Thomas Sanchez is the kind of person with whom it's easy to lose an entire day, and that is just what PW did last month after meeting Sanchez at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, a nostalgic place for him since he read and wrote poetry there as a teen. A quick cab ride up to Coit Tower—once the highest point in this city—and Sanchez scans the horizon and says, "I can stand here and see damn near my whole life played out."
Like a character out of one of his own novels, whether a Washoe Indian from debut Rabbit Boss (1973) or a mixed-race insurance salesman in the middle of prerevolution Havana in King Bongo, just released by longtime publisher Knopf, Sanchez's story unravels in layers of generations steeped in history and very much anchored to a place.
"All of my grandparents came from Portugal and Spain, and they came right through the Golden Gate," he says, extending his arm toward the grand entrance into the San Francisco Bay, which gives its name to the famous red bridge spanning the gap. "My grandfather was a Spanish peasant and he took my father out of school [to] work in the Kaiser Shipyards," he continues pointing across the water toward Oakland. "Then he went to Treasure Island in the navy," his story goes on, as Sanchez indicates the tree-covered island that is the center anchor of the extensive Bay Bridge. "Then he was shipped out under the Golden Gate Bridge and was killed by the Japanese." Tragedy entered Sanchez's life before he was even born in Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland three months after his father's death.
Just 19 years old, his mother moved up to Hayward to live with her mother, who ran a boarding house. "My mother's family were all through these hills. They were fishermen and ranchers," he adds, looking like a dressed-up rancher or fisherman himself in a brown leather vest, cap (worn backwards) and dark sunglasses. Now in her 80s, his mother still lives on a ranch in the hills. Sanchez indicates the now densely populated Berkeley and Oakland Hills: "When I was a boy, this was all empty." It seems hard to believe that an area could change so much in one lifetime.
The effect of modernity on the natural world and the people who populate it is central to Sanchez's work. It is clearly the driving force behind Rabbit Boss, the novel he began writing more than 30 years ago as a young man working on a ranch in the Sierra Nevada. And it is there again in King Bongo, set in Havana on the precipice of the revolution that toppled an American-supported dictator and brought Castro to power.
"What I was trying to do with King Bongo is to go back to a specific time, which is Havana in the 1950s. And it's very difficult to do because you think of the 1950s in a retro way, or in a noir way, or in the point of view of a detective story," he explains. "The point was to go back to the 1950s where everything was fresh and new, and to pick up in the language the beat of that extraordinary birth of Havana that was happening then."
Talk of writing and publishing comes while Sanchez continues to bask in his tour guide role as we walk down Telegraph Hill toward North Beach. "That's Mexican bottle brush," he says of a bright flower on the path. "And Oregon grape." He points to a deco-style apartment building that looks like it is a ship on top and says, "That's where they shot Dark Passage," referring to the classic noir movie with Humphrey Bogart. "I always wanted to live in that building as a young writer." Some resident with a sense of humor has placed a cutout of the movie legend in a window.
Although he has traveled all over the world and lived in exotic locales from Majorca to Key West for much of his life, Sanchez considers San Francisco his home port. He oozes ownership as he walks its streets.
For a boy born in Oakland, San Francisco seemed like "Oz," to use his word, and Sanchez moved here at 19. He does not care for comparisons to Hemingway, but his life's trajectory lends itself to just that. He considered himself a beatnik, drawn to the city and its explosion of jazz and the written word. He lived in the Haight before the Haight was the Haight, and never cared much for the hippie lifestyle. He was there at the first Vietnam War demonstrations and helped organize in the Sacramento Valley with Cesar Chavez.
In the '70s he ran food to the Indians at Wounded Knee, an experience he says was like walking right out of Rabbit Boss. He had just returned from Spain where he had been writing Rabbit Boss. A renowned Knopf editor named Ash Green heard of this young novelist writing up in the mountains. Green contacted Sanchez's agent, and Knopf optioned the partially written Rabbit Boss for $500. The Sanchez/Green relationship is now one of the oldest in publishing, lasting more than 30 years.
Publishing is filled with stories of apparent overnight success, but as with most writers, that success was hard-won for Sanchez. A previous novel about the Haight was rejected by 12 New York publishers, but the buzz around it landed Sanchez Dorothy Oppenheimer as an agent. Paul Monash (executive produce of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) bought the movie rights to Rabbit Boss in one of the biggest deals of its time; it also attracted a huge paperback buy from Ballantine. Currently, Sanchez is working with Ken Burns on an eight-hour television adaptation of Rabbit Boss. We arrive at Café Niebaum-Coppola for lunch and are seated at Mr. Coppola's table, which is normally roped off when Coppola is in town. We sit through three waitstaff shifts as lunch is leisurely served and turns into an afternoon of wine sipping. Outside, the brilliantly sunny day gives way to a series of heavy showers, and Café Niebaum-Coppola feels like a perfect place to wait out the weather.
Seated beneath posters for some of Coppola's biggest blockbusters, Sanchez tells PW that he worked on two scripts for Coppola's company—one of Mile Zero to star Andy Garcia—but that the vagaries of Hollywood priorities prevented the films from being made. A similar fate befell the paperback of Rabbit Boss, a subject Sanchez would rather not discuss in too much detail. He says that a new head of Ballantine, who did not buy Rabbit Boss, never really got behind it. Vintage hopes its 30th anniversary paperback release along with the new novel will bring Sanchez better recognition. Sanchez has given up hope that the New York literary establishment will ever appreciate his work. "My intellectual world is rooted in the natural world," he adds, "and that's alien to the New York sensibility."
Without his sunglasses, it's clear that Sanchez's blue eyes are his prime vehicle for expression. They squint when he expresses disappointment and squint even more when he smiles broadly or laughs, which he does readily. He likes talking about his Portuguese grandmother, who never learned to read but understood the power of words—perhaps even more.
"When she died, under her bed she had this little cigar box with her greatest possessions—which weren't many," Sanchez says. "In it she had a clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle of the review for Rabbit Boss, and she couldn't even read it."
Clearly, his grandmother was one of the greatest influences on his writing. "That's where I get the whole idea of obliterating the language and restructuring it," he explains. "Because if they couldn't read and write, their approach was so real. It was completely fresh and original the way things were said."
In King Bongo, Sanchez applies his deconstructionist talents to the noir genre. "It was my idea to find a way to deconstruct that and reconstruct it in a way to connect with a readership which today is so well informed," he explains. He did a similar thing in Day of the Bees, an epic love story of an artist and his muse set in occupied France and told largely through love letters found by an art historian after the woman's death. He had been working on this story, probably his most personal, for many years when something stranger than fiction occurred: out of the blue his mother gave him a brown paper bag filled with his father's love letters to her written from his ship.
"Here I am working on a book about that when literally these letters are handed to me that had been unknown to me for 50 years," he says. "Then you remember how much free will you have."
He says that critics of Bees misunderstood what he was doing as a writer. "They say, 'he's writing a 20th-century European love story,' when in reality I wasn't doing that at all," he adds. But a recent rave review in Le Monde of the paperback of Day of the Bees makes him feel vindicated. "No one could believe it," he continues. "This American writing about France? Forget it. An American writing about the Resistance? Forget it, the French can't even do that." Yet Le Monde called Bees a "literary monument," which is a huge leap for a kid who once was placed in remedial classes because of his ethnic surname.
Each of Sanchez's novels delves into drastically different worlds, from capturing the destruction of California Indians in Rabbit Boss to examining Hispanic L.A. gangs in Zoot-Suit Murders, or smugglers and refugees in post—Vietnam War Key West in Mile Zero. "Life is too short to write the same book twice," he says. "Each book to me is a profoundly unique experience."
King Bongo seems similar to Mile Zero, however, because it originated as part of the first book, conceived while Sanchez was living in Key West working on Mile Zero. "I realized that it was far too good to be part of Mile Zero. That it was a book on its own," he explains. "The beat of King Bongo was always with me."
As Sanchez talks about King Bongo, it is obvious he had some real fun with it. For example, one of the comic characters in the book has a habit of avoiding questions by singing show tunes. "When I did my first reading, I didn't realize that I picked a section with Broadway Betty [the singing character] in it," he says, laughing. "I hadn't read in Key West in years and there I am in the library, singing."
But don't be fooled by King Bongo's noir veneer; it is a serious book. "Havana in the 1950s was very, very culturally sophisticated," Sanchez says. "It had an enlightened and profound middle class that sadly was lost in the jaws of history after the revolution." Sanchez captures all the layers of Cuban society—from the glittering to the corrupt.
If writing about Havana of that time is a difficult undertaking, Sanchez is unfazed. "Today's accelerated sense of history is tainted by commercially packaged notions of the quaint and the retro," he explains. "I wanted to blow up the bridge between then and now and explode the righteousness that there is only one legitimate interpretation of its text and its historical time." He might say the same thing about any of his books.
