Books: The lone wolf

Richard Ford went from being a sports writer to creating The Sportswriter.

Each year American novelist Richard Ford heads to Ireland to shoot woodcock. Robert McCrum joins him on the Irish coast.

Connemara, on the far west of Ireland, is a haunting place of gorse and stone, resonant with literary associations. Beyond the bright horizon, John Millington Synge researched The Playboy Of The Western World around the Aran Islands, lying on the upstairs floor of an inn to eavesdrop on the conversations of the country girls below.

On Connemara's Atlantic coast, Clifden is doubly remote and literary. Every September it hosts a festival attended by many of Ireland's poets and storytellers. So it's hardly a surprise that you should find the American writer Richard Ford, author of the Frank Bascombe trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay Of Ohe Land), who has plenty of Irish blood in him, renting a house there every autumn.

Except that Ford has come here to shoot woodcock. This juxtaposition of books and guns is typical of this writer, who has always loved to hunt and fish. While the sun shimmers on the sea beyond, he and his wife Kristina, also a keen shot, seem completely at home in a big stone house overlooking a little harbour at the end of the Errislannan Peninsula. Here, Ford can revel in the independence of solitude.

"No one lives here permanently," he says. "For us it's ideal. No phone, no FedEx delivery, 10 metres from the open Atlantic, a few congenial neighbours we hardly see, a single-track lane. My father's side of the family were Irish, from County Cavan. It's not that I feel at home - 'identify' is not what I do - I just don't feel out of place."

This lovely spot of seclusion could hardly be further from the Mississippi of Ford's childhood, yet its isolation speaks to an important side of his character. Ford is a lone wolf and always has been, perhaps because his life is inextricably linked to the American South.

The Mississippi of the 1950s both shaped him and made him permanently restless. "Some of my high-school friends think of that time as their happiest," he says, "but I really don't." When he was growing up, the American civil rights movement was hot and divisive. Ford remembers that Jackson, his home town, was "churchy and bigoted and parochial. When the moment came that I could leave, I did."

At the same time he cannot break the old connection. "I'll always think of myself as a Mississippian through the accident of birth. I still go to Mississippi a great deal. After 50-something years, I probably talk to some high school classmate every other day. We're all pretty close."

As a writer he's had to wrestle with some powerful local influences. "I grew up with William Faulkner and Eudora Welty alive and writing in Mississippi. Their presence gave permission, to anyone who wanted to try, to be a writer."

It was some years before Ford acknowledged his vocation. "The norm would've been to go into some profession like the law, or banking. I tried to become a lawyer but I didn't like it." He had several false starts. "Being a Marine Corps officer. Trying to be a sports writer in Little Rock. None of them worked out."

Ford's first move away from home was eventually to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Later on, he would make another move to the American mountain west.

Ford's beginnings as a published writer were accidental as his path to his literary vocation was slow and uncertain. His first novel, A Piece Of My Heart, happened almost by chance. "I certainly never had the ambition to write a novel," he says. Looking back, he confesses, "I didn't feel I was getting anywhere."

Then he got a break. The University of Michigan nominated him for a prestigious fiction award. "They'd been told I was writing a novel - which I wasn't. I had to cobble up something resembling the beginning of a novel." When he showed them what he'd written, "Lo and behold, I was awarded this cushy fellowship from the Ford Foundation."

He and his new young wife Kristina moved to Michigan in the summer of 1971, and it was there that he set about writing A Piece Of My Heart.

Ford's trajectory continued to stutter. That first novel took more than four years. After its publication, his career hardly prospered. "By 1983-84, I'd published two novels [A Piece Of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck], but neither had done well. I'd quit writing fiction." By the mid-80s he was just "a happy sportswriter" on Inside Sport. But when the magazine folded, he found himself out of work.

In desperation he began to write the novel that became The Sportswriter "out of cluelessness, not having anything else to do". These were dark times for Ford. "Midway through writing the f***er," he recalls, his literary agent advised him, with breezy candour: "This one better be good. Otherwise you're toast."

Ford says now: "I guess I kinda knew that, but [I thought]: 'Thanks for putting it so clearly for me.' For someone who tends to be as ascetic about doing his work as I tend to be, it was a comfort."

This is a telling admission. Ford presents himself as a shooter, a fisherman and an outsider, but that's only half the story. Secretly the currents of a cherished creative life flow deep. There is, for instance, his all-important friendship with one of America's greatest late-20th century writers.

"I first met Ray Carver," he says, "at a literary festival in Dallas, in 1977. I didn't really know him, and he certainly didn't know me. We just took a shine to one another. I liked his stories - and he pretended to like my first novel."

Carver was emerging from years of alcoholism. "What he really liked about me," says Ford "was that I wasn't a drunk, wasn't a bankrupt, had a house and a wife that I loved. He needed to change his acquaintance away from the drinking crowd."

During the next winter Carver came to stay. He and Ford developed their friendship. "We went on seeing each other and being close friends for the next 11 years," says Ford. "I loved him and still miss him every day. We liked to hunt and fish, and we did that together in the west. He got famous, and when he did, he invited me along with him. It was wonderful to cruise around with him as his sidekick, and in his shadow."

Ford has nothing but regret for Carver's premature death. "I feel certain that he'd have done even more marvellous things. Fifty is an alarmingly young age to check out. He once wrote that his life had been blessed, but he was angry about being ill and angry about dying, even though he faced it with a kind of serenity."

Ford's friendship with Carver was founded on books and guns. They became a fraternity of two. Neither was a groupie. The label "Dirty Realism" was imposed, from the outside, by editors hustling their work in a competitive fiction market. "I've never been much of one for meeting famous writers whose work I admire," he says, "nor visiting their former houses." From time to time, however, Ford's regular-guy mask will slip: "Once, for some reason," he remembers, "I decided to visit Flannery O'Connor's house down in Milledgeville, Georgia."

But the house was closed for Sunday. Ford the reluctant fan became Ford the hunter. "I parked my car," he remembers, "and stole back through the trees into the grounds of the house. There were irises in bloom along the driveway." Ford now reveals that he "excavated" one of O'Connor's irises, wrapped it in wet paper towels, and took it home to Maine. "I planted it," he says, "just outside the boathouse where I work." He laughs. "It lived, and is living to this day, 10 years later. But - and Flannery would love this - it never bloomed."

Ford, by contrast, was now flourishing with a vengeance.

After years of struggle, the uncertainty in Ford's life dissipated. The Sportswriter, the tale of a failed novelist turned sportswriter who suffers an existential crisis following the death of his son, was published in 1986 to almost immediate acclaim.

Frank Bascombe, the would-be writer who becomes an estate agent, is a character readers identify with. Ford recognised Bascombe's fictional potential, making him part of an informal trilogy. The downward trajectory of Bascombe's career evolved in an ironic counterpoint to Ford's success: Independence Day, in 1996, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. Ford had sworn off Bascombe after The Lay Of The Land, in 2006, but now, in a last hurrah, he has brought a 68-year-old Bascombe back in a sequence of four linked novellas, Let Me Be Frank With You.

Going back to the character has been enjoyable. "The long-story form is less onerous than a long novel, but still provides plenty of time to air Frank out and complete a whole story." He admits saving up "Bascombe" lines for this moment, jotting down zingers in his notebook.

"It is," he says, "just a pleasure to hear Bascombe's voice. He makes me laugh. Making Frank 68 wasn't very difficult, with me being 70. This world's full of different observations from the world of 50. The Big D [death] is always peeking at me. All I can do is enjoy life. I operate as Frank's ventriloquist under the premise that, 'If nothing's funny, nothing's serious'."

Ford, the late starter, has had plenty of time to think about his readership and to reflect on the process of writing. Does he have an ideal reader in mind? "My audience," says Ford, "is someone similar to who I was when I got started with serious reading: a young person - I was 19 - who can simply read."

He tells a story about giving a reading at the University of North Dakota. "Two large, healthy women came up to have a book signed. They were dressed in big plaid shirts and coveralls, and said they were 'partners'. They said that they read my books on their tractor when they were ploughing. They were farmers. I thought, 'well, if these two lesbians are reading my books on their tractor, then I've made some measurable progress in the world'. I've never forgotten that lesson."

Let Me Be Frank With You (Bloomsbury $36.99) is out now.