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When Richard Ford’s first novel, A Piece of My Heart, was published in 1976, he appeared to be a gifted novelist much indebted to William Faulkner. Since then his novels, including The Ultimate Good Luck and Wildlife, and his much acclaimed collection of short stories, Rock Springs, have proved him a much less predictable writer and one harder to categorize. His single volume of stories has established him as a master of the genre. His most recent novel, Independence Day, which brought back Frank Bascombe from The Sportswriter, now as a harassed real-estate agent, was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction for 1995, the only book ever so awarded. In Frank Bascombe, Ford has created one of the most complex and memorable characters of our time, and the novel itself is a nuanced, often hilarious portrait of contemporary American life. Independence Day has been called “the definitive novel of the postwar generation,” and Ford himself has been hailed as “one of the finest curators of the great American living museum.” In setting, types of characters, plots, point of view and, most importantly, in ever broadening sympathy, Ford has, as he remarks in this interview, consciously kept moving on.

The following interview took place on a warm breezy July day in a large seaside house Ford sometimes rents outside of Jamestown, Rhode Island. Dressed in khakis and loose blue shirt, Ford seemed relaxed as he enjoyed the beautiful weather on the large veranda surrounding the house, where the interview began. We soon moved indoors, where the breeze from the open windows kept us pleasantly cool. He answered questions slowly and thoughtfully but without any evident selfconsciousness about word choices. Although originally reluctant to be interviewed, Ford was genuinely cordial and unhurried (although we spoke for more than three hours), and when I thanked him at the end he said he preferred to see the afternoon as a “literary conversation” rather than as an interview. Ford took obvious pleasure in his rented house, which had a view across high grass to the sea (though he warned of deer ticks and the danger of Lyme disease). Later he said he was thinking of offering to buy the property, and that one of his greatest regrets was selling his house in Mississippi. Frank Bascombe the real estate agent did not seem far away.

 

INTERVIEWER

Is there any one aspect of fiction that is particularly central to you?

RICHARD FORD

These days, when I’m writing every morning and afternoon, the distinctions among such fictive concerns as narrative strategy, story, character, and dramatic structure don’t seem very isolable. I’m always interested in words, and no matter what I’m doing—describing a character or a landscape or writing a line of dialogue—I’m moved, though not utterly commanded by an interest in the sound and rhythm of the words, in addition, I ought to say, to what the words actually denote. Most writers are probably like that, don’t you think? Sometimes I’ll write a sentence that sets up an opportunity for say, a direct object or predicate adjective and I won’t have a clue what the word is except that I know what I don’t want—the conventional word: the night grew dark. I don’t want dark. I might, though, want a word that has four syllables and a long a sound in it. Maybe it’ll mean dark, or maybe it’ll take a new direction. I’ll have some kind of inchoate metrical model in my mind. One of the ways sentences can surprise their maker, please their reader, and uncover something new is that they get to the sense they make by other than ordinary logical means.

INTERVIEWER

You’re unusually sound-oriented for a fiction writer.

FORD

I don’t exactly know why that is, but probably it was just the way I could do it. And even though I may be “sound-oriented,” I’m not sure that shows up in the sentences I write in ways the reader would necessarily notice.

INTERVIEWER

Does your concern for language and especially for sound lead you to poetry?

FORD

I’d love to be able to write poetry, but I think if I ever brought my attention down to that meticulous level of utterance, I’d never be able to ratchet it back up to the wider level of reference that, for me, fiction requires. Quite a few of my teacher and writer friends have been poets over the years: Donald Hall, James McMichael, Michael Ryan, Larry Raab, Dan Halpern, C. K. Williams.

INTERVIEWER

Putting aside the sound of language, how important is the development of character to you?

FORD

Well, we wouldn’t have moral dilemmas and conflicts without them. But when I started trying to write, inventing characters was sort of hard for me. I’d thought about characters first from having read the practical criticism of E. M. Forster and Henry James and Percy Lubbock, who all talked about characters that were, in the first place, already written—and mostly written under the influence of nineteenth-century ideas of what human character was. Character seemed to me, therefore, a rather fixed quotient. Forster did say in Aspects of the Novel that characters ought to have the “incalculability of life.” But I didn’t find his own characters to be that way. Maybe I was naive. Let’s say I was naive. But they seemed, say in A Passage to India, pretty hard-sided, pretty strictly representative of their class or gender or religion. I, on the other hand, already had a personal experience of character—mine and others—which definitely stressed the incalculable, the obscure, the unpredictable. I’m not sure the word character ever came up in my childhood family life—except that so-and-so was “a character.” Plus, my family was given to explain almost nothing about people. People just were the mysterious sum of their actions. So, from a shortage of information, I was already making people up long before I became a writer—actual people—doing it just to make them seem more knowable.

Today I think of characters—actual and literary characters— as being rather unfixed. I think of them as changeable, provisional, unpredictable, decidedly unwhole. Partly this owes to the act of writing characters and of succeeding somewhat in making them seem believable and morally provoking. As I write them they are provisional, changeable, and so forth, right on through and beyond the process of being made. I can change them at will, and do. For instance, I can come upon an adjective that seems to have nothing to do with the person I thought I was inventing—an important adjective—good or bad, for instance, and I can use it and see where it takes me. I can also erase it—maybe I’ve convinced myself that we make ourselves up pretty much the way I make characters up in books. But this is the development of character, in my view; not the setting out of something fixed, which is how I thought of them when I was beginning. Maybe this view deviates from the conventional view of character. Maybe I’m guilty of writing deviant characters. But I don’t think so. Of course not, right?

INTERVIEWER

Well, don’t you think people have characters?

FORD

I certainly think we have histories. And based on them we can purport to have characters—invent or allege character, in a sense. And sometimes histories predict what people will do. Though often not. But character is just one of those human pseudoessences that is often used detrimentally. Certainly a lot of modern fiction derives its drama from the conflict between assumed character and some specific action that deviates from it.

But let me give you another kind of example of what I’m talking about. I was working on a scene in which a man goes over to a woman’s house—a woman he’s sort of in love with. All along I’ve been thinking that one of the things that’ll happen in this scene will be that she’ll cut him loose, because earlier she’s seemed uncertain about him. In my plan, she’s going to say to him that their relationship is heading nowhere and she wants something better, and she’s not married to him so why should she go on with somebody who doesn’t satisfy her. But I get to the part of the scene in which I have her start to tell him the preliminary things that are going to eventuate in her saying that they aren’t going to be lovers anymore. And she says, You know, I was driving back from New York today and I was just thinking about you. I knew you were going to be here, and I knew we would have dinner. And I’m writing along and it suddenly seems right for her to say, And I thought what a sweet man you are—which is what I write. He’s listening, and he says, I try to be a sweet man. But what? And she says (I have her say), But nothing. What happened at that moment was that it occurred to me that she not fall into this track that I’d predicted for her—into the form of her character that I’d devised. Based on how the scene felt I completely switched the dynamics. What happens next is that he—not she—tries his best to get out of their relationship as quickly and smoothly as possible. Which, for a couple of hundred pages, he does. But have you ever had to call somebody on the phone, somebody you wanted to get rid of, only you end up doing nothing but getting yourself in more deeply? Now that’s something about life that interests me. That’s incalculability, if on a small scale—how we cope with contingency in ourselves but try still to accept responsibility for our acts. You can say, of course, that in this situation my “character” or the woman’s character in my book is simply irresolute. That’s my, or her, character. But then we may not do it that way the next time. So, you’re left with a somewhat defective concept.

INTERVIEWER

Do you start off with the end in mind?

FORD

I certainly think about it a lot before I start, and I like to have some clear idea of my destination. But I eventually get to the point in my planning at which I begin to feel I’m sacrificing useful time that I could be using to write by holding off until I can figure out what the ending is going to be. Then I think to myself, Well, start. Start. Start. As I write, I, of course, think about these things more. Don DeLillo said, “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking”—thinking, I assume, about the things that you sense are important and that could or will find their way into your book—including where it’ll end.