A Multitude Of Ford

I forget sometimes how lucky I've been. I don't mean this in a sentimental way, only that I get so wrapped up in the business of being whatever it is that I am professionally  -- novelist? short story writer? journalist? teacher? -- that I forget that this is what I always wanted to be: the kind of person who earns their currency with their words. But what I also mean is that I've been able to do things that just seemed inconceivable even a few years ago.

In 1999, Wendy and I were living in Las Vegas and I was struggling through the last bits of Fake Liar Cheat and trying to conceive of what life might be like as a real writer, searching for inspiration in anything I could find. At the time, we were both depressed as hell and though I was only 28, I felt like time was sprinting past me while I tried to figure out how to finish a book I wasn't 100% sure I really liked (later in life I'd finish a book I was 100% sure I loved only to find that publishers found it too little of one thing and too much of another, or, alternately, too much of one thing and too little of another, but that's a story for another day). One afternoon, though, a bit of forwarded yellow-stickered mail arrived in the mailbox informing me that, if I only I still lived in Southern California, my very favorite author Richard Ford was going to be speaking at a Writer's Bloc event the next day at the Skirball Center. 

The problem was that both Wendy and I were terribly sick (we were terribly sick in Las Vegas a lot -- I think we might have been allergic to the city) and there was no way we were going to drive 300 miles across the desert to sit in a stuffy auditorium. But the next morning I woke up and felt better. Or didn't feel better. I'm not sure which. But I woke up and decided that I'd drive the 300 miles across the desert to see Richard Ford because who knew when I'd ever get the chance again? Wendy, still sick and possibly dying, possibly drowning in her own mucous, told me to go, though I knew she didn't want me to and that the right thing to do was to stay...but I went anyway.

I arrived just a few spare moments before the event began and took a seat at the end of a crowded row. I don't recall who was interviewing Ford that night -- it might have been Kitty Felde, but I'm not certain -- and though I found the interview fascinating, found Ford engaging and interesting and filled with inspiring stuff to say (and the truth is, he could have talked about how to make a peanut butter and mayo sandwich that night and I would have been inspired), I kept thinking, I wonder what it would be like if I were sitting there asking him questions, someone who actually has read every word he's ever written and not just his last book, someone who wouldn't bother asking him the same old questions about his Southern roots, someone who was interested in what he had to say in his books vs. what his biography clearly detailed.

Well, I'm gonna find out. The fine folks at the Writer's Bloc have asked me to interview Richard Ford on November 8th at 7:30pm somewhere in Beverly Hills. Full event details will be made available soon. That sound you hear in the background is me hyperventilating ever so slightly. 

In celebration of that -- and, really, because I just stumbled over it while preparing my month of re-reading -- I thought you all might like to read the transcript of an interview I did with Richard Ford upon the release of A Multitude Of Sins. Ford was in LA to speak at the Writer's Bloc then, too, but I was previously engaged. We met up at a Starbucks in Studio City where we spoke for about an hour for a story I did on him for the Las Vegas Mercury. It was a brief (600 words) narrative interview in print, so most of this has never seen the light of day before, so enjoy [and pardon any rough spots, it's literally the direct transcription]:

TG: When you were thinking of what to do next – after Women with Men and the success of Independence Day – did you think consciously that you were going to write another collection of short stories, or was that something that just ended up occurring by virtue of output alone?

RF: Yes. Absolutely. I don’t know if I thought of it after Independence Day, but I knew I wasn’t going to write another novel.  I knew I was going to go on writing. I wrote those novellas and I had one story written before those novellas and then I wrote one more. Creche. And then I thought, “I’m going to write a book of stories here, that’s what I’m going to do,” based upon the experiences of writing those two. I haven’t really done anything else aside from the odd bit of journalism.

TG: Creche is an interesting story because it is stylistically so different from everything you’ve written before. Was that intentional, the style shift?

RF:It was different for me to, so yes, it was. I got the first line of Creche which was “Fate wasn’t driving them, her mother Esther was.” When I wrote that line, it more or less set the tone for the story. It is double entendre, in its clippedness, the way the sentence breaks into a compound sentence without a coordinating conjunction, that’s what set the tone for the story and everything followed upon that. It made me so happy because not only had I never done it before, but using the 3rd person opened up the writing of the story in a way that it rarely does.

TG: There so many more 3rd person stories in Multitude Of Sins – more than any of your previous works –

RF: It was by design…

TG: That made me wonder: so much of your success has come from your first person narrators – be it in Rock Springs or Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter or Independence Day – that when I read these intimate 3rd person stories, what made choose to veer off your normal course?

RF: Never have I, except in one instance, backed away from a story in the way it presents itself. If it presents itself in 3rd, I write it in 3rd. It’s true that I had a will to write in the 3rd person – maybe in some sublime way, I set myself to write in the 3rd rather than just have the first line present itself that way. I just thought it was something I needed to do. I thought it was something I didn’t do comfortably and I didn’t want it to cause me to shy away from material I didn’t want to lose.

TG: It’s taking a real chance with yourself. So when you sit down to write a story like Creche, are you starting with a voice, a character, or the situation?

RF: I don’t know. I never start with a character. I usually start with something more sonorous. How a story sounds, how the cadences of the sentences come to me. Character really comes out of those other qualities in the story. Particularly what the story seems to want to be about. Character comes out of the principal concerns of the raw material I’ve accumulated to make the story from.

TG: I think the stories in Multitude of Sins are love stories, more so than they are tales about adultery, maybe they’re stories about the end of love, I guess I should say – so that when Abyss closes the collection it is the only ending possible: a person stuck dead in a tree.

RF: I’m willing to say that they’re about adultery, but the adultery occasionally looms large and occasionally looms small. They’re certainly about people trying to get close to each other and failing. When I wrote Abyss, I wrote it next to last, I knew where it went, I knew it would be the knell of the story. Though I planned these stories to be together right from the start almost, I’m so interested in what I’m doing, I don’t look beyond it too much.

TG: There’s a line in Dominion about love being “the quest for the answers to the questions” that really resonated with me. Like I said, when I think about this book, I think about that line and about how many of these stories are not about the loss of love but the quest of love, or what happens when love decays and people aren’t willing to make the hard choices. Do you think this is the kind of thing – this subject matter – that you’ll return to?

RF: No. I think whatever scene this was in my writing life is over. I just wrote another story as sort of a test case to see what was left of any of this stuff. And it’s gone. It’s gone now. And I’m glad because I found it rather spiritually innervating.

TG: How do you live with the characters and their problem then?

RF: I have empathy. The stories themselves are empathetic gestures for me. So I don’t have a problem doing it, but there is a consequence to writing a story like Quality Time. The consequences of trying to find language for interiors that are in tumult and jeopardy. And I live around them.

TG: Now that this is out of you, what do you think the next thing for you will be?

RF: I’m writing a novel that going to be called The Lay Of the Land which is going to be narrated by Frank Bascombe set in 2000. I’m starting it. I’ve been preparing to write it for three years while I’ve been working on these stories. I feel happy to be starting it now.

TG: Is it because you feel comfortable going back to Frank?

RF: I don’t know if it’s going to eventuate into a novel or not. I want it to. The difference between writing The Sportswriter and Independence Day was very singular. Now, writing these two novels and now a third will also be very singular. I don’t know all together what to expect. I know I’ve got to do something I didn’t do when I wrote Independence Day: I’ve gotta go back thru those two books in a bibliographers way and just look back and see if there’s anything in there I want to use. Which I didn’t do when I wrote Independence Day.

TG: That’s surprising as  I didn’t feel there was a time in Independence Day where it felt like you were struggling to get that voice back. It felt like you started to write Independence Day the day after you finished the Sportswriter.

RF: Actually, I finished the Sportswirter in 1985 and started Independence Day in 1992. Seven years. It never seemed too long and it doesn’t seem too long to have waited six years since I finished Independence Day to begin writing this book. I want them to be unique. I want them not to have pre-requisites in other books.

TG: I don’t think you do. You can read Independence Day separate from the Sportswriter with no problem. In fact, I used it for a novel writing class I teach and the students had no difficulty at all.

RF: I’m happy to hear that. I’d like students to be able to read it if they can.

TG: I think what distinguishes your work – be it Piece of My Heart or Wildlife or Multitude of Sins – is that by the end of the book, I feel like I’ve witnessed a human life…

RF: That’s what I want.

TG:…and what’s amazing about this book is that these are human lives somewhat in wreckage and I’m fascinated by them like a car accident. Especially a story like Reunion, which is a very uncomfortable story. Do you find yourself looking for these kinds of stories or do they just come?

RF: Unh-uh. I’m not looking for them. All I do is write stories and write novels and I’m on the alert for whatever comes by me and I make stories up out of the amalgam of stuff I end up writing in my notebook. It’s also true with a book like this that it must have represented a current going through my life. Whether I knew it or didn’t know it, there’s altogether a kind of point of view here that’s pretty lacerating. I must have felt something lacerating about that whole experience.

TG: When I read Reunion, I remember feeling like I needed to run out of where I was, because it was a moment I’d absolutely hate to be in, but that I’d be forced to do. You almost have to put yourself into those kinds of situations.

RF: That’s an interesting story because I thought that this man who sees another man who’s the husband of his former lover – that’s entirely plausible – making them come together and actually having a rather etiolated conversation was not implausible, was stern and dramatic. And out of that disappointment was something stern and dramatic. That was the challenge for me. To do something that might not be entirely plausible, to see once you did it what the dramatic consequences might be. I didn’t think it was a very easily believable story.

TG: Oh, I think it is.

RF: Maybe the story makes it that way?

TG: Yeah, because I think people like that kind of conflict. When you see someone you’ve had that kind of intimate moment with, you almost have to say something.

RF: There’s a line in the story, “Maybe when you knock somebody around, that becomes that place in your life.”

TG: I think that’s absolutely true and why it’s so uncomfortable. I think what you did with Reunion is you made the minutia of the worst moment possible almost poetic.

RF: The speaker says, “This meeting seems to be almost classical in character,” which was my attempt to try to raise its profile. Which is not what you would normally think. If anything, it should be a moment to be avoided at all costs!

TG: I don’t know if you get credit for it, but I think there are many humorous elements in Multitude of Sins and that parts of the Sportswriter and Independence Day are downright hysterical.

RF: They’re comic novels – I guess I don’t come off funny when you meet me – so I rarely get credited with writing funny things.

TG: Especially in Abyss – that’s straight black humor.

RF: Geoffry Wolf and I were talking about Abyss – it’s low comedy, almost slapstick in its way except that it doesn’t end in low comedy. I wanted it to be funny. What she say’s when she falls of the cliff – “Oh my!” – is actually a reverberance from something I wrote in the late 70s when I was writing the end of A Piece of My Heart. Mr. Lamb electrocutes himself and he says, “Oops.” I like it if you have an opportunity to say what a person says as their last words. It’s not gonna be like what Henry James was supposed to have said when he saw death come through the door. “Ah, the magnificent thing…”

TG: I think if I see Death coming through the door I’m asking for another 15 minutes.

RF: I’m out the window. Boy. I’m out the window.

TG: Do you think you’ll ever return to screenwriting?

RF: No. Not a chance. I don’t have any complaints aside that it doesn’t interest me. I like writing novels. I only have so much time left on the earth and I want to dedicate that time to writing novels.

TG: How many more novels do you think you’ll write?

RF: Well, one for sure. There’s another I want to write after that called Canada and a third I could write after that, but I don’t think I’ll ever write the third one. I think I’ll abandon it. So I don’t know.

TG: Do you think you’ll be like Updike, writing into your late 70s?

RF: If I could be writing the stories he’s been writing the last few years, I’d be happy to.

TG: Are you aware of your influence on other writers?

RF: I don’t know about affecting other writers – but I’m glad that somebody who would be a writer could find something in my stories or anything that I write and use that to encourage their own work. That’s wonderful. What probably affects me more poignantly is when people come up to me at booksignings and say, “I read your book when I was going through a divorce,” or “I read a passage out of your book at my wedding,” or “I read your book to my wife when we were newlyweds.” That really affects me. My best readers are people who have no interest in writing at all.

Comments

[Clair Lamb]

Wow... any lingering doubt about your coolness has disappeared forever.

Wish I could be there. Will there be a podcast?

[Angela]

Lucky you, Tod! I think that's so awesome you'll get to sit down with Ford again and interview someone you really respect and who inspires you! Good for you. I'll be there for sure. Multitude of Sins is one of my favs.

[Tanya]

Congrats, Tod! I'm so happy for you. Your admiration for Mr. Ford is well-known among your fans. :)

[Myfanwy Collins]

Thanks for this. Richard Ford is one of my favorite writers. I can't wait to read his new book.