Richard Ford's got all the best lines

Nice interview in the Irish Times today with Richard Ford. It's one of the many interviews he's given recently about his new book, Between Them, a slim memoir about his parents' lives before and after his birth in 1943. 

I was in the Rotunda recently for Ford's appearance at Dublin's International Literature Festival and had the opportunity to talk to him afterwards. I mentioned how much I enjoyed his recent encounter with Terry Gross on npr's Fresh Air and he told me that he thought he did a good one this time. It's true - he did, he's a great interviewee and seems to have a warm rapport with Gross - but I'd argue that his previous interview with Gross in 2014 was even better.

Recorded to coincide with the publication Let Me Be Frank With You, it caught him in great form, talking about the ongoing travails of former sportswriter and real estate agent Frank Bascombe, Ford's health as he ages, his parents lives (foreshadowing Between Them) and his thoughts about literature and life in general.

In conversation, Ford seems to have an unending supply of quotations from writers and critics that he can turn to at the drop of a hat to support whatever he's talking about. That's because, as he told Gross, he keeps them on a stack of 3" x 5" cards that he looks at them regularly. And what a gift they are. Rarely will he speak for a few sentences without dropping a reference to people like Seamus Heaney, Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, William Blake or F.R. Leavis. It's quite charming really and, let's face it, we could all do with a little more wisdom from great minds. Here's a handful of examples from recent interviews:

if you're going to do good in the world, you can only do good in particulars. (WIliam Blake)

We're all probably well advised to keep a nodding relationship with the person that we used to be. (Joan Didion) 

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. (Don DeLillo)

If we knew what went on between men and women we wouldn't need literature. (Mavis Gallant)

However my favourite of Ford's borrowed wisdom comes from Philip Larkin. Recounting, in the 2014 Fresh Air interview, how his wife didn't react the same way he did to a recent health scare, he said, "Kristina didn't feel that way about it. But it wasn't happening to her. You know, there's a great line of Philip Larkin's. He said,

"Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me."

I love that line and think of it often. It really captures what so many of us feel but don't like to show - we want to be sympathetic, of course, and it'd be nice to help others – we do what we can, obviously - but, at the same time, we're thinking, "hang on - what about me, what about my problems?!"

When I was talking to Ford in the Rotunda, I mentioned his stack of cards and how much I enjoyed the Larkin quotation. Stopping me for a moment, he waited before reciting it to me with a smile. And what a thrill it was to hear it spoken, not from the horse's mouth, as such, but from the mouth of the horse that brought it to my attention. I'm not saying it was like hearing Springsteen sing Thunder Road to me but it wasn't far off. He laughed afterwards and said the line works every time because it seems so sympathetic, but then it gets you in the end. "And isn't that just like life?" he asked. 

And it is. But sometimes you have encounters with people like Richard Ford that takes the edge off all the hard times. We're lucky to have him.