By Stuart Mitchner
In the time of your life, live — so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
—William Saroyan (1908-1981)
During the last week of August, my wife was watching HBO’s The Gilded Age while I made do with mercifully small doses of Lord Love a Duck (1966) on YouTube, a black comedy freaking out around the life-force of Tuesday Weld. At the end of a month of columns that began with Hiroshima (“A Song Cycle for the Sixth of August”), I learned from the Literary Book of Days that August 31, 1908 marks the birth of William Saroyan, who included the lines about “goodness” in the preface to his prize-winning play The Time of Your Life (1939). Also noted is that on the last day of August 1946, John Hersey’s landmark essay Hiroshima filled virtually an entire issue of the New Yorker, which is celebrating its centenary this month with a cover (“Being Eustache,” September 1&8) featuring photographic artist Cindy Sherman.
“The Time of Your Life”
In September 2025, Saroyan’s mandate to “seek goodness everywhere” seems touchingly out of touch with the current chaotic realities, as it may also have seemed when The Time of Your Life opened on October 25, 1939, as the Second World War loomed on the horizon. Written in six days in a New York hotel room, the play was a huge hit, bringing Saroyan a Pulitzer Prize, which he refused, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, which he accepted. His reason for refusing the Pulitzer was that “Commerce should not patronize art,” along with the fact that the play was “no more great or good than anything else I have written.”
Almost a decade passed before the film version starring James Cagney was released roughly three years after the war ended, an event celebrated this Tuesday, on the 70th anniversary of VJ Day. On the domestic front, the big news is that my wife gave up on The Time of Your Life last night. To be exact, she insisted on switching from a murky YouTube print shattered by ads to the streaming splendors of The Gilded Age. Expecting as much, given the groans of acute discomfort I’d been hearing (“This is awful! I can’t stand this!”), I surrendered without an argument and finished the film on my computer.
When it comes to cinema, foreign or American, Hollywood or television, for better or for worse, my wife and I are emotionally attuned: we cringe together and we cheer together, feel the same chills and thrills, register the same lows and highs. Having no particular investment in H.C. Potter’s film of Saroyan’s play, I forgave it the lapses that repelled my wife, in part because of my fondness for William Bendix, who has one of his better roles (“gentler” is James Agee’s word for it), and most of all because I was fascinated by James Cagney’s odd turn as “a sort of bush-league saint” (Agee again).
As may by now be obvious, when the film was over I turned to the author of “the most remarkable regular event in journalism today,” as the poet W.H. Auden once famously said of James Agee’s film reviews, a hallowed source for words of wisdom about all things cinematic between 1942 and 1948. In “Nearer My Agee to Thee,” the title of critic Manny Farber’s mildly heretical review of his colleague’s writing on film, Agee’s masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is demoted to a “Tol’able Jim classic” revealing only that Agee was “an unorthodox, unsure left-fielder” who “was able to build skyscrapers in art out of cross-purposes and clay,” a trope worthy of the master, who reviewed the filmed version of The Time of Your Life twice. Writing in The Nation (June 19, 1948), Agee pointed out that the picture “needs the live stage the way a fish needs water.” An earlier June 14 review in TIME calls it “a skillfully calculated improvisation for live actors on a rigid stage” with “an almost cabaret dependence on flesh-and-blood intimacy with the audience.” After praising the performances by Cagney and several others, Agee suggests that what might have been “as taut and resonant as a drum-head on the stage is relatively dull and slack on the screen,” just as it seemed to my wife during our YouTube viewing of a film she’s sure “nobody ever heard of.”
“Goodness” and “Schmaltz”
Without actually quoting from Saroyan’s “in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches” preface, Agee goes on to describe the playwright as “a very gifted schmaltz artist” who “requires more belief, more wishful thinking on the part of the audience, than better artists would dare require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist’s most difficult love affair.” (More cheers from my wife when she hears that the film was a box office flop.)
Jimmy Cagney
When I was growing up in the 1950s, he was Jimmy “You dirty rat” Cagney, a favorite subject for impersonators. What makes his portrayal of Saroyan’s Joe so compelling is the way the role contrasts with and even illuminates the genius gangster dancer he played in his 1930s prime. Guns are strangers to Joe, the well-dressed, monied mystery man who actually dons a pair of spectacles at one point and sits so still for so long at his table in Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, Restaurant and Entertainment Palace (where “you can come in and be yourself”) that you can practically see his dancer’s legs itching to hit the stage — especially when the “real” dancer played by Paul Draper is tiresomely tapdancing all around the joint (in the play he was played by a young Gene Kelly). True, there is a gun on the premises, a six-shooter Cagney examines (“so the bullets go in here?”) only to disprove Chekhov’s dictum that a gun mentioned in act one has to go off in act five. What goes off is vintage Cagney, roused at last from his table when the play’s vile antagonist harasses the onetime B-girl played by Cagney’s sister Jeanne. No firearm is needed, just “this” says the Jimmy we know, raising the fist that just knocked the creepy stalker to kingdom come. In the end, all is well with the world, Cagney is Cagney, and as for the other characters, cameraman James Wong Howe’s last and most revealing image shows William Bendix’s Nick taking down and tearing in half the big Come In and Be Yourself sign shown in the film’s opening shot.
Walt’s Here
I’m imagining a version of Nick’s saloon in Manhattan with Walt Whitman playing Joe, who asks every stranger “What’s the dream?” Or better yet, let’s say it’s Walt’s place and the mystery man is D.H. Lawrence. Today, when his book Birds, Beasts and Flowers surfaced from under a pile of old letters in the chaos of my room, I opened it at random to these words at the top of page 81: “It is your trump. It is your hateful little trump.” In fact, Lawrence, who died 95 years ago in France, is communing with a mosquito (“You pointed fiend”) whose “trump” is his “small, high, hateful bugle.” No preview of the future here, just one of life’s little ironies common to Walt’s domain, which contains multitudes.
At Walt’s, Charlie Yardbird Parker is spreading “free, unashamed” worlds of time-of-your-life jazz goodness (no schmaltz in this horn), while a very much alive Bruce Springsteen pounds rock and roll anthems out of the pinball machine as Clarence Clemons cheers him on and another New Jersey hero Stephen Crane, who was born 125 years ago, stares down the Creature lurking behind Mary (Frankenstein) Shelley, born in London August 30, as the bartender Charlie “Flowers of Evil” Baudelaire, dead in Paris on August 31, buys drinks for everyone. Outside on rainy St. Mark’s Place, a tall, thin tenor saxophonist named Wardell Gray, who died mysteriously in the desert May 25, 1955, two months after Charlie Parker’s March 12 death in New York, plays a rendition of “The Man I Love” known only to the angels on the rooftop.
Meanwhile Walt Whitman joyously sings of the joy of death, joys of the thought of death, a voice triumphant, justifying all, bridging the way from life to death, accepting, exulting in death in its turn the same as life — What invigorates life invigorates death.”
At the Song of Myself Marathon on Saturday, September 13 Walt’s people will be reading all 52 sections of Leaves of Grass at the Granite Prospect in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Anyone who wants to read can sign up by emailing songofmyselfmarathon@gmail.com by September 6. For further information, email info@waltwhitmaninitiative.org.