Monday, November 03, 2014

Novelist Richard Ford on Ireland, lost friends and his accidental career

Every summer the quintessential American novelist heads to Connemara to shoot woodcock. Robert McCrum joins him on the Irish coast

Writer Richard Ford at his holiday home in Ireland
‘It’s not that I feel at home here – I just don’t feel out of place’: Richard Ford in the house he rents every autumn in Clifden, Ireland. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer
Connemara, on the far west of Ireland, is a ragged, 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 the Land), who has plenty of Irish blood in him, renting a house here every autumn.

Except that Ford has come here not for the literature but to shoot woodcock, a treasured pastime. This juxtaposition of books and guns is typical of this writer, who has always loved to hunt and fish
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1 comment:

Curl said...

To hunt & fish - that figures!