The apostle of an ancient, great love of humanity has died, the younger brother of Schweitzer, Nansen, Gandhi and Tumanyan. The twentieth century’s greatest monument to humanity and humaneness has reached its completion: the unity of the life and work of the American and Armenian William Saroyan. Though black, numbing, constricting grief has settled heavily upon my heart and mind, I regard his life and work as the century’s greatest in all sobriety. I remember the luminous figure of Hemingway, with his fragile heart, outwardly overcome yet unbowed, inwardly both overcome and overcoming; I remember Faulkner’s magical power, Sholokhov’s ringing Cossack blood and his images full of ringing sabre blows. I say this with the sobriety of those days when Saroyan himself was alive, when each visit of his to the homeland was a celebration for us all, his departure a sense of having been robbed, and the days that followed an expectation of his return as of sunrise.
Like warm light itself, he filled with his own being the chasms opening within a person and between people, and soared like the sun across the sky of people who no longer had chasms. He could, and had the right to, say that he neither saw nor knew chasms, since for him they truly did not exist: they were filled with his own light.
Neither the emergence and growth of his titanic presence in the distant crisis-stricken thirties was accidental—his encouraging, joyous call was needed like fresh air in that fluid world—nor his near disappearance during the nightmarish decade and a half of war and cold war: he, the great lover of humanity, the Father who sheltered the poor and orphaned, had been squeezed into army uniform and thrown to the front. Nor was his renewed emergence and growth, a flag of truce in his hand, accidental—this time among us, in our country.
He knew where and why he was coming. His great forebear Tumanyan had worn out his life in that same mission; his fellow writer Faulkner, in Saroyan’s words, had been sent by the American government to Japan on that same mission, to warm the chill between the two countries. With that same love of humanity, between the two wars, Nansen’s figure had risen over devastated Europe as far as the Urals and Armenia. Such is the destiny of great people. With that same mission the great American of Armenian descent, Saroyan, stood between the last war and the threat of another. He stood with the multitude of wonderful children he had created, with a child’s purity—precisely his own, Saroyan’s purity—with Armenians, Mexicans, Norwegians, Assyrians, women and men, with the memory of the infernos of Deir ez-Zor and Auschwitz… Each of them, and all of them together, are the negation of war; there is no war in any of them. They refute malice and stupidity, and above all the tragic presumption of writing new words on the divine forehead of the human being. A whole giant, flawless, godlike, he did not mock the crookedness of us who had emerged from the incomplete cupped hand of Tsovinar Khanum, humanity’s great mother. He wept over it, as though he, not we, had emerged from that incomplete hand.
No one must know that I am not with them, he would say, and so it was: he was with the Russian and the American, with Charents and Tolstoy, with the musician and the hired labourer. And when it became impossible to find room for himself in some vile person or vile phenomenon, he fled into the world of childhood and art, finding his place among children and childlike adults.
Those who accompanied him to the museum of the Auschwitz inferno testify that others were appalled by fascism and its victims, astonished, moved, or looked on shuddering. Only he, Saroyan, wept, sobbing like a child. These were tears not for the bones, women’s braids and ashes—they were already ashes and braids—but for the human being’s bottomless capacity to be base, cruel and presumptuous.
I was fortunate enough to accompany him on a two-day journey. From the many good people, at the end he singled out the best: an eight-year-old girl, Anush, her large eyes fixed on you with trust. “She was defenceless. How will she live?”
He was freedom embodied, and contact with his great, whole body of work, breathing light and flight, and with a minute of his day, gave you the wings of a free spirit.
For the sake of the life they have tangled and become tangled in themselves, people will go to Saroyan’s door many times, and never come away dispirited and without will: he himself is triumphant, natural life.
His great spirit now hovers over a world flooded with anxieties and hopes, and blessed is the one in whom that spirit will dwell.