About Writers: Hack, Serious, and Academic
[In the following excerpt, Pinsker examines how writers feel about their profession, and provides a positive assessment of A Dangerous Profession, Busch's collection of essays about writing.]
“This isn't writing,” Truman Capote famously observed about Jack Kerouac's On the Road, “it's typing.” Thus was it ever—from the days when putting words on the page was so much scribble-scribble with a quill pen, to pounding away on a manual typewriter, and finally to our current love affair with keyboarding. What has remained constant is not just the yawning gap between “somebody who writes” and a writer, but also the hard economic truths that pit serious (which is to say, underappreciated) writers against the hacks who end up on the bestseller list and smile all the way to the bank.
As I tell my students, you're a writer when you write something. Period. Adjectives such as rich or famous are largely beyond your control. For better or worse, others will decide about these matters, beginning with the editor who accepts your piece and puts his hand into his pocket to pay for it, and continuing through a long series of book reviewers and literary critics.
In short, the writing life was never for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart. (I would like to add that it is also not for the disingenuous or the dishonest, but I know that this simply isn't true.) Writing covers so wide a swath and involves individuals so different in temperament and talent that one can easily end up talking about “everything”—and, as a result, talking about nothing. Why so? Because writing that matters is grounded in concrete instances rather than in abstract language. As a character in Philip Roth's I Married a Communist puts it, “Politics is the great equalizer, literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other—they are in an antagonistic relationship.” In this novel, set in the turbulent years of redbaiting and blacklists, Roth's sympathy is clearly for writing that allows us to see messy human lives (and historical periods) with the complexity and nuance they deserve.
Roth is hardly alone in cranking out such manifestoes. One thinks, for example, of prefaces by the likes of Henry James or Joseph Conrad, of Ralph Ellison's essays and William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech—but, taken together, these eloquent pronouncements tell at best only a partial story, for writing in the wider world incorporates much more than pronouncements of aesthetic rigor. That's why the books under discussion here strike me as a valuable corrective to those who would not be caught dead talking seriously about potboilers, much less about the ways that too many academics (mis)communicate with each other.
Does this mean that I have a newfound respect for those writers who butter their parsnips by dint of pen alone, or that I've changed my mind about the various ways that most academic writing is built upon a foundation of cowardice and subterfuge? Not bloody likely. But if Henry James was correct in arguing that fiction deserves its donnee—one cannot rightly criticize a novel about the Kansas prairie because it was not set in New York City—it is also true that roughly the same principle should apply when we talk about any piece of writing. To twist Gertrude Stein's famous aphorism, good writing is good writing is good writing—whether it be a short story, a travel sketch, a literary essay, or an inner-office memo.
Serious writers are oft inclined to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of book publishing's better days, mounting jeremiads that posit a golden age from which we have presumably fallen. Yet writers who rail about the end of print often confuse a willful exercise in nostalgia with harder truths. A lifetime devoted to serious writing was never a walk in the park, especially if one hoped against all odds that his or her paragraphs might last. History must be the final arbiter, conferring fame on a few while consigning many more to the scrapheap.
Small wonder, then, that writers are such a testy, beleaguered breed. As they say in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods, “You gatta luv 'em.” But we also need to see them through a variety of prisms, which is why the following books struck me as fascinating studies in the disparate ways that people put their hopes and fears into print. …
Frederick Busch's A Dangerous Profession: A Book about the Writing Life provides us with news from a very different front. As the author of eighteen novels and two books of nonfiction, Busch understands how elemental writing is, as well as how essential it can be to our survival. In short, he knows, as can only a writer with full commitment to craft, that writing is “a dangerous profession.” The result is a portrait of the serious writer who has no choice about his or her lifelong commitment to letters, and who doesn't give a fig (or not many figs) about the vagaries of the marketplace. Hack writing is a hard-knock life, but it is not elemental in the sense that Busch uses the term, for what he means is a terrible (and uncompromising) honesty of emotion, one that sentences our best writers to a life of writing sentences.
Some of Busch's most engaging essays here talk about how his own fiction came into being, as when his father's World War II journals provide a jumping-off point for a son's extended psychic search, and about how it is that serious writing is a way to answer one of the most disturbing questions of all: “Where are you?”: “When I write, then, when I place my characters in a geography I labor to make actual-feeling, in some way true, perhaps I'm trying to earn my reader's approval. Maybe I have to find him first. Maybe, when I write, I'm mapping him.” Other Busch essays crackle with savvy remarks about Melville, Dickens, and most of all Hemingway. With a snip here, a tuck there, what he says about Hemingway could be about all serious writers regardless of their time or place:
I have talked about some of the plainest and most poignant examples I know of Ernest Hemingway's dedication to his art [his examples include such stories as “Indian Camp” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” along with For Whom the Bell Tolls and Garden of Eden], which was hardly selfless and priestlike, but which was, and this is my point, selfish and afraid. He did his work because it meant his life to him. … [His fiction] is alive with death, and with his sense that he would inevitably reach out for it. What I have talked about is the obvious trail he left in his art of his lifelong movement between the most terrible sounds of life, and the final silence with which serious writers seem somehow to be familiar.
Talk about giving an important writer his just desserts! What most Hemingway critics quite miss are exactly the counterthemes on which Busch concentrates: the pitiless demands of art and the ways in which genuine writing simultaneously becomes solace and threat.
The sixteen essays collected in A Dangerous Profession range widely, but taken together they come to nuanced portraits of what it means (and costs) to be a serious writer. Take, for example, his elegiac portrait of Terrence Des Pres, a colleague at Colgate University who wrestled with the demons of his childhood and then found an appropriate subject in his seminal study of Holocaust survivors. The Survivor (1976) is a landmark book that rightly gave Des Pres wide public recognition, but what Busch wants to emphasize are the ways that the man put his very life into every sentence and paragraph:
He wrote as if his life were at stake. Never mind the fame he wanted and achieved, and never mind the money he might have made or the undergraduates who held him in awe. Many of us, readers and writers, experienced enough to understand the human amalgam were also impressed and even awed. His work on the Holocaust remains important. So do his essays on contemporary poetry and the relationship of art to politics. Something of what he needed to find and needed to say is in the conclusion of his essay on the poetry of Thomas McGrath: “Against the old ultimatum, not thunder and the fall of sky, but the street's careless laughter and the sigh of a neighbor next door.” He was an engaged man who wanted to believe in Whitman's wished America, and he died too young.
Among those who have lost touch with Busch's sense of writing as an elemental struggle between memory and forgetfulness are professional literary critics. In far too many cases they tell us everything about a poem or novel except why anyone should love it. On this much-debated matter Busch is as passionate as he is workmanlike. Granted, our continuing academic follies are so many fat softballs lobbed over the plate, but unlike those who are satisfied by getting on base with a bunt, Busch swings for the fences. In “Bad,” a free-wheeling essay that, taken alone, more than justifies this collection, he rails against almost everything that our contemporary culture throws up: “Songs on jukeboxes that take as their subject sundown, long nights, or truck rides are bad. Women who feel constrained to dress for business by looking like men and carrying cordovan attaché cases have been subjected to what's bad. MTV is bad. Press secretaries are bad. Plastic bottles for whiskey are bad. So is most Beaujolais nouveau and the fashion for giving it as a gift.”
But the curmudgeonly Mr. Busch saves his greatest firepower for literature professors and those creative writers who have broken ranks with everything that makes a serious writer … well, serious. On his list of things gone “bad,” nothing quite trumps
literature professors who think that contemporary writing is, at its best, the cream in the departmental coffee. They tolerate writers, although it is their secret, they think, that Geoffrey Chaucer, were he to make application for work, would not be hired because he is a dead white European male and because his degree isn't good enough, and because he doesn't do theory. These people do not understand that literary art is not only the cream in their coffee but also the hillside on which the coffee is planted, the earth in which it is grown, the sweat on the skin of the men and women who pick the beans, the water in which the ground beans steep, the mouth that, savoring it, speaks by expelling words in shapes of breath it scents.
Moreover, such people not only corrupt their students but also muddy the very waters in which many creative writers now work:
It is bad that black writers do being black, white writers only being white, Chicanos being Hispanic, lesbians being homosexual, and feminists being feminists—instead of each doing art, or professing English, or writing about the nature of the world that has the temerity to exist outside them. It is bad for their souls and our minds that careerism so drives their critical faculties and their prose. A young artist or professor knows that you achieve success now by writing, painting, composing, or critiquing by way of your genes and the color of your skin. Authors once strove to get good by being more than the total of their birth weight multiplied by their genetic code. It's bad that they now claim credibility (and royalty checks) on the basis of the accident of their birth.
No doubt some readers will chalk up Busch's harangue to a bellyful of sour grapes, but they would be wrong. He speaks truth to power rather than the other way around. In addition, as George Orwell once pointed out, there are times when it is the duty of intellectuals to “restate the obvious.” We live such a time, and what Busch so passionately declaims is nothing more nor less than the fundamental truths serious writers and readers have always known. If many have substituted for these understandings whatever preens itself as the flavor of the month, Busch knows better—not only that writing which matters is made of sterner stuff, but also that this is the writing we as a culture most need. A Dangerous Profession is a delight on several fronts: clear, uncompromising, and absolutely free of the pretentious jargon that now passes for literary discussion, the book blends manifesto and testimony into a seamless, altogether convincing whole.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.