The Man with the Heart in the Highlands and Other Stories. - book reviews

I can remember having wondered, while in graduate school in the early 1960s, "What is so awful about William Saroyan?" Philip Rahv (included here) had provided an answer based on a convenient overlapping of Marxist and Formalist aesthetics. There was, furthermore, the Original Sin of Saroyan's popularity. Later I would see how Saroyan violated such creative writing workshop fetishes as the limited and consistent point of view. I was never, however, to forget how much I had enjoyed him before I listened to his critics.

Now Edward Halsey Foster's entry in Twayne's always useful "Studies in Short Fiction" format assures me that my first impression was the right one. Since Saroyan's largely first-person narratives approximate the discourse of the oral storyteller, the dicta of Percy Lubbock were never applicable. Saroyan's expressionism and individualism, rooted in his Armenian heritage and in Whitman, occurred at a critical point of least convenience between the first wave of Modernism--Joyce, Stein, Anderson--and that new wave of Postmodernism--Kerouac most obviously--that he is shown to have influenced. He would seem a prime candidate for any new multicultural canon, although he may remain politically incorrect until a healthy literary anarchism prevails over attempts to supplant old party lines with new. To understand the paradox of Saroyan's reputation is to begin to grasp the plight of writers as diverse and uncanonized as John Fante, Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski, and Gerald Haslam.

Conveniently, New Directions has reissued as a "Revived Modern Classic" 16 of Saroyan's best stories from his volumes 1936-1944. From the famous title story through "The Living and the Dead," "The Mexicans," "The Declaration of War," and the pugilist classic "Dear Baby," we come to realize how ancient he was in his facility and lyricism, yet how much our contemporary when he mixes discourses, erases boundaries, and reflects upon his vocation:

I was now satisfied that I had gotten to the bottom of the man's irritation, and had obtained fresh and original material for a new memoir, so without another word, I sauntered out of the shop and down the street.

I feel that I have effectively utilized the material; that I have shaped it into a work which, if anything, will enhance my already considerable fame.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group