InterviewRichard Ford, whose first novel in 11 years is to be published in October, will read in Ireland next week. Belinda McKeon met him in upstate New York
It was cruelly hot in Jackson, Mississippi, that summer of 1952; so hot that the four blocks to the grocery store seemed interminable. The store had air-conditioning, and for the young Richard Ford and his mother, struggling on in the midday sun, that much made it the most exotic place in town. But it was to grow more exotic still. Standing in line at the counter, Ford's mother leaned down to him suddenly and gestured towards a woman in the store.
"She said to me, 'Richard, do you see that woman over there? That's Eudora Welty. She's a writer.' And her voice took on a kind of reverential tone. My mother was a reader. And I knew that being a writer was something that she approved of. And that was all I needed."
Five decades later, and about to publish his sixth novel, Ford himself is one of those writers book-loving Americans stare at in the street. Like Welty once did, he cuts a distinctive figure: tall and lean, he has a mane of grey hair, a high, perplexed forehead, startling blue eyes and a mouth perpetually pursed somewhere between mirth and disapproval.
He is returning, with The Lay of the Land, to the character he first introduced to readers in his breakthrough novel, The Sportswriter, in 1986, and who appeared once again in his 1995 Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner Award-winning novel, Independence Day. Frank Bascombe is still a real-estate agent, still selling houses and still dealing in dreams - his own dreams as well as those of his clients. Still haunting his dreams, unsurprisingly, is the ghost of the child he buried some 20 years ago, the young son for whom his grief was red-raw in The Sportswriter - but disturbing him now, also, are the tidings of his own mortality.
Frank is heading for 60, and he has cancer. And it's Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, that is, in the year 2000, with a still-undecided presidential election and a bout of millennial anxiety tinting the air. Readers of Ford will remember Frank's habit of giving grand titles to certain periods in his life: in The Sportswriter he lived through the period of dreaminess - a welter of denial - while in Independence Day he heralded the "existence period", an emotional balancing act driven by distance and by control. This time, he has announced the "permanent period", a project of ageing smoothly and contentedly, with his mistakes, his miseries, his bitter regrets all in the past. But life has other plans.
Ford was surprised by the life of Frank Bascombe too, it turns out. He didn't plan to write a sequel to Independence Day, but then, before Independence Day, he hadn't planned to write a sequel to The Sportswriter. Yet here he is, with a fully formed trilogy, the Bascombe novels.
"I was always a person who thought that you write a book and then it's over," he says over lunch in his home in upstate New York (one of three homes he shares with his wife, Kristina - the others are in Maine and New Orleans). "When I found myself [ with Independence Day] writing sentences in my notebook in a tone and voice that was familiar to me as Frank's, I resisted it. I felt, I'm just not the kind of man who writes books that are linked."
He tried to talk himself out of it, he says, worried that he was simply writing the same book all over again "in a better way", worried, even, about how a sequel would be received.
"But after a lot of squirming around, it occurred to me that I should just take what I had been given. In the manner of Henry James saying, you have a donnée. This voice, this way of writing sentences that meant this character . . . just go ahead and do it. And I'm glad I did, because it made me bear down on the second book a lot, work hard at it. Because I thought it had a special responsibility by being attached to another book."
THAT SENSE OF responsibility can only have intensified with the writing of The Lay of the Land, especially given the decision to set Frank's private battle against the backdrop of a political farce that would come to seem much less farcical a year later, when the notion of thanksgiving itself would have been radically changed. Ford purposefully set his novel before the year with which every American writer, since September of that year, has had to grapple, explicitly or otherwise. But by virtue of setting it in that time, does he not locate it firmly within the lens of a very American sense of retrospect? This is Ford's first novel in 11 years, after all, and Frank Bascombe is one of modern American literature's best-known characters. Its publication has been nothing if not eagerly awaited.
Despite his overt intentions, could The Lay of the Land end up being read as Ford's 9/11 book? An exasperated glance. An insistence, repeated, that the novel takes place before all that. And then an allowance that the knowledge of what came afterwards may be to the fore - in the reader's mind. What of the writer's mind? "I didn't want to write about it," Ford says. "I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years. Things would have to go into the ground and percolate back up for me to be sensitive to anything about them that's worth writing about them for myself.
"But whether or not it went into the calculation of the book, I don't know . . . I mean, I wouldn't have set it in 2000 if, the year after that, something terrible hadn't happened. You can't unknow what you know. But you can't be burdened by what you know, either."
Interestingly, it's the need to strike just such a balance - between remembrance and release, between the acknowledgement of what has been lost and the ability to go on without it - which burdens Frank most poignantly throughout The Lay of the Land. His eldest son, Ralph, has been dead almost as long as his other two children have been alive now, and he has grieved for him long and hard since the days of writing columns for a glossy New York sports magazine, but it is not until the close of the century, not until the "interesting sonogram", not until the prospect of a reconciliation with the wife from whom he separated soon after burying their son, that Frank faces up to the fact that he is gone.
"Frank thought that he had already accepted the death of his son," Ford explains. "But his modes of acceptance were really modes of deflection. And this last period of this, the 'permanent period', when I had to work out what that would be, I realised that it was the last era of deflection."
In a way, then, the books map a process of mourning, a long and laborious process of letting go. "Yes they are," says Ford, quietly. "And a process of ageing and of maturing."
Over the past 20 years, his protagonist has been through a lot. He has had a rich life, a comical life; he has known lovers and losers and fall-outs and friends; he has sold homes to all those around him, including his ex-wife, but has never known a real home himself, not truly. And it's all because of a character who never really appeared in the novels except as an absence, as an outline, as an image and a memory wrestled with by those of Ford's characters who were made of flesh and blood, so to speak. Did he ever stop to wonder why the character in whom these novels had their starting point had to be only a shadow? Did he ever wonder why it was that Ralph Bascombe had to die?
"I started writing that book in 1982, on Easter Day," he says. "My mother had died just after Christmas of 1981. And I was still very much mourning the loss of my mother. And I think that I must have wanted to have, without even thinking about it, Frank to have endured a loss that would have . . ." He pauses. "This was not calculated. I've never had a child. I've never had a child to die. But I think I had a lot of emotion going on in my own heart at the time, and that was the way it expressed itself. Quite intuitively."
FORD WAS EIGHT years old that day in Mississippi when his mother pointed out the novelist in the grocery store. And though the sight of Eudora Welty inspired in him a sort of awe, it would be another 25 years before he would read her books. Coming from the South, he says, he didn't want to read about the South "for a long time" - the mark of William Faulkner on his early novels and stories notwithstanding. But Welty's influence on him was of a different kind from that of Faulkner.
"Her influence was more of a spiritual kind than it was of a specifically aesthetic kind," he says. "It mattered a lot to me. I realised in retrospect that I had grown up in a town where a great writer lived." He shrugs. "Of course, if you grew up in Ireland it happened to you all the time."
The day before our interview, Ford gave a seminar on the American short story at Columbia University in New York. He is brilliant as a teacher, committed to the minutiae of the short story form, incisive and passionate about the slightest stroke of nuance or style in a story by Alice Munro, John Cheever or by his great friend, Raymond Carver, whose death left him disconsolate in 1988. But it all comes down, he says, to a line in a story by Frank O'Connor, whose work he holds in deep esteem, and at whose commemorative festival he will be reading next week in Cork.
"'Anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again,'" he quotes from Guests of the Nation. "That's a phrase I would have loved to have been able to put at the end of any story I ever wrote. Because it testifies to the importance of the events you've just read. And I would like to write stories about events that are incontestably important. Not necessarily on a grand scale. But important in a way that their importance can be discoverable. A line like that at the end of O'Connor's story, it wants to say, life is very important. Pay really close attention to it. Because your acts will have consequences."
Richard Ford will read in Cork next Sat as part of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival, which runs from Wed until Sun. His reading, alongside writer Silke Scheuermann, is at 7.30pm in the Millennium Hall, City Hall. Admission €10
The Lay of the Land, by Richard Ford, is published next month by Bloomsbury