Parental leave
‘Even an old man like me can miss his parents,’ Richard Ford says in a poignant memoir of loss
Richard Ford HarperCollins It’s quite simple, really — the reason for this new book from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford. He misses his parents. “I wanted to make it clear to readers that even an old man like me can miss his parents,” Ford says. “Even all these years beyond their lives, I miss them.”
The revered
and is on the phone from his home in Maine.
He’s now 74 and pondering the genesis of his heartfelt new memoir,
“I don’t think I’ve ever written a book that I thought was necessary,” he says. “I’ve always been kind of averse to identifying forces over which I have no power.”
Yet somehow, did happen. It’s both a meditation on parents and the often elusive nature of love, as well as a glowing celebration of ordinary lives.
“One thing that I hope the reader will understand is that it’s possible to love your parents without reservation,” Ford says quietly.
Plenty of major authors have written about their parents and it’s the less flattering remembrances — from the likes of Samuel Butler, Osbert Sitwell, even Dickens in turning his own father into the feckless Mr. Micawber — that usually have the biggest impact. But Richard Ford has gentler motivations.
“As a writer, I think that if you ever have a chance to say in print that you love your parents, then you should relish that opportunity,” he says. The book has two sections —
and The second was written shortly after his mother’s death in 1981. The first section was written recently, 55 years after Parker Ford died in his teenage son’s arms.
Ford’smother,Edna,whomourned the loss of her husband for the rest of her life, remains a more immediate presence.
“My father was her everything, but I was her pal — maybe even more than I was her son.”
Parker Ford, frequently on the road as a travelling salesman during Richard’s childhood, is more elusive — which perhaps explains his son’s delay in writing about him.
“I think during that long period preceding the writing of my father’s memoir, I felt a growing sense of maturity accumulating. I sensed a wish that I didn’t feel had been fulfilled, a task of mine that I didn’t feel I’d be up to, so that when I finally found a way, I felt a rather considerable satisfaction.”
But the book is also tinged with a quiet melancholy because of Ford’s failure to remember details of treasured shared experiences with his father.
“I have a pretty good memory, and I gleaned from my past everything I could winkle out. I’m also a little bit rueful in the sense that — for example — I can’t remember the sound of his voice.”
Ford’snovelsexcelinbringingpresence and texture to what an outsider might consider to be an ordinary life. Frank Bascombe, the Everyman hero of and the award-winning Independence Day, captivated readers to a degree than continues to surprise Ford.
“I always think that if you met Frank walking down the street, you wouldn’tpaymuchattentiontohim,” he laughs. “And if you met me walking down the street you wouldn’t pay much attention to me!”
And what of his own parents? Ordinary lives again? Not when it came to a love for each other that was consuming.
For 16 years after their marriage in 1928, she was the sweet-natured Parker’s constant travelling companion as he drove the highways and byways of the U.S. South on behalf of The Faultless Starch Company.
They “lived alone together” on the road until their only child, Richard, arrived in 1944, thereby necessitating a more permanent home base.
When Ford considers his mother, he sees a life not fully lived.
“I really wanted her to marry again because she was young and pretty and a lot of fun. But she didn’t have it in her.”
In the eyes of his parents, their marriage was extraordinary.
“He was her protector, and she was his.”
And what was so special about the father whose loss he still mourns? Well, he was a man who liked to be happy and possessed the “art” of being loved.
“He didn’t have any particular skills,” Ford says now. “He had no real attainment in life. I would say his greatest accomplishment was that he was very good at being loved. He rewarded love, he liked it, it made him happy. He came from an Irish Protestant background that was pretty stern … but he was so happy because he had married my mother.”
Ford’s father was buried in Arkansas, whisked back there by possessive relatives who placed the body in a family plot too small for his mother to share.
“My mother … heard about this only in the hours after the train had departed,” Ford writes. “I was too young to be of use. Grievous wrong lives on in this act. And nothing’s to be done .… In her way of thinking, eternity would not be theirs together. It’s not the saddest thing I know. But it is one of them.”
He still thinks of his parents every day. So one consequence of this book is that he realizes even more how much he misses them. But with that comes acceptance that life does go on — not unexpected for an author so conscious of his own resilience.
“I’m pretty good at carrying on,” he says. “That’s one of my few strengths. I’m kind of a long-distance runner at everything. I’ve been married 49 years, have never started a book I haven’t finished, I’ve been doing this one job since 1968. This is my nature. I simply carry on.”