An Interview with Richard Ford

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

Not church-going. But faith, well… There’s the famous line in Hebrews 11: ‘Faith is the evidence of things unseen’. I’ve always been attracted to that line. But for specifically ir-religious reasons. I deem that line to be a line about the imagination. I could almost say that, ‘the imagination is the evidence of things unseen’. But again specifically I’d say that my ‘faith’ lies in the imagination and in the imagination’s power to bring into existence essential experience that heretofore wasn’t known to exist.

That reminds me of Frank Bascombe’s line: ‘The unseen exists and has properties.’ Do you have an ongoing sense of that ‘unseen’, or only at certain charged moments?

I don’t much think about the unseen. For lack of great erudition, or a great education, I suppose I’ve stored a fair amount of trust in my instinct. But as soon as I see that written down I start to think that instinct may just be another word for luck and for trusting to luck — which I’ve done. A favourite line I repair to is by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who said: ‘We have a built-in, very potent, hairtriggered tendency to find agency in things that are not agents.’ I’m not sure if Dennett approves of that tendency or not. But certainly that’s one of the things literature does — it ascribes agency where before no agency was noticed: it says this causes that, this is a consequence of that, etc. It may be that writing fiction, imagining agencies, is my most trusted way into the unseen.

There is a kind of unflinching morality in many of your stories. I’m thinking particularly of the tales of adultery in A Multitude of Sins. Trangression has consequences, even if only in pointing up the emptiness of lives. Does this moral sense grow out of characters, or does the moral engine come first?

I don’t know a specific answer to that. In most of those stories I didn’t start with a character. I usually don’t. I usually start either with a situation (a man meets his ex-lover’s husband in Grand Central Station; a married couple are on their way to a party, when the young wife informs her young husband that she’s had an affair with the host of the party they’re attending — those are examples). Or else I just go looking for bits and pieces that I want a story to contain, and organize the story out of those bits. I suppose when I put it that way, and in terms of your question, the ‘moral engine’ may seem to come first, be an unspoken force in the choosings. But I’m entirely unaware of its being so. I hold with the notion that Martin Amis quoted Northrop Frye to say: that literature is a disinterested use of language; a writer must have nothing riding on the outcome. I set up situations and then see what I can have happen as a consequence, using language. And, at least in theory, the consequence could pretty much be anything.

Does that principle of disinterest apply equally in your novels, is it tough not to be rooting for Frank, say?

I’m always rooting for Frank to do something, or have something to say that’s not expected, but interesting, given the conventional sort of man the reader may be imagining him to be — a real estate agent, etc. So, the rule of disinterest still applies. It should also be said, of course, that I’m not bound strictly by that rule. If by following it I write something that I don’t like, or have Frank or any character say or do something that seems dumb or somehow wrong, I can just scratch it out and often do. I never saw Frank as a human being (although I’d like the reader to think he was pretty close to being a human being). Rather I saw him as an agency made of language. So, I wouldn’t be ‘rooting’ for him the way you’d root for the kid with Hodgkin’s Disease to see one last game at Yankee Stadium. It’s different. I may be more rooting for myself to come up with something good.

Do you find your empathy with the weaknesses of your characters has deepened as you have grown older?

My empathy with every kind of weakness has deepened. Is it a matter of age? Maybe. More probably it’s just a matter of experience. Graham Greene wrote — and I’ve always hated the idea — that morality comes with old age, with one’s curiosity growing weak. That’s a sourpuss’s notion of morality. As something that’s moribund. And I don’t buy it. Maybe that’s because my curiosity still seems strong.

In your introduction to The New Granta Book of the American Short Story you quote Walter Benjamin suggesting ‘We no longer work at things that can’t be abbreviated’, perhaps a factor of waning curiosity. What is your feeling for America’s attention span?

That was Benjamin expressing his displeasure with modern times. Probably an observer could make, or could’ve made, the same claim about the contemporary attention span at any given time in history. But as for me, and as for now, I see lots of people on airplanes reading really long books; I see the ‘young’ of my country, as well as their beaverish parents, spending long, long, long periods of time in front of computer screens; I see athletes training and training until they drop. So, I conclude from this admittedly unscientific survey, that plenty of Americans have plenty of attention available — for something. It may not be for literary fiction. But then it’s my job as a purveyor of literary fiction to tap into that otherwise wasted attention span. But it’s there.

You have rarely written of childhood, in the way that, for instance, Tobias Wolff has; has that territory never tempted you?

Well, I’d say I have written about childhood. Several of the stories in Rock Springs are narrated by teenagers, as is all of Wildlife. And in the New Jersey books there are Frank’s kids all around —especially in Independence Day. Maybe in your terms a teenager isn’t a child; and maybe that’s true. But I always think I’ve written about children — because I always brag that it’s a lot easier to write about children than to have them. And I don’t have any.

Next page: To what extent do you think your life was shaped by being an only child among big Southern families?