Here Comes There Goes You Know Who is the title of his autobiographical book. It remains for us to testify that this passer-by, he himself, was the messenger of this tormented, unfortunate human being, and therefore of literature’s Most High. He came, passed, and left those of us not yet departing, still admiring, with our hands to our mouths: of what noble materials Mother Earth is formed, what children she can bring forth, and how worthy she still is to soar through the universe as the homeland of humanity and humaneness.
His word and creed: before it is a display of mind and conscience, literature is confession. In other words, literature will be what you yourself are.
His words again: “No one must know that I am not with them.” In other words, you see yourself in everything and everyone, young men and girls, women and men, animals and trees, children and elders, and look at yourself from within them. More precisely:
But who would grant me that delight, to feel not even myself,
To melt, to spread, to be within everyone.
Many write good books. Anyone can be the author of at least one good book: their life. But to write books that shape the outlook of contemporaries and descendants is given to the rare few, and among those rare few Saroyan was unique.
He mocked and looked askance at those lawgivers of literature for whom their conception of us stands higher and more complete than the human being, than each and all of us; who roast in their national, class, racial and religious prejudices and strive to sanctify what their own limited minds have produced. There he laughed, because those lawgivers appeared to him not as children born of mothers but as beings come straight from God’s mouth.
Again from his book: “I wrote in the English of immigrants. It was violence against the language; publishers drew back in horror, but that was what I was, and eventually they yielded.” In a television interview he added: “I am on the side of the oppressed. If those immigrants — my father, uncle, relatives, the people from Mush and Bitlis — had not been despised people in America, perhaps I would not have written about them or kept my surname Saroyan, like one compatriot of ours who was a gifted writer but evaded his nationality. Anyone who hides his people, his parents, his nationality cannot be a true writer.” And a few days earlier or later, with a slight smile of satisfaction: “You know, there are Japanese boys named Aram. They have taken it from my books.” So it is.
When my lyre grows cold,
Giving love its last farewell,
I shall go to sleep in my Cilicia,
The land that gave me sunlight.
After all loves have gone out, to turn with a cold lyre towards the only love that cannot go out is the final flight of many, many delicate souls. But from the very beginning, at the proud age of youth, when the whole world seems an open-armed mother and lover, to take the homeward road towards “Armenia, the beloved aflame with blood” — this is a singularly rare gift, growing from the very substance of genius. To abandon that road would mean renouncing the road into literature’s deepest depths. He was continually on the road to the homeland. In short, he found the homeland on the road of true literature, and that spiritual attainment of a courageous, unstoppable soul was already inalienable, as the essence of great literature.
And of course that continuous, endless flight towards the homeland, always beginning and never ending, was to end beautifully, as uprightly as his whole life and work, with one landing: entrusting his ashes to the native soil. The body in which he lived, turned to ashes, was to descend from the native sky to the native earth.