A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life

A master craftsman talks of his art and honors other writers. I have been reading Fred Busch for over twenty years, but he practiced his craft of writing for nearly twice that long. I kept hoping for a memoir from Busch, as I always do from writers I admire, but he died in 2006, so this book will have to suffice. And A Dangerous Profession does not disappoint. It is worth the cover price for just three pieces alone, the ones which are the most autobiographical. In the first, "My Father's War", Busch tries mightily to understand more about his father's inner life by examining and speculating on what might have been implied "between the lines" of terse entries found in a small pocket journal that the senior Busch carried throughout his WWII years. Busch also here remembers his grandparents, "old country" folk. Two others, "The Writer's Wife" and "The Floating Christmas Tree", look at his marriage from the early days to more contemporary times. To his description of the lean early days of their marriage I could immediately relate: "We had seven dollars each week for food. Our rent was eighty-four dollars." As I remember, my wife and I budgeted five dollars for food and our rent was seventy-five dollars. I read passages from these essays aloud to my wife, who snorted and chuckled in recognition of those lean early days. There continue to be hints and glimpses of the kind of man Fred Busch was in the other fine essays in the book - about other writers, people as diverse as Melville (an obvious favorite, who even became a main character in Busch's The Night Inspector), Kafka, John O'Hara, Graham Greene, Hemingway, and a couple writers I'd never heard of: Terrence des Pres and Leslie Epstein, who obviously have written eloquently of the Jewish experience. Busch, who calls himself a "secular Jew," was a friend and colleague of des Pres, and mourns the man's early accidental death. Busch tells of how he once peeked into a notebook des Pres was using and found the phrase: "Stories, first of all, store time." Later he tells of how badly he misses his friend, and how he wept because they could never talk again. When Fred Busch died, I read of it in the newspapers. I never met the man, but I felt such a sense of loss that I nearly wept, but I didn't. Instead I wrote a letter to his widow, telling her how much his writing had meant to me. She didn't know me, and I don't know if she got my letter, but I felt better. "Stories store time," his friend once noted. Fred Busch's stories - his life stored in carefully crafted words, phrases, sentences - will live a long time. This is a wonderful book; a tribute not just to the writing profession, but to the importance of language itself. ( )