TOM FITZSIMONS talks to writer Richard Ford – author of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land – recently in the country for the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.


THERE’S SOMETHING glacial about Richard Ford. Something calm and slow and contented.

His luggage is still in Los Angeles, where it missed one of his many transfers on the way to New Zealand, but it hardly bothers him.

He goes the wrong way to get to our table at the bar of the Intercontinental, then unhurriedly turns and corrects his route.

He is dressed like a Seinfeld character: the big American jeans, the yellow t-shirt tucked in, the white sneakers.

I confess, before I met Richard Ford, I thought he might be an evil genius.

I think it was the dull blue eyes in his huge photo on the back of my copy of The Sportswriter, his breakout novel.

Or maybe the careful long grey hair, reaching back around his ears. Or maybe the skin, the whiteness, the waxiness of it.

Now I can attest that he’s either not evil at all, or else a very good deceiver.

Throughout our interview, he surprises me – not by the quality of his thought, or his articulacy (both superb), but by his engagement.

He seems genuinely willing to hold court with a young bastard who hasn’t even finished reading his latest book.

Before I turn the tape recorder on, he tells me how Wellington is one of his favourite cities in the world, but for once it somehow seems authentic.

After I turn it back off, he happily dishes out journalism advice (‘You can’t just try to be ethical – you have to be ethical!’), convincing me to run this piece as a transcript.
He speaks in a southern accent with southern emphases, and his sentences seem to grow in confidence as he speaks them, till they are paragraphs and fully-formed thoughts.

Over 45 minutes, he strikes me as a serious but open man; alarmingly well read and occasionally acerbic in his criticism, but still alive to humour and people and imperfection.

Here is our conversation, as faithfully reproduced as possible:


You’re done. You’re done with the trilogy.

Yeah. I never thought of it as a trilogy until I finished it and then people began to think of it as a trilogy and so I just jumped on the bandwagon and decided it was a trilogy.

Right, so it’s not going to be a quad...

A tetralogy? No, it isn’t. At least, I don’t see how I could conceivably do this act again. It could be done by someone else. You know, sometimes those cartoonists, when they get old and they can’t draw anymore, they hand their character off to someone else [laughs], so I guess that could happen. But, I don’t know, I’m 63 years old. I’d like to do something that’s a little easier for the next little bit. It’s hard to imagine muscling up again to do the kind of work that you have to do – or that I have to do anyway – to write another, commensurate book … to these Frank Bascombe books.

But you’ll keep writing?

I’d love to write another book. I have the idea for a novel, for a short novel that I’ve had in my head for a couple of decades, finally getting around to it. And I’d be happy to write some stories.

Can you talk about the next novel?

It’s a book set in Saskatchewan in western Canada. It’s a little novel about a man who leaves America in the 60s to live in western Canada because he’s on the run from violent involvement in the right-to-work movement in America. He sets some explosives and kills somebody and goes basically to live in hiding in western Canada and over the next couple of decades, he gets found out, people are sent up to assassinate him. So it’s got for me a rather tightly wound little plot.

Sounds intriguing.

I think it’s a good idea. That’s why I’ve been sticking it in my brain all these years.

And maybe slowly it’s been building up.

It has been building up. I just went through my notes. I’ve got a lot of notes. I went through my notes and next month in June I’m going out to Saskatchewan again and just kind of seeing if there’s anything out there that I can see – that is to say retinally see – that I can actually describe.

Is that what you do with your landscapes – do you put in some heavy-duty research?

Well, if you call it that. I just mostly go driving around with a tape recorder in my hand and I see things and I speak them into the tape recorder. But that isn’t a writing process. The writing process for me is strictly a writing process. But I’ll go back and transcribe those tapes. Maybe once in a while, something that I’ve actually said into the tape recorder will get put down on the page, but mostly it doesn’t work that way… because writing is writing and speaking is speaking.

So what does that process do if it doesn’t come out on the page – does it, does it foreshadow it somehow or...?

Sometimes. There’s no uniformity of how it will eventuate on the page. Sometimes it’ll be a sentence that I’ll actually say. Sometimes it’ll just be sort of a generic note that I made to myself that I’ll then come back and try to put more felicitous language to. It works in all kinds of ways. Mostly I think it just gets into my memory.

Back to the finishing of the third book – how do you feel about it now, and how do you feel about Frank Bascombe?

Well, I don’t feel anything about Frank, because Frank is a character that I made up, and so when he’s done, he stops existing for me. He lives on in the books for readers who want to read those books, but for me, everything just ceases to be. He would commence again to be if I wanted to write him all over again, but since I don’t, then he doesn’t.

But how do I feel about the books? Well, I think this last book is a really good book. And it’s funny and it’s serious and it’s grave. And it’s quite abundant. I think it’s felicitous in most ways. I’m very happy about it.

I’ll make a confession. I’m only a third of the way through it.

Oh, that’s alright, you’ve got a good taste of what it is.

Yeah. Well, I’m enjoying it. I mean, I love your prose.

Thanks. I think I’ll read something from it tonight...

Actually, I would be tempted to read a short story. Truthfully, I usually don’t decide what I’m going to read till somebody says my name and I walk up on the stage.

Really?

Yeah. It gives me a little edge for myself.

Can you remember the creation of Frank and how that came to be and where...?

I was living in Princeton, New Jersey, in the spring of 1982, and I had been affected by several books that were written and told in the first person, and I was just trying out some links basically to see what I could do with some of the facilities of the books that I had been reading, if I had anything to bring to those strategies.

One was Joseph Heller’s book called Something Happened. Another was Fred Exley’s book A Fan’s Notes. Another was The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.

And [I was] just living down in New Jersey and really back on my heels, in the sense that I had quit writing a couple of years before and thought that my writing life as a novelist had finished.

And then for various circumstantial reasons I ended up back in New Jersey with nothing to do but figure out ... what to do. Writing a novel was what I figured out. And yeah, it felt natural to me what I was doing, the first time I did it. It seemed like something I had a feel for – Frank’s voice. Writing sentences on the page which in your mind’s ear sound like that character.

One of the things that strikes me about Frank is the way he sizes other people up very quickly and just with a few details sketches them... and with such immediacy, I think. Is that something you find yourself doing?

No. No. I never do. I never do that with people. I’m a sort of inveterate suspender of judgment about people. I’m a natural listener. I never make hasty decisions about people.

So how do you write that – when he says “this person is the kind of person who...”?

Because I want him to be the kind of person who does that kind of thing. And also, from the standpoint of the writer writing to a readership, I want to make his views properly accessible to the reader. So it’s a little bit of the writing strategy which finally becomes part of the character’s identity. And I think also those kinds of little snap-assessments that he makes are often funny – and so it gives me an opportunity to write something funny, which I’m always really thrilled to get to do.

Yeah, prejudice often is funny... well, not necessarily prejudice, but generalisation.

Well, sometimes it’s prejudice. But as you say, it’s just encapsulating people. He’ll call somebody a ‘guinea’, or he’ll call somebody a… It’s not always ethnic. But sometimes it’s ethnic.

He is the kind of man who... this’ll be hard to say. I wouldn’t want somebody to think ill of him for doing that, because he’s a rather thoroughgoing thinker about things.

But on the other hand, I want to be able to write a character who does that, and so I can’t have it both ways. I can’t have him be not a character who does that and still do it. So I choose if I’m going to do it, I’m going to choose to write those little snap, encapsulating assessments of people, and I’m just going to have to live with the fact that that’s going to adhere to Frank.

So it’s really an interesting phenomenon, I’ve never really thought about it before. It’s something I want to do as a writer – and so I make him the bearer of it – and then he becomes that kind of person ... even though I don’t really think he is.

Yeah, well you talk about him as thoroughgoing and I do think that as well. He’s reflective and he mulls things over a lot.

Oh yeah. Particularly in this third book. When there’s more to mull. Which is why [the Isle of] Mull is in the book.

And he says things that, a lot of the time, feel like real wisdom to me.

Well, I would hope that I could, after all these years, write something that was reasonably intelligent about the world. You know, I do think that that’s something that novels are good for – after the model of Walter Benjamin, that novels should give counsel, that novels should be useful to the reader. Even if it is that he pronounces on something important and you don’t believe it, you’re at least doing what I want the book to do, which is to have a conversation with the reader.

So not necessarily any really didactic properties?

Not really. It tries to be smart about what it’s about. But it doesn’t have any – I hope – serious didacticism, because in everything that Frank believes, there’s always a kind of a tincture of humour in it, that will let you out the back door of it if you don’t want to stay.

What are the other things you think novels can do? Why are you writing novels?

Mmm, that’s a good question. I’m writing novels because I couldn’t think of anything else to do that was valuable and that was useful and that engaged me in things that I liked. And that in a way was a response to reading. To me, writing novels is a response to my habits as a reader. I mean I could have been an academic, or I could have been a lawyer. I could have done all kinds of – well, not all kinds – but a few things that would have been tantamount to being responses to my reading. And so, reading made such a big difference to me in my late teens and early twenties, that writing inspired by reading seemed natural to me. Although, although I don’t really think it is natural to me. It just felt more natural than anything else that I did.

Does anybody feel natural about being a writer?

Well, I always assumed that there are people who do. I mean, I think Updike must. I’ll have to ask Updike this some time because I keep citing him as somebody who I think is a natural writer. But for me it’s always required the kind of effort that is tantamount to work. So why I am writing? Because I like to read novels I guess, because I think novels are grand, cultural, artistic forms... so, apart from that, it was an easier gig than anything else I was writing.

What about the novel compared to short stories?

Well, novels are harder to write and more important if you get them right.

More easy to mess up?

No, short stories are more easy to mess up. Novels are very forgiving forms, because they have so many formal elements about them that forgive the other formal elements about them. I mean, whereas with short stories... I mean, a messed-up short story or a short story that’s unsuccessful – it really isn’t a short story. It isn’t really anything.

But a novel can be busted in some way and still be a successful novel. You think about The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. You think about The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. You think about Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. Those novels all have serious misfeasances in them – all three of them do – and yet, they’re thought of as elegant, wonderful, plausible novels. They get past it because they have many other formal features beside their structure to forgive their structural inadequacies.

I’ve got all my little things about Frank written down here, so I’ll return to one of them.

Sure.

Especially in The Sportswriter, I remember particularly the “dreaminess” he describes and just sort of being adrift and isolated. Where did the impulse for that come from?

I don’t know. I think there are just some things, Tom, that you just make up. I mean I can trace the origins of that book to the circumstances of my own life at the time, which was to be quite unsettled emotionally. My mother had just died. I had been teaching up at Williams College and had moved back down to New Jersey without any real sense of a vocation, and my wife and I were thinking very seriously about leaving Princeton and going somewhere else. Life was really afloat for me, and so particularly in the aftermath of my mother’s death, I think a lot of the book’s subject matter – namely grief and loss – it really originated in that. But you know, it’s just something I made up based on how I thought someone would feel who was in Frank’s situation.


It just felt like something I hadn’t read a lot of: people who were in a numb state, or something like that.

Yeah. Right. I was kind of in a numb stage. But I wouldn’t want to say it was autobiographical, because I think if I hadn’t written that, if I hadn’t externalised what I did externalise in that book, I wouldn’t have thought I was in a numb state. I would probably look back on it now, absent that book, and not think I was in that state.

I’m very wont to not pay attention to my emotional states. I just don’t. I don’t think most of them matter. What I think matters are the larger intentions that I have in the world. So that how I feel on any given day – what my emotions are tricking around and doing and how they’re making me feel at any given moment – I don’t give a shit. I don’t pay any attention to that.

I mean, I’ve known lots of people who were very much victims of their feelings and victims of their emotions. I’m really not. If I’m in a bad mood, you’d have to really push me to know it. And if I was sick, you’d have to really get under my skin to find that out. I just generally want to make things be normal, so that I can go on and be doing the things that I’ve set out for myself to do... the larger intentions.

Hmm, that’s impressive.

Well, it’s just a habit. It’s a habit. I’m not generally a holder-inner. Actually I think I’m quite aggressive and potentially bad-tempered. But what I try not to do is to make my temper and whatever I have going on inside of me work badly on other people.

Some other things I’m sure you’ve been asked before – the suburbs. Why do you set the books there?

Well, I think I set those books in the suburbs because when I looked around back in 1982 to ask myself where I could set a novel, I simultaneously asked myself, what did I know about that maybe nobody else had written about in the way that I thought I could write it? The suburbs were the world that I knew. We lived in the suburbs at the time in Princeton. And I had been driving around a lot in New Jersey for about six years. I grew up partly in the suburbs. Suburbs were everywhere. So it just seemed a kind of a natural backdrop for what I was going to make my characters do. It really wasn’t anything more than that.

Do you think the suburbs are... you know, we have all this imagery of the suburbs taking off post-WWII and being the fabric that holds together American society and western societies? Is that true? Does it hold true?

I think there’s not anything I can give a simple answer to. I mean, the suburbs shelter and house lots of people successfully and make their lives more – if homogeneous – more serene. However, and my view is not Frank’s view – Frank’s view is distinct from mine – I’ve never lived in the suburbs when I didn’t think they were bland and uneventful and slightly boring.

So you’re saying you did think those things?

I do think those things. Not since 1992 have I really lived in the suburbs, but when I did live in the suburbs in 1992, I thought it was ghastly. I lived in a new middle suburb where Christina and I – my wife and I – were renting a house up in Mississippi and I just thought it was horrible. But Frank doesn’t have that view. And even as I say that they’re horrible to me, I know that they serve the purposes and make possible the lives and safety of millions of people… so there’s no one simple answer to that question. For me: no. For others: yes.

Another element obviously for Frank is his marriage and divorce and relationships. You sound like you have had a successful marriage.

Well, I’ve had a wonderful marriage. More than a successful one. I’ve been married to the same girl for 42 years. Well actually, we started living together when we were teenagers. She was 17 and I was 19. And then we got married four years later. So I sort of lump it all into 42, but actually we’ve only been married for...

...40 maybe?

39. It will be 40 next March. We were just kids. Just kids. You know the greatest good luck I could have ever had was to have married Christina.

So how do you write these books about this guy who’s struggling with relationships so much?

Well, I think we write books about all kinds of stuff that we only partly know about. You make it up. You listen to what others tell you. You infuse what you’re writing with some of your own fears. You report on some things that happened to you directly.

You just come by all of those bits of information in that kind of omnivorous way that writers do – grab a little here, grab a little there, read things in the newspapers, yeah. And that’s my job. My job is to write about things really persuasively, but maybe not have it done. It’s not hard. You have to believe in it. You have to believe you can write about things you haven’t specifically done, but that you have a curiosity about, and have a kind of a commotion about in your heart and your brain.

You have to believe that that’s valuable, that it’s not idle to be doing that. And the illustration of that is how you relate to the books that you’ve read. If you believe that those books are valuable, if you believe that they’re plausible and they speak to your life, then you can set about doing it yourself.

That sounds about right. Another thing I’m interested in – I was re-reading the Sportswriter and there’s this scene where Frank stops by the church...

Hmm... the First Presbyterian.

... and pulls over and goes in there... and there’s this amazing description of sort of religious ecstasy or something...

Mmm... it’s the music.

... but there’s this acknowledgement that it is only going to be this temporary thing and it’s going to pass over... even while he’s having it. Which seems in an age where it’s either hardline secularity or the kind of total religious authenticity that seems unreal, that’s striking. What’s the background you bring to that?

Well, I was raised in the Presbyterian church and faked religious ecstasy from day one. I felt my chest swell and my heart beat harder and my head get swirly, but it was just because of other people’s devotion. It was being in the presence of other people’s rather curious devotion. And also the music and the ceremony. All of those things had a ... I can only say a superficial effect on me, because it certainly wasn’t religious. I kept trying to identify it as religious. I kept trying to say, ‘Well gee, I’m a believer’, but a little voice in my head kept saying, ‘No, you aren’t, you’re having palpitations but you’re not really having the experience.’ So for that reason I’m very sceptical of other people’s religious fervour. I think it’s self-induced. I mean, I think it’s all rubbish. I think religion’s rubbish. I think believing in a deity is rubbish. I think it’s just an opiate, just like the communists say.

What do you think about the position it continues to occupy in American life?

It’s dangerous. Delusional. Demagogic. And exclusivist. It’s everything bad. I’m anti-religion.

In all of its forms?

In all of its communal forms, yeah. A private sense of spirituality I don’t find to be offensive. I wouldn’t even say wrong, but not offensive to me. I wouldn’t want to call another person’s private experience fallacious. I just wouldn’t think I knew enough about them. But the outward evidences of large widespread religion are almost always bad. They’re bad for the poor, they’re bad for the future, they’re bad for the present. You know, I was raised in a church where the all the members thought African-Americans were subhuman. And they used the doctrine of their church to substantiate that. Well, that’s to me, that’s bad. They wouldn’t let black people into our church! And I kept thinking to myself, if this is so fucking great, why wouldn’t you let anybody in here?

Tied to that, I’m interested in your political views.

I used to be a Democrat. And I’ll probably vote Democrat. But I’m not a Democrat, because I think they’re just such a bunch of stumple-puppies, such an injudicious pseudo-political party. They can’t organise themselves, they can’t learn to compromise. They’re just as doctrinaire as the Republicans are, in their own way.

You know, I’m a liberal – about most things, not all things. I’m against the war. I’ve never voted for a Republican. I’m sure I never will. I think of myself as a secular humanist.

Do you think of yourself as political?

Yes, I do. I think The Lay of the Land is a political novel. I think all these novels are political novels, but particularly The Lay of the Land, being set in election year – and so was Independence Day. Having something going on in it about the culture at the end of the millennium, so yeah, I think of myself in that regard, as regards those three books, as a man who writes political novels. Whether anybody agrees with me or not, I don’t care.

It certainly was my intention in writing Independence Day, which is about the history of the country. And it was my intention in writing The Lay of the Land, which is a pre-9/11 book. So yeah.

Read anything good lately?

I’ve just this afternoon finished Andrew O’Hagan’s book, which I quite liked, called Be Near Me. I liked it quite a lot, in fact. I’m going to be on stage with Andy and I’ve met him once or twice, so I thought I’d read his latest book just to see what he’s about, see what he’s thinking about these days... and I quite liked it. It’s about a priest... living in Scotland. It’s not the kind of book that I would ordinarily think that I would cotton to. But once I started reading it, I couldn’t quit reading it. And now that it’s over, I’m really sorry it’s over.

Always a good sign.

I remember a couple of years ago, I went to a little college in America. One of my books was used for the freshman convocation, whereby every entering freshman had to read my book, and then the freshman class just entering in the autumn was divided up into little preceptorships, and they all had to go talk to their professors about my book.

And I had to do one of those preceptorships. And one of the women said to me, she said, ‘You know, I didn’t really read all of your book. I couldn’t see why what a 40-year-old man was doing in life would be of any interest to me.’ Which was just stepping into my bear-trap.

I said, ‘Well, you do have parents, don’t you? Do you have to find in every book that you read, yourself? Are books just mirrors about your own concerns and preoccupations’. It was a nice pedagogical moment. I think she completely didn’t know what I was talking about.

Washed over her.

Well, washed under her, I think. I was trying to be very fundamental about why we read books. Not that we have that kind of native attachment to them, but that the books themselves have the responsibility of finding a common cause with us. And Andy’s books found a common cause with me.

Do you think books can do that in a way that other media can’t? Are you a fan of movies?

Very much. Very much a fan of movies. Fan of music. A great Springsteen fan. Yeah, I think all kinds of media can do it. Books have their special appeals – the pace that we read books, the way we can linger in books, the degree to which we are in control of how fast we advance, the possibility of stopping and thinking and reading over again – which other media, which render us relatively passive, don’t provide as easily. I think books have very special appeals, but they are similar to the appeals of other art forms – painting, sculpture, dance … particularly dance.

Are you a poetry reader at all?

Very much. I did a master class today at Victoria University where I talked a lot about poetry and read a poem to them, so I read poetry, I would say on a given day of my life, I’d read one or two poems every day.

But I love poetry. I don’t write it, and I have no urge to write it and I’m sure any capacity to write it, but I love to read it. I read it out loud.

I thought I better get a question in there about poetry.



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