Twenty Years of Writing

by WILLIAM SAROYAN

1

ON OCTOBER 15, 1934 my first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, was published. The year 1934 seems quite near, but the fact remains that it was twenty years ago, as I write. Many things happened in those twenty years, several of them to me.

I did not earn one dollar by any means other than writing. I wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, poems, book reviews, miscellaneous comment, letters to editors, private letters, and songs.

Nothing that I wrote was written to order, on assignment, or for money, although a good deal of what I wrote happened to earn money. If an editor liked a story as I had written it, he could buy it. If he wanted parts of it written over, I did not do that work. Nobody did it. One editor took liberties with a short piece about Christmas, and the writer of a cookbook to which I had written a free Preface added a few lines by way of making me out a soldierpatriot. I protested to the editor and to the writer of the cookbook, but of course the damage had been done. During World War II I wrote no propaganda of any kind, although I was invited several times to do so. The point is that for twenty years I have been an American writer who has been entirely free and independent.

I consider the past twenty years the first half of my life as a published writer, and the next twenty I consider the second half. At that time I shall be sixty-six years old, which can be very old, or not. I expect to be more creative in the next twenty years than I was in the first twenty, even though I start with a number of handicaps. To begin with, I owe so much in back taxes that, it is very nearly impossible arithmetically to even the score by writing, and I have acquired other personal, moral, and financial responsibilities.

I have never been subsidized, I have never accepted money connected with a literary prize or award, I have never been endowed, and I have never received a grant or fellowship, A year or two after my first book was published I was urged by friends to file an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Against my better judgment I filed an application, which was necessarily if not deliberately haphazard. How should I know what 1 wanted to write, for instance? I couldn’t, possibly describe it. My application was turned down and I began to breathe freely again.

I am head over heels in debt. I expect to get out of debt by writing, or not at all. I have no savings account, no stocks or bonds, no real estate, no insurance, no cash, and no real property that is convertible into anything like a sum of money that might be useful. I simply have got to hustle for a living. I mention these matters impersonally, as facts, and not to arouse sympathy. I don’t want any.

Had my nature been practical I might at this time know financial security, as it’s called. There is nothing wrong with such security, I suppose, but I prefer another kind entirely. I prefer to recognize the truth that I must work, and to believe that I can.

I squandered a great deal of money that I earned as a writer and I lost a lot of it gambling. It seems to have been my nature to squander and to gamble, that’s all. I gave some away, perhaps a great deal. I am not unaware of the possible meaning of the discomfort I have felt when I have had money, and the compulsion I have had to get rid of it somehow or other. I think I have felt the need to be only a writer, a writing writer, and not a success of any kind.

The ability or compulsion to hoard money has always seemed to me a complicated if not offensive thing. And yet I have always had sympathy for those who have been experts at hoarding, at legal means by which not to pay taxes, at timely thrusts into new and profitable areas of money-making, such as investments, real estate, inventions, oil, uranium, government contracts, the backing of plays, manufacturing, and marketing. The noticeable shrewdness of such people has always amused me, even when I myself have been the party to be outwitted.

When I was in the Army, for instance, in the snow of Ohio, in the dead of winter, a very capable money-man who was quite rich and young and not in the Army, Hew from New York to Ohio to discuss with me changes he felt I ought to make in one of my plays on which he had paid me $1000 in advance. I met him whenever the Army regulations permitted me to, and I heard him out, which took a great deal of time I would have preferred to keep to myself. The man talked around and around, and it suddenly occurred to me that what he was really trying to say but couldn’t was that he didn’t feel the play would be a hit and that he was helpless not to do something about the $1000. This did not astonish me at all. I took a check for $1000 around to his hotel and left it at the desk, along with a short note. I wanted to see if my hunch was right. It was. We were supposed to meet the following night. We didn’t. He flew back to New York with the check, cashed it, and I never heard from him again. There was no legal, or even moral, reason for me to return the $1000 to him. I simply couldn’t bear to see him so upset about the small sum of money, all the while pretending that he was only concerned about art.

At one of the biggest moving picture factories in Hollywood, when I discovered that I had been hoodwinked into making a poor deal, I met the executives who had done the brilliant hoodwinking,

I established that they had done it, and I got into my car and drove to San Francisco. I was informed several years later that I had left behind wages due me under the terms of the hoodwinking agreement that amounted to something between five and fifteen thousand dollars. I never investigated the matter. The factory and its chief beneficiaries were hoarding profits by the millions, and yet six or seven of the executives found it absolutely necessary to act in unison and to out wit the writer of a story they wauled desperately, from which they acquired three or four more millions of dollars. I have no idea what they have done with their money, but I am sure it has been something nice.

Before my first book was published I was not a drinker, but soon after il came out I discovered the wisdom of drinking, and I think this is something worth looking into for a moment.

In 1935 I drank moderately, and traveled to Europe for the first time, but the following nine years, until I was drafted into the Army, I drank as much as I liked, and I frequently drank steadily for nine or ten hours at a time.

I was seldom drunk, however. I enjoyed the fun of drinking and talking loudly with friends — other writers, painters, sculptors, newspapermen, and the girls and women we knew in San Francisco.

Drinking with good companions can be a good thing for a writer, but let a writer heed this humble and perhaps unnecessary warning: stop drinking when drinking tends to be an end in itself, for that is a useless end. I believe I have learned a lot while I have been drinking with friends, just as most of us may say we have learned a lot in sleep. There is, however, a recognizable limit to what may be learned by means of drinking.

In the writing that I have done during the past twenty years, what do I regret?

Nothing. Not one word. Regret is nonsense pure and simple. There simply isn’t anything for anybody to regret.

Did I write enough?

No. No writer ever writes enough.

Might I have written differently? More intelligently, for instance?

I don’t know how.

First, I always tried my best, as I understand trying. Second, I believe I was quite intelligent all the time.

Then, what about the theory of certain estimable critics and intelligent readers that my writing is unrealistic and sentimental?

Well, I think they are mistaken. In writing that is effective I don’t think anything is unrealistic. As for my own writing, I think it has always been profoundly realistic if not ever superficially so. I don’t think my writing is sentimental either, although il is a very sentimental thing to be a human being. What else could you possibly be, lugging around the head and heart and soul of man all your life? The enemies of sentiment in life as in art are simply sentimental in another way. As far as I am concerned it is as good a way as any, just so they don’t extend their counterfeiting to U.S. currency, where the risks and hazards aren’t worth the big cars and anxiety.

2

As I write, I am back in San Francisco, where I lived when my first book was published, where I have not lived in six or seven years, and the day is the 13th of October. I drove up from Malibu two days ago for a visit of ten or eleven days while my house on the beach in Malibu is being painted inside and out. I did not drive to San Francisco in order to be here on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my first book, but I shall be here on that day nevertheless.

Already I have walked in the various neighborhoods of San Francisco I have known, to notice again the various houses in which I have lived: 348 Carl Street, 1707 Divisadero, 2378 Sutter, 123 Natoma. And the various places in which I worked before I had had a story published in a. national magazine: various branch offices of the Postal Telegraph Company — on Market Street in the Palace Hotel Building, on Powell Street at Market, on Taylor at Market in the Golden Gate Theatre Building, and at 405 Brannan, near Third.

I was a clerk and teletype operator in the first three branch offices, but I was the manager of the office on Brannan. I have always been a little proud of that, for I was the youngest manager of a Postal Telegraph branch office in America, nineteen years old and without a high school diploma.

I walked through the Crystal Palace Market and visited the stand at which I once hustled potatoes and tomatoes. It was called The Fior D’Italia.

I went into the building at Market and Sixth where the offices of The Cypress Lawn Cemetery Company are located. I worked there, too.

The vice-president said, “Do you intend to make Cypress Lawn your lifetime career?”

I said, “ Yes, sir.”

I got the job.

I quit a month later, but 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 twentytwo 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 a flair.

I walked along the Embarcadero to the Dodd Warehouse, across from Pier 17, for I worked there a month, too. The trouble with that job was the floating crap games of the longshoremen every lunch hour in empty box-cars or behind piles of lumber on the docks. My take-home pay every week was nothing, although I made a friend of the great Negro crap-shooter and game-manager who was called Doughbelly. The sunlight down there on the waterfront during those lunch-hour crap games was wonderful, and as I walked there yesterday I could almost see the huge old man calling the points of the game, and I had to remember that whenever he noticed I wasn’t betting he correctly surmised that I was fresh out of funds and slipped me a silver dollar or two so that I might get back into the action.

Once, when I stayed away from the games for three days running in the hope of having a few dollars in my pocket for Saturday night, Doughbelly kept asking everybody, “Where’s that Abyssinian boy?”

I was in the Dodd Warehouse eating sandwiches and reading Jack London, that’s where I was.

It was at 348 Carl Street twenty years ago on this day, October 13th, that I opened a package from Random House and saw a copy of my first book. That was a hell of a moment. I was so excited I couldn’t roll a Bull Durham cigarette. After three tries I finally made it, and began to inhale and exhale a little madly, as I examined the preposterous and very nearly unbelievable object of art and merchandise. What a book, what a cover, what a title page, what words, what a photograph — now just watch the women swarm around. For a young writer does write in order to expect pretty women to swarm around.

Alas, the swarmers aren’t often pretty. This is a mystery that continues to baffle me. Pretty women swarm around fat little men who own and operate small businesses. They swarm around chiropractors who are full of talk about some of their interesting cases and achievements. They swarm around young men who wear black shirts and have five buttons on the sleeves of their sport coats, who have no visible means of support, who spend hours chatting amiably about last night’s preposterous trivia as if it were history.

Pretty women swarm around everybody but writers.

Plain, intelligent women somewhat swarm around writers.

But it wasn’t only to have pretty women swarm around me that I hustled my first book into print. It wasn’t that alone by a long shot.

I also meant to revolutionize American writing.

3

IN THE early thirties the word revolutionize enjoyed popularity and was altogether respectable, but a special poll invented by a special statistician would be the only means today by which to measure my success in revolutionizing American writing. To pretend that my writing hasn’t had any effect at all on American writing, however, would be dishonest. The trouble is that for the most part my writing influenced unpublished writers who remained unpublished, and to measure that kind of an influence calls for a lot of imagination and daring. The good writers that my writing influenced were already published, some of them long published, but the truth is that my writing did influence their writing, for I began to notice the improvement almost immediately. And I didn’t notice it in short stories alone, I noticed it in novels and plays, and in movies, too.

AY ha l did my writing have that writing in general ought to have?

Freedom.

I think that that sums up what my writing had. I think I demonstrated that if you have a writer you have writing, and that the writer himself is of greater importance than his writing.

Thus, if you are a writer in the first place you do not necessarily have to kill yourself every time you write a story, a play, or a novel.

But why did I want to revolutionize American writing?

I had to. It was unavoidable.

And why, as a writer, was I unwilling to act solemn? Didn’t I know that unless I acted solemn the big critics would be afraid to write about my writing? I knew. I refused to act solemn because I didn’t Feel solemn. I didn’t feel I ought to feel solemn or even dignified, because I knew acting dignified was only a shadow removed from being just plain pompous. Some writers are naturally solemn and dignified, although that does not mean that they are also naturally great, or even effective. I’m not such a writer.

There simply isn’t any mysterious connection between solemnity and great or good writing. Some great writers had great solemnity, but most of them had almost none. They had something else.

What is this other thing?

I think it is an obsession to get to the probable truth about man, nature, and art, straight through everything to the very core of one’s own being.

What is this probable truth?

It changes from day to day, certainly from year to year. You can measure the change from decade to decade, and the reason you can measure it is that there have been writers (and others) who have been obsessed about it.

To become free is the compulsion of our time — free of everything that is useless and false, however deeply established in man’s fable. But this hope of freedom, this need of it, does not for a moment mean that man is to go berserk. Quite the contrary, since freedom, real freedom, true freedom, carries the life and fable of man nearer and nearer to order, beauty, grace, and meaning — all of which must always remain correctable in details — revised, improved, refined, enlarged, extended.

But I will not talk big. It is not my nature to do so, and when it happens, it happens by itself, and I know it is time to get back where I belong. Only this, though: intelligence is arriving into the fable of the life of man. It is not necessarily welcome, certainly not in most quarters. In order to be a little less unwelcome it must be joined by humor, out of which the temporary best has always come. You simply cannot call the human race a dirty name unless you smile when you do so. The calling of the name may be necessary and the name itself may be temporarily accurate, but not to smile at the time is a tactical blunder which nullifies the entire usefulness of the probable accuracy of the name, for without humor there is no hope, and man could no more live without hope than he could without the earth underfoot.

Life rules the world, impersonal and free life: the anonymous living tell their story every day, with the help of professional or amateur writers, such as myself. But the greatest story-teller of all is time, change, or death. But death is not our doom and not our enemy. Next to birth it is our best gift, and next to truth it is our best friend.

I am back in San Francisco on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my first book—the beginning of my life as a writer, as a conscious force upon the life of my time, as a voting representative of my anonymous self and of any and all others whose aspirations parallel my own — to live creatively, to live honorably, to hurt no one insofar as possible, to enjoy mortality, to fear neither death nor immortality, to cherish fools and failures even more than wise men and saints since there are more of them, to believe, to hope, to work, and to do these things with humor.

What advice have I for the potential writer?

I have none, for anybody is a potential writer, and the writer who is a writer needs no advice and seeks none.

What about courses in colleges and universities in writing?

Useless, they are entirely useless.

The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody’s best friend and only true enemy — the good and great, enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops. lie does not conform for the simple reason that there is nothing worth conforming to yet. When there is something half worth conforming to he will not conform to that, either, or half conform to it. He won’t even rest or sleep as other people rest and sleep. When he’s dead he’ll probably be dead as others are dead, but while he is alive he is .alive as no one else is, not even another writer. The writer who is a writer is also always a fool. He is the easiest man in the world to belittle, ridicule, dismiss, and scorn; and that is precisely as it should be. He is also mad, measurably so, but saner than all others, with the best sanity, the only sanity worth bothering about — the living, creative, vulnerable, valorous, unintimidated, and arrogant sanity.

I am a writer who is a writer, as I have been for twenty years, and expect to be for twenty more.

I am here to stay, and so is everybody else. No preposterously powerful bomb or other explosive is ever going to be employed by anybody on anybody. Knowing this, believing this, the writer who is a writer makes plans to watch his health casually, and to write his writing with more and more purposeful intelligence, humor, and love.

I am proud of my twenty years, undecorated as they may be. I am proud to be a writer, the writer I am, and I don’t care what anybody else is proud of.