The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Faber Editions)

This collection of short stories by William Saroyan, originally published in 1934, is being reissued by Faber Editions this autumn. It reminded me of Dziga Vertov's film 'Man with a Movie Camera' (1929) - a young man in the city trying to capture experiences of everyday life.

Many of the stories are written in first person. As Stephen Fry observes in the introduction to the new edition, while the narrative voice is a fictional construct, it is tempting to assume it is Saroyan himself. The tone is so personal and reflexive, as he confides that this is the first thing he has written since getting his typewriter back from the pawnbrokers, or notes wryly at the beginning of a story that writing beginnings is difficult. Much of the charm of the stories is in this directness and appearance of frankness.

In one story, the narrator is an impoverished young writer who is acerbic in his praise of successful authors, including Hemingway. He claims with not-quite-believable bravado, and an undertow of resentment, that he has "no desire to sell this story or any story to the Saturday Evening Post or to Cosmopolitan or to Harper's.... I am not expecting Paramount Pictures to film this work." It is self-mocking, humorous and perhaps slightly reckless for Saroyan to have written like this.

There is vivid intelligence and lightness of touch to the best of these tales, which are full of interesting tangents (for example: "we see the universe through the language we know... and we isolate ourselves in the language we know.") However, it's not a relaxing read, as there is a pervasive sense of anxiety underpinning these stories which were written during the Great Depression. Recurrent motifs include hunger, poverty, unemployment, the long shadow of World War I, the elusiveness of success, and death. Saroyan is often flippant and humorous about these topics, and some of the jokes still land 90 years later, though they are riddled with cultural references that are less familiar now (it took me a minute to realise that NRA stood for National Recovery Administration, not National Rifle Association). As with many books from that era, there is a smattering of outdated/offensive language and attitudes, though thankfully not much.

The note about the author, at the end of the collection, felt like a happily-ever-after: 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze' became a bestseller in the 1930s, and Saroyan was later offered a Pulitzer Prize (which he turned down) and worked in Hollywood. Perhaps I am sentimental, but it is rather lovely that those pipedreams, that he claimed not to care about, came true.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy.