"William Saroyan," photographed by Al Aumuller, 1940. Larger.
In California—as elsewhere—not every job is a career. But if you plan your future well, every job can help you make one.
Recalling a writing career spanning two decades, William Saroyan once described how various odd jobs he took in San Francisco lent him valuable experience, including a stint at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery Company.
. . . working there was a valuable experience. I remember the arrival of Christmas week and the vice-president's bitter complaint that owing to the absence of an epidemic of influenza the company's volume of business for December over the previous year had fallen twenty-two per cent.
I remarked, "But everybody will catch up eventually, won't they?"
The vice-president lifted his glasses from the bridge of his nose to his forehead in order to have another look at me.
"I'm a writer," I said. "Unpublished."
He asked me to look at some slogans he had composed for the company: Inter here. A lot for your money.
I said he had flair.
William Saroyan's first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories appeared in 1934. He wrote "A Writer's Declaration" twenty years after.
"The Essential Saroyan," book jacket, 2005. Larger.
Bicycle riding not only reduces pollution, decreases traffic, and tones your body, according to one Fresno cyclist, it also enhances your mind and stimulates your imagination.
In his 1952 memoir The Bicycle Rider of Beverly Hills, writer William Saroyan ranges beyond considering the physical benefits of cycling in order to consider how it rhythmically stimulates the mind.
Out of rhythm come many things, perhaps all things. The physical action compels action of another order—action of mind, memory, imagination, dream, hope, order, and so on. The physical action also establishes a deep respect for grace, seemliness, effectiveness, power with ease, naturalness, and so on. The action of the imagination brings home to the bicycle-rider the limitlessness of the potential in all things. He finds out that there are many excellent ways in which to ride a bike effectively, and this acquaintanceship with the ways and the comparing of them gives him an awareness of a parallel potential in all other actions. Out of the imagination comes also music and memory.
William Saroyan's style—a blend of seeming informality and optimism—has inspired its own adjective, "Saroyanesque."
In California's Central Valley, farming isn't easy—but it's even more difficult when you don't know what you're doing.
In his story "The Pomegranate Trees," William Saroyan tells a story about a would-be farmer whose unlikely dream was creating a garden in the desert.
My uncle Melik was just about the worst farmer that ever lived. He was too imaginative and poetic for his own good. What he wanted was beauty. He wanted to plant it and see it grow. I myself planted over one hundred pomegranate trees for my uncle one year back there in the good old days of poetry and youth in the world. I drove a John Deere tractor too, and so did my uncle. It was all pure aesthetics, not agriculture. My uncle just liked the idea of planting trees and watching them grow.
Only they wouldn't grow. It was on account of the soil. The soil was desert soil. It was dry. My uncle waved at the six hundred and eighty acres of desert he had bought and he said in the most poetic Armenian anybody ever heard, Here in this awful desolation a garden shall flower, fountains of cold water shall bubble out of the earth, and all things of beauty shall come into being.
Yes, sir, I said.
Saroyan's collection of stories, My Name is Aram, appeared in 1940 and captured "the large comic world" of his native Fresno.
below to hear radio segment.
