‘At my age I can’t get into fistfights’: Novelist Richard Ford on dyslexia, musical heroes and his heavyweight literary feuds

Richard Ford once spat at fellow novelist Colson Whitehead, and claims he’s hung up his boxing gloves for good. Martin Chilton finds him still up for a scrap and landing punches on Trump (‘pooch-lipped, virulent’), William Faulkner (’an awful little creature’) and his own literary legacy (‘a crock of s***).

‘Legacies are a crock of s***’ (Handout)

Richard Ford’s celebrated Frank Bascombe novels are about a failed novelist turned sports journalist. In real life, though, it was the other way round. Trying to land his first gig after university, the author, from Jackson, Mississippi, was sent into a room with “a bunch of clips” and tasked by the Arkansas Gazette’s sports editor to write a story. “I sat down and looked at all the clips – which, as a practised note taker, is exactly the way I write novels – and produced a dog’s breakfast,” he tells me. “It was a real bunch of crap. I showed it to him and he said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no… get out of here.’ He threw me out. I had no hope of being a writer. It’s 60 years ago, but I keep hoping to this day that he will call me.”

As we chat on Zoom – Ford is in temporary residence in Dublin, where he once lectured in creative writing at Trinity College – we laugh about the quirks of being a sportswriter, a job that, in fact, lurks in both our pasts. He recounts a funny tale about a hugely talented baseball player who was, off field, “the meathead’s meathead”. Soccer “puts him out”, incidentally, because of the way footballers are always “flopping and diving and grabbing their d***s”. Asked if he believed he was destined to write great fiction, he replies with a cackle: “No, not at all.”

It was with The Sportswriter that the Bascombe series began, back in 1986; Ford has just published the latest instalment, Be Mine. This time round finds the ageing Bascombe undertaking an emotional road trip to see Mount Rushmore, as he tries to make peace with his ailing son Paul. Bascombe is a memorable literary creation – one of the most complicated and unique characters of our age – and these first-person novels, so resonant in setting and so strong in plot, are full of pathos, as well as being nuanced, wickedly funny depictions of contemporary American life. Independence Day, the second in the Bascombe series, was the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award in a single year (1996).