Barbaric Yawp

INHALE & EXHALE--William Saroyan-- Random House ($2.50).

Until William Saroyan burst from his cell last year with a whole series of yells, Dikran Kouyoumdjian (Michael Arlen) was the only Armenian writer U. S. readers were aware of. Apart from their ancestry the two have little in common. Michael Arlen, called brilliantine if not brilliant, has taken all Mayfair for his province. William Saroyan is astounded, delighted, agonized by the mystery of his own breathing. His first collection of outbursts was called The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (TIME, Oct. 22, 1934). His second is even more appropriately titled Inhale & Exhale.

Like Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River), Saroyan writes about himself, but in a more Whitmanesque vein: he is large, he contains multitudes. Touted as a short-story writer, mostly because his "stones" are written in prose, he seldom sets down a formal narrative. Most of his "stories" are poetic shouts--no less lyrical for being written in street-language with many a cuss word--swelling the chorus of a "Song of Myself." It might almost have been Saroyan who wrote:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Subjects of the 71 pieces in Inhale & Exhale range from the reminiscences of a (Saroyan) schoolboy to speculative statements on the (Saroyan) universe. But whether the scene is barbershop, vaudeville, honkytonk, back street or California valley, Saroyan's brooding eye sees more in it than would meet an ordinary fact-finding glance. He sits through a custard-pie cinecomedy "but God Al mighty it didn't seem funny to me and I sat in the darkness trying to laugh, but I kept thinking, 'Why are they wasting everything, why are they making all these mistakes, why is everybody so awkward and mean, what is the God damn meaning of this stuff?' "

Caring nothing for art ("to hell with art"), everything for Life ("No one is reading the story of life, and no one is writing it"), Saroyan finds himself in the dilemma of every serious writer: how to say what he means without getting tangled in the means of saying it. His second book shows that he still has something to say but is not yet sure of how to say it. Inhale & Exhale announces his creed but does not propagate his gospel.

"I'll begin to think about making up things. Stories, maybe, that will have the effect of improving the vision of man, of elevating his spirit. . . . I don't know if it is ever possible for anyone actually to improve life, and I imagine that it isn't, but all the same I think it is worth while to want to, and the more I think about this, the more I am convinced that this is essentially the job of every man who writes, and that anything else any of us do is irrelevant. . . . I cannot stop wanting to say something because it is all around me, everywhere I go great prose is all around me, in the streets, in the dirt and ugliness, in the lost men, and I know that it needs only a humble and pious language for translation, and I pray to God and everything else to let me have this language, so that I may be able to say the clean word, to utter the place and the time, my country, big broad America, coming up out of the evil days and being lithe and powerful."

Critics last week applauded Saroyan's ambition, but could not agree that his language had become "humble and pious." On the importance of Saroyan himself they were about evenly divided. Some damned with faint praise, some fanned him with dainty phrases. Few would say straight out whether he was a genius or a fake. Even his admirers admitted he had more than a touch of the charlatan; even his contemners allowed that he was at least singed with the divine fire.

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