Collection’s Fate Adds New Chapter to Saroyan Legend

FRESNO —  When writer William Saroyan died 15 years ago at the Veteran’s Hospital here, he left behind a treasure trove of unknown manuscripts and memorabilia that secured his legend as one of California’s most prolific literary geniuses and pack rats.

Hundreds of cardboard boxes were stuffed with unpublished novels, short stories, plays, essays, letters, line drawings--even pebbles and glass shards collected during his furious bike rides through the streets of his hometown.

In keeping with his wishes, Saroyan’s artistic outpourings were loaned to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. The memorabilia, from his frayed shoelaces to his mustache clippings, stayed behind in Fresno, a place he loved and hated, often in the same paragraph.

Now, in a move that stirred up the normally sedate library world, the Saroyan Foundation has announced that it is taking back the entire collection, a scholarly and literary gold mine, and giving it to Stanford University.

Library officials at Stanford are trying hard not to gloat over their good fortune while their rival across the bay is crying foul over what might be considered archival poaching. Meanwhile, Fresno, which has never quite known what to make of Saroyan, alive or dead, is mostly silent.

“We’ve nurtured the Saroyan collection for 14 years,” said Anthony Bliss, the rare book and manuscript curator at Bancroft. “No one at the foundation consulted us. We were blindsided. You read the self-congratulatory announcement from Stanford and it’s hard not to gag.”

Michael Keller, Stanford’s head librarian, said he understood the hard feelings. “I don’t want to rain on our colleagues at Bancroft because they’ve been doing wonderful things for decades and decades. But we’re very pleased. Saroyan is going to have a very strong presence here.”

Those who knew Saroyan, who was 72 when he died, agree that the whole thing would have caused the author of “The Human Comedy,” no wallflower in assessing his own literary genius, to uncork his famous bellow of disapproval or maybe smile slyly beneath his magnificent walrus mustache.

It was during the Depression that Saroyan, the son of an Armenian priest and frustrated poet who died young, soared to fame as a fast, lyrical writer of short stories, autobiographical novels and plays. He bragged that he could write an entire stage show in three days and indeed wrote the Pulitzer Prize winner “The Time of Your Life” in six days holed up at the Great Northern Hotel in New York City. He rejected the prize because the play was “no more great than anything else I have ever written.”

In his later years, broke from gambling at the racetrack and the roulette table, he turned inward to a life of documenting every external facet of his existence. When he finished eating a can of green beans, for instance, he would neatly steam off the label and stamp the backside with the day, month and year.

He saved these labels, as well as pencil drawings that captured his every mood, his old Metro tickets from France, twine and chunks of concrete that he picked off the streets. He said he collected rocks because they reminded him that art should be simple.

He became his own subject matter, Saroyan observing Saroyan, and it was either the most selfless act--the writer affording future scholars a detailed look inside the artist’s life and muse--or the narcissism of a crazy man. And it had its practical consequences as well, not the least of which was the need for a place to store all this accumulation.

Saroyan, who deeply mistrusted the landed class, ended up owning five houses, including two stucco tract houses side by side in Fresno. In one, he lived and wrote; the other he set aside for storage. His old black Royal typewriter in the middle of the living room never stopped clattering, an estimated 10 million to 15 million words worth--plays, short stories, a memoir called “Adios, Muchacho,” most of them never shared with another human being.

“When all the words are counted, Saroyan will go down as the most prolific writer of this century,” said Dickran Kouymjian, director of Armenian studies at Cal State Fresno and editor of the only two Saroyan volumes published after his death.

“All those words and all that clutter, he was building something gigantic and immortal, an edifice to beat death. He was obsessed with not dying.”

Before he uttered one of the great parting lines of our time--”Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”--Saroyan insisted on a few things. No buildings were to be named after him. His houses in Fresno and Paris were to be kept for visiting writers. And he wanted half his ashes scattered over the family’s ancestral village in Armenia.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way. The theater in downtown Fresno was renamed the Saroyan, and his houses were sold and half his ashes buried in a stone memorial in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.

With Saroyan’s wishes thwarted at each turn, the question for family and friends became: Will Bill get his way with his collection? The sheer heft of the material--and his desire that it not be scattered among different institutions--has made life difficult for the foundation he set up in his name.

Because of a friendship with scholar James D. Hart, who directed the Bancroft Library from 1969 to 1990, Saroyan wanted Berkeley to have first crack. With the foundation’s approval, Hart sent a team to Fresno to sift through his thousands of boxes.

Bancroft ended up taking less than a tenth of the material to Berkeley, where it was cataloged and housed in a special collection that made Mark Twain’s nearby oeuvre seem paltry. The Saroyan Foundation continued to own the material, and public access was strictly limited to a few scholars of the foundation’s choosing.

Bancroft Library officials said they tried many times to get the foundation to lift the restrictions or even to donate the material outright. Each time, they were rebuffed. Robert Setrakian, a San Francisco attorney who heads the foundation, said he had the same problem with Berkeley that he had with every other institution that expressed interest in the Saroyan collection: It wanted to skim the best stuff and return the rest.

“Saroyan made it very clear that he wanted all his collection to be under one roof,” he said. “Why would I offer [Bancroft] this gift when they gave back some of the stuff they took originally saying it had little value? I don’t go begging to anybody.”

Cal State Fresno showed a keen interest in housing the writer’s clothes and other memorabilia. For a while, the university provided two guest cottages for storage. Then one day, Setrakian got a call from the president’s office. Sorry, but the stuff has to go. He contacted the Fresno Metropolitan Museum and officials there agreed to store it.

For nearly a decade, 1,200 boxes gathered dust in the museum’s fourth-floor attic. Last year, the museum gave Setrakian a final date to clear out everything. He tried to find an institution eager to take the entire archive and for a time even considered the Presidio in San Francisco, which was converting from military to civilian use.

“I spent 14 years in federal government, 11 years as a governor of the U.S. Postal Service,” he said. “I helped oversee three unions, a $50-billion budget, over 700,000 full-time employees. And all that was a piece of cake compared to this Saroyan stuff.”

He said it wasn’t until he met with library officials at Stanford, his alma mater, that he started hearing the right answers. Yes, they would be happy to house the entire collection, mustache clippings and all. Yes, Saroyan would get equal billing alongside Hemingway and Steinbeck. Yes, they would establish an international William Saroyan writing award and give the author a presence in each of their 12 branch universities worldwide.

“After a long, emotional process, we finally found a home for the entire collection,” Setrakian said. “Stanford will give Saroyan the treatment deserving of one of this country’s greatest writers. Bill would be very happy.”

Some family members disagree. “Bill would never have approved of Stanford, anymore than having his ashes shipped off to Yerevan,” said cousin Ruben Saroyan. “Bill felt a real connection to Fresno and the Bancroft.”

Last week, a truck pulled up to the Fresno Metropolitan Musuem and workers spent the entire day packing the boxes for the trip to Palo Alto. “We’re not upset that we’re losing it,” said the museum’s curator, Kimberly Cline. “We didn’t have the staff to maintain it.”

It is unclear when a similar truck will be visiting Bancroft to remove its cache. Berkeley lawyers are reviewing Saroyan’s correspondence with the library to determine if they can challenge the move.

“A library just doesn’t give up one of its special collections,” said curator Bliss. “For the moment, all we can say is that we regret this decision and one way or the other Bancroft will remain interested in Saroyan and the Armenian American experience in California.”

Keller, the Stanford librarian, placed the value of the gift in the “millions and millions of dollars,” including future trade publication rights. He said the university will appoint a specific curator for the Saroyan collection. Everything will be made available to scholars. He hopes for a Saroyan renaissance.

“He’s an underappreciated author now but that will change,” he said.