An Interview with Richard Ford

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

That’s one of those questions that asks me to imagine another life from my own. I suppose I could — a life with brothers and sisters — but it’s a bit like asking whether things have been different, do you suppose, if you’d been a girl. Probably would. Being an only child, however, shaped a great, great deal in my life. A psychologist could probably give a better answer than I could, and probably a truer answer, too. But I’ll just propose one thing: that I was almost always around adults when I was quite young. Adult life was the ‘important’ life, the aspired-to life, and I could eavesdrop on it all the time, hear what adults thought was important, observe discrepancies in their behaviours and their pronouncements. It probably also intensified the faith that I had in parent–child relationships, inasmuch as my parents seemed to have wanted me, loved me, wanted good for me. It might’ve also caused me to fear loss more than would’ve been the case had there been others around. And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

Do you think that instinct to protect yourself against loss is one of the reasons you chose not to have children?

Doctor Freud might say so. But I just say that it was because Kristina and I didn’t especially like children, didn’t want to be saddled with the responsibility of them. We had our ideas about the future, and there was never room for children in those ideas. It was really the first important thing we ever agreed on when we were in our teens together, in Michigan. I remember the exact moment we first talked about it. It was great.

There are, you’ve said, two fixed points in your life: ‘I always write and I am always married to the same girl.’ In what ways does one depend on the other?

I’ve answered that question enough for one lifetime.

All right; you’ve also said that you consciously want your writing to be ‘affirmative’ of the possibility of love, closeness in a life, what makes you hold to that?

Not to keep on quoting famous men, but somewhere in Wallace Stevens there’s a little fragment that says, ‘we gulp down evil, choke at good’. That’s always meant to me that it’s more appetizing to decry, and less appetizing, maybe less simple, to find a vocabulary for affirmation. And also ‘closeness in a life’ and (if you will) ‘love’ seem immensely sustaining to me, and worthy of efforts at articulation. That said, I’ve written mostly stories that would have to be called ‘cautionary tales’, and that a lot of readers would not think of as conventionally affirming. However, I hold with John Gardner [the novelist and early supporter of Raymond Carver] who said that moral literature (by which I understand him to have meant good literature, valuable literature) ‘tests values and arouses trustworthy feelings about the better and worse in human actions’. To me, indeed, great literature is always affirming, even if it’s grim — if only because it’s a gesture by someone for the use of another in a future that’s hoped to come. Sartre said even the grimmest literature is optimistic since it proves those things can be thought about.

So literature makes us want to be better men (and women)?

I don’t know about that. I just know it gives a reader the chance to see life affirmed through literature’s great concern with life. And it gives the reader a chance — in the sheltered environment of a book — to see the important consequences of events. Making one want to be better, well that’s a private matter. I have some evidence that that may not be accurate — although wanting to be better and being better are obviously different things.

What did you make of being described as a ‘Dirty Realist’ by Granta?

I thought — we probably all thought — that ‘Dirty Realism’ was a wonderful marketing ploy. I don’t think Carver or Toby Wolff or Jayne Anne Phillips or any of us ever thought it really described anything especially true or thematically consistent in our stories. Bill Buford just dreamed it up to sell magazines in Britain. And it worked very, very well. We’re still talking about it, aren’t we? At the time — the middle Eighties — I had no books in print, and no readership. This wasn’t true for the other writers in the ‘Dirty Realism’ issue. But it was true for me. And Bill’s scheme helped me find a readership for my stories. I can’t thank him enough.

Did you ever think of giving up at that time?

I certainly did. I thought that I’d had my shot at being a novelist and it hadn’t worked out well enough. I went over to Sports Illustrated and asked for a job. But the guy who was running it told me no. He said I was a novelist (cruel irony), and that I couldn’t be a sportswriter. So I went home and wrote The Sportswriter. But if he’d given me a job I’d almost assuredly have taken it and been very, very happy. I’d be retired now and have a big pension. It would’ve been a great life.

It seemed to me natural to group you with Carver and Tobias Wolff as writers to the extent that you had some kind of shared interest in a sort of lonely or alienated masculinity. Where do you think that came from?

I never think about that. At our best (if I have a best — and certainly they do), our stories weren’t that much alike. And frankly I can’t think about my own characters in those rather cosseted, conventional terms — alienated, lonely, even masculine. I’m not interested in ‘masculinity’. I’d be surprised if Ray or Toby would’ve said much different. But. I do know that I inherited much of my sense of what a story could be and be about from my reading — from Frank O’Connor, from Sherwood Anderson, from Faulkner, from Isaac Babel, from Flannery O’Connor — alas, from Hemingway, who seems influential in only the most superficial ways. So, that’s where my first ideas came from.

You’ve lived longer than your father, do you catch yourself making his gestures, or have a keener impression of his life now you have reached and passed his age?

I look like my father. I sometimes feel my facial features arranging themselves into visages that I know are like his. The long Irish upper lip lapsing over the poor lower one in a state of puzzlement; my tendency to sigh at moments of frustration; the fierce swarm into anger; the tendency to strike out at something (or someone) that threatens me. I saw all this in him when he was in my life. And I accept them in myself — which isn’t to say I glory in them. That said, I have a paler and paler recollection of him as time’s gone on. And I feel the poorer for that. I liked him very much.

Do you think men are born with more ways to fail than women?

I don’t know what that means. But, no. Women and men seem a lot more alike than they’re given credit for. A lot of ‘interests’, of course, are deeply and perniciously invested in keeping them apart and distinct.

You have written about your love of hunting. Does it inform your writing?

It’s certainly informed some stories — the ones that’re expressly about hunting: ‘Communist’, ‘Great Falls’, ‘Calling’. But in general I think it’s just been a thing I like to do that hasn’t much informed my writing. I don’t like to read hunting stories. ‘Communist’ I wrote back in 1984, only because Tom McGuane and I were out hunting partridge in Montana, and he told me he knew a guy who was preparing an anthology of hunting stories and if I ever wrote a hunting story I should send it to this guy. I never had before. But I did. And ‘Communist’ was it. I probably never wrote a better story than that. Go figure.

Tell me about your relationship with your Harley-Davidson; it feels like an escape clause?

When I got back to owning motorcycles, in the mid-Eighties, I used to say (in my boyish way) that a fellow needed to have something around that could kill him. And at heart, once we get past the snapshot visions of oneself astride the rakish machine, and the appeal of the sound of the thing, and the wind-in-your-hair imagery, and the hoped-for effect on women — once that’s all gone by, I guess I still feel the way I did in the mid-Eighties.

You don’t strike me as someone with a self-destructive urge though — not at all?

I don’t think I have a self-destructive urge. But the prospect of one’s eventual end is pretty firmly fixed in my brain. And I’d certainly like to think I held my fate in my own hands should I be struck by some withering disease. I remember when my mother died — of breast cancer — and Kristina and I were sitting on her bed, getting dressed for her funeral, the phone rang. And it was one of my mother’s old Arkie cousins, from up in the sticks. This woman was just calling up to express her condolences, I guess. I had no idea who she was, just a scratchy voice on the phone, there in Little Rock. She said a few consoling things. And then she said—and this woman didn’t know me; she said, ‘Now, Rich-ard. Your mamma died of cancer. So, hon, you’re gonna get it, too. Don’t forget that.’ ‘Okay, I won’t,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ Just a kind sober thought toward the future to penetrate one’s grief.

Next page: What did you learn in writing and in life from Raymond Carver?