cars carrying an old lady and a man with a moustache, and he laughed until he lost his breath and his face got red, and suddenly all the shame was gone and he was laughing and looking at Miss Wissig, and then bang: jiminy Christmas tears in her eyes. For God’s sake, he hadn’t been laughing at her. He had been laughing at all those fools, all those fool things they were doing day after day, all that falseness. It was disgusting. He was always wanting to do the right thing, and it was always turning out the other way. He wanted to know why, how it was with her, inside, the part that was secret, and he had laughed for her, not to please himself, and there she was, trembling, her eyes wet and tears coming out of them, and her face in agony, and he was still laughing because of all the anger and yearning and disappointment in his heart, and he was laughing at all the pathetic things in the world, the tings good people cried about, the stray dogs in the street, the tired horses being whipped, stumbling, the timid people being smashed inwardly by the fat and cruel people, fat inside, pompous, and the small birds, dead on the sidewalk, and the misunderstandings everywhere, the everlasting conflict, the cruelty, the things that made man a malignant thing, a vile growth, and the anger was changing his laughter and tears were coming into his eyes. The two of them in the empty classroom, naked together in their loneliness and bewilderment, brother and sister, both of them wanting the same cleanliness and decency of life both of them wanting to share the truth of the other, and yet, somehow, both of them alien, remote and alone.
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He heard the girl stifle the sob and then everything turned up-side-down, and he was crying, honest and truly crying, like a baby, as if something had really happened, and he hid his face in his arms, and his chest was heaving, and he was thinking he did not want to live; if this was the way it was, he wanted to be dead.
“Ben.”
The voice calm, quiet, solemn; how could he ever look at her again?
“Ben.”
He lifted his head. Her eyes were dry and her face seemed brighter and more beautiful than ever.
“Please dry your eyes. Have you a handkerchief?”
“Yes.”
He wiped the moisture from his eyes, and blew his nose. What a sickness in the earth. How bleak everything was.
“How old are you, Ben?”
“Ten.”
“What are you going to do? I mean —”
“I don’t know.”
“Your father?”
“He is a tailor.”
“Do you like it here?”
“I guess so.”
“You have brothers, sisters?”
“Three brothers, two sisters.”
“Do you ever think of going away? Other cities?”
It was amazing, talking to him as if he were a grown person, getting into his secret.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, New York, I guess. The old country, maybe.”
“The old country?”
“Milan. My father’s city.”
“Oh.”
He wanted to ask her about herself, where she had been, where she was going; he wanted to be grown up, but he was afraid. She went to the closet and brought out her coast and hat and purse, and began to put on her coat.
“I will not be here tomorrow. Miss Shorb is well again. I am going away.”
He felt very sad, but he could think of nothing to say. She tightened the belt of her coat and placed her hat on her head, smiling, golly Moses, what a world, first she made him laugh, then she made him cry, and now this. And it made him feel so lonely for her. Where was she going? Wouldn’t he ever see her again?
“You may go now, Ben.”
And there he was looking up at her and not wanting to go, there he was wanting to sit and look at her. He got up slowly and went to the closet for his cap. He walked to the door, feeling ill with loneliness, and turned to look at her for the last time.
“Good-bye, Miss Wissig.”
“Good-by, Ben.”
And then he was running lickety split across the school grounds, and the young substitute teacher was standing in the yard, following him with her eyes. He didn’t know what to think, but he knew that he was feeling very sad and that he was afraid to run around and see if she was looking at him. He thought, if I hurry, maybe I can catch up with Dan Seed and Dick Corcoran and the other boys, and maybe I’ll be in time to see the freight train leaving town. Well, nobody would know, anyway. Nobody would ever know what had happened and how he had laughed and cried.
He ran all the way to the Southern Pacific tracks, and all the boys were gone, and the train was gone, and he sat down beneath the eucalyptus trees. The whole world, in a mess. Then he began to cry again.
The Fire
It was so cold in the world, beyond the warm room, and the air was so clear you could hear it and when the Santa Fe crossing bell rang it was like churches, Sunday and peace in the world, quiet, and then the whole house, like the soft laughter of his father Jesse, trembled with the heavy weight and movement of the passing train.
It seemed as if the only safety in the world was in the red and yellow and white flames of the fire in the stove, the color and the heat, the whole house trembling like a sad man laughing, the whole world cold and sad, and nothing in the world, only the flowers of the fire, blossoming a hundred times a minute, a whole world full of flowers, and outside, beyond the room, the whole world frozen and hushed, so still you could hear the hush.
They said to sit in the kitchen and keep the stove going so he would be warm until they got home in the evening, and not open the door of the stove, be sure not to open the door of the stove, especially Beth, always telling him what to do, and Jesse telling him to mind her because now she was his mother. His father asking him if he couldn’t be nice to her and act like she was his mother.
Well, they couldn’t fool him. The door of the stove was open, his mother was dead, they couldn’t put anything like that over on him, she was dead. It was so quiet in the world you could hear it and the ringing of the Santa Fe crossing bell was like churches. He guessed he was old enough to know his mother was dead, he guessed he knew who saw them put the big box at the front of the church, and the way the house trembled while the train moved was the way Jesse laughed when it was all over and the house was empty, and little pieces of the fire like petals of flowers, flew out of the stove to the floor and disappeared.
He knew. There was nothing in the world. It was empty and she was dead. Empty as a pitch black night, and nothing to have but fire, no light and no warmth and no color and no love. They asked him to keep the door of the stove closed. What did he care about any of that stuff? He was cold, he was almost freezing. At the same time he seemed to be burning. It was the first time in his life he felt cold and hot at the same time. It was the first time in his life he noticed things like the crossing bell being like churches, the trembling house being like Jesse laughing, the fire being like flowers, and everything being nothing because the house was empty.
Nothing in the whole world could make her come back and be alive and come up to the front door of the house and put the key in the lock and open the door and come in and be there with him and be his mother and talk to him again.
It was the first time in his life he knew about everything. They couldn’t fool him. Beth was all right. She was swell. She even brought him candy and toys. That was all right. He liked candy sometimes. He liked the little colored whistles and marbles and different kinds of toys that did all sorts of things and he liked Beth too, but he knew all about it. There was a bag of candy on the table in the parlor. He didn’t want any of it. The toys were in the parlor. He didn’t want to blow any of the whistles or shoot the marbles or wind up the toy machines and watch them work. He didn’t want anything. There wasn’t anything. There wasn’t one little bit of anything. All he wanted was to be near the fire, as close to it as he could be, just be there, just see the colors and be very near. What did he want with toys? What good were toys? The whistles sounded sadder than crying and the way the machines worked almost made him die of grief.
In the fire, though, there was laughter, and not only that, there was singing and every kind of music he had ever heard. There was no end of laughter and singing in the fire, only the laughter was not like the times at school when he used to laugh at the funny way the kids talked and acted, and the singing was sadder than the singing at church. Everything was not the way it used to be. He used to think a whistle was something and he used to blow a whistle until it wouldn’t make a noise any more. He didn’t want anything. Beth was in town working in the department store, and Jesse was at the factory. Jesse worked with big machines and made all kinds of stuff out of iron.
He guessed Jesse was making nothing. What could Jesse make? What could anybody make? Jesse could make a part of a machine, but even after he had made it, what good was it? What good was the whole machine, after it was put together? Maybe it would be an automobile, maybe a Ford. Who wanted a Ford? Who cared about getting into an automobile and going down the highway? Where could you go? What place was there in the world to go to?
Bright petals of yellow and red flew from the blossoming flower to the floor and disappeared, and he knew. Nothing in the whole world could happen to make her be there again. Jesse figured he was doing stuff at the factory, but he wasn’t doing anything. There wasn’t anything to do. Could Jesse do something that would make her be in the house again where she belonged? Could anybody do anything in the world that would make something like that happen? Not one man in the whole world could do anything like that. Jesse could go ahead and make every crazy kind of piece of machinery he felt like making and after they had put all the pieces together nothing would happen, except maybe smoke would come out from some pipe and some wheels would turn and the big machine would do something that nobody cared about, maybe move, but nobody in the whole world could make anything that would do something everybody in the world would like to see done. Jesse could work hard and save money and fill the house with new furniture, like the new tables and chairs in the parlor, but the house would always be empty. He could try to live in the house with Beth, but he knew it couldn’t be, it could never turn out that way, and he knew this from the quiet way Jesse laughed when Beth wasn’t around. Jesse just didn’t know what to do. That’s why he brought Beth to the house. He just didn’t know what else to do. Before Beth came to the house Jesse used to sit in the parlor and do nothing and say nothing. Jesse figured maybe there was something he could do. He knew, though. He knew exactly how it was. He didn’t like to know, it scared him, but he knew.
The fire. That was all. The laughter. The singing. The blossoming of the flower. The color and the sadness, and the bright petals falling to the floor and ending. The ending, especially. Even though one petal followed another endlessly. The house was no good any more. It was no place she would come to again. The world was no good. She was not there. It was no use getting well again and going back to school and laughing at the kids. He didn’t want that again. He didn’t want to learn to read and write and answer the questions. They were fooling everybody. The questions were nothing. They asked you about apples and eggs. That was nothing. They asked you about a word. They never ask you a real question, so how could you give them a real answer? They didn’t even know a real question, how could anybody tell them the answer? They couldn’t fool him. None of them, not Miss Purvis, not Jesse, not Beth, not any one of them.
He knew. The question was, Can you do it? Any of you? Here or in any other place of the world? Can you do it by doing something in the world or by praying or by doing anything anybody alive can do? He knew the answer too. He knew it was no. So what were they doing? What good did it do them? What good was anything in the world when you couldn’t do it? When you could never be able to do it? What good did it do you to do a million other crazy things that had nothing to do with it? What was the sense in answering a million other questions and never even asking the real question?
They told him to sit still and keep warm and not to open the door of the stove. They told him to be a good boy and wait for them to come home in the evening. They told him he was all but all he needed to do was to sit by the stove and keep warm.
He knew what he could do. It was right too. It was the only thing to do. It was a good thing, and he knew he would do it. He knew there would never again be any house for them to come to. And he wished a strong wind would carry the color and heat and fury of the fire to every house in the world and destroy every house and make them all know nothing in the world they could do could ever do it.
When the day darkened and he knew they would be coming soon, he took the fire on burning paper into the parlor and let it eat into the new table. The fire crept slowly up the leg of the table, and then he took the fire into each of the other rooms and planted it in the things of the house, so the whole house would burn, and when they found him across the street staring at the burning house, crying, they thought he was crying because the house was burning, they did not know he knew.
HARRY
This boy was a worldbeater. Everything he touched turned to money, and at the age of fourteen he had over six hundred dollars in the Valley Bank, money he had made by himself. He was born to sell things. At eight or nine he was ringing door bells and showing housewives beautiful colored pictures of Jesus Christ and other holy people – from the Novelty Manufacturing Company, Toledo, Ohio – fifteen cents each, four for a half dollar. "Lady," he was saying at that early age, "this is Jesus. Look. Isn't it a pretty picture? And only fifteen cents. This is Paul, I think. Maybe Moses. You know. From the Bible."
He had all the houses in the foreign district full of these pictures, and many of the houses still have them, so you can see that he exerted a pretty good influence, after all.
After a while he went around getting subscriptions for True Stones Magazine. He would stand on a front porch and open a copy of the magazine, showing pictures. "Here is a lady," he would say, "who married a man thirty years older than her, and then fell in love with the man's sixteen-year-old son. Lady, what would you have done in such a fix? Read what this lady did. All true stories, fifteen of them every month. Romance, mystery, passion, violent lust, everything from A to Z. Also editorials on dreams. They explain what your dreams mean, if you are going on a voyage, if money is coming to you, who you are going to marry, all true meanings, scientific. Also beauty secrets, how to look young all the time."
In less than two months he had over sixty married women reading the magazine. Maybe he wasn't responsible, but after a while a lot of unconventional things began to happen. One or two wives had secret love affairs with other men and were found out by their husbands, who beat them or kicked them out of their houses, and a half dozen women began to send away for eye-lash beautifiers, bath salts, cold creams and things of that sort. The whole foreign neighborhood was getting to be slightly immoral. All the ladies began to rouge their lips and powder their faces and wear silk stockings and tight sweaters.
When he was a little older, Harry began to buy used cars, Fords, Maxwells, Saxons, Chevrolets and other small cars. He used to buy them a half dozen at a time in order to get them cheap, fifteen or twenty dollars each. He would have them slightly repaired, he would paint them red or blue or some other bright color, and he would sell them to high school boys for three and four times as much as he had paid for them. He filled the town with red and blue and green used automobiles, and the whole countryside was full of them, high school boys taking their girls to the country at night and on Sunday afternoons, and anybody knows what that means. In a way, it was a pretty good thing for the boys, only a lot of them had to get married a long time before they had found jobs for themselves, and a number of other things happened, only worse. Two or three girls had babies and didn't know who the other parent was, because two or three fellows with used cars had been involved. In a haphazard way, though, a lot of girls got husbands for themselves.
Harry himself was too busy to fool around with girls. All he wanted was to keep on making money. By the time he was seventeen he had earned a small fortune, and he looked to be one of the best-dressed young men in town. He got his suits wholesale because he wouldn't think of letting anyone make a profit on him. It was his business to make the profits. If a suit was marked twenty-seven fifty, Harry would offer the merchant twelve dollars.
"Don't tell me," he would say. "I know what these rags cost. At twelve dollars you will be making a clean profit of two dollars and fifty cents, and that's enough for anybody. You can take it or leave it."
He generally got the suit for fifteen dollars, alterations included. He would argue an hour about the alterations. If the coat was a perfect fit and the merchant told him so, Harry would think he was being taken for a sucker, so he would insist that the sleeves were too long or that the shoulders were too loose. The only reason merchants tolerated him at all was that he had the reputation of being well-dressed, and to sell him a suit was to get a lot of good free advertising. It would bring a lot of other young fellows to the store, fellows who would buy suits at regular prices.
Otherwise, Harry was a nuisance. Not only that, the moment he made a purchase he would begin to talk about reciprocity, how it was the basis of American business, and he would begin to sell the merchant earthquake insurance or a brand new Studebaker. And most of the time he would succeed. All sorts of business people bought earthquake insurance just to stop Harry talking. He chiseled and he took for granted chiseling in others, so he always quoted chisel-proof prices, and then came down to the regular prices. It made his customers feel good. It pleased them to think that they had put one over on Harry, but he always had a quiet laugh to himself.
One year the whole San Joaquin valley was nearly ruined by a severe frost that all but wiped out a great crop of grapes and oranges. Harry got into his Studebaker and drove into the country. Frost-bitten oranges were absolutely worthless because the Board of Health wouldn't allow them to be marketed, but Harry had an idea. He went out to the orange groves, and looked at the trees loaded with fruit that was now worthless. He talked to the farmers and told them how sorry he was.
Then he said:
"But maybe I can help you out a little. I can use your frost-bitten oranges... for hog and cattle feed. Hogs don't care if an orange is frost-bitten, and the juice is good for them the same way it's good for people... vitamins. You don't have to do anything. I'll have the oranges picked and hauled away, and I'll give you a check for twenty-five dollars, spot cash."
That year he sent over twenty truckloads of frost-bitten oranges to Los Angeles for the orange-juice stands, and he cleaned up another small fortune.
Everyone said he could turn anything into money. He could figure a way of making money out or anything. When the rest of the world was down in the mouth, Harry was on his toes, working on the Los Angeles angle of disposing of bad oranges.
He never bothered about having an office. The whole town was his office, and whenever he wanted to sit down, he would go up to the eighth floor of Cory Building and sit in M. Peter's office, and chew the rag with the attorney. He would talk along casually, but all the time he would be finding out about contracts, and how to make people come through with money, and how to attach property, and so on. A lot of people were in debt to him, and he meant to get is money.
He had sold electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, radios, and a lot of other modern things to people who couldn't afford to buy them, and he had sold these things simply by talking about them, and by showing catalogue pictures of them. The customer had to pay freight and everything else. All Harry did was talk and sell. If a man couldn't pay cash for a radio, Harry would get five dollars down and a note for the balance, and if the man couldn't make his payments, Harry would attach the man's home, or his vineyard, or his automobile, or his horse, or anything else the man owned. And the amazing thing was that no one ever criticized him for his business methods. He was very smooth about attaching a man's property, and he would calmly explain that it was the usual procedure, according to law. What was right was right.
No one could figure out what Harry wanted with so much money. He already had money in the bank, a big car, and he wasn't interested in girls; so what was he saving up all the money for? A few of his customers sometimes asked him, and Harry would look confused a moment, as if he himself didn't know, and then he would come out and say:
"I want to get hold of a half million dollars so I can retire."
It was pretty funny, Harry thinking of retiring at eighteen. He had left high school in his first year because he hadn't liked the idea of sitting in a class room listening to a lot of nonsense about starting from the bottom and working up, and so on, and ever since he had been on the go, figuring out ways to make money.
Sometimes people would ask him what he intended to do after he retired, and Harry would look puzzled again, and finally he would say, "Oh, I guess I'll take a trip around the world."
"Well, if he does," everyone thought, "he'll sell something everywhere he goes. He'll sell stuff on the trains and on the boats and in the foreign cities. He won't waste a minute looking around. He'll open a catalogue and sell them foreigners everything you can think of."
But things happen in a funny way, and you can never tell about people, even about people like Harry. Anybody is liable to get sick. Death and sickness play no favorites; they come to all men. Presidents and kings and movie stars, they all die, they all get sick.
Even Harry got sick. Not mildly, not merely something casual like the flu that you can get over in a week, and be as good as new again. Harry got T. B. and he got it in a bad way, poor kid.
Well, the sickness got Harry, and all that money of his in the Valley Bank didn't help him a lot. Of course he did try to rest for a while, but that was out of the question. Lying in bed, Harry would try to sell life insurance to his best friends. Harry's cousin, Simon Gregory, told me about this. He said it wasn't that Harry really wanted more money; it was simply that he couldn't open his mouth unless it was to make a sales talk. He couldn't carry on an ordinary conversation because he didn't know the first thing about anything that didn't have something to do with insurance, or automobiles, or real estate. If somebody tried to talk politics or maybe religion, Harry would look irritated, and he would start to make a sales talk. He even asked Simon Gregory how old he was, and when Simon said that he was twenty-two, Harry got all excited.
"Listen, Simon," he said, "you are my cousin, and I want to do you a favor. You haven't a day to lose if you intend to be financially independent when you are sixty-five. I have just the policy you need. Surely you can afford to pay six dollars and twenty-seven cents a month for the next forty-three years. You won't be able to go to many shows; but what is more important, to see a few foolish moving pictures, or to be independent when you are sixty-five?"
It almost made Simon bawl to hear Harry talking that way, sick as he was.
The doctor told Harry's folks that Harry ought to go down to Arizona for a year or two, that it was his only hope, but when they talked the matter over with Harry, he got sore and said the doctor was trying to get him to spend his money. He said he was all right, just a cold in the chest, and he told his folks to ask the doctor to stay away. "Get some other doctor," he said. "Why should I go down to Arizona?"
Every now and then we would see Harry in town, talking rapidly to someone, trying to sell something, but it would be for only a day or two, and then he would have to go back to bed. He kept this up for about two years, and you ought to see the change that came over that poor boy. It was really enough to make you feel rotten. To look at him you would think he was the loneliest person on earth, but the thing that hurt most was the realization that if you tried to talk to him, or tried to be friendly toward him, he would turn around and try to sell you life insurance. That's what burned a man up. There he was dying on his feet, and still wanting to sell healthy people life insurance. It was too sad not to be funny.
Well, one day (this was years ago) I saw Simon Gregory in town, and he looked sick. I asked him what the trouble was, and he said Harry had died and that he had been at the bedside at the time, and now he was feeling rotten. The things Harry talked about, dying. It was terrible. Insurance, straight to the end, financial independence at sixty-five.
Harry's photograph was in The Evening Herald, and there was a big story about his life, how smart Harry had been, how ambitious, and all that sort of thing. That's what it came to, but somehow there was something about that crazy jackass that none of us can forget.
He was different, there is no getting away from it. Nowadays he is almost a legend with us, and there are a lot of children in this town who were born after Harry died, and yet they know as much about him as we do, and maybe a little more. You would think he had been some great historical personage, somebody to talk to children about in order to make them ambitious or something. Of course most of the stories about him are comical, but just the same they make him out to be a really great person. Hardly anyone remembers the name of our last mayor, and there haven't been any great men from our town, but all the kids around here know about Harry. It's pretty remarkable when you bear in mind that he died before he was twenty-three.
Whenever somebody fails to accomplish some unusual undertaking in our town, people say to one another, "Harry would have done it." And everybody laughs, remembering him, the way he rushed about town, waking people up, making deals. A couple of months ago, for example, there was a tight-wire walker on the stage of the Hippodrome Theatre, and he tried to turn a somersault in the air and land on the tight-wire, but he couldn't do it. He would touch the wire with his feet, lose his balance, and leap to the stage. Then he would try it over again, from the beginning, music and all, the drum rolling to make you feel how dangerous it was. This acrobat tried to do the trick three times and failed, and while he was losing his balance the fourth time, some young fellow away back in the gallery hollered out as loud as he could, "Get Harry. Harry is the man for the emergency." Then everybody in the theatre busted out laughing. The poor acrobat was stunned by the laughter, and he began to swear at the audience in Spanish. He didn't know about our town's private joke.
All this will give you an idea what sort of a name Harry made for himself, but the funniest stories about him are the ones that have to do with Harry in heaven, or in hell, selling earthquake insurance, and automobiles, and buying clothes cheap. He was a worldbeater. He was different. Everybody likes to laugh about him, but all the same this whole town misses him, and there isn't a man who knew him who doesn't wish that he was still among us, tearing around town, talking big business, making things pop, a real American go-getter.
FABLE IX
The Tribulations of the Simple Husband Who Wanted Nothing More than to Eat Goose but was Denied this Delight by His Unfaithful Wife and Her Arrogant but Probably Handsome Lover
A simple husband one morning took his wife a goose and said, “Cook this bird for me; when I come home in the evening I shall eat it.”
The wife plucked the bird, cleaned it, and cooked it. In the afternoon her lover came. Before going away he asked what food he could take with him to his friends. He looked into the oven and saw the roasted goose.
“That is for my husband,” the wife said.
“I want it,” the lover said. “If you do not let me take it, I shall never love you again.”
The lover went off with the goose.
In the evening the husband sat at the table and said, “Bring me the goose.”
“What goose?” the wife said.
“The goose I brought you this morning,” the husband said. “Bring it to me.”
“Are you serious?” the wife said. “You brought me no goose. Perhaps you dreamed it.”
“Bring me the goose,” the husband shouted.
The wife began to scream, saying, “My poor husband has lost his mind. My poor husband is crazy. What he has dreamed he imagines has happened.”
The neighbors came and believed the wife, so the husband said nothing and went hungry, except for bread and cheese and water.
The following morning the husband brought his wife another goose and said, “Is this a goose?”
“Yes,” the wife said.
“Am I dreaming? – No.”
“Is this the goose’s head? – Yes.”
“Wings? – Yes.”
“Feathers? – Yes.”
“All right,” the husband said, “cook it. When I come home tonight I’ll eat it.”
The wife cooked the goose. The lover came.
“There is another goose today,” he said. “I can smell it.”
“You cannot take it,” the wife said. “I had a terrible scene with my husband last night, and again this morning. It is too much, I love you but you cannot have the goose.”
“Either you love me or you don’t love me,” the lover said. “Either I take the goose or not.”
So he took the goose.
“Bring the goose,” the husband said.
“My poor husband,” the wife screamed. “He’s stark raving mad. Goose, goose, goose. What goose? There is no goose. My poor, poor husband.”
The neighbors came and again believed the wife.
The husband went hungry.
The following morning he bought another goose in the city. He hired a tall man to carry the goose on a platter on his head. He hired an orchestra of six pieces, and with the musicians in a circle around the tall man carrying the goose, he walked with them through the streets to his house, calling to his neighbors.
When he reached his house there were many people following him.
He turned to the people and said, “Mohammedans, neighbors, the world, heaven above, fish in the sea, soldiers, and all others, behold, a goose.”
He lifted the bird off the platter.
“A goose,” he cried.
He handed the bird to his wife.
“Now cook the God Damned thing,” he said, “and when I come home in the evening I will eat it.”
The wife cleaned the bird and cooked it. The lover came. There was a tender scene, tears, kisses, running, wrestling, more tears, more kisses, and the lover went off with the goose.
In the city the husband saw an old friend and said, “Come out to the house with me tonight; the wife’s roasting a goose’ we’ll take a couple of bottles of rakki and have a hell of a time.”
So the husband and his friend went out to the house and the husband said,
“Have you cooked the goose?”
“Yes,” the wife said. “It’s in the oven.”
“Good,” the husband said. “You were never really a bad wife. First, my friend and I will have a few drinks: then we will eat the goose.”
The husband and his friend had four or five drinks and then the husband said, “All right, bring the goose.”
The wife said, “There is no bread; go to your cousin’s for bread; goose is no good without bread.”
“All right,” the husband said.
He left the house.
The wife said to the husband’s friend, “My husband is crazy. There is no goose. He has brought you here to kill you with this enormous carving knife and this fork. You had better go.”
The man went. The husband came home and asked about his friend and the goose.
“Your friend has run off with the goose,” the wife said. “What kind of a friend do you call that, after I slave all day to cook you a decent meal?”
The husband took the carving knife and the fork and began running down the street. At length in the distance he saw his friend running and he called out, “Just a leg, my friend, that’s all.”
“My God,” the other said, “he is truly crazy.”
The friend began to run faster than ever. Soon the husband could run no more. He returned wearily to his home and wife. Once again he ate his bread and cheese. After this plain food he began to drink rakki again.
As he drank, the truth began to come to him little by little, as it does through alcohol.
When he was very drunk he knew all about everything. He got up and quietly whacked his wife across the room.
“If your lover’s got to have a goose every day,” he said, “you could have told me. Tomorrow I will bring two of them. I get hungry once in a while myself, you know.”
THE FAILURE OF FRIENDS
I had hoped that among my friends at Longfellow High there would have been a number to remember my not inconsiderable fame during the semester I was there, but having found, after thirty years, that my friends have died, moved away or forgotten Longfellow High I have decided to remember this fame for myself.
Longfellow High was not strictly speaking a high school at all. It was the seventh and eighth grades of grammar school, and its full name was Longfellow Junior High School. The Longfellow in question was of course the Mr. Longfellow, or Henry Wadsworth, although nothing much was ever made of that.
Were it not that I established a new school of thought and behavior while I was at Longfellow, it would not have occurred to me that some of those who had had the honor of knowing me then might have taken the pains to write about me.
It was in ancient history that I first astonished my class into an awareness that here was a truly original mind. It happened that this was the first class of the very first day. The teacher was a hairy-faced, gray-and-brown-looking woman of forty or so who was said to be, in spite of her offensive-looking skinny body and her drab clothes, fast. She smoked cigarettes, laughed loudly with other teachers during the lunch hour, and had frequently been seen by the older students running suddenly, pushing, and acting gay. She was called Miss Shenstone by the students and Harriet or Harry by the other teachers. Ancient-history books were distributed to the class, and Miss Shenstone asked us to turn to page 192 for the first lesson.
I remarked that it would seem more in order to turn to page one for the first lesson.
I was asked my name, whereupon I was only too glad to say honestly, “William Saroyan.”
“Well, William Saroyan,” Miss Shenstone said, “I might say, Mister William Saroyan, just shut up and let me do the teaching of ancient history in this class.” Quite a blow.
On page 192, I recall quite clearly, was a photograph of two rather common-looking stones which Miss Shenstone said were called Stonehenge. She then said that these stones were twenty thousand years old. It was at this point that my school of thought and behavior was started.
“How do you know?” I said.
This was a fresh twist to the old school: the school of thought in which the teachers asked the questions and the students tried to answer them. The entire class expressed its approval of the new school. There was a good deal of vocal enthusiasm. What happened might be described as a demonstration. The truth of the matter is that neither Miss Shenstone, nor Mr. Monsoon himself, the principal, had anything like a satisfactory answer to any legitimate question of this sort, for they (and all the other teachers) had always accepted what they had found in the textbooks.
Instead of trying to answer the question, Miss Shenstone compelled me to demonstrate the behavior of the new school. That is, she compelled me to run. She flung herself at me with such speed that I was hardly able to get away. For half a moment she clung to my home-knit sweater, and damaged it before I got away. The class approved of the behavior of the new school also. Instead of remaining in one’s seat in a crisis, it was better to get up and go. The chase was an exciting one, but I got out of the room safely. Five minutes later, believing that the woman had calmed down, I opened the door to step in and return to my seat, but again she flung herself at me, and again I got away.
Rather than wait for the consequences, I decided to present my case to Mr. Monsoon himself, but when I did so, I was greatly astonished to find that his sympathies were with Miss Shenstone and that he looked upon me with loathing.
“She said the rocks were twenty thousand years old,” I said. “All I said was, ‘How do you know?’ I didn’t mean they weren't that old. I meant that maybe they were older, maybe thirty thousand years old. How old is the earth? Several million years old, isn’t it? If the book can say the rocks are twenty thousand years old, somebody ought to be able to say how the book got that figure. This is Longfellow Junior High. I came here to learn. I don’t expect to be punished because I want to learn.”
“Your name again, please?” Mr. Monsoon said.
“William Saroyan,” I said as humbly as possible, although I must confess it was not easy to do.
“You are?” Mr. Monsoon said.
“Eleven,” I said.
“No, I don’t mean that.”
“One hundred and three pounds.”
“No, no.”
“Presbyterian.”
“The name, I’m thinking of.”
“It’s said to mean blond.”
“Nationality,” Mr. Monsoon said.
“Armenian,” I said proudly.
“Just as I thought,” the principal said.
“Just as you thought what?”
“Nobody but an Armenian would have asked a question like that.”
“How do you know?” I said, giving the new school another whirl.
“Nobody did’ the principal said. “Does that answer your question?”
“Only partly,” I said. “How do you know somebody else would not have asked it if I hadn’t?”
“In all the years that I have been connected with the public school system of California,” Mr. Monsoon said, “no one has ever asked such a question.”
“Yes,” I said quickly, “and in all the years before Newton wanted to know what made the apple fall, nobody wanted to know what made it fall.”
At the time I believed that some day Mr. Monsoon would give an accurate account of this discussion, for I had no reason to believe he could not write or that he was not aware he was in the presence of a man it was his duty to remember. But there it is, the man never wrote such an account.
I was brilliant.
It’s not my fault nobody else was.
Mr. Monsoon chose not to continue the discussion. He just sat and looked at his shoes.
“How about that?” I said.
“Well,” he said rather wearily, “I must give you a thrashing. How about that?”
“For what?” I said.
I got to my feet, watching the stenographer, whose desk was beside the door. This was a rather pretty girl, and I had hoped to make a favorable impression on her, although I can’t imagine what I expected to come of it.
“Miss Slifo,” Mr. Monsoon said, but that was all I needed to hear, and before Miss Slifo was able to block my way, I was at the door, out of the room, and just about halfway across the school grounds.
Once again, the behavior of the new school had been tested and found true.
I went home and found my Uncle Alecksander, who was studying law at the University of Southern California, on a visit at our house, drinking coffee in the parlor. I told him the story. He invited me into his car and we took off for Longfellow Junior High School.
“That’s the story, just as you’ve told it to me?” he said as we rode.
“That’s exactly how it happened.”
“All right,” my Uncle Alecksander said. “You wait in the car.”
I don’t know what my Uncle Alecksander and Mr. Monsoon said to one another, but after a few minutes Miss Slifo came out to the car and said, “Your uncle and Mr. Monsoon and Miss Shenstone would like to see you in the office.”
I went in and my uncle said, ‘‘There are men who know how to determine the approximate age of different things in the world and on the earth. Who these men are and how they determine these things, Mr. Monsoon does not know, and neither does Miss Shenstone. Miss Shenstone has promised to look into the matter. On your part, you may ask any question you like, but in a more polite tone of voice.” He turned to the principal, “Is that in accordance with our understanding?”
“Quite,” the principal said.
“It was with admiration that Mr. Monsoon remarked that only an Armenian would have asked a question like that,” my Uncle Alecksander went on. Is that correct, Mr. Monsoon?”
“It is,” Mr. Monsoon said. “In a city with a population of ten or fifteen thousand of them, I could hardly - ”
“With admiration, then,” my Uncle Alecksander said. He turned to me.
“You will spend the rest of this day away from school, but tomorrow you will return to your classes as though nothing had happened.”
“Is that also in accordance with our understanding?” he asked the principal.
“I was wondering if he might not be transferred to I lawthorne,” the principal said, but my uncle said quickly.
“He lives in this district. His friends come to this school. I shall be interested in his progress.”
“We all shall,” the principal said.
I could not have been more ill at ease, or more angry at my uncle. The very thing I had always despised had just taken place: a brilliant man had come to my defense.
A brilliant man, who happened to be my mother’s younger brother, had stepped in among the great figures of the school, bossed and threatened them: and they, instead of fighting back, had meekly permitted him to get away with it.
Well, I didn’t want him to get away with it.
The following day I presented myself to Mr. Monsoon, who, when he saw me, appeared to want to close his eyes and go to sleep.
“I’ve come to apologize,” I said. “I don’t want any special privileges.”
“Just ask your questions in a polite tone of voice,” the man said. “You may go now.”
He refused to open his eyes.
I went straight to the ancient-history class, where I found Miss Shenstone at her desk, gravely at work.
“I’m sorry about the trouble I made,” I said. “I won’t do it again.”
For an instant I thought she was about to fling herself at me again, but after a moment she seemed to sink inwardly quite a bit, and then, without looking up from her work, she said very dryly, “They have a way of determining such things. You may go now.”
I felt sure the principal and the teacher would one day remember how handsomely I had behaved in this unfortunate affair, but as I’ve said, they didn’t, and so I have had to.
Fortunately, Miss Shenstone taught at Longfellow only another four days, and during that time did not permit herself to look at me once or to ask me a question. A series of new teachers took over the teaching of the ancient-history class, but by now the new school was in full operation throughout Longfellow High and the teachers were always eager to finish out a day or a week and be gone forever.
Mr. Monsoon spoke about manners at several meetings in the school auditorium, but nobody took the hint, and after a month he too left the school and was succeeded by a man who was famous for his exploits as a captain in the First World War. It was expected of this man to quickly put down the new school and to restore the old. He tried the method of brute force at first, thrashing as many as three dozen boys a day, and then lie tried the method of taking the worst boys into his confidence, going for walks with them through the school grounds, being a pal, and so on: but neither of these methods worked, and after the first semester, the man accepted a post at a small country school with only forty or fifty students.
As for myself, I transferred to Tech High in order to learn typing.
The shepherd's daughter
It is the opinion of my grandmother, God bless her, that all men should labour, and at the table, a moment ago she said to me: You must learn to do some good work, the making of some item useful to man, something out of clay, or out of wood, or metal, or cloth. It is not proper for a young man to be ignorant of an honourable craft. Is there anything you can make? Can you make a simple table, a chair, a plain dish, a coffee pot? Is there anything you can do? And my grandmother looked at me with anger. I know, she said, you are supposed to be a writer, and I suppose you are, but you must learn to make solid things, things that can be used, that can be seen and touched. There was a king of the Persians, said my grandmother, and he had a son, and this son fell in love with a shepherd's daughter. He went to his father and he said. My Lord, I love a shepherd's daughter, I would have her for my wife. And the king said, I am king and you are my son, and when I die you shall be king, how can it be that you would marry the daughter of a shepherd? And the son said, My Lord, I do not know but I know that I love this girl and would have her for my queen. The king saw that his son's love for the girl was from God, and he said, I will send a message to her. And he called a messenger to him and he said, Go to the shepherd's daughter and say that my son loves her and would have her for his wife. And the messenger went to the girl and he said. The king's son loves you and would have you for his wife. And the girl said. What labour does he do? And the messenger said. Why, he is the son of the king; he does no labour. And the messenger returned to the king and spoke the words of the shepherd's daughter. The king said to his son. The shepherd's daughter wished you to learn some craft. Would you still have her for your wife? And the son said. Yes, I will learn to weave straw rugs. And the boy was taught to weave rugs of straw, in patterns and in colours and with ornamental designs, and at the end of three days he was making very fine straw rugs, and the messenger returned to the shepherd's daughter, and he said, These rugs of straw are of the work of the king's son. And the girl went with the messenger to the king's palace, and she became the wife of the king's son. One day, said my grandmother, the king's son was walking through the streets of Baghdad, and he came upon an eating place which was so clean and cool that he entered it and sat at the table. This place was a place of thieves and murderers, and they took the king's son and placed him in a large dungeon where many great man of the city were being held, and the thieves and murderers were killing the fattest of the men and feeding them to the leanest of them, and making a sport of it. The king's son was of the leanest of the men, and it was not known that he was the son of the king of the Persians, so his life was spared, and he said to the thieves and murderers, I am a weaver of straw rugs and these rugs have great value. And they brought him straw and asked him to weave and in three days he weaved three rugs, and he said. Carry these rugs to the palace of the king of the Persians, and for each rug he will give you a hundred gold pieces of money. And the rugs were carried to the palace of the king, and when the king saw the rugs, he understood that they were the work of his son and he took the rugs to the shepherd's daughter and he said. These rugs were brought to the palace and they are the work of my son who is lost. And the shepherd's daughter took each rug and looked at it closely and in the design of each rug she saw in the written language of the Persians a message from her husband, and she related this message to the king. And the king, said my grandmother, sent many soldiers to the place of the thieves and murderers, and the soldiers rescued all the captives and killed all the thieves and murderers, and the king's son was returned safely to the palace of his father, and the company of his wife, the little shepherd's daughter. And when the boy went into the palace and saw again his wife, he humbled himself before her and he embraced her feet, and he said. My love, it is because of you that I am alive, and the king was greatly pleased with the shepherd's daughter. Now, said my grandmother, do you see why every man should learn an honourable craft? I see very clearly, I said, and as soon as I earn enough money to buy a saw and a hammer and a piece of lumber I shall do my best to make a simple chair or a shelf for books.
A FRESNO FABLE
Kerope Antoyan, the grocer, ran into Aram Bashmanian, the lawyer, in the street one day and said, “Aram, you are the very man I have been looking for. It is a miracle that I find you this way at this time, because there is only one man in this world I want to talk to, and you are that man, Aram.”
“Very well, Kerope,” the lawyer said, “Here I am.”
“This morning,” the grocer said, “when I got up I said to myself, ‘If there is anybody in this whole world I can trust, it is Aram,’ and here you are before my eyes–my salvation, the restorer of peace to my soul. If I had hoped to see an angel in the street, I would not have been half so pleased as I am to see you, Aram.”
“Well, of course I can always be found in my office,” Aram said, “but I’m glad we have met in the street. What is it, Kerope?”
“Aram, we are from Bitlis. We understand all too well that before one speaks one thinks. Before the cat tastes the fish, his whiskers must feel the head. A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain. Caution with strangers, care with friends, trust in one’s very own–as youare my very own son, Aram. I thank God for bringing you to me at this moment of crisis.”
“What is it, Kerope?”
“Aram, every eye has a brow, every lip a mustache, the foot wants its shoe, the hand its glove, what is a tailor without his needle, even a lost dog remembers having had a bone, until a candle is lighted a prayer for a friend cannot be said, one man’s ruin is another man’s reward.”
“Yes, of course, but what is the crisis, Kerope?”
“A good song in the mouth of a bad singer is more painful to the ear than a small man’s sneeze,” the grocer said.
“Kerope,” the lawyer said. “How can I help you?”
“You are like a brother to me, Aram – a younger brother whose wisdom is far greater than my own, far greater than any man’s.”
“Well, thank you, Kerope,” Aram said, “but pleasetell me what’s the matter, so I can try to help you.”
In the end, though, Kerope refused to tell Aram his problem.
MORAL: If you’re really smart, you won’t trust even an angel.
The Filipino and the Drunkard
This loud-mouthed guy in the brown camel-hair coat was not really mean, he was drunk. He took a sudden dislike to the small well-dressed Filipino and began to order him around the waiting room, telling him to get back, not to crowd up among the white people. They were waiting to get on the boat and cross the bay to Oakland. If he hadn't been drunk no one would have bothered to notice him at all, but as it was, he was making a commotion in the waiting room, and while everyone seemed to be in sympathy with the Filipino, no one seemed to want to bother about coming to the boy's rescue, and the poor Filipino was becoming very frightened.
He stood among the people, and this drunkard kept pushing up against him and saying, I told you to get back. Now get back. Go way back. I fought twenty-four months in France. I'm a real American. I don't want you standing up here among white people.
The boy kept squeezing nimbly and politely out of the drunkard's way, hurrying through the crowd, not saying anything and trying his best to be as decent as possible. He kept dodging in and out, with the drunkard stumbling after him, and as time went on the drunkard's dislike grew and he began to swear at the boy. He kept saying, You fellows are the best-dressed men in San Francisco, and you make your money washing dishes. You've got no right to wear such fine clothes
He swore a lot, and it got so bad that a lot of ladies had to imagine they were deaf and weren't hearing any of the things he was saying.
When the big door opened, the young Filipino moved swiftly among the people, fleeing from the drunkard, reaching the boat before anyone else. He ran to a corner, sat down for a moment, then got up and began looking for a more hidden place. At the other end of the boat was the drunkard. He could hear the man swearing. He looked about for a place to hide, and rushed into the lavatory. He went into one of the open compartments and bolted the door.
The drunkard entered the lavatory and began asking others in the room if they had seen the boy. He was a real American, he said. He had been wounded twice in the War.
In the lavatory he swore more freely, using words he could never use where women were present. He began to stoop and look beyond the shut doors of the various compartments. I beg your pardon, he said to those he was not seeking, and when he came to the compartment where the boy was standing, he began swearing and demanding that the boy come out.
You can't get away from me, he said. You got no right to use a place white men use. Come out or I'll break the door.
Go away, the boy said.
The drunkard began to pound on the door.
You got to come out sometime, he said. I'll wait here till you do. Go away, said the boy. I've done nothing to you.
He wondered why none of the men in the lavatory had the decency to calm the drunkard and take him away, and then he realized there were no other men in the lavatory. Go away, he said.
The drunkard answered with curses, pounding the door. Behind the door, the boy's bitterness grew to rage. He began to tremble, not fearing the man but fearing the rage growing in himself. He brought the knife from his pocket and drew open the sharp blade, holding the knife in his fist so tightly that the nails of his fingers cut into the flesh of his palm.
Go away, he said. I have a knife. I do not want any trouble.
The drunkard said he was an American. Twenty-four months in France. Wounded twice. Once in the leg, and once in the thigh. He would not go away. He was afraid of no dirty little yellow-belly Filipino with a knife. Let the Filipino come out, he was an American.
I will kill you, said the boy. I do not want to kill any man. You are drunk. Go away. Please do not make any trouble, he said earnestly.
He could hear the motor of the boat pounding. It was like his rage pounding. It was a feeling of having been humiliated, chased about and made to hide, and now it was a wish to be free, even if he had to kill. He threw the door open and tried to rush beyond the man, the knife tight in his fist, but the drunkard caught him by the sleeve and drew him back. The sleeve of the boy's coat ripped, and the boy turned and thrust the knife into the side of the drunkard, feeling it scrape against rib-bone. The drunkard shouted and screamed at once, then caught the boy at the throat, and the boy began to thrust the knife into the side of the man many times, as a boxer jabs in the clinches.
When the drunkard could no longer hold him and had fallen to the floor, the boy rushed from the room, the knife still in his hand, blood dripping from the blade, his hat gone, his hair mussed, and the sleeve of his coat badly torn.
Everyone knew what he had done, yet no one moved.
The boy ran to the front of the boat, seeking some place to go, then ran back to a corner, no one daring to speak to him, and everyone aware of his crime.
There was no place to go, and before the officers of the boat arrived he stopped suddenly and began to shout at the people.
I did not want to hurt him, he said. Why didn't you stop him? Is it right to chase a man like a rat? You knew he was drunk. I did not want to hurt him, but he would not let me go. He tore my coat and tried to choke me. I told him I would kill him if he would not go away. It is not my fault. I must go to Oakland to see my brother. He is sick. Do you think I am looking for trouble when my brother is sick? Why didn't you stop him?
SEVENTY THOUSAND ASSYRIANS
I hadn't had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work. You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party. We barbarians from Asia Minor are hairy people: when we need a haircut, we need a haircut. It was so bad, I had outgrown my only hat. (I am writing a very serious story, perhaps one of the most serious I shall ever write. That is why I am being flippant. Readers of Sherwood Anderson will begin to understand what I am saying after a while; they will know that my laughter is rather sad.) I was a young man in need of a haircut, so I went down to Third Street (San Francisco), to the Barber College, for a fifteen-cent haircut.
Third Street, below Howard, is a district; think of the Bowery in New York, Main Street in Los Angeles: think of old men and boys, out of work, hanging around, smoking Bull Durham, talking about the government, waiting for something to turn up, simply waiting. It was a Monday morning in August and a lot of the tramps had come to the shop to brighten up a bit. The Japanese boy who was working over the free chair had a waiting list of eleven; all the other chairs were occupied. I sat down and began to wait. Outside, as Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises; Farewell to Arms; Death in the Afternoon; Winner Take Nothing) would say, haircuts were four bits. I had twenty cents and a half-pack ofBull Durham. I rolled a cigarette, handed the pack to one of my contemporaries who looked in need of nicotine, and inhaled the dry smoke, thinking of America, what was going on politically, economically, spiritually. My contemporary was a boy of sixteen. He looked Iowa; splendid potentially, a solid American, but down, greatly down in the mouth. Little sleep, no change of clothes for several days, a little fear, etc. I wanted very much to know his name. A writer is always wanting to get the reality of faces and figures. Iowa said, "I just got in from Salinas. No work in the lettuce fields. Going north now, to Portland; try to ship out." I wanted to tell him how it was with me: rejected story from Scribner's, rejected essay from The Yale Review, no money for decent cigarettes, wornshoes, old shirts, but I was afraid to make something of my own troubles. A writer's troubles are always boring, a bit unreal. People are apt to feel, Well, who asked you to write in the first place? A man must pretend not to be a writer. I said, "Good luck, north."Iowa shook his head. "I know better. Give it a try, anyway. Nothing to lose." Fine boy, hope he isn't dead, hope he hasn't frozen, mighty cold these days (December, 1933), hope he hasn't gone down; he deserved to live. Iowa, I hope you got work in Portland; I hope you are earning money; I hope you have rented a clean room with a warm bed in it; I hope you are sleeping nights, eating regularly, walking along like a human being, being happy. Iowa, my good wishes are with you. I have said a number of prayers for you. (All the same, I think he is dead by this time. It was in him the day I saw him, the low malicious face of the beast, and at the same time all the theatres in America were showing, over and over again, an animated film-cartoon in which there was a song called "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", and that's what it amounts to; people with money laughing at the death that is crawling slyly into boys like young Iowa, pretending that it isn't there, laughing in warm theatres. I have prayed for Iowa, and I consider myself a coward. By this time he must be dead, and I am sitting in a small room, talking about him, only talking.)
I began to watch the Japanese boy who was learning to become a barber. He was shaving an old tramp who had a horrible face, one of those faces that emerge from years and years of evasive living, years of being unsettled, of not belonging anywhere, of owning nothing, and the Japanese boy was holding his nose back (his own nose) so that he would not smell the old tramp. A trivial point in a story, a bit of data with no place in a work of art, nevertheless, I put it down. A young writer is always afraid some significant fact may escape him. He is always wanting to put in everything he sees. I wanted to know the name of the Japanese boy. I am profoundly interested in names. I have found that those that are unknown are the most genuine. Take a big name like Andrew Mellon. I was watching the Japanese boy very closely. I wanted to understand from the way he was keeping his sense of smell away from the mouth and nostrils of the old man what he was thinking, how he was feeling. Years ago, when I was seventeen, I pruned vines in my uncle's vineyard, north of Sanger, in the San Joaquin Valley, and there were several Japanese working with me, Yoshio Enomoto, Hideo Suzuki, Katsumi Sujimoto, and one or two others. These Japanese taught me a few simple phrases, hello, how are you, fine day, isn't it, good-bye, and so on. I said in Japanese to the barber student, "How are you?"He said in Japanese, "Very well, thank you." Then, in impeccable English, "Do you speak Japanese? Have you lived in Japan?" I said, "Unfortunately, no. I am able to speak only one or two words. I used to work with Yoshio Enomoto, Hideo Suzuki, Katsumi Sujimoto; do you know them?" He went on with his work, thinking of the names. He seemed to be whispering, "Enomoto, Suzuki, Sujimoto." He said, "Suzuki. Small man?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I know him. He lives in San Jose now. He is married now."
I want you to know that I am deeply interested in what people remember. A young writer goes out to places and talks to people. He tries to find out what they remember. I am not using great material for a short story. Nothing is going to happen in this work. I am not fabricating a fancy plot. I am not creating memorable characters. I am not using a slick style of writing. I am not building up a fine atmosphere. I have no desire to sell this story or any story to The Saturday Evening Post or to Cosmopolitan or to Harper's. I am not trying to compete with the great writers of short stories, men like Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Hergesheimer and Zane Grey, men who really know how to write, how to make up stories that will sell. Rich men, men who understand all the rules about plot and character and style and atmosphere and all that stuff. I have no desire for fame. I am not out to win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize or any other prize. I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know. I am merely making a record, so if I wander around a little, it is because I am in no hurry and because I do not know the rules. If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man. This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for. I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments. I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth. Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretense, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength... . But a baby is a baby. And the way they cry, there you have the brotherhood of man, babies crying. We grow up and we learn the words of a language and we see the universe through the language we know, we do not see it through all languages or through no language at all, through silence, for example, and we isolate ourselves in the language we know. Over here we isolate ourselves in English, or American as Mencken calls it. All the eternal things, in our words. If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language. The heart of man, the unwritten part of man, that which is eternal and common to all races.
Now I am beginning to feel guilty and incompetent. I have used all this language and I am beginning to feel that I have said nothing. This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said. Any ordinary journalist would have been able to put the whole business into a three-word caption. Man is man, he would have said. Something clever, with any number of implications. But I want to use language that will create a single implication. I want the meaning to be precise, and perhaps that is why the language is so imprecise. I am walking around my subject, the impression I want to make, and I am trying to see it from all angles, so that I will have a whole picture, a picture of wholeness. It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.
Let me try again: I hadn't had a haircut in a long time and I was beginning to look seedy, so I went down to the Barber College on Third Street, and I sat in a chair. I said, "Leave it full in the back. I have a narrow head and if you do not leave it full in the back, I will go out of this place looking like a horse. Take as much as you like off the top. No lotion, no water, comb it dry." Reading makes a full man, writing a precise one, as you see. This is what happened. It doesn't make much of a story, and the reason is that I have left out the barber, the young man who gave me the haircut. He was tall, he had a dark serious face, thick lips, on the verge of smiling but melancholy, thick lashes, sad eyes, a large nose. I saw his name on the card that was pasted on the mirror, Theodore Badal. A good name, genuine, a good young man, genuine. Theodore Badal began to work on my head. A good barber never speaks until he has been spoken to, no matter how full his heart may be.
"That name," I said, "Badal. Are you an Armenian?" I am an Armenian. I have mentioned this before. People look at me and begin to wonder, so I come right out and tell them. "I am an Armenian," I say. Or they read something I have written and begin to wonder, so I let them know. "I am an Armenian," I say. It is a meaningless remark, but they expect me to say it, so I do. 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. I hope some day to write a great philosophical work on tennis, something on the order of Death in the Afternoon, but I am aware that I am not yet ready to undertake such a work. I feelthat the cultivation of tennis on a large scale among the peoples of the earth will do much to annihilate racial differences, prejudices, hatred, etc. Just as soon as I have perfected my drive and my lob, I hope to begin my outline of this great work. (It may seem to some sophisticated people that I am trying to make fun of Hemingway. I am not. Death in the Afternoon is a pretty sound piece of prose. I could never object to it as prose. I cannoteven object to it as philosophy. I think it is finer philosophy than that of Will Durant and Walter Pitkin. Even when Hemingway is a fool, he is at least an accurate fool. He tells you what actually takes place and he doesn't allow the speed of an occurrence to make his exposition of it hasty. This is a lot. It is some sort of advancement for literature. To relate leisurely the nature and meaning of that which is very brief in duration.)
"Are you an Armenian?" I asked.
We are a small people and whenever one of us meets another, it is an event. We are always looking around for someone to talk to in our language. Our most ambitious political party estimates that there are nearly two million of us living on the earth, but most of us don't think so. Most of us sit down and take a pencil and a piece of paper and we take one section of the world at a time and imagine how many Armenians at the most are likely to be living in that section and we put the highest number on the paper, and then we go on to another section, India, Russia, Soviet Armenia, Egypt, Italy, Germany, France, America, South America, Australia, and so on, and after we add up our most hopeful figures the total comes to something a little less than a million. Then we start to think how big our families are, how high our birthrate and how low our death-rate (except in times of war when massacres increase the death-rate), and we begin to imagine how rapidly we will increase if we are left alone a quarter of a century, and we feel pretty happy. We always leave out earthquakes, wars, massacres, famines, etc., and it is a mistake. I remember the Near East Relief drives in my home town. My uncle used to be our orator and he used to make a whole auditorium full of Armenians weep. He was an attorney and he was a great orator. Well, at first the trouble was war. Our people were being destroyed by the enemy. Those who hadn't been killed were homeless and they were starving, our own flesh and blood, my uncle said, and we all wept. And we gathered money and sent it to our people in the old country. Then after the war, when I was a bigger boy, we had another Near East Relief drive and my uncle stood on the stage of the Civic Auditorium of my home town and he said, "Thank God this time it is not the enemy, but an earthquake. God has made us suffer. We have worshipped Him through trial and tribulation, through suffering and disease and torture and horror and (my uncle began to weep, began to sob) through the madness of despair, and now he has done this thing, and still we praise Him, still we worship Him. We do not understand the ways of God." And after the drive I went to my uncle and I said, "Did you mean what you said about God?" And he said, "That was oratory. We've got to raise money. What God? It is nonsense." "And when you cried?" I asked, and my uncle said, "That was real. I could not help it. I had to cry. Why, for God's sake, why must we go through all this God damn hell? What have we done to deserve all this torture? Man won't let us alone. God won't let us alone. Have we done something? Aren't we supposed to be pious people? What is our sin? I am disgusted with God. I am sick of man. The only reason I am willing to get up and talk is that I don't dare keep my mouth shut. I can't bear the thought of more of our people dying. Jesus Christ, have we done something?"
I asked Theodore Badal if he was an Armenian.
He said, "I am an Assyrian."
Well, it was something. They, the Assyrians, came from our part of the world, they had noses like our noses, eyes like our eyes, hearts like our hearts. They had a different language. When they spoke we couldn't understand them, but they were a lot like us. It wasn't quite as pleasing as it would have been if Badal had been an Armenian, but it was something.
"I am an Armenian," I said. "I used to know some Assyrian boys in my home town, Joseph Sargis, Nito Elia, Tony Saleh. Do you know any of them?"
"Joseph Sargis, I know him," said Badal. "The others I do not know. We lived in New York until five years ago, then we came out west to Turlock. Then we moved up to San Francisco."
"Nito Elia," I said, "is a Captain in the Salvation Army." (I don't want anyone to imagine that I am making anything up, or that I am trying to be funny.) "Tony Saleh," I said, "was killed eight years ago. He was riding a horse and he was thrown and the horse began to run. Tony couldn't get himself free, he was caught by a leg, and the horse ran around and around for a half hour and then stopped, and when they went up to Tony he was dead. He was fourteen at the time. I used to go to school with him. Tony was a very clever boy, very good at arithmetic."
We began to talk about the Assyrian language and the Armenian language, about the old world, conditions over there, and so on. I was getting a fifteen-cent haircut and I was doing my best to learn something at the same time, to acquire some new truth, some new appreciation of the wonder of life, the dignity of man. (Man has great dignity, do not imagine that he has not.)
Badal said, "I cannot read Assyrian. I was born in the old country, but I want to get over it."
He sounded tired, not physically but spiritually.
"Why?" I said. "Why do you want to get over it?"
"Well," he laughed, "simply because everything is washed up over there." I am repeating his words precisely, putting in nothing of my own. "We were a great people once," he went on. "But that was yesterday, the day before yesterday. Now we are a topic in ancient history. We had a great civilization. They're still admiring it. Now I am in America learning how to cut hair. We're washed up as a race, we're through, it's all over, why should I learn to read the language? We have no writers, we have no news- well, there is a little news: once in a while the English encourage the Arabs to massacre us, that is all. It's an old story, we know all about it. The news comes over to us through the Associated Press, anyway."
These remarks were very painful to me, an Armenian. I had always felt badly about my own people being destroyed. I had never heard an Assyrian speaking in English about such things. I felt great love for this young fellow. Don't get me wrong. There is a tendency these days to think in terms of pansies whenever a man says that he has affection for man. I think now that I have affection for all people, even for the enemies of Armenia, whom I have so tactfully not named. Everyone knows who they are. I have nothing against any of them because I think of them as one man living one life at a time, and I know, I am positive, that one man at a time is incapable of the monstrosities performed by mobs. My objection is to mobs only.
"Well," I said, "it is much the same with us. We, too, are old. We still have our church. We still have a few writers, Aharonian, Isahakian, a few others, but it is much the same."
"Yes," said the barber, "I know. We went in for the wrong things. We went in for the simple things, peace and quiet and families. We didn't go in for machinery and conquest and militarism. We didn't go in for diplomacy and deceit and the invention of machine-guns and poison gases. Well, there is no use in being disappointed. We had our day, I suppose."
"We are hopeful," I said. "There is no Armenian living who does not still dream of an independent Armenia."
"Dream?" said Badal. "Well, that is something. Assyrians cannot even dream any more. Why, do you know how many of us are left on earth?"
"Two or three million," I suggested.
"Seventy thousand," said Badal. "That is all. Seventy thousand Assyrians in the world, and the Arabs are still killing us. They killed seventy of us in a little uprising last month. There was a small paragraph in the paper. Seventy more of us destroyed. We'll be wiped out before long. My brother is married to an American girl and he has a son. There is no more hope. We are trying to forget Assyria. My father still reads a paper that comes from New York, but he is an old man. He will be dead soon."
Then his voice changed, he ceased speaking as an Assyrian and began to speak as a barber: "Have I taken enough off the top?" he asked.
The rest of the story is pointless. I said so long to the young Assyrian and left the shop. I walked across town, four miles, to my room on Carl Street. I thought about the whole business: Assyria and this Assyrian, Theodore Badal, learning to be a barber, the sadness of his voice, the hopelessness of his attitude. This was months ago, in August, but ever since I have been thinking about Assyria, and I have been wanting to say something about Theodore Badal, a son of an ancient race, himself youthful and alert, yet hopeless. Seventy thousand Assyrians, a mere seventy thousand of that great people, and all the others quiet in death and all the greatness crumbled and ignored, and a young man in America learning to be a barber, and a young man lamenting bitterly the course of history.
Why don't I make up plots and write beautiful love stories that can be made into motion pictures? Why don't I let these unimportant and boring matters go hang? Why don't I try to please the American reading public?
Well, I am an Armenian. Michael Arlen is an Armenian, too. He is pleasing the public. I have great admiration for him, and I think he has perfected a very fine style of writing and all that, but I don't want to write about the people he likes to write about. Those people were dead to begin with. You take Iowa and the Japanese boy and Theodore Badal, the Assyrian; well, they may go down physically, like Iowa, to death, or spiritually, like Badal, to death, but they are of the stuff that is eternal in man and it is this stuff that interests me. You don't find them in bright places, making witty remarks about sex and trivial remarks about art. You find them where I found them, and they will be there forever, the race of man, the part of man, of Assyria as much as of England, that cannot be destroyed, the part that massacre does not destroy, the part that earthquake and war and famine and madness and everything else cannot destroy.
This work is in tribute to Iowa, to Japan, to Assyria, to Armenia, to the race of man everywhere, to the dignity of that race, the brotherhood of things alive. I am not expecting Paramount Pictures to film this work. I am thinking of seventy thousand Assyrians, one at a time, alive, a great race. I am thinking of Theodore Badal, himself seventy thousand Assyrians and seventy million Assyrians, himself Assyria, and man, standing in a barber shop, in San Francisco, in 1933, and being, still, himself, the whole race.
THE PIANO
I get excited every time I see a piano. Ben said.
Is that so? Emma said. Why?
I don’t know, Ben said. Do you mind if we go into this store and try the little one in the corner?
Can you play? Emma said.
If you call what I do playing, Ben said.
What do you do?
You’ll see, Ben said.
They went into the store, to the small piano in the corner. Emma noticed him smiling and wondered if she’d ever know anything about him. She’d go along for a while thinking she knew him and then all of a sudden she’d know she didn’t. He stood over the piano, looking down at it. What she imagined was that he had probably heard good piano playing and loved that kind of music and every time he saw a keyboard and the shape of a piano he remembered the music and imagined he had something to do with it.
Can you play? She said.
Ben looked around. The clerks seemed to be busy.
I can’t play, Ben said.
She saw his hands go quietly to the white and black keys, like a real pianist’s, and it seemed very unusual because of what she felt when that happened. She felt that he was someone who would be a long time finding out about himself, and someone somebody else would be much longer finding out about. He should be somebody who could play a piano
Ben made a few quiet chords. Nobody came over to try to sell him anything, so, still standing, he began to do what he’d told her wasn’t playing.
Well, all she knew was that it was wonderful.
He played half a minute only. Then he looked at her and – said, It sounds good.
I think it’s wonderful, Emma said.
I don’t mean what I did, Ben said. I mean the piano.
I mean the piano itself. It has a fine tone, especially for a little piano.
A middle-aged clerk came over and said, How do you do?
Hello, Ben said. This is a swell one.
It’s a very popular instrument, the clerk said. Especially fine for apartments. We sell a good many of them.
How much is it? Ben said.
Two hundred forty-nine fifty, the clerk said. You can have terms, of course.
Where do they make them? Ben said.
I’m not sure, the clerk said. In Philadelphia, I think .I can find out.
Don’t bother, Ben said. Do you play?
No, I don’t, the clerk said.
He noticed Ben wanting to try it out some more.
Go ahead, he said. Try it some more.
I don’t play, Ben said.
I heard you, the clerk said.
That’s not playing, Ben said. I can’t read a note.
Sounded good to me, the clerk said.
Me, too, Emma said. How much is the first payment.
Oh, the clerk said. Forty or fifty dollars. Go ahead, he said, I’d like to hear you play some more.
If this was the right kind of room, Ben said, I could sit down at the piano for hours.
Play some more, the clerk said. Nobody’ll mind.
The clerk pushed up the bench and Ben sat down and began to do what he said wasn’t playing. He fooled around fifteen or twenty seconds and then found something like a melody and stayed with it two minutes. Before he was through the music became quiet and sorrowful and Ben himself became more and more pleased with the piano. While he was letting the melody grow, he talked to the clerk about the piano. Then he stopped playing and stood up.
Thanks, he said. Wish I could buy it.
Don’t mention it, the clerk said.
Ben and Emma walked out of the store. In the street Emma said, I didn’t know about that, Ben.
About what? Ben said.
About you.
What about me?
Being that way, Emma said.
This is my lunch hour, Ben said. In the evening is when I like to think of having a piano.
They went into a little restaurant and sat at the counter and ordered sandwiches and coffee.
Where did you learn to play? Emma said.
I’ve never learned, Ben said. Any place I find a piano, I try it out. I’ve been doing that ever since I was a kid. Not having money does that.
He looked at her and smiled. He smiled the way he did when he stood over the piano looking down at the keyboard. Emma felt very flattered.
Never having money, Ben said, keeps a man away from lots of things he figures he ought to have by rights.
I guess it does, Emma said.
In a way, Ben said, it’s a good thing, and then again it’s not so good. In fact, it’s terrible.
He looked at her again, the same way, and she smiled back at him the way he was smiling at her.
She understood. It was like the piano. He could stay near it for hours. She felt very flattered.
They left the restaurant and walked two blocks to The Emporium where she worked.
Well, so long, he said.
So long, Ben, Emma said.
He went on down the street and she went on into the store. Somehow or other she knew he’d get a piano some day, and everything else, too.
THE ORANGES
They told him, “Stand on the corner with two of the biggest oranges in your hand and when an automobile goes by, smile and wave the oranges at them. Five cents each if they want one,” his uncle Jake said, “three for ten cents, thirty-five cents a dozen. Smile big,” he said. “You can smile, can’t you, Luke? You got it in you to smile once in a while, ain’t you?”
He tried very hard to smile and his uncle Jake made a terrible face, so he knew it was a bad smile. He wished he could laugh out loud the way some people laughed, only they weren’t scared the way he was, and all mixed-up.
“I never did see such a serious boy in all my life,” his uncle Jake said. ”Luke,” he said.
His uncle squatted down, so his head would be level with his, so he could look into his eyes, and talked to him.
“Luke,” he said, “they won’t buy oranges if you don’t smile. People like to see a little boy smiling, selling oranges. It makes them happy.”
He listened to his uncle talking to him, looking into his uncle’s eyes, and he understood the words. What he felt, though, was: Jake is mixed-up, too. He saw the man stand up and heard him groan, just as his father used to groan.
“Luke,” his uncle Jake said.” Sometimes you can laugh, can’t you?”
“Not him,” said Jake’s wife. “If you weren’t such a coward, you would be out selling them oranges yourself. You belong the same place your brother is,” she said. “In the ground. Dead,” she said.
It was this that made it hard for him to smile: “the way this woman was always talking, not the words only, but the meanness in her voice, always picking on his uncle Jake. How did she expect him to smile or feel all right when she was always telling them they were no good, the whole family no good?1
Jake was his father’s younger brother, and Jake looked like his father. Of course she always had to say his father was better off dead just because he was no good selling stuff. She was always telling Jake, “This is America. You got to get around and meet people and make them like you.” And Jake was always saying, “Make them like me? How can I make them like me?” And she was always getting sore at him and saying.
“Oh, you fool. If I didn’t have this baby in my belly, I’d go out and work in Rosenberg’s and keep you like a child.”
Jake had that same desperate look his father had, and he was always getting sore at himself and wanting other people to be happy. Jake was always asking him to smile.
“All right,” Jake said.” All right, all right, all right, kill me, drive me crazy. Sure. I should be dead. Ten boxes of oranges and not a penny in the house and nothing to eat. I should be dead. Should I stand in the street, holding oranges? Should I get a wagon maybe and go through the streets? I should be dead,” he said
Then Jake made a face, so sad it looked, as if nobody was ever that sad in the world, not even he, and wished he didn’t want to cry because Jake was so sad. On top of that Jake’s wife got sorer than ever and began to cry the way she cried when she got real sore and you could just feel how terrible everything was because she didn’t cry sad, she cried sore, reminding Jake of all the bills and all the hard times she had had with him and all about the baby in her belly, to come out, she said, ” Why, what good is another fool in the world?”
There was a box of oranges on the floor, and she picked up two of them, crying, and she said, “No fire in the stove, in November, all of us freezing. The house should be full of the smell of meat. Here,” she cried, “eat. Eat your oranges. Eat them until you die,” and she cried and cried.
Jake was too sad to talk. He sat down and began to wave back and forth, looking crazy. And they asked him to laugh. And Jake’s wife kept walking in and out of the room, holding the oranges, crying and talking about the baby in her belly.
After a while she stopped crying.
“Now take him to the corner,” she said, “and see if he can’t get a little money.”
Jake was just about deaf, it looked like. He didn’t even lift his head. So she shouted.
“Take him to the corner. Ask him to smile at the people. We got to eat.”
What’s the use1 to be alive when everything is rotten and nobody knows what to do? What’s the use to go to school and learn arithmetic and read poems and paint eggplant and all that stuff? What’s the use to sit in a cold room until it is time to go to bed and hear Jake and his wife fighting all the time and go to sleep and cry and wake up and see the sad sky and feel the cold air and shiver and walk to school and eat oranges for lunch instead of bread?
Jake jumped up and began to shout at his wife. He said he would kill her and then stick a knife in his heart, so she cried more than ever and tore her dress and she was naked to the waist and she said, “All right, better all of us were dead, kill me,” but Jake put his arms around her and walked into the other room with her, and he could hear her crying and kissing him and telling him he was just a baby, a great big baby, he needed her like a mother.
He had been standing in the corner and it all happened so swiftly he hadn’t noticed how tired he had become, but he was very tired, and hungry, so he sat down. What’s the use to be alive if you‘re all alone in the world and no mother and father and nobody to love you? He wanted to cry but what’s the use to cry when it don’t do any good anyhow?
After a while Jake came out of the room and he was trying to smile.
“All you got to do,” he said, “is hold two big oranges in your hand and wave them at the people when they go by in their automobiles, and smile. You’ll sell a box of oranges in no time, Luke.” “I’ll smile,” he said. “One for five cents, three for ten cents, thirty-five cents a dozen.”
“That’s it,” said Jake.
Jake lifted the box of oranges from the floor and began walking to the back door.
It was very sad in the street, Jake holding the box of oranges, and him walking beside Jake, listening to Jake telling him to smile big, and the sky was sad, and there were no leaves on the trees, and the street was sad, and it was very funny, the smell of the oranges was clean and good and they looked so nice it was very funny. The oranges looked so nice and they were so sad.
It was Ventura corner, where all the automobiles went by, and Jake put the box on the sidewalk.
“It looks best with only a small boy,” he said. “I’ll go back to the house, Luke.”
Jake squatted again and looked into his eyes. “You ain’t afraid, are you, Luke? I’ll come back before it gets dark. It won’t be dark for two hours yet. Just feel happy and smile at the people.”
“I’ll smile,” he said.
Then Jake jumped up, like maybe he couldn’t get up at all unless he jumped up, and he went hurrying down the street, walking away swiftly, making it a sad world: five cents for one, three for ten cents, thirty-five cents a dozen.
He picked out two of the biggest oranges and held them in his right hand, and lifted his arm over his head. It didn’t seem right. It seemed sad. What’s the use to hold two big oranges in your hand and lift your arm over your head and get ready to smile at people going by in automobiles?
It seemed a long time before he saw an automobile coming up the street from town, right on his side, and when it got closer he saw there was a man driving and a lady in the back with two kids. He smiled very big when they got right close, but it didn’t look as if they were going to stop, so he waved the oranges at them and moved closer to the street. He saw their faces very close, and smiled just a little bigger. He couldn’t smile much bigger because it was making his cheeks tired. The people didn’t stop and didn’t even smile back at him. The little girl in the automobile made a face at him as if she thought he looked cheap. What’s the use to stand on a corner and try to sell oranges to people who make faces at you because you are smiling and want them to like you?
What’s the use to have your muscles aching just because some people are rich and some people are poor and the rich ones eat and laugh and the poor ones don’t eat ant always fight and asked other to kill them?
He brought his arm down and stopped smiling and looked at the fire hydrant and beyond the fire hydrant the gutter and beyond the gutter the street, Venture, and on both sides of the street houses and in the houses people and at the end of the street the country where the vineyards and orchards were and streams and meadows and then mountains and beyond the mountains more cities and more houses and streets and people. What’s the use to be in the world when you can’t even look at a fire hydrant without wanting to cry?
Another automobile was coming up the street, so he lifted his arm and began to smile again, but when the automobile went by saw that the man wasn’t even looking at him. Five cents for one. They could eat oranges. After bread and meat they could eat an orange. Peel it and smell the nice smell and eat it. They could stop their automobiles and buy three for ten cents. Then another automobile went by while he smiled and waved his arm, but the people just looked at him and that was all. If they would just smile back it wouldn’t be so bad, but just going by and not even smiling back. A lot of automobiles went by and it looked as if he ought to sit down and stop smiling and cry because it was terrible. They didn’t want any oranges and they didn’t like to see him smile the way his uncle Jake said they would. They just saw him and didn’t do anything else.
It began to be pretty dark and for all he cared the whole world could end. He just guessed he would be standing there holding up his arm and smiling until the end of the world.
He just guessed that’s all he was born to do, just stand on the corner and wave oranges at the people and smile at them with great big tears coming down his cheeks till the end of the world, everything black and empty and him standing there smiling until his cheeks hurt and crying because they wouldn’t even smile back at him and for all he cared the whole world could just fall into the darkness and end and Jake could be dead and his wife could be dead and all the streets and houses and people and rivers and meadows and sky could end and there could be nobody anywhere, not even one man anywhere or one empty street or one dark window or one shut door because they didn’t want to buy oranges and they wouldn’t smile at him, and the whole world could end.
CORDUROY PANTS
Most people hardly ever, if ever at all, stop to consider how important pants are, and the average man, getting in and out of pants every morning and night, never pauses while doing so, or at any other time, even for the amusement in the speculation, to wonder how unfortunate it would be if he didn’t have pants, how miserable he would be if he had appear in the world without them, and how awkward his manners would become, how foolish his conversation, how utterly joyless his attitude toward life.
Nevertheless, when I was fourteen and a reader of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Spinoza, and an unbeliever, a scorner of God, an enemy of Jesus Christ and Catholic Church, and something of a philosopher in my own right, my thoughts, profound and trivial alike, turned now and then to the theme of man in the world without pants, and much as you might suppose they were heavy melancholy thoughts no less than often they were gay and hilarious. That, I think, is the joy of being a philosopher: that knowing the one side as well as the other. On the one hand, a man in the world without pants should be a miserable creature, and probably would be, and then again, on the other hand, if this same man, in pants and in the world, was usually a gay and easy-going sort of fellow, in all probability even without pants he would be a gay and easy-going sort of fellow, and might even find the situation an opportunity for all manner of delightful banter. Such a person in the world is not altogether incredible, and I used to believe that, in moving pictures at least he would not be embarrassed, and on the contrary would know just what to do and how to do it in order to empress everyone with this simple truth: namely, that after all what is a part of pants? and being without them is certainly not the end of the world, or the destruction of civilization. All the same, the idea that I myself might some day appear in the world without pants terrified me, inasmuch as I was sure I couldn’t rise to the occasion and impress everybody with the triviality of the situation and make them know the world wasn’t ending.
I had only one pair of pants, my uncle’s, and they were very patched, very sewed, and not the style. My uncle had worn these pants five years before he had turned them over to me, and then I began putting them on every morning and taking them off every night. It was an honor to wear my uncle’s pants. I would have been the last person in the world to suggest that it wasn’t. I knew it was an honor, and I accepted the honor along with the pants, and I wore the pants, and I wore the honor, and the pants didn’t fit.
They were too big around the waist and too narrow at the cuff. In my boyhood I was never regarded as well-dressed. If people turned to look at me twice, as they often do these days, it was only to wonder whose pants I was wearing. There were four pockets in my uncle’s pants, but there wasn’t one sound pocket in the lot. If it came to a matter of money, coins given and coins returned, I found that I had to put the coins in my mouth and remember not to swallow them.
Naturally, I was unhappy. I took to reading Schopenhauer and despising people, and after people God, and after God, or before, or at the same time, the whole world, the whole universe, the whole impertinent scheme of life.
At the same time I knew that my uncle had honored me, of all his numerous nephews, by handing down his pants to me, and I felt honored, and to a certain extend clothed. My uncle’s pants, I sometimes reasoned unhappily, were certainly better than no pants at all, and with this much of the idea developed my nimble and philosophical mind leapt quickly to the rest of the idea. Suppose a man appeared in the world without pants? Not that he wanted to. Not just for the fun of it. Not as a gesture of individuality and as a criticism of Western civilization, but simply because he had no pants, simply because he had no money with which to buy pants? Suppose he put on all his clothes excepting pants? His underwear, his stockings, his shoes, his shirt, and walked into the world and looked everybody straight in the eye? Suppose he did it? Ladies, I have no pants. Gentlemen, I have no money. So what? I have no pants, I have no money. I am an inhabitant of this world. I intend to remain an inhabitant of this world until I die or until the world ends. I intend to go on moving about
in the world, even thought I have no pants. What could they do? Could they put him in jail? If so, for how long? And why? What sort of a crime could it be to appear in the world, among one’s brothers, without pants?
Perhaps they would feel sorry, I used to think, and want to give me an old pair of pants, and this possibility would drive me almost crazy. Never mind giving me your old pants, I used to shout at them. Don’t try to be kind to me. I don’t want your old pants, and I don’t want your new pants. I want my own pants, straight from the store, brand new, size, name, label, and guarantee. I want my own God damn pants, and nobody else’s. I’m in the world, and I want my own pants.
I used to get pretty angry about people perhaps wanting to be kind to me, because I couldn’t see it that way. I couldn’t see people giving me something, or anything. I wanted to get my stuff the usual way. How much are these pants? They are three dollars. All right, I’ll take them. Just like that. No hemming or hawing. How much? Three dollars. O.K., wrap them up.
The day I first put on my uncle’s pants my uncle walked away several paces for a better view and said, “They fit you perfectly.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Plenty of room at the top,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And nice and snug at the bottom,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Then, for some crazy reason, as if perhaps the tradition of pants had been handed down from one generation to another, my uncle was deeply moved and shook my hand, turning pale with joy and admiration, and being utterly incapable of saying a word. He left the house as a man leaves something so touching he cannot bear to be near it, and I began to try to determine if I might be able, with care, to get myself from one point to another in the pants.
It was so, and I could walk in the pants. I felt more or less encumbered, yet it was possible to move. I did not feel secure, but I knew I was covered, and I knew I could move, and with practice I believed I would be able to move swiftly. It was purely a matter of adaptation. There would be months of unfamiliarity, but I believed in time I would be able to move about in the world gingerly, and with sharp effect.
I wore my uncle’s pants for many months, and these were the unhappiest months of my life. Why? Because corduroy pants were the style. At first ordinary corduroy pants were the style, and then a year later there was a Spanish renaissance in California, and Spanish corduroy pants became the style. There were bell-bottomed, with a touch of red down there, and in many cases five-inch waists, and in several case small decorations around the waist. Boys of fourteen in corduroy pants of this variety were boys who not only felt secure and snug, but knew they were in style, and consequently could do any number of gay and lighthearted things, such as running after girls, talking with them, and all the rest of it. I couldn’t. It was only natural, I suppose, for me to turn, somewhat mournfully, to Schopenhauer and to begin despising women, and later on men, children, oxen, cattle, beasts of the jungle, and fish. What is life? I used to ask. Who do they think they are, just because they have Spanish bell-bottomed corduroy pants? Have they read Schopenhauer? No. Do they know there is no God? No. Do they so much as suspect that love is the most boring experience in the world? No. They are ignorant. They are wearing the fine corduroy pants, but they are blind with ignorance. They do not know that it is all a hollow mockery and that they are the victims of a horrible jest.
I used to laugh at them bitterly.
Now and then, however, I forgot what I knew, what I had learned about everything from Schopenhauer, and in all innocence, without any profound philosophical thought one way or another, I ran after girls, feeling altogether gay and lighthearted, only to discover that I was being laughed at. It was my uncle’s pants. They were not pants in which to run after a girl. They were unhappy, tragic, melancholy pants, and being in them, and running after a girl in them, was a very comic thing to see, and a very tragic thing to do.
I began saving up every penny and nickel and dime. I could get hold of, and I began biding my time. Some day I would go down to the store and tell them I would like to buy a pair of the Spanish bell-bottomed pants, price no consideration.
A mournful year went by.1 A year of philosophy and hatred of man.
I was saving the pennies and nickels and dimes, and in time I would have my own pair of Spanish style corduroy pants. I would have covering and security and at the same time a garment in which a man could be nothing if not gay and lighthearted.
Well, I saved up enough money all right, and I went down to the store all right, and I bought a pair of the Spanish bell-bottomed corduroy pants all right, but a month later when school opened and I went to school I was the only boy at school in this particular style of corduroy pants. It seems the Spanish renaissance had ended. The new style corduroy pants were very conservative, no bell-bottoms, no five-inch waists, no decorations. Just simple ordinary corduroy pants.
How could I feel gay and lighthearted? I didn’t look gay and lighthearted. And that made everything worse, because my pants did look gay and lighthearted. My own pants. Which I had bought. They looked gay and lighthearted. It meant simple, I reasoned, that I would have to be, in everything I did, as gay and lighthearted as my pants. Otherwise, naturally, there could never be any order in the world. I could not go to school in such pants and not be gay and lighthearted, so I decided to be gay and lighthearted. I was very witty at every opportunity and had my ears boxed, and I laughed very often and discovered that invariably when I laughed nobody else did.
This was agony of the worst kind, so I quit school. I am sure I should not now be the philosopher I am if it were not for the trouble I had with Spanish bell-bottomed corduroy pants.
Библиографический список
1. Английский язык: сборник текстов для лингвостилистического анализа / составители Ю.А. Власова, Л.Л. Ткачёва. ─ Челябинск: Изд. ЮУрГУ, 2009. ─ 49 с.
2. Зарубежные писатели. Биобиблиогр. слов. в 2 ч. / Под ред. Н.П. Михальской. – М.: Просвещение: Учеб. лит., 1997.
3. "Basically Decent." Novelist John Updike reviews a big biography of John Cheever, Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life (Knopf 2009). The New Yorker 9 March 2009
4. Blythe, Hal and Charlie Sweet. "Cheever's Dark Knight of the Soul: The Failed Quest of Neddy Merrill" [on "The Swimmer"]. Studies in Short Fiction 29, 3 (Summer 1992) pp 347-52
5. Ernest Hemingway. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway>
6. H. H. Munro. <http://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/>
7. "Introduction" Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism Ed. Janet Witalec Project Editor. Vol. 137. Gale Cengage 2003 <http://www.enotes.com/topics/william-saroyan/critical-essays/saroyan-william-79705#critical-essays-saroyan-william-79705-introduction>
8. The Great and the Good. Somerset Maugham’s sense of vocation. Ruth Franklin. May 31, 2010 Issue <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/31/the-great-and-the-good>
[1] It’s raining
[2] Yes, yes Madam. Awful weather.
[3] Have you lost something, Madam?
[4] Down with the officers!
[5] brotherhood and self-sacrifice
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