Culture That Made Me: American writer Richard Ford on Frank O'Connor, The Sopranos, and more...
Richard Ford is in Ireland for Listowel Writers Week. (Picture: RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP via Getty Images)
Richard Ford, 79, grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1968, he married, having met his wife while in university. He spent a few years working as a sports journalist before establishing himself as a novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his series of Frank Bascombe novels about suburban American life. They include The Sportswriter and Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner awards for fiction in 1996. He will be in conversation with Sean Carlson at Listowel Writers Week, 3pm, Sunday, 4 June. See: www.listowelwritersweek.ie
The first great novel I read, which is probably the greatest American novel of the twentieth century, was William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! I was a kid from Mississippi, and this was Mississippi history. I loved it because not only was it about the place I came from, but it proved the place I came from could be the father for great literature, which is useful to a kid who would become a writer – that here all around, which you might have thought was ordinary, boring stuff, was the raw material for great writing.
Probably the first short story writer that made me think to myself, Gee, I wish I could do that was Frank O’Connor. It was after reading Guests of the Nation. I came to the end of that story, and the last line is, “Anything that happened to me afterwards, I've never felt the same about again.” I thought, I’d like to be able to write that sentence at the end of every short story I write. When I was teaching at Columbia for the past decade, I would always get the students to read that story. Frank O’Connor manages to do something great writing can do, which is to blend the most serious human experience with a funny side, without sacrificing the seriousness.
The Sopranos broke the mould. The thing that The Sopranos was so good at – that many subsequent series that you see are not good at – is that The Sopranos rarely ever had a dud episode. Now you see series, they sell the pilot, and the pilot is the best thing you ever saw in your life, and then it gets worse and worse and more and more improbable, until you can't watch it anymore, but The Sopranos – they were working hard at those scripts right to the end.
F Scott Fitzgerald, like Chekov, was trying to give language to things that didn't have language but that were in a way ultimately available in a sensory experience. How do you feel, for instance, when you come back to Paris after your life has been ruined and you're hoping to see your young daughter but unintentionally you managed to get drunk again and completely ruined what you’re trying to do – to see your young daughter? How do you feel when that happens? Fitzgerald could elicit elegant language for that in a story called Babylon Revisited.
When I was growing up in Mississippi, a little semi-privileged white kid, all these giants of the blues would come down to Jackson and play at our little white boy parties. They came down from Chicago to Mississippi to play gigs on what they called “the chitlin’ circuit”. They were parties held at a multi-purpose room at a golf club. There would be a dance – 14- and 15-year-old white kids, boys and girls, would all be boppin’ and hoppin’ to Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Big Mama Thornton, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. I once sat on Howlin' Wolf’s amplifier – a little pickup amplifier – while he was playing.
My favourite book – and I'm not much for favourites, but this comes close to it – is The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. It’s spectacular. It blends subtle humour and serious business. It's set in New Orleans, which is where I read it in 1976. It is about the South in a way that is untinctured by William Faulkner. Faulkner so dominated America mid-century – the way that people could see the American South. Walker Percy wrote about New Orleans in a way that I had never imagined before. It was about upper middle class white people, largely, living in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. When we read a book that's set in the place where we happen to be, there's a magic to it that can't be replicated.
Roger Angell’s sportswriting was good because he knew his beans, as we say in the US, but he also knew how to turn a phrase. He was writing often about baseball. He knew baseball very well because he grew up in New York with plenty of money and he could go to ball games all the time, as sportswriters must. Yet he had a felicity that was purely literary. It wasn't sportswriter-ish in the daily paper sense. He never allowed the reader, even with his great intelligence and felicity, to think that you were reading about anything but a game. He never burdened it with the importance that only life and not games can have.
I've seen Chinatown probably 25 times. I pretty well have the movie down to memory. I can say all the lines as I'm watching it. I was around, working at Paramount, when it was being made. I knew some of the people working on it – the screenwriter Robert Towne, for instance, is a friend of mine. It’s the ultimate noir Los Angeles movie.
I love the Jonathan Demme film Silence of the Lambs with Jodie Foster. The Anthony Hopkins character is completely malevolent. He's the most malevolent creature that you could conceivably imagine and yet he's hilariously funny. Eating people’s faces off; at the same time, he’s saying, “You know, I'm meeting a friend for dinner tonight,” which is the last line in the movie. It's the combination of bravado humour and deep monstrousness I find irresistible.
The Bridge is a joint production between the Swedes and the Danes. It’s a really good noirish series. The premise of it is that there’s a wonderful bridge that connects Denmark and Sweden. In the first episode someone has been murdered on this bridge. Half the body is in Denmark and half the body is in Sweden. It’s intact, but it's lying right on that national boundary line. That causes the series to be about how Danish police and Swedish police cooperate and don't cooperate in trying to find the killer. It’s exceedingly good.
