An Interview with Richard Ford

When The Lay of the Land was completed you suggested you would never write another long novel. Are you still feeling that way?

I still feel that way, possibly even more that way. The Lay of the Land was, for me, a big effort and, as efforts go, entirely singular. And it requires a commensurate (if not exactly equal) devotion from its readership. More than I can’t imagine myself writing such a long novel again (and I can’t), I neither can imagine wanting to write anything that would ‘work on a reader’ with anything like the same intense force — length, complexity, general largeness. I’d like to write another novel, yes. I’d like to write plenty of things. But I can’t imagine another such undertaking as The Lay of the Land. Some things just don’t need to be done twice — especially since I feel like I did it right the first time.

You set that book at the time of the disputed first Bush presidential election. Do you feel that election set America’s fate?

It did set America’s fate. No question. Insofar as the election was stolen by the Republicans, and insofar as the American electorate was sufficiently uninspired as to permit such a close race, and insofar as the two-party system (particularly the feckless Democrats) allowed a man of George Bush’s astonishing incompetence and dishonesty to become the leader of our country — insofar as all these things are true and occurred at the heart of the 2000 election, then that set of events can be viewed as a direct cause of the unthinkable circumstances in Iraq today, the cause of so much loss of innocent life, and the cause of America’s near-obliterated role as a potential force for good in world affairs. Is all this America’s final fate? I surely hope not. It’s the fix we’re in today. And I hope we have a better, more wholesome fate than this. But there’s no doubt about what was the initial event in the chain of events that landed us in this mess.

Why do you think so many American novelists — some surprising ones, John Updike, some less so, Don DeLillo — have felt bound to confront 9/11 so directly in fiction?

They were moved by those events. It’s not very complicated. In the case of DeLillo and Updike, they’re both supremely accomplished writers who’re unusually confident of their abilities to make a subject their own. The fact that I wouldn’t do it, didn’t do it, probably just means I’m not their equal on either front. Otherwise I’d have surely done it. Right?

Much of Frank Bascombe’s dislocation and hurt comes from the death of his son. All of your writing seems to have some of this atmosphere of loss. Where do you sense the source of that in your own life?

First of all, I don’t think that a writer who writes about loss (if I do) needs to have suffered loss himself. We can imagine loss. That’s the writer’s job. We empathize, we project, we make much of what might be small experience. Hemingway (as usual, full of wind) said ‘only write about what you know’. But that can’t mean you should only write about what you yourself have done or experienced. A rule like that pointlessly straps the imagination, confines one’s curiosity, one’s capacity to empathize. After all, a novel (if it chooses) can cause a reader to experience sensation, emotion, to recognize behaviour that reader may never have seen before. The writer’ll have to be able to do that, too. Some subjects just cause what Katherine Anne Porter called a ‘commotion in the mind’. That commotion may or may not be a response to what we actually did on earth.

That said, I probably experienced loss no more fully than most people. I was the child of older parents who I always was fearfully expecting to die on me. And the old Arkansas aunties and great uncles did start departing life when I was just a small child. One of my first vivid memories is of my Aunt Lizzie’s funeral — in Arkansas — and of her lying in her casket. Vivid, yes; but also rather normal in life. Then my father died when I was sixteen — died in my arms, at home. That could certainly be seen as imprinting. We were a three-person family, very close and loving. So I experienced loss when he died; and probably, as significantly, I experienced the loss my mother suffered — of her one great love in life. How we experience what we experience is a complex business.

Did you, or do you, look back on the years before your father died, when there were the three of you, as a golden time?

No, not a golden time. I’m suspicious of ‘golden times’. I think that right now this minute had better be the golden time, because it’s what you’ve got. I had a happy childhood because my parents loved me and took good care of me. But my father had a very serious heart attack when I was eight and he was forty-eight. And that coloured a lot of life, because it scared him silly and he never felt entirely well after that — probably wasn’t well. And he was gone a lot. His job as a salesman caused him to travel by car five days a week, and my mother and I were left at home together. And we were both of us pretty volatile personalities. And I never did particularly well in school; was, as time went by, a kid who tended to get into trouble — stealing, getting into fights. I was dyslexic and never read very well. So, no. ‘Golden’ it wasn’t. But it was good.

Did the stealing have consequences — did you get caught?

We’re not talking about holding up Brink’s trucks, here, or Manson Family capers; just, oh, stealing the odd car, some random breaking and enterings, and many lesser offences. And I did get caught, got hauled in front of the juvenile judge, put on probation — which was sort of awful but also sort of a badge of honour. It all scared my mother, though, made her miserable, in fact. And as far as consequence was concerned, I suppose I saw what consequence my behaviour had on her — which was bad. I was on probation at the time my father suddenly died; and my mother sat me down and told me that she wasn’t going to be able to look after me the way she had up to then — because she had to go out and get a job — and that I’d better not turn up in jail or juvenile court again because she wouldn’t get me out. That made a big impression of me. I guess that’s consequence of a kind. But I wasn’t a very committed felon. More of a little dickhead.

Do you think the dyslexia has shaped how you have read?

Absolutely. I read slowly, and as a consequence have definitely not read as many books as I should’ve — in order to be considered properly educated. But what I’ve read — because I’ve read slowly and attentively — I seem to have taken in pretty well. And, importantly, when you read slowly you also become available to those qualities of language that’re other than the cognitive qualities. One becomes sensitive to what you might call the poetic qualities — rhythms, repetitions, sonorities, syncopations, the aptness of particular word choices — those qualities. They’re important — at least they are to me. That’s had a consequence not only upon my reading but also upon my aims as a writer of sentences.

Next page: Do you always know what a Richard Ford sentence sounds like?