Burning Bridges Brilliantly
The young writer wanted the world to know of the greatness of John
Sanford. But the combative author wouldn’t make it easy – until now
West Magazine (A Supplement of the Los Angeles Times)
Sunday, March 5, 2006
By Aris Janigian
Every year about this time, as winter edges into spring, I think about
driving to Santa Barbara to visit my good friend John Sanford. Situated
on a cliff, the cemetery where he rests is one of the most beautiful
I’ve ever seen.
“This land’s-end place,” Sanford described it in some of the last words
he ever wrote, “seems to be bounded only by sea and sky, and what sound
can be heard there is the wind, the surf, and, if rain has fallen, the
shrill of shore-birds come to drill the softened earth.”
I want to stand in the sun of that place and lay my hand on his simple
headstone. I want to go, but for four years now I’ve found a dozen
last-second reasons not to. And so March 5, the anniversary of his
death, passes and I tell myself, “Maybe next year.” My discomfort with
cemeteries might explain it – I’ve visited my father’s grave only a
handful of times in 15 years – but it probably goes deeper than that. My
wife wears a wedding ring that belonged to John’s wife, Marguerite
Roberts; my daughter’s middle name is Marguerite in her honor. John
Sanford helped shape my writing and my life, but the friendship was also
complicated and deeply pained. Maybe I don’t go so I won’t be reminded.
At the same time, how could I possibly forget?
I met Sanford a little more than 20 years ago, not long after I returned
from a semester abroad in England reading Dickens and Wordsworth and
Keats, my head swirling with fantasies of becoming an author myself.
While abroad, I had also fallen in love with a girl whose father, Tom
Andrews, was dean of our college, Westmont in Montecito. Over the years
he had cultivated relationships with a number of writers in the Santa
Barbara area and had recently become acquainted with Sanford.
I had no idea who Sanford was, and because I fancied myself a serious
reader I assumed that he couldn’t be much. Andrews handed me Sanford’s
“The Winters of That Country” so that I could judge for myself, and from
page one I knew it was like nothing I’d ever read. Chillingly subtitled
“Tales of the Man-Made Seasons,” the book was a 349-page recitation of
American barbarity over 500 years, from the earliest settlers to the
Vietnam War – a work of history, but of the most renegade sort. In scene
after scene, Sanford spurned the detached air of the historian, and
instead returned to the site of the transgression and recounted it in
real time and in the very idiom of the perpetrator, witness or victim.
Here was a voice as deep and harrowing as a prophet’s, and the more I
got into it, the more I was convinced that “Winters” was a masterpiece.
I also knew that the master lived a few miles away, just around the bend.
John Sanford was born Julian Shapiro in 1904. His father, an attorney,
raised a family of four in an upper-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in
Harlem until the stock market crash of 1907 set him back. The defining
event of his life was the death of his mother when he was only 10. That
loss left him confused, embittered and emotionally orphaned, and his
passage for the next several years was troubled. He floundered through
high school and later enrolled at Fordham University to study law. He
seemed to finally find a footing when, on the golf course one day, he
ran into his boyhood friend Nathan Weinstein. Shapiro asked him what
he’d been up to and Weinstein replied, “I’m writing a novel.” Those four
words worked on Sanford like a spell. Try as he might, he couldn’t shake
it. At the age of 25, he abandoned law and started writing stories.
Shapiro and Weinstein, concerned about prejudice against Jews, renamed
themselves John Sanford and Nathanael West. They would eventually rent a
cabin in the Adirondack Mountains for a summer of novel writing. “Pep”
West was working on “Miss Lonelyhearts” and Sanford on his first novel,
“The Water Wheel.” He would later describe the old cabin in the second
volume of his autobiography:
There was no running water in the kitchen or anywhere else, and no
power-lines ran to the cabin from North Creek or Lake George. When you
needed light, you used a coal-oil lamp, a glass jar in which a wick lay
coiled like a tapeworm in formaldehyde.
For all their remoteness that summer, these two young writers were
manning the trenches of the literary avant-garde, dispatching stories to
little magazines that were devoted to writing “in the American Grain,”
as William Carlos Williams would call it.
One of those little magazines, Contact, was edited by Williams himself,
along with Robert McAlmon and his friend Pep. Sanford was invited to
contribute to the inaugural issue, but when he fired off the story “Once
In a Sedan and Twice Standing Up,” Williams blushed at the sexual
allusion and asked Sanford to change the title. Sanford refused, and a
while later West broke the news to him: “By the way, Bill tells me your
story will not be printed in No. 1.” The offhanded way West put it ate
away at Sanford, and at a public dinner party he let his friend have it.
“What you are, Pep, is a sheeny in Brooks’ clothing!” And then to finish
off the friendship, he went right for West’s Ashkenazi heart: “I knew
you when your name had two syllables.”
A few weeks after I finished “Winters,” Tom Andrews drove me and his
daughter to Sanford’s house for a visit. As we pulled up his driveway, I
saw him: an old man in chinos and a plaid shirt watering orchids on his
front porch. Up close, he was short, a little pudgy, and he had a
boyishly round face with impish brown eyes.
We gathered in his writing studio, a huge room with books hugging the
walls, and above the shelves wood shades drawn over deeply set windows.
Sanford was funny, playful and full of energy – with his hands he’d slice
this way and that way to animate the conversation. But he hardly held
court that day, as I imagined he had the right to. Rather, he was
solicitous of my opinions, and whenever I’d let loose a rambunctious
notion – I had plenty in those days – he’d kindly square up on it and
consider it for a spell. I was 24, and he was 80. I was tenacious, and
he was generous. I left his house that day vowing to myself that we
would be friends.
Both of my grandfathers died well before I was born. Maybe this explains
why I have always been so fond of old men. There were four or five in
our neighborhood in Armenian town in Fresno, and I remember wondering
about them as they strolled up and down our block flicking their
strung-up marbles, what someone called worry beads. In college, when
most students hovered around the young hotshots, I followed the old
professors, often all the way across campus, with questions. In my early
30s, I roomed for three years with the great folklorist Albert Friedman,
who was then 75. I suppose I like old people for the same reason I like
wandering through ancient ruins or a rustic village off the beaten path.
They are both openings out of the pandemonium, places that time has all
but finished with and where I can take in the full measure of life.
For several years after I met Sanford, I made a monthly drive from
Claremont, where I was now studying, to the hills of Montecito to spend
an afternoon with him (always after 2 p.m., when his writing day was
done). I came loaded with questions, and he always had a fair share of
his own for me.
He wanted to hear about my struggles with school, writing and family,
and when I’d lay them out for him I sometimes felt as if he was getting
a second look at himself at my age. I was in a doctoral program in
psychology (just as he had studied law), trying to write poetry on the
side, and he told me, “Kid, to write well you’ll have to unlearn
everything you’ve learned in the classroom.” For a while, I deliberated
about dropping out and pursuing an MFA in creative writing. “Sounds like
those places where they sanitize the sewage. Stay in head-shrinking if
you have to.”
For the most part, the generation gap was absent, but when it did open
up it was comically wide: “Now when you say rap music, kid, do you mean
what you do to a sandwich?”
“A word processor? How does that work? You throw in a bunch of sentences
and press a button.”
I’d laugh it up to the rafters when he poked fun at me, and he wasn’t
above poking fun at himself. He’d lift fan letters off his desk, read
out loud their high praise and then declare, “The man clearly has no
taste in literature.”
We’d discuss anything and everything – his wife Maggie, Ronald Reagan,
racehorses (he owned a few in his day), Israel, the McCarthy hearings,
Pound versus Williams. As we’d walk out to his mailbox, he’d point to
the woodpecker that was making a racket in his tree: Melanerpes
formicivorus, he wanted me to know, not to show off, but rather, in
summoning its scientific name, he hoped to protect it from a kind of
cheapening.
And yet there were times when our conversation would come to a menacing
standstill, and I could see the fireball that he had hurled at West
flash from behind his eyes. Sanford brooked no foolishness, but he had a
way of turning one’s most innocent remark into that or worse.
He would seize on something I’d said and grow quiet before warning: “I
hope I didn’t hear you right, kid.” I would have to make a sudden
decision about whether to back down or stand my ground.
Inch by inch our friendship grew, and as it did, my passion for his
work, the scope and seriousness of it, grew in proportion.
I began to pitch his books to others with missionary zeal. I sent his
books to famous writers and asked them to spread the word. I copied
pages from “Winters” and posted them around the Claremont campus. The
absence of his name in the critical literature, I swore to friends,
amounted to conspiracy. There wasn’t a single mention of him in
“American Writers,” a 13-volume production by Scribner; no Sanford in
“Contemporary Novelists” or the “Oxford Companion to American
Literature” or the “Readers Encyclopedia of American Literature” or
“World Authors.” “Who’s Who in America” hadn’t even indexed him.
Not long after we met, I teamed up with a friend to interview Sanford.
We submitted it to every literary magazine of any merit. Conjunctions,
one of the better avant-garde journals of the ’80s, rejected it, as did
the Partisan Review. The Paris Review hadn’t heard of him, and neither
had Grand Street. Even Zyzzyva, a West Coast operation, turned down the
interview.
Undaunted, I approached Michael Silverblatt of KCRW-FM’s “Bookworm,” one
of the best radio shows about fiction in the country. He said that he’d
heard of Sanford, but, frankly, I doubted it. Most people, I’d come to
realize, confused him with the suspense writer John Sandford. So I sent
Silverblatt half a dozen of his books. Several months passed, and I was
about to give up hope when Silverblatt contacted me.
He was bowled over and asked to do the interview. I called John with the
good news. He said that he couldn’t make it to Los Angeles. I offered to
schlep him there and back.
“Forget it, kid,” he told me, “I don’t see the point. If they want to
know what I’ve got to say, let them read my books.”
Thankfully, Silverblatt wasn’t one to give up easily either. He had
never done an interview outside the KCRW studio in Santa Monica, but he
managed to secure the facilities at a sister station on the campus of UC
Santa Barbara for this one.
John agreed, but when I called him a couple of days in advance to
confirm the time, he changed his mind. “Forget it,” he said, “I don’t
want to walk all that way.” He meant from the parking lot to the studio.
So Silverblatt offered to take the studio to John’s house. “You don’t
let go, do you, kid? What the hell, then, since it means so much to you.”
The interview was aired in two segments in 1993. Silverblatt ended it
with these words: “John Sanford writes some of the greatest prose that
we’ve heard in America, and it really is American prose in that it is
prose about the American conscience.”
I told John when it was being aired. “Don’t expect me to listen,” he
said with a chuckle. “I didn’t care for how I sounded the first time
around. I’d be a fool to put myself through that again.”
The stubbornness he exhibited with Silverblatt was the rule, and the
salvo he had launched at West was just one of hundreds.
The sweet old man that I had befriended could be a real “prick,” as he’d
often describe himself. Feeling slighted or put upon, he’d shoot off a
letter – a tirade – to an acquaintance or friend. The results were usually
devastating. John’s first literary executor, Paul Mariani, a world-class
scholar who had written extensively on some of the giants in American
literature, got hit with one. So did the gentleman who should have been
his next executor, Tom Andrews.
Then one afternoon John asked me, “Do you believe that my work will get
its due in the future?” I told him, “Yes, but I don’t think it will
happen overnight.” My answer apparently sufficed. He asked me to be his
literary executor. I was honored, though with most of his friendships
dead, I recognized that the job was pretty much mine by default.
It was also a job laden with danger. I had known John long and well
enough to realize that the closer you got to him, the more you were
subject to preposterous tests of devotion. I had weathered several over
the years, but there was one I barely survived. In the spring of 1995,
the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara was doing a musical adaptation of
Sanford’s masterpiece “To Feed Their Hopes,” dubbing its production “An
American Cantata.”
John waffled about going, but then said, “What the hell.” When I asked
him if he wanted me to take him, he told me he’d catch a ride with
Elaine Kendall, the lyricist who’d also been badgering him to go. “See
you there,” I said. But I never did. The next morning I called: “Hey,
John, what happened to you last night?”
“You screwed me!” he hollered. “You screwed me!”
I had no idea how, and he didn’t want to say. Finally I dragged it out
of him: He’d expected me to pick him up. Picturing him sitting there in
his old suit, glancing at the clock, before turning bitterly to bed, I
felt terrible, but not responsible. For weeks I tried to patch things up
over the phone, only to have him hang up on me. I decided for a surprise
showdown, face to face. It worked. “Forget about it,” he said, “I don’t
want to talk about it anymore. The damage is done.”
There were certainly easier tasks in this world than promoting John
Sanford. He had burned nearly every bridge I might have used to advance
his reputation. He killed his relationship with his agent, inflamed
editors and publishers, and one by one cut his connections to other
writers. He begrudged promoting his books and did few signings, all
local, no readings (“I’m a writer, not a carnival barker”) and led no
writing workshops – the stock-in-trade of writers today.
Once I asked him if he’d like to do a stint at the famous Bread Loaf
Writers’ Conference. “Now what commerce would I have with a bunch of
bakers?” was his answer. Way back when, John might have schmoozed with
writers in Hollywood, but not now. “They like to sit around and talk
about themselves, and they booze it up more than I care for.”
For all of John’s irascibility, his love for his wife, Marguerite, could
not have been deeper or more even-keeled. The way John painted it, their
life together was so paradisiacal that children were viewed as an
intrusion. “We talked about it just once,” he told me, “and neither of
us was interested. I suppose we didn’t want anything to get in the way
of each other.” I met her once, and was moved by his affection toward
her. She wore thick glasses, was old and frail and tiny, but he slung an
arm around her and beamed like a teenager: “Aris, I’d like you to meet
my girl, Maggie.”
The romance began in Hollywood shortly after he’d been called out from
New York to write screenplays on the strength of his second book, “The
Old Man’s Place.” Marguerite Roberts was a screenwriter herself, one of
the best in the business. At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, she wrote for
Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck, and
among her credits were “Honky Tonk” and “True Grit.”
They dined at Musso & Frank and strolled down Hollywood Boulevard when
you could still smell orange blossoms in the air. Early in their
relationship, she told John to quit writing screenplays, or he’d never
get back to novels. When he asked her how the heck he was supposed to
make a living and support his father, she said she’d take care of that.
And for the rest of his life, she did.
It was in Hollywood that John also got involved with the Communist Party.
When the movement was still findings its legs, members met regularly,
played cards and drove cars with bumper stickers that said “Join the
Communist Party” as casually as ours might say “Vote Democrat” today.
But by the 1950s they were driven deep underground, and then the
campaign to root them out of Hollywood began. Sanford and Roberts (she
had dabbled in the party but was not particularly political) were both
called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
They both pleaded the Fifth. She was blacklisted and lost her job at
MGM. Not long afterward, they retreated to Montecito.
Their two-story house, with stone walls a foot thick, was a virtual
fortress, and I couldn’t help but feel that it was a metaphor for John’s
relationship with the world after those hearings. His extensive garden,
where we often strolled, stood for other things. The tidy flower beds
and perfectly trimmed trees, the meandering retaining walls that he’d
cut from stone and stacked by hand, the tiny workshop out back where he
spent hours carving intricate frames and jewelry boxes – they all spoke to
a craftsman’s ethic and how to endure rejection and betrayal by turning
ever more caringly to those things that are closest to you.
Of course, John cared for nothing more than Maggie, not even his
writing. In 1989, she fell sick with a heart condition. They went back
and forth for tests, in and out of the hospital, and eventually the
doctors decided that she should get a pacemaker. But the stress of the
surgery was too much, and she died just hours after the operation.
John was a man cut in half. He’d sit in his chair, and with teary old
eyes talk to her picture on his desk, which he had arranged into a kind
of shrine. He lost, he told me, his wife, his best friend and his mother
all over again. He had quit writing, and was just short of quitting life
itself, it seemed.
Maybe a year passed before I began to notice scraps of paper in his
wastebasket. He decided that not writing would betray the “investment”
she’d made in him. But when he started up again, it was all about her.
By this time, he was into the fifth volume of his monumental
autobiography, and Maggie was everywhere. He wrote “Maggie: A Love
Story” and a book titled “We Have a Little Sister,” which imagined her
life before they met.
One day, John asked me come to his house with my Korean American
fiancée, In Sun, whom he had grown to adore. As we sat at his kitchen
table, he brought out several little boxes and handed them to us one by
one. In John’s mind, his entire estate was Maggie’s and would pass to
her relatives, so these were the few personal effects he had left to
give away. There was a silver cup that he drank from as an infant, a
brooch for In Sun and a watch for me.
Lastly, he handed me a small square box. Inside was a gold ring. “It’s
Maggie’s wedding band,” he told us, his voice trembling with emotion. “I
couldn’t let her take it with her.” In Sun slipped it on her finger, and
went for a walk in his garden to give us some time alone. After about
half an hour, she rushed back to the house.
“John,” she said, “Inside the band is an inscription. November 26.”
“We didn’t know exactly when we’d get married, but I wanted it inscribed
right away, so I used Maggie’s birthday, November 26.”
“That’s my birthday, John.”
How could I help but feel that some invisible hand was blessing the
exchange? Then, just before we left, I remember his asking me, “Now you
wouldn’t abandon an old man like me, would you kid?”
I would have to. First, there was the wedding planning, then a monthlong
honeymoon. In Sun and I had just begun to settle down as a couple when
my mother was found to have cancer. We moved to Fresno to help care for
her. The first night in our new house we had our first baby. We named
her Valentine Marguerite.
John and I talked on the phone frequently to make up for the absence of
visits. In March 1999, he called with some news:
“How you holding up, kid?”
“We’re fine.”
“And little Valentine Marguerite?”
“Spunky as her namesake.”
“That a girl. Listen, kid, I just got a call from the L.A. Times. They
told me that they want to present me with the Robert Kirsch Award for
lifetime achievement at the Book Awards this year.”
“That’s great, Johnny.”
“I can’t get there, so as my literary executioner you’ll have to go for
me. I like the L.A. Times. They’ve always been good to me, but at this
point I wouldn’t cross the street to accept the Nobel.”
A month later, I sat in the front row of UCLA’s Royce Hall and listened
to Jonathan Kirsch introduce Sanford and his work to a packed house.
Previously, the Kirsch Award had been given to Ray Bradbury, Gary
Snyder, Ken Kesey, Czeslaw Milosz and other luminaries, and now I was
accepting on behalf of a writer whom a vast majority of that bookish
crowd had never heard of.
Not to worry, I assured them: Sanford was eminently worthy of the prize.
But, alas, he could also “run a clinic on how not to become a famous
writer.”
At 93, he was also desperately trying to find a publisher for a new book
titled “A Palace of Silver.” He handed me a draft, and though there were
flashes of brilliance, the prose drifted nostalgically for pages, and
the subject, Maggie, was hardly fresh. Worse, his memory was turning
against him. What he’d written on page 30 he’d written almost word for
word on page 130, and this happened over and over again.
With as much finesse as I could muster, I pointed out the problems. He
met my opinion with a withering silence, as if I’d betrayed him. I
backed off, but maybe not soon enough.
One morning, while walking in the back part of his garden, John fell. No
broken bones, but he was bruised pretty good, and it was a warning.
I broached the subject – delicately – of a retirement home. No chance. He
agreed to a compromise: I found a young woman from Westmont College, my
alma mater, to check on him every day. He charged me with making medical
decisions for him should he become unable to make them for himself.
Marguerite had relatives who lived in Ojai, and apparently this did not
sit well with them. John called and said he’d like them to be part of
the decision-making process. I thought it was a good idea, especially
because I was 300 miles away. But a week later, he called again. “Kid, I
don’t think it’s right for you to get involved. This is a family matter,
and Maggie’s family can handle it.”
I was still taking care of my mother, so in one way I was relieved. But
in another way, I was hurt. Wasn’t I like kin? Why had he changed his
mind twice in so many weeks? Had I insinuated myself into a role that he
was reluctant to let me to play? In a letter, I conveyed my feelings. It
was a gentle note, and I told him that I hoped I had done nothing to
offend him.
Sanford’s response was a sneer. “Get off Mount Olympus!” he wrote,
before proceeding to tell me how he owed everything to Maggie. The
rejoinder was completely uncalled for, as brutal as it was insane. One
minute I was confused, the next I was stomping around the house cursing him.
I might have replied, but I became severely ill, the sickest I’d ever
been, as though our brawl had stepped into my body. (I found out later
that Sanford fell deathly ill at exactly the same time.) Two months
later, as I was recuperating, I caught another blow. This time he was
writing to tell me that I was no longer his literary executor.
It had taken nearly two decades, but John Sanford had cut me down like
all the rest. My parting missive left no doubt how I felt:
With my last letter, I left an opening for us, and I had hopes that your
letter would convey something like, “Come over soon, kid, and let’s talk
it out.” That’s all it would have taken. Instead, through that opening
you slung the final arrow, your coup de grce, no doubt. Simple stuff
for so expert a marksman. But how am I to take my wife’s hand that bears
your wife’s ring? What am I to make of nearly two decades of the deepest
admiration, and, yes, love for you? How am I supposed to explain my
daughter’s name to her when she is old enough to ask? You haven’t lost a
friend, you’ve killed a friendship.
Over the next several months my mother’s cancer went into remission, and
I moved back to Los Angeles with my family, where I resumed my life and
began working on my own novel, keeping in mind as best I could the
lessons Sanford had taught me while simultaneously ignoring the wound.
In 2002 “Bloodvine” was accepted for publication. When the editor called
to ask if I wanted a dedication page, I sat down and wrote this: “To my
parents, who never stood in the way.”
But it wasn’t enough. And so I added, “To John Sanford and Albert
Friedman, who helped me find it.”
I hadn’t talked to John in nearly two years, but I’d come to recognize
that our friendship had had an undeniable life of its own, however much
we blocked it from memory.
I also suspected that Maggie’s relatives had exploited John’s senescence
and reckless adoration of his wife. They had never had much to do with
John and were afraid that I might sneak into his sizable estate through
the backdoor, so they forced him to choose between me and them (as
stand-ins for Maggie).
Then Christmas came, and I saw another opening. My wife was licking the
last of the envelopes, when I said, “Sweetie, you might want to send a
card off to John Sanford.”
Surprised, she looked up from her work.
“I’d be happy to. But are you sure?”
The Christmas card showed Valentine and her little sister sitting on our
hardwood floors in the sweetest taffeta dresses. Sunlight was breaking
on their faces, and below the picture my wife had penned in gold ink,
“Peace.”
Just after Christmas I got a call. “Aris, this is John Sanford.” His
voice was frail, but the tone was warm.
“Hello, Mr. Sanford.”
“The card moved me deeply, Aris. Seeing those two angels of yours. Look,
I’m sorry it happened. It was all a misunderstanding. Won’t you come to
Santa Barbara so we can talk about it?”
I drove up the next week.
After knocking twice, I let myself into his office. He was sitting in
his writing chair, as usual, but there was hardly anything left to him,
and the old Royal manual typewriter that he’d used to tap out his books
wore a plastic cover. His vision had deteriorated to the point where he
could no longer write. “After 24 books,” he told me, “I’ve said what
I’ve wanted to say. In any case, it won’t be long now, kid.” And it
wasn’t. Two months and two visits later, he died.
During our last time together, he told me he was happy that we’d made
up. I asked him if he regretted not patching it up with other friends.
“I shouldn’t have done that to Pep. I was a hothead, sure,” he said.
“But for the others. . . .” Then he paused, as though to look it over
one last time. “No, kid, I wouldn’t take back a word.”
Aris Janigian, a contributing writer to West, is the author of the novel
“Bloodvine.”
ntedition/magazine/la-tm-sanford10mar05,1,4652283. story