Marc A. Mamigonian
I have seen them carved in stone monuments, lit up on the big screen in The Promise,
framed and hung on the wall outside my own office. Practically every
Armenian knows them, and probably quite a few know them by heart —
these, the most famous words of William Saroyan:
I
should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small
tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost,
whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard,
and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you
can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their
homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray
again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will
not create a New Armenia.
These
words resonate with Armenians everywhere, and not only Armenians. They
have been quoted on the floor in Congress. David Mamet uses them as an
epigraph in his book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews. They speak of deep yearnings and fond hopes — for the immortality of the Armenian spirit and the Armenian nation.
There is only one problem. These aren’t the words William Saroyan wrote.[1]
I
should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small
tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars have
all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose
literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no
longer uttered. Go
ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is
war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them
from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor
water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live
again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not
live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years after,
and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do
anything about it. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas
of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the
world, go ahead and try to destroy them.
The
first thing to notice here is the absence of the climactic phrase “see
if they will not create a New Armenia.” These are words that Saroyan
never wrote or uttered. The famous version does not merely sanitize the
original passage for family ears or compress it for space: it
substantially rewrites Saroyan to include new phrases and concepts. And
now the pseudo-Saroyan version has effectively displaced the genuine
article. How did this come about?
One
would have to trace the matter back to the enduring success of the
posters that feature the quotation and an image of Saroyan, most
particularly the 1982 poster copyrighted by WizMen Productions and
created by Zaven Khanjian and designer Mher Tavitian. It does not help,
of course, that Inhale & Exhale has
been out of print since the 1930s. But Saroyan himself was recorded
reading “The Armenian and the Armenian” for the 1973 three-LP collection
Here’s William Saroyan Reading His Own Stuff and Talking,
so it’s not as if the original words had become inaccessible. Had they
been inaccessible, they would not have been remembered at all.
Khanjian,
to his credit, has explained at considerable length the history of this
poster, trying to set the record straight in articles published in
Armenian newspapers.[3] Despite his efforts, the record is still more
than a little bit crooked.
According
to Khanjian, he first saw the “quotation” in early 1982 on a poster
(above left) evidently created by one Peter Nakashian. Using the same
words, which he assumed were correct, Khanjian had a new poster (above
right) designed by Mher Tavitian, and in the years ahead the poster
enjoyed great popularity. Certainly many copies were sold out of the
bookstore of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research
(NAASR).[4]Though it is no longer available, people still ask for it.
William
Saroyan, having died in 1981, was not available to offer a correction
to Nakashian or Khanjian. Eventually the William Saroyan Society
contacted Khanjian, but they were not concerned about the unauthorized
alteration of Saroyan’s words. They were concerned about rights — and
suggested to him that he cease and desist or share the profits. He
ceased and desisted.
Eventually, the Saroyan Society issued its own poster, citing the ostensible source, Inhale & Exhale,
and appending an Armenian translation by Dr. Arra S. Avakian, even
though “The Armenian and the Armenian” had already been translated into
Armenian as early as 1940 by Samuel Toumayan and published in Lebanon.
Incredibly, given its mission to promote Saroyan’s works and educate the
public, the Saroyan Society used the altered quotation yet again – the
work not of the late William Saroyan but of an unknown and
self-appointed collaborator – and the Armenian translation, right down
to nor Hayastan, is based on the concocted text.
To date, I have never seen the actual passage from Inhale & Exhale
quoted on a poster, and you will look long and hard before you find it
correctly quoted anywhere. I have seen the fake one on plenty of
posters, not to mention wall plaques, t-shirts, and what other retail
items heaven only knows. Zaven Khanjian, in his assessment of the legacy
of the posters, takes the sanguine view that no harm has been done and
the spirit of Saroyan’s idea has not been compromised. “Whereas it was
indisputably wrong to tweak Saroyan’s original text, it was done only
with the intention of making it even more powerful,” he argues. To my
eyes, the rewritten text is not more powerful, only (in a very narrow
sense) more palatable. It is certainly less interesting. Whether it’s in
the spirit of what Saroyan wrote is debatable.
I
cannot defend this kind of bowdlerization, even if it was done with the
best of intentions. Quietly deleting “you sons of bitches” in order to
create a family-friendly poster — well, okay. But it took a lot of chutzpah
for somebody to look at Saroyan’s published text and see it as a rough
draft that he or she had license to work over. “See if they will not
pray again”: an entirely new concept introduced by Saroyan’s uncredited
co-author! Quite a far cry from the earthiness of two Armenians meeting
in a beer parlor and cursing. Speaking of prayers, in the original they
are “no longer uttered,” while in the rewrite they are “no longer
answered”— as if the tragically significant idea that post-genocide
Armenians no longer bother praying was too shocking and had to be
reversed.
And
what a difference between the sentimental nationalism of “For when two
of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New
Armenia,” on one hand, and “See if you can stop them from mocking the
big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians
talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them,” on the other.
C. K. Garabed calls the “New Armenia” sentence “completely gratuitous,”
and I agree. Yet most people who today are aware of William Saroyan, the
most famous of Armenian-American writers, know that ersatz sentence and
nothing else he ever wrote. This is the fate of a man who turned down
the Pulitzer Prize because he felt commerce shouldn’t judge art.
Ironists please take note.
It
gets worse. Close to the beginning of this great story that nobody
bothers to read, Saroyan writes, “There are only Armenians, and these
inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia, gentlemen,
there is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no
Italy, there is only the earth, gentlemen.” I’m not sure that would make
a best-selling poster to hang in every Armenian home; but while Saroyan
was indeed a proud Armenian, he was also a proud contrarian.
“The Armenian and the Armenian” is short — under two pages, it is placed carefully at the end of Inhale & Exhale,
the last of the collection’s 71 pieces. A lot is packed into those two
pages. Like most of Saroyan’s best work it is filled with humor,
vitality, contradictions. As in other writings, he seems to say: Being
Armenian is different and no better than being anything else, but it is
also the best thing in the world. He is saying: There is no Armenia, if
there ever was such a place it was destroyed, but you can’t destroy
Armenians. This is no more or less than he says in his great story
“Seventy Thousand Assyrians” in his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,
describing the Assyrian barber Theodore Badal as “himself seventy
thousand Assyrians and seventy million Assyrians, himself Assyria, and
man standing in a barber’s shop, in San Francisco, in 1933, and being,
still, himself, the whole race.”
The
third-to-last paragraph of “The Armenian and the Armenian,” the one
right before the notorious passage, is also worth quoting, with its
almost Whitmanesque catalog:
And
the Armenian gestures, meaning so much. The slapping of the knee and
roaring with laughter. The cursing. The subtle mockery of the world and
its big ideas. The word in Armenian, the glance, the gesture, the smile,
and through those things the swift rebirth of the race, timeless and
again strong, though years have passed, though cities have been
destroyed, fathers and brothers and sons killed, places forgotten,
dreams violated, living hearts blackened with hate.
In
other words, a more subtle version of “when two of them meet anywhere
in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia”? Not quite.
Saroyan embraced Whitman’s line from Leaves of Grass,
“Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself, / I am
large, I contain multitudes,” and made a pretty good career out it. The
Saroyan who writes in “Antranik of Armenia” (also included in Inhale & Exhale),
“Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better.…What
difference does it make what the nation is or what political theory
governs it?” is the same Saroyan who delights in hearing that the
countryman he encounters, thousands of miles from home, in a beer parlor
in Rostov, is from Moush. “Moush. I love that city,” he writes. “I can
love a place I have never seen, a place that no longer exists, whose
inhabitants have been killed. It is the city my father sometimes visited
as a young man.” At times Saroyan elevates the Armenian nation; at
other times he sounds like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses
who scoffs at the idea that he might be important because he belongs to
the Irish nation, stating that, on the contrary, “I suspect that
Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.”
So,
we can cozy up to the Saroyan who sounds like a worldly
post-nationalist, a man beyond the nation state, a citizen of the world.
Or we can embrace Saroyan the Armenian patriot who celebrates the
Armenian nation and longs for its revival. And in both instances we’ll
be dead wrong. And, also, partly correct. Strip Saroyan of his
contradictions and he’s no longer Saroyan, and no longer worth our time.
I think you either embrace Saroyan in all his contradictions — his
greatness and his mediocrity, his love of people and his misanthropy,
his ethnicity and his cosmopolitanism, his art-for-art’s-sake integrity
and his pursuit of commercial success, his self-destructible
individualism, his Christian anarchy (in the words of James Agee) — or
you don’t. Unfortunately, for the most part, it appears that people
don’t.
“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams once said. (At least, I think
he said it.) But perhaps even more stubborn than facts are myths. The
trumped up Saroyan “quotation” is a myth — both in the sense of “a
popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or
someone” and “an unfounded or false notion.” It is obvious that it
expresses something Armenians want or need to believe, and perhaps in a
way that the original might not. Sometimes, sadly, the big ideas of the
world get the last word. When that happens the least we can do is
consider for a moment what has been lost.[5]
NOTES
[1]
I want to make it clear that I am neither the first person to notice
this nor to write about it. (And, let’s face it, I probably won’t be the
last.) For example, in the August 8, 2009, edition of the Armenian Weekly,
C.K. Garabed penned a piece entitled “Mincing Words” that presented all
of the variants of the “quotation” that were known to him, without, as
he wrote, “the intent to be critical.”
[2] It also appears in the following collections: 31 Selected Stories from Inhale & Exhale (1943), The Saroyan Special (1948, reprinted in 1970), and most recently in He Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease: A William Saroyan Reader (2008).
[3] See “How I Came to Know Saroyan: The Story of a Poster,” Armenian Reporter, Nov. 1, 2008, and Saroyeaně yev Yes, Asbarez, Aug. 13, 2008.
[4] NAASR is where I work. I am its Director of Academic Affairs.
[5] My
thanks to Dickran Kouymjian for sharing his thoughts and recollections
regarding the Saroyan posters and his many insights about Saroyan’s
work; to Vartan Matiossian for his assistance; and to Zaven Khanjian for
responding to my queries.
"Creative Armenia," June 13, 2017 (www.creativearmenia.org)
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