Where the Bones Go
When the twenty-five year old William Saroyan received a letter from Story magazine informing him that a story – his first piece of writing that he knew was good – had been accepted for publication, he responded immediately that he would send in a brand new story every day for the entire month of January, 1934. He wasn’t sure how his reckless promise had been received until he got a telegram, eleven or twelve days into the experiment:
STORIES ARE ARRIVING DON’T STOP.
The book that emerged from this mad, inspired endeavor was The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, the book that first made the young Armenian writer’s brash voice heard on the literary scene, and the one that is probably still his best known today.
Fast-forward forty-six years and Where the Bones Go is a book written at much the same relentless pace, but with an entirely different urgency and purpose. Completed in 1980, the final year but one of his seventy-two-year life, Where the Bones Go is Saroyan willing himself to live, day by day, through prostate cancer:
Since I set out to write this work, I thank God that I did, because it is the best way I know to wait.
This remarkably idiosyncratic memoir comes to us posthumously and abridged, but is no less Saroyan for all that. The full manuscript, according to the editor, Robert Setrakian, is 337,000 words, composed of individual type-written pages, single-spaced, with no margins. Each thought, musing, memory, is one page, no more, no less. I imagine Saroyan setting himself this task that in a sense he had set himself his entire life: here is a blank page, let us fill it with words. Each page, each day, a world.
The pieces ramble, with little respect for structure or grammar. They go down the avenues, alleyways, and shortcuts of his mind, sometimes resurfacing where he dove in and often not. They are raw, unselfconscious, and pure Saroyan.
Take, for example, “That Incredible Piece of Furniture,” in which a string of personal reminiscences starts with a New York Post reporter and eventually tells you, Reader, to listen to as much Chopin as you can. There is nothing of particular note in this piece, and indeed if you asked me to recommend selections from Bones it would not make the top twenty-five. Why then do I mention it? Because it suddenly clarified something for me about his writing. You see, one of the main criticisms of Saroyan, and the common explanation for his decline in popularity, is that he is too optimistic about human nature, too universalizing and sunny-sided. And yet he writes so often of the particular, the individual, the sad and depressing. So when in “That Incredible Piece of Furniture” he swings suddenly from George Sand’s affair with Chopin to how Chopin’s anti-Semitism brings him (Saroyan) “suddenly face to face with the theory that all men are created equal,” whereupon he riffs momentarily on the self and the brain and the universe, then returns to an appreciation of Chopin’s musical talents, it occurred to me that in Saroyan the particular and the universal, the specific and the general, are like point and counterpoint, creating their own texture and rhythm within his work. The one does not stand in, take the place of, or lead the to the other – they play off each other, they converse, they riff.
But basically everything I can say about Saroyan, or want to say, he already knows about himself and has said better than I could. And so I will simply let him say it here:
On Where the Bones Go: “Everything is permissible in this work, for its best and deepest reality is in its haphazard character, its formlessness which somehow acquires form as it goes along.”
On his writing style: “I write my book as I have always written it, straight out of then and there, out of myself at that time and in that place. And if I don’t know what I am going to write, I do discover later on what it was I wrote, and it has a kind of authenticity, a kind of reality, a kind of connection with everything, that you don’t get out of any other kind of writing . . . ”
On generalizations: “I oversimplify because I really have no wish to straighten out the human race or the total race of being, all things that live, for it does not need to be done.” But also: “the failure to see everybody as solely himself was (and is) a fundamental failure to be one’s self a full individual, for until a man sees the particular with full clarity he cannot begin to see the general in any of its truth. Generalization about any order of human beings has got to be out of order for the simple reason that it turns out to be about nobody.”
There is so much in Bones, both of the insightful variety and of the absurdly wonderful: the origins of Saroyan’s innocent prostitute character; why preserving his memory through writing is so important; the time he purposefully ignored Nelson Rockefeller (“it was my obligation to myself, my own family, to people on 6th Avenue, people in general, to ignore the shameless groveling multimillionaire”); his theory on the ineffectualness of Henry James (“He just never seems to have experienced a hard-on”); his gratitude to the inventors of graham crackers and fig newtons. There is much in here that sheds light on Saroyan’s other writings, and perhaps at the end of this blogging project I’ll return to the beginning; after all, I began with the end – with the last thing he wrote.
But out of all this fertile material, what really grabs you about Bones is the final section, the section Setrakian gathered under “Adios, Muchachos,” where the threads of imminent mortality, of immortality through art, of what will become of me when I’m gone, come together with crystal immediacy and with a sudden sustained cogency. He saves a spider trapped in his bathtub: “I want it to live. Why? Because I want to live.”
Each of us is dying, although on a day like this the dying is noticed, it is felt in the bone, and the beautiful aloofness of the green grass beyond the window. The indifference of the green grass only sweetens the truth of it all. I am caught up in all manner of complications, and all of a sudden I know this is nothing new. I ought to be singing but I am not, for the sun is out, the sky is blue, there are elongated white fleecy clouds all about, and yet I stand and growl at everybody and everything. Who is everybody? God. What is everything? Being.
Is it too late? Is there an instant that will turn it around and make it not too late, or is it too late, man, Jesus, All, All, All, is it too late, too late? I can’t breathe. It is too late. I am crossing the limitless white and snow of everywhere, God take care of the kids, God look after them when they become the mothers and the fathers. Dead.
. . .
But, by God, before anything else is said, I am obliged to say that I shall never be gone, even after I am gone. I shall be dead, I shall be turned to ashes, but I shall not be gone, for didn’t I put myself here and everywhere, during my time? Isn’t it impossible to remove anybody who is here, has been here, is anywhere, or liable to be, whenever by chance or plan somebody takes up one or another of the clues about his presence, in this case a book?
I said earlier that Bones was written with a different purpose and urgency than The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. But I remember now something he wrote at the very beginning of Daring Young Man:
A writer can have, ultimately, one of two styles: he can write in a manner that implies that death is inevitable, or he can write in a manner that implies that death is not inevitable. . . . If you write as if you believe that ultimately you and everyone else alive will be dead, there is a chance that you will write in a pretty earnest style. . . . Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might. . . . Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
We are dying all the time, all of us. Saroyan always knew this, and perhaps it became more personal, less abstract, later in life, but he was always that first type of writer, the one who knows death is coming and that the immediacy and inevitability of death implies also and especially the immediacy and inevitability of life. Perhaps the end and the beginning are not so different after all.
References: Saroyan, William. Where the Bones Go. Ed. Robert Setrakian. Fresno: The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2002. Saroyan, William. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and other stories. New York: New Directions, 1997 [copyright 1934, 1941 by The Modern Library, Inc.].
The Saroyan Project 