ver the last decade, Jeffrey Ford has emerged as one of America's master fantasists. Subtle, shrewd, stylish and intensely surprising, he is a leading exponent of what Michael Swanwick has termed hard fantasy: fantastic literature that is authentically original rather than safely conventional, that strikes to the surreal heart of human nature with a fresh, courageous novelty and flair.
This is amply evident in Ford's highly regarded trilogy of novels concerning the Physiognomist Cley and other denizens of the Well-Built City: The Physiognomy (1997, winner of the World Fantasy Award), Memoranda (1999) and The Beyond (2001). His growing prowess was further attested by two books published in 2002, the major magic-realist historical thriller The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and the striking story collection The Fantasy Writer's Assistant (Golden Gryphon Press).
In the next few months, three further fine titles follow: a novel, The Girl in the Glass (Harper Perennial, Aug. 2005), a long novella, "The Cosmology of the Wider World" (PS Publishing) and a second collection, The Empire of Ice Cream (Golden Gryphon, March 2006).
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Jeffrey Ford by e-mail in January and July of 2005.
Your major new novel is The Girl in the Glass (Harper Perennial). What is the book's setting, and how would you sum up its central concerns?
Ford: The Girl in the Glass takes place during 1932, the Great Depression, and is about con men who put on séances for the grieving rich of Long Island's north shore Gold Coast. The leader of the group, Thomas Schell, whose opinion of life is that the only thing that matters is the con, claims to have seen what he believes to be a real ghost's image in a glass door during one of the séances. He and his associates, Henry Bruhl, an ex-carnival strong man whose stage name had been Antony Cleopatra, and a 17-year old illegal Mexican immigrant, Diego, set out to uncover the truth about the girl in the glass. The story is told retrospectively, from the point of view of Diego as an old man.
Because of the Mexican repatriation going on during the '30s, Schell has Diego pose as a Hindu swami with turban and fake accent for the séance customers. In addition to the three main characters, there is a network of Coney Island midway performers, magicians, cold readers, fake psychics, that helps them in their quest. Underlying the story of the mystery there is mention of the darker aspects of the American scene during this time—the strength of the Ku Klux Klan on Long Island during the '20s and the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, an organization founded by the wealthy elite of this country to "cleanse" the American bloodline of its shiftless element ...
Girl's also the story of a father and son, and Diego's coming-of-age tale. I changed my style up a little here, making it less florid, inspired by the writing style of Dashiell Hammett in his novel The Thin Man. The book is really pared down and moves like a bat out of hell in the reading.
Why did you choose Diego as your narrator? Was that to emphasize Girl's status as a book about the socially excluded, the marginalized?
Ford: When I initially conceived of the book, I wanted the narrator to be an orphan who'd been taken in by Schell and schooled in the ways of the con, but as I got deeper into the preliminary research of the time period I started uncovering all this incredible stuff I'd had no previous knowledge of—the extent of the KKK on Long Island, the Mexican repatriation and the Eugenics Record Office. These three tidbits came to me all in one day, and I knew the story would have to incorporate them in some way. There was a definite link between them, and there was most definitely a link to today in them.
The U.S. economy is not at its healthiest right now, let's face it. The dollar is circling the toilet bowl—all you have to do is travel to Europe from here to witness how weak it is. Japan and China are really getting leery of buying U.S. debt because the dollar is so weak. Always in times of economic crisis there is scapegoating—not just in the U.S., but everywhere. Hard times can bring out the best in some people, but they have a tendency to bring out the racist in others. Consider right now the vigilante movement growing along America's border with Mexico, the economic problems of California. Real problems exist for both Mexicans and Americans in this dilemma. A reasoned, complex approach to this issue that takes the interests of all into account as much as possible needs to be forthcoming from our leadership, and it is nowhere to be seen. Also in Mexico, Vicente Fox's recent statement that Mexicans in the U.S. are only taking jobs "even American blacks don't want" shows a real lack of intelligent engagement of the issue by leadership on that side of the border. I get the uneasy premonition that bad days are ahead. If unemployment rises along with gas prices and the cost of living, somebody's going to take it on the chin, and it isn't going to be the folks in power.
Back in the '20s and '30s, the Western rail system and the agricultural industry in the U.S. were built in part by the efforts of immigrant Mexican laborers. And as long as times were good, they were tolerated in this country, but man, the minute things started to bottom out, they, along with southern Europeans and Jews, became the shiftless, evil invaders, the tainted bloodline, and suddenly found themselves responsible for all this country's ills. This propaganda was not just being spewed by the usual bone-dry ignorant knuckleheads, but was actively pursued by this country's political and industrial elite, who ended up being in their own "upstanding" way as frightening as the KKK. These WASP power brokers thought it necessary to "cleanse the bloodline of the country." It didn't surprise me that I'd never heard of any of this in my high-school or college history classes. I invite all readers to investigate the connection between Henry Ford, the export of his racially charged philosophy to Europe, and its connection to Hitler's eugenics protocols. It wasn't the Germans who dreamed up the concept of eugenics, my friends. That was home-grown, right here in the land of liberty and freedom for all.
The Girl in the Glass, although it's a fast-paced, Hammett-inspired, noir mystery-thriller, and has as its main goal, as all of my books do, to entertain, this political thread runs as a dark undercurrent through it, as it did through the historical period in which it's set.
As for Diego, he was the character from that time who came to me and suggested that his story needed to be told now. I was very trepidatious at first in writing a character from another culture, hoping I could be convincing. I did a lot of historical research about Mexico and about Mexican immigration in the '20s and '30s, and then I just dove in head-first and let the character guide me. There are lines of dialogue occasionally throughout the book that are rendered in Spanish only. I did this as an attempt to remind the reader of the uniqueness of the culture from which the characters Diego and Isabel come, but tried, for readers of English, not to be too confusing with it. The writing of the book, for these reasons, was exciting, like a tightrope walk. Obviously, readers will eventually let me know if it worked or not.
Your choice of the year 1932 for the events in Girl: How specifically significant is that—a few months before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president for the first time, on the eve of a sea change in U.S. politics?
Ford: The year 1932 was landed upon merely by way of the fact that I had to coordinate each character's history and the history of the Great Depression and the operation of the Eugenics Record Office, etc. It was most likely that Diego would have come to the U.S. in 1924, when the largest wave of Mexican immigrants came. He also at the time of the story had to be 17, on the cusp between a teenager and a man. I wanted Schell to have been a veteran of the first World War, so that had to be added into the calculation. I had to incorporate Arthur Conan Doyle's American visits. All of these elements and many more had to be ciphered together. Believe me, I'm no whiz with numbers. The other day I was turned to stone trying to figure out how much of the change from a 20 I should get back from the pizza delivery guy so that he got a four-dollar tip. So, for the book, the calculator was out and there was much sweat and gnashing of teeth, but 1932 was the year in the end. And what a year it was, for all the reasons you mention and many more. It's a fascinating thing to go back in history and just scratch the surface down past whatever shallow hogwash they teach in public school. You'll soon realize, for both better and worse, that you're living in a much different country or world than you ever could have imagined.
Girl has many of the aspects of a crime thriller—your stylistic homage to Hammett, murders, detection, investigation, action. Yet is Girl truly a thriller? Or truly only a thriller?
Ford: Yes, The Girl in the Glass has many of the hallmarks of a thriller—suspense, mystery, violence, etc.—yet, again, it is as much a coming-of-age story, and a fictional investigation of a historical time period. My novels are always gumbos of different genres and styles—hybrids. The pursuit of genre purity bores the bejesus out of me. The novel also has what a lot of thrillers don't have, a sense of humor. That's what intrigued me about what Hammett had done in The Thin Man. He created a noir crime story that was infused with a certain comedic lightness. This really struck a chord with me, because as much as I enjoyed reading James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler (although he also exhibits a sense of humor sometimes) and more recent hard-boiled fare, the sensibility of The Thin Man resonated with my own. I knew I couldn't pull off writing a total hard-ass tract. It's not a mode of being that I have much interest in.
As with your masterful 2002 novel The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, Girl is a book that, while not overtly a work of fantasy, has something of the atmosphere of one, and plenty of hints of the fantastic. Why this technique of careful understatement?
Ford: There's a certain valuable storytelling tension I think you can get when a work skates on the border of the fantastic. The reader, while following the story, is ever aware that there is the possibility that the story could veer into full-blown fantasy. It adds to the suspense. But I've done two novels now along these lines, and I'm itching to get back to something much more firmly grounded in the fantastic, which has its own value as a story-telling mode.
A number of remarkable short stories appear in your upcoming Golden Gryphon Press collection, The Empire of Ice Cream and Other Stories. The title novelette is a case in point: "The Empire of Ice Cream" is one of the most brilliantly structured pieces in the modern fantasy canon. How did you conceive this extraordinary rendering of mental illness?
Ford: Jeez, thanks. The idea for that story has been around with me for many years. I think it came initially from my interest in and obsession with double or doppelganger stories. "The Double" by Dostoyevsky and "William Wilson" by Poe are two of my favorites, but there are dozens of other great ones. Add the fact that once in my reading I was looking at an article on synesthesia and it said that for those who experience the phenomenon, when their senses exchange a visual effect for that of a sound or smell or a taste, etc., that visual is always abstract. I began to wonder what it would be like if the phenomenon generated figurative visuals, so that you would see people or definite objects. Once I had that idea, it transformed, at first, into a story about someone who sees an identical likeness of himself, living out scenes in an alternate life. Both were to have been musicians, but one was to have been very successful and one a great failure.
I wrote an early draft of this story called "The Licorice Twins," but the twin thing had been done so much before that I tired of it and dropped it. When Jeff VanderMeer tapped me for a couple of "ailments" for The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, I used "Figurative Synesthesia" as one of them and something of the plot of the older version of the story. Then, before Lambshead came out, one day I was thinking about that storyline again, and it struck me that it could be a love story between two people who are not twins. After that, "The Empire of Ice Cream" came very quickly to me. The narrator of the story and main character is a musician, a composer, and in casting about for a piece of music for him to compose, I came upon the form of the fugue. It interested me because it has a musical line and then a corresponding line that answers it. I never considered it consciously, but later I saw that the structure of the story follows the structure of the fugue that the character states he is planning to compose.
Another notable story in Empire, "The Weight of Words", explores issues of linguistics and perception. How, given such subject matter, did you arrive at the style of the tale—formal, yet naïve?
Ford: "The Weight of Words" was another story that took a very long time to coalesce. When I was a kid the school subject of math was a real mystery to me. I remember one year, I think it was 10th grade, my mark for the year was 30 out of 100. I was forever in summer school, making up the math class I'd failed the previous school year. The strings of numbers in algebra always seemed to me to be a secret language, and even as a kid I wondered if there was any way to translate the numbers into words in order to make sentences, since I had more facility with manipulating language, not that I did all that great in English class either. In an equation, I'd see the character X, and it would repeat and be shown in conjunction with other numbers and letters, and I'd think of X as a character, like in a story, and all of the functions it went through as the plot of a story.
The idea remained with me and changed over time into the idea of the physical representation of words in texts having weights and properties, as if you could look them up on the periodic chart of elements. The story, though, seemed really complicated and fraught with all kinds of difficulty, so I let it drop. Then Michael Swanwick did his Periodic Table of SF stories for SCI Fiction, and although what he was doing was almost the reverse, it brought the storyline back to me. One day, while giving a midterm exam in my Early American Lit class, the character, setting and approach to the story came to me like a light going on. While my students took their test, I madly jotted down voluminous notes, not so much about the drama but how to represent the weight of words. This was unusual for me, because I don't usually take notes on stories, but it had been so long in the maturation stage I was afraid I would lose my ideas. It was like waking from a dream and trying desperately to get it down before it faded.
I knew I had to set the story back in the '50s, because the whole idea of subliminal seduction was rather new then. Now it's business as usual on a grand scale. The character of Secmatte, I think, in his innocence about what he was doing, hearkened back to me as a kid struggling with math, manipulating numbers but never really sure what their impact was or what the story they were telling was about.
In "The Trentino Kid," you tell a subtle ghost story against a background that is explicitly autobiographical. Does such addition of the supernatural, the highlighting that that provides, increase your understanding of yourself, of your body of personal experience?
Ford: This is an interesting question, and to be honest in answering it, I have to say, I'm not sure. As you guessed, the setup for this story is all true. I was a clammer, there was a younger kid in town who we used to let play basketball with us older guys, and he did drown scratch raking in the flats, probably by getting his foot caught in a sinkhole when the weather got bad. I'll never forget the day his old man came to the dock and asked us not to forget his son. Man, that was one of the saddest things I think I've ever witnessed. It stayed with me through the years. I suppose, in a way, I had to lay that ghost to rest. The story is a kind of memorial for that time period in my life and who knows what else. ...
When I write the stories that are based on autobiographical incidents, I don't intellectualize about them at all. They just appear, like ghosts materializing. Only later, after they're written, do I sometimes think about where they came from and why I wrote them. I wrote "The Trentino Kid" in three days. Stories like this one always emerge suddenly, for some reason. The addition of the supernatural does something. I think the elements of fantasy that show up in these stories are the manifestation of my subconscious feelings about the real-life situations—if that makes any sense. They're a way for me to express that stuff when I'm not able to consciously express it rationally and verbally. So much of my fiction comes from my (for want of another term) subconscious. I don't plan, don't take notes, don't have any idea where the thing is going. Writing fiction for me is the art of letting go, taking my hands off the steering wheel. If I second-guess and get nervous and try to start giving the guy in my head who writes the stories directions and advice on how to drive, there's a good chance the story is going to get lost or wind up in a ditch.
You've written a couple of young-adult fantasy stories: "The Green Word" and "Annals of Eelin-Ok." How much of a modification to your customary narrative method does such age-group-specific writing require?
Ford: In short, not much. The change is not in the narrative method as much as in the content. Young people are pretty hardy readers and thinkers. They're an audience I really respect. They know the world can be an ugly place, etc., but they're usually more interested in the aspects of wonder in it. I never write down to this audience, but I try to remember what kind of stuff I liked when I was a kid. I liked strange creatures and knights and witches and magic, so I wrote "The Green Word," and I liked the beach and the idea of a diminutive race of beings, so I wrote "Eelin-Ok." I probably wouldn't have written either story if I'd not had a chance to do something for these anthologies (The Green Man and The Faery Reel), and that would have been a shame. Writing these stories got me in touch with the things I initially liked in fiction, allowing me to reinspect them and honor them. I think these anthologies that Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow are doing, along with the Fairy Tale ones they did earlier, have reintroduced adult readers generally to the themes and styles they liked when they were younger. Going back like this has been a real learning experience and a lot of fun.
"Coffins on the River" is about a couple of inveterate pot smokers, and definitions of heroism. How difficult was it to get this strong-but-controversial story published?
Ford: "Coffins on the River" is one of my favorites of the more recent stories I've written. I think the writing and the humor in it are pretty good, and I love the wonky dog-leg structure, where it just kind of takes a sudden turn. It wasn't that hard to get published. I sent it out, and one editor didn't want it, I think for a combination of the fact that the editor wasn't that hot on the story and that it had a good deal to do with drugs. That's cool. I take no umbrage. You can write anything you want, but editors have to consider both the reactions of their readers and the management for which they work.
That said, drugs have been a part of fantasy literature from its inception—the magic potion, the secret elixir, etc. They are agents of transcendence. There are probably quite a few readers who would be incensed by a story about a couple of pot smokers, taking ayahuasca, as if this stuff didn't exist out there in the world. Their reaction denotes the view that, because drugs and drug takers appear in a story, that means the story is advocating taking drugs—which is basically a retarded way of looking at it. Does a murder mystery advocate murder? Does a historical novel, like Middle Passage, Charles Johnson's novel about a slave ship, advocate slavery?
We live in a time where it's a moral outrage to blow a joint, but morally righteous to deny two people of the same sex who love each other the right to marry. People can do real time in jail for holding less than an ounce of pot, and yet Rush Limbaugh, that f---ing hypocrite, can rail against drug users as being worthless, get caught illegally using pills, and get away with saying he's sorry he did it. Doctors can pump their patients full of the worst poison peddled by the pharmaceutical companies and no problem, but a person smokes some grass and the whole pinhead, Bible-thumping, morally righteous zombie squad is aghast. America's view on drugs is as lacking in complexity as its view on most things. What's new?
I took the story to Sycamore Hill, the writing conference, and got good advice on it from Andy Duncan and Kelly Link and some of the other participants. I incorporated these changes and sold the piece to Deb Layne at Polyphony for their third volume. Deb didn't bat an eyelash at the drug references, because I think she saw that the story was about much more than the smoke.
"A Man of Light" is an extremely striking piece of fantastic surrealism. What was your inspiration here? And what is your opinion of fantasy's conventional opposition of light and darkness, good and evil?
Ford: My inspiration for this story came directly from a visit to my friend Kevin Quigley's studio. He's a painter, and he'd just done a painting for a local Halloween art show. The picture was a takeoff of a famous early American painting of a man ascending a staircase and looking back over his shoulder. I could be wrong, but I think the original is by Charles Wilson Peale. When I looked at Quigley's rendition more closely, I saw that all he had really rendered was the figure's head and gloves, socks and shoes, and that the green wallpaper behind him filled in for what I, at first, mistook to be his suit. It's a neat visual trick, making the fact that the figure is a ghost of some kind slowly dawn on the viewer. The face of the figure was very dour and vaguely forbidding, and I told Kevin I thought the guy in the painting looked like the old actor Ray Milland. He nodded, and then said, "You know who he really looks like, and I didn't plan this, but tell me he doesn't look like John Ashcroft." And yes, he most definitely did.
After that, I was looking at another of Quigley's paintings, and I commented upon the use of light in it, and he responded by saying, "I'm the man of light." Then he proceeded to tell me about some painter who painted saccharine-sweet landscapes and portraits of people's homes to order and added as much painterly "light" as the patron requested. This guy bills himself as something like "The Man of Light" and has franchises in shopping malls throughout the country. It was these two things that came together in my mind to give the impetus to the story. I was going to call it "Ashcroft," but then it would have been an overt political allegory, which I wasn't interested in.
The theme of dark and light—hey, what's not to like about it? It's been around forever, and since it was good enough for Nietzsche and Blake and Dante and Milton, it's good enough for me. But I think the story subverts the theme from its classical representation. I wasn't thinking about any of this when writing it, I was just trying to tell a story, but after reading it later, one thing I think it captures is the idea that it's always good to be wary of those proclaiming themselves to be "men of light." Often they shine on the outside with silver tongues and incandescent CGI halos but are black as pitch within.
"The Scribble Mind" places a very ordinary person in a position of unusual and dangerous knowledge, yet he resolutely remains unaffected by it. Is this story your antidote to the escapist tendencies of genre fantasy, to its emphasis on privileged erudition and elite conspiracy?
Ford: I think I understand what you are asking, but though it might be there in the piece, it's not what I had in mind consciously. I'm not choosing sides. "The Scribble Mind" is a story where no one really gets what they want. It's not so much the meaning of the scribble that Esme is pursuing, it's a more basic understanding she desires. The scribble is merely a manifestation of that, a focal point for her frustration. There's something far more integral to her life that drives her. As for the narrator, Pat, he wants Esme, but he'll never have her because of her obsession. As adults they both try to convince themselves and each other that they have succeeded. Pat sees through Esme, and the story is told from his point of view, but there is a clue in the story that she sees through him at the end also, even though we don't get to hear her side of it. The relationship the two characters have is very complex, but it is where the real story is, or so I'm saying today.
Upcoming from PS Publishing is a long novella, "The Cosmology of the Wider World," a remarkable surrealistic tale of talking animals and much besides. How long has this work been in gestation? How did it evolve?
Ford: "The Cosmology of the Wider World" is something I've been working on for a long time. The piece being published by PS is a section of it, "Part One", that can stand alone, but the work in its entirety is much larger. I started writing it back in the '80s, and a story-length piece of it was published by the magazine MSS around 1990. What can I say—it's a talking-animal story. The protagonist is a minotaur. I got the idea from one day paging through a book of art and seeing a painting of a minotaur, standing on what looks like the turret of a tower, staring out to sea. The painting invited daydreaming, and from this the story was born. I'm sure having read The Jungle Books, by Kipling, not too long before was influential to my writing it.
The symbolism of Belius the Minotaur is abundantly clear in some respects—notably his simultaneous status as human and as animal. Yet there's also the matter of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth at Knossos, the menacing being Theseus confronts in the Greek myth. ... What is Belius' labyrinth?
Ford: I think to some extent "The Cosmology of the Wider World" is about loneliness, in both its personal and existential manifestations. Belius is isolated in that he is the sole member of his race. Not to get too serious about all this, but loneliness is something we all deal with. We are, ultimately, trapped within ourselves, alone. This isolation is mitigated by friends and family and community, but if we are not at peace within ourselves we charge blindly through a world that becomes a dark labyrinth. It's not an easy thing to find this peace. It can take a lifetime and many never achieve it. To whatever degree one carries guilt, self-recrimination, feelings of inadequacy, these measure the complex extent of the personal prisons one labors to escape from. Self-awareness is the exit.
I will say that "The Cosmology" is as much a work of autobiography, in certain respects, as anything else. Or, let me revise that, is more the autobiography of the me who began writing it back in the '80s. Kim Deitch, the artist who did the "Cosmology" cover, and I met only once, and we talked for a couple of hours, but after reading the book, before setting out to do the illustration, he told me, "You're Belius."
"Cosmology," or part one of "Cosmology," is full of brilliant original imaginative flourishes—a flea's odyssey through Belius' bloodstream, an adulterous tortoise, a bizarrely humorous experiment in the shaping of a female golem, etc. How substantially, do you think, does "Cosmology" revise and ramify the traditional talking-animal fable—are you consciously redirecting the form, to a higher or more mature level?
Ford: I doubt whether anyone can actually top the Jungle Books. I love them, and writing this right now is a reminder to go back and read them again. The way I originally began writing "The Cosmology" was that I tried to think of the most tired-out form of the literature of the fantastic. The talking-animal story seemed pretty beat back in the 1980s, although Richard Adams' Watership Down was fun. I wondered if I could write a beast epic that would be as engaging as any novel. It was a kind of test for me, a writing exercise that turned into a long engagement with the "Wider World." I can't tell if the book has accomplished the things you asked about, because it remains unfinished. The second part is finished and very close to being publishable, and the third is done but rough. There will definitely be a fourth, and maybe more. With the exception of the second installment, I'm not sure any more will ever actually be published. I'm in no rush to finish "Cosmology," but may simply continue writing it, on and off, for the rest of my life. It is one long continuous story—sort of a writer's playground.
The above-mentioned part two of "Cosmology"—how will that carry the story of Belius onward?
Ford: I don't want to give too much away, but there is both great sadness and a great journey in Belius' future. And for anyone who reads the first installment and feels that the character of Soffea has been treated badly, don't worry. In a roundabout way, she'll have her revenge.
What other projects do you have forthcoming? Short fiction, certainly ... a further novel, perhaps?
Ford: I have that collection coming from Golden Gryphon, The Empire of Ice Cream, which will contain 13 stories and a new 40,000-word novella, "Botch Town." That will be out in March of 2006. I'll have a story, "The Dreaming Wind," in The Coyote Road, an anthology of trickster tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. And the magazine Weird Tales will be devoting an issue to my work, an interview, a bibliography, a reprint and a new story, which I believe will be out at the end of this year. I've been clearing the decks, as I am preparing to write a new novel. As I mentioned in response to an earlier question, it will contain more than a nod to fantasy, as my two most recent novels have used that quite sparingly, but it's too early to talk about it yet.
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