A writer’s roots
Cracking open Richard Ford’s remembrance of his parents, the immediate temptation is to forage for the seeds of a literary career. And yes, you can root them out: The solitary childhood; the early death of the traveling salesman father. Ford says it point-blank: “had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become.” A son’s grief may be mirrored in Frank Bascomb, the protagonist of four of Ford’s finest works, beginning with “The Sportswriter,” in which Bascomb has lost a son. Yet the book’s profound, enduring pleasures transcend the hunt for literary clues.
Ford’s stated intention is to illuminate two seemingly unexceptional lives, “to try to credit what might otherwise go unremarked.” Real lives — lived quietly, in obscurity — but filled with desire, and hope, and fear, and love, and everything else that makes us singularly human.
After the publication of his most recent Bascomb book, “Let Me Be Frank With You,” Ford was asked in a New Yorker interview about Frank’s emotional growth. He found the question tricky, he said, because Frank is not a person: “He’s an instrument and a vessel, made of language, which I fill up with all sorts of things that are running through my mind.” There in a nutshell is the memoirist’s and the biographer’s dilemma: how to capture and vivify a person on the page, rather than create one.
The answer, in the case of Ford, is still and always language. Precision. Cadence. Sentences that verge, unsentimentally, on poetry. He begins: “Somewhere deep in my childhood, my father is coming home off the road on a Friday night . ... He’s carrying with him lumpy, white butcherpaper packages full of boiled shrimp or tamales or oystersby-the-pint he’s brought up from Louisiana. The shrimp and tamales steam up hot and damp off the slick papers when he opens them out.” And there it is: A conjuring. A man, a place, a world. An infinity of feeling.
The first half of the book is focused on his father, Parker Ford, from what can be known of his childhood in tiny Atkins, Ark., to his second, fatal heart attack in their new suburban home. Even in life, he served as both a presence and an absence, off selling Faultless Starch through seven Southern states. Piggly Wigglys. Two-bit shops. “Most always, he was not there — my father.
Though I remember his Ford sitting on the curb on weekends, remember the sound of him in the house, in the bathroom, snoring in his bed. I remember the size of him. His leather suitcase was never unpacked.” Parker Ford was a likable, self-effacing company man who married the love of his life and who, if felled too soon by his heart, had achieved his goal of owning a home. His death, when Richard was 16, was an echoing canyon of loss.
The book’s second half — written 30 years earlier — tells the story of his mother, Edna Akin. The his-and-hers structure might be a slight nod to Evan S. Connell’s twin novels “Mr. Bridge” and “Mrs. Bridge,” but it seems more an issue of necessity, a way to evoke two overlapping but distinct lives. Occasional repetitions and discrepancies are left unreconciled. Neither version is untrue. “Remembered time can shift and wander,” Ford writes, almost understating the case.
Edna was born in backwoods Arkansas, to a 14-yearold mother who didn’t want her around. When her mother remarried, Edna was sent to convent school, then abruptly retrieved and put to work; her mother insisted on telling people they were sisters.
Upon marrying Parker at 18 or so, Edna spent happy years on the road with him, waiting in the company car while he met with small-town buyers, sleeping in hotels, eating in supper clubs and bars and roadside joints. The birth of their only child, 15 years into their marriage, upended the arrangement. Settling into Jackson, Miss., his mother mostly stayed home. Richard was wanted and loved, yes, but he also came literally between them — the issue of their union, the reason they spent their days apart. Sometimes, they all three traveled together; other times, when Edna had to help with the driving after Parker’s first heart attack, Richard lived in the hotel his maternal grandparents now ran. But in the main, the family was a triangle, with the shortest distance between him and his mother.
In one of the most moving passages, she boards a train after taking him to college in Michigan. “I saw her, her white face behind the tinted window, her palm flat to the glass for me to see. And she was crying. Good-bye, she was saying. I waved my hand, a wide wave, and mouthed,
Good-bye. I love you, and watched her train go out of sight through the warp of that bricky old factory town.” They were never to live nearby again. To Ford’s eternal regret, he hesitated ever so slightly in inviting her to stay with him at the end of her life, and the moment passed. She died in 1981.
“Between Them” is a powerful reckoning with the inbetween: the chemistry between two people — man and woman, parent and child — the gap between what we wish we’d done and what we did, and the inexpressible feelings that reside in the space between words.
Dawn Raffel’s most recent book is “The Secret Life of Objects.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com