A Celebration of Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City Trilogy: The Physiognomy

Jeffrey Ford is one of America's best fiction writers. He's won multiple World Fantasy Awards as well as an Edgar Allen Poe Award, establishing his reputation through a series of iconic short story collections and quirky, beautifully written novels. Now Golden Gryphon Press is reissuing Ford's Well-Built City novels--The Physiognomy (1997), Memoranda (1999), and The Beyond (2001)--with stunning new covers by award-winning artist John Picacio. Compared to the work of Kafka, among others, these highly surreal and original works launched Ford's career.

(Jeffrey Ford's novels fit well on my somewhat omnivoracious mantel...) 

What are the novels about? They revolve around Cley, a complicated character who changes dramatically as the novels progress. As Cynthia Ward wrote for Amazon.com when The Physiognomy was originally published, "In the Well-Built City, Cley is the perfect judge and jury, the infallible arbiter of life and death, for he is trained in the art/science of physiognomy. To the physiognomist, body shape and facial features reveal every aspect of personality, expose every secret, and even predict the future. When Drachton Below, Master of the Well-Built City, sends his premier physiognomist into the primitive outlands to uncover the thief of an unperishing fruit that may grant immortality, Cley discovers love and the truth about physiognomy...The Physiognomy may be read with equal success as either fantasy or SF, but it does not much resemble the fiction of either genre. This novel's closest relatives are In the Well-Built City, Dante's Divine Comedy, Kafka's black allegories, and Caleb Carr's crime thriller The Alienist. The brilliant and sardonic Physiognomist Cley is SF/F's most entertainingly arrogant narrator since Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters."

To celebrate the re-release of the Well-Built City trilogy, I recently spoke to Jeffrey Ford about each book, starting with The Physiognomy. (My interviews with Ford on Memoranda and The Beyond will run Wednesday and Thursday.)

Amazon.com: What sparked writing the novel? Wasn't there also a kind of proto-Well-Built City tale before The Physiognomy?
Jeffrey Ford: What sparked the idea for the novels was my discovery of a dusty tome, lying on a bottom shelf in the stacks at the Temple University library. This was Johann C. Lavater’s great work on the bogus science of Physiognomy.  It was a facsimile edition of an 18th century book. I have a tendency to be easily side-tracked when in libraries by books people leave out on tables, and works that are mis-shelved. I was looking for a book that would describe to me who St. Cuthbert was for some work I was doing on a dissertation. I blew the dust off that big old book and opened it and discovered a page of beautifully rendered lithograph heads staring out at me. There were pages and pages of them.  I read some of the text and it became clear to me what the study of Physiognomy was about--a reading of a person’s physical attributes in order to determine their inherent moral worth. It struck me, while reading, that this reliance on surface to predict depth was an approach to the world that was still prevalent today in our own society. Especially in America, we live and die by our reliance on surface and rarely bother to look beneath it. On that afternoon, the story line for the three books just opened out before me. I had the basic plot for the trilogy before I left the library.  I never did find out about St. Cuthbert that day but later discovered that he was often depicted carrying a severed human head. There was no proto-Physiognomy, but there was a short novel I’d written, Vanitas, published by Space & Time Press, and a short story, “The Delicate,” in which I was sort of half-consciously working out the style I wanted for the trilogy.  Scarfinati, a character in Vanitas, appears in the books and makes an appearance in some of my other work as well.

          

Amazon.com: Is there an influence or stimulus on the novel that might come as a surprise to readers?
Jeffrey Ford: I don’t know if this would be surprising to the reader, but I did wait about six or so years before actually getting down to writing the books. Before actually beginning The Physiognomy, I spent one summer doing these black and white drawings that looked like crazy woodcuts.  I was obsessed with doing them--did giant ones and very small ones--dozens of them. When I finally exhausted my interest in the process of creating them, I started writing the novel. What this points to or what it means, I don’t know. I don’t know about the reader, but I’d be surprised to finally understand what that was all about. 

Amazon.com: How did the publication of the novel affect your career and your writing?
Jeffrey Ford: Well, it was the first novel I published with a major press. It was published by Avon books as a “literary novel” but was reviewed as Science Fiction. I don’t think it sold very well, but a few good things happened with it. It got a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, The New York Times chose it as a notable book of the year, and it won The World Fantasy Award. These accolades allowed me to continue publishing, and allowed me to finish the trilogy, which was my main desire. It was a struggle, though.  My editor at Avon and later Harper Collins, Jennifer Brehl, believed in the project, and that helped me complete it. As for changing my writing, it made me a better novelist as I was able to continue writing novels.