Richard Ford: ‘I’m pretty content with nothing going on in my brain’

As with all good comebacks, Frank Bascombe was never supposed to return. Since his first appearance, in The Sportswriter, Richard Ford's 1986 novel, the laconic Everyman had been the American writer's most memorable fictional creation. But such was the strain of completing The Lay of the Land, the third volume chronicling the tribulations of his character, that in 2006 Ford decided he was done with Frank.

"It made me sick," Ford says. "I had all kinds of somatic and psychosomatic maladies, so I thought, I just don't want to do this any more." And so it came to pass. Ford recharged his batteries and wrote another novel, Canada, far removed in tone and content from the Bascombe trilogy.

But Frank wouldn't go away. As Ford toured the US to promote Canada, readers constantly asked him to reconsider his decision not to write about the character again, requests that "struck a tender note" with the writer. The clincher came not long afterwards, when, in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Ford visited the New Jersey Shore area, site of the Bascombe books.

“Driving back, I was full of lines, and the lines were all in Frank Bascombe’s voice,” Ford says. “And I thought, Oh shit, I don’t know what to do about this, because I don’t want to write another long novel. So I had this idea of writing novellas. Because to be given a voice that is already plausible, and supple enough to hold all the things that you’re capable of putting into a book, is such a plus. It’s what people like me are all about. So I thought, Don’t run away from what seems to be your destiny.”

So, eight years after Ford retired Bascombe, he has brought him back for a new volume, Let Me Be Frank With You. A collection of four linked stories, it follows the now retired realtor as he deals with prosaic events in the weeks after Hurricane Sandy has demolished much of his home state. Along the way he encounters his terminally ill ex-wife, a dying friend and a genial visitor with a terrible past, all the while trying to avoid any more emotional entanglement than is necessary.

Drily barbed observations

As the studiously flippant title suggests, it is not a work that groans under a sense of its own earnestness. “Most of the things in the book I play for some kind of joke,” the 70-year-old author says, as he sips coffee in his rooms at Trinity College Dublin, where he regularly stays in his capacity as a professor of creative writing. Sure enough, the book is very funny, full of drily barbed observations on contemporary life and mores. For all the recurrent themes of mortality and the general fragility of life, the stories have none of the fulminating rage at the notion of dying that marks, say, the similarly premised work of Philip Roth. “It’s something to be made fun of, at best, and to have a yuck with,” he says. “I mean, Roth is entitled to his view, and he makes a lot of it, but I don’t look at death that way.”

Ford seems to approach most aspects of his work with this determinedly untortured attitude. Taken together, the four Bascombe books constitute a contemporaneous chronicle of US life over the past 30 years, at once intimate and epic, à la John Updike's Rabbit novels. But Ford downplays this element. Aside from The Lay of the Land, which sought to mirror the complacency of the United States before 9/11, "they're about this guy who does these things." He portrays writing the new stories as a comparative doddle. "I was happy to have something to do, because I hadn't really thought of anything else."

On the face of things, Ford has lived his life with a similarly pared-down lack of dramatics, characterising himself as “a little middle-class kid from Mississippi”. He has always sought a settled existence with his wife, Kristina, whom he met when he was 19. “I’ve structured my life to avoid certain kinds of things that I saw happening around me when we were kids, children being one, alcoholism being another, poverty another. We’ve been very compact in how we’ve conducted life.”

It all sounds very ordered. But at the heart of this streamlined self-sufficiency lies a life-wrenching event: the death of his father, from a heart attack, when Ford was still a teenager. “It certainly informed my belief that around 16 years old something flips,” he says. “There’s a way in which I think about myself, that I probably wrote books into the vacuum that my father’s death created. Somewhat compensatory. It certainly made me understand that something can happen and everything changes, you never see the world the same way again.”

One thing that Ford soon viewed differently was the racially segregated society of his youth. He grew up accepting the institutionalised racism of the American South – “I was a go-along person, in a bad way” – but that changed in the early 1960s. “By the time I was 17 I realised that what I had been trying to matriculate into was a morally corrupted system, and I tried to extricate myself from that. And I did, because I knew race inequality was wrong. I came to it really slowly. There was nothing heroic about it. I just figured it out and left.”

The underlying notion of a life shaped by circumstances is a common thread whenever Ford talks about his past. He portrays even his decision to become a writer in a reactive frame, as a consequence of his having “failed” at his original career goals: to be a US marine officer and an attorney.

“I was 23 when I sat down in my mother’s house, in January 1968, and for the first time I probably did something independent. I thought, What have I ever done that I enjoyed doing and that I haven’t failed at already? It wasn’t that I really enjoyed writing that much, but it felt like a little free zone that I could maybe wander into.”

Success did not readily follow. It was the 1980s before he found his readership, first through his association with the "dirty realist" school of American writers, such as his close friend the late Raymond Carver, then with the publication of The Sportswriter. Even now Ford can sound almost suspicious of the path he took: "I'm unwilling to say any books are hard to write, because there are so many people in the world who do things that are useful and really hard."

Even still, he knows the value of his vocation, approaching his work with serious intent. The new book may have a humorous surface, but it is suffused with awareness of the United States’ racial fault lines. “I want to be a white guy who writes about race – though it doesn’t get me anywhere, it has to be said.” Does he think this is because, as a white male of a certain age, he is seen to be unqualified to talk on such issues? “That’s exactly why I would do it. To jangle the bars on my cage a little bit. But it doesn’t work.”

“Default self”

It remains tempting to draw parallels between Ford and his most famous character. In the new book Frank muses on his “default self”, the idea that we are shaped by what happens to us rather than by any inner core. Ford resists the idea that his writing yields greater self-consciousness. “I’ve given up on that. Perhaps it’s that my own ‘is’, if I could be said to have one, is so unsatisfactory that I just gave up on the whole notion of it. I was brought up a Christian and steeped in the kind of American literature that says that human beings have what Emerson calls a mass. I never found it.

“So I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just a composition of stuff put together, and it never completely makes a whole middle that you’d call a mass or a soul. It doesn’t make me pessimistic about human beings or mean I don’t hold people accountable, because I do. But I grew up around people who were always talking about other people’s character. But it was a racist environment, so it was corrupted right from the start. If we have good character, why are we excluding all these other human beings? All of those things you get taught about people’s interiority, they were all compromised for me at a very early date.”

Ford, again like Frank, has little time for the idea that life has some kind of inherent trajectory. “In my case what’s made it cohesive is my wife; that’s what really has made life be life.” But he is cheery in his slightly fatalistic outlook. He may be conscious of having a finite amount of time left – “My high-school friends are dying right and left” – but feels little pressing need to write furiously, with no plans for new novels in the offing. “I’m pretty content with nothing going on in my brain.”

Of course, as the deceptively funny, magnificently realised latest chapter in the Frank Bascombe saga proves, Ford’s commitment to writing is profound. “If you take writing seriously, it’s a very high calling. There’s never any doubt about the fact that you’re doing something that Chekhov did. All you have to do is work at it really hard.” He is, in the end, a writer, not a tortured artist.

“I’m real good at going on, at putting both good and bad things behind me. My mother said to me on her deathbed – and I was fortunate enough to have this conversation – she said, ‘Richard, of all the things in the world you must do, you must be happy.’ And I took her seriously. All the things that have threatened to make me critically unhappy, I’d get away from them.”

Let Me Be Frank With You is published by Bloomsbury on November 5th