Richard Ford: ‘Work. That’s what I do’

Writers are often reluctant to talk about work in progress. But when I speak to Richard Ford, he delivers a revelation.

“In the last month, I’ve written 100 pages of a new Frank Bascombe novel,” says the 76-year-old from his home in Boothbay, Maine. “It’s called Be Mine. It’s set in contemporary New Jersey and Minnesota on Valentine’s Day. It’s about Frank and his son seeking treatment for his son’s illness.”

Bascombe, a modern everyman, was newly divorced and in early middle age when readers first encountered him in The Sportswriter (1986). His story continued in Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014), which all reflected the changing textures of American life. Fair to say, then, that Ford is thriving in quarantine?

“I’m old and I’m dogged and, apart from my social life, which I don’t care about anyway, everything is virtually unchanged for me,” he says. “My [Columbia] students were complaining yesterday that their lives have been turned upside down and I told them: ‘Work. Shut up. That’s what I do.’”

Ford is half-joking. “I love being in the classroom, talking about great literature with intelligent young people,” he enthuses. “I wasn’t trained as a teacher. I only got to do it because my books brought me there. I’m not erudite.”

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944 and, after a lifetime of living all over America, retains a Mississippi accent. You wouldn’t define him as a southern writer, however. The Bascombe books are synonymous with New Jersey, while Ford has also set fiction in Montana, Michigan and abroad. His ancestors came to the US from Ireland in the 1880s and his new collection of stories, Sorry For Your Trouble , is “about the way the Irish have seeded out into America,” he says. Does he feel like an outsider? “I think writers are people who want to use their work to become insiders,” he says. “If you grow up in Jackson you’re either very curious about the rest of the country or you feel like you live in the white hot centre. I wanted to live all over.”

By the time Ford was 23, he’d attended law school, taught in a junior high school, served in the US Marine Corps and briefly got a job with the CIA.

The only thing he liked doing was writing. “Just before we got married in 1968, my wife Kristina asked: ‘What are you going to do with yourself?’ I said: ‘I’m going to try to be a writer.’ She said: ‘Oh good, you do that. I’ll get a job and you stay at home and write stories.’”

Ford is dyslexic and has said he reads slowly. Has it shaped the way he writes?

“I make a lot of mistakes,” he says, “so I read my work aloud to myself. In the process of reading aloud you become sensitive to all kinds of non-cognitive aspects of what sentences are. I think I’ve benefited a lot from reading slowly.”

The Sportswriter catapulted Ford into the front rank of US novelists. Last year, however, when it was announced Ford would receive a lifetime achievement award from The Paris Review, protesters pointed to an incident in 2003, when he spat at the novelist Colson Whitehead, who had written a critical review of Ford’s book A Multitude of Sins (2001).

“Some people just didn’t want me to get it,” says Ford. “What should I say to them? ‘Oh yes, I should get this award?’ It wasn’t my call to begin with.”

His new collection begins with a story about former lovers meeting and ends with one about divorcees who marry at short notice then abruptly divorce. Ford has been married for 52 years, so why is there so much divorce in his fiction?

“The secret to happy marriage is marry the right girl and don’t have children,” he says, laughing. “When you write about somebody’s unhappiness and adulteries, you’re drawing devils on your own wall, saying to yourself: ‘Don’t let that happen . . . ’”

There’s a story set in Paris on US election night 1992 and, when I mention this November’s presidential election, Ford says he’s “fearful Trump will find some way to call the election off”.

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He mentions “armed people in front of state capitol buildings militating to go back to work” [we spoke before the latest round of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing] and adds, “Trump could say it would be too fulminant to have the election.”

Ford resists, however, the idea that America is more hostile to outsiders today than before: “I know many Americans who are generous and accepting and welcoming of human beings from elsewhere . . . It’s a tragedy that in this of all trying times, we should have this dismal, menacing man running this country. But he is not we.”

It’s morning in Maine and Ford is eager to re-immerse himself in the onrush of his new novel. Did he always plan to return to Bascombe?

“I didn’t think I’d come back to Frank,” he says, his voice lighting up. “But I knew I could. Those books are immensely pleasurable to write and immensely difficult to finish.”

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