Richard Ford: Shooting for the stars

Interview with the American writer Richard Ford, who many have compared to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. In this video he talks about his novel 'Canada' published in 2012 as well as about his authorship in general.

According to the The Washington Post Richard Ford (b. 1944) is "one of the finest curators of the great American living museum." In 1995 his novel Independence Day was the first to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In this conversation with the Danish journalist and publicist Synne Rifbjerg, Ford speaks about his novel Canada, in which he explores the mysterious and consoling bonds of family in a tale about a young man forced by catastrophic circumstance to reconcile himself to a world that has been rendered unrecognizable. Ford himself grew up in Mississippi and lost his father at an early age. Later on in the interview, he reflects upon the differences between the United States and Canada, which to Ford is a much more liberal country. Furthermore Ford talks about his own path towards writing and literature, which he defines as "the lively negotiation with the ongoing."

Richard Ford was interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken

Produced by: Jakob Solbakken and Marc-Christoph Wagner, 2012

Recorded at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, December, 2012.

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

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Supported by Nordea-fonden.

'First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed, then about the murders which happened later.

The robbery is the more important part since it served to set my and my sisters lives on the

courses they eventually followed, nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.

Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank, they weren't strange people,

not obviously criminals, no-one would have thought they were destined to end up the way they did.

They were just regular, although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void

the moment they did rob a bank'.

I always have liked beginnings that were grabbers, I always liked beginnings that would, you know,

throw down the gauntlet for the reader. The only problem with a beginning like that is that

then you've got to have a second act, and sometimes if you don't have a second act,

if you can't follow up a really good beginning like that with something equally gripping then you might as

well not have it, because you've just basically created a trap for yourself and sprung it so,

no I just um...I always... I think when I wrote it I knew it was OK.

I thought it was just a sort of typical old fashioned narrative hook, and, you know,

you're going to have a murder down the line here, you're gonna have a bank being robbed

by my parents, so I thought it was good.

It's an American family of 4 people, 2 children, twin boy/girl, mother/father, and the father has been

in the air force since World War II, and the book takes place in 1960.

Eventually after staying in the air force, he gets out of the air force, and then doesn't really

know what to do with himself, he's been in the military his whole life, and they live in a little town in

Great Falls Montana, where none of them has ever lived before, and he just happened to be stationed

there in the air force.

And he hatches upon a scheme to sell stolen beef to the railroad, to sell to the dining cart customers on the railroad.

And he very quickly runs amiss and runs afoul of the Indians who he basically goes into business with to

kill the beef and deliver it to him, and he finds that he owes them $2,000, which is in 1960

a considerable sum of money, for half a beef that is somehow or other gone rancid before they can sell it.

And so in a fit of sort of chaotic lunacy rather than just leaving town in the middle of night, or

borrowing the money, because he had no contacts in the town, no collateral, he didn't own anything,

he determines he will rob a bank and get the money that way.

And that sets in motion, the book actually.

And what happens to him and his wife, who is his colleague in this bank robbery, is that they

are immediately caught, and once they are immediately caught, then the children are left alone,

and the children fend for themselves.

I mean I invented that, so I don't really know what relation it bears to most peoples' normal thinking.

I did discover when I was trying to make plausible to myself the idea that 2 people who didn't

have to rob a bank would rob a bank, that anybody who robs a bank who's not already a hardened,

criminal, who's not John Dillenger or Pretty Boy Floyd, anybody who's a normal person who robs a bank

is crazy, because they're going to get caught immediately, so all manner of assumptions about

how you do it and how you get away with it and what happens to you afterwards, are complete lunacy,

because none of those things is going to be true, because as Dell says, without wanting to

quote my own book as though Dell was a creature I didn't write, but he says when you think you're

going to get away with robbing a bank you forget one thing and that is that you're the only

person in town who's robbed a bank, and so you're going to stand out no matter what.

Somehow or another you're not going to be, you've given up your hold on normal, yeah.

For some reason or other that was very vivid to me that you will have the discretion of all of your

normal life up to a point, and I think Dell describes it as being on a boat which is getting farther and

farther away from shore, or you're in a lighter than air balloon that rises higher and higher very quickly

away from the surface of the earth. For a long time you could just let go and be there,

or for a long time you could swim back to shore and be safe, but all at once, imperceptibly,

you can't any more, and then your life is totally not a life you ever understood.

In the first book, I was just thinking about this, in the first book I ever wrote there was an image which

I just collected out of the culture about putting a frog into a pan of water at room temperature,

and little by little by little by little heating the water up and the frog sitting there perfectly fine

when all of a sudden he's not perfectly fine and all of a sudden he's no longer viable,

and that's, there's something about that odd change from what is totally normal to what is totally

abhorrent and felonious, it appeals to me, maybe that's just one of the strange perversities involved in

being a novelist I don't know. I don't know. You know Thoreau says that a writer is a man

who having nothing to do finds something to do.

I think it's all about being loved, I mean as a child I was loved, and one of the things that my wife

always says to me, she says you know I grew up in a household of divorce and she says love was always

conditional, she says, in regarding me, she says with you love is unconditional because I love her

unconditionally, and that's because I just think that's the way life should be, and I'm far from perfect,

but on that one issue I do understand that to create a sense of reliable normality that the person who

loves you loves you, and will always love you, is your due in life.

And again I'm speculating about a book that I wrote, OK?, so there's a certain fortuity to that,

but I think that's because those two children, Dell and his sister, were loved as children,

that they were most impressionably persuaded that normal was normal, that life had its normal

parameters around it, and that no amount of eccentricity and no amount of shocking behaviour by

their parents quite disturbed that sense of normal so that they were pitched off, at least in Dell's case,

his sister may be differently, so that they were pitched off into the chaos that no normalcy would describe.

I always say that if the devil always was in your life wearing a read suit, with a tail and horns,

you wouldn't get anywhere close to him.

But the fact of the matter is the devil often comes with certain appeals, it's also true just in dramatic

terms, that drama is interesting when the villain says something that's true.

So to create a persuasive villain, to create somebody who has the power that evil must have,

because if evil was just dispensable none of us would run afoul of it, but to create a character who has a

sort of tempting evil to him he has to be able to make sense, he has to be able to have affection,

he can't just be the antithesis of all that is good, he has to be tinctured by something that's appealing.

Maybe none of us is a character at all, I mean I don't believe in character anyway, I don't believe

that any of us has a sort of a kernel, hard, essential core, that we are basically as human beings,

and certainly as literary creations, we are a combination of imputed memory, wishes in will, fears,

desires, all kinds of things that just kind of get laid on, laid on, laid on, and laid on, and that because

that is a such a vertiginous kind of human condition, we ascribe to people to have cores,

to make that vertiginous seem less scary, so Dell is that way, but one of the things he does to establish

his own sense of persuasiveness to himself is that he tells this story, and his ability to intercalate

good with bad, violent with normal, love with not love, is a measure of his gaining dominion over it,

into the extent that he can gain dominion over it then he once more performs an act which would conclude that he has a character.

And I think we don't. It's a kind of, it's not an heretical idea, it may be a slightly nihilistic idea.

Growing up in the south was lucky in one way because I grew up down the street from Udor Welthy

and not far from Wayne Falkoner, and the idea that being a writer was a possibility, was ingrained in everybody,

writing literature was just in the air in Mississippi.

That was probably the only good thing about Mississippi, and everything else was bigoted and

racially tense, and unfair, and absurd, and it made most of us who were white kids growing up in

Mississippi basically kind of absurd creatures.

So what I wanted to do to escape that sense of burden, a burden visited on me simply by the

accident of my birth, was to get away.

And one of the things I found out when I got away was that the south had been perpetrating a great

lie upon me, many lies actually.

One big lie was that the south was unique, that the south was in fact a very special place

in the middle of an otherwise nondescript land country which was America.

And what I found was that America was equally interesting irrespective of where you went,

and that the values, if you had particularly good values, which is to say that you didn't want to harm

other people, you didn't want to be prejudiced against other races, that you wanted to treat people

equally, that those kinds of morays and values worked everywhere, that the language in America

was English, that the currency was the dollar, that the President was the President,

So America was a much more, for me, approachable, and I won't say it was homogenous because it

really isn't homogeneous at least not superficially, but America was a much more approachable,

knowable place, even for a southerner than I had been led to believe it was.

You know, you sort of think southerners only know the south, southern writers only write about the

south, southern writers only write for other southerners, what southern writers know only

other southerners can know, all baloney, it's all bullshit, complete bullshit, so I just decided to

dedicate my life to proving that that was bullshit.

It was worth doing because those preoccupations and those presumptions and those lies were very

confining, intellectually confining, morally confining, spatially confining, all those things you don't really

need in a country as vast as ours. You want to go, you want to see.

Canada is hugely appealing to me for a lot of reasons, one is I always feel better when I go there,

and I'm not quite sure why, I feel restored, I feel I'm in a more tolerant place.

There's also something about Canada which is mysterious, and that is that it is retinally

similar to America, but that once you pass across the 49th parallel and into Canada you realise

that you are in a totally different place from where you were before.

And that combination of retinal similarity and profound difference is to me mystifying and interesting,

and I can't explain it, this book is not about explaining that but it is about putting that fact

in play and seeing what can be said on the strength of that peculiar kind of nexus.

Similarity encased in mystery, mystery encased in similarity.

You don't need a book to go out there and feel what it feels like, and smell the surf.

I just appropriate the language of the place and from the language of the place, which is chiefly what

I'm interested in, I kind of use, I sort of co-opt the reader to in his or her minds eye envision the place,

where these words are appropriate, so saskatchewan. I would want to write about

saskatchewan only so that I could put the word saskatchewan on the page as many times as possible.

Because I think that's exciting, but when I put it on the page then that gives me an opportunity to

use other language to create descriptions and create word pictures which will help make more plausible

what the characters are doing in the foreground.

So it's a kind of a, you know one thing, on the one hand it's just language, it's just words,

on the other hand, once you have the words well you might as well describe what those words mean to

most people's experience, and you do that again so you can make what the characters do be plausible.

And chiefly I think for me the language is pleasurable to the reader. I mean a reader finds it pleasurable

to read a description and think she or he can identify that out of life.

But they also take pleasure in the fact of seeing that it's made of all of these words which can be put

together in such a felicitous way as to become almost but not quite invisible.

So the complexity of that kind of dual medium experience is very pleasurable for a reader,

and it's something that we all as people who live on the earth are better if we know, we're better if

we know, we're better if we know that we look out a window and we see the surf but we also see the

window, we also see the droplets on the window.

It's in an attempt to make lived experience be more valuable, to be more morally good, and to be alert to it.

I have changed as a reader because when I was young I didn't know what I was reading,

I was just reading books that I was taking on faith, that people said were great books, such as

'Absolum Absolum', for instance, I just dived into books like diving into the surf, and whatever

stuck to me stuck to me, without my sense of knowing necessarily what that good stuff would be.

Now I think I'm much more discerning as a reader, so that I know what the good stuff is when it's

happening to me, but I couldn't have done that without that act of faith which is to dive in without a clue,

I mean I was reading the beginning of Arm Parnok's book about Istanbul yesterday,

and he just starts it off profoundly, you would think that he would give himself a little grace note or two,

but he starts off profoundly and I just thought wow, wow that's, and I sat down and I put the book

down and I wrote about five pages in my notebook because it immediately triggered something in me

that had not been, I had not been able to trigger in my own brain for twenty years,

so I know when I'm being acted on, and I think that's another thing that I know that I maybe wouldn't

have known when I was young, that books act on you, and that books are fabrications,

and that readers know they are being acted on, and readers like being acted on if they can feel like

they're acted on to great profit.

It isn't as though a book has to become invisible, or that its machinations and its allures have to be

subliminal, they can be, and I learned this from writings like Bohais and the Latin Americans,

readers are perfectly willing to be overtly acted on as long as they can feel like it's in some good behalf,

and I know that in my own work, and I know that in my reading.

My definition of literature comes from F.R.Leavis, which is that literature is the supreme means

by which we renew our sensuous and emotional life, and by that means learning new awareness,

so I'm always reading to learn a new awareness, I'm always reading to have my sensuous and

emotional life renewed, so that's very crucial to me, because umm well, when I was a young boy

life was not enough, I had to go to some other place to make life be enough.

But the other thing, the other side of that duality, that dichotomous sense,

is that literature is made by regular people, literature is made by....living in her house on Pinehurst street,

and thinking her daily thoughts, and suddenly realising she has something she can write down,

it's...as Picasso said you know, all art is local, and by that he didn't mean that it took place in

somebody's village, he meant that it took place in someone's local heart, with simple thoughts

and simple expectations, and simple perceptions, and out of those simple perceptions through the

very hartalymbic that is a work of art becomes something staggeringly wonderful,

and that to me is irresistible about art, that is starts small.

You know I just backed into being a writer, I had failed at everything else, I'd been in the

marine corps, I'd been to law school, I'd failed at staying in the south, I'd taught school

a year and hadn't liked it.

Nothing I had tried had opened a path for me that was followable.

So I was just sitting around my mother's house one day in Little Rock Arkansas,

January 1968, and she looked at me with a very....I always think about the Scream, the Munch painting

you know, she said to me Richard, what are you going to do with yourself son?, and I said, for

reasons that I could probably not replicate, I said I think I'm going to try to be a writer,

and she just looked at me, because she actually read books, I think she thought I've never heard such a

thing in my life, but...I don't know why I said it,if I had said something else I would have probably done

something else but it just so happened fortuitously that I said I wanted to try to be a writer,

if I said I'm going to go work for a bank she would have been happy, but I didn't say that,

you know...why...that interests me that you think about a man like me who has had a life as a writer

for forty plus years, started out really with just a random remark that I made to my mother

on a cold January day in 1968. You know there was not a drum roll, trumpets didn't play, and then when

I said within a week to the girl who was going to be my wife, I said I think I'm going to move to

New York and move in with you, and then I'm going to stay home and try to write, she said to me

"Oh that's a wonderful idea she said, let's do that", who could resist that?

You don't have to be an American to write the great American novel,

you don't have to be an American to write .... to be the curator of the great American museum.

Anybody can do that, the only thing I don't like about curatorial imagery is that it seems to

be applied to things that are already there, whereas for me literature is a lively negotiation with the ongoing.

I don't know the difference between being 68 and 28, so I don't know the difference between

sitting down to write a story now from sitting down and writing a story when I was 28.

Seems the same.

But I just thing that young writers have to be readers, and they have to know that there doing,

when they sit down at their desk every morning at age 25, with no experience and no hope

for success, they have to realise that they are doing what Chekov did, because that's what

Chekov did when he was 25, and he became Checkov, so you have to think to yourself,

there is no difference between what I'm doing and what Hardy did, or what Chekov did,

or what George Elliot did, or what Neuhamsin did, it's all the same.

It's all, no matter how pokey and local it is, it's all shooting for the stars.