What an accelerated start in life for any boy, even excluding all other traumas! At any rate, during the intermittent times in adolescence that the son saw his father, the latter would obsessively rave and rant to the emotionally paralyzed boy about his ex-wife. Saroyan was almost twice her age, famous, gallant, erratically in love with this ripe young thing - so much so that he married and divorced her twice by the time Aram was eight years old. Walter Matthau, and Saroyan's almost pathological hatred of her was apparently predicated on three unforgiving "deceptions": (1) she passed herself off as an heiress, which she wasn't (2) she was Jewish, and claimed that she wasn't and (3), she was illegitimate, and didn't tell him.Īt the time that Carol Marcus painted these lies for Saroyan, she was an insecure East Side-debutante type who was all of 17. Her maiden name was Carol Marcus, now Mrs.
Although William Saroyan had little use for his son, considering him a hippie and a druggie whose own children bear names like Cream and Strawberry, the main reason he carried out a "lifelong, psychological war" against Aram and Aram's younger sister, Lucy, was because he detested the woman who bore them.
The diary form gives young Saroyan - a legitimate New York School poet in his own right, with no help or encouragement from his parent - a chance to backtrack in time in order to trace out all the scars that now burn prominently as the elder Saroyan approaches death day by day. It concludes a month later when the great-spirited prose singer of the American Depression bites the dust at the age of 72. They've been out of touch for four years. If Aram Saroyan is a good indicator, the sense of betrayal is all the greater because the father's or mother's "name" has practically crushed their own personalities, and then to have it worshipped for phony qualities is almost too much to bear.Īram tells the story of his relationship, or non-relationship, with his father in the form of a loose diary that begins on April 14, 1981, when he hears that William Saroyan is dying of cancer. Since Americans attribute every unreal virtue to shimmering public figures, the absence of these qualities is felt with desperate incredulousness by the children. Why have the floodgates opened towards the famous of a dying generation? More particularly, why have the sons and daughters of some of our best-loved national icons begun to pour out their secrets of bitterness and betrayal? One clear reason is the schizoid split between what the public knows of its idols and what the family has to live with. But before you ascend to any convenient moral heights and dump on such a traitorous kid - as sentimental admirers of our one and only Armenian Mark Twain are already doing - let it be said that this is an honest, even softly-shaded book, which permits its contempt to sting all the more. Here there is no equivocation, no apology: William Saroyan was a bum and his 38-year-old son, Aram, is not ashamed to document every drop of his revenge. THE NEW AMERICAN TRADITION of parent-assassination takes a monster step forward with this book.
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