Mr Ford comes to town

Interviewing Richard Ford is like meeting his iconic character Frank Bascombe: funny, candid, perplexed, sharp, multitudinous, tender. Over the phone from his New Orleans home, ahead of his appearances this week in Wellington and Christchurch, the 79-year-old author of five Bascombe books – from The Sportswriter (1986) to Be Mine (2023) – is a generous and eloquent interviewee.

“Tell me this, Alexander: what are you doing?” he interjects, with genuine interest. The much-accoladed writer is considerate and attentive, speaking in that distinctive courtly and rhythmic Southern accent.

Mortality is a constant presence in Bascombe books, and especially in Be Mine. Over five novels, Bascombe endures the death of his first young son, Ralphie. Two divorces. Cancer. His parents’ death. An AR-15 bullet strikes him in the chest, but he somehow survives.

Bascombe plays many parts: failed short-story writer; successful sportswriter; spouse; ex; Dad; real-estate agent. In Be Mine, Frank is a septuagenarian carer for Paul, his 47-year-old son, who is terminally ill with ALS. They go on a roadtrip to Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic for experimental treatment.

Our interview was conducted over the phone on January 18.

I’ve been asked to ask about the “controversies” around you.

I’m too old to give a shit.

Fair. Like Irvine Welsh, you’re a well-known critic of American “sensitivity editors” interfering in the writing and editing process.

You know what, that little wave has crested now. So asinine to begin with, it’s begun to go away now. I’m currently reading Adam Rapp’s wonderful novel Wolf at the Table. Published a year after my book, they no longer both any more [with “sensitivity editors”]. I think we’ve outlived them.

You’re just back from shooting ducks in the Arkansas woods with Kristina. You must have thought of your Granddad, such a beautifully written character in Between Them?

All the time. We were doing it only about 50 miles from the places he used to take me, when I was under 10 years old. We did it in the same way. There weren’t any duck blinds. We were standing up to our knees in water in the forest, and calling ducks with a duck call, and putting out decoys. Getting into the woods well before light, and watching the light come up. Big Shelley [his grandfather] was with me in spirit. It’s very heartening for me to have that connection now at almost 80 with my past when I was eight. It makes life seem almost continuous and rational. 

I think a lot about my granddad, who passed a couple of years ago.

Were you close with him?

We were very close, although there were disappointments and differences of opinion.

I loved my grandfather immoderately. But I wince sometimes thinking of some of the things I said to him. Probably we were at our closest just before he was dying. When I was in my early ‘20s I was in the anti-war movement, and was of the old-school militarily. We had some pretty vituperative arguments. I said some things to him I really wish I hadn’t said.

Speaking of incisive reflection on transcending regret, congratulations on Be Mine, which I am really enjoying thus far –

The ending is the best part.

As with Between Them, it is powerful on fathers and sons.

What you look for writing books is a can’t-miss premise, like a father taking care of his dying son. Something that absolutely invites language, invites ingenuity, invites not taking the conventional route.

When I first heard you talk, in Auckland, circa 2007, that was a memorable experience for me; like how funny Frank Bascombe and his books can be.

I mean them to be funny. I have this kind of maxim, “If nothing’s funny, nothing’s serious.” I go at serious things by routing through things that are funny. It gets harder for Frank to be funny as he gets older. Maybe that’s because it’s harder for me to be funny as I get older? But he still makes me laugh. And I want him to make me laugh. 

I reread The Sportswriter, where it all began. Do you laugh enough these days?

Absolutely not. No, I don’t laugh enough at all. One of the things that makes me laugh the most is the books that I’m writing, especially from these Frank Bascombe books. Most of my laughter comes from that. There’s not very much to laugh about in the United States these days, except cruel laughter.

I’d really like to visit New Orleans.

Don’t come in summer. Because of climate change the heat is just beastly in summer. We’ve been back here one year. The summer heat is just unbearable… After [Hurricane] Katrina something happened in the civic spirit here. Something was eroded. People’s sense of community, their sense of having a rapport with others, their sense of needing to follow laws, the value of institutions, has been substantially degraded. Both because of Karina, the disaster that that was (so many homes wrecked!), and Covid, which came along and further pushed it. New Orleans has become a chaotic place.

In Be Mine, Frank hits Trump country. “The harm that has been done to America, in its spirit,” you told me once.

It’s a harm that Trump has done, yes. It’s also a harm the country has done to itself. Trump is a blunt force instrument. Most of the things Trump is spouting on the stump his supporters, mostly white men, think anyway. Trump is just an exponent for these views: anti-immigrant views, anti-other views, anti-women views. It’s a self-inflicted wound. 

In reference to Bascombe, you talk about the “vital necessity of the play of light and dark” in literature? Henry James’ line: “There are no themes so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connexion between bliss and bale, of the things that help with the thing that hurt.”

You know the two masks of drama, one grimacing the other laughing, that seems to me to be the essence of what is the most worthwhile to write about. 

Talking about resonant Bascombe passages, there’s this in The Sportswriter: “But in these literal and anonymous cities of the nation…your St Louises…even your New Jerseys, something hopeful and unexpected can take place.” Do you still believe this?

Yep, I still believe it. I still believe in the possibility of romance. I still believe in the possibility of illumination. I still believe in the possibility of renewal. Most of which can be achieved through the agencies of literature. 

“The casual, lilting voice of a woman you don’t know” is an evocative The Sportswriter line.

Absolutely, why not? If you’re me anyway, you never get too old for that. 

Do you still enjoy watching sports?

I don’t watch boxing anymore. I decided that boxing was just too destructive to the brains of young women and men. I don’t watch that MMA garbage. I do watch a little basketball. I’m still a sports fan.  

Our version of professional football is so rule- bound. The people who run it are so deathly afraid that people are going to get hurt. Well, people are going to get hurt. It’s a violent sport, you can almost not prevent it. These days sport is largely a television event anyway. To be so herky-jerky, stop-and-go, nothing no-play ever happens that it doesn’t get called back and reviewed. It’s not any fun to watch on TV.

Your penultimate book is short-story collection Sorry for Your Trouble. “Second Language” is about a break-up. Another highlight, opener “Nothing to Declare”‘, tells of a woman visiting New Orleans, and her desire for “the inner resolve (elusive) she’d read about in Fitzgerald.” What’s your take on resolve?

That’s a good question. It may in fact be inner resolve is only a thing Republicans have. I’m not sure I’ve ever had it. I’m not sure Fitzgerald knew what he was talking about either. Knowing Fitzgerald’s life very well, he never had a moment of it. 

There’s a durable sense of disappointment in Sorry for Your Trouble. How do you get beyond life’s disappointments?

Well, I write books. I love my wife. That kind of does it. I don’t ask of life what life doesn’t offer. 

Even in Paris! How did your two years living in Paris influence your thinking and writing?

Influence is such a tricky thing, such an indeterminant thing. Paris gave me another setting that readers like. And it gave me American characters living away from the US.

Your writing evokes place strongly.

That’s self-persuasion, Alexander. That’s me persuading myself that this is really happening, by setting it down someplace where I know it could happen or setting it down someplace where I know the lineaments of things because I’ve been there. 

Between Them, your superb memoir about your “blissful” upbringing, puts us right there in Mississippi childhood. 

Mississippi is a place that I should be able to write about with some fluency. But I find it kind of a challenge because I knew it when I was young, and it was also so much a part of my reading experience with [William] Faulkner. To really have my own fast grip on things that are in Mississippi has been a task. Nothing I do is hard, okay. It’s just been a little more demanding than usual. Being a writer is not hard. Anybody who tells you otherwise, hold on to your wallet. 

How do you feel about being called a Southern writer?

Can we just say “American writer” or “US writer”? I’ve spent 55 years trying to shake “Southern” so as to be able to write not just for Southerners or about Southerners, but for and about the entire world.  

I rated Paul Dano’s film Wildlife, adapted from your Montana-set book. Do other Ford adaptations interest you?

Scott Cooper is adapting Canada, which I think will make a good film. For several years HBO had the Bascombe books all under a rather nice-paying contract. That’s funny money to me. I don’t expect it and if it comes I’m happy for it.

Has your writing process changed?

My writing process hasn’t changed since 1982.

Good year. Do you write by hand?

I write with a ballpoint pen, as I always have written. I rather like making letters on the page, I like the homemade quality of the whole thing. Eventually I have to type it up on my computer. That’s a very useful editorial process to go laboriously through all my handwriting, and try to figure out what I wrote. 

Listening to music?

No. I don’t write listening to anything, except what’s going on in my head. I don’t have a phone. I don’t have the internet. I don’t have anything in the room with me when I’m writing, except my dog. He doesn’t say very much. 

Dogs are great for writers, aren’t they?

They certainly are. Always happy to have you talk to them. Always happy to have you pet them. And they don’t ask very much. 

I’m looking forward to hearing you talk again, at Wellington’s Embassy Theatre. What attracts you to New Zealand?

I left it to chance. We’ve been twice to Auckland and Wellington. It seems a remarkably congenial place, without needing to be homogenous. There was a sense of rapport among the people who do what I do, certainly. Which was elevating; elevating the whole spirit of being there.

I hope to keep travelling, like you and Kristina do.

We go across the country at least twice a year, driving. We’re going to Spain in about 10 days, then home for nine days. Then to New Zealand and Australia. Then to Ireland in late May. And then to Naples on the first of July. We feel like if we stop we’ll fall over dead.

 We’ve touched on the rhythms of phrases and sentences: what you call language’s “corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page”.

I found a way to make being a slow reader [and mildly dyslexic] an asset. I began to sound words and see all those qualities.

I like short novels, as I’m a slow reader of novels.

Me too. Oh boy, me too. That’s okay. We’re not in a hurry to go anywhere. At least I’m not. If I pore over a book, or pore over the sentences, it keeps me staying in the book, I think I’m ahead of the game. My fancy is that the Great American novel is the Great American short novel…Out of this Sturm und Drang [America’s current situation], great literature will emerge, I’m confident of it. 

New Zealand’s housing crisis is even worse than America’s. I appreciate realtor Frank’s reflections on his part-time job at House Whisperers realty. “On my shady block of Wilson Lane, the old ether of true residence has all but burned off now…leaving the door ajar to absentee owners, private-equity snap-ups, Airbnbs and executive apartments, where, before, citizen… It’s rare anymore to know who lives next door to you.” This seems to keep getting worse?

You bet. And because so much money’s involved it’s not likely to reverse course, Alexander. Closeness and rapport with neighbours we’re going to have to get used to losing, I’m afraid. We’re going to have find other ways of getting it.

Is this your last Bascombe book?

It must be the last one. I’m 79, I don’t have the energy to do another one…I can’t use Frank Bascombe any more. I was driving past a fenced-in enclosure of portapottis today and said to Kristina, “I can’t use that anymore. That’s Frank’s province”. 

What are you writing next?

I get up at three o’clock every morning and write for an hour in my notebook. And see what that cleansing hour of the night will give me. Gradually things are starting to attach it. Maybe there’s hope for me, Alexander.

Editor’s note: ReadingRoom has made the first exception to its five-year rule of only ever covering New Zealand literature out of respect and admiration for one of the world’s greatest living writers. Richard Ford will speak in Wellington at the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts this Saturday (February 24) at 10.15am, tickets available; he will then travel south, and speak the next day (Sunday, February 25, at 3pm) at WORD Christchurch, tickets available.