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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1930
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30life33
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1930s) The Time Of Your Life
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Theater
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
The Time of Your Life
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(November 6, 1939)
</p>
<p> Out of a warm heart and a lively fancy William Saroyan has
written a paean in The Time of Your Life to the essential
goodness in life and people, a chant of love for the scorned &
rejected. He has filled a San Francisco waterfront dive with
prostitutes, sailors, cops, bums, drunks, slot-machine addicts,
hoofers, young men in love, old men in rags. Some of these
people are as touching as his battered Arab who plays an
ancient, mournful wail upon a harmonica. Some are as
uproariously funny as his prodigious, W.C.Fieldsy liar (Len
Doyle) who bursts on the stage with: "I don't suppose you ever
fell in love with a midget weighing 39 pounds?" All are forlorn.
But by means of a wealthy drunk (Eddie Dowling) with a generous
purse Saroyan gives back to these people some of their hopes &
dreams, something of their dignity.
</p>
<p> Says Saroyan: Cops have hearts and streetwalkers souls; it is
interference, institutions, authority that degrade humanity. And
in a gush of feeling, he preaches a benevolent anarchy of live-
and-let live. That feeling gives his play warmth, faith, also a
measure of falseness. For to exorcise evil and unhappiness,
Saroyan has to make the world cock-eyed and alcoholic, and all
its outcasts childlike and starry-eyed. His mushy idealism turns
his play with its god from the slot machine, into a fairy tale,
Saroyan takes the bread & butter of existence and smears it with
a lot of jam.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>