This state may continue for many years. Then comes the fall. It may be initiated by success in getting published. His view of himself as a writer shifts fundamentally. Writing must be for other people, not a narcissistic emanantion. There must be real characters (not transparant copies of the writer), plot, development. He begins to see his stacks of juvenilia as trails left from his thought-flow. A useful practice, an exercise in expressing oneself. But something to be embarrassed about if it should get out. Time to turn to the work of telling a story, close obversation, the arts of evoking particular feelings in the reader. Those who persist in believing that they have something to say are deluded. Their self-importance is laughable. All that ‘what you say’ is encompassed in how you say it.

“You will have to take my word for it that I believed the world would never be the same,” Saroyan writes of his first book. Most of the stories in this book purport to be directly autobiographical. “I am a young man in an old city. It is morning and I am in a small room.” Another story is a complete synopsis of a film starring Tom Garner, from the viewpoint of Saroyan’s seat in the movie theatre.

Now that I have been sullied by trying to get published, I find it hard to look at writing in the same way. Questions intrude: What type of man is this? How did he come to be? How did this get published? How does it fit in to other writing of that decade? What strands of the zeitgeist does he weave together?

And I always remember, I am reading this not because Saroyan wrote it, but because it was published. And no matter how much it may have the appearance of a diary, it is an act of communication. The confidence is there. His voice is worth listening to. Where did he get his self-image from, one young man walking through a city of millions? He doesn’t tell us in his writings. “I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know.”