[In the following interview, conducted in March 1999, Busch discusses Letters to a Fiction Writer and The Night Inspector, and ruminates about the short-story genre.]

Frederick Busch is one of our most distinguished and accomplished fiction writers. Of his 23 published books, 19 are fiction. His 4 nonfiction works are all related to his passionate engagement with the craft of writing. He has been awarded the PEN/Malamud award for achievement in short fiction, has won the National Jewish Book Award, and has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. His novel Girls (Fawcett, 1998) was selected as a New York Times Book Review notable book. He has been acting director of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and is Edgar Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University. His three most recent books are all, in one way or another, about writing. The Night Inspector, a novel in which Herman Melville is a principle character, explores several powerful and significant themes: war, social injustice, parental love—but prominent among these is the struggle of the writer whose work has been ignored or forgotten. A Dangerous Profession is a collection of essays on fiction and the craft of fiction—including, in fact, two essays on Melville. It was also listed as one of the New York Times Book Review's notable books of 1998. Letters to a Fiction Writer is just what its title promises: a collection of letters from accomplished writers to writers at earlier stages of their careers, with a variety of modes of advice. It is, in effect, a portable mentor, and will be of tremendous help to new and emerging writers. Though Frederick Busch's fiction is widely known and admired among writers, he has not yet received as full a recognition and as wide a readership as his work deserves. His fiction is filled with richly realized and convincing characters, with beautifully rendered language and rightness of detail. Some of the major themes in his work are the importance of the “domestic particulars” of daily life, a concern for the lives of children in a dangerous world, a love for craftsmanship and labor of all kinds—and always, a love for the craft of writing.

I spoke with Frederick Busch last March about the short story and about the state of writing and publishing today. We met in his barn studio in upstate New York, where big windows look out on snowy fields, the sort of landscape he writes about so often—but where his computer faces away from the windows, to keep him focused on his work.

[Walker]: You have two books coming out in May 1999, and each in its different way is about the art of writing. Do you find any parallels between your novel about Melville, The Night Inspector, and Letters to a Fiction Writer?

[Busch]: The book of letters is, of course, about the art of writing—and about the craft, or craftiness, required of someone who wishes to be a writer, to live the writer's life. So there's a lot in Letters to a Fiction Writer about self-management; naturally, ways of approaching the art, of trying to make art, are present, in many forms, in those pages.

The other book to be published this spring, The Night Inspector, is a story narrated by a maimed Civil War veteran whose life becomes entangled with that of Herman Melville in New York City in 1867. Melville is at the far end of his career. His novels have failed; most of them are unread, even forgotten. His life is financially difficult—as it always was—and he earns his living as a deputy inspector of customs in the Port of New York. So here the concerns of the first book—approaching art, living the writer's life, managing a career, I guess you'd say—are visible in darker, unhappier terms. For this is a man whose fiction is thought of as failure, whose poetry is mocked, whose final narrative, Billy Budd, won't be discovered until the 1920s, when he's dead and in further eclipse. How did an artist, driven by such extraordinary vision, cope with “failure,” and, not incidentally, with the need to make a living? So there's Melville, on East Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan, going to work at the docks: the far end of the life's are predicted—or prayed for—by those starting-out writers to whom the Letters to a Fiction Writer are addressed.

How would you describe the experience of writing a serious novel like this one?

You discover your book as you write it. That's why intention is blunted, foiled, failed; the only success available to us is in the dangerous meeting of the chaos, the ignorance with which we begin the day's work, and the moments of shaping that occur; those miracles of structure achieved; characters who breathe. You get lucky sometimes, and, dammit, you're Viktor Frankenstein, stitching life together from the contents of the soiled bag of spare parts—a hand turned a certain way, an eye reflecting light so that your eyes produce tears, the sound of a woman's skirt as it brushes the doorway as she leaves—that you carry around, whether you want to or not, calling it memory, need, talent, what you will. That instant when you do it, when you make life, and when you sense you've done so, and maybe can even muster the intelligence, energy, and cartographical skills to create a narrative structure in which these moments of plausible life can engage aspects of each other and of your reader: That is the only grace and glory, the best time you can have as a writer. The rest is when you assess your failure, or lie about your advance, blow a tin whistle to celebrate yourself, as if you matter in the world, and know, all the while, that what mattered was about your writing and happened back then, when the it occurred on the page. You know that you will lament its passing, and will wish to return to work so that it might happen one more time. The rest is tinsel. The rest is vanity. The rest is … not writing.

You've written several novels about characters who first appeared in short stories—Girls growing out of “Ralph the Duck,” for instance—and I am wondering about the question of completeness of a short story that then later gets drawn upon to become a novel. The short story is still complete as a work of art. …

In my mind, yes. But the characters can go on. In my early book Domestic Particulars, I adapted a number of early stories which had been about different characters, because I came to see that the narrator was the same, the narrative consciousness—and I realized I had been knocking at the door of a novel. I did not have a sense of form that such a novel could take, but I did see that something more could be done with those stories. So I made the narrative consciousness have the same name and the same family, and I linked all the stories in Domestic Particulars, so that they were a cycle of stories, starting with the boyhood of the narrator, and ending with a sort of sorrowful middle age. And was able to give each story the completeness that we like to find in a story, that sense of a shimmering drop of life, and yet connected to other little drops, so I could have a great big glassful by the end of the book if I did my work right. … There are times in stories when … there's an imbalance, either in the assertiveness of one character, in the interesting proposition that is the plot, or in the characters' confrontation, that makes us want to examine that aspect further—then it stops being a story. Then if you're going to examine an aspect, you're no longer writing a story about that one tiny moment prized away from time. You're either writing a novella or a novel or a cycle of stories, and your focus is on something other than that gorgeous moment when a solution precipitates into a crystal, and something is changed forever.

Is that how you define a short story?

I guess so. I just heard myself say it. [Laughs.] I think that's not bad, actually. It gets toward at least some of what the story does.

It reminds me of something that Virginia Woolf says too. She talks about a glowing object that you hold in your hand. She wants to make of the moment something that you hold in your hand.

Perfect. And, I have here a story by Ann Beattie called “Janus,” and that's a story in which that actual bowl becomes in a sense the hero of the story.

That's right! So the story as an object—that's really very interesting.

Yes. And Ann has helped me to move that way in thinking about the story. I still worry about that kind of extraordinary moment that she could achieve and that I could not [laughs]—and then I thought, Well, the hell with it, just try to learn to be half as good as she is, and get toward that. … I always thought I should try to be a little shaggier, a little rougher, a little less polished, lest I be disserving my characters. What I learned from contemplating Ann's work and the work of my other betters is that you can have both the emotional shagginess and inexactitude that I think realistic fiction is about, and at the same time work toward more precision—so I'm doing it, I guess.

When you mentioned Ann Beattie and the bowl just now, I was reminded of Nabokov's “Signs and Symbols” and the translucent jelly jars. There must be something for writers about that kind of image. …

There is. I think writers are inclined toward being artistic photographers—that is to say, not merely people who take pictures of cars for advertising, but who can use light and objects and a lens, which is consciousness, to capture an object or a physical circumstance and then show it to be more than the sum total of its captured parts. And the imperfection—capturing the imperfection, celebrating the otherness of the object, the not-meness of it—is what interests me. And I don't trust writers who don't care about things outside themselves. I care about writers who wish to be painters and musicians as they write.

One of the things that I find interesting in your work is the exploration of conscience as well as consciousness. The more I read of your stories, the more I begin to be aware of a larger social and political consciousness. I wonder if you'd be willing to talk about that.

I read the papers. I react to public events with the usual paranoia of the small, embattled artist. I think I feel responsibilities, ethical and social responsibilities, as everybody does—and I'm lucky enough to have a way of wedging it into a tiny division of the public consciousness, sometimes, in a story or a novel. I think in my novels I always try, and sometimes in my stories, to have simultaneously a public context and a domestic context going on, the one reflecting the other, in the hope that the domestic matters will reach out and impinge on public matters, and the public matters will reach down and touch domestic matters. … I think that's the brilliant idea behind those pictures of those poor children on the milk cartons. You're sitting there in your kitchen thinking about your Cheerios, and you see the face of somebody from another county or state, and suddenly you're simultaneously here and out there where the kid is, or where he's from, where he's missing from. And your small world becomes large, and the larger world becomes small, I believe. That's one of the jobs that fiction does, actually.

I'd like to ask you about the state of short fiction today. How you see the limitations of publishing opportunities for short fiction, and how you see the state of the short story as an art form today—two very different questions.

Of course, I don't think I know enough to answer either of them usefully, but that won't stop me from trying to sketch out a reply. The state of the short story is what it has always been. It's good. It's an American art form and we do it very well. But: The most excellent short story, the most wonderful soul-stretching short story as a work of gorgeous language and breathtaking event is alive and plentiful, but not well, because the editors of anthologies and many magazines are, in my eyes, second-rate. So they are picking what people like to call the workshop story, the “well made” story. … There are many good workshops, and there's nothing wrong with a well-made story—it can still be a surprise. What is happening, however, is that there are probably too many not-so-great writers who are not-so-great teachers teaching the composition of the short story. I'm not sure about that—could be. I do know there are some not-so-great editors selecting the short story, and what they select is sort of the average thing. The selection process, for whatever reason, is not very good. I think that the selectors are exciting new people sometimes, and are not experienced people. When they get experienced, and if they're not fired, and they probably will be, or move on, because it's a remarkably promiscuous profession—but were they to stay in one place and get experienced, they would become good selectors, and the anthologies would be better and the magazines would run better stories. So we have very very good stories, and not great examples of them culled, I would say. … I meet a lot of good students, I meet a lot of good writers. They're all over the country. We're in great shape. But we have to do better publishing. The writers are there.

The other part of your question, about getting short fiction published: There are the literary quarterlies; they are where I began, they are where I reside, and they are where I hope to conclude. If sometime Harper's is generous enough to take a story, which sometimes it is; and if, once, The New Yorker made a mistake and took a story of mine—great. Delighted to have their readership, which I covet, delighted to have the approval of some very smart people who edit there, and delighted of course to have their money, which is very good. But there are not enough pages in the glossy magazines for us all, or almost for any of us. The real writer, the working-level infantry writer in the trenches, has to keep writing, and when he or she thinks of publications to send stories, where intelligent editors have wider open arms, these are the quarterlies. Not that they aren't selective; but they are open to more. That is: The Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser; Stan Lindberg at Georgia Review; Pam Durban, a fine fiction writer, at a new magazine called Five Points at Georgia State, where I'm very proud to be published. Seattle Review, Gettysburg Review. They're all over the place. This is where we work. And if, as happened to you, one of those stories gets taken for the O. Henry Awards, or the Best American, isn't that great. But if not …

One of my interests in your work is the way your stories deal with particulars of work, of labor, of craftsmanship. …

I really believe in it. I believe in myself as a worker when I write. Maybe it's because I'm the son of communists. My father was a red-diaper baby. He was recruited into the Party by his mother, a Russian immigrant. Not that we were raised with any ideologies of any sort that I can think of—political ideologies—but my grandfather was a worker, he was a carpenter. My other grandfather was a baker. And I have great respect for work and how it's done by workpeople, with skills and craft and sweat. I find that I cannot write a story or a novel unless I know what job my character has. I absolutely can't get started. When I know the job I've got the character, because that's where they meet the world. … And I'm interested in the process of work. I don't know how to do anything. I don't know how to do anything. I could barely tie my children's shoes when they were little. … So I'm full of reverence for people who know stuff. I'm a writer because I don't know anything. … But work is sacred. I know I sound like—who? Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Work is sacred. I love that I can do this work. I wish I could do more kinds.

So the work of writing is sacred too. …

It's a priesthood without a priest and without an order. But, yeah, it's sacred. And it's about The Sacred. It's about where we poor, bare, forked animals intersect with time, try to see ourselves in the context of the cosmos. What could be more sacred than that?

You have an obvious very high standard for your work, a standard that you are seeking to reach, that most readers feel you have reached. It's very moving to me to hear you speak about that; there's something almost unattainable that you seem to have in mind.

There is. That's what we should be trying to attain. Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way of trying to say what is not sayable. That to me is prayer, and in that sense fiction has certain religious elements, and I don't mean people reciting the same words in the same room. I mean interior religious elements, private religious elements. I think art is really hard to make, and that most of us who try to make it fail. There's a great sense of risk and danger when you write, and I love that. It's skydiving, it's hang gliding without the glider—I don't know how else to describe it—and without the sky. Because you're getting close to the dark, scary stuff, which is what writing is about, and yet you're trying to make it useful to other people—a remarkable simultaneity, it seems to me. And I don't think it's very easy to do, and I think most of us just don't get there, but we're compelled to keep trying to do it. And I'm as hard on myself, I guess, as I am on anybody else's work. But I really believe it. This is not a profession for the fashion plate or kids or amateurs. This is, as the book says, a dangerous profession. And it's one where you just aren't good enough very often or for very long, because you're going after it and it gets you first every time.