THOMAS SANCHEZ ARCHIVAL PERSPECTIVE
BY KEVIN STARR
STATE LIBRARIAN CALIFORNIA EMERITUS
The Thomas Sanchez Archive documents the life, hard work, and creative achievement of one of the most respected writers of his generation. Of Spanish and Portuguese descent, born in Oakland, California, in 1944, just a few days after his father, Seaman 2/c Thomas Louie Sanchez, lost his life in the Battle of Tawara, Sanchez belonged to the Silent Generation sandwiched between the Greatest Generation of his parents and the Boomer Generation that was to follow. Each in its own way, these two generations – the one fighting a global war and earning the postwar boom, the other dominating American life up to the present – left little room for the Silent Generation to find itself. As the creative output preserved in these archives proves, however, Thomas Sanchez triumphantly found himself across a half century of sustained production as a novelist, screenwriter, and master of non-fiction prose.
Sanchez came of age as a Californian – rooted in region through bloodlines and imaginative affinities – and in Rabbit Boss (1973) he made a stunning debut with one of the three or four finest novels ever to be set in California and its hinterlands. In Rabbit Boss Sanchez made a connection with Native America that would result in a continuity of creative non-fiction that would have rendered him a noted writer had he never written another novel. But he went on to write five more published novels (and an unpublished novel as well, as this archive reveals), set in an ever-expanding gyre of place: Los Angeles, Key West, Havana, France, and Spain, mastering each of these places, releasing their resonances and mysteries with all the skill he had demonstrated in the Sierra Nevada/Lake Tahoe setting of his first novel.
Because Sanchez was the member of a very small generation, moreover, that produced an even smaller number of first-rate writers such as he is now considered, he fused an unfolding and mutually reinforcing number of authorial approaches. From California, he absorbed that peculiar brand of laconic naturalism that also energized John Steinbeck. And from California as well incorporated within himself and mastered the techniques and minimalism of the hardboiled school of the Boys in the Backroom, as Edmund Wilson described these writers. But his characters never played tough guy for its own sake. Sanchez’ tough guys – like the tough guys of Ernest Hemmingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane – sustained an existential edge to their toughness, which also linked Sanchez to the postwar edginess of Norman Mailer and James Jones of the Greatest Generation.
In Day of the Bees (2000), moreover, Sanchez made that connection with Europe that so many American writers have struggled to achieve as well as releasing – not for the first time, but with notable energy and fullness – a lyricism of language, a poetry even, showing another side of a writer who had already demonstrated his skills as a documentary naturalist, a master of regionalism and Native American psychology, a tough guy as hardboiled as the best of them, a sardonic explorer of the subeval undercurrents of race, place, sun and sex in a Caribbean setting.
This archive, then, gives us the background of the novels. But it also reveals Sanchez’ lifelong commitment to work: real work, hard work, constant writing, drafts and re-drafts, screenplays on spec. True, Sanchez published with Alfred A. Knopf, where his editor was the legendary Ashbel Green. And true, his fiction was enthusiastically received. Sanchez might very well have secured for himself a post in a writing program at a distinguished college or university; indeed, he had started out in this direction at San Francisco State University at an earlier stage in his career. But he wanted something else: an undistracted pursuit of the written word, and he was willing to pay the price of the entrepreneurial hard work involved.
The evidence of commitment is this archive, in which is documented Sanchez’ achievement but also the rough drafts that stayed rough and the screenplays on spec remaining unproduced. And through it all, through the entire collection, there emanates a mood of one man, one writer, challenging himself, defining himself, earning his reputation through talent and achievement – and believing in himself as a writer with something compelling to say about the human condition. Little did he know, as he assembled this archive across the decades, that in and through it he was achieving yet another work of art: the record of a life lived for art with purity of intention, with total dedication to craft, with courage in response to criticism and humility in response to the praise he so richly deserved.
