84
PARTISAN REVIEW
NARCISSUS
THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE,
by William Saroyan. New York: Random House.
$2.50.
Just because Saroyan has been writing silly letters to the magazines
is no reason for discounting him as a total loss. First the common run oi
reviewers lost their heads and then the boys with the higher standards
tried to laugh him out of court, and they almost succeeded . They pierced
through the ballyhoo and pointed to his very definite shortcomings, his
adolescent struttings, etc.; yet I feel that the man illustrates a literary
trend or symptom of social importance. And this, rather than the efforts
of press-agents or the rakish angle of his hat, explains the languishments
whose blatancy so offended the adverse commentators. Except in a certain
sense, both the response to him and what he says are not fads but articula–
tions of concrete history. Hence it might prove worth while to examine
his work: in detail. Esthetics may be the under-sea level of ideology, but
that's where you find the pearls.
From the viewpoint of sheer writing Saroyan's performance deserves
little praise. He overstates what he says and he says it the same way at
the beginning, the middle and the end of his stories, self-conciously,
with the romanticism of an uncalled-for defiance that soon becomes ridicu–
lous. Usually he runs around and around a perception till finally it's as
big
as
life and he can't miss it. Instead of philosophical overtones or im·
plications, he gives us philosophy in the actual texture, line after line. He
does not tread the earth; he promenades-a soul-de-luxe in felt slipperi.
And yet there are many vivid, passages in the book, which prove the
writer to possess a very tangible talent. Moreover, since we don't believe
'sheer writing' to be self-determining, it must be in the conception, in
the world-feeling that shapes it, that we will find the source which mari
his expression. In most of the stories Saroyan is concerned with himself,
with his fusion with God and the Universe, with his dark ways as a young
man of a dark: kind. And these are precisely the stories that most per–
ceptive critics didn't care for. He is more successful where he manages
to discard the poetry of ego and eternity in favor of a more objective
field of reference. Instances of this are
Laughter, Harry,
and
Aspirin
Is
A Jlfember of the N.R.A.,
in which he tries to spread himself but the
N.R.A.-more real than he-rudely overshadows him. The less there
is of Saroyan
as
a subject (because then the subject ceases to exist and thr
writing really becomes 'sheer writing' ) the less he writes "for God" and,
ultimately, for
Vanity Fair.
The dashing title of the book has given people a false sense of the
author. Actually he is trembling. Objective life terrifies him-art alone
is "everlastingly dependable." Working as a teletype operator he feels
that he is being murdered, and only in the fiction room of the public
library is he able to identify himself. He hates to think: of the world's
