Richard
Ford
Author
of A Multitude of Sins
talks with Robert Birnbaum
Print
this interview.
 Writer
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944 and received
a B.A. from Michigan State University. He attended law school at
Washington University in St Louis for one semester but quit, ultimately,
to pursue a career in writing. He received a M.F.A. from the University
of California at Irvine (studying under E.L. Doctorow and Oakley
Hall).
Ford has published five novels: A Piece of My Heart,
The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Wildlife and Independence
Day (which in 1996 was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer
Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award). He has also published three story
collections: Rock Springs, Women with Men and in February
2002, A
Multitude of Sins. In addition to
his own writing, Richard Ford has edited anthologies such as The
Granta Book of the American Long Story, The Granta Book of
The American Short Story and The Complete Stories of Anton
Chekov, among others.
Ford has received numerous awards, been published in a
wide array of American magazines and has taught at various universities
around the USA. He nominally lives in New Orleans with his wife,
Kristina, to whom he has dedicated all his books. Richard Ford also
keeps residences in Mississippi, Montana and Maine. He is at work
on the third Frank Bascombe novel (The Sportswriter, Independence
Day...)
Robert Birnbaum: All
these stories have been previously published but for one, "Abyss."
Richard Ford: That's right.
Birnbaum: At what point did you see these
stories pointing to something more or decide that you wanted to
do a collection?
Ford: When I had written the first three.
I wrote "Privacy" first, "Creche" second and "Quality Time" third.
Then I thought, "Oh, I see where this taking me." So I'm going to
exclude stories that didn't go into what I thought this was going
to be about. I wrote "Charity" last and I called it "Charity" because
I thought it was the most, in a way, healing story. I thought that's
it. And then I tried to write one more, but all I had left for the
book was meanness.
Birnbaum: Meanness?
Ford: I just had the dregs of things to make
a story out of. And it was just a terrible piece of...well, it was
a terrible little story. Whether it was a terrible piece of writing
I don't know.
Birnbaum: That wasn't the title of the story?
Ford: Dregs?
Birnbaum: Meanness? What do you mean that
it was the dregs?
Ford: It was called "They Argued." It was
a little trick story about a series of declarations by an unknown
speaker. All of which started with the phrase, "They argued." It's
about all of the things that two people that are having an affair
argue about. I sent it to my agent and she said to me, "Oh you don't
want to publish this." Of course, then I immediately did want to
publish it.
Birnbaum: Has the story "Abyss"
appeared anywhere before?
Ford: No, it has not. I sent it to The
New Yorker. The New Yorker took it, and Bill Buford did
an edit on it, and he figured it had to come down some few pages.
I thought it was a really good edit for what he wanted but that
it didn't leave the story intact. It took out things that I just
couldn't have taken out. So I chose not to publish it elsewhere.
Birnbaum: Is it of typographical consequence
that the "Abyss" is set off in the table of contents?
Ford: There is. It's because it's a novella.
That's the reason.
Birnbaum: That would be a whole other subject.
You have devoted some effort to defining literary categories. You
defined it [in the introduction] in the Granta Book of the American
Short Story that you edited. Or tried to...
Ford: Yes.
Birnbaum: Then you edited the Granta Book
of The American Long Story in which [in the introduction] you
tried to define that genre...
Ford: A novella.
Birnbaum: ...or distinguish a long story
from a novella. And you also wrote that essay for Granta,
"Where Do Stories Come From?" When you write about these issues,
do feel like you are offering solid, definitive answers?
Ford: No. I know I am pulled toward the subject
in the very same way that I am pulled toward whatever I write about
and make a story out of. That there is something about a subject
which just — in a quite palpable way — rather than a cognitive
way — leads me to want to put some language to it. So that's
what I did with novellas. I also wanted to do all of the reading
about novellas that there was to do. I wanted to read all the criticism.
And I came away from reading all the criticism, to the extent that
I wasn't completely confused, I was frustrated in trying to use
the word 'novella' in a meaningful way, in common parlance, but
as you can see I have gone back to it. To use the word "long
story" seems a little pretentious. Since nobody is really going
to argue with you if you say, "I wrote a novella." They all kind
of think, "Oh yeah, that something that's shorter than a novel but
longer than a short story."
Birnbaum: What do those categories mean for
people other than writers?
Ford: Well, that's not a question you want
me to address historically? You don't want to talk about Boccacio,
thank god. It's very interesting.
Birnbaum: (both laugh) I was told we only
have a few minutes...
Ford: I think that they, probably, in America,
don't mean anything. I think they mean something in Europe. Europeans
have typically written at that length much more frequently in the
20th century than Americans have. Though Americans have done it
some, too. Because of magazines in America and the rise of magazines
at the end of the 19th century, the short story came into vogue
and they stayed in vogue. If that hadn't happened — if the
magazine hadn't been the vehicle for which the short story had fitted
itself so nicely, those longer forms might be just as popular as
they are in Europe. I know when I sell books of short stories into
Europe, they always say the same things, "We can't pay you very
much because the short story is not very popular over here."
Birnbaum: Well, didn't that used to be true
here?
Ford: It is still true here.
Birnbaum: It seems to me that I have been
seeing many more short-story collections in the past few years.
Ford: I can say some of the reasons why.
Writing programs.
Birnbaum: That means more people are writing
them. What explains why publishers are publishing them?
Ford: This is just one of those "go
figures." In American writing right now, there is a class of
young writers who are between thirty and forty who are really good.
Really good. They turned themselves to writing short stories because
Bill [Buford] will publish them. I think it's nothing more than
that. Bill does this contest every year, the Debut Fiction issue
for The New Yorker, and everyone of those people get snapped
up. Nell Freudenberger, for instance, got a lot of money. She was
offered on the strength of one short story which she published in
The New Yorker a half a million dollars for a two-book contract.
Birnbaum: Things have changed...
Ford: Things have changed. She turned it
down, bless her heart.
Birnbaum: Wow! There's a story.
Ford: It's a good story. A half a million
for a two-book contract...[Rosie, RB's obnoxious labrador, sits
next to RF] Dogs like me.
Birnbaum: Interesting title, A Multitude
of Sins. The most prominent sin here is adultery. Do want to
talk about the other sins?
Ford: Under the house of adultery is all
of the little failures that actually comprise it...
Birnbaum: Failure equals sin?
Ford: Yes. I'm conscious about doing that.
I wanted to try to elevate the way we fail each other to that level
to make it morally consequent and to make it more noticeable. And
also so as not to avoid it. I don't want to write a story in which
I swept the consequences of acts under the carpet. I didn't want
to write a half-assed book. I wanted to write a book that was in
your face about what this book wanted to be in your face about and
live with the consequences myself. See what I could actually generate.
So I wanted to say, "We writing about some sins here. These are
how they get performed and these are what they are specifically
at ground level. It's not about the ether of sex. It's about what
happens the next day."
Birnbaum: Are any of these stories, stories
that you wanted in some way to take further?
 Ford:
No.
Birnbaum: They are all complete for you?
Ford: Absolutely. There was never a thing
that I could have done to any of those stories to make them any
longer and make them any better.
Birnbaum: Perhaps that was a poorly phrased
question. There was one story in particular made me want to know
more.
Ford: "Under the Radar"?
Birnbaum: No, "Calling." Everything about
it was compelling, and I wanted to know more about the character's
life than the slice that we get in the story.
Ford: You may have put your finger on something
that I tried to pave over and thereafter became unaware of. That's
what you do. You come to some little glitch in the story's form
and you try to find — in the way that stories can remedy themselves
— you find a way to pave over the glitch. I wanted that to
be a story. I did not want it to grow long. It may very well have
been that the point in the story I tucked it in and made it come
to its end was too arbitrary a point. I'm never a hundred percent
sure about things like that. You go on instinct and you say, "Okay
this the point in the story where I am going take it away from the
here and send it in this direction. You might do it better in another
way. I didn't have any further interest in that situation. What
I do to compensate — and you probably noticed it other stories
of mine — I kind of load up the end. I make the end be really
full. I give the character a chance to say a bunch of things that
only a story would permit you to say, that in life you would never
think or say. It's probably the story ["Calling"] in the book that
people seem to like the most.
Birnbaum: Really?
Ford: Yes, at least now that the book is
in the world. I know why for myself. I don't know why really. I
think it's like some of the stories in Rock Springs in how
it's told. People sentimentalize Rock Springs in way that
they wouldn't if they read it again.
Birnbaum: Perhaps I missed this in reading
your previous work, but I found this collection ripe with reverberating
bon mots.
Ford: Oh really.
Birnbaum: In the "Calling": "Few things in
the world are actually mysterious. Most things have disappointing
reasons behind them no matter how strange they seem at first." It
didn't really matter to me whether that was true...I thought, "Well,
yeah I suppose we do invest things with a certain mystery, and if
we really thought it through they wouldn't be."
Ford: Well, that's a little bit what adultery
is about. If you find yourself actually thinking about — not
just the next 25 minutes — but the next 24 hours you might
look at it differently.
Birnbaum: That's a tough call. In one of
the early stories you say that people don't remember the past, they
imagine it.
Ford: That's in "Quality Time." I still think
it's true. But that may be the story writer and novelist talking,
trying to say something that is true about me — in a provisional
way — to be true about everybody else. Like you said before,
it's probably more true than we think, but for some people it may
not be true at all. I was just on the radio with someone calling
up from North Carolina wanting to talk about adultery because he
wanted to figure out how to talk to his Sunday school class about
it. He said, "You know, I don't know where to start. 'Cuz I have
no experience in this." I said, "Present your students with a hypothetical
and ask them to write down all the things that they think. And if
they don't come up with anything then I have a book to sell you."
He didn't think that was very funny, although he was polite. My
only way to get at what people aren't thinking about is to imagine
things for them to think. And so maybe people never think memory
is memory. Maybe they think it's the thing running at the bottom
of the screen that is always factual.
Birnbaum: You aren't making epistemological
claims here?
Ford: I'm talking about accountability. The
way in which we try to take responsibility for the things that we
do and somehow leaven the things that we do through the casting
capacities of memory. Sure we can say we walked out of that building
with that woman. Or we can say we didn't. But we can also say a
whole lot of things about why. John Gardner in his not-very-good
book on moral fiction says, "Life is all about, and this and
this and this. Literature is about subordination. It's about this
because of this. This although that. This in spite of that. And
that's the difference."
Birnbaum: (long pause) The characters in
A Multitude of Sins seemed to be very specific. Was this
something you paid special attention to?
Ford: Hmm. I was very engaged to write them.
I was very engaged to write about this subject.
Birnbaum: The characters are so finely tuned.
Little Francis the real estate agent from Connecticut who refers
to her lover Howard as a pogo stick.
Ford: I was trying to do better.
Birnbaum: (chuckles)
Ford: I was. I reached a point two or three
years ago where I realized I wasn't doing enough of what I needed
to be doing when it came to describing people. When it came to finding
a way for the reader to actually physically envision people. Some
of that comes with writing in the third person. Writing in the first
person, a character describing herself or himself is a little unpersuasive.
In the third person it becomes absolutely essential. I wanted to
write in the third person because it's one of the things I feel
that I don't do very well. One of the things I did was to set a
task to try to make myself do it better. To try to describe people
more. How they looked, what they wore, what their faces were like.
I'm always reading my colleagues...Ian McKewen, for instance, He'll
spend a whole paragraph doing something that I would have thought
heretofore I would have got away with not doing at all. Or maybe
half or a third as much. I decided I would do it more because maybe
I could do it better. It might make the characters more vivid. Maybe
it was just an opportunity to write, that I could seize.
Birnbaum: When all is said and done, are
you happy with this, shall we call it a collection?
Ford: Yes, it's a collection. I am happy
with it for all kinds of personal reasons. Principally, because
I have finished writing about this. I found it to be emotionally
and spiritually ennervating. I kept putting my head down after I
would write about something and think to myself,"Why is this happening?"
What I hope is that what I had contacted was the subject matter
itself. But beyond that, I had made the stories felicitous enough
that the reader won't run away from the stories. But yes, I feel
like I am finished with this now.
Birnbaum: Do you re-read your work?
Ford: Oh yeah. In finishing this book, the
last thing that I did, I read every story aloud and made some changes
in every one of them.
Birnbaum: You recorded the audio book version
of A Multitude of Sins? How did that happen?
Ford: They asked me to do it. Somebody at
Harper Collins had heard me read a story. It made me happy because
it gave me a chance to read them all again.
Birnbaum: This was after you had completed
the stories. Did it in any way cause you to look back?
Ford: It was terrifying. It was horrifying.
I went to each one of those sessions with a great deal of trepidation.
However, completely by fortuity, the last day I finished reading
these stories was the day before the book went into its final run.
So anything I found I could change. Which was such a relief to me
because I did find a bunch of things — typos.
Birnbaum: Is it too early to know what the
world thinks of this book?
Ford: I've heard some things. A terrible
review in The Sunday New York Times.
Birnbaum: Are you going to go out and shoot
it? Is that a true story that your wife took a pistol and shot a
bad review Alice Hoffman gave you?
Ford: Yes, it is a true story. Shot her book.
Seemed so good to do. We had another copy so I went out and shot
it. I don't read my reviews anymore.
Birnbaum: Well, that might save you on ammunition.
Ford: Since I found out yesterday that this
book is getting a terrible review in the Sunday Times, for
lack of something better to worry about, I lay in bed and thought
of all the Sunday Times reviews I've gotten for 8 books —
4 bad, 4 good. It's not much consolation to me now people tend not
to remember your bad reviews and they tend to think that you only
ever have gotten good reviews. That's okay with me. I try to find
ways to insulate myself from the feelings of bad reviews. The feelings
of bad reviews are not so much that somebody doesn't like your book
but that it keeps other people from reading your book. I hate that.
Birnbaum: Why do reviews matter?
Ford: They create the all-important buzz.
It becomes one of the little strings that are plucked in the hum
of what's going on about a book.
Birnbaum: Isn't it sufficient to be reviewed
by the New York Times Book Review?
 Ford:
Seemingly. We all know that people say, "Gee, I saw a great review
of your book in the Times." And it was one where they called
you everything but a writer. I hear about these things second hand
because my wife tells me about them. Randall Jarrell said, "You
have to be sure to offend the right people." I don't know if I'm
being sure, but I am about my business.
Birnbaum: Do you have a sense of a shifting
role of the writer as a public intellectual in the past decade?
Ford: Yes, more. Writers seem to be on TV
more. We seem to be being asked all sorts of basically political
but more particularly sociological questions. I don't know why that
is. I don't think it's because the public has more of an interest.
Probably more writers are telegenic and radiogenic and that we use
language better than sociologists and politicians do. And we ought
to. It could be that. I grew up in the '60s with Mailer and Gore
Vidal and Truman Capote on TV. They were wonderful. You still don't
hear writers talking very much about politics. You see them talking
about affairs of the heart, gray areas between behavior and intention.
I was on radio today — as if I was giving advice to the lovelorn.
I'm not qualified, and I'm not very good at it.
Birnbaum: Who is? I'm thinking about the
way pop culture has "celebrified" designers, models, musicians and
wrestlers as "stars"...
Ford: It would happen when I was 58...[Jonathan]
Franzen tried to put a block under that wheel. Sort of gave it a
bad name. I'm not sorry he did it. I wouldn't have done it...done
what he did. But since he did do what he did, I'm not sorry he did
it. I don't think novelists benefit from becoming glib public respondents
to each big issue. It's so much easier to do that have to write.
Novelists are better off writing.
Birnbaum: They are also better off selling
lots of their books...there is that practical imperative.
Ford: There sure is. I also think that as
a writer your best chance is with your work. Not transmogrifying
yourself into something...
Birnbaum: That's so hopeful...maybe naive...
Ford: It may be naive.
Birnbaum: Best chance in what sense?
Ford: To make a living. Using myself as an
example. I've been really lucky as a writer, and I have worked really
hard as a writer and stuck to it for 30 plus years now. So I have
to feel like it's a way to proceed. The alternatives — writing
for the movies or something celebrity conscious — have never
seemed to me to be real. All the writers who I have seen who have
gone to Hollywood who are real writers either came back and went
back to their work or became gobbled up and became something else.
Birnbaum: What about you stories and movies?
Ford: There is one story that I wrote called
"Bright Angel" which Sam Shepard was in. Valerie Perrine and Lily
Taylor. It was terrible. I thought it was terrible. I thought my
screen play wasn't very good. It was a really honest to God project
that we all worked like dogs to do...it just didn't work out very
well and I was one of the principle reasons.
Birnbaum: What moves you to take on certain
editing projects, The American Short Story, The Long Story...
Ford: I want to advance the work of my colleagues.
Nothing more than that.
Birnbaum: And The Collected Stories of
Anton Chekov?
Ford: I did that so I could read all the
stories. I had never read all the stories. I wanted to read all
235 of those stories. And I did. That was, if not a noble intention,
it was a good intention. But the doing The Granta Book of the
American Short Story or doing Best American Short Stories
or Best American Sports Writing or the Granta Book of
the Long Story, that's just to try to get American writing pushed
forward a little bit. I don't find it persuasive to have an abstract
love for a form. It isn't that I love the short story form. I don't.
I don't love things like that.
Birnbaum: Who comes to mind when you are
asked about overlooked writers?
Ford: Ford Maddox Ford, probably. Charlie
Portis. And I did my little bit for Dick Yates because I thought
he was very badly overlooked. The way things work with new publishers
and new imprints trying to get an angle on the market like Ecco
and with the New York Review of Books doing their own publishing
effort to really uncover overlooked books, there probably aren't
very many. I have a friend whose job it is — whose only job
it is — is to ask that question of everybody she meets and
then run and read the book. And if she likes the book she puts it
forward to the people at the New York Review and they publish
it.
Birnbaum: You've been writing for 30 years.
When you start a work, do you think about all that has come before
in your writing? What's it like to be at this point in your career?
Ford: I have to make myself work harder.
Probably my habits, because of good luck and using up things that
I had easier access to — like my own past, for instance —
have probably depleted what might have earlier in my life been a
little easier access to material. Now I feel like I have to make
myself work harder, and I somehow feel like I don't want to do it
as much but as though I have to do it. So I just go project by project
by project. I don't think ahead at all. So I do that so I can concentrate
on what I am doing. If I don't give a project my every bit it really
won't be very good. My half measures are really not good measures.
Updike's half measures are probably as good as my full measures.
My half measures you don't want to see. At least that's what I've
got myself convinced. I want to be able to do what I have always
done which is to say, "I could do this no better. I could not make
this better."
Birnbaum: You leave it all on the playing
field...
Ford: Yes. That's kind of how I go about
doing it. I get to that frame of mind perhaps a with little more
difficulty. But I'm working on the 3rd Frank Bascombe [The Sportswriter,
Independence Day] book...Once I finish that...
Birnbaum: I thought you said you weren't
going to do that?
Ford: No I said...
Birnbaum: I'm kidding, I'm kidding..
Ford: I hope I didn't say that. I might have
said it. I do a lot of things to remind myself of how serious projects
need to be to do them.
Birnbaum: So you are working on the next
Frank Bascombe novel?
Ford: Yes and I will be working on it. There
are moments when I feel like I can really do it. There are moments
when I feel like...yesterday was a bad day. You find out things,
people don't like your book, you think to yourself, "I don't know
how I can spend the next three years writing a book when I feel
so shitty about this now?" But being a novelist, it is important
to average your days. It's like Olympic diving. You throw out the
high score and the low score. I threw out the low score yesterday...
Birnbaum: After all this time you still have
— what to call it — a lapse in confidence? An inability
to see the meaning of what you do?
Ford: I sometimes I have the inability to
see how I can do what I need to do at a high enough level for me
to do it. I don't think that is unusual, and I don't think it's
bad. Sometimes I'll have young writers say to me, "I've just had
my confidence shaken." I say, "It just matters how you respond
to that having your confidence shaken, that makes you what you are."
When you have your confidence shaken, you don't have that perspective
when it happens. You think, "I'm done."
Birnbaum: Well yeah, you're in that terrible
moment.
Ford: You don't have anything. You just think
that this really feels horrible. The only habit you can rely in
the Scarlet O'Hara rule: Tomorrow is another day. And you hope you
are there for it.
Birnbaum: I am going to assume that you think
storytelling and writing is important.
Ford: Yes.
Birnbaum: If you didn't think it was important,
would you still do it?
Ford: No. I would quit in an instant. I'd
quit yesterday. That's the only reason I do it. I been as lucky
as I'm ever going to get, in all the ways you can calculate success.
I've made a living. I won a couple of fancy prizes. I'll never win
the Nobel Prize. I might back into some other fancy prize because
Phillip Roth wouldn't have written a good book that year. But I
do it because it's important... that old line of Leavis' that he
wrote in his essay on DH Lawrence, "Literature is the supreme means
by which we learn a new awareness and renew our sensuous and emotional
life." I believe that. I believe...
Photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
Robert Birnbaum came to journalism, where
he has been a practitioner for the past two decades, from a series
of possibly (it's too soon to tell) educational vocational experiences
that are too numerous to mention. In the '80s and '90s, as publisher/creative
director of STUFF magazine in Boston, when he wasn't attending industrial
gatherings, he interviewed nearly 500 hundred writers — from
Martin Amis and Isabel Allende to Marianne Wiggins and Howard Zinn
— and read almost 1000 books. He is currently, among other
things, pondering if there is a place for him in a profession increasingly
infested with vulgarians who believe 'editorial content' is celebrating
restaurant and shop openings, endlessly lionizing the same small
group of celebrities and reiterating the press releases of the publicists
they have just had lunch with. He lives with his Labrador retriever
Rosie and helps parent his young son Cuba Maxwell.
Note:
Featured author in November 2000
E-mail: reddiaz@aol.com
Writing interests: Interviews, Photography
Author interviews: Dorothy
Allison, Nicholson
Baker, Julian
Barnes, Andrea
Barrett, Alex
Beam, Jill
Bialosky, Amy
Bloom, Amy
Bloom 2002, Alain
de Botton, Arthur Bradford,
Ethan Canin, Stephen
Carter, Sandra
Cisneros, Michael
Connelly, Richard
Conniff, Frank
Conroy, Mark
Costello, Elizabeth
Cox, Jim Crace, Nicholas
Dawidoff, Andre
Dubus III, John
Dufresne, Tony Earley,
Barbara Ehrenreich, Gretel
Ehrlich, James
Ellroy, Richard
Ford, Alan
Furst, Alan
Furst 2002, Anthony
Giardina, James
Gleick, Adam
Gopnik, Allan Gurganus,
Barbara
Haber, David
Hadju, Ethan
Hawke, Christopher Hitchens
#1, Christopher
Hitchens #2, Gabe
Hudson, Elizabeth
Inness-Brown, Ben Katchor,
Nora
Okja Keller, Chip Kidd,
Anthony
Lane, Annette
Lemieux, Alan
Lightman, Paul Lussier,
Ruben Martinez, Daniel
Mason, Thomas
McGuane, Thisbe Nissen,
Tim
O'Brien, Susan
Orlean, Ann
Packer, Arthur
Phillips, Samantha
Power, Christopher
Rice, David
Rieff, Hazel
Rowley, Richard Russo #1,
Richard
Russo #2, John
Sedgwick, David
Shields, Ilan
Stavans, Darin
Strauss, Manil
Suri, Nick
Tosches, Brady
Udall, Sarah
Vowell, Brad
Watson, W.D. Wetherell,
Mark
Winegardner, Howard
Zinn
Author portraits: John
Sayles, Howard
Zinn, Robert
Stone, Ana
Castillo, John
Waters, Allen
Ginsberg, Carl
Hiaasen, Carlos
Fuentes, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Eduardo
Galeano, Isabel
Allende, Junot
Diaz, Joan
Didion, James
Ellroy, John
Edgar Wideman, Martin
Amis, Michael
Ondaatje, Richard
Price, Rigoberta
Menchu, Louis
de Bernieres, Studs
Terkel
Photography: "I
am the Son of my Son"
Journal: "A
Reader's Progress"
Link: Review
of Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion at Hyde Park Review
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