A Man Without Shoes Read online

  A MAN

  WITHOUT

  SHOES

  JOHN SANFORD

  IN MEMORY OF

  SARAH AND HARRIS FRIEDMAN

  “The people are a powerful source of power.”

  Contents

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  PART SIX

  Note on the Author

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  In 1943, I was under contract to Harcourt, Brace & Co. for the publication of three books, the first of which was about to appear as The People From Heaven. For the second, I pro-pounded to editor John Woodburn a novel to be called Johnson, Daniel, and as I described it to him, its frame would be the standard army questionnaire known as a Soldier’s Classification Card. In addition to his name, his place and date of birth, and the extent of his education, the card recorded his civilian occupation, his fluency in foreign languages, if any, his aptitudes and entertainment talents, and his athletic proficiency. to these, I meant to add headings and data of my own that would explore him much more fully, and it was my hope that when the material was assembled and dramatized, it would realize the life and time of one who, though no one in particular, might well be anyone at all. I thought of him, for no reason I now remember, as Daniel Johnson.

  The proposal was endorsed by my editor, but the book was slow to take shape, and three years went by before a version was ready for submission. By then, the war having ended, the world had changed and with it I. Originally, I’d intended to write about the experiences of an ordinary American during the first few decades of this century. No definite person (at any rate, none I knew of) had been a pattern for the character I’d had in mind, an unremarkable member of the lower middle class: he was to have been no great shakes, merely one of many and very much the same. But all in whose time it came were affected by that war, not just for its duration but forever, and in the course of being created, Dan too had changed. Only an imagining to begin with, he seemed to have grown beyond my inventing, and I hardly knew him as the man I’d fancied three years before. The main spread of his development was political, and while he never did a signal deed or spoke in smoking words, what force he possessed was outward, and in his effort to transcend himself, to the extent that he succeeded, he no longer struck me as ordinary.

  There’d been a time when my publisher might’ve been in different to the left ward swerve the book had taken, but in 1946, for most of the reputable imprints, left was quite the wrong direction. Along with a letter rejecting it, the manuscript came back to me with a rare violation of the editorial canon: the pages were pencilled with comment, the mildest of which was “Straighten up and fly right.” Hard weather was on the way, but there were still a few independent spirits around, and after a time I managed to place the book with Reynal & Hitchcock. There, even when Curtice Hitchcock was killed in a car-crash, I was assured that

  Eugene (Reynal) is returning to the firm after five years’ absence with the Army and State Department, and we go on where Curtice left off. Please don’t for a moment think that there will be any change in house policy. We plan to go on in Curtice’s liberal tradition.

  Within a year, sad to say, that liberal tradition was a dwindling memory. The best of the editorial staff—Albert Erskine, Frank Taylor, and Harry Ford—had either resigned or been fired, and many of the choices they’d made for publication were under reconsideration or already in disfavor. Among the latter was Johnson, Daniel—or, as then retitled, Man Without Shoes. The new managing editor told me straight out that Reynal & Hitchcock would not sponsor the book even though it had been contracted for, and he demanded a return of the advance. It gave me small satisfaction to refuse, for once again I was out in the cold. But now, in 1947, it was a new kind of cold altogether: McCarthyism, it was called, and hard weather was no longer on the way, —it was here.

  For A Man Without Shoes, the sixteen seasons of the next four years were all of them winter. During that period, the book was submitted to some thirty publishers, and thirty-some times it was declined. No rejection, however, was predicated on the political cast of the book: the grounds given, though they varied in detail, were always literary, always they smelled of the lamp. No one seemed to notice that Dan Johnson was a hot defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, or, if aware, no one seemed to mind. For all I could find, it was perfectly acceptable for a writer, through his characters, to deplore the many evils in American history; publishers and editors were superior to political prejudice, and never would they turn down a book that went against the grain. See, they appeared to say, see how warmly we welcome a lament for the plunder of a continent, see how we anguish over the skinned Indian, the freed and still unequal slave, see how we too march with Tom Mooney, Gene Debs, Joe Hill, with all the insulted and injured of the American earth! Their quarrel with the book, I was asked to believe, was the quarrel of the scholarly: I’d failed to meet the bluestocking criterion.

  Well, maybe so, maybe so. But all the same, under the words they used were traces of the words they’d erased, and what those vestiges said was this: “Straighten up and fly right.” By the end of 1950, it was clear that I’d have to lay the book to rest or publish it myself. I simply couldn’t bury what I thought was still alive, wherefore I took the other course and sought out a printer—not any printer, but a particular printer. His name was Saul Marks, and I’d known him for ten or a dozen years, ever since the days of a Los Angeles magazine called The Clipper.

  Published as Black & White for its first few issues, the periodical was composed and run off by Saul more or less monthly over the course of about two years. A short life, but a worthy one, for many an honorable name graced the pages. Theodore Dreiser appeared more than once, and so did Agnes Smedley and Dalton Trumbo. Other contributors were Carey McWilliams, Cedric Belfrage, and John Howard Lawson. Guy Endore’s correspondence from Mexico was printed whenever received, and there were poems by Genevieve Taggard, Edouard Roditi, and Ring Lardner Jr. Only the final issue, which came out just before Pearl Harbor, wasn’t the work of Saul, and the difference is apparent at a glance. He seemed to sign each page; his touch is hard to miss.

  I’d been one of the editors of The Clipper, and on occasion I’d carried copy to Saul’s shop and then hung about to watch him compose type or handle his prized old German press. Always I saw the same great care, whether he was designing a cover for The Clipper, a newspaper notice, a museum brochure, or a volume for the Huntington Library—always that fine sense of arrangement, that judgment of spacing, color, ornament. At his death thirty years later, he’d long been accepted as the leading typographer and letterpress printer in North America—but I feel as I’ve always felt, that he raised a craft to the level of an art.

  He never told me why he agreed to print A Man Without Shoes. It may have been the book’s history, the book itself, or his own restive nature, but whatever it was, he fell in with my proposal, and, aided by his wife Lillian, he began to fashion words from melted bars of lead. He called his shop after Christophe Plantin, a French printer and book binder of the 16th century, and when he permitted me the use of the name, I became, for a single publication, the Plantin Press. And that was all he allowed me, except the privilege of observing with my mouth shut. Every choice was his, the type-face, the size of the page, the quality of the paper, the binding, the jacket. He’d stand for no interference, but I wasn’t minded to interfere: from where I stood, silent and well out of his way, all he did had virtue.

  When the work was completed, early in 1951, I thoughtlessly directed that the entire edition be delivered to my home. It was as if a cord of wood had been stacked in the hallway, and af
ter a while, sales having hardly diminished it, it began to overwhelm me, and I had it moved into storage. There it has remained since the time of publication, so in a sense the book was buried after all.

  Until now—

  John Sanford

  PART ONE

  Father’s Name

  Late one night in the fall of 1908, a man emerged from a livery stable near Coenties Slip and walked west toward Bowling Green. He was a hack-driver, and all day he had operated a Pope-Hartford landaulet from a cab-rank at the Vesey Street exit of the Astor House. Between calls, he had idled with other drivers along the hotel wall, watching traffic change for the changing hour: the drays and runabouts of morning, the victorias of noon, the electric broughams of evening, and then, in the gaslit dark, the drays again, their Belgians plodding the cobblestones on muffled horn.

  A wind off the Bay, damp and salt and faintly iodine, struck the man as he passed the Custom House and headed for home, a cold-water flat on the third floor of a tenement in a narrow street running uptown from Battery Place. There were distant stations on the wind, and there were strange flavors, and the man deep-breathed as if to know them by knowing the migratory air, but the far came no nearer, and the nameless remained unnamed, and he spoke a soft prayer, saying, “Ah, God, to see it all! to see it all some day!”

  He entered a vestibule between two store-fronts, and as he mounted a brass-knuckled flight of steps, a door opened above, and light lacquered the spindles of the stairway. A woman’s voice made a mild question of his name, and he replied by churning chimes from a pocketful of coins. On the second landing, there was a long embrace, after which, giving the woman a purse, the man locked the door behind them and went to a map of the United States that papered much of one entire wall: with a ruler and a red crayon, he drew a line from the island of Manhattan to the town of Passaic. Then he joined the woman at the table, where she sat counting money and making entries in a ledger, and absently filling a pipe, he stared at the great colored chart tacked to the plaster.

  Long before, the five boroughs of New York had been overrun by a slick of red wax, and from this always-growing trespass, there now were paths to Port Jervis and Princeton, along the Sound to the Saugatuck, down the Jersey coast to Barnegat, and, longest of all, to Saratoga Springs. In time, the man thought, there would be lines to every name in the nation; in time, he thought, the record of his trips would be the nation itself; in time, he thought…. And pipe-smoke, blue from the bowl and gray from the stem, fought a skirmish in the air. A pen stumbled over paper. Money met money and spoke civilly of silver. The map blurred under the man’s gaze, and he made scenes in his mind and heard unspoken speech.

  [Suppose.…

  [Suppose the Astor doorman nodded you off the wall, and while you trotted to the old Pope-H, set the choke, and spun the motor, he slung a satchel at the meter, caught a tip on the fly, and gave your fare a send-off with a salute.

  [And suppose you said, “Where to, mister?” and the fare said “Erie Ferry,” and you said, “Erie Ferry, it is,” and threw down the flag. Suppose all that.

  [And suppose the fare was a silk-shirt sport, with two-tone shoes and a grip made of crocodile, and suppose the tip he’d flipped the door-man was a cartwheel—and therefore suppose you drove carefully, with no quick stops, no horn-work, no close calls, a nice smooth swing into West Street, and a real pretty waltz around the horses and the backed-up trucks.

  [And suppose, when you reached the slip, the fare said, “Make it Weehawken,” and you said, “Weehawken, it is” and you ran the Pope-H aboard and got a good place up forward at the gates, and suppose you switched off the motor and set your hand-brakes, and then you stepped out and tested a plug, shot a squirt of oil at nothing in particular, and ragged off the door-handles and the lamps.

  [Suppose a little more. Suppose at Weehawken you tooled ashore, saying, “Where to now, mister?” and he said, “Tait’s Restaurant.”

  [And suppose you said, “Tait’s? What street’s that on?” and he said, “Market Street” and you said, “I’m sorry, mister, but I don’t know any Market Street in Weehawken.”

  [And now suppose he said, “That’s all right. The one I’m talking about is in Frisco.”

  [Suppose! Just Suppose!]

  For hack-driver Daniel Johnson, that would be The Great Day.

  Mother’s Name

  The coins had been stacked and the crushed bills uncrushed, and the totals they came to had been committed to columns in the ledger under a date late in the year 1908, but having finished her task, the woman was no longer interested in the sorted currency and the writing materials that lay before her, nor was she concerned for the moment with the man seated opposite her, or the map on the wall, or any of the furniture that the room contained, or the federal-confederate smoke at war in the air: her hands were clasped over a belly bulging with seven-ninths of a child, and it was the contents of herself that she was trying to see with the backs and bottoms of her eyes.

  [On a marble-topped table in one of the bedrooms of a Catskill farm-house, a coal-oil lamp spread a skirt of light around a box of cigars and a bottle of whisky. In a nearby rocker, a man flinched as a moth rammed the lampshade, bounced off, and, revolving to recover speed, rammed it again. The man dabbed at his nostrils as if to find blood, found none, and smiled. He tufted his mustache and smiled once more.

  [A woman’s voice, muted by fatigue, came from a bed outside the cast of the lamp. “What kind of cigars you got, Anson?” it said, but the made no reply. He drew deeply on a cold and mangled cigar and exhaled what he thought was smoke. “What kind of cigars did you bring this time?” The man fancied the sound of knuckles on the door, and without rising, he reached for the knob. It was yards from where he sat, but his fingers seemed to feel the chill china, and he went through the motions of opening the door: no one was there. “Godamighty,” the woman said.

  [The man turned toward the bed, his head wobbling as he peered into the shadow. “You say something, Maggie Azora?” he said.

  [“The cigars,” the woman said. “What’s the brand?”

  [“Best brand money can buy,” the man said.

  [“Bring me that box!”

  [The man built a flimsy look of surprise. “You smoke?” he said.

  [“Bring me the box, you boozing old bull!” The man transported it to the bedside with dangerous whiskied care. The woman took it, held it so that some light reached its label, and let it fall to the floor. “My God,” she said, “was that the only kind you could get?”

  [“Dollar a box,” the man said.

  [“But the name—Apollo Panetela!”

  [“Fifty in a box,” the man said.

  [“But Apollo’s a boy’s name, Anse! A boy’s!”

  [The man squinted down at the woman from a height of many miles. “Didn’t we have a boy this time?” he said.

  [Slowly, in affectionate contempt, the woman shook her head “Come down here, you drunken old punkinhead,” she said, and he let himself sag to his knees. “Why do you have to get bug-eyed every time I’m confined?”

  [“‘Celebration,” he said.

  [“‘Celebration of what?”

  [“I don’t know. Just celebration.”

  [“I don’t mind you getting soused once a year,” the woman said, “but why can’t you stay away from cigars? Specially when we have girls. Just once, Anse, just once don’t let’s call a girl after a cigar.”

  [“The name’s Apollo,” he said.

  [“Can’t that be her middle name?”

  [“Apollo’s the name. Apollo Panetela.”

  [“People’ll laugh at her.”

  [“Apollo” the man said. “Polly for short”

  [“Please, Anse!” the woman said. “Please!”

  [“Feel like a kiss” the man said, and he leaned toward her, but the image fuzzed and went away, and his face touched the pillow, and he was asleep.

  [The woman turned to another face, a very small one almost hidden by a hood of b
lankets. “Apollo Varner,” she whispered. “Your name is Apollo Varner.”]

  “What’re you smiling at, Polly?” the hack-driver said.

  “I was thinking of names,” she said.

  “You hit on one yet?”

  “I think so. I think I have a fine one.”

  “What is it?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Hell, I got a right to know the name of my own kid!”

  “I won’t tell you, Dan.”

  Date of Birth

  On February 11th, 1909, night began to curl back from the most easterly square yard of the Florida Keys at 6:45. Within an instant, it was day for the Okefinokee Swamp and Bob Anderson’s Fort Sumter, and it was day too for Cape Hatteras and the mouth of the Rappahannock, for the rip-rap from Seabright to Sandy Hook, and for the lighthouse cliff at Montauk Point. And now the wet grass at Saratoga became a groundswell of broken glass, and the white markers for the dead turned lilac, and through the raveling mist of Valley Forge, light split to splinters on a brass muzzle-loader still trained on Philadelphia, and it was day over Yorktown on the York, and Jamestown on the James, and Resaca on the Union flood of Georgia, and it was the Union sun that spoke over Mobile Bay, and at Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle, and in the Peach Orchard of Gettysburg. Now the silver ice of Antietam Creek was changed to gold, and day, not John Brown, raided Harper’s Ferry, and day, not Jackson, shuttled through the passes of the Massanutten, and now the Piedmont began to warm, and the Cumberland, and all the highland between Chattanooga and Syracuse, and light came to the Western Reserve, and Island Number Ten, and Shiloh, and it was day down the Michigan mitten and the Wabash, and the ironclads of morning ran the hairpin bend before Vicksburg. And now it was bright from Bemidji to the Alamo, and now the Panhandle showed, and the Cherokee Strip, and now the Yellowstone yellowed, and the bald Big Horns where Custer fell. And now the snow shone on the Absarokas and the Shoshone country and the Teton Range, and from Ogden, where the ceremonial spike was hammered down, the sun ran west like a train on fire. And now lakes of sun were made on salt and sand, and here and there morning and morning air went through the open windows of a whitened skull. And now it was February 11th, 1909, for the American earth.