The dyslexic writer

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Richard Ford Photo: Sondeep Shankar

A voice, felicitous and mellifluous, floats from across the oceans and continents, carrying with it the unfamiliar sounds and descriptions of American life. The gong of bell towers, the boom of a local band, snatches of conversation and the buzz of people in motion. American lives captured along with their settings and mentalities. Individual destinies and situations crafted with carefully chosen words and meticulously sounded resonances is what the work of award-winning novelist Richard Ford is all about.
A number of literary minded Indians were treated to a slice of all that when the novelist came visiting in January this year. Hitting on 67 but physically fit, the tall Richard Ford sat surprisingly easy with his Indian audience. He did not talk down, dismiss or lecture. He spoke clearly, even quietly, about his work, life and what he experienced in India. After participating in the Jaipur Literary Festival, he went across to Kolkata to inaugurate the book fair and then returned to New Delhi for a well-attended talk.
One quality that immediately endeared Ford to me was his unaffected responses. “Novelists are not famous in the United States”, he explained in an answer to a question on how he handled the transition to fame. “They are not famous in the way movie stars are.” Yet, Ford is not an obscure novelist pulled from some corner of rural America.
He is very much a mainstream American writer, whose works have at times been compared to those of other great American novelists such as John Updike, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. He hit the headlines in 1995 when his novel The Independence Day (nothing to do with the movie about alien invasion) won both the PEN/Faulkner Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
That achievement crowned a literary career that had begun in earnest in 1982 when the sports magazine he was working for went bust, leaving Ford wondering what to do with his life. He knew, as he now acknowledges, that he was “blessed with language” and therefore the most natural thing to do was write. He had written two books before — A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) — but neither had received any critical acclaim and Ford had moved over to a career as a sportswriter.
Returning to New Jersey, Ford began working on a novel about a sportswriter, inventing in the process his central character, Frank Bascombe, who would remain with him over three books and eventually lead him to literary acclaim, if not fame. Ford’s The Sportswriter appeared in 1986 and immediately earned recognition. It was chosen by Time magazine as one of the five best books of the year and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
In all Ford has written six novels, four short story collections, one screenplay and has edited a number of short story collections. Ford has managed to live life his own way. Eleven years ago, he decided to move from New Orleans where his wife is a very prominent public official, to Maine where he built a house on the seashore. Ford stays busy reading, playing squash whenever he has the time, which he says makes being a writer more tolerable, and taking long rides on his Harley-Davidson. Sometimes when his wife is over, they go pheasant hunting.
While Ford is not pursuing fame, he is definitely pursuing a readership. He recalled that Jean Paul Sartre once said that imaginative literature was “gratuit”, which in French means free, in the sense of not having any intrinsic worth, unless the writer somehow managed to make it essential. Perhaps that is why Ford, during the course of his talk, mentioned that he does not always want to write any book but a great book.
As a writer, Ford aspires to write a book that changes the world. This is why, he admitted, “I exhaust myself with every book. I set myself the highest goals and I live with that consequences of that”. But he does not overly worry if his book is not the kind of success every writer would want it to be. “What happens to the book once it is out there in the world is another matter, I do not pain over it”, he added.
Talking to Ford, the literary craftsman, is a delight because he does not wrap his art in nebulous terms. Writing, like many other activities, is a craft. And Ford has developed methods of work in his own fascinating way for several reasons, one being his dyslexia. After writing out something, the novelist reads it out aloud to make sense of nuances and the felicity of the sentences. While this process helps him to evaluate what he has written, it also has the consequence of producing beautiful prose.
Like many writers, Ford too is a note taker. He always carries a slim pocket notebook in which he jots down impressions, ideas and experiences as they come to him. He takes time to transcribe and organise his notes, thoughts, character sketches and scribbles into one big spiral binder. The binder expands and contracts, growing in detail and clarity as he adds coloured tabs, pages and rearranges them. “The notes help me to immerse myself in the material”, he explains. “It works for me but it is a clerical nightmare!”
There is clearly a lot to be learnt from Richard Ford, and perhaps most of it from his writings. Whatever else his India visit might have served, it also provided the Indian reading public an introduction to a literary master craftsman. To encounter Ford is to be reintroduced to the literature of wonderful prose that exults in the recreation of life itself.

Indranil Banerjie is a fellow at Vivekananda International Foundation