Comfort and miracles - unfashionable books by unfashionable writers

"What is it with writers? What guts, what nerve, what presumption, what folly to imagine the stuff has got to get on paper, has got to get into print, has got to get onto a neatly designed page in a book, and out to the people, standing around in small disgruntled groups, waiting for it..."

These are the words of William Saroyan, from his experimental memoir 'Here Comes There Goes You Know Who'. Saroyan (1908-1981) was an Armenian-American playwright, novelist and short story writer who could fairly be described as a writer whose works are no longer fashionable. 

I'm a great fan of unfashionable books by unfashionable writers. I prefer them. For example, I recently read R C Sherriff's 'The Fortnight in September' (first published in 1931 and now available again, thanks to Persephone Books.) This is a novel about a very ordinary family's annual holiday in Bognor Regis. It doesn't sound like a page-turner but I love Sherriff's gentle prose, his startling use of imagery and his sympathy for his characters.

Another unlikely recent reading choice of mine was 'Sombrero Fallout', a 1975 novel by Richard Brautigan. Brautigan grew up in poverty in 1930s Washington but went on to become part of the San Francisco sixties counterculture. 'Sombrero Fallout' is a novel made up of very short chapters which almost read like a succession of prose poems. It's about a humourist dealing with the break-up of his relationship with a Japanese girlfriend. It's also about a story the humourist is working on involving a sombrero that's fallen from the sky. I found the book compelling, highly poetic and unexpectedly hilarious.

And then there's William Saroyan. I've been a fan of Saroyan's short stories for years, so I was delighted when, a few years ago, I found a first edition of 'Here Comes There Goes You Know Who'. (I came across the book at Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland - the amazing second-hand bookshop that occupies a beautiful 1887 railway station building.)  

Saroyan's life was perhaps too painful to describe in a linear, direct way. Born into a poor immigrant family, he spent part of his childhood in an orphanage because his widowed mother couldn't afford to support him. He went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940 and, in 1943, an Academy Award for an adaptation of his novel 'The Human Comedy'. Despite gaining fame and fortune as a writer Saroyan struggled with compulsive gambling. His isn't a life story to be told in a straightforward way, hence his tendency towards impressionism in his autobiographical writing and an irrepressible all-pervading sense of humour.  

Saroyan had begun writing 'Here Comes There Goes You Know Who' in 1960. As someone who was born in 1961, I was fascinated to read his thoughts on the opening years of the 1960s: 

"The year 1960 has a silly unreal look to it. The line-up of the numbers seems unfortunate ...and one must be sympathetic to anyone born in such a year. Next year will be different, though: the numbers will have a proper look to them: 1961, the two ones at each end making it something from which to derive comfort and to expect miracles. The interior nine and six are virtually flawless. How I envy the man born in 1961. He should have a good life..."