Black Dog of Fate

A FEW DAYS AFTER MY MOTHER HAD RETURNED WITH A HAPPY report to Auntie Nona about the Ginsberg event at Bucknell, I received a letter from Nona inviting me to her apartment in early May because William Saroyan was coming to dinner. “Now,” she wrote, “you and Bill will be able to really talk!” I couldn’t say no, so in early May in the midst of exams, I hitchhiked Route 80 to the George Washington Bridge and appeared halfway through the evening.

When I open the door to Auntie Nona’s apartment, Saroyan is leaning against one of the dozens of bookshelves that cover the walls. He sips alternately from two tall glass tumblers, one of dark tea and the other of vodka. He is thick and broad-chested. His buffed and polished fingernails glisten against the tumblers. His receding hair is long, black, and slicked back, curling up at the back of his neck. The handlebars of his ivory mustache bush down to the bottom of his jutting chin. In his black shirt, navy pants, and black shoes, he looks like an Old World peasant.

When I walk in, in blue jeans and a tweed sport jacket, I see a group of writers dressed more formally crowding around him as he cracks jokes and laughs in his baritone voice. A group of Armenian-American writers: Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Michael Arlen, Peter Sourian, Leo and Linda Hamalian, Jack Antreassian, Harry Keyishian, Nishan Parlakian, Fred Asadourian, the jazz and blues producer George Avakian, and, of course, Auntie Anna. For all his fame as an American literary star and Broadway playwright, Saroyan means something more to Armenian Americans. He’s an embodiment of a particular sensibility that Armenian Americans feel close to the bone.

Saroyan: master of the short story during the Great Depression. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” “Two Days Wasted in Kansas City,” “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” “We Want a Touchdown,” “The Armenian and the Armenian.” Saroyan: who brought together the essay, a confessional autobiographical voice, and lyrical language and invented something new. An Armenian American from Fresno, California, whose parents had emigrated at the turn of the century from the ancient Armenian city of Bitlis in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, a city the Turks wiped clean of Armenians in 1915. A flamboyant autodidact, who invented a style and democratic spirit in which Americans saw and heard themselves. Saroyan: Armenian peasant as American iconoclast, who turned down the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for his play The Time of Your Life, the same year another Armenian American, Arshile Gorky, was becoming central to the revolution of American abstract expressionism.

He talks compulsively as he sips compulsively from both tumblers. He talks about racehorses. “Do you know how many horses owe me money?” He talks about his grandfather’s vineyards in Bitlis, in old Armenia, which he has never seen, about growing tomatoes and figs in his backyard in Fresno, about his “rival,” Hemingway, about living on pita bread and yogurt during the Depression. His eyes are wetly luminous, dark, excited, slightly vulnerable. I sit down next to my mother and father, and my father pours me a tall scotch.

It is a steamy night and the windows are open and the curtains hang like stiff dresses, and everyone is sweating and drinking scotch and eating smoked salmon and bereks and dolmas. Not long after I greet Bill, Auntie Nona tells him that I’m writing poems and asks him what kind of typewriter I should have. I’m feeling somewhat embarrassed, and asking myself, Why do I need Saroyan’s opinion? His blessing? Can’t I just call my local business-machine store and buy something? What does Saroyan know anyway? He’s still stuck in the thirties.

“What should I get?” I ask reluctantly, now that my aunt has pushed me out on the carpet. Saroyan slams his tumbler of tea on the mahogany console. “Not goddamned electric! You see how strong these hands are?” As he holds them out, I stare at the fine hairs on his fingers, the odd shine of his polished nails, and the fleshiness of his palms. “That’s fifty years of typing on a real typewriter. I’d do anything to have my Underwood of 1928 back. Typewriters have souls, they have magic, something comes out of them. Certain keys have luck, and certain cylinders zing. You know what comes then? The real stuff. The voices of people. The hearts of men and women. Life comes like a rhythm of sounds, like a clippety clicking, like a tap-dancing genie.” He sounds like a character in one of his stories. Romantic, nostalgic, verbose. And I, not sure whether Saroyan is an old kook or a prophet and still deferential enough to the Armenian patriarchal mode, go out the next day and buy a manual typewriter. The best manual typewriter I could find, which turned out to be a piece of junk, and I cursed Saroyan every time its bolts came undone. I pitched it a few years later in a dumpster off an exit ramp on Route 80.

But Saroyan was a literary patriarch, and Auntie Nona, who always encouraged and praised my writing, wanted me to connect with him. I was grateful for her love and spirit and her embrace of my young poetry, but I was not a Saroyanite. “Bill did a great thing,” I said to Nona, “in his day. He invented something. But I don’t think we have a lot to say to each other about writing. He likes a different thing.”

She was persistent, and one night a couple of years later after a huge Armenian feast at her apartment, Auntie Nona announced, looking at Bill, “Peter’s poems have been appearing in some very good magazines lately, and I hope he’ll read one for us tonight.” I looked in disbelief across the carcass of a leg of lamb at Auntie Nona. I was sipping wine fast and nervously and kept shaking my head no.

As the evening went on, she kept prodding me and whispering in my ear, “Just a few lines, Bill will love it.” “Please, I can’t, Auntie.” And sometime around midnight, when my head was spinning from booze, my aunt held up her wine glass and began tapping it with a spoon.

“Peter is going to read us a poem!” She was smiling her cherubic smile, and I looked at her and looked at Saroyan, who was grinning with his big white set of ivories, and I said okay. “It’s a poem, Bill, that uses an image from your story ‘Seventy Thousand Assyrians.’” If I had a poem that had anything to do with Saroyan, this was it. It was a dumb poem and I was angry with myself for letting Nona dragoon me into this. I stood up in front of the mantle, wobbly and sweating in my tweed jacket, and recited it. When I finished, everybody clapped, and I felt like a seven-year-old who had just performed “Song of the Volga Boatmen” on the cello for his adoring aunts. Bill got up and shook my hand and said, “That’s great, Peter. I’m a poet—you understand that, don’t you?”

Before I could get another word out of my mouth, Bill was talking again about himself in the thirties when he was at work on his first stories, and as I slumped into a wing chair I watched him happily take over the spotlight. He was frenetic and I thought a bit sad, talking so loudly and drunkenly about himself for as long as anyone would listen.

By the time I graduated from college, I came to understand why my aunt Nona knew so many writers, and why so many writers wanted to know her. She did more than assign books for review at the nation’s most influential book review, and she did more than write reviews in the daily Times; she was an aider and nurturer of writers. Writers from around the country sent her manuscripts as well as books. From the moment she stepped into her apartment after work until sometime after midnight, she was on the phone with writers. She gave as much time to unknown writers she believed in as she did to established friends, and lived through the emotional roller coasters of her friends’ writer’s blocks, postbook depressions, prereview anxieties, early-, mid-, and late-career despair.

Nona’s parties introduced me to the idea of literature as a public occasion, a place where writers came together to eat and drink and talk about what they believed in. I met many of her colleagues and friends there: Eudora Welty, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael and Alice Arlen, Erica Jong, Walter Abish, Marguerite Young, Daisy Aldan, Harriet Zinnes, Bill Henderson, Marvin Cohen, Muriel Rukeyser. Nona was an exuberant hostess, always dressed immaculately in a suit or a floral dress, a Parisian scarf around her neck, and she moved like a hummingbird between groups of people with trays of bereks, dolmas, smoked salmon, anchovies on crackers. She was tiny, several inches under five feet, because of her disfigured spine, the result of a childhood illness.

Almost nothing was ever said about Aunt Nona’s bowed back, but I knew that my grandparents sought the best medical care possible in Vienna and Geneva in the early 1920s and decided against spinal surgery because the risk of death was too great. When the Balakians arrived in New York, Nona was not sent to school, and my grandmother continued her education at home. Aunt Anna brought home her own school books, and Aunt Nona read them. My grandmother taught her mathematics and grammar, and her sister’s homework assignments provided a structure for a curriculum, which her mother shaped and added to.

An émigré, a refugee from this century’s first genocide, born on a Turkish army base, transported in fragile health from Asia Minor to Europe to North America, Nona spent her youth indoors. Sharing a bedroom with her younger brother and older sister in an apartment in which her father had his medical practice, she read her way through childhood. She once told me, “Until I was eighteen, I literally lived through books. Everyone I met was filtered through a literary equivalent—Proust, James, Chekhov. Reading wasn’t just pleasure, it was an introduction to life, to myself.” By the time she was fifteen, my grandmother had persuaded the administration at Horace Mann School for Girls that her daughter could keep up with anyone. At first, the Horace Mann administrators said, categorically, “no” to my grandmother. A handicapped immigrant girl, who had never been to school, enter the ninth grade at one of the elite prep schools of America? How many immigrant girls were there at Horace Mann in 1933, in the worst years of the Depression? My grandmother refused to take no for an answer, and after several appeals, the administration at Horace Mann School for Girls consented to let Nona Balakian become a freshman, and with a scholarship at that.

It is September 1933, and my aunt Nona is wearing a navy skirt and a white blouse. She walks in patent-leather shoes, spindly legged and petite, her silky black hair curling at her earlobes. Her torso is top-heavy due to her bowed back, and she carries a school bag in one hand, looking carefully both ways as she crosses the side streets on her four-block journey to school. She has never been to school in the New World—or in any world, for that matter. Buses and cabs and cars speed by her. A colorful scarf she wears around her neck blows occasionally into her face. The façades of buildings seem to waver against the blue sky. It is warm and humid and a faint breeze comes off the river. She is careful as she walks over sidewalk cracks and up and down the curb.

Nona did well at Horace Mann, and from there went to Barnard, where she majored in English and wrote plays. In 1942, she went to the graduate school of journalism at Columbia, where one of her teachers was John Chamberlain, then the leading book reviewer for the Times. He liked her work and suggested she apply for a position at the Book Review, and her public life began.

My aunt never spoke about her physical deformity. Only at the dinner table, when she needed a phone book or a pillow to raise the height of the chair, was it ever acknowledged. Had anyone suggested that she was handicapped or needed any special consideration, Nona would have been insulted. She commuted every day from 116th Street to Times Square, and moved briskly through the crowded streets and packed buses and subways. She was one of the first women at the Book Review and she rose in the patriarchal world of journalism.

More than anyone, William Saroyan defined my aunt’s notion of the hybridization of literature and her feeling about the meaning of exile. Not long after Saroyan’s death, after she had already begun her book on him, we were having dinner at Sardi’s, where she often took me when I was in town. It was her favorite place, a Times hangout just yards from her office on 44th Street. As we drank our martinis in the air-conditioned restaurant, my aunt told me that she had dreamt about Saroyan last night.

“We were at Gristede’s, an old one on Broadway in the 90s. Bill picked up some fresh figs and said—shouted, the way Bill does—‘Nona, a fig is a fig, you can’t change it. It grows like a big sac of seeds and only the sun can change it, only the sun can make it sweeter and tougher. Isn’t that right, sweeter and tougher. Isn’t that what we want to be, sweet and tough.’”

“‘Listen, Bill,’ I said, ‘you see those apples, each one is different. Each bin a different skin, a different texture, a different juice. Delicious, Macintosh, Cortland, Golden, Northern Spy, Rome, and so on. Isn’t that America for you? An apple in each state. A state in each apple.’”

“He looked at me and began to laugh. ‘Hey, Nona, that’s it, I got my figs in the sun and my apples in my pockets. What more do I need? What more does a writer need?’ Then the lights went out in the store, and when they came back on again, there was no one in the store, but a bird, flying around the fluorescent lights and then swooping down through the aisles and round the stacks of cans and bins of fruits and vegetables. It was a big owl-like bird with a great white walrus mustache, which is how I knew it was Bill.

My aunt paused and looked down at her drink, from which she had not taken a sip, and she brought it to her lips. And as tears began to roll down her cheeks, she picked up the white napkin on the table and wiped her eyes. I realized how deeply she missed Saroyan.

“You see,” she went on, composed again and talking like a critic, “I believe that Saroyan, like all Armenians, was a natural utopian. We have a dream instead of a country. Because territory has eluded us, we have a freedom to invent that most people don’t. The more our geography shrinks, the more our imaginations expand, the more we’re like owls flying in the dark.”