The Old Trapeze

THE ASSYRIAN AND OTHER STORIES (276 pp.) -- William Saroyan -- Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

That professional pixie, William Saroyan, is. back again, considerably older (41) than when he first announced himself a genius, somewhat heavier around his literary middle, but still wildly infatuated with the one subject that has always held his interest: himself. This time he opens a collection of eleven fair-to-Saroyan stories with a 26-page introduction which is so brash that it finally worries the reader into amusement.

The most unusual feature of Saroyan's sound-off is his announcement of how much money he has already made from selling The Assyrian's contents to magazines--$8,300. Of this sum he got $5,000 from Cosmopolitan for The Cocktail Party and $3,000 from the Saturday Evening Post for The Pheasant Hunter. Most of the other stories he could not sell at all, but three of them he let go free to a magazine apparently close to his Anatolian-American heart: The Armenian Review. Less unusual in an introduction, but still reminiscent of the old Saroyan trapeze act, is his advice to other writers:

P: A writer should bathe as often as he is in need of a bath.

P: He also should not do calisthenics, as doing them tends to upset him . . .

P: He should think all the time.

P: He should never strike a woman for getting her sexual hunger identified with socialized medicine . . .

P: A writer should never stop work on the job of creating his own character.

The Assyrian collection suffers precisely from the fact that Saroyan is so busy creating his own character that he has little time left for the characters in his stories. Bright and shiny on the surface but mushy and sentimental at the core, the stories are pretty much standard Saroyan: a boy steals a hammer and feels stripped of his dignity when caught; a wacky playwright buys a punch bowl and a dozen cups for $1,050 from Cartier without knowing how he is to pay for them; an abandoned boy is befriended by a bighearted bartender; a middle-aged writer gets the fantods in Lisbon. And all the while Saroyan is passing out breathless bromides about Love.

Of the two big-money yarns, The Cocktail Party is a woozy piece about a misunderstood writer who finds understanding in his young son; The Pheasant Hunter is a restrained and moving sketch of a boy who is learning to hunt. Saroyan was not exactly underpaid for either of them, but the second is good enough to suggest that if he could ever drop his vast enterprise in egocentricity he might write some first-rate stories.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.