Richard Ford is not Hemingway, nor is he Clint Eastwood, Raymond Carver or Bruce Springsteen. Standing on the dock by his New England home, he reels off the list of frequent comparisons. He is fiddling with a fishing rod, cursing loudly as the line whips back and tangles - the fish are long gone. It is a most successful impression of not being Hemingway, yet Ford has undeniably carved himself out as a man's man, and an all-hunting, all-fishing, Harley-riding sort of a writer. His is the male American voice of motels and freeways and love derailed. It is 27 years since he published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, in 1976. Since then, he has written five novels and three collections of short stories, edited both the Granta Book of the American Short Story and the Granta Book of the American Long Story and racked up numerous prizes. In 1995, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award for his novel Independence Day.
The taut, moody character who stares out from the dust-jackets of his books is less doleful in person, his gaze less urgent. He lives in Maine, a region he describes in his book, A Multitude of Sins, as "small in scale, profusely scenic, annoyingly remote, exclusive and crowded". Yet he seems happy enough in his broad, timbered house overlooking the bay. Vitamin pills clutter the dressing table, while in the kitchen sits the latest edition of the New York Times and a copy of a Martin Amis novel, somewhat soggy round the edges where the dog has chewed it.
Ford's story begins in the south. Edna and Parker Carroll Ford were born in Arkansas, shortly before the depression. "My mother was from really poor circumstances," says Ford. "I don't mean eating dirt, but she was born on a dirt floor." At the age of 18, she met Parker. "My father was from an Irish background," Ford says. "He was a big, handsome, sweet man. Together they - and I always say it about my wife Kristina and me - they made one whole person." Like one of the characters in A Piece of My Heart , Ford's father was a travelling salesman, and Edna realised she was pregnant when they were on the road, selling starch. They settled in Jackson, Mississippi, where their only child was born on February 16 1944. While Parker maintained his itinerant lifestyle until his death, Edna invested her efforts in raising their son. "Her ambition, was to be first in love with my father," Ford says simply, "and second to be a full-time mother."
His was a contented upbringing. "My parents loved me," he says. "They were nice to me. They did not foster in me any bad attitudes. Any bad attitudes I have, I have fostered on my own." Yet he describes himself as an essentially dull child. "I was a product of my environment," he says. "Not very ambitious. Not very curious about very much. But my father died at a crucial time and I was kind of left to my own devices. If he hadn't died then we would've stayed quite an insular, nuclear little family." Ford still regards Mississippi as his home, though he describes it as "a churchy, conservative, mostly agricultural, bigoted place". Even today, his speech is sprinkled with the sugar-dipped mannerisms of a gent from the deep south - "sweetheart", "honey".
Ford grew up in the same neighbourhood as fellow Pulitzer winner Eudora Welty. He attended the same high school 30-odd years after her. In August 2001, Ford was a pallbearer at Welty's funeral and he remains her literary executor. Welty and William Faulkner are two of the literary figures whom Ford feels have exempted him from writing about his birthplace. "Fortunately," he says, they have "written about it so well, that I don't ever have to worry about it. Mississippi is already well on the literary map." A Piece of My Heart was set in Arkansas and Mississippi, telling the story of drifter Robert Hewes who leaves his wife to pursue a married cousin. Though it was well-received and nominated for the Ernest Hemingway best first novel award, Ford was irked by the critics' readiness to file him neatly under southern writer.
As if to throw them off the scent, Ford set his next novel, The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) in Oaxaca, Mexico. Later, and most successfully, he would turn his attentions to New Jersey. "I didn't see anything about New Jersey that would obligate me. I wanted to set stories there, to purloin the place, put it down there on the page and say 'that's Haddam, New Jersey'. But I didn't feel any obligation to be faithful to the place." Since then, Ford has encountered numerous New Jersey writers who might have exerted some kind of "obligation" over him. "But," he says, "it wasn't in the way that Faulkner did. If you're in Mississippi and you want to be a writer, you have an inescapable obligation to Faulkner."
He claims only to get to know a place to a certain degree. "What a writer does is not report on the world," he argues. "I never meet anybody that I think I want to put into a book. Sometimes I'll meet somebody and they'll say something, and I'll want to put it in my notebook and bring it back in another incarnation. But do I - when I go here, or to New Jersey - go hungrily into the place? No. When I leave here I don't feel as much a part of it as the lobsterman. But this is how my life has been conducted." He says where he actually lives is inside his head. "I don't mean to make that sound romantic, or even interesting. But I do that rather than go plundering around trying to find nice little ancient graveyards, or going down to the historical society. I do the normal routine things - go to the hardware store to buy hornet spray, get my tyres rotated, go have lunch. Whatever is around in the ambience here I'll find it, without having to go at it."
Fred Hobson, Lineberger Professor of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says, "He doesn't wish to be considered a southern writer, and I think he is astoundingly insightful in capturing contemporary America, both north and south. He writes within the earlier high tradition of, for example, Faulkner, but tends to parody that. For example, in The Sportswriter, the idea of lofty ancestors is a very conscious playing on tradition seen in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom Absalom." Hobson draws further parallels - both The Sportswriter and The Sound and the Fury take place over an Easter weekend, and, in Faulkner's novel, Mrs Compson's middle name is Bascomb - later echoed in Ford's most famous character, The Sportswriter's Frank Bascombe.
Ford's father died of a heart attack when Ford was 16, and he was sent to Arkansas to live with his grandmother and her second husband, a former boxer, who were running a hotel. It proved educational, allowing the sort of glimpses into other people's lives which have since become Ford's stock in trade. "I did everything in the hotel," he says. "I worked in it and I played in it. A lot of things go on in great big hotels, behind closed doors, and I saw behind those doors. Recklessness and mistakes, y'know?"
His grandmother's husband sought to harness the boy's enthusiasm for the hotel business, researching colleges where he might study hotel administration. By his own admission, he was not an outstanding student. He was a slow reader, hindered by dyslexia, and had no aptitude for maths. His grades placed him in the middle of his class. "But after my father died," he remembers, "I started taking life a lot more seriously."
He applied to Cornell, without really knowing what or where Cornell was, and to Michigan State University. "I knew where Michigan was, 'cause Michigan had football, and it didn't have racial problems the way Mississippi did." At Michigan, he completed just one term of hotel administration before moving to literature. "I said 'I don't want to go back home, what can I study?' They said 'What are your aptitudes, what do you like?' And I liked words, I liked literature."
He excelled at Michigan, spurred on by the apathy of his peers and by a girlfriend he was "wildly in love with". "For me to do well at anything," he explains, "I have to work harder than other people. I can't do a lot of other things at the same time. I have concentration for one thing at a time. It's not such a bad way to be, and it's not such a bad thing to learn."
Graduating in 1966, Ford hovered over various professions - the police, teaching, working for American Druggist magazine, applying to the CIA. For a while, he settled on law, heading off to Washington University in St Louis for a term before returning, disillusioned, to Arkansas to teach. "I didn't have that sense of getting out of university and feeling that opportunities were sitting in front of me," he says. "It was more like looking at a wall which was mostly turning dark. And a little window, which was writing stories, opened up and I just went through it."
Ford enrolled in a graduate writing course at the University of California in Irvine, where he was taught by Oakley Hall and EL Doctorow. He was not, he claims, the finest writer in his class, though he is now its most successful graduate. Although his early novels were greeted warmly, writing brought little financial reward or personal satisfaction, and in 1981 he decided to abandon novel writing. For a few years he had been sporadically teaching creative writing at the University of Michigan, Williams College and Princeton, though he was unwilling to consider academia as a permanent career.
"To me it's kind of like a non-contact sport," he explains. "It's showing off, being the smartest one on the block. I've got a pretty good memory, and I read literature as food. I remember lines, specific poems. But I could never hope to have this Christopher Hitchens-like command, [people] who know everything, but fundamentally don't know jack shit - who have a heart basically made of coal. Literature hit me amidships. When I read Absalom Absalom - the first novel I ever read - it just took me over. In a way it left me with a reverence for literature which does not require an encyclopaedic knowledge. I read what I read really closely. People always know more than I do, but what I know I know."
He sought work as a sportswriter with a New York publication named Inside Sports. "I tumbled, face-forward into sportswriting," he recalls. "I felt I'd had my shot at being a novelist. But all I was qualified to do, all I was trained for, was being a writer. And I knew a lot about sports - I'd been a boxer, a would-be athlete." Sportswriting, he explains, has a different heritage in America. "There's a certain literary side to it." He was employed to cover football and baseball between 1980-83. A year later, the magazine folded, and he once again found himself unemployed.
Here the line blurs between Ford and his most famous protagonist, Frank Bascombe. First introduced to us in The Sportswriter, Bascombe is a 38-year-old who abandoned a promising writing career to report on sports for a glossy magazine. Set in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey, the story takes place over Easter weekend 1983. Four years earlier, his eldest son had died, and like some latter-day Rip Van Winkle, Bascombe fell into a spell of "dreaminess" only to emerge to a changed world, in which he is divorced, albeit amicably, from his wife, known throughout as X.
Aged 23, Ford married his college sweetheart, Kristina, and they moved into a one-bedroom apartment in New York. "It seemed," he says, "like the right time. I always thought that, given my Irish background, I wouldn't get married till I was about 35, that someone would drag me kicking and screaming to it. But when you meet someone like Kristina, who's a once- in-a-lifetime person, you don't pass that up." He recalls, early on in their marriage, despatching her dejected suitors. "I called them up on the phone, I said I didn't want to see their sorry asses anymore. She was quite taken by it."
Kristina studied for a PhD in city planning, teaching at New York University and acquiring increasingly prestigious positions in her field. In 1989 they moved to New Orleans where she found a job in the city planning commission, eventually becoming executive director. She now runs a public benefit foundation. They have no children, having decided not to early on in their relationship. It is a subject at which he visibly bristles.
"I hate children," he declares. Seemingly, they did not fit with either their career plans or their itinerant lifestyle. In Ford's fledgling-writer days, as money trickled in, Kristina was the main source of income. In his introduction to a 1996 edition of Ploughshares, the literary magazine of Emerson College, Boston, he recalls his "meatless days in Chicago (while my wife was, of course, pulling down a handsome living for us), of dashes to the mailbox, of envelopes ripped open, form rejections hungrily scoured for encouraging nuances in phrasing, or the slapdash 'Pls try us again'..."
Until 1995, the couple lived together in the French quarter of New Orleans. But Ford had found the process of writing Independence Day , begun in 1991 and published in 1995, exacting. New Orleans, he says is "noisy and crowded and not a good place to be a novelist". So he moved to Maine. "I said to Kristina, 'Look, I love you and I want to be your husband forever, but I don't want to live here anymore'."
Kristina, committed to her own job, stayed in New Orleans. "I would be in love with Kristina no matter what," he says. "And I'd like to live in the same place in the future. But you really only get to live once, and there's a sense of not wanting to waste life by enduring situations that you don't like." A lot of people, he claims, say that having one's wife 2,000 miles away is no way to live a life. "But there's no one way to conduct a marriage," he says. "There's just a lot of bad ways."
Despite Ford's devotion to his wife, infidelity and all the "bad ways" to run a marriage remain dominant themes in his work. In A Multitude of Sins , his most recent story collection, published in the UK last year, "Quality Time" is concerned with Wales and Jenna, who is married, as they collide in a Chicago hotel room, while "Dominion" introduces Henry and Madeleine, stationed in some other Chicago hotel room, at the end of their affair. "You're gonna get restless," says Ford, "if you put the stamp of permanence on your life in some way - institutionalising matrimony or children, a house or a job." Notably, Jenna's husband, a real estate whiz, mourns the lack of "a sense of locatedness" in their life, and this introduces another of Ford's themes - the static versus the transient, real estate versus the open road. A Multitude of Sins shows us snapshots of hotel rooms, freeways, car journeys: the places in between.
Ford wrote about the attraction of transcience in a 1992 article: "Longing's at the heart of it, I guess. Longing that overtakes me like a fast car on the freeway and makes me willing to withstand a feeling of personal temporariness, the darker side of which is a malfeasant sensation that I'm here again with the wrong papers, or I'm lying about something, or that no one in the neighbourhood can vouch for me - the emigrant experience at home."
One of Ford's female characters supposes that after marriage life "would cease to be an open, flat plain upon which you walked with a chosen other, and became instead cluttered, impassable". Even Bascombe's quintessential American-ness is enhanced by the fact that, like a Thoreau, an Emerson or a Kerouac, he is happiest when on the move, liking the travel necessitated by sportswriting, recalling routes and freeways with tenderness. By Independence Day he has settled himself in a job in real estate, but has a little sideline in a roadside root beer stall - keeping, perhaps, a weather eye on the road out. Yet Independence Day is soaked in a love of place, of Haddam, New Jersey, of America itself.
Ford has spoken of his admiration for writers such as Ford Madox Ford, because he "tends towards lushness and wider use of the language. I like books that are generous and at risk of being baggy," he says. What he gives us in the opening paragraph of Independence Day is an unri valled generosity and lushness, slow and wafting: "In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems. Shaded lawns lie still and damp in the early a.m. Outside, on peaceful-morning Cleveland Street, I hear the footfalls of a lone jogger, tramping past and down the hill toward Taft lane and across to Choir College, there to run in the damp grass..."
Christopher MacLehose, Ford's British publisher, first encountered him in 1985, when Ford joined an American writers' tour in the UK, alongside Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent and Ford's best friend Raymond Carver, the four being labelled "new minimalists". To a packed reading in London, Ford read a story called "Communists". MacLehose was dazzled, and immediately offered to publish anything Ford chose to write. "He's the best reader of his own work in English that I've ever heard," says MacLehose, who was Carver's editor at the Harvill Press. "There was a certainty that isn't always generated by readings." He is similarly impressed by Ford's work on the page. "It is intensely serious. You don't have any sense that it has been worked. It is so fluent. It is a pleasure to read his sentences."
MacLehose believes the Pulitzer prize was awarded because Independence Day "seems to be a really major American fiction; Ford is among the absolute outstanding writers of his generation". Ford himself says he won only because Philip Roth didn't write a better book. "People had written me off. When the book came out it just took a while to make its way. It didn't happen overnight. It got bad reviews - that's the book that Alice Hoffman wrote nasty things about in the New York Times."
Ford's run-in with Hoffman, with whom he shared a publisher, has become legendary. In retaliation for her criticism, Ford shot a hole through her latest book and posted it to her. "Well my wife shot it first," says Ford, rather proudly. "She took the book out into the back yard, and shot it. But people make such a big deal out of it - shooting a book - it's not like I shot her."
Ford had met Raymond Carver in 1977, at a literary festival in Dallas. "He never made me feel I was in the shadow," Ford wrote in "Good Raymond", in 1998, 10 years after Carver's death,"[he] never scolded me when I inadvertently cadged a character's name, adopted as my own the direct style of his short-story openings, which he, of course, had adopted from Chekhov. To do any of that, to hold myself against me, was not his nature. We were friends."
Ford is now at work on the third Frank Bascombe novel. It is a complex process. He hauls out a large cardboard box from a cupboard in his study. It is filled with tiny scraps of paper - backs of envelopes, corners of notepaper from the University Club and the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, scrawled with his tight, knotty handwriting. He pulls out a few at random. "I used to wear an appliance, but I lost it..." "Weather is all we really have of real experience in the suburbs... standing out in rain..." "Going to the male clinic... having seen blood on the sheets..."
"And then I just pick at them," he says, "very patiently, and I mean it takes months, and I know what I'm writing, because part of the collation of these notes indicates that I think I'm writing something. And then I start making files." He has a file for Frank and a file each for Paul and Clarissa, Frank's children, and a file for Thanksgiving, when he plans to set the novel. He has a file for real estate and one for carryovers - the things from the other books which may re-emerge in this one, and he has a file for what he calls the permanent period, which is how Frank will define this period of his life, following on from the existence period of Independence Day .
A lot of the files have duplicate entries, phrases he doesn't know whether to attribute to one character or another. He prints up all the notes and puts them into ring-bound notebooks. And then, he says, "I like to put them in the freezer, so if the house burns down, the freezer won't. I probably have more things I want to write about in this book than I had in the other two," he says. "But I hope this book is going to be shorter than Independence Day ."
At the end of Independence Day he thought he had created a natural successor to The Sportswriter. But when he read them both again recently, he decided they aren't alike at all. "I was shocked to see how long the sentences in Independence Day were," he says. "And I didn't like it very much." Right now he is enjoying "lolling about in all the big ol' messy stuff", the mucky business of trawling through notes, distributing quotes to his characters, deciding that Frank's root beer stall will be sold to a gay sandwich shop chain called Twin Buns. "I'm enough of a Presbyterian to know that it ain't the destination - it's all in the trip there. I like the part of being a writer in which you don't feel the sides of anything. You don't see the beginning, and you don't see the end, you're just in it."
Richard Ford
Born: February 16, 1944, Jackson, Mississippi.
Education: Davis Elementary School, Jackson; Michigan State University; University of California, Irvine.
Married: 1968, Kristina Hensley.
Career: 1980-3 Sportswriter, Inside Sports.
Novels: 1976 A Piece of my Heart; 81 The Ultimate Good Luck; 86 The Sportswriter; 90 Wildlife; 95 Independence Day.
Short story collections: 1987 Rock Springs; 97 Women With Men: Three Stories; 2002 A Multitude of Sins: Stories.
Dramatic writing: 1983 American Tropical; 91 Bright Angel.
Non-fiction: 1988 My Mother in Memory; 92 Editor, The Granta Book of the American Short Story;99 Editor, The Granta Book of the American Long Story.
· The Sportswriter, Wildlife and Independence Day are reissued this month by Vintage.
· A Multitude of Sins was published last year.