Word: saroyaned
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This is the play that seven years ago took both the Pulitzer Prize and the Critics' Circle Award, made the reputations of Gene Kelly and William Bendix and the fortune of William Saroyan. With Julie Haydon the only holdover from the original cast, it's still a very good play. Characters like the Arab and Nick and McCarthy are indestructible, even on the borscht circuit. Regardless of who asks it, "Did you ever fall in love with a 39 pound midget?" will always be a funny line...
...ADVENTURES OF WESLEY JACKSON (285 pp.) - William Saroyan - Harcourt, Brace...
...took a world war to slow down William Saroyan's output. Even critics who found his 20-odd books and plays raddled with verbosity and cuteness conceded that they were sometimes beauty-spotted with comic genius. Saroyan, out of the Army now, is 37, a bit heavier, a bit graver, and a well-domesticated citizen of San Francisco. He lives in a two-story stucco house, with wife Carol and two children (Aram, 2½, and Lucy, four months), sprinkles the lawn, and sits at his work desk studying the Racing Form with practiced...
...hunch is wrong. It is more like a parody on almost all his worst weaknesses. He has loosened his loose, gabby prose until it is as flabby as Nesselrode custard. His hero, Private Wesley Jackson, is a writer-of the Saroyan persuasion. He even has the Army job Saroyan had: writing scenarios for training and documentary films. And just to moisten the damp resemblance, Saroyan makes him a precocious Californian: Wesley is published in the New Republic when he is only 18-but it never goes to his head. Nothing does...
Scared Girl, Crazy World. Wesley gets his life direction (to find "his girl") while unconscious with pneumonia. But all the poor boy can find are careless loves. Like all Saroyan's "little people," he dreams of many "higher things," including a son as yet unconceived. Finally, in London, he finds "his girl"-an epitome of those vacant people who tinkle brightly through Saroyan stories like Christmas-tree bells...