Frank gets lucky
Richard Ford’s readers want their ‘Virgil voice’ to stay — and Bascombe obliges, writes Bron Sibree
Let Me Be Frank With You Richard Ford (Bloomsbury, R280)
IT’S difficult to say who is more feted in American letters, Richard Ford or his famous fictional creation, Frank Bascombe. Mississippi-born Ford is revered for his immaculate sentences and has been likened to everyone from Hemingway to Twain. His fictional everyman, Bascombe — the protagonist of a celebrated trilogy of novels, beginning with The Sportswriter and including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day — has, meanwhile, been dubbed the US’s unlikely Virgil, the voice who is there to guide Americans through their “leafy, secret-harbouring suburbs”, as the Washington Post once declared, and remind them “that glimmering meaning is hiding everywhere, even in the ugliest or most banal of places”.
It’s also a voice that readers can’t get enough of, as Ford himself discovered while on tour with his novel Canada , not long after announcing he was done with Frank Bascombe for good. “Readers kept coming up to me and saying, ‘are you really not going to do this again?’ ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘We really want you to do this,’ and that had never happened to me before,” recalls Ford. “It made me realise there was a readership and that means a lot to me.”
But what ultimately prompted the return of Bascombe in Ford’s 12th book to date, Let Me Be Frank With You, and fed into what Ford calls his “sense of mission”, was the arrival of Hurricane Sandy on the US east coast in 2012. Or more significantly, its aftermath. “I looked at the residue of that hurricane and the disaster it had caused, and I had all these lines being generated in my head that were in Frank Bascombe’s voice and that told me, ‘well, you have to write something’. It seemed to me to be one of those kind of writerly incidents in which you have a commotion visited on you, and those come along rarely enough that I had to respond in some way.”
Let Me Be Frank With You — four interlinked stories in Bascombe’s voice — serves as an eloquent, wise, penetratingly insightful, funny yet deeply moving coda to Ford’s famous trilogy. The book is a grace note of sorts.
Ford sketches the background of the first story in the quartet: he remembered something he had written in his notebook about the long-ago hangings of a group of Sioux Indians. “They were all being hanged at the same time, and they all cried out in their own language, Lakota, ‘I’m here, I’m here’.” He parlayed this into a conversa- tion between Frank and his wife, Sally, and the story takes its title and its beautiful, sad double meaning from the last words of the doomed Sioux.
“Like many great things that come into your stories,” says Ford, “it was just luck that I knew this and luck that I had written it in my notebook. Once that took place, I understood Frank’s mission in all of these stories. His mission was to bear witness, which is both biblical in nature, and humane. It’s hopeful.”
Indeed, there is a sense of hope — coupled with a keen sense of tempered expectations — throughout the book, which doubles as a superbly nuanced and refreshingly candid meditation on ageing and acceptance. “While Frank thinks and says things I wouldn’t necessarily think or say, we share a kind of active engagement with that fact of our lives,” says Ford, laughing. He is now 70 years old, and admits that he found himself in the grip of something so powerful when he came to writing the finale to his wickedly funny and unexpectedly uplifting final story that he wept. “Sometimes as a novelist, or as a writer of any kind, you can get in the grip of something larger than you are, and that’s the place you want to be.”
Despite his larger-than-life literary career, Ford insists he has never been “under the thumb of some terrible force as a writer”. At the core of his writing is a profound optimism. “It’s an optimism that the book will find a use out in the world,” he says.
“Books work on us. They are not passive. We have a conversation or relationship with books, and you write books because you think there will be a future in which they can be helpful. You write them because they have something to do with the persistence of the human spirit. Like Yeats once said, ‘The arts lie dreaming of what is to come.’ And that’s what I think novels are about. They’re dreams of what is to come.”
‘As a writer, you can get in the grip of something larger than you are’