Hollywood in an Epic Autobiography : A VERY GOOD LAND TO FALL WITH Scenes From the Life of an American Jew, Volume 3<i> by John Sanford (Black Sparrow Press: $20, cloth; $12.50</i> ,<i> paper</i> ;<i> 296 pp.) </i>

Noting the 17 books of John Sanford’s 55-year literary career neatly listed by his publisher as nine novels, four interpretations of history, one collection of letters and three volumes of autobiography, you’d have every reason to think him a writer working in well-established genres, yet nothing could be further from the truth.

The novels are both autobiographical and historical. The histories contain passages of fantasy, the correspondence between Sanford and the physician-poet William Carlos Williams becomes a dual meditation upon the writer’s craft. The autobiography itself combines every one of these disciplines plus free and rhymed verse.

Even the explicit, 8-word subtitle of this third volume of the autobiography exceeds its apparent limitations, for in this particular context, the noun Jew can stand for every man who has ever felt himself outside the mainstream of society, a condition that, often enough, has less to do with religious or ethnic ties than with a particular cast of mind. Because Sanford avoids the subjective I and refers to himself in the second person as you, the reader may occasionally forget that “A Very Good Land to Fall With” is in fact autobiography at all, and begin to think of it in far broader and more general terms as a story of growing up with this century.

The source of Sanford’s quixotic title is a jotting made by Robert Jewet, a sailor on Henry Hudson’s battered ship as it sailed into New York bay in 1609. Refusing to abandon his search for the Northwest Passage even after frigid weather and related hardships had caused the Dutch East India Company to withdraw its support and driven his exhausted crew to virtual mutiny, Hudson defied his sponsors by sailing west from Norway on a second attempt to find a sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. “A very good land to fall with, a pleasant land to see,” written by an obscure young crewman after those months of privation and misery, must rank as one of the most exquisitely restrained judgments of all time.

Sanford’s book begins in 1936, the first two books having taken us from his birth in New York in 1904 through his education, graduation from law school, abandonment of that profession for first ventures as a novelist and obligatory European Wanderjahr to end with his return to Depression America. All three volumes intersperse intensely lyrical historical vignettes with personal memoir, a technique Sanford has devised to show “the color of the air”--the social and political climate that molds us all. While many of these asides deal with current events, others delve further back into American history to remind us of our common heritage.

This third volume opens as Sanford is crossing the country by train on his way to a screen-writing job in Hollywood. The very first pages display the author’s meld of past and present with an ode to John Brown inspired by the sight of the Kansas plains, verses that would later appear in the controversial novel, “A Man Without Shoes.” The length of the “scenes” that comprise the book varies widely. Some are no more than a hundred words of sensuous imagery while others are fully fledged chapters with characters, settings and incidents developed according to traditional methods. By the same quality of vision that transforms a heap of colored pebbles into a luminous mosaic, these segments become a cohesive and glowing narrative.

“A Very Good Land to Fall With,” set almost entirely in Hollywood, provides a marvelously individual account of the movie industry during the Depression and war years, a panorama of personalities and politics that will amaze even specialists in local lore. Relatively early in his Hollywood career, Sanford met and married Maggie Roberts, and their long love story, told directly and colloquially, modulates the impassioned tone of the social commentary, providing balance and continuity to the narrative as it has to the life. In this book, even the characteristic flamboyance of the language is tempered, the writer who could never tolerate an editorial change willingly editing himself. There are, however, never any compromises in either the definitive style or the outspoken content.

The screen-writing career was brief and unremarkable, Sanford soon realizing that he lacked the accommodating temperament the job demanded. As for the novels written during his Hollywood years, each of them had a different publisher, and none, Sanford says, ever sold more than 2,000 copies in its original edition.

The high moral principles, however, and the strong convictions never wavered. “He is one of the most irresistible challenges an editor could ask for--and I am asking for it,” one of Sanford’s many editors wrote in persuading Harcourt Brace to accept “The People From Heaven,” a novel of small-town race relations that had already intimidated a dozen publishers. The inflamed rhetoric of the reviews of that book, equally divided between overwhelmed admiration and unbridled disdain, suggest the power of Sanford’s prose to arouse, astonish and stun. Forty-five years later, the Sanford style is mellower and deeper without losing one iota of its original vigor.

Looking back at the intransigent young man from a vantage point of 50 years, the writer is now able to appraise his own youthful implacability and mark the places where it might have been mitigated with no loss of integrity. Where the youthful novels were fiercely sardonic, this latest volume of the autobiography is moderated by an engaging wit. Where they were made of adamant, “A Very Good Land to Fall With” is cast in more malleable material. As Sanford gracefully acknowledges, he now agrees with those who tried to convince him that less could sometimes be more.

Sanford concludes in 1945, with the bombing of Nagasaki recalled in two searing pages of verse and one of prose. The fourth volume of what was to have been an “autobiographical trilogy” will appear within the coming year.

The high purpose of Sanford’s oeuvre, taken as a whole, has been to let us glimpse the perfectible America that might have been. Because that sometimes thankless job has been accomplished so thoroughly and effectively by the novels and histories, the autobiography is free to delight and entertain, to be affectionate, tender, amusing, good-humored, suspenseful, ironic, sometimes wicked and always beguiling. This third volume is, in fact, exactly what the author has postponed and resisted until now, the book with an irresistible appeal to a broad general audience.