Honing lifetime’s work to reach perfect pitch
IT’S not every day a Pulitzer prizewinning author makes you coffee. Then again, Richard Ford confounds expectations at every turn.
Hailed as one of the greatest writers of his generation, Ford has a patrician, almost forbiddingly severe appearance, not unlike that of the actor Christopher Plummer.
In person, in the private rooms overlooking the tranquil inner sanctum of the quad at Trinity College, where Ford has been a visiting professor teaching on the masters programme in creative writing for the last five years, he is warmly hospitable, bustling around making coffee and apologising, in an accent with a charming Southern twang, for the fact that the coffee comes in “little old lady cups”.
Indeed, so polite and friendly is this literary titan that it almost feels as if I’m insulting him by suggesting that his latest novel, Canada, is the longest, most elegant noir novel I’ve ever read.
Literary novelists don’t usually like to be described as crime authors. But how else to describe a book that begins: “First I’ll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later …”?
“It was certainly deliberate to try to emphasise the incidents in the book,” he says. “Which is to say, a bank robbery, a kidnapping, an abandonment and then a murder. I didn’t want to write a standard, meditative literary novel, although it is meditative in some ways, but I really did want to write a novel full of incident. Noir? I don’t know about that. But insofar as noir books do advertise that quality of fatalism, in that they often forecast what’s going to happen — yeah, I wanted to do that.”
That tone — Canada is fuelled throughout by a doom-laden foreboding — harks back to Ford’s earliest novels, A Piece of My Heart (1987) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1989), both of which were essentially crime novels. The latter, particularly, was an attempt to fuse the crime narrative tropes to a literary style.
“That’s exactly what it was,” he says. “My model for that book, or the book I had read which I thought was a great book and wanted to be able to aspire to, was Dog Soldiers (1974) by Robert Stone. I just thought, ‘Gee whizz, that’s a great book.’ And I was a fan of Graham Greene’s too, and he managed, even in the ‘entertainments’, to write serious books that were about both serious subjects and crimes and chicanery.”
Typically polite, Ford goes off in search of pen and paper to make a note of the name Newton Thornburg, whom I suggest was as fine a writer as his peer, Robert Stone. The note is for Kristina, his wife, who is, he says, a fan of the smarter kind of crime novel.
It is to his wife that Canada is dedicated. In fact, all of Richard Ford’s work gets the same simple, poignant dedication: ‘Kristina’.
“She’s my ideal reader,” he says. “She’s lenient — she’s not a hard taskmaster. But as she says, ‘I want to be your first reader because I want to save you from the world, if I can’.” A rueful smile and he shakes his head. “She guards, she guards, she guards.”
Canada is Ford’s seventh novel (he has also published four collections of short stories; a fifth is due next year). Opening in the town of Great Falls in Montana in 1956, the story is told by Dell Parsons, a teenage son to ostensibly respectable, middle-class parents who one day set out to rob a bank, and set in train a series of events that culminate in murder.
It’s a sprawling epic that cuts to the dark heart of the American Dream. In terms of its setting and particularly the use of language that is at times brutally cold and deliberately sterile, it is reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966).
“I didn’t think of In Cold Blood when I was writing this book but I can certainly understand that,” says Ford.
“That ‘documentary’ style in the language … I wanted it to seem at least true if not real. But that’s how you make [a novel] work. I’m going to tell you something, and even if you faithfully believe that I don’t know this thing I’m telling you, I’m going to make it seem so interesting that you won’t even worry about that.”
It helps that Ford is fully invested in his research. While writing the novel, he even went to live in the town of Great Falls.
“My wife is in Great Falls this very morning,” he says. “We go in and out of Great Falls all the time. We’re thinking about buying a house there. For me, it’s a kind of Winesburg place, sort of a spirit place for me.”
He’s now 68, and freely admits that he has only a limited number of books left in him. By that reckoning, Canada was a very ‘costly’ book.
“It took two years to write, and a year before that of planning. And 20 years of collecting notes for a book that I always knew I would write, and which I first started to write in 1989. Then I set the whole project aside for what were good reasons at the time and just didn’t go back to it for 20 years, which is something I’ve never done before.”
Those ‘good reasons’ involved Ford deciding that, despite the superb reviews for his early work, he simply needed to become a better writer. What quality did he believe his novels lacked?
“I thought I was capable of more than I was getting into the books. A sense of humour, a sense of gravitas, a sense of complexity, a sense of largeness — those things weren’t getting into the books. They weren’t all getting in at the same time. So I was trying to create a sense that the books would contain my whole array of, for want of a better word, talents.
“You know, when John Updike died, there was a piece in the New Yorker, and one of the things that Adam Gopnik wrote about John was that by the end of his life, Updike was fully expressed. And I think to write a novel, you have to be fully expressed, leaving nothing out.”
It’s safe to say that Ford’s determination to become a better writer succeeded handsomely. In 1995, Independence Day, the sequel to The Sportswriter (1986), was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Almost two decades later, as he approaches 70, is it too early to ask whether Richard Ford feels himself “fully expressed”?
“Oh no, it’s not too early. If I quit tomorrow, or if I died tomorrow, I would die with the satisfaction that I am fully expressed. And by ‘expressed’ I don’t mean that I have ‘expressed myself’, but that I have pushed out of myself everything I can push out. Some people say, ‘I write for myself’, or ‘I just write about myself’. I don’t think that’s what I do. But I do make use of probably everything myself contains.”
It’s not so much that art imitates life as art takes life by the scruff of the throat and makes it cough up something worth remembering.
“There’s a line of John Gardner’s,” says Ford, “in which he says, ‘Life is this and then this and then this and then this. Art is this because of this, in spite of that …’ But that’s what we do, as writers. We leave bits out and connect other bits together. Life is all conjunctions, art is all subordinations.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
