Richard Ford & Colm Tóibín Conversation: Narrators Are Unreliable

oh my god this is the last thing that is going to happen at the Louisiana literary festival this year and what a thrill actually we could already leave because it's too good to be true Richard Ford come to be in the same room oh hello hello how are you in the same room I know and I only have one question you have been talking to each other constantly during four days what have you actually been talking about real estate that's a literary answer that doesn't happen I mean I think that writers have a duty to be silly when they're not writing and when they are writing never duty not to be silly and it's nothing quite difficult than to explain to people look I'm just being silly because all day I was not being silly does it mean yes absolutely although occasionally you know we will a book will come up but what we probably don't do is this is what people think we do do which is to say you know I've got this problem with this this issue in my book would you would you have five minutes to look at this we don't do that you know maybe lawyers do that real estate people real estate people maybe they don't know we've known each other a long time and we actually end up seeing each other mostly off off off the lot because we teach it both of us teach at Columbia in New York City and once in a while I'll see you would wave yeah what does that mean hi hi means I'm okay are you okay I'm awesome we had this this can seem a bit too familiar but we have I mean Richard Ford has idiosyncrasies with certain words and one of them is awesome so I was going to say I'm can I say I am in all at having you two here would that be okay when I would be alright but then if I didn't think it's it it's so awesome you just get a happy well we are here to celebrate anyway literature and your two recent books and all your books and all the amazing amount of literary awards that I'm not going to mention because I would be embarrassed on your behalf because you have so many we would just be darkly pissed because we're thinking that all the ones we didn't win yeah the one girl yeah the ones you were shortlisted for somebody else won that year wrongly quite yeah nobody talks about that book anymore all over for that person is it worth being shortlisted than not being shortlisted the art of losing isn't hard to master this is only one thing worth it twinning actually Richard Ford when he's not been talking about not talking about literature backstage has been writing thank you for the literary and scott Fitzgerald award that you haven't received yet but which is coming up yeah I think it doesn't matter I mean I mean you've got an award named after a sort of overpraised guy who wrote a couple good books and who was a drunk all of his life what's the matter with let's not get more in this thing no oh it's let's get to the let's get straight to literature because for those few of you haven't read the two recent books of these gentlemen we have asked them to read a small part each and then we will jump straight into everything else okay will you start sure yeah yeah and Nora Webster is a widow and she hasn't really gone out since her husband died and people want her to go out I think she should go out the problem is the first time she goes out with her friend Phyllis and Phyllis is very ground she's from Dublin and Nora Webster is not from Dublin and there's a big distinction and Phyllis is a very grand voice and she's very imperious nobody doesn't really know her and because she's so used to going out with her husband she can't believe she's - Grove this woman and spend the whole evening in this situation the problem is there's a quiz that's what they're going to do Nora's going to keep the score and Phyllis is going to ask the questions second problem is that Nora knows all the people who are being asked the questions because she used to come here with her husband on their holidays Phyllis of course knows nobody and so just imagine they're all these country people in a small place and it's not even a town it's not even a village and they're being asked questions by this really grand woman from Dublin by the time the six mark questions began the Blackwater team was slightly ahead and then Phyllis demands silence for the next round which are questions about classical music how many symphonies did Brahms compose Phyllis asked Nora watched the man from Kill Mockridge she's one of the villagers he bothered his time as though he was trying to remember something he once knew when Phyllis announced that she was activating to stop what she said 25 Phyllis looked contemptuously around the hall leaving a silence Nora looked down at the score she's as everyone knows Phyllis said Brahms wrote four symphonies twenty-five indeed there was a hush at the next question how many symphonies did Schumann write it was a turn of the retired schoolteacher from Blackwater I'll guess nine he said quietly wrong said he wrote for she took them she took them then through hiding Mozart Schubert Malheur Sebelius and Bruckner - stunned silence as each name was called out and each contestant failed to guess the correct number of symphonies when she listed operas and asked him the name of the composer of both the retired teacher and the young man from the blackwater team knew the answers this put blackwater ahead by 15 points as she came to the last rounds when the contestants could consult with each other when one of them asked for a toilet break Phyllis agreed another brandy and soda could have been drinking steadily throughout and Babycham arrived on the table when Nora looked over towards the door she noticed that a few men had gathered there they were looking at herself and Phyllis with suspicion and resentment one of them a young man with sandy hair in a sunburned face glanced back at his associates when he saw that Nora was watching him as he approached her he appeared personally agreed she's a queer big grand voice that one he said nodding towards Phyllis I hope she's not thinking of driving through kill Mockridge tonight because there are a few lads are sore enough at her and the voice on her she thinks she's someone I'll say that for her Nora looked away and did not reply I'll tell you now he said to another man she'd get her a great big fright if someone stuck one of her symphonies up her hole she wouldn't be asking questions then Phyllis whispered to Nora that they should proceed with the quiz as soon as they could now everybody she shouted get ready for the last exciting round mrs. Webster will give us a score so far the man continued to hover until Phyllis turned her full attention on him I'm afraid you are in the way she said and there's no reason for you to stand so close could you go back and sit down the man hesitated and then gave her a look of pure contempt before he went back to his friends at the doorway one of the comic rich contestants had obviously prepared for this round of questions about the prime ministers and presidents of various countries he was able to give the names of the prime ministers are both Norway and Sweden it was when the team was asked the name of the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union the greet first on Brezhnev and then change to pod gorni that the problems arose which is it Phyllis asked they consulted for a while until Phyllis set the stopwatch it's part Gorney one of them said I'm afraid you are wrong with both of your answers the premier of the Soviet Union is Kosygin you asked the name of the Prime Minister one of them said and that is Kosygin you just said he is the premier and that is the same as Prime Minister and my decision is final I'm afraid you can argue all you like now next question as murmurous came from all around Phyllis raised her voice I will have no more interruptions nor a concentrated on the scoresheet he was afraid to look up by the end of the round since the Blackwater team had failed to answer some of the questions they were only three points between the teams it was clear to Nora and she presumed to many in the hall that if the Soviet Union answer had been allowed and killed Mockridge would be ahead in the last round which focused on famous battles each team managed to answer every question correctly by the time the quiz ended Nora had a score she tottered up blackwater had won by three points Phyllis got to her feet and demanded silence and read out the results in an imperious voice before she'd even time to sit down a man emerged from the crowd and moved towards her he was wearing a cap and a checked jacket where are you from he asked Philip aggressively what has it to do with you she replied you're not even from Enniscorthy said you're a blow in and you have no right to push your weight around down here maybe it's time you went home with a set at least I know where my home is yeah Rob just another man shouted that's all there is to it I think it's an absolutely amazing scene because life I gets only my hands wet every time I hear it because it's so nerve-racking it's so funny but it's so threatening at the same time because actually she is way beyond and she has no sense of what is going on it's really scary yeah I don't think it's really scary but I mean am in those towns and villages there's there's an awful hatred for Dublin people and you just saw she was from Dublin they just say and they wouldn't need to send any more meaning but I mean it's not perhaps really scary but it's scary in the sense that they have to be saved both from themselves but also from their jong-hong state because they actually start drinking too much they're not supposed to drink at all yeah and I mean it's the moment where when they go back to the pub Phyllis who's been drinking this brandy and soda without noticing gets really drunk and it's really hard to do drunkenness in a novel but the best way of doing it is pretend they're not drunk they just talk too much or don't have them swaying around and if actually drives home in a perfectly straight line more or less and of course they start singing and it's the singing then that leads to everything else in the rest of the book where she suddenly says to Nora you heard an extraordinary singing voice and noise isn't it you know she's nervous always about oh so no I don't my mother did but I don't know you do and but of course if anyone has ever tried to sing in a pub I don't know what happens here in Ireland which is really won't be very good because they try and sing Brahms Lullaby in both German and English and people think this is desperately funny and there's a crowd in the corner that just keep laughing and even when they try and sing beautifully the crowd laughs even more and then they go out of tune the crowd just thinks this is yeah and and what's mentioned here which is absolutely true is this would be talked about for years afterwards we would say those two women the two women who sang and them that would never be mentioned forever you know I think this is so characteristic of the whole book it that not much has to happen nothing scandal as it doesn't have to you know a plane doesn't have to crash next to the village or anything you just have to sing a bit drunken a bit to sort of self-consciously and then you were the ones who's saying so little things are happening that have really big consequences yeah I was interested in that idea that Nora is out and without her anchor and that up to then she would always be conscious of her husband when he wanted to go who he was talking to what was going on with him and now she realizes no anchor at all and that and that this then means that she's almost cut that Hoffer is almost missing for social occasions and him so I'm just trying to dramatize that in a way by giving her and bringing her back to the place where she thought you'd never go back to which is which is filled with those with those sort of memories yeah and and it's it's a funny part of Ireland in the sense that it's not like the rocky West of Ireland and whether perhaps there's a lot more drama going on it's the east coast of Ireland with very gentle waves like here and people don't tend to say what they are thinking about ever so just someone would be enough someone if someone looked at you to know that something had happened and there's there's a lot of coastal erosion and and I missed the fact that this house had well it really had fallen into the sea and the people had had to go and so when I arrived down the next time I knew there was news of something that happens and someone but they would never tell you straight out they just say I know that they went they went into the village meaning of course their house had gone and they no one else to go into the village but they would never tell you the whole story and just presume you'd pick up that that was a disaster had occurred well talking about disaster let me be frank with you is based on disaster it is it's it's houses not one house but many houses falling into the sea its occasioned English my writing it was occasioned by Hurricane sandy and on the East Coast to New York and going down to visit the the aftermath of the hurricane and then being moved by it in a way that I didn't really expect to be quite the way it was and you know the Katherine Anne Porter calls the the beginning of her famous story flowering Judas she calls it a commotion in the mind and it went in she rue she remembers in 1921 walking down a little Paseo in Mexico City and she happens to look in a window and sees a very fat man kneeling in front of a very beautiful woman that's all she saw and and and that she called the commotion and the mind which was the commencement of her writing that story the commotion in my mind was that was to think about the aftermath of of the hurricane and what could it be that the news wouldn't have picked up yeah would you read a bit for us to this little bit here get me specs a little bit here takes place in the state of New Jersey where actually most things in the world take place this is Frank Bascom speaking about a conversation that he has with his wife and then they are and they are living in the aftermath of this hurricane and she comes in and she says later later yesterday morning after I spoke to my friend Arnie my wife Sally came downstairs to where I was eating my all-bran and stood staring musing through the window into the backyard at the late autumn squirrel activity I was pleased to be thinking nothing worth recording not about Ani erkut my friend in trouble just breathing to the cadences of my shoes after a while I'm not speaking she sat down across from me holding a book I'd noticed her reading late into the night her light stayed on after I'd gone to sleep and was switched off then on again it's not unusual for people our age I read the shocking thing last night she held a book she'd been engrossed by crutch to her yoga shirt her eyes are intent she seemed worried I couldn't make out the book spine but understood she meant to tell me about it tell me I said well she pursed her lips back in 1862 right when the Civil War was in full swing the u.s. cavalry had time to put down an Indian revolt in Minnesota did you know that I did I said the Dakota up writing uprising it's pretty famous okay you knew about it I didn't I know some things I said and stared down at a banana slice okay but in December 1862 our government hanged 38 Sioux warriors in one big scaffold just did it all at once that's famous too I said supposedly that massacred eight hundred white people not that that's an excuse Sally took in a breath and turned her head away in a manner to indicate a tear she didn't want seen might be wobbling out of her eyes but do you know what they said these words were nearly choked with throat clogging emotion what who said I asked the Indians they all began shouting out as they were standing on the gallows sweating to drop and never speak again I didn't know but I looked up to let her understand I realized this was important to her and that the next thing she said would be important to me possibly my spoon had paused on its upward arc toward my mouth I may have shaken my head in amazement they all shouted I'm here they started calling out that in their Sioux language all around that awful contraption that was about to kill them people who heard it said it was awe-inspiring not awesome no one ever forgot it then they hang them all of them at one moment I'm here as if that made it alright for them made death tolerable and less awful he gave them strength Sally shook her head her tear of anguished for long ago 1862 did not emerge she held her book tight to her front and smiled at me mournfully across the glass top table where I've eaten possibly three thousand breakfasts I just thought you'd want to know about that I'm sorry to ruin your breakfast I'm glad to know about it sweetheart I said it didn't ruin my breakfast at all I'm here she said and seemed to embarrass herself so am i I said and with these words she got up came around the square table kissed me once on my forehead still embarrassed then went away carrying her book back to where she come from in the house I'm here is the theme in there let me be frank with you it's all novellas and and everybody is somehow bearing witness to other people's right problems yeah that isn't what I started out thinking it was about I had that little anecdote in my notebook and at a certain point I wanted to kind of slam it in there somewhere and then when I had that that line I'm here I thought well that's really about bearing witness isn't it and so that was the first book in this of these forward I wrote them in the order in which they occur and and I thought wow that's that's interesting I wonder I wonder if I can embroider and darn a bit on that notion and so the other the other three stories in the book were sort of written with that in the back of my mind as you know one of the things you said about Collins pieces is that nothing enormous needs to happen and and one of the things we do as as novelists is that we make things happen where and when it might appear to others that no one that nothing is as a way of saying pay attention pay attention to something that you might otherwise be missing and so I mean I could have written those other three stories and thought that they were about something else perhaps and made them you know forced them to be about something else but what I really noticed that what what was interesting me was bearing witness then that's how the other stories were were informed and again from on the surface of things it might seem that other things are happening or it might seem that things were not happening at all but but bearing witness is a is it both an active and a passive seeming kind of gesture could I as a reader be bearing witness to what you have written is that could that be part of the situation I wouldn't know nearly think so but I mean who's to say if you it's in a way a choice for you to make it isn't you know is column said yesterday in his conversation we right these books for readers and and and and when chakra has said well books don't get to be beautiful until they have escaped their maker and so when it escapes me its maker and gets into your brain then you do with it the best you know how there's another thing which is I wanted you to talk about the time you write in the actual time when you were writing in and the time you write about because it's not the same I mean it's it you go back in time or you are in the time and and you have in your let me be frank book a grief counselor and in your book grief is a big issue but nobody knows how to give it a name it's something has really happened from when you wrote not that you wrote it now but the time that it plays out in brief as I don't know if it happens frankly speaking I don't know that much about grief counselors it's mostly what I when I think about grief counselors I think it's kind of a joke so I don't know if I don't know if grief is any better counseled now than it was in 1968 we may have a we may have some kind of a virtual vocabulary for the counseling of grief but I don't know that it's done any differently intimately yeah I mean I think that one of the things you can do in a novel that you can't really do in film or you can't really do in drama is that you can show what the character is feeling or even thinking or even wanting to say and then you can show what the character actually says and you can show the distance between those two things and the reader can get to know all the distances the drama is in that distance so it doesn't matter as you say how small the drama is because it's somebody is feeling the opposite of what they're saying and I suppose grief is interesting in that sense because people may be feeling it in waves it may come and go it may be there all the time for a given day and yet people will try or at least some of the time not to talk about it and therefore that will become away for the reader to enter into to spirit but into three perhaps into the you know the third one being the silence the thing not said the thing that said becomes therefore the muscle there was a powerful said thing for example in what you've just read there there's almost attention within the marriage over her wanting to say something to him that morning it may be something else but you know and the reader the reader knows and the reader is watching them to see and this is at this this can be as large as the Battle of Waterloo you know in the tension that you build between what's said and not said no he's column I said in between about three or four times and that certainly is the space that we work in there's this great little fragment from October pods which goes between what I see and what I say between what I say and what I keep silent between what I keep silent and what I dream between what I dream and what I forget is poetry so we we're always we're always in that little hyperspace there between what I see and what I say and and that's the opportunity because you have to make that space up it doesn't exist if you don't make it up yeah and can I ask Richard I'm wondering if you could just talk to us about that use of the first-person and just maybe with with with this book with the Frank Bascombe book and and with Canada where because and you're using a first-person singular the reader has a right to feel at a certain point this is the opening that this is going to be a confession that everything is going to now be said by this person who is writing stroke speaking you know quite sure which because it's a literary form but yet the reader ends up knowing more about the boy in Canada than the boy and how he's feeling then the boy in Canada is ready to declare or knows and you're playing with that with his voice by giving him a tone and out of the town comes great knowledge for the reader but his tongue doesn't give him the knowledge I think if something has to do with the fact that it is a literary form it is a piece of artifice and it's acknowledged to be a piece of artifice both by me and by the reader so we know that this is even though it may be confessional in its and its surfaces it is in fact not confessional in its nature because because ultimately I don't make it be that way I don't make it be a confession and this is why the notion of the unreliable narrator is always interesting to me because it's a goods it's a kind of a misnomer because narrators are always unreliable insofar as the reader will bring a heightened intelligence to the - what's what she or he is reading and we'll know more than the characters do because your space agree you're standing outside the book and they're locked inside the book listen but I think I mean under cute forms of unreliable narration one where they you realize that the narrator is slowly telling you lies and the one where the generator is such a generator in Canada for example or Frank actually are trying to tell you everything and but you're learning more than they're learning by what they're saying but they're attempting to be honest or frank well I just always think that they're did I'm trying to give the illusion that the trunk that the coin are trying to tell you everything but but but because of the economies of the book I mean it's sort of it's sort of a little bit like if you if you if you wanted to write a short story based on where's the hole somebody's I'm not doing anything but you everything you see it's what I do you're the unreliable narrator the under I've the speaker here but I don't think it's not having any making fun with this time some if you if you decided you were going to write a short story based upon what two people said at the breakfast table in the morning and then what you decided you could do it just be to record two people having breakfast in the morning you a quickly understand that you do not have a short story there what you have is just a conversation between two rural people which is different from a piece of artifice so not if you know I know I know exactly what you mean about their big two or three different kinds of and unreliable narrators but I always sort of use Occam's razor on that so as to so as to empower the reader to make her his decisions about whatever he or she is reading and inevitably readers will know more than what's going on on the page whether whether it's Jane Austen or whoever it is it at all to me you know we all have people who do what we do we have different sort of parlance for what we do I mean for me it all depends on it being artifice and giving the you know Frank O'Connor said they're 12 at least 12 different forms of verisimilitude I'm just operating in one but however how about it continuing a bit on this line if you if when you write for instance the Frank Bascombe voice do you have sort of messages you want to get across the table because there are lots of things going on in politics sort of play a role what do they do also in Nora Webster but but in a more indirect way calm talk letters yesterday that that that in some ways you you you stick in that bit in or Webster about to what they see on television and the baton charge as a way of both framing it temporarily and also maybe as an opportunity to get in something that you had in your notebook or in your imperfect your perfect memory have you had it and so you got it and so you want to use it and then so you sort of slam it in there I don't have a perfect memory Richard hmm no I've got a good one but I don't have as good as yes good just to follow on from that can you talk about the idea then are finding this I'm asking you this really because I can't do it that if I move into the first person singular I end up with a voice that is filled with with with with some sort of flavor that often is not intended by me I just can't do it and I just wanted about that idea of finding a first person someone's voice and letting it be theirs and and not intervening with it you just leaving it to be theirs and giving them a sort of I don't know what the word would be with just let's let's say a comp OA tree in their town but which isn't obvious to the reader and slowly becomes powerful without the reader knowing at what point it becomes powerful well the the persona of the the four books so there's four different kinds of persona really but the first time I took a crack at writing Frank Bascombe in eighteen in 1862 these books take a while not easy and then 1982 I I had been reading Joe Heller's book something happened and I had been reading Walker Percy spoke the movie Gore and I had been reading Frederick actually spoken fans notes and and what I said what I saw was that that what those books could all do was be both funny and smart which is what I wanted to do I wanted to be funny and smart on the page so that would that was my that was my guide in a way so so whenever I would find myself going outside some invisible boundaries I would I would sort of haul it back in a way unless I wrote something that went outside of those boundaries that I thought was extraordinary and therefore wanted to keep because when you you know when you when you write a book in the third person or you write a book in the first person you're sort of hearing something as you as you work along but it but it's not a it's not a terribly constricted kind of operation because you do want the advantage of your if you should have a brilliant moment of of slamming it in there putting it in the story so so you're operating with a voice and you sometimes the voice goes outside its boundaries and you think well this reader getting enough if I break the tone of the book if I break the tenor of the voice is the reader getting enough to make that be okay so that that probably is the only way to talk to operator if you if you read know a web server which is in the third-person you said it was sort of a closer which is vertical at an intimate third it is a kind of intimate third free and direct style you could call it free and direct style it's all it seems to it seems to be doing one thing most of the time which is to say an omniscient narrator is telling you what noir was doing and what Nora's thinking and what other people are saying to her not what anybody else is thinking except in her surmise but every once in a while you'll just simply deviate from that and you deviate from it when you do in behalf of something that you have decided is worth the risk of the deviation right so I'll just write a really brilliant line I will read one everyone yeah great if you would I've got three or four marked here it is this is one book sir this is when books are smart this and this is how books get smart Nora did not sleep she glanced at the newspaper she had bought in the station and put it down and watched the two boys slumped back in their seats they're taking a train trip she would love to have known just then what they were dreaming in these months she realized something had changed and I would hear what Nora's thinking had changed in the clear easy connection between her and them and perhaps for them between each other and here's the whip-crack she felt that she would never be sure about them again that that's that's just that's just this man talking here and making her think it but because because that's a piece of imagination for the on the basis of what that paragraph was telling you about it doesn't naturally come to that conclusion he makes it come to that conclusion and what he does he gets outside a little bit of of the vernacular outside a little bit of the of the tenor of her voice don't you yeah I would still argue though that and that can still e in that second if you think a black thought comes for a second which she almost doesn't mmm doesn't thought doesn't think and it's that it enters has to be short and brisk like that that she doesn't follow up on right it has to be very difficult for her so then she stops herself doing when she does that she would never be able to do something again so you I would argue that that's still within her it's answered well you were you've well I'll see you know you need to make it be within her well yeah but if I had noticed that I would have taken it house you know she know that but no but see I see what I wrote in the margin but I said I said leap quack and I love it I mean I think that's what you know you've made it be part of her interior whereas she has no interior she doesn't exist she's just this paragraph there and you come in you're manhandling that paragraph at the end to to accommodate something that you yourself dream up and make her feel and think and you make it then you make it completely persuasive by by by doing so you see I think the thing there is not to put in a poetic term or to go to tighten the language he used to bring the language down to its anglo-saxon roots you know even enough is there a Latin word and that shouldn't be is it qu OD I didn't read it what does it mean but I mean that you try and make it as plain as possible so that it can seemed to be within her mind then rather than you writing and I think that's the issue isn't a video where if anyone starts imagining oh there he is at home writing he's not typing it's much worse he's writing odd and I mean in Canada you must have had this problem of dealing with the idea of how much he knew later have much II knew at a time and who you are as you're working on this trying to deal for example with his modesty without quiet ears with her careful years that you do you cannot intervene in that isn't it I don't we same time but the same time sorry for you already but he has to notice everything as well you know what you're hearing is between the two of us is he he believes in things a little more than I do I think I mean in the sense that you you believe that line when you have Nora think that line you believe it what I think is what a brilliant line to have dreamed up and and and when I'm when I'm operating in those betwixt areas there I'm always thinking to myself we have a compact the writer and the reader which is that I'm making this stuff up and if I can lean on you enough to make you think something that you wouldn't have thought otherwise you'll forgive me for leaning on you in the white and I think novels too I would say as a reader because this I this is the conversation you said you were never having backstage and I imagined this is I mean this is a very eloquent literary conversation about details and I if I can say just as the dumb journalist I am when I read Nora Webster for instance as opposed to let me be frank with you with nor website I have the feeling that I somebody has just lowered his voice and wants to tell me something I have to lean in a little to hear what is it actually what you're saying and then when I've leaned in enough I just really gosh is this it oh my god and when I'm reading let me be frank with you it's like the hurricane is rolling through the paint I mean this is post-sandy but the hurricane is on the pages it's a different kind of energy I know this is a very perhaps it's just how you experience that's how I experienced it and the endive and I never go into thinking so precisely what is it that is actually going on with the first person all deeply you know but then there is you up obviously I'm just it's two very different ways of writing but but the outcome is like somebody's speaking in a loud voice as opposed to somebody speaking in a lower voice it's amazing we can talk to each other at all I mean one of the problems that I would have with the first person it is ruining the first version would be regional flavor that this woman is from particular part of our in the particular year their search the phrase that she will use and how much of that to put in and I mean one of the advantages in a way you have but I'm not sure that it's a full advantage is that American the American language has become sort of fishel English in a way that regional Irish speech remains a sort of hidden thing I mean they're both advantages and disadvantages and that but sometimes when Frank Bascombe speaks I realize that anyone in ireland reading this will understand every term he uses everything is watching every everything is noticing you know for the old brand to the you know to the american civil war in Ireland we had our own Civil War should you should explain more of you know more about it to the outside you know it's not a third person the third person in the word protects you from yeah from having to worry and I mean in a way I think if you're working from Ireland and I imagine this is true about Denmark or any country in any small country is that you constantly watch it in case you begin to explain your country to the outside world in case you say you know and the day they watched it on RTE the Irish television channel no seriously because otherwise someone will write you say this RT like what was that we got bogged down in all those initials we couldn't work out you know Jeremie impressive you just ride Amtrak everyone will know you right New Jersey everyone you know you know but when you write when you but I think that when I write this book that I'm writing as my from my principle audience who will be people in the United States now that's who I think is my principle audience when you write Noah Webster do you think that your principle audience is going to be people in Ireland or do you not it would almost be Wexford rather than Harland Emily would almost be narrowed down and you things I mean there there are even phrases in that bit I rather or only would only really someone in Wexford would get the full meaning of and what the book has all kinds of what the shouldn'ts are all kinds of but there are but there are plenty of little inflective phrases in the book which come in not in the dialogue but sometimes come in in the narration which which which flight which flavor it yes as being as being what it is and but that's what I'm wondering is if there is such a thing as a standard American language now that you know in in other words are you conscious of in Canada his where he is in America or it with Frank that he is in New Jersey and there's a word he will use that someone further down further in the south or in the in the west coast won't choose I think that there is a kind of a pan continental language which is I grew up in the south and in the South has says its own supposedly go with all kinds of expressions and preoccupations and what I found in writing stories that are said said not about but set in a putative New Jersey or a putative Montana that I can pretty well take what I brought from the south up to those places and it will be plausible that I can use certain southern expressions put it in the mouth or put it in the narration of somebody who's living in Montana in 1960 and nobody will much call attention to it and I don't know if that quite is what you mean but I the other thing would I put something in the book that was so specifically New Jersey that it would need explanation I would only do it if I I could get away with making it funny but you've done one thing which I thought was really interesting you you explained the other day that you to write about the South you actually left the south you went itself to begin to write you've actually changed sort of north and south to get started and and to write about coming from the south or something that takes place in the South you had to take the whole location out first write the story and put back in the location I did there and and that you had I mean you you use your really local place because then it gives you freedom you know where you are so you don't have to worry about that it means me the place being Spain in the south that's yourself everything I was referring to because yeah I mean what happened was that I just didn't think that this world of these this small coastline with these gentle waves these small villages and the town that they would ever yield enough for a novel I just I just wasn't sure how you would do that I thought you would get some short stories and playing melancholy ones from it pretty clearly classic Irish ones you know that people were sad and then they were sad later actually and and the the the what happened was that I was stuck in the first now I just couldn't I was record his way through and I really couldn't proceed and I painter had told me that you make a painting I think Sam Francis might have known this by just making a mark and then dealing with the mark you've made and I thought look I'm gonna close my eyes and any sentence comes into my head I'm going to write down anything matter what it is postman came okay spring came anything and it was to see a gray shine on the sea gray shine well that's not the Mediterranean you don't get that on the measuring much that's what this is back in Wexford this is back home and that chapter brought me back home unexpectedly and I knew I realized I knew every contour and I could find a rhythm for that chapter that came easier or seemed to have more in it more more feeling in it and that really surprised me because this landscape was now yielding up something that I could begin to work with and so the next book I went I went all the way to it I went back to it in full dealt with that low sky the constant threatening rain that had a blazing with it with constant use of euphemism no one's saying anything much silence solitude gray skies long winters and that I could just work with it I was very surprised by this it didn't it didn't seem to me to be natural nothing you didn't take Barcelona where you stayed in - I've never really gone back to Barcelona as a novelist to write about it again it just it just it just faded it's just all its glamour all its drama all the Civil War Aldi and I was there for all the child went Frank who died all those night marches and baton charges I've just never been able to use it I mean maybe I will but this comes easier now and you you have sort of reconciled with the South as some place yeah yeah I had to quit running about the South because when I was young because everybody had written about the South better than I was ever going to be able to just wasn't any use of my doing it everything I knew about the south Mississippi Louisiana Arkansas where I grew up now or even written about my Flannery O'Connor and playing Faulkner and Eudora Welty and all kinds of people so I just thought I had nothing to contribute here so I have to just basically just and it was I I can make it sound as if it was painless it was not painless it was it was sort of it was sort of the equivalent of giving up your vocation and hoping to find another one because when you come out of Mississippi and you want to be a novelist it's just do rego that you write about Mississippi what you're supposed to do but I wasn't doing it very well when being a successful so I said so leave it leave it behind it and only later issues you were alluding to before when I wrote a multitude of sins I wrote of stories set in New Orleans and it's a long story called calling and and I normally what would happen to me was it when I would start to write something a sentence that was set in the south and I put it was a cold it was a cold day in Jackson Mississippi then all of a sudden I'm hearing Faulkner and I'm here wealthy and I'm hearing you know all kinds of things got in other words it just took a lost control of it so I wrote this story said in New Orleans without ever saying that it was in New Orleans or without ever putting any of the particulars of the of the town into the story the story just basically took place no place then when I got it all the way finished I taking place no place I showed it to Christina and I said do you think it would be okay if I just kind of went back in and retrofitted New Orleans into the story she said I think you'd be worth trying yeah then I went back in and did that and I found that all of those all of those old rhythms weren't rumbling anymore I could do it more or less the way I would have liked to do it without without having those haunting sounds in my head I mean I was very lucky in that em there's there's a novelist ten years older than me started writing a good time before I did and he's better than I John Banville and that he's from ten miles away we went to the same school we had the same English teacher he could have easily got in first here with all this coastline with all this you know low skies with threatening rain but instead he wrote our great brilliant European novels about ideas of good and he was so lucky that he just didn't bother with this um but but I mean really really lucky I wouldn't have been able to do it then because he would have done it and better and but the big problem is of course I spent a lot of my life in Dublin and one of the things everyone who lives in Dublin knows about is that gorgeous midsummer time when the days are days really long and you get a gorgeous day around the 16th of June where the day starts early and you meet everyone you know and you're in the National Library some of the time and then you know you're meeting all sort of in pubs and then it goes and you could go on into you know and of course you guys oh that would be called Ulysses it's already been written on I don't think so you know I think you better not just keep that midsummer day to your private Diaries and tell your grandchildren about it but if you started it saying I've got a great Malcolm it's about please don't please oh you know everyone in Dublin clear another Christmas party's the same people I mean the Leopold Bloom called it what a nation the same people in the same place you know this in Ireland because the same Christmas party happens every year with the same people singing the same songs at the same time drinking the same drinks going home with the same are you think the hospitality is wonderful you think I always feel a bit uneasy at the beginning an end of those parties and yes I think about sex at an inappropriate moment during them you're someone things are some that really affects me Oh James Joyce's two dead I mean don't don't don't write your your Christmas party story don't think of it it's not it's over you know that's really I mean we need really to grow up into Mars and the moon phases but naturally if we only could but you do you have to write about the thing that you're going to be the world's greatest expert in irrespective before it is you you have to be mean to be the author of something you have to be the authority over it that's what it's what it means to be an author you authorize everything and if everybody's already authorized but you think that you've got in your kit you have to go somewhere else but and just talk to us about the Jersey Shore in this context then about it being a nun mud extreme that's it that's it well it wasn't on muddy stream but plenty people have written again I'm not writing about New Jersey I'm just using the words of the New Jersey lexicon to create a sort of backdrop against which I put principles characters who run around and do things and I just take advantage of the language of New Jersey but I didn't know anybody who had written about it to the extent that I was going to write about it and I did feel like it was for me uncharted ground and I haven't over them now some years 30-plus years since I started doing it nobody's come along and shown me anything that that was doing what I didn't know what someone was doing way back in them Roth wrote about New Jersey a lot and wrote about it in the book like pastor role better than anybody ever could but that's Newark you don't do good I don't do Newark you cute joke right he does Montclair and I don't do my Clair so I just but but grind along in my little my little patch but there could be another I mean you've you've even done something which could be I mean inspire or when many people you've written a novel about Henry James and I mean Harriet novel and and a brilliant wonderful novel about Henry James and I mean just the idea if you have problems with people who written brilliant things before entering into the mind in a novelistic way of Henry James yeah I mean I thought that there was enough in him there were so many ambiguities within him that a novelist could really work with in the way that I couldn't have done with James Joyce whose appetites or or his interests or his life was known was clear to me I mean the Jane's room was neither American nor English in the end or by the time I started my book starts he loves his family but he got really far away from them and stayed away from them he loves the company of women but he's probably homosexual he loves solitude he's always going out in the evening you know that everything about him the opposite is true and so that you can constantly work with that as though you've got sort of two colors to work with and and you also never know as you're starting a chapter where this is going to go at certain points so so he interested me to that extent that that that I even from the biographies he emerges as I think is a very great mystery as an enigma and I could work with that in the way that I couldn't work with clarity I couldn't have worked with George Eliot it couldn't have worked with anyone whose whose mind was as clear as Eliot's so he just began to interest me in that way that I could never tell what he was thinking on a given day despite the fact that I would have a notebook entry a letter piece of a novel he was writing I still couldn't tell and that's the most interesting idea it's a moral issue what was in between era yes yeah because that that that in-between area is pressurized on both sides by things that you do that you do know and in fact in convinced and conventional wisdom we we are made to feel that we do know what went on except of course we do not and you and you mind in that in-between area and and that's just that's the kind of special pleading that a novel is the novel wants to say let me tell you something about this little in-between area between what he said and what he didn't say that you think you understand but that I'm going to tell you more than you know better than you know you're both Rice's who write longhand right yes we have where the jacket stains to prove it I just I just sent a really nice jacket off to a woman in New York named Madame Isadora who who apparently is magically able to take ink stains on a silk jacket why why why why this by this motion it's well for me it's pleasurable then it's slow and I I can type a lot faster than I can think and and this I think there's no reason to do that yeah it means you can touch the page and I write under the right-hand side Lee the left-hand side blank and then I can go just put an arrow over from a thing and rewrite it on the opposite side I can look at it I can see the two of them I mean part I'm not sure it really makes that much difference but but there is a sense of being able to touch the words that might make a difference I mean it must form must mean something when you write Henry James in in your novel and probably in his life has difficulty writing and has to have a secretary to dictate to ya you halfway through what Maisie knew around 1897 Henry James and really can't write anymore I mean the what he's doing at the level of industry and he's writing letters in the evening so his hand just gives up and he gets a dare Scott called McAlpin who simply types what he writes and James walks up and down and writes but he gets two pages back every evening and he goes over them every evening so it is and he's also been living in language by this point really for 30 years day-in day-out living in language so it isn't as though every time he has a thought it seems that thought can make its way into a very long sentence without any interruption and he can do this and he can see it almost as he's working so people say they can notice the moment where he stops writing and starts dictating you cannot I mean it doesn't mean you know I really because we know we really know what few pages it was and it can't be done but I started to think about in the novel because he starts to write the turn of the screw which is very frightening and of course he now has an audience not an audience in the future but he has a Scott whose job is to type everything is saying and he mean he was in my novel to frighten the scarf just even get one look of scared oh he was scared look the Scott isn't giving him this thing is really help and later on he gets this other wonderful he gets a wonderful woman who just adores him and he writes the three masterpieces wings of the Dove the golden bowl and the ambassador's and he doesn't write them he dictates them and people say you can see feel that and I don't I mean I mean I think that he but I couldn't do it could you do it I do no no I could I couldn't remember stuff I couldn't remember it's just very important to to but you can do this by going over the pages of course but seeing the pages every night but it's also important to it when you're when you're sort of pushing pushing that senate's on toward its end it's kind of important for me to have in my mind what I didn't and if I think if I were if I were dictating it I wouldn't remember it as well because I think there's something crucial here with you for with Frank Bascombe and with Canada where your ma it's somebody speaking its speech I mean the allusion is you're creating um the illusion of speech but it's not speech no it's writing even though it's meant to look like speech and what you're managing is this very strange thing but I refer to earlier as a sort of calm poetry that you're getting within the speech which is a sort of writing so there's this I mean you're not trying to disguise the fact in other words it's not like some of those it's not like As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner which is all just somebody speaking who really isn't good at speaking many do we do Bundren yet doing the old get their grammar wrong I mean you don't do that you allow the speech a sort of rhythm which is a writerly rhythm even though it's first-person narrative which is what it really I was referring to earlier I think that would be very difficult to say out loud as you were working and I wrote a screenplay a few years ago and I everybody I was said to me you write really good dialogue so I thought well then I should be able to write a movie so I so I wrote I wrote a movie and it all sounded like what we think of as literary dialogue it was it was so it was wrong it didn't sound like anybody will be talking and as you say it's it's writing it's in it's understood by the reader to be writing even though it may be subliminal understanding you understand that it is not someone talking if someone writing a sentence that a verse that someone's talking is it difficult to end the book well I it's part of the day's part of the deal I mean you write agenda so it's in a way for me I think it's one of the most thrilling times in the life of a book not because the work is finished because it's always it's not happy when the work is finished in a way because you have been doing this as hard as you can and as patiently as you can as well as you can then that gesture is over and there's a certain kind of melancholy involved in but but to actually write the ending movement of a novel if it's five pages if it's two pages your perspective before this for me is one of the most exhilarating moments that I ever get to experience yeah and it requires this care because you have to soften the thing bring it down you can't bring in new images somehow other every image you find has to be one that's just got a downward feel to it and even with the rhythm even if it's not noticeable to the reader the rhythm has to somewhere or other just move in on itself a bit so you're not expanding the rhythm you just I mean it's a funny business but you here'll back through the book to see what you've got available to you yeah for it for a word or an image or a thought or an idea and you can you can bring that to bear upon upon the end and in a way that is meant to be quite satisfying and consoling to the reader because you're saying to the reader I have let you in at the beginning I've taking you through to the middle now in the best possible way I can I'm going to let you out Richard

Channel: Louisiana Channel

Views: 9,511

Rating: 4.8596492 out of 5

Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, Richard Ford, Colm Tóibín, writing, Ireland, USA, Louisiana Literature, Literature

Id: gTs9pPhzcmg

Length: 60min 28sec (3628 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 23 2016