The Markaz Review:

To commemorate annual recognition of the Armenian Genocide on April 24th, TMR is publishing two columns, Heritage by Aram Saroyan and Armenian Eyes by Mischa Geracoulis, each of which takes the reader back through personal memories of family and belonging, in the Armenian and American diaspora. See also our Resource Guide to Armenian Culture for a recommended list of writers, artists, filmmakers and more. —Editor

Aram Saroyan

The youngest and only American-born child of an Armenian immigrant family, my father grew up and came of age on the West Coast, a writer out of the loop of the New York literary scene that might have given his career a jump-start. Among his correspondence now at Stanford’s Special Collections Library is a letter from 1928, the year he turned 20, from Clifton Fadiman, then a young editor at Simon & Schuster. Fadiman praises a group of stories he’d received and says he would be very interested in seeing a novel. It would be six more years, however, before William Saroyan would make his national breakthrough with his famous story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” It was 1934, the depths of the Depression, and the story, with its personal as well as its national resonance, tells of a young writer in San Francisco who over the course of a day succumbs to starvation and dies. At 26, my father had at last hit the note that would bring him not just acceptance, but national and quickly international fame.

By the time the story appeared — the deferred hour of reckoning in a career that in another less determined writer might not have dawned at all —he was already a stylist, master of a prose light years beyond all but one or two of his most accomplished contemporaries. The final two paragraphs of the story, about the last moments of the young writer’s life, read:

He became drowsy and felt a ghastly illness coming over his blood, a feeling of nausea and disintegration. Bewildered, he stood beside his bed, thinking there is nothing to do but sleep. Already he felt himself making great strides through the fluid of the earth, swimming away to the beginning. He fell face down upon the bed, saying, I ought first at least to give the coin to some child. A child could buy any number of things with a penny.

Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.

_________

Here was an Armenian American writer — and Armenians of his day in Fresno were looked down on — destined to become an international literary sensation, quickly eclipsing the Fresno fame of his uncle, Aram Saroyan, the younger brother of his mother, Takoohi. 

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