by Christopher Atamian
It’s never easy existing in the shadow of a more famous or accomplished artist, just ask Salieri who labored for years, an accomplished composer who never quite reached his friend and rival Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s brilliance. And if the more famous or talented person in question is your cousin, as William Saroyan was to Archie Minasian, then it may be even more difficult.
In this case all reports seem to point to the contrary: Minasian and Saroyan not only grew up together in Fresno, but they remained lifelong friends. Both jovial and larger-than-life characters, they seemed to revel in each other’s company and success, at least at is has been reported to date. Saroyan did his best to help his cousin, including writing one of the best essays about Minasian in “The World of Archie Minasian,” where he posits that his self-taught cousin was like the true poets of yore who write from the heart and without having necessarily read or studied much literature before — he is the thing and the purity of his writing and thought, Saroyan asserts, is a rarity.
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He was self-taught, in part because necessity would have made it impossible for him to attend school, even had he wanted to. Like most Fresno Armenians at the time, Minasian was born on August 2, 1913 to poor Armenian immigrant parents. He was named Khatchik after his grandfather who perished immediately following the Hamidian massacres in 1897. His father, Vahan, died when Archie was 6 years old, leaving six children and a wife behind to fend for themselves.
While Saroyan was able to make a good living from his work publishing books and writing plays like “The Time of Your Life,” which won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Minasian remained in the shadows. Instead, he published occasional pieces in Ararat and the Armenian Weekly and worked as a house painter his entire life to support his family, which brought him great joy. Many of the topics he wrote about, including nature, human relations and man’s place in the grand scheme of things, as well as his pared down but upbeat, jovial writing style, recall Saroyan as well. Minasian is best remembered as a poet, though he also wrote hymns and some good prose as well.
In “The Celebrated House Painter of Palo Alto,” an autobiographical short story, Minasian begins with a jubilant description of his children frolicking all around him; the scene could accompany a Norman Rockwell illustration. Then the central theme of the story, and of much of Minasian’s writings takes over: the love of nature and the need for communing with the natural world and the everyday things that surround you: “The urge for the open air became overwhelming, and I felt compelled to fulfill this seasonal awakening, the animal desire, the thaw of the lumbering soul. I declared myself a dividend (not in cash) and we drove southward through the great valley, (past Ezo’s lair), to Dinuba, a small community whose lush orchards and vineyards, neatly furrowed by pride and labor, sprawled contentedly under the hot sun. Nothing seemed amiss here, only warm winds and the scent of growth. I always enjoyed visiting this end of the valley, and always with a sense of envy, where the Sierras rise distinctly in a huge arc to the east, like a monstrous arm enclosing the vast farmlands.”
Here in rich vocabulary and original turns-of-phrase, Minasian equates the “thawing of the soul” with that of nature — man has tamed nature, yet nature also encircles man “like a monstrous arm enclosing the vast farmlands.”
For Minasian, nature provides a way to recharge the soul, especially when faced with human duplicity or cunning.
In one of the only essays on Minasian’s poetry, Saroyan qualifies his cousin’s work by the now dated term “Asiatic,” by which I believe he means an economy of language, a favoring of image over linguistic niceties, a form perhaps best exemplified by the Japanese art of Haiku. Though Minasian’s poetry is not as brief nor as codified as Haiku, there is indeed something quintessentially pared down about his use of the language, as in the following poem, “Memories of my Father”:
The wind spoke to me
I went to the orchard,
Leaves came down
Of every kind
With busy whisperings
I could not understand
Interestingly, nothing in the poem describes his father per se; rather the rustling of leaves and “whisperings” reminiscent of many children’s memories of parents speaking in hushed tones late at night, evoke Minasian’s memories of his late father.
And in the following poem, titled “How foolish the sweating men,” Minasian uses 10 couplets to juxtapose the serenity of nature and farm to the vain toil of man. The first eight describe the beauty and effortless purity of nature
“How pure the air we breathe
And our thoughts;
“How inviting the lushy meadows,
The wandering girls by roadsides;
“How still the air,
How dense the views we pass;
And so on until the tenth couplet like an anvil descend upon the reader, who has been waiting since reading its title for this wonderful conclusion:
“How foolish the men sweating in orchards,
Shaking peach and the last ripe plum.”
Rather than pass summary judgment, Minasian rather tosses out man’s foolishness as if a mere evidence, his vanity present up until the last fruit that he shakes out of the peach and plum trees. So much effort, so much toil when nature already has everything perfectly planned out ahead of time.
Minasian was also a gifted painter. Legend has it that one day out of the blue he simply went out and bought canvas and paints and began to paint. Like his writing, much of his painting concentrates on nature, beautiful watercolor landscapes which can be seen at the web site for the remarkable organization Forever Saroyan: https://www.foreversaroyan.com/three-poems-by-archie-minasian. This organization, started and run by Saroyan’s cousin, Charles Janigian, has become a veritable treasure trove and archive of all things Saroyan and Minasian. It also organizes presentations and public lectures on the two writers, as well as (re) publishes much of their writing, ranging from psalms, to short stories, watercolor prints and just about anything the two ever wrote, including the fascinating compendium “William Saroyan & Archie Minasian: The Complete Correspondence, 1929–1981”! Anyone interested in reading some lovely lyrical poetry, or with a particular interest in Minasian or Saroyan, would do well to check out this remarkable site.
Writer Aris Janigian has singled Minasian out as one of our most gifted poets, and indeed he deserves to be read by this generation of readers, if nothing more than for the simple almost Buddhist outlook that he presents on life. In a sense, Minasian is also godfather to a long line of accomplished Armenian-American poets that stretch down to writers such as Aaron Poochigian, Lory Bedikian and Peter Balakian. You can also read some of Minasian’s work at the Armenian Poetry Project, the brainchild of another talented Armenian poet, Lola Koundakjian: https://armenian-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/11/.
