Richard Ford stays in shape. He has turned eighty years old, but he sports the enviable silhouette of a long-distance swimmer: tall, thin and agile. Age has not diminished his stature and he keeps his back straight from the men who are still able to decide on his fate. He boasts large hands and has a mocking look. The writer hides it, but he has a sense of humor and there is irony in his comments. He has boards this Richard Ford. And a lot of life on top of it, although I avoid mentioning it. He practiced boxing in his youth, had his ups and downs with some renowned authors and admits to taking criticism badly. In “Be mine” (Anagrama) says goodbye to Frank Bascombe, the protagonist who has accompanied him throughout four books. What you have not yet decided and if this goodbye is also yours.
When were you happy? When her grandfather taught her to box or correcting books today?
(Laughs). I never feel happy when I proofread books. The last part… correct, edit, revise… The truth is that it is painful for me and I want it to be over. But it’s better that it never ends completely. But when my grandfather taught me to box I wasn’t happy either, because he knew that he was going to get me into more trouble and, you know, he got me into more trouble (laughs). For a while I did boxing, but only for a year or two. There were people who hit me and I hit people.
«Writers don’t need a cursed legend. It is a myth”
It served? Writers are made of readings and experiences.
Yes, but I think you can be a writer and have only had internal experiences. You don’t have to have done anything great to be a novelist. If you have sensitivity and a lively sensibility, an intense inner life, you can also write great books. You don’t need to have been a boxer (laughs). But not having done dramatic things either. The truth is that I have had a life without too many significant episodes. There is nothing in my existence that ten million other people haven’t done. My friend Tim O’Brien was a soldier in the war and wrote some fantastic stories about it, but you don’t have to go through that. If the question were whether it is necessary for a writer to have a cursed legend, the answer, without a doubt, is no. That’s a myth.
Have you been happy?
Happy and unhappy, but mostly happy. The main institutions of my life have been good. My mother and father loved me, and I loved them. I married the right girl. I haven’t had children. I wanted to write novels and I did. And I keep doing it. I’m not an alcoholic. I have not had any illnesses. My mother told me: “You have to be happy.” And I was. But I think you have to invent happiness for yourself. Many things happen to you in life and you can’t control everything. That. Well. It depends on you. Sometimes bad things happen to me, making me unhappy or very unhappy, but I look for mechanisms and words to survive that and take advantage of it. That is our responsibility. That is, taking advantage of doing something useful with what is bad. And I would say that I manage to take advantage even of bad things.
In “Be Mine” Frank Bascombe’s novel cycle closes. What is the relationship with the characters like? Do you give them your experiences? Do you learn from them?
The characters have nothing to teach me. I have everything there is to teach them. I’m the boss. Here, I am the one in charge (laughs). I am the final authority. And if they make something brilliant or hard or fun, it’s me, I’m the one who invented it. And if another author tells you something different, he is lying to you.
“I don’t know if I will be able to face the discipline required to write another novel, long or short.”
And when they do something bad?
It’s my fault too! Yes. (laughs). In fact, it’s better when they do something bad, because then I can write about its consequences. I once had a brother and sister sleep in the same bed and people told me everything, that it was incestuous… but I wanted to do it to examine the consequences of that act, which, in the end, were good. When writing my characters, I am simply free.
In his novel, a father survives his son. Why is she fired from Frank Bascombe?
Because it has allowed me to investigate what the conventions dictate to us on this matter. Conventions tell us how to feel. They say that if a father survives his son, it is the worst thing that can happen to you. And I wanted to see if he could write something different and against what one can survive and overcome the death of a child. At that moment, your most powerful feeling is I’m not dying. Convention would tell you that you want to die, that you won’t be able to survive, but conventional constructions are not interesting enough for me.
Don’t you like conventions? Do you like writing against them?
Basically it is both things. You have to write within the conventions so that the reader can relate, but you have to write about issues outside the conventional point of view. You have to dream something new within those conventions. Conventional wisdom is not always satisfactory. So you have to find a balance between the conventional and the new, the unconventional.
“I am not at all surprised that the forces that fought in World War II act again”
It is a novel about a father and his son.
I had a father who died early and left me with a lot of life to live without him. This is a theme of my narrative, of my writing, although I have not had a child. Although that is why many people write novels or poems. To live an experience that has not been lived. You need to feel complete.
You were born in 1944. Your character Frank Bascombe, in 1945. You both belong to the world after the Second World War. But everything that was fought back then is returning.
Seems that if. My generation also fought in Vietnam, which was an absolutely wrong and fatal war. I am not at all surprised that these forces are acting again. Let’s say that the devil works in very different ways… We must resist and fight against them in new ways, in different ways. Nothing you solve is fixed forever. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but a real one. I never saw my time as a time of goodness. Japan was bombed, presidents were killed. That period of life was very hybrid in that sense. The illusions that existed in the 60s died, to begin with, because they were unreal. Then Richard Nixon came along and I don’t know what’s good about that. It is useful to look at the history of a country with open eyes. That is Trump’s big lie. Make people think that things were better 50 years ago. In some ways yes, but at other times, no.
Trump. He said that if he came back he would go to Canada.
(laughs). Yes, but my wife wouldn’t follow me and I would rather live with my wife than become Canadian. I proposed it to her and I wanted to leave, but between Kristina and Canada, I’m staying with my wife. So I stayed home and that’s why I wrote “Canada.”
How do you see Trump’s return?
Let’s see, I see Trump as a natural excrescence of the things that have always been bad in America. He has become the poster boy for all those things that have always been there and never had a leader. Now, he is a leader of that, of hatred of the Government, of minorities, of immigrants, of climate change. That was, with a few lower decibels, present in the United States. For me he is a character who what he does is turn institutions into slogans. He wants to be President. Those who say that he is anti-institutional are wrong. He is an institutional creature. He wants to be president and win more votes than the opponent. What could be more institutional than that? The thing is that some of his means of gaining more votes are illegal. But now he is in court for precisely that.
“I’m afraid of losing my country”
But…?
What worries me, I insist, is not the anti-institutional part. It’s that nihilistic line in American life. What the people who support Trump want is to blow up the country. But those people have always been there, just as there are anarchists in other cultures. But now there are more. And if they can’t blow up the country, they can damage things so much that it will take a long time to be corrected. I’m afraid of losing the country, of going backwards. Look at climate change. We cannot allow ourselves to go backwards there because we destroy the planet, not just the United States. And then Trump is using our foreign policy instruments to do business with nefarious states like Saudi Arabia. He says stupid things like he doesn’t like the Army or generals, but he also doesn’t say that we aren’t going to have an Army or generals.
Is America polarizing too much?
He is dividing it a lot. And he worries me about Russia and China. If they see a weakened United States already from within, we become vulnerable. These nation states are harmful actors. In the past, diplomacy, that would have regulated it, but Trump has no idea about diplomacy or patience. Diplomacy is slow, it takes time, it is based on history. But all that doesn’t interest him at all. In that sense it is a danger.
It’s the end of Frank Bascombe’s life as a character.
It describes the end of a certain period of my very fruitful life. I recognize it. I don’t feel sad about it. That is to say, it is not melancholic, but rather a realization. Maybe I’ll keep writing. Maybe not. The days go by and I continue with my note books, my notebooks. These notes are a natural reflection of being alive. Maybe something comes out of them or not. I don’t know if I’ll be able to face the discipline required to write another novel, long or short. I don’t know if I want to get back into that discipline.
