In Tribute: My Favorite Town, Fresno By William Saroyan, 1952

I discovered the human race there. I discovered art there. And wherever you discover helpless man and his high hope, that is your place, or not. What is his hope? His hope is for meaning, for meaning is everything; anything; and he achieves meaning, inventing it or discovering it, through art.

Who was the human race I discovered in Fresno? It was my family, my neighbors, my friends, the teachers at school, the classmates, the strangers in the streets, and myself; most of all myself and the strangers which were not strangers, which could not be strangers because I saw them, recognized them, knew them. Were the strangers any good at all? Was it possible to believe in them at all? They were good: good and hopeless; and that is why I discovered art, for I was glad they were good, and angry that they were hopeless, for I didn’t want them to be hopeless. If they were hopeless, then of course so was I, and I didn’t want to be hopeless.

My mother’s cousin, Hovagim Saroyan, dead thirty-five years now, was the human race. He had a vineyard of thirty acres of Muscats in Goshen, a railroad siding eight or nine miles out of town, or was it Lone Star? I know it wasn’t Malaga, for I had other relatives there. Hovagim was a man who seemed to have been made of bone and stone, and yet no one laughed with so much joy and compassion; softly sometimes, almost silently, and other times loudly and with all of his body, so that he fell or flung himself to the ground, rolled over, leaped up, and nearly died. Perhaps it was laughter that killed him at thirty-seven. I don’t know. I’ve never been able to decide what it is that ends mortal life. He lived alone on the vineyard in a kind of shack-house in which among other things was a phonograph and a dozen records of songs of Armenia, Kurdistan, and Turkey. He had a cow. He had a revolver and a shotgun. He had a horse and a buggy. Two or three times he brought the horse and the buggy to the little house on San Benito Avenue, picked up my brother Henry and myself, and took us to the Goshen vineyard. At sundown he got out his shotgun and we went along with him to the Muscat vines to see what we would see. We saw jackrabbits which were pests, which ate the young shoots of new vines. Hovagim shot them and they leaped and died. We saw quail, doves, and kildees, but better than seeing kildees was hearing them as they plunged straightaway, wailing clean and clear at the enormity of being part of life, a cry both joyous and despairing, which I shall never forget and which shall always be associated in my thinking and memory with the human race and one of its first exponents, Hovagim. After dark we walked back to the house, and there he cooked supper and we sat down in the light of the kerosene lamp and ate and talked–in a mixture of bad Armenian and bad English. After he put a record on the phonograph and we listened to the old music. He put his water-pipe in order, sat on the floor, and smoked, and listened to the old music. It was said of him that he had a wife in Bitlis, and two sons; but the wife had died, the sons had gone along to her father’s house. Hovagim was alone in California. No one was so fiercely devoted to kindness and truth as this lonely man. In the last years of his short life he took another wife; but one knew he’d lost his life when he’d lost his wife and his sons. Suddenly I was at his funeral and that was the end of Hovagim, except that here I am thirty-five years later writing about him.

Hovagim was the human race: sorrowful, lonely, laughing.

There were others, many others: relatives, friends, strangers.

Huff sold popcorn from a wagon on the Republican Corner when I sold papers there every night after school. He was a skinny old man with a large patch of black cloth over his left eye and cheek. At first glance people were frightened by his appearance; perhaps at second, too. I do not remember anybody stopping to chat with him. He seemed grim, if not sinister. Actually he was a lonely old man who lived in a furnished room, whose only possession in the world appeared to be his popcorn wagon, whose only place in the world was The Republican Corner. From his room he pushed his wagon to his corner every morning around ten, and back again every night around ten. Huff and I became friends when he was perhaps in his late seventies and I was nine or ten. I had been selling papers on that corner about a month before we began to speak to one another. One rainy night he called me over to the wagon and handed me a bag of popcorn. I thanked him and ate the popcorn. It was very good. After that, we began to be pals. Every night when things were quiet, almost nobody in the streets, we stood and talked. Huff, I discovered, was an atheist, but like so many small-town atheists he kept his ideas to himself and he was very deeply a good man, perhaps a religious one. I remember that when he remarked that the human race was vicious I could not feel that he was speaking with hatred: I felt rather that he spoke with regret, compassion, and perhaps even love. He named writers whose books he had read with his one eye, which was itself inflamed, watery, and appeared to be on the verge of falling out of his head. As time went on I became entirely oblivious of his physical appearance because I sensed his inner handsomeness. He was proud and independent. One night I offered to push the wagon home for him, for I lived in the same direction, but he would have none of it. And then, weeks later, perhaps months later, one night he asked if I would get the wagon home for him. Doing so was fun, but I knew he must be very ill. The following day when I reached the corner with my papers Huff wasn’t there. I went to the house on Mono Street where he lived and the landlady said he was sick in bed. I visited him in his room. As we talked I knew how ill and tired he was and yet how eager he was not to give over and die. He wanted to stay in the world. He wanted to get back to The Republic Corner with his popcorn wagon, so he could go on beholding the human race and being a member of it. He asked if I would come by the following day during my lunch hour. I said I would. He was up, sitting on a chair, waiting, very tired. He asked if I would push the wagon to the corner for him. I did, and left him there and went back to school. After school I found him there, smiling faintly, because he was so ill. This procedure continued for a month. In the meantime from the public library I got the books he had read and began to read around in them: Ingersoll, Paine, Emerson. I read swiftly and carelessly but I think I got what was important for me to get: that the human race is anything any of us wishes to notice and believe it is, and that it can be anything we hope. Huff and I talked about these things. Since it is true, I must remark that now and then I found myself suddenly disliking him very much — his terrible deterioration, his bad luck, his misery and loneliness, his insistence on staying alive at his corner of the world, his very appearance and smell — but soon enough this dislike would pass and I would know that whoever he was, whoever he had been, he was a good man, a helpless one, an earnest one, my neighbor, my friend, my contemporary. Every day at noon and every night at ten for a month or so I got his wagon back and forth. I knew he was dying. I even asked if he wanted to go to the County Hospital out by the Fairgrounds and get in bed and rest the rest of his life. He did not. He wanted to follow the schedule we were following. One day at noon the landlady told me he had died during the night, and so I never saw him again. I didn’t go to his funeral. I don’t even know if he had one. The theory about old men around town like Huff was that they were misers, that they had great wealth hidden away somewhere. I never believed any of this about Huff. I knew he had a popcorn wagon for some time. I never saw the wagon again, either.