Description
Je remercie l'hôtel Belles Rives de Juan les Pins et les éditions de l'Olivier pour cette conversation exceptionnelle avec l'un des plus grands romanciers américains : Richard Ford, 81 ans.
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Transcription
Good afternoon, Mr. Richard Ford.
Good afternoon. It is a good afternoon. It is? Yes, it is.
Welcome to a conversation not at La Pérouse. Usually I talk with writers in a restaurant in Paris. But today it's a conversation at Hotel Belle Rive.
Couldn't be better.
Impossible. You received the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award the same year in... 1996.
Yes, when I was a child.
Yes, exactly. And also the Prix Femina Etranger in Paris. Yes. Later on. Yes. When I was a teenager. And now, the Scott Fitzgerald Prize in Le Cap d'Antibes. So my question is very simple. When will you stop stealing prizes from other authors?
Well, you know. Writing books is not a competition.
But you win all the time.
No, not all the time. I would happily win all the time. But no, other people write wonderful books and they win sometimes. Everybody who is a writer does better when someone does well. When someone wins a prize, we are all encouraged. We all have something wonderful to read. We were happy for our friend. We might wish in our heart of hearts that we could win that prize that day. But no, at least in America, we're not competitors about writing books.
That's maybe the only thing, the only place where you are not competitors.
It could be true. It could be true. But art, and art in general, I think, always succeeds when someone does it very well. that means by succeeding I mean that other people feel encouraged. I mean, you know, Fitzgerald himself is very famous for having said, I cannot do well unless my competitor does poorly. That's not true. That's just not true.
So Fitzgerald was living here with his wife Zelda 100 years ago exactly, in 1925. And they were fighting all the time, yelling at each other. drinking too much. And well, I wonder, is it a big influence on you? Yes. This author and this way of...
Absolutely. It has influenced me not to drink all the time, not to fight with my wife.
You're married for 61 years.
I'm together with my wife 61 years. Yeah. Not to have children who are a little hostages to fortune. So, you know. Yeah, I learned a lot. I remember when, before Christina and I were married, I had read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, who Fitzgerald was a temporary of and a competitor with. And then he's both. And Hemingway married this wonderful girl named Hadley. And then they didn't live together so long, but then he divorced her. And he thought all of his life. that that was the greatest mistake he ever made which was divorcing his first love i told my wife i said you are my first love i will live with you forever but many people say it but don't do it well i've done it congratulations well no no no congratulate me absolutely but um because i'm smart enough not to ruin it you know but i i think it's the I think it's the best possible outcome. I suspect that most people get divorced and think to themselves, at some remote moment in three o'clock in the morning, what did I, why did I go wrong? What did I do that messed up this wonderful thing that started so well?
But you know your hero, Frank Baskin, who is the main character of five beautiful of your novels, A Weekend in Michigan in 1986, Independence in 1995, The State of the Place in 2006, In All Franchises in 2014,
and The Paradise of the Madmen in 2013. Yes, a bunch of books.
Olivier, Frank, the hero of this book, was divorced.
Yes.
Many times.
No, only divorced once, but had another love that he left to become a nun. The worst possible outcome for a marriage, right? I live with you, I'm married to you, and what I'm going to do is leave and become a nun? That would be terrible.
So you decided to write about a guy who divorces because you didn't do it and you want to know what happens.
Sometimes you write about the things that scare you the most. And divorce was something that I just couldn't imagine. My parents did not divorce. My wife's parents did divorce. And I think we both of us learned a lesson about that, about what the best outcome is.
Let's go back to Fitzgerald because you received this prize.
Yes, and I know a lot about Fitzgerald.
He's asking in the crack up, he's asking himself the same question that Frank is asking at the beginning of Le Paradis des Fruits. He's asking, yeah, and now what do we do? You know, in the crack up he says, what was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the womb of time. I never understood what it means, the womb of time.
The womb of time. Well, I... He probably means the oubliet of time.
Oui, oui.
Oubliette of time. Oui,
oui, oui.
The womb of time.
So you begin your novel by asking this question. I don't quote exactly, but it's like, what the fuck are we doing here?
Yes. Well, that's not a bad premise for any novel, you know, if you can write about that subject, which everybody experiences, and be smart and write something that's... that's worth reading. Anybody who reads novels, particularly literary novels, would like to know the answer to that. I mean, readers have conversations with books. They don't just read the book and say, okay, now I know, now I understand, now I understand. They read the book and they say, oh, that's bullshit. Or they say, no, I reject that. Or no, maybe that's right. So if you can engage a readership about a subject that they completely understand to be worth the time, worth the thinking. then maybe you have a chance to read to the end.
Yes, but this question, what are we doing here? This question, does it have an answer?
Well, it has an answer in an Augustinian sense, that happiness If that's what you want to be, if you want to be happy, and I do, most of us do, happiness is, in Augustine's view, is the absence of unhappiness. So what are we doing here? We're trying to do as little harm as we can.
To ourselves and others. Yes.
Yeah. And along the way, trying to find a vocabulary, and it's often just a matter of choosing words, trying to find a vocabulary for what we are doing that makes us feel that what we are doing is worth our life.
Again back to Fitzgerald, what role did he play in your life and your work?
He played a lot of roles really. He's very smart. And if you read a book like The Beautiful and Damned, The Beautiful and Damned, in a way, he's too smart. He can't let any subject go. He's obsessed with being smart on the page. And that taught me a lot. It taught me that that's what readers of serious books want to find. They want to find something said about life that they haven't thought of and that seems appropriate to the moment and that gives them something that they didn't have before. And that set for me a goal early on when I was teaching at Columbia for years. That's what I was always... I used to teach a course called being smart on the page. That's what I was always trying to encourage my students to do. Be smart on the page. Because you do it for the reader. You don't write books for yourself. You write books for somebody else who will read them, who you don't know. So that was one thing. The business with the marriage was certainly another. The negative influence. And he was so young. He was like Keats in a way. He was so young and so smart.
And he died when he was 44.
And he only wrote four or five books, not very many. And I just thought to myself, well, I'm already five years older than he is when I start, you know. But it encouraged me to think that somebody that young from the Middle West, even though he went to Princeton, good school, I talked there. He was just natively smart. And, because he didn't learn, he didn't learn to be smart, he was smart. He learned to be smart by Only by observing and participating and empathizing, although he didn't seem a very empathetic man, I think he was very empathetic. So that's what I learned. I learned to pay attention.
And also maybe your narrator, Frank Bascombe, in five of your books, looks a little bit like the narrator of The Last Tycoon or the narrator of Tender in the Night, you know, desperate but funny.
I never think of Frank as desperate. Desperate to me is too extreme. I think Frank is...
Melancholic?
Well, sometimes. I mean, there are plenty of things in life to be melancholic about. Your son is dying. You don't like your daughter very much. Your other son has already died. Your first wife has died. So there's a lot not to relish.
But... Strong has a sad life. I mean, he was not very lucky.
Well.
He lost two sons.
If you live long enough. Yeah,
that's what happens.
You're going to experience all of that. Yeah. So it's not unusual. I mean, it's not unusual to have people that you love pass away. My father died in my arms.
When you were 16. Yeah.
My mother, I adored my mother. She only lived to 71. So loss is something we all.
have to get used to not not like but find a way beyond that's the that's the story the subject of yes it is this book la la le paradis de fou is the story of frank bascombe who um travels with his dying son dying son yes goes from minnesota to mount rushmore yes and they experience meet people and describe. Yes. The America of today?
Yes, I think so. And they laugh about it. And they make you laugh about it. But it's also about, because his son is going to die. I don't write books that I mind giving away the end of. It's okay. It's not about plot.
No, there is no surprise. He's very, very ill.
His son dies. His son dies from a disease that you do not recover from, what we call amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
From Maladie Charcot. From the beginning we know that. Yes.
And so Frank's mission is to take his son as far as he can, and then to take himself beyond that. as far as he can. That's why it ends the way it ends.
And you said before you wrote about divorce because you didn't do it. So you write this beautiful novel about fatherhood, about a son and a father, and you didn't have any children.
No. But a lot of my friends have children, and I'm paying attention to how they get along. And I was a child, and I have preserved as much of being a child in my adult life as I possibly can. I think there's nothing wrong with being childish, nothing wrong with being youthful. It's okay. I mean, it's worse to be old and not youthful and not surprising yourself, you know? No, sure. So, you know, I'll tell you, Frederic, nothing I do is hard.
It looks easy, but I'm sure it's not too bad.
The idea is to make it look easy, but if anybody who is a novelist tells you, oh, what I do is very hard, hold on to your wallet.
Yeah, when you... When I read this book, I was moved, deeply moved all the time because it's very sad. It's about a father who's going to lose his son. Yes. So it's very emotional. Yes. But you do it with lightness and always funny scenes, you know, weird places. Yes. Weird people. And you describe an America that is very... strange and lonely. People are in shopping centers. Yes,
huge. America is enormous. I heard President Netanyahu say today that Israel is the size of New Jersey. America is 50 New Jersey's. And so it's huge and it is underpopulated for the most part. So if you travel out into the middle of it, which I do all the time, I drive across the country twice a year, what you are encountering are large empty spaces. And with people every once in a while living on those empty spaces, I don't think they're sad. And I don't even know if they're lonely. There's a difference, at least in English, between being solitary and being lonely. Lonely is to suffer from being solitary.
But at one point, they are walking together, Frank and Paul, his son. They talk together. Yes. And you say they are the only ones talking together in a crowd of lonely people.
Yes, in a mall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Like they're strange because they talk to each other.
Yes. But how many times have I sat in restaurants and seen a man and a woman sitting across from each other saying nothing? My wife and I, we chatter all the time. And so I think they're lacking in imagination. They're afraid of self-revelation. They're afraid of intimacy. You know, we use books. The way readers like books is that they find them to be useful. And I would like to write books that would be useful in the way that would encourage people, when they sit across from their wives, to say something, to hear something.
Have you read French novelists? Maybe, I don't know, Sartre, Camus?
All of them.
All of them?
In English. I read them in translation. I could read them in French now probably, but I read them in translation. Consequently, I read them in college when I was in university. Consequently, because I read them in English, it's very useful to read books in translation because their Frenchness. become secondary. It was as if Camus was an American, or as if Sartre was an American. And that's a way of taking it in, you know. I don't have to use the barrier of his Frenchness to block me from trying to find things that he says that are about my life.
Because there is a tone that could be a little bit existentialist, you know.
I'm sure.
In your writing.
I'm sure.
I'm trying to make you…
Jokka katt.
I'm trying to make you…
Well, make me Danish.
Yes, Danish. In the beginning, it's in the snow in Minnesota. Yes. It's snowing everywhere.
Yes. At the beginning of one of my favorite books, which is called The Movie Gore. It's a little epigram from Kierkegaard. And the Kierkegaard is, the worst thing about despair is that it doesn't know it's despair. Mm. I don't know if that's the worst thing. I don't know what you get when, if you are in despair, you think you are in despair. I think it might be better if you didn't know.
If you don't know it's better.
Kierkegaard said it was the worst thing. I don't know what Sartre would say about that.
Probably the same. Probably the same. So the title, so the title in English is Be Mine. Yes. Sois à moi. Yes. And in the Jose Camus, an excellent translator, she chose Le Paradis des Fous. Yes. And it's a quote by you said by Emerson. Yes.
There's a famous quote by Emerson in one of his essays in which he said, Traveling is a fool's paradise. And what he means by that is that when you travel, You're foolish to think you're going to get away from yourself, that you're going to vacate yourself. He also says elsewhere in a different essay, he said, I carry my giant with me wherever I go, which is to say myself. my burdensome self. Yeah.
But it's interesting because in many, many American novels, they travel since Moby Dick and Jack Kerouac and... Yeah,
yeah. On the road, of course.
Because you have a big country.
You have a big country and people do it all the time. But it's also as a literary device. It's a very fruitful literary device because... The landscape is always changing, so that gives you something to write about. There is the presumption in a voyage that something along the way is going to change, that the result of the voyage from beginning to end will be the evolution or the devolution or the maturation of something going on. Now, whether that actually is true in life, I don't know. I mean, I just the other day drove from Montana. to Maine because those are the two places I live. How many? 2600 miles, 2600, not kilometers.
So it's like 40,000 kilometers.
I don't think I was any different when I got to the end from how I was when I started.
That's why it's a fool's paradise.
Yes, to think you're going to outrun yourself. Of course, yeah. I think that's what he means. And in fact, I think Frank understands that. I mean, I shouldn't say, I think Frank understands it. Frank understands it. I wrote it.
So you control Frank?
Completely.
Ah, okay,
yeah.
Yeah. Why do you always go back to Frank Bascombe, this character? Is it like an appointment with an old friend?
Destiny, appointment in Samara? Maybe so. I don't know. Because to be able to use language to make his voice frees me to put into the book anything I want to put into the book because I have found that his voice and his... putative intelligence are limitless. There's nothing that I can dream up that I can't make him say or think or do. And that's such a lenience for a novelist. I mean, when you're struggling with different characters in every book, you're continually trying to fit what you know and fit what you want to say into something plausible that your character can think or feel.
or say for me frank was always able to be completely available to me for anything is it because he started like you working as a journalist in a sport magazine no no
i i don't think he's like me i think that that the degree to which he and i are alike is a failure of mine I think whenever I come across something that Frank says or thinks. I think to myself, oh, you're not doing this well enough. Because he's agreeing with you. He's saying what you think. I think I ought to be able to dream up something better than what I already know.
So you want him to be really different from yourself. Yes. This is different than French writers. French writers, most of them have alter egos.
Oh. Well, maybe I don't know what an alter ego is. Maybe I don't. But no, I was always thinking that, you know, T.S. Eliot said that we don't write to express ourselves. We write to get away from ourselves. But that's also what Marcel Duchamp said. I make these things, I make these ready-mades that he built in the 20s to vacate my personality. I use my personality to vacate my personality. So I think... And when you do get away from your personality, or when you're writing about children and you've never had children, you're free to write whatever you want. And that's what we're all looking for, freedom.
What do you think Frank would say about the Fitzgerald Prize? I have a suggestion.
Okay, tell me.
He might say...
So I can agree.
No, no, you can, no, you're allowed to disagree. He might say, why this bunch of French journalists give prices to American writers?
No, because, well, maybe he would say that, but then I would have to write that for him to say it. But for me, I think to myself, isn't it a miracle that you can sit in your little boathouse in Maine and write these sentences in English? which get translated into French and that French readers read. To me that's just a miracle. And what it means to me is that literature is useful in all cultures. Literature is one of those things that can cross nation-state boundaries and find a use and find a place. So I would be much more optimistic, much less sarcastic about that than Frank would be.
In the book you say we are happy after 70 years old or before 30 years old. But between it's...
He's quoting statistics there.
Oh,
really? Yeah.
People are unhappy from 30...
Typically, typically they... No, not unhappy. Just typically, statistically, demographically, people after they reach 30, they kind of typically... become slightly less satisfied. Not unhappy. Unhappy is something else. But then when they get to be older, And they've done a lot of things and made a lot of mistakes and still find themselves alive. They find that they feel better about life. Just to have survived and just to have learned something.
Yeah. Maybe that's the real hidden subject of this book. It's two guys who should be very, very sad and finally are quite... Not happy, but they...
Well, they are together.
Yes, they're together. They're not suffering all the time. No. Not complaining all the time.
And what would you mean if you had a fatal disease and you were 42 years old? What would you do? And you could, you know, who knows? But what I would think I would write about if I were going to write about it, I would say... I would try to make a joke out of it. And I've read lots of books about people who have amyotropic lateral sclerosis. And remarkably enough, that death sentence, which they're getting... does not make them unhappy. I mean, it may be in their heart of hearts they wish that they didn't have it. Or maybe they wish they could live much longer. But they find ways to think about now is now. I'm alive today. I can listen to this music. I can look at that mountain. I can hear this someone tell me they love me.
So to enjoy life, you have to be sick.
Maybe.
That's a philosophy.
That's very French.
What do you think of politically correctness? There's a scene in the book where they go to the cinema and there is a demonstration of feminists and they don't, they're not allowed to see a movie about Al Capone because Al Capone is a very bad guy. Yes.
Mean to women.
to women. Is there a risk of self-censorship now in American literature?
Well, I can only gauge that from what my students at Columbia have said to me. And at least in the last eight years...
Because your teacher at Columbia... ...was,
until just two years ago. They were hesitant. They were hesitant to believe that they could write about anything they wanted to write about. They were hesitant to believe that they could use the language... as freely as the language can be used. They were hesitant to have certain kinds of thoughts that they harbored but didn't want to put on the page. And I just always tried to tell them, no one can stop you from doing this. Do what you want to do. Do what you want and that you can call good, that you can call excellent. And if you can call it excellent, then do it. I mean, the idea is not to always to comfort people. The idea is not always to support or corroborate what they already think. Sometimes the object is to get in their face. Sometimes the object is to outrage them. There is a kind of culture in the United States of reluctance about surprising or outraging or... Provoking. Provoking people. But that's what literature has always been for. Madame Bovary?
Of course. Big scandal. Yeah. Yes, the flower of evil makes scandals. Right, exactly. But don't you feel there's a kind of danger with this evolution of, you know, less and less freedom of writing?
Well, first of all, danger. Writing books is an indoor sport.
Yeah, of course, it's not dangerous.
It's not war, right?
It's not dangerous, but you can be canceled.
Yes, well you can live beyond being cancelled. You can be cancelled and write another book.
You would be happy to be cancelled?
No. I've had my dealings with being cancelled. It wasn't fun. You did have that? Well, we don't have to talk about that.
Okay.
But I survived. Here I am, winning this prize, winning this beautiful place. Somehow or another I survived it.
Oh, okay. And did you have your publisher asking you to get a sensitivity reader?
Absolutely. Yes? In America, not in France.
No, but here, this book was read by somebody who checked.
Every book for the last five, six years has been sensitivity checked.
But it's a very bad reader because you left many provocative things.
I tried to. But I remember four or five years ago, I wrote a book in which...
There was a casino, which in America means a place to gamble. Same in France. Is it? And there are many casinos that are built on Indian reservations. And I was told by my editor that I could not use the word Indian, that I had to say Native American.
Ah, of course.
And so I said, well, I'm not going to say Native American because it has too many syllables. He said, I want a word that has three syllables, that it starts with an I, has an I in the middle, and ends with an N. And that only allows me Indian. And my editor said, and parenthetically, I said, look, they say they're Indians. I can say they're Indians. He said, no, they can say it. You can't.
You can't.
But I did.
And he published it?
He did. He didn't…
Okay.
He told me that the book in which the word Indian occurred was his least favorite book in the story collection. I said, well, there has to be one that you don't like, right.
Now I have the question from Eric Neuf, a French literary critic. He's asking you…
It's probably going to be difficult.
It's a difficult one, yes. Okay. this is a strange guy What heads would you choose if you were to build a Mount Rushmore with only writers? So which heads would you sculpt in the mountain?
Faulkner.
I don't want to influence you but...
Richard Wright. Richard Wright. And these are the only ones. Unfortunately when you say which heads would you choose, it would have to be a big mountain for me. So I would... Mount Rushmore,
how many heads are there? Five? Four?
I don't remember. I should know. Five. Who cares? Not Trump. Not Trump. I went to Mount Rushmore when Trump was there. And I know he was looking at... at the real estate, just trying to see if there would be a place on the mountain that his ugly face could be. But I don't know. I mean, I'm not a person who looks at the world with a pinnacle on it. I'm a person who looks at the world that way. So there's lots more room on that plane than there is on that triangle, you know, so people falling off the triangle.
And so we started like you said, there's no competition in art.
No, so I don't know. I mean, I would put a lot of people on there. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor. I would put Virginia Woolf. I would put Flaubert.
At least one French.
I would put Dostoevsky. I would put Modiano.
Modiano on Mount Rushmore.
Absolutely. I think… Yes,
I agree.
That's one time the Nobel jury got it right. Yes,
I agree. So what do you prefer, finally, make people laugh or make them cry? In this book you do both.
I would prefer to do both because I think if nothing's funny, nothing's serious. And so I want to make them laugh, but I want to make them cry. Because I'm, truthfully, when I get to the end of writing a book like this book, if I don't cry in my room by myself, I think something's wrong. I think I've missed something somewhere. So I want to make myself cry, not just for trivial reasons, but I make myself laugh all the time. So, both. And I have no time limits. I can take as long as I want to do the things I want to do, so I can do both.
Did you try ChatGPT? Because I asked AI to write me some questions for this interview.
You did?
And yeah, I asked, please give me questions for Richard Forb. And they were all completely stupid and- Nonsensical? Yes, really, really bad. So I had to work.
They were all silly questions?
Like, for example, I tell you one. To write a novel, what is the most useful, imagination or memory? This is a question by a computer.
Well, that's not such a bad question. No. Updike, one of my heroes, I would put him on Mount Rushmore also. Updike says in a wonderful little essay that the halls of memory and the halls of imagination run side by side.
maybe ai knows something nabokov said the same nabokov says imagination is is a sort of memory yes yeah form of memory and i i often i often confuse them i
often confuse as memory something i've imagined
Or the opposite.
Yes, or the opposite.
You think you invent something, but you're just remembering.
That's exactly right. Yeah. Or something I've actually read. Yeah. Or shared.
So... Now we go to my famous game. I have a game in this show.
The questione méchante.
No, it's not. No, no. But it's difficult. I'm going to quote you. It's called Guess Your Quotes. Devin des citations. I'm going to read you sentences that you wrote. And you have to guess in which of your books you wrote this sentence.
Oh, you're asking the wrong person. You should ask that literary critic who you just quoted a moment ago. Why should I be burdened with this?
People from Minnesota all say, yeah, nah.
Well, that's from Be Mine.
That's from the last one.
Yeah, no. They say, yeah, no.
They say, yeah, no?
Yeah, no.
What does it mean?
People, not just in Minnesota, people in Ireland say it also. What they mean is, yes, I understand, and the answer is no.
Ah, okay. Because in Normandy, here in France, we have tête-bainque oui, tête-bainque non.
Takes too long, no?
It's long. It's like maybe yes, maybe no. It's like you don't want to decide.
Qui ça si, qui ça non. I see. In Mexico.
So this one from the last one, another sentence by you. Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
Well, I can only think that that would be from Canada.
It's from Canada. You remember your books. So in which category are you? The one who wants to be a bank president or to rob banks?
I'd rather rob banks.
When you were young, you were a little bit gangster.
Well, no, I was just a little criminal. I wasn't a gangster. I mean, gangster now means something different. I was just a little petty criminal.
You were not violent, but you were robbing houses.
Breaking into houses, breaking into houses with a couple of my friends. We didn't constitute a gang. We were just three feckless little... Trivial children, but we broke into houses and stole cars and told cars. Yeah, and Yeah, we did that no and we got caught and put in jail so okay Oh you my mother my mother got me out. Ah, it was the it was the it was the year my father died and After my mother Took me to court She took me outside the courthouse and she said, she said, your father's dead. She said, I have to go to work. We don't have any income. She said, I cannot be getting you out of trouble anymore. And so I thought, that makes sense to me. I don't, I understand that. It was a moment in my life when my mother and I became colleagues.
And then you decide to become a writer.
Well, I had many other many other starts and many other false starts before that. Really, being a writer was the last thing I ever thought I would do. It's so preposterous, you know.
Yeah. Another sentence by you.
Yes.
You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
Gee whiz.
I love it, by the way, I love this. For me it's very interesting, this way of thinking.
Well, I believe that.
Yes.
It's one of those things that I wrote that I actually believe.
So you agree with yourself?
I agree with myself. But it could have been a lot of places. That line could have come up a lot of places, because that's the kind of thing I write about.
It's Canada.
About being bad and choosing not to be bad. I mean, if you're just good because it's easy. It's just good because...
No value. Yeah, it has no value.
But if you have a choice between doing bad which seems very attractive... And not doing that because it maybe harms fewer people?
Yeah.
Then you get credit for it.
Yeah, exactly. So this was in Canada, 2013.
But it could have been three or four other places too.
Another one. Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.
Well, that I don't believe. That's a good question that I don't believe. But again, that could have been in the Womanizer.
It's in Wildlife.
Wildlife. 1990. 1990. Long time ago. But again, I don't want to talk as if I'm talking about someone. Not myself. But that's the kind of line that I would have in my notebook. And I would just stick it into a story somewhere. Because I think it's such a provocative line. And that's what you're always trying to do when you work out of your notebook. You're trying to find places for these provocative lines that you have saved. I mean, I always keep my notebook with me. It's just in case I say something provocative, I'll write it down. Or if you do, I steal from you. Ah,
no, I write myself.
Of course we do. We all do that.
Another one. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I like it.
I could have said it about myself. Because I do like to fight. It's a trap. It's a trap. Yeah.
It's not in a book. You said that in an interview.
I was going to say, it sounds like me talking about me. Yeah.
It's in an interview by Transfuge magazine. Yeah. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight. It's like, you know, a famous sentence, if you want peace, prepare war.
Yeah.
That's the same. Yes. Yes. Old age, old age is not for sissies.
Well that's a famous line for... I stole that from the internet probably.
It's Bette Davis who said that.
I was gonna say, yeah.
It could be the title of Le Paradis des Fous.
It could. Old age is not for sissies. But I would probably have to convert it in some way so that it didn't bespeak Bette Davis.
what what what film was that in well maybe she just talked maybe she just said it about herself yeah yeah yeah but it's it's it's a that's a very famous line in america um one last one but i only have it in in french so i'm going to translate the translation okay mankind doesn't lose anything when a writer decides to shut up
well i'm sure i said that about myself absolutely it's in a weekend on michigan yeah i don't know the english title of this the sports uh the weekend in michigan is is is uh the sports writer uh the sports writer so the first frank bascom yes when i was when i was trying my best to persuade Olivier to take me seriously.
But you really think mankind loses nothing if a writer shuts his mouth?
No, I do think that. I think nothing is nothing. Nothing is not a loss. I, I, my, the epitaph which will go on my grave is nothing is enough.
Ah, I like it. But I mean, if writers are replaced by algorithms, mankind will lose something.
Something else comes along. See, I don't think that the imagination can be suppressed. I don't think that.
You're not afraid by artificial intelligence?
I'm wary of it. Of course, anybody has to be wary of it. But I put my faith in human beings. I really put my faith in human beings to dream what they dream, to wake up thinking what they wake up thinking, to go to sleep thinking what they go to sleep thinking, to wake up in the middle of the night in fear. I'd put my money on those people.
One last sentence by you. Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Yeah.
Where did you write that? It's a tough game.
It could have been in Be Mine.
It could have been.
It could have been.
But it isn't.
But you see, what you're finding...
In Canada.
What you're finding out is that... Given how I work in this kind of constitutive way, which is to say for me writing novels is more mosaical, it's putting together things that weren't together before, so it never is for me that one book has its own absolutely unique source, because the source is always me. Yeah, so it could be anyone. So I could put into books. And Fitzgerald used to do this, speaking as we were. He kept notebooks.
He had notebooks,
yeah. And when he would write a story and he didn't like it, he would take it apart and put things back in his notebook so that he could then use them again. Many things can go many places. If you're thinking at a high enough level, if you're thinking about things that are memorable and plausible and important, things can go many places.
When they were here, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, they were here in what's called La Villa Saint-Louis.
La Villa Saint-Louis.
Yes, and it belonged to the Murphys. They were friends with the Murphys.
The Americans. Yeah. One hundred years ago, yeah. He dedicated the...
Tender is the Night.
Yeah, Tender is the Night too. Sarah Murphy. Sarah and Gerald.
So they were here and Zelda told him he was a loser. They were always drinking, you know. She said, you're a loser. So he went to Jouan-les-Pins and saw a bar and got inside the bar, took a few drinks, and there was a band playing music. So he asked the band to come to this place. And then he... He locked the band inside his room and said, now you are my prisoners. You must play until the morning or I will never let you free. And he went to see Zélda and said, so you still believe I'm a loser?
i made this story i like that i like i like that story i like that story a lot i'm sure it didn't make any difference to her no but my my wife has never called me a loser that's why you're staying with her no i know that's why i'm staying staying with her because she's the most wonderful woman in the world but but even with that being true she also never called me a loser even when I was you never fight you never oh sure ah okay every every point on the compass we've traversed Yeah.
Why not?
For life.
We end with the questions about the books you prefer.
Okay,
come on. So, short answer.
It won't be hard.
Okay. A book that makes you cry.
The movie Goa by Walker Percy.
A book that makes you stop crying.
The movie go up by Walker Percy. Same.
So it's like you like sad and funny. Yes. A book to get bored.
I wouldn't finish a book. So plenty of books make me bored. I throw it across the room.
A book to show off in the street.
That's not what I would show off in the street. I try to have a pair of nice socks on.
Yes, you have to film the socks of Mr. Ford, the yellow socks.
So it wouldn't be a book, it would be the socks.
Yeah, you see, Tom Wolfe had a white suit. Richard Ford has yellow socks. They all have, you know.
I have a white suit too. Oh, you do? Yeah.
A book that makes you clever.
Alice Munro. Books about the stories of Alice Munro. I come away from Alice Munro's stories thinking like a character in her books, which means to me that the stories have had a profound effect on what I can think. How my life, how my mind can open up beyond its normal. Beyond its normal boundaries.
That's the goal of every writer is to create this.
Absolutely. And that's another Nobel jury that got it right.
Yeah. A book to seduce.
Well, I've never seduced anything or anybody, so I don't know anything about that.
Such a liar. A book I regret having read.
Nothing. I don't do my... I know so little about regret that there is no book that I regret having read. None. Zero. If I read to the end of a book, because that's what a successful book is. A successful book is not a book the reader likes or dislikes. It's a book she or he reads to the end of. And if I read to the end of it, I have no regrets, because something has made me get there.
A book that you pretend you have finished.
I have nothing to gain from pretending I had finished it.
So, it never happened to you to say, oh, I love, I don't know, Under the Volcano, but you didn't finish it.
No, no, I would always say I loved Under the Volcano, but I did read all of it, all of what took me. Several chances. I would always say I didn't finish it, but I liked what I read I've got nothing as again. I've got nothing to gain from maybe that's what academics do There's a there's a famous line in academia in America. People will say Did you read such-and-such and somebody would say no and I know I haven't even taught it
The book I wish I had written?
There is no book that I wish I had written but the books that I did write. I couldn't possibly imagine, through the gauze of the greatest admiration, wanting to write a book that somebody else wrote. It would never occur to me.
Which is the worst book you've ever read in your life? Richard Ford.
Well, I guess I don't remember. Isn't that the ideal?
Yeah, it's better to forget it. And which book are you reading now?
I'm reading two books at the same time, because every once in a while it will start, one of them will start to bore me and I'll go to the other one. I'm reading the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. which is quite interesting. And I'm reading another famous American book called Giants in the Earth by a Norwegian man named Ole Rølvag. It's kind of one of those seminal books about Norwegians immigrating to America and going out into the steps of South Dakota and living until they perish. It's really one of those foundational books in American literature. So I'm reading those. And both of them, particularly the Olly Rollbag one, I started to read when I was 18 and never finished. So finally, I'm getting around at age 81.
Oh, it's the opposite. Yeah. 18 and 81.
Yeah.
Reverse. Strange. Thank you so much. And congratulations again for the F.
It's such a pleasure.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize. Well. mr ford it's an honor thank you very much pleasure to meet you this show was brought to you by the figaro tv and uh we thank of course the hotel belrive to host this wonderful award and to celebrate your genius well thank you my luck bye bye oh and don't forget read books or you will become idiots
You always say that. That's great.
Description
Je remercie l'hôtel Belles Rives de Juan les Pins et les éditions de l'Olivier pour cette conversation exceptionnelle avec l'un des plus grands romanciers américains : Richard Ford, 81 ans.
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Transcription
Good afternoon, Mr. Richard Ford.
Good afternoon. It is a good afternoon. It is? Yes, it is.
Welcome to a conversation not at La Pérouse. Usually I talk with writers in a restaurant in Paris. But today it's a conversation at Hotel Belle Rive.
Couldn't be better.
Impossible. You received the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award the same year in... 1996.
Yes, when I was a child.
Yes, exactly. And also the Prix Femina Etranger in Paris. Yes. Later on. Yes. When I was a teenager. And now, the Scott Fitzgerald Prize in Le Cap d'Antibes. So my question is very simple. When will you stop stealing prizes from other authors?
Well, you know. Writing books is not a competition.
But you win all the time.
No, not all the time. I would happily win all the time. But no, other people write wonderful books and they win sometimes. Everybody who is a writer does better when someone does well. When someone wins a prize, we are all encouraged. We all have something wonderful to read. We were happy for our friend. We might wish in our heart of hearts that we could win that prize that day. But no, at least in America, we're not competitors about writing books.
That's maybe the only thing, the only place where you are not competitors.
It could be true. It could be true. But art, and art in general, I think, always succeeds when someone does it very well. that means by succeeding I mean that other people feel encouraged. I mean, you know, Fitzgerald himself is very famous for having said, I cannot do well unless my competitor does poorly. That's not true. That's just not true.
So Fitzgerald was living here with his wife Zelda 100 years ago exactly, in 1925. And they were fighting all the time, yelling at each other. drinking too much. And well, I wonder, is it a big influence on you? Yes. This author and this way of...
Absolutely. It has influenced me not to drink all the time, not to fight with my wife.
You're married for 61 years.
I'm together with my wife 61 years. Yeah. Not to have children who are a little hostages to fortune. So, you know. Yeah, I learned a lot. I remember when, before Christina and I were married, I had read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, who Fitzgerald was a temporary of and a competitor with. And then he's both. And Hemingway married this wonderful girl named Hadley. And then they didn't live together so long, but then he divorced her. And he thought all of his life. that that was the greatest mistake he ever made which was divorcing his first love i told my wife i said you are my first love i will live with you forever but many people say it but don't do it well i've done it congratulations well no no no congratulate me absolutely but um because i'm smart enough not to ruin it you know but i i think it's the I think it's the best possible outcome. I suspect that most people get divorced and think to themselves, at some remote moment in three o'clock in the morning, what did I, why did I go wrong? What did I do that messed up this wonderful thing that started so well?
But you know your hero, Frank Baskin, who is the main character of five beautiful of your novels, A Weekend in Michigan in 1986, Independence in 1995, The State of the Place in 2006, In All Franchises in 2014,
and The Paradise of the Madmen in 2013. Yes, a bunch of books.
Olivier, Frank, the hero of this book, was divorced.
Yes.
Many times.
No, only divorced once, but had another love that he left to become a nun. The worst possible outcome for a marriage, right? I live with you, I'm married to you, and what I'm going to do is leave and become a nun? That would be terrible.
So you decided to write about a guy who divorces because you didn't do it and you want to know what happens.
Sometimes you write about the things that scare you the most. And divorce was something that I just couldn't imagine. My parents did not divorce. My wife's parents did divorce. And I think we both of us learned a lesson about that, about what the best outcome is.
Let's go back to Fitzgerald because you received this prize.
Yes, and I know a lot about Fitzgerald.
He's asking in the crack up, he's asking himself the same question that Frank is asking at the beginning of Le Paradis des Fruits. He's asking, yeah, and now what do we do? You know, in the crack up he says, what was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the womb of time. I never understood what it means, the womb of time.
The womb of time. Well, I... He probably means the oubliet of time.
Oui, oui.
Oubliette of time. Oui,
oui, oui.
The womb of time.
So you begin your novel by asking this question. I don't quote exactly, but it's like, what the fuck are we doing here?
Yes. Well, that's not a bad premise for any novel, you know, if you can write about that subject, which everybody experiences, and be smart and write something that's... that's worth reading. Anybody who reads novels, particularly literary novels, would like to know the answer to that. I mean, readers have conversations with books. They don't just read the book and say, okay, now I know, now I understand, now I understand. They read the book and they say, oh, that's bullshit. Or they say, no, I reject that. Or no, maybe that's right. So if you can engage a readership about a subject that they completely understand to be worth the time, worth the thinking. then maybe you have a chance to read to the end.
Yes, but this question, what are we doing here? This question, does it have an answer?
Well, it has an answer in an Augustinian sense, that happiness If that's what you want to be, if you want to be happy, and I do, most of us do, happiness is, in Augustine's view, is the absence of unhappiness. So what are we doing here? We're trying to do as little harm as we can.
To ourselves and others. Yes.
Yeah. And along the way, trying to find a vocabulary, and it's often just a matter of choosing words, trying to find a vocabulary for what we are doing that makes us feel that what we are doing is worth our life.
Again back to Fitzgerald, what role did he play in your life and your work?
He played a lot of roles really. He's very smart. And if you read a book like The Beautiful and Damned, The Beautiful and Damned, in a way, he's too smart. He can't let any subject go. He's obsessed with being smart on the page. And that taught me a lot. It taught me that that's what readers of serious books want to find. They want to find something said about life that they haven't thought of and that seems appropriate to the moment and that gives them something that they didn't have before. And that set for me a goal early on when I was teaching at Columbia for years. That's what I was always... I used to teach a course called being smart on the page. That's what I was always trying to encourage my students to do. Be smart on the page. Because you do it for the reader. You don't write books for yourself. You write books for somebody else who will read them, who you don't know. So that was one thing. The business with the marriage was certainly another. The negative influence. And he was so young. He was like Keats in a way. He was so young and so smart.
And he died when he was 44.
And he only wrote four or five books, not very many. And I just thought to myself, well, I'm already five years older than he is when I start, you know. But it encouraged me to think that somebody that young from the Middle West, even though he went to Princeton, good school, I talked there. He was just natively smart. And, because he didn't learn, he didn't learn to be smart, he was smart. He learned to be smart by Only by observing and participating and empathizing, although he didn't seem a very empathetic man, I think he was very empathetic. So that's what I learned. I learned to pay attention.
And also maybe your narrator, Frank Bascombe, in five of your books, looks a little bit like the narrator of The Last Tycoon or the narrator of Tender in the Night, you know, desperate but funny.
I never think of Frank as desperate. Desperate to me is too extreme. I think Frank is...
Melancholic?
Well, sometimes. I mean, there are plenty of things in life to be melancholic about. Your son is dying. You don't like your daughter very much. Your other son has already died. Your first wife has died. So there's a lot not to relish.
But... Strong has a sad life. I mean, he was not very lucky.
Well.
He lost two sons.
If you live long enough. Yeah,
that's what happens.
You're going to experience all of that. Yeah. So it's not unusual. I mean, it's not unusual to have people that you love pass away. My father died in my arms.
When you were 16. Yeah.
My mother, I adored my mother. She only lived to 71. So loss is something we all.
have to get used to not not like but find a way beyond that's the that's the story the subject of yes it is this book la la le paradis de fou is the story of frank bascombe who um travels with his dying son dying son yes goes from minnesota to mount rushmore yes and they experience meet people and describe. Yes. The America of today?
Yes, I think so. And they laugh about it. And they make you laugh about it. But it's also about, because his son is going to die. I don't write books that I mind giving away the end of. It's okay. It's not about plot.
No, there is no surprise. He's very, very ill.
His son dies. His son dies from a disease that you do not recover from, what we call amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
From Maladie Charcot. From the beginning we know that. Yes.
And so Frank's mission is to take his son as far as he can, and then to take himself beyond that. as far as he can. That's why it ends the way it ends.
And you said before you wrote about divorce because you didn't do it. So you write this beautiful novel about fatherhood, about a son and a father, and you didn't have any children.
No. But a lot of my friends have children, and I'm paying attention to how they get along. And I was a child, and I have preserved as much of being a child in my adult life as I possibly can. I think there's nothing wrong with being childish, nothing wrong with being youthful. It's okay. I mean, it's worse to be old and not youthful and not surprising yourself, you know? No, sure. So, you know, I'll tell you, Frederic, nothing I do is hard.
It looks easy, but I'm sure it's not too bad.
The idea is to make it look easy, but if anybody who is a novelist tells you, oh, what I do is very hard, hold on to your wallet.
Yeah, when you... When I read this book, I was moved, deeply moved all the time because it's very sad. It's about a father who's going to lose his son. Yes. So it's very emotional. Yes. But you do it with lightness and always funny scenes, you know, weird places. Yes. Weird people. And you describe an America that is very... strange and lonely. People are in shopping centers. Yes,
huge. America is enormous. I heard President Netanyahu say today that Israel is the size of New Jersey. America is 50 New Jersey's. And so it's huge and it is underpopulated for the most part. So if you travel out into the middle of it, which I do all the time, I drive across the country twice a year, what you are encountering are large empty spaces. And with people every once in a while living on those empty spaces, I don't think they're sad. And I don't even know if they're lonely. There's a difference, at least in English, between being solitary and being lonely. Lonely is to suffer from being solitary.
But at one point, they are walking together, Frank and Paul, his son. They talk together. Yes. And you say they are the only ones talking together in a crowd of lonely people.
Yes, in a mall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Like they're strange because they talk to each other.
Yes. But how many times have I sat in restaurants and seen a man and a woman sitting across from each other saying nothing? My wife and I, we chatter all the time. And so I think they're lacking in imagination. They're afraid of self-revelation. They're afraid of intimacy. You know, we use books. The way readers like books is that they find them to be useful. And I would like to write books that would be useful in the way that would encourage people, when they sit across from their wives, to say something, to hear something.
Have you read French novelists? Maybe, I don't know, Sartre, Camus?
All of them.
All of them?
In English. I read them in translation. I could read them in French now probably, but I read them in translation. Consequently, I read them in college when I was in university. Consequently, because I read them in English, it's very useful to read books in translation because their Frenchness. become secondary. It was as if Camus was an American, or as if Sartre was an American. And that's a way of taking it in, you know. I don't have to use the barrier of his Frenchness to block me from trying to find things that he says that are about my life.
Because there is a tone that could be a little bit existentialist, you know.
I'm sure.
In your writing.
I'm sure.
I'm trying to make you…
Jokka katt.
I'm trying to make you…
Well, make me Danish.
Yes, Danish. In the beginning, it's in the snow in Minnesota. Yes. It's snowing everywhere.
Yes. At the beginning of one of my favorite books, which is called The Movie Gore. It's a little epigram from Kierkegaard. And the Kierkegaard is, the worst thing about despair is that it doesn't know it's despair. Mm. I don't know if that's the worst thing. I don't know what you get when, if you are in despair, you think you are in despair. I think it might be better if you didn't know.
If you don't know it's better.
Kierkegaard said it was the worst thing. I don't know what Sartre would say about that.
Probably the same. Probably the same. So the title, so the title in English is Be Mine. Yes. Sois à moi. Yes. And in the Jose Camus, an excellent translator, she chose Le Paradis des Fous. Yes. And it's a quote by you said by Emerson. Yes.
There's a famous quote by Emerson in one of his essays in which he said, Traveling is a fool's paradise. And what he means by that is that when you travel, You're foolish to think you're going to get away from yourself, that you're going to vacate yourself. He also says elsewhere in a different essay, he said, I carry my giant with me wherever I go, which is to say myself. my burdensome self. Yeah.
But it's interesting because in many, many American novels, they travel since Moby Dick and Jack Kerouac and... Yeah,
yeah. On the road, of course.
Because you have a big country.
You have a big country and people do it all the time. But it's also as a literary device. It's a very fruitful literary device because... The landscape is always changing, so that gives you something to write about. There is the presumption in a voyage that something along the way is going to change, that the result of the voyage from beginning to end will be the evolution or the devolution or the maturation of something going on. Now, whether that actually is true in life, I don't know. I mean, I just the other day drove from Montana. to Maine because those are the two places I live. How many? 2600 miles, 2600, not kilometers.
So it's like 40,000 kilometers.
I don't think I was any different when I got to the end from how I was when I started.
That's why it's a fool's paradise.
Yes, to think you're going to outrun yourself. Of course, yeah. I think that's what he means. And in fact, I think Frank understands that. I mean, I shouldn't say, I think Frank understands it. Frank understands it. I wrote it.
So you control Frank?
Completely.
Ah, okay,
yeah.
Yeah. Why do you always go back to Frank Bascombe, this character? Is it like an appointment with an old friend?
Destiny, appointment in Samara? Maybe so. I don't know. Because to be able to use language to make his voice frees me to put into the book anything I want to put into the book because I have found that his voice and his... putative intelligence are limitless. There's nothing that I can dream up that I can't make him say or think or do. And that's such a lenience for a novelist. I mean, when you're struggling with different characters in every book, you're continually trying to fit what you know and fit what you want to say into something plausible that your character can think or feel.
or say for me frank was always able to be completely available to me for anything is it because he started like you working as a journalist in a sport magazine no no
i i don't think he's like me i think that that the degree to which he and i are alike is a failure of mine I think whenever I come across something that Frank says or thinks. I think to myself, oh, you're not doing this well enough. Because he's agreeing with you. He's saying what you think. I think I ought to be able to dream up something better than what I already know.
So you want him to be really different from yourself. Yes. This is different than French writers. French writers, most of them have alter egos.
Oh. Well, maybe I don't know what an alter ego is. Maybe I don't. But no, I was always thinking that, you know, T.S. Eliot said that we don't write to express ourselves. We write to get away from ourselves. But that's also what Marcel Duchamp said. I make these things, I make these ready-mades that he built in the 20s to vacate my personality. I use my personality to vacate my personality. So I think... And when you do get away from your personality, or when you're writing about children and you've never had children, you're free to write whatever you want. And that's what we're all looking for, freedom.
What do you think Frank would say about the Fitzgerald Prize? I have a suggestion.
Okay, tell me.
He might say...
So I can agree.
No, no, you can, no, you're allowed to disagree. He might say, why this bunch of French journalists give prices to American writers?
No, because, well, maybe he would say that, but then I would have to write that for him to say it. But for me, I think to myself, isn't it a miracle that you can sit in your little boathouse in Maine and write these sentences in English? which get translated into French and that French readers read. To me that's just a miracle. And what it means to me is that literature is useful in all cultures. Literature is one of those things that can cross nation-state boundaries and find a use and find a place. So I would be much more optimistic, much less sarcastic about that than Frank would be.
In the book you say we are happy after 70 years old or before 30 years old. But between it's...
He's quoting statistics there.
Oh,
really? Yeah.
People are unhappy from 30...
Typically, typically they... No, not unhappy. Just typically, statistically, demographically, people after they reach 30, they kind of typically... become slightly less satisfied. Not unhappy. Unhappy is something else. But then when they get to be older, And they've done a lot of things and made a lot of mistakes and still find themselves alive. They find that they feel better about life. Just to have survived and just to have learned something.
Yeah. Maybe that's the real hidden subject of this book. It's two guys who should be very, very sad and finally are quite... Not happy, but they...
Well, they are together.
Yes, they're together. They're not suffering all the time. No. Not complaining all the time.
And what would you mean if you had a fatal disease and you were 42 years old? What would you do? And you could, you know, who knows? But what I would think I would write about if I were going to write about it, I would say... I would try to make a joke out of it. And I've read lots of books about people who have amyotropic lateral sclerosis. And remarkably enough, that death sentence, which they're getting... does not make them unhappy. I mean, it may be in their heart of hearts they wish that they didn't have it. Or maybe they wish they could live much longer. But they find ways to think about now is now. I'm alive today. I can listen to this music. I can look at that mountain. I can hear this someone tell me they love me.
So to enjoy life, you have to be sick.
Maybe.
That's a philosophy.
That's very French.
What do you think of politically correctness? There's a scene in the book where they go to the cinema and there is a demonstration of feminists and they don't, they're not allowed to see a movie about Al Capone because Al Capone is a very bad guy. Yes.
Mean to women.
to women. Is there a risk of self-censorship now in American literature?
Well, I can only gauge that from what my students at Columbia have said to me. And at least in the last eight years...
Because your teacher at Columbia... ...was,
until just two years ago. They were hesitant. They were hesitant to believe that they could write about anything they wanted to write about. They were hesitant to believe that they could use the language... as freely as the language can be used. They were hesitant to have certain kinds of thoughts that they harbored but didn't want to put on the page. And I just always tried to tell them, no one can stop you from doing this. Do what you want to do. Do what you want and that you can call good, that you can call excellent. And if you can call it excellent, then do it. I mean, the idea is not to always to comfort people. The idea is not always to support or corroborate what they already think. Sometimes the object is to get in their face. Sometimes the object is to outrage them. There is a kind of culture in the United States of reluctance about surprising or outraging or... Provoking. Provoking people. But that's what literature has always been for. Madame Bovary?
Of course. Big scandal. Yeah. Yes, the flower of evil makes scandals. Right, exactly. But don't you feel there's a kind of danger with this evolution of, you know, less and less freedom of writing?
Well, first of all, danger. Writing books is an indoor sport.
Yeah, of course, it's not dangerous.
It's not war, right?
It's not dangerous, but you can be canceled.
Yes, well you can live beyond being cancelled. You can be cancelled and write another book.
You would be happy to be cancelled?
No. I've had my dealings with being cancelled. It wasn't fun. You did have that? Well, we don't have to talk about that.
Okay.
But I survived. Here I am, winning this prize, winning this beautiful place. Somehow or another I survived it.
Oh, okay. And did you have your publisher asking you to get a sensitivity reader?
Absolutely. Yes? In America, not in France.
No, but here, this book was read by somebody who checked.
Every book for the last five, six years has been sensitivity checked.
But it's a very bad reader because you left many provocative things.
I tried to. But I remember four or five years ago, I wrote a book in which...
There was a casino, which in America means a place to gamble. Same in France. Is it? And there are many casinos that are built on Indian reservations. And I was told by my editor that I could not use the word Indian, that I had to say Native American.
Ah, of course.
And so I said, well, I'm not going to say Native American because it has too many syllables. He said, I want a word that has three syllables, that it starts with an I, has an I in the middle, and ends with an N. And that only allows me Indian. And my editor said, and parenthetically, I said, look, they say they're Indians. I can say they're Indians. He said, no, they can say it. You can't.
You can't.
But I did.
And he published it?
He did. He didn't…
Okay.
He told me that the book in which the word Indian occurred was his least favorite book in the story collection. I said, well, there has to be one that you don't like, right.
Now I have the question from Eric Neuf, a French literary critic. He's asking you…
It's probably going to be difficult.
It's a difficult one, yes. Okay. this is a strange guy What heads would you choose if you were to build a Mount Rushmore with only writers? So which heads would you sculpt in the mountain?
Faulkner.
I don't want to influence you but...
Richard Wright. Richard Wright. And these are the only ones. Unfortunately when you say which heads would you choose, it would have to be a big mountain for me. So I would... Mount Rushmore,
how many heads are there? Five? Four?
I don't remember. I should know. Five. Who cares? Not Trump. Not Trump. I went to Mount Rushmore when Trump was there. And I know he was looking at... at the real estate, just trying to see if there would be a place on the mountain that his ugly face could be. But I don't know. I mean, I'm not a person who looks at the world with a pinnacle on it. I'm a person who looks at the world that way. So there's lots more room on that plane than there is on that triangle, you know, so people falling off the triangle.
And so we started like you said, there's no competition in art.
No, so I don't know. I mean, I would put a lot of people on there. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor. I would put Virginia Woolf. I would put Flaubert.
At least one French.
I would put Dostoevsky. I would put Modiano.
Modiano on Mount Rushmore.
Absolutely. I think… Yes,
I agree.
That's one time the Nobel jury got it right. Yes,
I agree. So what do you prefer, finally, make people laugh or make them cry? In this book you do both.
I would prefer to do both because I think if nothing's funny, nothing's serious. And so I want to make them laugh, but I want to make them cry. Because I'm, truthfully, when I get to the end of writing a book like this book, if I don't cry in my room by myself, I think something's wrong. I think I've missed something somewhere. So I want to make myself cry, not just for trivial reasons, but I make myself laugh all the time. So, both. And I have no time limits. I can take as long as I want to do the things I want to do, so I can do both.
Did you try ChatGPT? Because I asked AI to write me some questions for this interview.
You did?
And yeah, I asked, please give me questions for Richard Forb. And they were all completely stupid and- Nonsensical? Yes, really, really bad. So I had to work.
They were all silly questions?
Like, for example, I tell you one. To write a novel, what is the most useful, imagination or memory? This is a question by a computer.
Well, that's not such a bad question. No. Updike, one of my heroes, I would put him on Mount Rushmore also. Updike says in a wonderful little essay that the halls of memory and the halls of imagination run side by side.
maybe ai knows something nabokov said the same nabokov says imagination is is a sort of memory yes yeah form of memory and i i often i often confuse them i
often confuse as memory something i've imagined
Or the opposite.
Yes, or the opposite.
You think you invent something, but you're just remembering.
That's exactly right. Yeah. Or something I've actually read. Yeah. Or shared.
So... Now we go to my famous game. I have a game in this show.
The questione méchante.
No, it's not. No, no. But it's difficult. I'm going to quote you. It's called Guess Your Quotes. Devin des citations. I'm going to read you sentences that you wrote. And you have to guess in which of your books you wrote this sentence.
Oh, you're asking the wrong person. You should ask that literary critic who you just quoted a moment ago. Why should I be burdened with this?
People from Minnesota all say, yeah, nah.
Well, that's from Be Mine.
That's from the last one.
Yeah, no. They say, yeah, no.
They say, yeah, no?
Yeah, no.
What does it mean?
People, not just in Minnesota, people in Ireland say it also. What they mean is, yes, I understand, and the answer is no.
Ah, okay. Because in Normandy, here in France, we have tête-bainque oui, tête-bainque non.
Takes too long, no?
It's long. It's like maybe yes, maybe no. It's like you don't want to decide.
Qui ça si, qui ça non. I see. In Mexico.
So this one from the last one, another sentence by you. Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
Well, I can only think that that would be from Canada.
It's from Canada. You remember your books. So in which category are you? The one who wants to be a bank president or to rob banks?
I'd rather rob banks.
When you were young, you were a little bit gangster.
Well, no, I was just a little criminal. I wasn't a gangster. I mean, gangster now means something different. I was just a little petty criminal.
You were not violent, but you were robbing houses.
Breaking into houses, breaking into houses with a couple of my friends. We didn't constitute a gang. We were just three feckless little... Trivial children, but we broke into houses and stole cars and told cars. Yeah, and Yeah, we did that no and we got caught and put in jail so okay Oh you my mother my mother got me out. Ah, it was the it was the it was the year my father died and After my mother Took me to court She took me outside the courthouse and she said, she said, your father's dead. She said, I have to go to work. We don't have any income. She said, I cannot be getting you out of trouble anymore. And so I thought, that makes sense to me. I don't, I understand that. It was a moment in my life when my mother and I became colleagues.
And then you decide to become a writer.
Well, I had many other many other starts and many other false starts before that. Really, being a writer was the last thing I ever thought I would do. It's so preposterous, you know.
Yeah. Another sentence by you.
Yes.
You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
Gee whiz.
I love it, by the way, I love this. For me it's very interesting, this way of thinking.
Well, I believe that.
Yes.
It's one of those things that I wrote that I actually believe.
So you agree with yourself?
I agree with myself. But it could have been a lot of places. That line could have come up a lot of places, because that's the kind of thing I write about.
It's Canada.
About being bad and choosing not to be bad. I mean, if you're just good because it's easy. It's just good because...
No value. Yeah, it has no value.
But if you have a choice between doing bad which seems very attractive... And not doing that because it maybe harms fewer people?
Yeah.
Then you get credit for it.
Yeah, exactly. So this was in Canada, 2013.
But it could have been three or four other places too.
Another one. Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.
Well, that I don't believe. That's a good question that I don't believe. But again, that could have been in the Womanizer.
It's in Wildlife.
Wildlife. 1990. 1990. Long time ago. But again, I don't want to talk as if I'm talking about someone. Not myself. But that's the kind of line that I would have in my notebook. And I would just stick it into a story somewhere. Because I think it's such a provocative line. And that's what you're always trying to do when you work out of your notebook. You're trying to find places for these provocative lines that you have saved. I mean, I always keep my notebook with me. It's just in case I say something provocative, I'll write it down. Or if you do, I steal from you. Ah,
no, I write myself.
Of course we do. We all do that.
Another one. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I like it.
I could have said it about myself. Because I do like to fight. It's a trap. It's a trap. Yeah.
It's not in a book. You said that in an interview.
I was going to say, it sounds like me talking about me. Yeah.
It's in an interview by Transfuge magazine. Yeah. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight. It's like, you know, a famous sentence, if you want peace, prepare war.
Yeah.
That's the same. Yes. Yes. Old age, old age is not for sissies.
Well that's a famous line for... I stole that from the internet probably.
It's Bette Davis who said that.
I was gonna say, yeah.
It could be the title of Le Paradis des Fous.
It could. Old age is not for sissies. But I would probably have to convert it in some way so that it didn't bespeak Bette Davis.
what what what film was that in well maybe she just talked maybe she just said it about herself yeah yeah yeah but it's it's it's a that's a very famous line in america um one last one but i only have it in in french so i'm going to translate the translation okay mankind doesn't lose anything when a writer decides to shut up
well i'm sure i said that about myself absolutely it's in a weekend on michigan yeah i don't know the english title of this the sports uh the weekend in michigan is is is uh the sports writer uh the sports writer so the first frank bascom yes when i was when i was trying my best to persuade Olivier to take me seriously.
But you really think mankind loses nothing if a writer shuts his mouth?
No, I do think that. I think nothing is nothing. Nothing is not a loss. I, I, my, the epitaph which will go on my grave is nothing is enough.
Ah, I like it. But I mean, if writers are replaced by algorithms, mankind will lose something.
Something else comes along. See, I don't think that the imagination can be suppressed. I don't think that.
You're not afraid by artificial intelligence?
I'm wary of it. Of course, anybody has to be wary of it. But I put my faith in human beings. I really put my faith in human beings to dream what they dream, to wake up thinking what they wake up thinking, to go to sleep thinking what they go to sleep thinking, to wake up in the middle of the night in fear. I'd put my money on those people.
One last sentence by you. Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Yeah.
Where did you write that? It's a tough game.
It could have been in Be Mine.
It could have been.
It could have been.
But it isn't.
But you see, what you're finding...
In Canada.
What you're finding out is that... Given how I work in this kind of constitutive way, which is to say for me writing novels is more mosaical, it's putting together things that weren't together before, so it never is for me that one book has its own absolutely unique source, because the source is always me. Yeah, so it could be anyone. So I could put into books. And Fitzgerald used to do this, speaking as we were. He kept notebooks.
He had notebooks,
yeah. And when he would write a story and he didn't like it, he would take it apart and put things back in his notebook so that he could then use them again. Many things can go many places. If you're thinking at a high enough level, if you're thinking about things that are memorable and plausible and important, things can go many places.
When they were here, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, they were here in what's called La Villa Saint-Louis.
La Villa Saint-Louis.
Yes, and it belonged to the Murphys. They were friends with the Murphys.
The Americans. Yeah. One hundred years ago, yeah. He dedicated the...
Tender is the Night.
Yeah, Tender is the Night too. Sarah Murphy. Sarah and Gerald.
So they were here and Zelda told him he was a loser. They were always drinking, you know. She said, you're a loser. So he went to Jouan-les-Pins and saw a bar and got inside the bar, took a few drinks, and there was a band playing music. So he asked the band to come to this place. And then he... He locked the band inside his room and said, now you are my prisoners. You must play until the morning or I will never let you free. And he went to see Zélda and said, so you still believe I'm a loser?
i made this story i like that i like i like that story i like that story a lot i'm sure it didn't make any difference to her no but my my wife has never called me a loser that's why you're staying with her no i know that's why i'm staying staying with her because she's the most wonderful woman in the world but but even with that being true she also never called me a loser even when I was you never fight you never oh sure ah okay every every point on the compass we've traversed Yeah.
Why not?
For life.
We end with the questions about the books you prefer.
Okay,
come on. So, short answer.
It won't be hard.
Okay. A book that makes you cry.
The movie Goa by Walker Percy.
A book that makes you stop crying.
The movie go up by Walker Percy. Same.
So it's like you like sad and funny. Yes. A book to get bored.
I wouldn't finish a book. So plenty of books make me bored. I throw it across the room.
A book to show off in the street.
That's not what I would show off in the street. I try to have a pair of nice socks on.
Yes, you have to film the socks of Mr. Ford, the yellow socks.
So it wouldn't be a book, it would be the socks.
Yeah, you see, Tom Wolfe had a white suit. Richard Ford has yellow socks. They all have, you know.
I have a white suit too. Oh, you do? Yeah.
A book that makes you clever.
Alice Munro. Books about the stories of Alice Munro. I come away from Alice Munro's stories thinking like a character in her books, which means to me that the stories have had a profound effect on what I can think. How my life, how my mind can open up beyond its normal. Beyond its normal boundaries.
That's the goal of every writer is to create this.
Absolutely. And that's another Nobel jury that got it right.
Yeah. A book to seduce.
Well, I've never seduced anything or anybody, so I don't know anything about that.
Such a liar. A book I regret having read.
Nothing. I don't do my... I know so little about regret that there is no book that I regret having read. None. Zero. If I read to the end of a book, because that's what a successful book is. A successful book is not a book the reader likes or dislikes. It's a book she or he reads to the end of. And if I read to the end of it, I have no regrets, because something has made me get there.
A book that you pretend you have finished.
I have nothing to gain from pretending I had finished it.
So, it never happened to you to say, oh, I love, I don't know, Under the Volcano, but you didn't finish it.
No, no, I would always say I loved Under the Volcano, but I did read all of it, all of what took me. Several chances. I would always say I didn't finish it, but I liked what I read I've got nothing as again. I've got nothing to gain from maybe that's what academics do There's a there's a famous line in academia in America. People will say Did you read such-and-such and somebody would say no and I know I haven't even taught it
The book I wish I had written?
There is no book that I wish I had written but the books that I did write. I couldn't possibly imagine, through the gauze of the greatest admiration, wanting to write a book that somebody else wrote. It would never occur to me.
Which is the worst book you've ever read in your life? Richard Ford.
Well, I guess I don't remember. Isn't that the ideal?
Yeah, it's better to forget it. And which book are you reading now?
I'm reading two books at the same time, because every once in a while it will start, one of them will start to bore me and I'll go to the other one. I'm reading the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. which is quite interesting. And I'm reading another famous American book called Giants in the Earth by a Norwegian man named Ole Rølvag. It's kind of one of those seminal books about Norwegians immigrating to America and going out into the steps of South Dakota and living until they perish. It's really one of those foundational books in American literature. So I'm reading those. And both of them, particularly the Olly Rollbag one, I started to read when I was 18 and never finished. So finally, I'm getting around at age 81.
Oh, it's the opposite. Yeah. 18 and 81.
Yeah.
Reverse. Strange. Thank you so much. And congratulations again for the F.
It's such a pleasure.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize. Well. mr ford it's an honor thank you very much pleasure to meet you this show was brought to you by the figaro tv and uh we thank of course the hotel belrive to host this wonderful award and to celebrate your genius well thank you my luck bye bye oh and don't forget read books or you will become idiots
You always say that. That's great.
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Description
Je remercie l'hôtel Belles Rives de Juan les Pins et les éditions de l'Olivier pour cette conversation exceptionnelle avec l'un des plus grands romanciers américains : Richard Ford, 81 ans.
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Transcription
Good afternoon, Mr. Richard Ford.
Good afternoon. It is a good afternoon. It is? Yes, it is.
Welcome to a conversation not at La Pérouse. Usually I talk with writers in a restaurant in Paris. But today it's a conversation at Hotel Belle Rive.
Couldn't be better.
Impossible. You received the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award the same year in... 1996.
Yes, when I was a child.
Yes, exactly. And also the Prix Femina Etranger in Paris. Yes. Later on. Yes. When I was a teenager. And now, the Scott Fitzgerald Prize in Le Cap d'Antibes. So my question is very simple. When will you stop stealing prizes from other authors?
Well, you know. Writing books is not a competition.
But you win all the time.
No, not all the time. I would happily win all the time. But no, other people write wonderful books and they win sometimes. Everybody who is a writer does better when someone does well. When someone wins a prize, we are all encouraged. We all have something wonderful to read. We were happy for our friend. We might wish in our heart of hearts that we could win that prize that day. But no, at least in America, we're not competitors about writing books.
That's maybe the only thing, the only place where you are not competitors.
It could be true. It could be true. But art, and art in general, I think, always succeeds when someone does it very well. that means by succeeding I mean that other people feel encouraged. I mean, you know, Fitzgerald himself is very famous for having said, I cannot do well unless my competitor does poorly. That's not true. That's just not true.
So Fitzgerald was living here with his wife Zelda 100 years ago exactly, in 1925. And they were fighting all the time, yelling at each other. drinking too much. And well, I wonder, is it a big influence on you? Yes. This author and this way of...
Absolutely. It has influenced me not to drink all the time, not to fight with my wife.
You're married for 61 years.
I'm together with my wife 61 years. Yeah. Not to have children who are a little hostages to fortune. So, you know. Yeah, I learned a lot. I remember when, before Christina and I were married, I had read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, who Fitzgerald was a temporary of and a competitor with. And then he's both. And Hemingway married this wonderful girl named Hadley. And then they didn't live together so long, but then he divorced her. And he thought all of his life. that that was the greatest mistake he ever made which was divorcing his first love i told my wife i said you are my first love i will live with you forever but many people say it but don't do it well i've done it congratulations well no no no congratulate me absolutely but um because i'm smart enough not to ruin it you know but i i think it's the I think it's the best possible outcome. I suspect that most people get divorced and think to themselves, at some remote moment in three o'clock in the morning, what did I, why did I go wrong? What did I do that messed up this wonderful thing that started so well?
But you know your hero, Frank Baskin, who is the main character of five beautiful of your novels, A Weekend in Michigan in 1986, Independence in 1995, The State of the Place in 2006, In All Franchises in 2014,
and The Paradise of the Madmen in 2013. Yes, a bunch of books.
Olivier, Frank, the hero of this book, was divorced.
Yes.
Many times.
No, only divorced once, but had another love that he left to become a nun. The worst possible outcome for a marriage, right? I live with you, I'm married to you, and what I'm going to do is leave and become a nun? That would be terrible.
So you decided to write about a guy who divorces because you didn't do it and you want to know what happens.
Sometimes you write about the things that scare you the most. And divorce was something that I just couldn't imagine. My parents did not divorce. My wife's parents did divorce. And I think we both of us learned a lesson about that, about what the best outcome is.
Let's go back to Fitzgerald because you received this prize.
Yes, and I know a lot about Fitzgerald.
He's asking in the crack up, he's asking himself the same question that Frank is asking at the beginning of Le Paradis des Fruits. He's asking, yeah, and now what do we do? You know, in the crack up he says, what was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the womb of time. I never understood what it means, the womb of time.
The womb of time. Well, I... He probably means the oubliet of time.
Oui, oui.
Oubliette of time. Oui,
oui, oui.
The womb of time.
So you begin your novel by asking this question. I don't quote exactly, but it's like, what the fuck are we doing here?
Yes. Well, that's not a bad premise for any novel, you know, if you can write about that subject, which everybody experiences, and be smart and write something that's... that's worth reading. Anybody who reads novels, particularly literary novels, would like to know the answer to that. I mean, readers have conversations with books. They don't just read the book and say, okay, now I know, now I understand, now I understand. They read the book and they say, oh, that's bullshit. Or they say, no, I reject that. Or no, maybe that's right. So if you can engage a readership about a subject that they completely understand to be worth the time, worth the thinking. then maybe you have a chance to read to the end.
Yes, but this question, what are we doing here? This question, does it have an answer?
Well, it has an answer in an Augustinian sense, that happiness If that's what you want to be, if you want to be happy, and I do, most of us do, happiness is, in Augustine's view, is the absence of unhappiness. So what are we doing here? We're trying to do as little harm as we can.
To ourselves and others. Yes.
Yeah. And along the way, trying to find a vocabulary, and it's often just a matter of choosing words, trying to find a vocabulary for what we are doing that makes us feel that what we are doing is worth our life.
Again back to Fitzgerald, what role did he play in your life and your work?
He played a lot of roles really. He's very smart. And if you read a book like The Beautiful and Damned, The Beautiful and Damned, in a way, he's too smart. He can't let any subject go. He's obsessed with being smart on the page. And that taught me a lot. It taught me that that's what readers of serious books want to find. They want to find something said about life that they haven't thought of and that seems appropriate to the moment and that gives them something that they didn't have before. And that set for me a goal early on when I was teaching at Columbia for years. That's what I was always... I used to teach a course called being smart on the page. That's what I was always trying to encourage my students to do. Be smart on the page. Because you do it for the reader. You don't write books for yourself. You write books for somebody else who will read them, who you don't know. So that was one thing. The business with the marriage was certainly another. The negative influence. And he was so young. He was like Keats in a way. He was so young and so smart.
And he died when he was 44.
And he only wrote four or five books, not very many. And I just thought to myself, well, I'm already five years older than he is when I start, you know. But it encouraged me to think that somebody that young from the Middle West, even though he went to Princeton, good school, I talked there. He was just natively smart. And, because he didn't learn, he didn't learn to be smart, he was smart. He learned to be smart by Only by observing and participating and empathizing, although he didn't seem a very empathetic man, I think he was very empathetic. So that's what I learned. I learned to pay attention.
And also maybe your narrator, Frank Bascombe, in five of your books, looks a little bit like the narrator of The Last Tycoon or the narrator of Tender in the Night, you know, desperate but funny.
I never think of Frank as desperate. Desperate to me is too extreme. I think Frank is...
Melancholic?
Well, sometimes. I mean, there are plenty of things in life to be melancholic about. Your son is dying. You don't like your daughter very much. Your other son has already died. Your first wife has died. So there's a lot not to relish.
But... Strong has a sad life. I mean, he was not very lucky.
Well.
He lost two sons.
If you live long enough. Yeah,
that's what happens.
You're going to experience all of that. Yeah. So it's not unusual. I mean, it's not unusual to have people that you love pass away. My father died in my arms.
When you were 16. Yeah.
My mother, I adored my mother. She only lived to 71. So loss is something we all.
have to get used to not not like but find a way beyond that's the that's the story the subject of yes it is this book la la le paradis de fou is the story of frank bascombe who um travels with his dying son dying son yes goes from minnesota to mount rushmore yes and they experience meet people and describe. Yes. The America of today?
Yes, I think so. And they laugh about it. And they make you laugh about it. But it's also about, because his son is going to die. I don't write books that I mind giving away the end of. It's okay. It's not about plot.
No, there is no surprise. He's very, very ill.
His son dies. His son dies from a disease that you do not recover from, what we call amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
From Maladie Charcot. From the beginning we know that. Yes.
And so Frank's mission is to take his son as far as he can, and then to take himself beyond that. as far as he can. That's why it ends the way it ends.
And you said before you wrote about divorce because you didn't do it. So you write this beautiful novel about fatherhood, about a son and a father, and you didn't have any children.
No. But a lot of my friends have children, and I'm paying attention to how they get along. And I was a child, and I have preserved as much of being a child in my adult life as I possibly can. I think there's nothing wrong with being childish, nothing wrong with being youthful. It's okay. I mean, it's worse to be old and not youthful and not surprising yourself, you know? No, sure. So, you know, I'll tell you, Frederic, nothing I do is hard.
It looks easy, but I'm sure it's not too bad.
The idea is to make it look easy, but if anybody who is a novelist tells you, oh, what I do is very hard, hold on to your wallet.
Yeah, when you... When I read this book, I was moved, deeply moved all the time because it's very sad. It's about a father who's going to lose his son. Yes. So it's very emotional. Yes. But you do it with lightness and always funny scenes, you know, weird places. Yes. Weird people. And you describe an America that is very... strange and lonely. People are in shopping centers. Yes,
huge. America is enormous. I heard President Netanyahu say today that Israel is the size of New Jersey. America is 50 New Jersey's. And so it's huge and it is underpopulated for the most part. So if you travel out into the middle of it, which I do all the time, I drive across the country twice a year, what you are encountering are large empty spaces. And with people every once in a while living on those empty spaces, I don't think they're sad. And I don't even know if they're lonely. There's a difference, at least in English, between being solitary and being lonely. Lonely is to suffer from being solitary.
But at one point, they are walking together, Frank and Paul, his son. They talk together. Yes. And you say they are the only ones talking together in a crowd of lonely people.
Yes, in a mall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Like they're strange because they talk to each other.
Yes. But how many times have I sat in restaurants and seen a man and a woman sitting across from each other saying nothing? My wife and I, we chatter all the time. And so I think they're lacking in imagination. They're afraid of self-revelation. They're afraid of intimacy. You know, we use books. The way readers like books is that they find them to be useful. And I would like to write books that would be useful in the way that would encourage people, when they sit across from their wives, to say something, to hear something.
Have you read French novelists? Maybe, I don't know, Sartre, Camus?
All of them.
All of them?
In English. I read them in translation. I could read them in French now probably, but I read them in translation. Consequently, I read them in college when I was in university. Consequently, because I read them in English, it's very useful to read books in translation because their Frenchness. become secondary. It was as if Camus was an American, or as if Sartre was an American. And that's a way of taking it in, you know. I don't have to use the barrier of his Frenchness to block me from trying to find things that he says that are about my life.
Because there is a tone that could be a little bit existentialist, you know.
I'm sure.
In your writing.
I'm sure.
I'm trying to make you…
Jokka katt.
I'm trying to make you…
Well, make me Danish.
Yes, Danish. In the beginning, it's in the snow in Minnesota. Yes. It's snowing everywhere.
Yes. At the beginning of one of my favorite books, which is called The Movie Gore. It's a little epigram from Kierkegaard. And the Kierkegaard is, the worst thing about despair is that it doesn't know it's despair. Mm. I don't know if that's the worst thing. I don't know what you get when, if you are in despair, you think you are in despair. I think it might be better if you didn't know.
If you don't know it's better.
Kierkegaard said it was the worst thing. I don't know what Sartre would say about that.
Probably the same. Probably the same. So the title, so the title in English is Be Mine. Yes. Sois à moi. Yes. And in the Jose Camus, an excellent translator, she chose Le Paradis des Fous. Yes. And it's a quote by you said by Emerson. Yes.
There's a famous quote by Emerson in one of his essays in which he said, Traveling is a fool's paradise. And what he means by that is that when you travel, You're foolish to think you're going to get away from yourself, that you're going to vacate yourself. He also says elsewhere in a different essay, he said, I carry my giant with me wherever I go, which is to say myself. my burdensome self. Yeah.
But it's interesting because in many, many American novels, they travel since Moby Dick and Jack Kerouac and... Yeah,
yeah. On the road, of course.
Because you have a big country.
You have a big country and people do it all the time. But it's also as a literary device. It's a very fruitful literary device because... The landscape is always changing, so that gives you something to write about. There is the presumption in a voyage that something along the way is going to change, that the result of the voyage from beginning to end will be the evolution or the devolution or the maturation of something going on. Now, whether that actually is true in life, I don't know. I mean, I just the other day drove from Montana. to Maine because those are the two places I live. How many? 2600 miles, 2600, not kilometers.
So it's like 40,000 kilometers.
I don't think I was any different when I got to the end from how I was when I started.
That's why it's a fool's paradise.
Yes, to think you're going to outrun yourself. Of course, yeah. I think that's what he means. And in fact, I think Frank understands that. I mean, I shouldn't say, I think Frank understands it. Frank understands it. I wrote it.
So you control Frank?
Completely.
Ah, okay,
yeah.
Yeah. Why do you always go back to Frank Bascombe, this character? Is it like an appointment with an old friend?
Destiny, appointment in Samara? Maybe so. I don't know. Because to be able to use language to make his voice frees me to put into the book anything I want to put into the book because I have found that his voice and his... putative intelligence are limitless. There's nothing that I can dream up that I can't make him say or think or do. And that's such a lenience for a novelist. I mean, when you're struggling with different characters in every book, you're continually trying to fit what you know and fit what you want to say into something plausible that your character can think or feel.
or say for me frank was always able to be completely available to me for anything is it because he started like you working as a journalist in a sport magazine no no
i i don't think he's like me i think that that the degree to which he and i are alike is a failure of mine I think whenever I come across something that Frank says or thinks. I think to myself, oh, you're not doing this well enough. Because he's agreeing with you. He's saying what you think. I think I ought to be able to dream up something better than what I already know.
So you want him to be really different from yourself. Yes. This is different than French writers. French writers, most of them have alter egos.
Oh. Well, maybe I don't know what an alter ego is. Maybe I don't. But no, I was always thinking that, you know, T.S. Eliot said that we don't write to express ourselves. We write to get away from ourselves. But that's also what Marcel Duchamp said. I make these things, I make these ready-mades that he built in the 20s to vacate my personality. I use my personality to vacate my personality. So I think... And when you do get away from your personality, or when you're writing about children and you've never had children, you're free to write whatever you want. And that's what we're all looking for, freedom.
What do you think Frank would say about the Fitzgerald Prize? I have a suggestion.
Okay, tell me.
He might say...
So I can agree.
No, no, you can, no, you're allowed to disagree. He might say, why this bunch of French journalists give prices to American writers?
No, because, well, maybe he would say that, but then I would have to write that for him to say it. But for me, I think to myself, isn't it a miracle that you can sit in your little boathouse in Maine and write these sentences in English? which get translated into French and that French readers read. To me that's just a miracle. And what it means to me is that literature is useful in all cultures. Literature is one of those things that can cross nation-state boundaries and find a use and find a place. So I would be much more optimistic, much less sarcastic about that than Frank would be.
In the book you say we are happy after 70 years old or before 30 years old. But between it's...
He's quoting statistics there.
Oh,
really? Yeah.
People are unhappy from 30...
Typically, typically they... No, not unhappy. Just typically, statistically, demographically, people after they reach 30, they kind of typically... become slightly less satisfied. Not unhappy. Unhappy is something else. But then when they get to be older, And they've done a lot of things and made a lot of mistakes and still find themselves alive. They find that they feel better about life. Just to have survived and just to have learned something.
Yeah. Maybe that's the real hidden subject of this book. It's two guys who should be very, very sad and finally are quite... Not happy, but they...
Well, they are together.
Yes, they're together. They're not suffering all the time. No. Not complaining all the time.
And what would you mean if you had a fatal disease and you were 42 years old? What would you do? And you could, you know, who knows? But what I would think I would write about if I were going to write about it, I would say... I would try to make a joke out of it. And I've read lots of books about people who have amyotropic lateral sclerosis. And remarkably enough, that death sentence, which they're getting... does not make them unhappy. I mean, it may be in their heart of hearts they wish that they didn't have it. Or maybe they wish they could live much longer. But they find ways to think about now is now. I'm alive today. I can listen to this music. I can look at that mountain. I can hear this someone tell me they love me.
So to enjoy life, you have to be sick.
Maybe.
That's a philosophy.
That's very French.
What do you think of politically correctness? There's a scene in the book where they go to the cinema and there is a demonstration of feminists and they don't, they're not allowed to see a movie about Al Capone because Al Capone is a very bad guy. Yes.
Mean to women.
to women. Is there a risk of self-censorship now in American literature?
Well, I can only gauge that from what my students at Columbia have said to me. And at least in the last eight years...
Because your teacher at Columbia... ...was,
until just two years ago. They were hesitant. They were hesitant to believe that they could write about anything they wanted to write about. They were hesitant to believe that they could use the language... as freely as the language can be used. They were hesitant to have certain kinds of thoughts that they harbored but didn't want to put on the page. And I just always tried to tell them, no one can stop you from doing this. Do what you want to do. Do what you want and that you can call good, that you can call excellent. And if you can call it excellent, then do it. I mean, the idea is not to always to comfort people. The idea is not always to support or corroborate what they already think. Sometimes the object is to get in their face. Sometimes the object is to outrage them. There is a kind of culture in the United States of reluctance about surprising or outraging or... Provoking. Provoking people. But that's what literature has always been for. Madame Bovary?
Of course. Big scandal. Yeah. Yes, the flower of evil makes scandals. Right, exactly. But don't you feel there's a kind of danger with this evolution of, you know, less and less freedom of writing?
Well, first of all, danger. Writing books is an indoor sport.
Yeah, of course, it's not dangerous.
It's not war, right?
It's not dangerous, but you can be canceled.
Yes, well you can live beyond being cancelled. You can be cancelled and write another book.
You would be happy to be cancelled?
No. I've had my dealings with being cancelled. It wasn't fun. You did have that? Well, we don't have to talk about that.
Okay.
But I survived. Here I am, winning this prize, winning this beautiful place. Somehow or another I survived it.
Oh, okay. And did you have your publisher asking you to get a sensitivity reader?
Absolutely. Yes? In America, not in France.
No, but here, this book was read by somebody who checked.
Every book for the last five, six years has been sensitivity checked.
But it's a very bad reader because you left many provocative things.
I tried to. But I remember four or five years ago, I wrote a book in which...
There was a casino, which in America means a place to gamble. Same in France. Is it? And there are many casinos that are built on Indian reservations. And I was told by my editor that I could not use the word Indian, that I had to say Native American.
Ah, of course.
And so I said, well, I'm not going to say Native American because it has too many syllables. He said, I want a word that has three syllables, that it starts with an I, has an I in the middle, and ends with an N. And that only allows me Indian. And my editor said, and parenthetically, I said, look, they say they're Indians. I can say they're Indians. He said, no, they can say it. You can't.
You can't.
But I did.
And he published it?
He did. He didn't…
Okay.
He told me that the book in which the word Indian occurred was his least favorite book in the story collection. I said, well, there has to be one that you don't like, right.
Now I have the question from Eric Neuf, a French literary critic. He's asking you…
It's probably going to be difficult.
It's a difficult one, yes. Okay. this is a strange guy What heads would you choose if you were to build a Mount Rushmore with only writers? So which heads would you sculpt in the mountain?
Faulkner.
I don't want to influence you but...
Richard Wright. Richard Wright. And these are the only ones. Unfortunately when you say which heads would you choose, it would have to be a big mountain for me. So I would... Mount Rushmore,
how many heads are there? Five? Four?
I don't remember. I should know. Five. Who cares? Not Trump. Not Trump. I went to Mount Rushmore when Trump was there. And I know he was looking at... at the real estate, just trying to see if there would be a place on the mountain that his ugly face could be. But I don't know. I mean, I'm not a person who looks at the world with a pinnacle on it. I'm a person who looks at the world that way. So there's lots more room on that plane than there is on that triangle, you know, so people falling off the triangle.
And so we started like you said, there's no competition in art.
No, so I don't know. I mean, I would put a lot of people on there. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor. I would put Virginia Woolf. I would put Flaubert.
At least one French.
I would put Dostoevsky. I would put Modiano.
Modiano on Mount Rushmore.
Absolutely. I think… Yes,
I agree.
That's one time the Nobel jury got it right. Yes,
I agree. So what do you prefer, finally, make people laugh or make them cry? In this book you do both.
I would prefer to do both because I think if nothing's funny, nothing's serious. And so I want to make them laugh, but I want to make them cry. Because I'm, truthfully, when I get to the end of writing a book like this book, if I don't cry in my room by myself, I think something's wrong. I think I've missed something somewhere. So I want to make myself cry, not just for trivial reasons, but I make myself laugh all the time. So, both. And I have no time limits. I can take as long as I want to do the things I want to do, so I can do both.
Did you try ChatGPT? Because I asked AI to write me some questions for this interview.
You did?
And yeah, I asked, please give me questions for Richard Forb. And they were all completely stupid and- Nonsensical? Yes, really, really bad. So I had to work.
They were all silly questions?
Like, for example, I tell you one. To write a novel, what is the most useful, imagination or memory? This is a question by a computer.
Well, that's not such a bad question. No. Updike, one of my heroes, I would put him on Mount Rushmore also. Updike says in a wonderful little essay that the halls of memory and the halls of imagination run side by side.
maybe ai knows something nabokov said the same nabokov says imagination is is a sort of memory yes yeah form of memory and i i often i often confuse them i
often confuse as memory something i've imagined
Or the opposite.
Yes, or the opposite.
You think you invent something, but you're just remembering.
That's exactly right. Yeah. Or something I've actually read. Yeah. Or shared.
So... Now we go to my famous game. I have a game in this show.
The questione méchante.
No, it's not. No, no. But it's difficult. I'm going to quote you. It's called Guess Your Quotes. Devin des citations. I'm going to read you sentences that you wrote. And you have to guess in which of your books you wrote this sentence.
Oh, you're asking the wrong person. You should ask that literary critic who you just quoted a moment ago. Why should I be burdened with this?
People from Minnesota all say, yeah, nah.
Well, that's from Be Mine.
That's from the last one.
Yeah, no. They say, yeah, no.
They say, yeah, no?
Yeah, no.
What does it mean?
People, not just in Minnesota, people in Ireland say it also. What they mean is, yes, I understand, and the answer is no.
Ah, okay. Because in Normandy, here in France, we have tête-bainque oui, tête-bainque non.
Takes too long, no?
It's long. It's like maybe yes, maybe no. It's like you don't want to decide.
Qui ça si, qui ça non. I see. In Mexico.
So this one from the last one, another sentence by you. Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
Well, I can only think that that would be from Canada.
It's from Canada. You remember your books. So in which category are you? The one who wants to be a bank president or to rob banks?
I'd rather rob banks.
When you were young, you were a little bit gangster.
Well, no, I was just a little criminal. I wasn't a gangster. I mean, gangster now means something different. I was just a little petty criminal.
You were not violent, but you were robbing houses.
Breaking into houses, breaking into houses with a couple of my friends. We didn't constitute a gang. We were just three feckless little... Trivial children, but we broke into houses and stole cars and told cars. Yeah, and Yeah, we did that no and we got caught and put in jail so okay Oh you my mother my mother got me out. Ah, it was the it was the it was the year my father died and After my mother Took me to court She took me outside the courthouse and she said, she said, your father's dead. She said, I have to go to work. We don't have any income. She said, I cannot be getting you out of trouble anymore. And so I thought, that makes sense to me. I don't, I understand that. It was a moment in my life when my mother and I became colleagues.
And then you decide to become a writer.
Well, I had many other many other starts and many other false starts before that. Really, being a writer was the last thing I ever thought I would do. It's so preposterous, you know.
Yeah. Another sentence by you.
Yes.
You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
Gee whiz.
I love it, by the way, I love this. For me it's very interesting, this way of thinking.
Well, I believe that.
Yes.
It's one of those things that I wrote that I actually believe.
So you agree with yourself?
I agree with myself. But it could have been a lot of places. That line could have come up a lot of places, because that's the kind of thing I write about.
It's Canada.
About being bad and choosing not to be bad. I mean, if you're just good because it's easy. It's just good because...
No value. Yeah, it has no value.
But if you have a choice between doing bad which seems very attractive... And not doing that because it maybe harms fewer people?
Yeah.
Then you get credit for it.
Yeah, exactly. So this was in Canada, 2013.
But it could have been three or four other places too.
Another one. Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.
Well, that I don't believe. That's a good question that I don't believe. But again, that could have been in the Womanizer.
It's in Wildlife.
Wildlife. 1990. 1990. Long time ago. But again, I don't want to talk as if I'm talking about someone. Not myself. But that's the kind of line that I would have in my notebook. And I would just stick it into a story somewhere. Because I think it's such a provocative line. And that's what you're always trying to do when you work out of your notebook. You're trying to find places for these provocative lines that you have saved. I mean, I always keep my notebook with me. It's just in case I say something provocative, I'll write it down. Or if you do, I steal from you. Ah,
no, I write myself.
Of course we do. We all do that.
Another one. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I like it.
I could have said it about myself. Because I do like to fight. It's a trap. It's a trap. Yeah.
It's not in a book. You said that in an interview.
I was going to say, it sounds like me talking about me. Yeah.
It's in an interview by Transfuge magazine. Yeah. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight. It's like, you know, a famous sentence, if you want peace, prepare war.
Yeah.
That's the same. Yes. Yes. Old age, old age is not for sissies.
Well that's a famous line for... I stole that from the internet probably.
It's Bette Davis who said that.
I was gonna say, yeah.
It could be the title of Le Paradis des Fous.
It could. Old age is not for sissies. But I would probably have to convert it in some way so that it didn't bespeak Bette Davis.
what what what film was that in well maybe she just talked maybe she just said it about herself yeah yeah yeah but it's it's it's a that's a very famous line in america um one last one but i only have it in in french so i'm going to translate the translation okay mankind doesn't lose anything when a writer decides to shut up
well i'm sure i said that about myself absolutely it's in a weekend on michigan yeah i don't know the english title of this the sports uh the weekend in michigan is is is uh the sports writer uh the sports writer so the first frank bascom yes when i was when i was trying my best to persuade Olivier to take me seriously.
But you really think mankind loses nothing if a writer shuts his mouth?
No, I do think that. I think nothing is nothing. Nothing is not a loss. I, I, my, the epitaph which will go on my grave is nothing is enough.
Ah, I like it. But I mean, if writers are replaced by algorithms, mankind will lose something.
Something else comes along. See, I don't think that the imagination can be suppressed. I don't think that.
You're not afraid by artificial intelligence?
I'm wary of it. Of course, anybody has to be wary of it. But I put my faith in human beings. I really put my faith in human beings to dream what they dream, to wake up thinking what they wake up thinking, to go to sleep thinking what they go to sleep thinking, to wake up in the middle of the night in fear. I'd put my money on those people.
One last sentence by you. Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Yeah.
Where did you write that? It's a tough game.
It could have been in Be Mine.
It could have been.
It could have been.
But it isn't.
But you see, what you're finding...
In Canada.
What you're finding out is that... Given how I work in this kind of constitutive way, which is to say for me writing novels is more mosaical, it's putting together things that weren't together before, so it never is for me that one book has its own absolutely unique source, because the source is always me. Yeah, so it could be anyone. So I could put into books. And Fitzgerald used to do this, speaking as we were. He kept notebooks.
He had notebooks,
yeah. And when he would write a story and he didn't like it, he would take it apart and put things back in his notebook so that he could then use them again. Many things can go many places. If you're thinking at a high enough level, if you're thinking about things that are memorable and plausible and important, things can go many places.
When they were here, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, they were here in what's called La Villa Saint-Louis.
La Villa Saint-Louis.
Yes, and it belonged to the Murphys. They were friends with the Murphys.
The Americans. Yeah. One hundred years ago, yeah. He dedicated the...
Tender is the Night.
Yeah, Tender is the Night too. Sarah Murphy. Sarah and Gerald.
So they were here and Zelda told him he was a loser. They were always drinking, you know. She said, you're a loser. So he went to Jouan-les-Pins and saw a bar and got inside the bar, took a few drinks, and there was a band playing music. So he asked the band to come to this place. And then he... He locked the band inside his room and said, now you are my prisoners. You must play until the morning or I will never let you free. And he went to see Zélda and said, so you still believe I'm a loser?
i made this story i like that i like i like that story i like that story a lot i'm sure it didn't make any difference to her no but my my wife has never called me a loser that's why you're staying with her no i know that's why i'm staying staying with her because she's the most wonderful woman in the world but but even with that being true she also never called me a loser even when I was you never fight you never oh sure ah okay every every point on the compass we've traversed Yeah.
Why not?
For life.
We end with the questions about the books you prefer.
Okay,
come on. So, short answer.
It won't be hard.
Okay. A book that makes you cry.
The movie Goa by Walker Percy.
A book that makes you stop crying.
The movie go up by Walker Percy. Same.
So it's like you like sad and funny. Yes. A book to get bored.
I wouldn't finish a book. So plenty of books make me bored. I throw it across the room.
A book to show off in the street.
That's not what I would show off in the street. I try to have a pair of nice socks on.
Yes, you have to film the socks of Mr. Ford, the yellow socks.
So it wouldn't be a book, it would be the socks.
Yeah, you see, Tom Wolfe had a white suit. Richard Ford has yellow socks. They all have, you know.
I have a white suit too. Oh, you do? Yeah.
A book that makes you clever.
Alice Munro. Books about the stories of Alice Munro. I come away from Alice Munro's stories thinking like a character in her books, which means to me that the stories have had a profound effect on what I can think. How my life, how my mind can open up beyond its normal. Beyond its normal boundaries.
That's the goal of every writer is to create this.
Absolutely. And that's another Nobel jury that got it right.
Yeah. A book to seduce.
Well, I've never seduced anything or anybody, so I don't know anything about that.
Such a liar. A book I regret having read.
Nothing. I don't do my... I know so little about regret that there is no book that I regret having read. None. Zero. If I read to the end of a book, because that's what a successful book is. A successful book is not a book the reader likes or dislikes. It's a book she or he reads to the end of. And if I read to the end of it, I have no regrets, because something has made me get there.
A book that you pretend you have finished.
I have nothing to gain from pretending I had finished it.
So, it never happened to you to say, oh, I love, I don't know, Under the Volcano, but you didn't finish it.
No, no, I would always say I loved Under the Volcano, but I did read all of it, all of what took me. Several chances. I would always say I didn't finish it, but I liked what I read I've got nothing as again. I've got nothing to gain from maybe that's what academics do There's a there's a famous line in academia in America. People will say Did you read such-and-such and somebody would say no and I know I haven't even taught it
The book I wish I had written?
There is no book that I wish I had written but the books that I did write. I couldn't possibly imagine, through the gauze of the greatest admiration, wanting to write a book that somebody else wrote. It would never occur to me.
Which is the worst book you've ever read in your life? Richard Ford.
Well, I guess I don't remember. Isn't that the ideal?
Yeah, it's better to forget it. And which book are you reading now?
I'm reading two books at the same time, because every once in a while it will start, one of them will start to bore me and I'll go to the other one. I'm reading the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. which is quite interesting. And I'm reading another famous American book called Giants in the Earth by a Norwegian man named Ole Rølvag. It's kind of one of those seminal books about Norwegians immigrating to America and going out into the steps of South Dakota and living until they perish. It's really one of those foundational books in American literature. So I'm reading those. And both of them, particularly the Olly Rollbag one, I started to read when I was 18 and never finished. So finally, I'm getting around at age 81.
Oh, it's the opposite. Yeah. 18 and 81.
Yeah.
Reverse. Strange. Thank you so much. And congratulations again for the F.
It's such a pleasure.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize. Well. mr ford it's an honor thank you very much pleasure to meet you this show was brought to you by the figaro tv and uh we thank of course the hotel belrive to host this wonderful award and to celebrate your genius well thank you my luck bye bye oh and don't forget read books or you will become idiots
You always say that. That's great.
Description
Je remercie l'hôtel Belles Rives de Juan les Pins et les éditions de l'Olivier pour cette conversation exceptionnelle avec l'un des plus grands romanciers américains : Richard Ford, 81 ans.
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Transcription
Good afternoon, Mr. Richard Ford.
Good afternoon. It is a good afternoon. It is? Yes, it is.
Welcome to a conversation not at La Pérouse. Usually I talk with writers in a restaurant in Paris. But today it's a conversation at Hotel Belle Rive.
Couldn't be better.
Impossible. You received the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award the same year in... 1996.
Yes, when I was a child.
Yes, exactly. And also the Prix Femina Etranger in Paris. Yes. Later on. Yes. When I was a teenager. And now, the Scott Fitzgerald Prize in Le Cap d'Antibes. So my question is very simple. When will you stop stealing prizes from other authors?
Well, you know. Writing books is not a competition.
But you win all the time.
No, not all the time. I would happily win all the time. But no, other people write wonderful books and they win sometimes. Everybody who is a writer does better when someone does well. When someone wins a prize, we are all encouraged. We all have something wonderful to read. We were happy for our friend. We might wish in our heart of hearts that we could win that prize that day. But no, at least in America, we're not competitors about writing books.
That's maybe the only thing, the only place where you are not competitors.
It could be true. It could be true. But art, and art in general, I think, always succeeds when someone does it very well. that means by succeeding I mean that other people feel encouraged. I mean, you know, Fitzgerald himself is very famous for having said, I cannot do well unless my competitor does poorly. That's not true. That's just not true.
So Fitzgerald was living here with his wife Zelda 100 years ago exactly, in 1925. And they were fighting all the time, yelling at each other. drinking too much. And well, I wonder, is it a big influence on you? Yes. This author and this way of...
Absolutely. It has influenced me not to drink all the time, not to fight with my wife.
You're married for 61 years.
I'm together with my wife 61 years. Yeah. Not to have children who are a little hostages to fortune. So, you know. Yeah, I learned a lot. I remember when, before Christina and I were married, I had read a biography of Ernest Hemingway, who Fitzgerald was a temporary of and a competitor with. And then he's both. And Hemingway married this wonderful girl named Hadley. And then they didn't live together so long, but then he divorced her. And he thought all of his life. that that was the greatest mistake he ever made which was divorcing his first love i told my wife i said you are my first love i will live with you forever but many people say it but don't do it well i've done it congratulations well no no no congratulate me absolutely but um because i'm smart enough not to ruin it you know but i i think it's the I think it's the best possible outcome. I suspect that most people get divorced and think to themselves, at some remote moment in three o'clock in the morning, what did I, why did I go wrong? What did I do that messed up this wonderful thing that started so well?
But you know your hero, Frank Baskin, who is the main character of five beautiful of your novels, A Weekend in Michigan in 1986, Independence in 1995, The State of the Place in 2006, In All Franchises in 2014,
and The Paradise of the Madmen in 2013. Yes, a bunch of books.
Olivier, Frank, the hero of this book, was divorced.
Yes.
Many times.
No, only divorced once, but had another love that he left to become a nun. The worst possible outcome for a marriage, right? I live with you, I'm married to you, and what I'm going to do is leave and become a nun? That would be terrible.
So you decided to write about a guy who divorces because you didn't do it and you want to know what happens.
Sometimes you write about the things that scare you the most. And divorce was something that I just couldn't imagine. My parents did not divorce. My wife's parents did divorce. And I think we both of us learned a lesson about that, about what the best outcome is.
Let's go back to Fitzgerald because you received this prize.
Yes, and I know a lot about Fitzgerald.
He's asking in the crack up, he's asking himself the same question that Frank is asking at the beginning of Le Paradis des Fruits. He's asking, yeah, and now what do we do? You know, in the crack up he says, what was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the womb of time. I never understood what it means, the womb of time.
The womb of time. Well, I... He probably means the oubliet of time.
Oui, oui.
Oubliette of time. Oui,
oui, oui.
The womb of time.
So you begin your novel by asking this question. I don't quote exactly, but it's like, what the fuck are we doing here?
Yes. Well, that's not a bad premise for any novel, you know, if you can write about that subject, which everybody experiences, and be smart and write something that's... that's worth reading. Anybody who reads novels, particularly literary novels, would like to know the answer to that. I mean, readers have conversations with books. They don't just read the book and say, okay, now I know, now I understand, now I understand. They read the book and they say, oh, that's bullshit. Or they say, no, I reject that. Or no, maybe that's right. So if you can engage a readership about a subject that they completely understand to be worth the time, worth the thinking. then maybe you have a chance to read to the end.
Yes, but this question, what are we doing here? This question, does it have an answer?
Well, it has an answer in an Augustinian sense, that happiness If that's what you want to be, if you want to be happy, and I do, most of us do, happiness is, in Augustine's view, is the absence of unhappiness. So what are we doing here? We're trying to do as little harm as we can.
To ourselves and others. Yes.
Yeah. And along the way, trying to find a vocabulary, and it's often just a matter of choosing words, trying to find a vocabulary for what we are doing that makes us feel that what we are doing is worth our life.
Again back to Fitzgerald, what role did he play in your life and your work?
He played a lot of roles really. He's very smart. And if you read a book like The Beautiful and Damned, The Beautiful and Damned, in a way, he's too smart. He can't let any subject go. He's obsessed with being smart on the page. And that taught me a lot. It taught me that that's what readers of serious books want to find. They want to find something said about life that they haven't thought of and that seems appropriate to the moment and that gives them something that they didn't have before. And that set for me a goal early on when I was teaching at Columbia for years. That's what I was always... I used to teach a course called being smart on the page. That's what I was always trying to encourage my students to do. Be smart on the page. Because you do it for the reader. You don't write books for yourself. You write books for somebody else who will read them, who you don't know. So that was one thing. The business with the marriage was certainly another. The negative influence. And he was so young. He was like Keats in a way. He was so young and so smart.
And he died when he was 44.
And he only wrote four or five books, not very many. And I just thought to myself, well, I'm already five years older than he is when I start, you know. But it encouraged me to think that somebody that young from the Middle West, even though he went to Princeton, good school, I talked there. He was just natively smart. And, because he didn't learn, he didn't learn to be smart, he was smart. He learned to be smart by Only by observing and participating and empathizing, although he didn't seem a very empathetic man, I think he was very empathetic. So that's what I learned. I learned to pay attention.
And also maybe your narrator, Frank Bascombe, in five of your books, looks a little bit like the narrator of The Last Tycoon or the narrator of Tender in the Night, you know, desperate but funny.
I never think of Frank as desperate. Desperate to me is too extreme. I think Frank is...
Melancholic?
Well, sometimes. I mean, there are plenty of things in life to be melancholic about. Your son is dying. You don't like your daughter very much. Your other son has already died. Your first wife has died. So there's a lot not to relish.
But... Strong has a sad life. I mean, he was not very lucky.
Well.
He lost two sons.
If you live long enough. Yeah,
that's what happens.
You're going to experience all of that. Yeah. So it's not unusual. I mean, it's not unusual to have people that you love pass away. My father died in my arms.
When you were 16. Yeah.
My mother, I adored my mother. She only lived to 71. So loss is something we all.
have to get used to not not like but find a way beyond that's the that's the story the subject of yes it is this book la la le paradis de fou is the story of frank bascombe who um travels with his dying son dying son yes goes from minnesota to mount rushmore yes and they experience meet people and describe. Yes. The America of today?
Yes, I think so. And they laugh about it. And they make you laugh about it. But it's also about, because his son is going to die. I don't write books that I mind giving away the end of. It's okay. It's not about plot.
No, there is no surprise. He's very, very ill.
His son dies. His son dies from a disease that you do not recover from, what we call amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
From Maladie Charcot. From the beginning we know that. Yes.
And so Frank's mission is to take his son as far as he can, and then to take himself beyond that. as far as he can. That's why it ends the way it ends.
And you said before you wrote about divorce because you didn't do it. So you write this beautiful novel about fatherhood, about a son and a father, and you didn't have any children.
No. But a lot of my friends have children, and I'm paying attention to how they get along. And I was a child, and I have preserved as much of being a child in my adult life as I possibly can. I think there's nothing wrong with being childish, nothing wrong with being youthful. It's okay. I mean, it's worse to be old and not youthful and not surprising yourself, you know? No, sure. So, you know, I'll tell you, Frederic, nothing I do is hard.
It looks easy, but I'm sure it's not too bad.
The idea is to make it look easy, but if anybody who is a novelist tells you, oh, what I do is very hard, hold on to your wallet.
Yeah, when you... When I read this book, I was moved, deeply moved all the time because it's very sad. It's about a father who's going to lose his son. Yes. So it's very emotional. Yes. But you do it with lightness and always funny scenes, you know, weird places. Yes. Weird people. And you describe an America that is very... strange and lonely. People are in shopping centers. Yes,
huge. America is enormous. I heard President Netanyahu say today that Israel is the size of New Jersey. America is 50 New Jersey's. And so it's huge and it is underpopulated for the most part. So if you travel out into the middle of it, which I do all the time, I drive across the country twice a year, what you are encountering are large empty spaces. And with people every once in a while living on those empty spaces, I don't think they're sad. And I don't even know if they're lonely. There's a difference, at least in English, between being solitary and being lonely. Lonely is to suffer from being solitary.
But at one point, they are walking together, Frank and Paul, his son. They talk together. Yes. And you say they are the only ones talking together in a crowd of lonely people.
Yes, in a mall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Like they're strange because they talk to each other.
Yes. But how many times have I sat in restaurants and seen a man and a woman sitting across from each other saying nothing? My wife and I, we chatter all the time. And so I think they're lacking in imagination. They're afraid of self-revelation. They're afraid of intimacy. You know, we use books. The way readers like books is that they find them to be useful. And I would like to write books that would be useful in the way that would encourage people, when they sit across from their wives, to say something, to hear something.
Have you read French novelists? Maybe, I don't know, Sartre, Camus?
All of them.
All of them?
In English. I read them in translation. I could read them in French now probably, but I read them in translation. Consequently, I read them in college when I was in university. Consequently, because I read them in English, it's very useful to read books in translation because their Frenchness. become secondary. It was as if Camus was an American, or as if Sartre was an American. And that's a way of taking it in, you know. I don't have to use the barrier of his Frenchness to block me from trying to find things that he says that are about my life.
Because there is a tone that could be a little bit existentialist, you know.
I'm sure.
In your writing.
I'm sure.
I'm trying to make you…
Jokka katt.
I'm trying to make you…
Well, make me Danish.
Yes, Danish. In the beginning, it's in the snow in Minnesota. Yes. It's snowing everywhere.
Yes. At the beginning of one of my favorite books, which is called The Movie Gore. It's a little epigram from Kierkegaard. And the Kierkegaard is, the worst thing about despair is that it doesn't know it's despair. Mm. I don't know if that's the worst thing. I don't know what you get when, if you are in despair, you think you are in despair. I think it might be better if you didn't know.
If you don't know it's better.
Kierkegaard said it was the worst thing. I don't know what Sartre would say about that.
Probably the same. Probably the same. So the title, so the title in English is Be Mine. Yes. Sois à moi. Yes. And in the Jose Camus, an excellent translator, she chose Le Paradis des Fous. Yes. And it's a quote by you said by Emerson. Yes.
There's a famous quote by Emerson in one of his essays in which he said, Traveling is a fool's paradise. And what he means by that is that when you travel, You're foolish to think you're going to get away from yourself, that you're going to vacate yourself. He also says elsewhere in a different essay, he said, I carry my giant with me wherever I go, which is to say myself. my burdensome self. Yeah.
But it's interesting because in many, many American novels, they travel since Moby Dick and Jack Kerouac and... Yeah,
yeah. On the road, of course.
Because you have a big country.
You have a big country and people do it all the time. But it's also as a literary device. It's a very fruitful literary device because... The landscape is always changing, so that gives you something to write about. There is the presumption in a voyage that something along the way is going to change, that the result of the voyage from beginning to end will be the evolution or the devolution or the maturation of something going on. Now, whether that actually is true in life, I don't know. I mean, I just the other day drove from Montana. to Maine because those are the two places I live. How many? 2600 miles, 2600, not kilometers.
So it's like 40,000 kilometers.
I don't think I was any different when I got to the end from how I was when I started.
That's why it's a fool's paradise.
Yes, to think you're going to outrun yourself. Of course, yeah. I think that's what he means. And in fact, I think Frank understands that. I mean, I shouldn't say, I think Frank understands it. Frank understands it. I wrote it.
So you control Frank?
Completely.
Ah, okay,
yeah.
Yeah. Why do you always go back to Frank Bascombe, this character? Is it like an appointment with an old friend?
Destiny, appointment in Samara? Maybe so. I don't know. Because to be able to use language to make his voice frees me to put into the book anything I want to put into the book because I have found that his voice and his... putative intelligence are limitless. There's nothing that I can dream up that I can't make him say or think or do. And that's such a lenience for a novelist. I mean, when you're struggling with different characters in every book, you're continually trying to fit what you know and fit what you want to say into something plausible that your character can think or feel.
or say for me frank was always able to be completely available to me for anything is it because he started like you working as a journalist in a sport magazine no no
i i don't think he's like me i think that that the degree to which he and i are alike is a failure of mine I think whenever I come across something that Frank says or thinks. I think to myself, oh, you're not doing this well enough. Because he's agreeing with you. He's saying what you think. I think I ought to be able to dream up something better than what I already know.
So you want him to be really different from yourself. Yes. This is different than French writers. French writers, most of them have alter egos.
Oh. Well, maybe I don't know what an alter ego is. Maybe I don't. But no, I was always thinking that, you know, T.S. Eliot said that we don't write to express ourselves. We write to get away from ourselves. But that's also what Marcel Duchamp said. I make these things, I make these ready-mades that he built in the 20s to vacate my personality. I use my personality to vacate my personality. So I think... And when you do get away from your personality, or when you're writing about children and you've never had children, you're free to write whatever you want. And that's what we're all looking for, freedom.
What do you think Frank would say about the Fitzgerald Prize? I have a suggestion.
Okay, tell me.
He might say...
So I can agree.
No, no, you can, no, you're allowed to disagree. He might say, why this bunch of French journalists give prices to American writers?
No, because, well, maybe he would say that, but then I would have to write that for him to say it. But for me, I think to myself, isn't it a miracle that you can sit in your little boathouse in Maine and write these sentences in English? which get translated into French and that French readers read. To me that's just a miracle. And what it means to me is that literature is useful in all cultures. Literature is one of those things that can cross nation-state boundaries and find a use and find a place. So I would be much more optimistic, much less sarcastic about that than Frank would be.
In the book you say we are happy after 70 years old or before 30 years old. But between it's...
He's quoting statistics there.
Oh,
really? Yeah.
People are unhappy from 30...
Typically, typically they... No, not unhappy. Just typically, statistically, demographically, people after they reach 30, they kind of typically... become slightly less satisfied. Not unhappy. Unhappy is something else. But then when they get to be older, And they've done a lot of things and made a lot of mistakes and still find themselves alive. They find that they feel better about life. Just to have survived and just to have learned something.
Yeah. Maybe that's the real hidden subject of this book. It's two guys who should be very, very sad and finally are quite... Not happy, but they...
Well, they are together.
Yes, they're together. They're not suffering all the time. No. Not complaining all the time.
And what would you mean if you had a fatal disease and you were 42 years old? What would you do? And you could, you know, who knows? But what I would think I would write about if I were going to write about it, I would say... I would try to make a joke out of it. And I've read lots of books about people who have amyotropic lateral sclerosis. And remarkably enough, that death sentence, which they're getting... does not make them unhappy. I mean, it may be in their heart of hearts they wish that they didn't have it. Or maybe they wish they could live much longer. But they find ways to think about now is now. I'm alive today. I can listen to this music. I can look at that mountain. I can hear this someone tell me they love me.
So to enjoy life, you have to be sick.
Maybe.
That's a philosophy.
That's very French.
What do you think of politically correctness? There's a scene in the book where they go to the cinema and there is a demonstration of feminists and they don't, they're not allowed to see a movie about Al Capone because Al Capone is a very bad guy. Yes.
Mean to women.
to women. Is there a risk of self-censorship now in American literature?
Well, I can only gauge that from what my students at Columbia have said to me. And at least in the last eight years...
Because your teacher at Columbia... ...was,
until just two years ago. They were hesitant. They were hesitant to believe that they could write about anything they wanted to write about. They were hesitant to believe that they could use the language... as freely as the language can be used. They were hesitant to have certain kinds of thoughts that they harbored but didn't want to put on the page. And I just always tried to tell them, no one can stop you from doing this. Do what you want to do. Do what you want and that you can call good, that you can call excellent. And if you can call it excellent, then do it. I mean, the idea is not to always to comfort people. The idea is not always to support or corroborate what they already think. Sometimes the object is to get in their face. Sometimes the object is to outrage them. There is a kind of culture in the United States of reluctance about surprising or outraging or... Provoking. Provoking people. But that's what literature has always been for. Madame Bovary?
Of course. Big scandal. Yeah. Yes, the flower of evil makes scandals. Right, exactly. But don't you feel there's a kind of danger with this evolution of, you know, less and less freedom of writing?
Well, first of all, danger. Writing books is an indoor sport.
Yeah, of course, it's not dangerous.
It's not war, right?
It's not dangerous, but you can be canceled.
Yes, well you can live beyond being cancelled. You can be cancelled and write another book.
You would be happy to be cancelled?
No. I've had my dealings with being cancelled. It wasn't fun. You did have that? Well, we don't have to talk about that.
Okay.
But I survived. Here I am, winning this prize, winning this beautiful place. Somehow or another I survived it.
Oh, okay. And did you have your publisher asking you to get a sensitivity reader?
Absolutely. Yes? In America, not in France.
No, but here, this book was read by somebody who checked.
Every book for the last five, six years has been sensitivity checked.
But it's a very bad reader because you left many provocative things.
I tried to. But I remember four or five years ago, I wrote a book in which...
There was a casino, which in America means a place to gamble. Same in France. Is it? And there are many casinos that are built on Indian reservations. And I was told by my editor that I could not use the word Indian, that I had to say Native American.
Ah, of course.
And so I said, well, I'm not going to say Native American because it has too many syllables. He said, I want a word that has three syllables, that it starts with an I, has an I in the middle, and ends with an N. And that only allows me Indian. And my editor said, and parenthetically, I said, look, they say they're Indians. I can say they're Indians. He said, no, they can say it. You can't.
You can't.
But I did.
And he published it?
He did. He didn't…
Okay.
He told me that the book in which the word Indian occurred was his least favorite book in the story collection. I said, well, there has to be one that you don't like, right.
Now I have the question from Eric Neuf, a French literary critic. He's asking you…
It's probably going to be difficult.
It's a difficult one, yes. Okay. this is a strange guy What heads would you choose if you were to build a Mount Rushmore with only writers? So which heads would you sculpt in the mountain?
Faulkner.
I don't want to influence you but...
Richard Wright. Richard Wright. And these are the only ones. Unfortunately when you say which heads would you choose, it would have to be a big mountain for me. So I would... Mount Rushmore,
how many heads are there? Five? Four?
I don't remember. I should know. Five. Who cares? Not Trump. Not Trump. I went to Mount Rushmore when Trump was there. And I know he was looking at... at the real estate, just trying to see if there would be a place on the mountain that his ugly face could be. But I don't know. I mean, I'm not a person who looks at the world with a pinnacle on it. I'm a person who looks at the world that way. So there's lots more room on that plane than there is on that triangle, you know, so people falling off the triangle.
And so we started like you said, there's no competition in art.
No, so I don't know. I mean, I would put a lot of people on there. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor. I would put Virginia Woolf. I would put Flaubert.
At least one French.
I would put Dostoevsky. I would put Modiano.
Modiano on Mount Rushmore.
Absolutely. I think… Yes,
I agree.
That's one time the Nobel jury got it right. Yes,
I agree. So what do you prefer, finally, make people laugh or make them cry? In this book you do both.
I would prefer to do both because I think if nothing's funny, nothing's serious. And so I want to make them laugh, but I want to make them cry. Because I'm, truthfully, when I get to the end of writing a book like this book, if I don't cry in my room by myself, I think something's wrong. I think I've missed something somewhere. So I want to make myself cry, not just for trivial reasons, but I make myself laugh all the time. So, both. And I have no time limits. I can take as long as I want to do the things I want to do, so I can do both.
Did you try ChatGPT? Because I asked AI to write me some questions for this interview.
You did?
And yeah, I asked, please give me questions for Richard Forb. And they were all completely stupid and- Nonsensical? Yes, really, really bad. So I had to work.
They were all silly questions?
Like, for example, I tell you one. To write a novel, what is the most useful, imagination or memory? This is a question by a computer.
Well, that's not such a bad question. No. Updike, one of my heroes, I would put him on Mount Rushmore also. Updike says in a wonderful little essay that the halls of memory and the halls of imagination run side by side.
maybe ai knows something nabokov said the same nabokov says imagination is is a sort of memory yes yeah form of memory and i i often i often confuse them i
often confuse as memory something i've imagined
Or the opposite.
Yes, or the opposite.
You think you invent something, but you're just remembering.
That's exactly right. Yeah. Or something I've actually read. Yeah. Or shared.
So... Now we go to my famous game. I have a game in this show.
The questione méchante.
No, it's not. No, no. But it's difficult. I'm going to quote you. It's called Guess Your Quotes. Devin des citations. I'm going to read you sentences that you wrote. And you have to guess in which of your books you wrote this sentence.
Oh, you're asking the wrong person. You should ask that literary critic who you just quoted a moment ago. Why should I be burdened with this?
People from Minnesota all say, yeah, nah.
Well, that's from Be Mine.
That's from the last one.
Yeah, no. They say, yeah, no.
They say, yeah, no?
Yeah, no.
What does it mean?
People, not just in Minnesota, people in Ireland say it also. What they mean is, yes, I understand, and the answer is no.
Ah, okay. Because in Normandy, here in France, we have tête-bainque oui, tête-bainque non.
Takes too long, no?
It's long. It's like maybe yes, maybe no. It's like you don't want to decide.
Qui ça si, qui ça non. I see. In Mexico.
So this one from the last one, another sentence by you. Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.
Well, I can only think that that would be from Canada.
It's from Canada. You remember your books. So in which category are you? The one who wants to be a bank president or to rob banks?
I'd rather rob banks.
When you were young, you were a little bit gangster.
Well, no, I was just a little criminal. I wasn't a gangster. I mean, gangster now means something different. I was just a little petty criminal.
You were not violent, but you were robbing houses.
Breaking into houses, breaking into houses with a couple of my friends. We didn't constitute a gang. We were just three feckless little... Trivial children, but we broke into houses and stole cars and told cars. Yeah, and Yeah, we did that no and we got caught and put in jail so okay Oh you my mother my mother got me out. Ah, it was the it was the it was the year my father died and After my mother Took me to court She took me outside the courthouse and she said, she said, your father's dead. She said, I have to go to work. We don't have any income. She said, I cannot be getting you out of trouble anymore. And so I thought, that makes sense to me. I don't, I understand that. It was a moment in my life when my mother and I became colleagues.
And then you decide to become a writer.
Well, I had many other many other starts and many other false starts before that. Really, being a writer was the last thing I ever thought I would do. It's so preposterous, you know.
Yeah. Another sentence by you.
Yes.
You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
Gee whiz.
I love it, by the way, I love this. For me it's very interesting, this way of thinking.
Well, I believe that.
Yes.
It's one of those things that I wrote that I actually believe.
So you agree with yourself?
I agree with myself. But it could have been a lot of places. That line could have come up a lot of places, because that's the kind of thing I write about.
It's Canada.
About being bad and choosing not to be bad. I mean, if you're just good because it's easy. It's just good because...
No value. Yeah, it has no value.
But if you have a choice between doing bad which seems very attractive... And not doing that because it maybe harms fewer people?
Yeah.
Then you get credit for it.
Yeah, exactly. So this was in Canada, 2013.
But it could have been three or four other places too.
Another one. Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. It's what you're willing to give up.
Well, that I don't believe. That's a good question that I don't believe. But again, that could have been in the Womanizer.
It's in Wildlife.
Wildlife. 1990. 1990. Long time ago. But again, I don't want to talk as if I'm talking about someone. Not myself. But that's the kind of line that I would have in my notebook. And I would just stick it into a story somewhere. Because I think it's such a provocative line. And that's what you're always trying to do when you work out of your notebook. You're trying to find places for these provocative lines that you have saved. I mean, I always keep my notebook with me. It's just in case I say something provocative, I'll write it down. Or if you do, I steal from you. Ah,
no, I write myself.
Of course we do. We all do that.
Another one. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight.
I like it.
I could have said it about myself. Because I do like to fight. It's a trap. It's a trap. Yeah.
It's not in a book. You said that in an interview.
I was going to say, it sounds like me talking about me. Yeah.
It's in an interview by Transfuge magazine. Yeah. I'm a Buddhist who likes to fight. It's like, you know, a famous sentence, if you want peace, prepare war.
Yeah.
That's the same. Yes. Yes. Old age, old age is not for sissies.
Well that's a famous line for... I stole that from the internet probably.
It's Bette Davis who said that.
I was gonna say, yeah.
It could be the title of Le Paradis des Fous.
It could. Old age is not for sissies. But I would probably have to convert it in some way so that it didn't bespeak Bette Davis.
what what what film was that in well maybe she just talked maybe she just said it about herself yeah yeah yeah but it's it's it's a that's a very famous line in america um one last one but i only have it in in french so i'm going to translate the translation okay mankind doesn't lose anything when a writer decides to shut up
well i'm sure i said that about myself absolutely it's in a weekend on michigan yeah i don't know the english title of this the sports uh the weekend in michigan is is is uh the sports writer uh the sports writer so the first frank bascom yes when i was when i was trying my best to persuade Olivier to take me seriously.
But you really think mankind loses nothing if a writer shuts his mouth?
No, I do think that. I think nothing is nothing. Nothing is not a loss. I, I, my, the epitaph which will go on my grave is nothing is enough.
Ah, I like it. But I mean, if writers are replaced by algorithms, mankind will lose something.
Something else comes along. See, I don't think that the imagination can be suppressed. I don't think that.
You're not afraid by artificial intelligence?
I'm wary of it. Of course, anybody has to be wary of it. But I put my faith in human beings. I really put my faith in human beings to dream what they dream, to wake up thinking what they wake up thinking, to go to sleep thinking what they go to sleep thinking, to wake up in the middle of the night in fear. I'd put my money on those people.
One last sentence by you. Most things don't stay the way they are very long.
Yeah.
Where did you write that? It's a tough game.
It could have been in Be Mine.
It could have been.
It could have been.
But it isn't.
But you see, what you're finding...
In Canada.
What you're finding out is that... Given how I work in this kind of constitutive way, which is to say for me writing novels is more mosaical, it's putting together things that weren't together before, so it never is for me that one book has its own absolutely unique source, because the source is always me. Yeah, so it could be anyone. So I could put into books. And Fitzgerald used to do this, speaking as we were. He kept notebooks.
He had notebooks,
yeah. And when he would write a story and he didn't like it, he would take it apart and put things back in his notebook so that he could then use them again. Many things can go many places. If you're thinking at a high enough level, if you're thinking about things that are memorable and plausible and important, things can go many places.
When they were here, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, they were here in what's called La Villa Saint-Louis.
La Villa Saint-Louis.
Yes, and it belonged to the Murphys. They were friends with the Murphys.
The Americans. Yeah. One hundred years ago, yeah. He dedicated the...
Tender is the Night.
Yeah, Tender is the Night too. Sarah Murphy. Sarah and Gerald.
So they were here and Zelda told him he was a loser. They were always drinking, you know. She said, you're a loser. So he went to Jouan-les-Pins and saw a bar and got inside the bar, took a few drinks, and there was a band playing music. So he asked the band to come to this place. And then he... He locked the band inside his room and said, now you are my prisoners. You must play until the morning or I will never let you free. And he went to see Zélda and said, so you still believe I'm a loser?
i made this story i like that i like i like that story i like that story a lot i'm sure it didn't make any difference to her no but my my wife has never called me a loser that's why you're staying with her no i know that's why i'm staying staying with her because she's the most wonderful woman in the world but but even with that being true she also never called me a loser even when I was you never fight you never oh sure ah okay every every point on the compass we've traversed Yeah.
Why not?
For life.
We end with the questions about the books you prefer.
Okay,
come on. So, short answer.
It won't be hard.
Okay. A book that makes you cry.
The movie Goa by Walker Percy.
A book that makes you stop crying.
The movie go up by Walker Percy. Same.
So it's like you like sad and funny. Yes. A book to get bored.
I wouldn't finish a book. So plenty of books make me bored. I throw it across the room.
A book to show off in the street.
That's not what I would show off in the street. I try to have a pair of nice socks on.
Yes, you have to film the socks of Mr. Ford, the yellow socks.
So it wouldn't be a book, it would be the socks.
Yeah, you see, Tom Wolfe had a white suit. Richard Ford has yellow socks. They all have, you know.
I have a white suit too. Oh, you do? Yeah.
A book that makes you clever.
Alice Munro. Books about the stories of Alice Munro. I come away from Alice Munro's stories thinking like a character in her books, which means to me that the stories have had a profound effect on what I can think. How my life, how my mind can open up beyond its normal. Beyond its normal boundaries.
That's the goal of every writer is to create this.
Absolutely. And that's another Nobel jury that got it right.
Yeah. A book to seduce.
Well, I've never seduced anything or anybody, so I don't know anything about that.
Such a liar. A book I regret having read.
Nothing. I don't do my... I know so little about regret that there is no book that I regret having read. None. Zero. If I read to the end of a book, because that's what a successful book is. A successful book is not a book the reader likes or dislikes. It's a book she or he reads to the end of. And if I read to the end of it, I have no regrets, because something has made me get there.
A book that you pretend you have finished.
I have nothing to gain from pretending I had finished it.
So, it never happened to you to say, oh, I love, I don't know, Under the Volcano, but you didn't finish it.
No, no, I would always say I loved Under the Volcano, but I did read all of it, all of what took me. Several chances. I would always say I didn't finish it, but I liked what I read I've got nothing as again. I've got nothing to gain from maybe that's what academics do There's a there's a famous line in academia in America. People will say Did you read such-and-such and somebody would say no and I know I haven't even taught it
The book I wish I had written?
There is no book that I wish I had written but the books that I did write. I couldn't possibly imagine, through the gauze of the greatest admiration, wanting to write a book that somebody else wrote. It would never occur to me.
Which is the worst book you've ever read in your life? Richard Ford.
Well, I guess I don't remember. Isn't that the ideal?
Yeah, it's better to forget it. And which book are you reading now?
I'm reading two books at the same time, because every once in a while it will start, one of them will start to bore me and I'll go to the other one. I'm reading the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. which is quite interesting. And I'm reading another famous American book called Giants in the Earth by a Norwegian man named Ole Rølvag. It's kind of one of those seminal books about Norwegians immigrating to America and going out into the steps of South Dakota and living until they perish. It's really one of those foundational books in American literature. So I'm reading those. And both of them, particularly the Olly Rollbag one, I started to read when I was 18 and never finished. So finally, I'm getting around at age 81.
Oh, it's the opposite. Yeah. 18 and 81.
Yeah.
Reverse. Strange. Thank you so much. And congratulations again for the F.
It's such a pleasure.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize. Well. mr ford it's an honor thank you very much pleasure to meet you this show was brought to you by the figaro tv and uh we thank of course the hotel belrive to host this wonderful award and to celebrate your genius well thank you my luck bye bye oh and don't forget read books or you will become idiots
You always say that. That's great.
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