Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon: William Saroyan
“Saroyan’s work is always delicately brushed with a sadness…”
When I first discovered the writer William Saroyan back in 1971, and read his superb memoir, Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon, I was immediately reminded of Hemingway’s own memoir, A Moveable Feast, and the way both books paint superb pictures of a writer’s life in Paris — one in the 1920s, the other in the 1960s — and for Saroyan, the California of the 1960s:
I have now lived long enough to have noticed the arrival and departure of everybody. They came forward shining, and went away faded or invisible. That’s the thing about staying alive — you see that.
As for myself, the whole thing is a joke. I look like an old man. One would think I had gone to a lot of trouble about getting ready to play an unsuitable part in an absurd Sunday School morality play.
But I’m still alive, and everybody else keeps dying…
Saroyan was a very fine writer who hit the heights and sank to the depths on more than one occasion, and a man who could pick a fight with just about anyone, including Ernest Hemingway — who was of a similar nature — and a man Saroyan claimed stole his trimmed down style of writing, which is something of a contradiction…
