Ford's Frank

LISTEN. Thinking about Frank Bascombe again, having recommended Lay of the Land to a friend who can relate all too well to Frank's health challenges. 

Frank says “Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. You rarely miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

Maybe not, for most people. But not Ford, most of his sentences are polished gems.

Just found a recent Ford conversation, and his earlier Library of Congress prize award ceremony in 2019 ("I don't need therapy, I have words"), and welcome news of a new novel from him forthcoming. "I'm writing a novel called Be Mine. It's (it simply has to be) that last Frank Bascombe novel of my lifetime."

I recall hearing Ford talk about his writing process, probably with Terry Gross; or possibly live with Ann Patchett in Nashville a few years ago, when he read from Let Me Be Frank With You (the trilogy became a tetralogy) and had interesting things to say about the pursuit of happiness as "a condition that we define for ourselves" during Q-&-A (at about the 49-minute mark). And then he graciously signed my book, probably feigning recollection of our much earlier meeting.

He said he reads every day's product aloud to his wife before proceeding. 

That's a marital partnership to envy. 

I did find this old Paris Review interview, which speaks to the care he takes in the aural dimension of literary prose. 

"I’m always interested in words, and no matter what I’m doing—describing a character or a landscape or writing a line of dialogue—I’m moved, though not utterly commanded by an interest in the sound and rhythm of the words, in addition, I ought to say, to what the words actually denote. Most writers are probably like that, don’t you think? Sometimes I’ll write a sentence that sets up an opportunity for say, a direct object or predicate adjective and I won’t have a clue what the word is except that I know what I don’t want—the conventional word: the night grew dark. I don’t want dark. I might, though, want a word that has four syllables and a long a sound in it. Maybe it’ll mean dark, or maybe it’ll take a new direction. I’ll have some kind of inchoate metrical model in my mind. One of the ways sentences can surprise their maker, please their reader, and uncover something new is that they get to the sense they make by other than ordinary logical means... "

He walks right up to the border of poetry. (Note how frequently he deploys variations on the locution "as the poet says," etc.) But he still makes lucent, transparent sense in a way that poets sometimes (often?) do not.

If I could write one Frank Bascombe novel I'd happily renounce academia. I keep coming back to that passage in The Sportswriter -- "In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five...explaining is where we all get into trouble."

I told Richard that, at a signing event in Nashville (at the wonderful and lamented old Davis-Kidd) for Independence Day a quarter-century ago. 

I didn't stop teaching, now I'm 64. But that's okay, Frank Bascombe already has an exemplary author.

And on the subject of enviable marital partnerships, I've noted Garrison Keillor turning to that theme in many of his recent dispatches. "I have given up trying to make a better world and instead I’m working on my sock drawer and maintaining a small circle of friendships, starting with my wife. It’s a large project."

Reminds me of my favorite E.B. White line, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy it. This makes it hard to plan the day.” That's a humanist.

That GK essay concludes with solid wisdom: "Get offline, walk humbly, be watchful, wait for your other to appear, be grateful, introduce yourself, hang on."

I think he means re-introduce. Anyway, I'm gratefully hanging on. And getting offline and walking humbly every morning. Not with dogs again, yet. (They're always eager to hear what I've written.) But I'm confident the docs will give me the green light on that very soon. Then, I'll be better able properly to re-introduce myself, and take on the large projects.

Solvitur ambulando