The time: midday, or thereabouts. The scene: a large manor house somewhere in rural Herefordshire in late May. From a taxi, I emerge, a little anxiously, to look around. If the setting is picture-perfect – the weather is glorious – it’s also unnervingly quiet, the only sound to be heard that of the swifts careening in the blue sky above. Where is everyone? Have I come to the wrong place? My knocks on the front door having gone unanswered, I scoot through a gate to the back of the house, where a sweeping lawn rises to meet a set of french doors that open on to a grand drawing room. Pressing my face to the glass, I peer in. But alas, no one occupies the squashy sofas; no lunchtime cocktail sits on a card table, awaiting a manicured hand. It is as if a play by Noël Coward is about to begin – either that, or one has just ended.
But then I hear a voice – a male, American voice – and Richard Ford appears, distinctly un-Coward-like in shorts and Converse trainers he has accessorised with neon pink shoelaces. He looks marvellous: brown-skinned, straight-backed, quietly zestful. “Shall we walk a little?” he asks, on hearing that I’ve travelled from London and will be returning there immediately after we’ve finished our conversation. “Let’s admire the view before we talk.” So this is what we do, crossing the lawn until we reach its very edge, a vantage point that enables us to gaze at the valley below – and also, more bizarrely, at a small metal sign that marks the spot from where, in 2001, Bill Clinton, having flown in for the Hay festival nearby, drove a golf ball clean into the River Wye.
“I was here that day,” confides Ford. “I stood back over there [he waves in the direction of a patio], and waited for him to notice me, which eventually he did.” He and Clinton, near contemporaries, are both southern boys – Ford, the son of a travelling salesman, was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived across the street from the novelist Eudora Welty, but spent much of his childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, just like the former president – and his tone, half fond and half cynical, is full of knowing.
Ford is here now for Hay, at which he appeared the previous day with his friend John Banville; this house belongs to another pal, who last night celebrated his 90th birthday around its vast dining table. Tomorrow, Ford will appear in Oxford and then he will travel to Holyhead to take the ferry back to Dublin, where he rents a house, and plans to spend most of the summer (he has loved Ireland ever since the days when he taught at Trinity College Dublin). The prospect is bliss, but it’s also crimped by the fact that Kristina, his wife of more than 50 years – they married in 1968 – is marooned in the US, where she is having an operation; she won’t be able to join him for a while. “She’s tough,” he says, though less in mitigation at his absence from her side, I think, than to reassure himself she will be OK. “We’ve been together since she was 17, and I was 19, and if you ever meet her, you’ll see why.”
For many years, he and Kristina chose to live separately, in different parts of the country; they enjoyed missing each other. But now, in their late 70s, they’re shacked up together. “To be with someone all your life is quite wonderful. But particularly so at this age. We don’t have children. We feel very vulnerable.” As he has got older, he has become a worrier, and he doesn’t like it one bit. “I just make up shit to worry about. At 3am, worry seems to be my default mode.” High on the list of the things he worries about is Kristina, who he wants only to be healthy and happy. “I guess you’ve just got to take each day at a time,” he says. “You’ve got to squeeze life, and that’s all.”
In the drawing room, we sit side by side, and prepare to talk about Frank Bascombe, Ford’s most famous creation and the man who’ll inevitably outlive him. Bascombe first appeared in his 1986 novel The Sportswriter – an American everyman who suffers an existential crisis after the death of his young son (a failed novelist turned sports journalist, Bascombe later moves into property). Three more books about him followed – Independence Day (1995), the second, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction – and now here is the fifth and, we are forewarned, final book in the series, Be Mine.
* * *
I had assumed that this one would end with Frank’s funeral, or at any rate, its planning (the novels are written in the first person). But it turns out that it isn’t Frank, by now in his 70s, who lies dying in Be Mine, but another of his sons, Paul, a troubled middle-aged man who, when the book begins, has been diagnosed with ALS, a form of motor neurone disease that is also known in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the baseball player who was diagnosed with it.
How cruel to keep killing off poor Frank’s children! (Bascombe also has a daughter, with whom he does not get on.) It’s against nature. Why did he do it? Shouldn’t it really be Frank who’s for the chop? Ford’s eyes are a famous shade of aquamarine and they consider me now, rather coolly. Don’t I know, his expression says, how horribly ruthless novelists can be? “I’m such a conventional writer,” he finally says. “I just couldn’t figure out any way that I could have written that book. I mean, I didn’t want to write as a… ghost.”
He smiles. “But I didn’t want him to die, anyway! I wanted to squeeze as much out of him as I possibly could.” He likes Frank. “He’s much nicer than I am. I don’t control all the things I am, but I do control all the things he is.” And so it came to pass that the novel ends with Frank still in relatively rude health and living in the basement of a female friend who owns a house that overlooks the ocean, on the hand-glazed brick terrace of which he likes to enjoy an early glass of north coast rosé.
People say that old age, with all its infirmities and need for care, is like a second childhood. Was it that Ford, who is 79, wanted to subvert this – even to rail against it – by making Frank the carer rather than his son? Not really, no. “I think what you’re ascribing to the novel is true,” he says. “But it was a formal decision, not a soft tissue decision.” What he means is that he had stuff he wanted to say and do that depended on Frank’s relative fitness. Be Mine is a reckoning up; it’s about happiness and what that involves (Frank defines it as what a person experiences when they aren’t unhappy, for which reason he also believes it is a state that can only really be recognised retrospectively). Is it possible, the book asks, ever to be happy again after the death of a child? But it’s also, irrefutably, about the US and the state it is in. Why else would Paul and Frank choose for their final journey together a road trip to Mount Rushmore, if not to elbow the reader into worrying whether the republic will last as long as the faces of the presidents that are carved on that South Dakota peak?
“Yes,” says Ford. “I didn’t want to invoke it literally, all this dangerous stuff. I had nothing to invoke that wasn’t received from another source; my political opinions are like everybody’s political opinions in that sense. But I wanted it to be part of the book’s background.” He has paid Rushmore three visits in his life. “And the last time, it was 3 July 2020, when Trump was there. I didn’t plan it. I just drove out there and all these mega Maga [Make America Great Again] buses were there. I guess he’d like his face to be on there. I’m sure that’s why he was there, though I didn’t actually see him. I didn’t go up the mountain when he was bloviating. I was at the Holiday Inn. But, you know, something like that happening is one of those things, when you’re a novelist, that makes you think to yourself: ‘I’m doing something right here.’ The culture kind of looks at you, and says: ‘Yes, you’re on to something.’”
(June 8, 1976)
After studying creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, Ford publishes his debut novel, A Piece of My Heart, about two men on an island in the southern Mississippi River, followed in 1981 by The Ultimate Good Luck. When both books sell poorly he steps away from fiction and becomes a writer for New York magazine Inside Sports.
(June 8, 1986)
The experience inspires The Sportswriter, the first book to feature the character of Frank Bascombe; it goes on to be named a Time book of the year. The following year he publishes his first short story collection, Rock Springs, leading Granta editor Bill Buford to categorise Ford’s writing as “dirty realism”, focusing on life’s mundanity.
(June 8, 1990)
Publishes Wildlife, about a teenager in Montana observing his parents’ marriage break down; in 2018 it is adapted for the screen by director Paul Dano and co-screenwriter Zoe Kazan. Ford co-edits The Best American Short Stories 1990 and edits The Granta Book of the American Short Story (in 1992 and 2007). Writes the screenplay for the film Bright Angel, starring Sam Shepard.
(June 8, 1995)
Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, is published, describing Bascombe – now a realtor – spending an emotional Fourth of July weekend with his son. In 1996 it wins both the Pulitzer prize and PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. The next year Ford publishes the short story collection Women With Men.
(June 8, 2006)
A third Bascombe book, The Lay of the Land, is published.
(June 8, 2012)
Publishes Canada, a standalone novel about a teenager left to fend for himself after his parents are arrested for robbing a bank; it receives the Andrew Carnegie medal for excellence in fiction.
(June 8, 2014)
Let Me Be Frank With You, the fourth Bascombe novel, is a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for fiction.
(June 8, 2017)
Ford’s memoir Between Them: Remembering My Parents is published, detailing the lives of Parker Carrol and Edna Ford.
(June 8, 2023)
Be Mine, Ford’s first novel in 11 years and the final book in the Frank Bascombe series, is published.
The fact of Donald Trump’s election continues, even now, to seem preposterous to him. But Ford believes – or perhaps he only chooses to believe – that his presidency was an interregnum, not the start of a downward spiral. “The republic is fairly ebullient and I don’t think he has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected again. Partly, he’s too old, just like Biden. Partly, he’s probably insane. I think it’s become glaringly obvious to everybody that he’s delusional.” So democracy will endure in the US? “I don’t know the answer to that, and I won’t be here anyway. But I will say that its survival is a whole lot less dependent on who the president is than it is on our position vis-a-vis our antagonists. The fact that we cannot stop this insane war in Ukraine. Americans are taking it as a given that we can’t stop it. And what’s happening with the Chinese. I don’t have much of an idea about that, but I know it’s nothing good. They’re not riven by doubts. They’re not riven by ethical conflicts. And I don’t think we’re in a position to do anything about them.”
All this isn’t to say, however, that he’s serene about the state of things in the US on a more day-to-day basis. A year ago, he and Kristina sold their place in Maine and bought a new house in New Orleans, the city where they lived for many years when she was the director of its planning commission. “But I don’t know how happy we’re going to be. It has changed a lot. We have no government there. We have a non-functioning mayor, racial tensions are very high, income inequality is quite… vivid, and global warming is chipping away at the periphery [of the city]. And people don’t, for instance, observe stuff…” What does he mean? Don’t they stop at traffic lights or something? “Exactly that,” he says.
I tell him it feels to me like there is a mass shooting every week in the US. “Well, that’s because there is a mass shooting every week,” he replies. “The gun lobby is reconciled to the deaths of children and it’s not any more subtle than that. The gun manufacturers have a death grip on the Congress of the United States.” Ford owns shotguns himself; he likes to shoot grouse (and, sometimes, the books of his enemies: when Alice Hoffman wrote what he called “nasty things” about Independence Day, he put a bullet through her latest book and sent it to her – though he tells me that he never reads his reviews). “And when people say: ‘Well, would you give up your guns in order to support gun restrictions?’, my reply is: ‘Every single one.’” Guns get inside your head, he says; it’s impossible not to feel their presence even in the most humdrum moments.
“I assume when I’m in Walgreens [the chemist] – and unfortunately, at my age, I often am in Walgreens – that 50% of people there are carrying. The reason they are doing this, ostensibly, is in case some malefactor tries to shoot them. But it’s blurry because I can tell you that when you walk around carrying a firearm, you look at everybody as a potential target. You’re basically thinking subliminally about the possibility that you will shoot.
“That just goes with carrying. A gun weighs a lot. It has an effect on your pocket. You know you’re carrying all the time because that weight is another possible way of thinking about the nervous world around you. It’s a horrible state to be in and the people who are getting killed are children who didn’t do anything.” Will he and Kristina move? Perhaps. He would like to head for the farthermost reaches of Maine, close to the Canadian border.
* * *
Is writing easier or harder for him nowadays? “Oh, writing novels is not hard, and even if it were, you can’t say that. No one wants to listen to that. No one gives a shit. You choose to do it, and as lofty an aspiration as it is, if you then want to talk about how hard it is, well, shut up.” But he is aware of how little time some young writers now have for older ones. “They’ve no use for us, and we weren’t that way when we were coming up. This kind of mendacious feeling of superiority… I never had contempt for John Updike. He got nothing but gratitude and high regard from me.”
We talk about Martin Amis, whom Ford regarded as a close friend. He was struck by the way people waited until Amis was gone to praise him. “He was a very decent and wise man, acerbic but generous. [The criticism] wasn’t really so much about his books. It was about his putative life, and that got bushed in with the thinking about his books.” It was unfair, but a man’s contentment, he thinks, probably shouldn’t be too dependent on his writing life. “I’m happy to be a schlepper,” he insists. He’s still close to some of his high school friends, and this gives him an abiding sense of identity and, perhaps, a little extra armour: “I keep up a relationship with the person I used to be.”
In Be Mine, Bascombe reveals a continuing desire for life, even in the face of his terrible loss: “It’s not cold-hearted or mechanical, but yes, his impulse, after his son dies, is to go on living, and it would probably be mine, too, after a while. Human beings are amazing, as amazing as the imagination will let them be. There’s no one way to cope with the death of a son and there’s no one way to live.”
For his part, Ford intends to go on writing, but he’s also at peace with the possibility that whatever is in the tank, words-wise, may not “be anything”. How will he celebrate his big birthday next year? He smiles. “I am a man who generally asks my friends to just shut up and let me spend my birthday quietly. I don’t want people insincerely revving up the engines of their delight. But Kristina has asked me about it, so…” A party? Surely he should have a party. For a moment, he looks at me in a way that makes me feel very young. “Sweetheart, the best word I can think of to describe how I feel about my life is: surprised… Whatever we do, it won’t be jubilant.”
• Be Mine is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
