Chance Meetings Read online

  CHANCE MEETINGS

  WILLIAM SAROYAN

  This book is a greeting to my contemporaries living in Armenia and writing in Armenian: Hrant Matevosian, novelist; Vahagn Davitian, poet; Levon Muggerditchian, critic; Razmik Davoyan, poet; Sergo Khanzadian, novelist; Maro Markarian, poet; and Grikor Gourzadian, astrophysicist, painter-philosopher. And also a greeting to Armenak Saroyan, infant great-grandson of Armenak Saroyan of Bitlis, 1814–San Jose, 1911.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter 1

  The thing about the people one meets on arrival, upon being born, is that they are the people they are, they are not the people any of us, had he indeed had a choice, might be likely to have chosen. These meetings are chance meetings.

  Certainly everybody between the age of two years and twelve years has studied such people and questioned their right to be related in any way at all to himself. Himself, the very center of the world, the justification for all time gone, the supreme achievement of the expenditure of all effort, at last a flawless specimen. Both human and superhuman, if only the truth were known.

  Are these people mine? This preposterous mad woman is my mother? This unbelievable loud-mouth man with the violent eyes is my father? How can such people be my people? There has got to be a very terrible mistake somewhere.

  And of course there is.

  There is this same terrible mistake back of every human being who is not yet thirteen or fourteen years old. And the mistake sometimes isn’t corrected, or at any rate isn’t ignored, even after the age of thirty. Now and then certain extraordinary people feel the pain of the mistake straight up to the event of death itself.

  These astonished and hurt souls are the geniuses, but there are also geniuses who have deeply cherished their parents. And if they haven’t both cherished and loved them, they have, at any rate, been so amused by them as to have never had any wish to have them out of the way.

  And these happy geniuses, so to describe them, are frequently the best of the lot.

  Mainly, though, geniuses are those who cannot be, or do not want to be, delivered from the feeling of being ridiculously involved in one colossal mistake.

  It is the impulse, the compulsion, or the wish, to try to correct this horrible blunder that drives these people to work and has them bring forth all sorts of forms of improved variations of the original thing—that is, the whole mishmash, the whole universe, if you like, the whole solar system, the whole world, the whole human race, the whole history of error, failure, madness, and death. The whole business of legends, stories, dramas, religions, cities, embracings, buildings, roads, ships, music, dancing, surgery, print, paper, paint, sculpture, you name it, for whatever its name may be, that is what genius deals in, and with.

  That is what genius wants to make straight, and to put in a bright light, corrected.

  Well, of course, this trying is all we really have, the rest is even less than this, the rest is really nothing when the tallying is done, the rest is ash, dust, and the invisible slag heaps of error and loss as big as solar systems.

  What these geniuses put forward is very little, compared with the potential, or with the original itself, all things already and for billions of years real and in place, but it is the only thing we have that is our own, that we have made, and after ourselves, after our continuous putting forward of ourselves, through the procedure invented or given as a gift by nature to all continuing things, after our most astonishing falling in with the procedure, our successful recreation of ourselves over billions of years, in all of our various forms, these things, this art, made by our madmen, our disgruntled boys, our violent girls, our geniuses, our refusers, our frequently sick boys and girls, these homemade things are all that we have, all that we call culture, civilization, and mortal glory.

  Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.

  If he wasn’t permitted to choose his parents, he should certainly have been permitted to choose the people he must have to deal with during his life, but this also is denied him.

  He can neither choose his parents, nor choose not to be drafted into the Army, even, for instance.

  Chapter 2

  Every person in the world has a favorite person, and if he is a sensible person, or a lucky one, his favorite person is himself, even if he doesn’t know that this is so, or knows it and pretends he doesn’t, or swears on a stack of Bibles that it isn’t so, because his favorite person is Jesus, for instance.

  But it is also possible that there are very smart people, very intelligent people, very wise in the mystic ways of the mind and soul, and hip to the tricks of the inner man, and it is also possible that these people, either in addition to being their own favorites, or instead of, have a great kinship with somebody else.

  Sometimes it is an animal, even, which of course to them is somebody else.

  Well, just who is a dog? Well, a dog is the owner, is he not? And the cat, who is the cat? Also, the owner. And the canary, who is the canary? Also, the owner. So again his favorite is himself, as D. H. Lawrence suggested long ago.

  And how about the strange people whose pets are boa constrictors? It is the same with them, too.

  And how about the people who have a child, or two children, or three, or four, or eight, or twelve? Who are those people, and who are their children?

  Well, again it is the same, although with the children it is drawing nearer to what goes on in the human experience in relation to approval, acceptance, admiration of one person by another.

  He is his own worst enemy, as they say, or, he is his own best friend.

  Variations of these remarks are spoken all the time, suggesting that nobody is really fully integrated, and that one side quarrels with another, except in the case of the person who is enchanted with himself, whereupon everything is quite nice all around, as far as it goes.

  Well, how far does it go?

  The person who approves of himself, does he also approve of his father, mother, brother, sister, neighbor, friend, and the human race in general?

  Yes, he does, sometimes, for in some approvers there is a force of energy that keeps moving out to everybody else.

  But on the whole, the person who thinks very highly of himself, and is not really very much in any real sense, is liable to find fault with everybody else, and with the whole world, and with the whole human race in it.

  Why?

  Well, finding fault supports this approval of himself, this admiration for himself. When he carefully considers the genius of a great scientist, he decides that the man’s achievement is actually an achievement of publicity, patronage, and favoritism, which compels him not to give up one iota of his admiration for himself.

  Still, while self-approval thus is seen to be mo
re often than not the mark of the nitwit, the fact remains that it is both desirable and necessary for every man in the world not to have contempt for himself, unless it is for the amusement of his friends, an act, a performance, and in reality a kind of superapproval of himself.

  For if a man actually does not find it possible to regard himself at least with courtesy, he must be a rotter, and he must know it, and this places upon him the choice between ceasing to be a rotter so that he can have a courteous relationship with himself, and therefore with his parents, his tribe, and the rest of the human race, or choosing quite simply to cease to be, at all.

  He can stop the rotter by a living effort, or he can stop him by killing him. It’s as simple as that.

  He can’t be both and not be phony. But how amusing a phony can sometimes be, just so the phony doesn’t happen to be your wife, for instance.

  Chapter 3

  Most of all I cherish having met the two people I had the good luck of meeting in the only way in which a meeting may be truly considered a meeting: my son Aram two hours after his birth in New York on Saturday September 25, 1943, and my daughter Lucy four hours after her birth in San Francisco on Friday January 17, 1946.

  Now, when you see a newborn human being, a new life, as one might put it, and it is somewhat intimately related to yourself, you are in fact seeing something, you are in fact meeting somebody, and inexperienced as I was when I first saw and met my son, I thought, “But this fellow’s old, he’s older than any old man I’ve ever seen.”

  And he seemed to be so intensely outraged that I thought, “Ah, he doesn’t like this at all, he doesn’t like being in that little body, he liked it better where he had been. He’s angry at his mother, his father, the human race, and everything else, because they’ve all ganged up on him and put him into that little body instead of letting him be everywhere, where he had been for so long.”

  And of course there is a little truth to this sort of thinking, because there is a little truth to any sort.

  Soon enough, however, I began to meet him, when, even before he was a week old, he wasn’t mad at me or anybody else. And I’m glad I did meet him, for such a meeting, a man meeting his son, even though even genetically it is now established that a son tends to inherit the character not of his father but rather of his father’s mother’s father’s brother’s son or something even more absurd and complicated than that—for such a meeting is a rather amazing event involving centuries of all manner of small and large accidents.

  All the same, having had the first intimate connection with his arrival, the newcomer is both legally and physically indentified as being my son, and I was glad that he was, disregarding his own seeming annoyance, anger, outrage, which I was happy to notice had soon become a kind of secret amusement.

  He was there. I met him soon after he arrived there. He was moving, he would grow, he would change, he would be a lot of trouble not so much to others as to himself, and so the Saroyan family would move along, the human race would keep going, both in faith and in ignorance, neither quite total.

  And so it was. He fought it out and fought it out. He met a girl and married her and they have a daughter of themselves, so to put it. A poem about this child that my son published in the Paris Review in 1972 pleases me:

  Little

  is what

  she is.

  I like that. I like him. I like his wife. I especially like their daughter.

  I met her when she was four months old. She was as serene as a sage. I liked that.

  I am really glad I met my son.

  And I am glad I met my daughter. But if I was confused by my son’s appearance and attitude soon after he arrived, I was really surprised by my daughter’s. As I told her when she began to ask about such things, when I first saw her, her face was all lopsided, perhaps because of the usage of certain birth-assisting metal instruments by the obstetrician.

  Who knows? I certainly don’t. When she was seven or eight years old, I told my daughter about herself at birth. She had been so ugly that, after pretending I was thrilled to see her, and walking down the hall at the Children’s Hospital in San Francisco I thought, “Ah well, I guess she’ll have a great mind, then. And perhaps be a writer.”

  After meeting your father and mother, meeting your son and daughter is the rounding out of that part of the human experience.

  Chapter 4

  All living things have faces: lions, elephants, camels, whales, sharks, cows, sheep, frogs, tadpoles, eagles, tigers, antelope, canaries, mosquitoes, worms, butterflies, cats, mice, bats, dogs, and horses, to name only a haphazard few.

  Well, the thing about people is that they frequently wear the faces that the other living things wear. Sometimes they even wear the faces of things that are not even members of the animal family. Everybody has seen somebody with a face that seems to be an apple, for instance.

  In the human face the eyes are supreme, or so they say, but such sayings are now and then not quite supported by the facts. There are toads in which the eyes are too big to be readily acceptable, although all seemingly unacceptable things are soon seen to be not only acceptable but pleasing, for the simple reason that these things have been studied in relation to the whole creature, and in a toad pop eyes are quite appropriate, if not quite instantly appealing. But of course they are not appropriate in people, where they also occur.

  The nose has a certain kind of importance in the matter of identity, for any man with a large nose has got to live accordingly, and we all know the touching story of Cyrano, as written by Edmund Rostand, who is said to have been an Armenian.

  Who said so?

  Several Armenians did, and with pride, too, adding, “Who else but an Armenian would write a play about a man with a big nose? No, sir, don’t dispute the truth, Edmund Rostand is an Armenian, and if you insist I will explain how the name was made acceptable to France. Yedvard Rostomian, that was his name, or something like that, and with the wisdom of his race he changed it to Edmund Rostand, let us be pleased about this and not say he should never have changed his name.”

  There are many kinds of noses, and the people who have noses that are not quite perfect are forever regretting it, and thinking poorly of their parents, or at least of one of them. But even noses change. A nose like a spear in youth, in middle age becomes something more like a shield, and in old age a little bit of a thing that looks like a button.

  At the outset I am proud to report two things: one, that I have a nose that was very nearly perfect from the beginning, and Roman, in the classic sense, but was broken when struck by a baseball bat before I was eleven, broken again when I was twenty-two, and again when I was forty-four—the last two times in minor automobile accidents.

  And twice the nose has been the object of surgical attention, both times by idiots who should have been rug peddlers, since the making of money was what they were really interested in.

  And two, I am proud to report that like Edmund Rostand himself I am an Armenian. Again and again it is good to get such things clear at the outset. Therefore, the reader is invited to study his nose and to name his nationality.

  Chapter 5

  I like to go out every day and find a story.

  Well, it’s not quite that cut and dried, and if the truth is told I don’t like to go out every day and find a story at all. I only like to go out, to go out. I can stay in and choose a story from out of a possible ten thousand stories always in my head, eyes, ears, nose, and throat.

  If it is time to write, you have already been out, you have already found a story, at least one for every day of your life, possibly two, three, or four. Perhaps even a dozen stories for every day.

  What is a story?

  It’s a writer with his mind made up to tell a story. To remember something, or to invent something. (It comes to the same thing.)

  But something happened when I went out at three in the afternoon of the day after Easter.

  I found my way up to Trinité and walked the full inter
ior length of that old church.

  I passed a businessman standing in a small alcove, staring at a hundred lighted candles. I couldn’t even begin to guess what might be eating him, why he was standing there that way.

  And last night I read the last chapter of The Red and the Black by Stendhal. In that chapter there was a lot of going to church and a lot of lighting of candles, but, then, that was in 1830, and this is 1972. What was a plain ordinary Paris businessman doing in Trinité, standing in front of burning candles, staring, and possibly even praying?

  The fact is I found the whole situation in The Red and the Black just a little overearnest, and rather laughable, if the truth is told. And yet the book is considered both a classic and a monumental achievement.

  Everybody in the story takes himself, and his ambition, and his busy little conniving mind, very seriously. The hero is a fatuous little bore.

  I can’t understand how he has won the sympathy of so many people for so long. They do identify with him, I understand, and when he goes to the guillotine for having fired two shots at a woman in a church, this very woman (who has been visiting him in jail and is madly in love with him) goes to his wife, who by law is in possession of his body and his severed head. She finds the wife kissing the lips of the head, an activity altogether out of order, very silly, and no proof at all of passion, love, helplessness, sorrow, despair, or even derangement—it’s just a little bit of writing of some kind.

  How long is the church going to have this hold over strange, unhappy, deceived, perfectly ordinary people—in novels, and out of them?

  Well, after the short walk through Trinité, I went up Avenue Clichy past the Casino where Zizi Jeanmaire, the long-legged dancer, is the star—but in her theatre photographs she looks different, not the way she looked at a party in Hollywood twenty years ago. At the party she looked young and alive, but now it is all art, effort, control, and things like that.