An Interview with Richard Ford

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

I don’t think there’s any signature to my sentences. I’ve heard some people say there is, but that’s just a gesture meant to flatter me. Because I’m sure there’s not. A sentence’s style or manner, or a book full of sentences with styles or manners, is a response to a variety of forces operating on a writer: the writer’s sensuous, instinctual relation to the material itself; the accumulated amount of material that precedes the writing; the writer’s history with other books that may or may not have entertained some of the same subject matter, or books that the writer simply admires; the daily tidal changes in any person’s mood and energies. And much more. All these things affect how sentences get written — how many words they hold, how syntactically complex they are, their diction and all word-choosings, what they undertake to elucidate. And in the course of any one book these stylistic characteristics can and often do change or modulate. It’s certainly the case that over the course of any writer’s life his or her grasp on sentences will also change — either from book to book, subject to subject, or just as one gets older. I think that The Lay of the Land has longer, complexer sentences because my mind (my older man’s mind) was just fuller of things that interested me, and I didn’t want to lose a lot of them. So, I devised sentences to keep all that stuff and put them in play. You can say that was ambition, or you could say it was poor judgment and an inability to discriminate. I’d say it was ambition, because I like the book a lot — like its thoroughness.

People can get preoccupied by such stylistic matters as ‘voice’: having a consistent ‘voice’, a true ‘voice’, a ‘voice’ of one’s own. This conception of voice can have something to do with a writer’s purported signature. But to me this isn’t very important. To me ‘voice’ is probably just the music of the story’s intelligence, how it sounds when it’s being smart, or when it’s working on the reader. And that music, like a story’s style, can change, and does change. So, a Richard Ford sentence will usually be differently made from one piece of writing to the next. Which is fine with me.

How aware were you of Eudora Welty in Jackson while you were growing up?

Well, I knew her name. One did, in Jackson. I went to school with her niece, Elizabeth. But, Eudora’d grown up directly across the street from me on Congress Street, and I didn’t even know that until I was far along into adulthood. I also didn’t read anything of hers (or anything much at all) until I was in college and had it presented to me on a syllabus. Eudora lived — on Pinehurst Street — not so far away from us when I was growing up. Walking distance. But it was in another, somewhat better ‘old Jackson’ neighbourhood than ours. My mother once pointed Eudora out to me at the grocery store — I might’ve been eight. She said ‘Richard, that’s Eudora Welty, over there. She’s a writer.’ I could tell from the tone of my mother’s voice that she thought being a writer was good.

Did she write anything herself, your mother I mean?

Interesting — to me, anyway. When I was going through my mother’s belongings after she’d died, in 1971, I found a notebook that had only one line written in it, on its first page, and in my mother’s quite elegant hand. It said ‘Les, A life’. Now my grandmother, her mother, was called Les — some version of her real name, which was Essie. My mother took care of my grandmother through the last years of my grandmother’s life. And it was not an easy passage. My grandmother was capable of great, aggressive nastiness. And I know my mother got in the way of it a lot. We all did at one time or other. But it may have seemed to my mother that some act of writing — fictive or otherwise — was the best way to record or imagine her own experience. I’d guess, too, it was partly because she had a son who was a novelist that this began to seem possible to her. But. She never did it — which is all right. She didn’t want to enough.

Do you think stories are created or discovered?

That’s easy. Stories are created. It isn’t as if they’re ‘out there’ waiting in some Platonic hyper-space like unread emails. They aren’t. Writers make stories up. It might be that when stories turn out to be good they then achieve a quality of inevitability, of there seeming to have been a previously existing and important space that they perfectly fill. But that isn’t what’s true. I’m sure of it. A story makes its own space and then fills it. Writers don’t ‘find’ stories — although some writers might say so. This to me just means they have a vocabulary that’s inadequate at depicting what they actually do. They’re like Hemingway — always fleeing complexity as if it were a barn fire.

You have written movingly of New Orleans, in memory of your feelings for that city, where you and Kristina have lived and worked; has that disaster altered your perception of loss?

I don’t know that I ever had a previous ‘perception’ of loss. But the disaster in New Orleans surely didn’t sponsor a new one. My sense of permanence has always included the likely demolition of all vestiges of permanence — houses, street corners, trees whereon we carved our names in hearts, persons. It can all go, and will. In America we white people sentimentalize permanence — or at least we once could. But Native Americans certainly don’t. Blacks probably don’t either. Europeans of a certain age don’t. I don’t.

Next page: Has faith or church-going ever had any appeal to you?