Word for Word: Insouciance abroad

By MIKE WILSON, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 16, 2002

[Sanders family photo] Jack Sanders at 23.

From a letter written in memory of Jacquin Sanders, the former St. Petersburg Times columnist who died on Dec. 20. Friends and family members gathered last Saturday at Florida Botanical Gardens to remember and tell stories about him.

This letter, read aloud at the gathering, was written by Stan Hoffman of New York. Hoffman met Sanders during World War II and later shared the literary life with him in Paris and New York. They remained close after Sanders moved to Florida in 1982.

-- MIKE WILSON, Floridian editor

I met Jack when we were both in the 66th Division, and he would occasionally come to my company area to seek out a mutual friend. We scarcely had more than a nodding acquaintance, but it was sufficient to recognize one another in Paris in 1949, where we were both treading in Hemingway's footsteps.

Actually, that isn't quite true. Jack had too much awareness of who he really was to tread in anyone's footsteps. He was an American original, but it took me a while to come to appreciate that in him.

Though I had brought a portable typewriter with me, I was always too "busy" to even attempt to write anything. Jack, who never seemed to be doing anything in particular, was busy writing all the time. But I was reading what Jack called "small, sensitive books" -- Katherine Porter, Mary McCarthy, etc. -- and completely failed to appreciate that Jack's horselaugh at most of the expatriate redux crew's pretentions was in another American tradition -- that of Mark Twain's frontier humor and Mark Twain's "barbaric yawp." His resistance to cultural contamination was such that I seem to remember that the only French phrase I ever heard him use was crochet du gauche -- "left hook" -- picked up from some sports publication.

I'd like to say that we had many a midnight discussion about literature over mugs of what the French waiters called "epouvantable," but I'm trying to tell the truth -- or at least to find the truth. All I can remember was that he was often very, very funny. It seems to me that we lived in an American world completely surrounded by more often than not hostile French unable to assimilate the loss of their cultural and political leadership. I remember almost no French people in our circle, but I do remember a former German soldier who had been wounded on the Russian front, a blond Swedish girl fascinated by dark-haired North Americans, a very bad Italian painter who thought that everything after Da Vinci had been an error, and an exotic Turkish girl who had blood-red fingernails and smelled like the Arabian nights.

We all had romantic relationships of varying seriousness, but as one of our group observed, "Jack will never marry until he finds a girl with balls." In any case, I got married first, and it was Jack who drove us to the hospital when Lee gave birth to our son. I still have a picture of him holding the infant David.

When sometime later Jack mentioned that he had gone on an excursion to (Franklin D. Roosevelt's home in) Hyde Park with a woman in his office and that she had expressed surprise that the souvenir shop did not offer tiny little wheelchairs, I knew that he had found the woman that God had intended for him -- and that He had equipped her with a critical eye and tongue that would prevent him from ever getting sentimental or morally flabby.

Too often when a friend marries, friends drift apart, but my wife and I began by loving Louise for Jack's sake and rapidly came to love her for her own. When they moved away, I felt lost. And now that former loss is magnified by this final loss. There are words and thoughts locked inside me forever now because only Jack could have understood them. For example, we shared an affectionate bemusement over the critical question of "what does woman want?"

What they want, Jack, is for us to remain with them. To keep on loving them as they love us.

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