Saroyan would have been seventy-four today. Death, I think, catches us with our silent or open consent: when our own doubt about our life, work, purpose or conduct confuses us for a moment. And so, now that I have begun to understand much in this world and to accept very much without understanding, I cannot in any way understand, still less accept, that man’s great absence. The absence of a man who had no doubt, for whom life and work were one and the same; for whom, as flowering is for a mountain, flowing for water and spreading for light, living, thinking, working, failing, succeeding, carrying away and being carried away were not care and effort, but a property of spirit and body, delight.
I was beside him for a few hours in 1976, a few days in 1978, and they were the greatest gifts of fortune to me, just as his death was the greatest robbery from my life. His profound literature, understanding, accepting and rejecting each and all of the living and non-living on earth, was very often not even literature in the classical sense, but an inflection caught from the cosmic symphony of human life. Take “The Armenian and the Armenian,” “The Pomegranate Grove,” that songlike passage in “The Human Comedy” where a flock of children bursts in to raid old Henderson’s apricot orchard and the owner watching them from among the trees is simply one of the children; his “At Least One,” “My Heart’s in the Highlands,” “The Time of Your Life.” Over many years, in the most receptive years of our lives, these had placed me and my generation in the position of a pilgrim who has reached his Mecca, reached it with tears and unconditional faith, able to absorb every word, pause, laugh and exclamation of the object of his worship, just as thirsty earth absorbs rain. Yet direct contact with him gave us not even the most secret warning of his death. He himself was eternally here on earth, and so our joy in his existence was eternal too. Like a child who had seen a flower in a dream, we were always to wake light and beautiful, with some expectation of a promising day, then understand that the source of our hidden joy was Saroyan’s presence here in Yerevan or somewhere else in the world—in Paris, Sofia, California. The cruel cold of the evil person and of evil itself rarely, only once or twice, creeps into his warm, kind, fertile valley, as if only to testify that the glorious founder of that dream valley, that splendid Saroyanland, Saroyania, Saroyanstan, Saroyan realm, is not ignorant of the evil that has gripped the world. It licks the border of his Saroyanland in a place or two and is swiftly driven away. The blessed patriarch of his valley, wise from birth, who at thirteen could cast his great literary creed—“Put aside Edgar Allan Poe and Emerson; their rules are for themselves”—seems to have understood at the beginning of his great creation that just as evil spoils life, it will spoil literature: evil must not be allowed near culture. All this makes us say with one voice that Saroyan himself was a kind man who knew neither enemies nor enmity. It is false.
A philosopher who knew neither enemies nor enmity would not so constantly fan the fire of kindness, so constantly strive to awaken kindness even in the evil person and in evil itself. He had an enemy, and that enemy was His Majesty the presumption of directing human destinies—or, what amounts to the same thing, falsehood that substitutes itself for people’s lives. The figures and cultures producing such falsehood were his enemies, even if these canonisations of incomplete thoughts adopted famous names or sprang from celebrated names, even if they infected masses and assumed the form of the universal, sole truth.
He forgave and loved us, the incomplete, the unfinished, those who had not come into being and could not do so; he even honoured us. He did not love, he hated, Napoleons and little Napoleons, regardless of whether that Napoleon lived inside a magnificent-looking thinker or a grand chairwoman of a ladies’ society supporting the army.
In the world’s fate tomorrow, therefore already after Christianity, he assigned the foremost importance to culture, within culture to literature, within literature to himself. We must say with him that this is so, and with him be anxious and angry at cultures encouraging national and class discrimination, the superman, a nation’s worldwide and universal mission. And if we think culture’s role is exaggerated here, we must remember that Christianity, which embraced half the world for two thousand years, was humanity’s age-old experience, but took shape through the hands of writers—Matthew, Luke, John and Mark—who were writers, ordinary writers, in whose infallibility Leo Tolstoy did not quite believe, and so sat down to edit and bring them together.
With Saroyan, yes, we must beware of narrow-minded, Cyclopean, one-eyed cultures—that is, cultures seeing only their own national and class interest, breeding and nurturing Hitlers, Kemals and McCarthys. Saroyan’s achievement was already inalienable as the essence of great literature.