Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Be brave,” Frederick Busch admonished aspiring writers in an interview he gave in 2003. “Keep your knees unbent.” Courage on the page mattered to this writer, and those reading through this collection of stories will find Busch’s writing to be relentlessly brave. “Love and serve your characters,” he said in the same interview. That will be found here, too, how he loved his characters and served them well. The undercurrent of tenderness toward these characters, combined with the daring presentation of them in their stripped down struggles, is what makes a Busch story its own inimitable experience to read. At the time of his death at the age of sixty-four, Frederick Busch had written twenty-seven books; seven of them were story collections. While he was a prize-winning novelist, the stories here have been chosen as a collection that represents the span of his life spent as a short story writer. This career began, he was to famously say, in the fourth grade when his stony-faced teacher suddenly smiled at him after he wrote a poem that pleased her. He claimed to have written steadily since then. But it would be a mistake to assume that Busch spent a lifetime as a writer in order for the world to smile upon him. These are not stories about a flowering dog wood tree, as his fourth grade poem had been. These stories are intended for the brave reader. These are stories for grown-ups.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Busch spent the majority of his adult years living in central New York State. Much of his work portrays the landscape of this rural and rugged and often bleak, often beautiful, terrain. There are other stories here — though they are fewer in number — that reflect his childhood spent in the Midwood and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn, where his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher. Certain themes naturally arise when one reads the work of a writer, and readers of Busch will see the recurrence of the man who is openly truculent, often self-lacerating, always aware of his failings. Busch, who cited Hemingway as one of his influences, also cites Hemingway’s phrase “It’s that some of them stay little boys so long….. the great American boy-men,” as an epigraph in the beginning of one of his collections, and it is no surprise. Busch’s men are often boy-men: men trying to be adults, trying to be good, and always, or often, it seems, falling short. They are men struggling to get the upper hand against their recalcitrant boy-part, that part that still views the world with bafflement in spite of their experience. It is their awareness of this aspect of themselves — and Busch’s awareness — that gives a particular type of sufficiency and fullness to his stories.

It also makes the women who love these men despair. The women found here are a varied lot, but they are fundamentally good. No one can accuse Busch of not liking his women. You can feel his sympathy for them as their husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, make them weep, make them yell, or cause them to walk out. While there may be the inattentive mother, the straying wife — more apt to be found in the Brooklyn stories — by and large the women in these stories love their men. If a boy-man survives his poor actions, it is often because of a woman’s love. More often than not it is a woman keeping the children cared for, and if the husband or boyfriend at times seems like another needful child, Busch portrays this need with clear eyes.

THE FIRST LINE of the first story in this collection is a fairly direct route to the Busch world view. “What to know about pain is how little we deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.” There is no summing up of Busch’s work, but these lines serve to open the causeway the reader will find himself riding across. These stories abound with pain undeserved — parents who have lost children through death or mental illness, children who have suffered the neglect, not always benign, of adults pursuing their own needs rapaciously — and these stories are filled, too, with the understanding that pain is hard to lose. But what Busch does especially well is to tell stories of how simple pain is to give. Because he writes with a large heart, the only judgment present comes from the characters themselves, certainly not from the writer. In his display of how easy it is to hurt another, we find that undercurrent of tenderness; Busch is not condemning. He — in his authorial role — seems as bewildered by all this as anyone. No one, the subtext of this voice might be saying, starts out life with the desire to cause anyone pain. And yet we hurt people all the time. The mere act of living, Busch seems to imply, means that this will be true.

Perhaps it is one reason that dogs appear so frequently in these pages. The black labs, and yellow labs, and big shaggy Newfoundlands inhabiting these rural settings are not hurting anyone. They are pure in their innocence, pure in their loyalty. They are not complicated, they are just good, although, Busch’s world being what it is, people are not always good to them. In the story “Dog Songs” there are twenty-six dogs living in a yellow trailer; they come to a bad end at the hand of the town deputy who fears they may have been perverted by their owners, one of whom is hoping for a sex change. The opposite is true, of course, the love these dogs have for mankind is never ending. Through the eyes of the protagonist, a judge lying in a hospital bed after driving — perhaps suicidal, he cannot remember — into a tree with a woman other than his wife, dwells on the image of these dogs which had earlier been destroyed. “He thought, when he thought of the dogs, that their lips and tails and even their postures signaled their devotion…… And as the deputies flung them…. and their bodies flew, they looked ardent.” Even in death, the innocence of these dogs is excruciating. They are the angels in the Busch universe.

The heroes are those people just trying to do their best, and you will find a lot of them here. One of his better known stories, “Ralph the Duck,” starts with a dog vomiting early in the morning. A wife is sleeping on the couch. The husband, a security guard at the local college, is determined to make her coffee when she wakes, determined to behave in a way that will cause her to forgive whatever he has done to hurt her the day before. But first the dog has to be let out, and let back in. The dog is interested in a dead deer carcass in the woods, and the protagonist man, a first person narrator, knows the dog will return to the carcass. “He loved what made him sick.” The dog is not the only one, and undoubtedly this is the point. The college girl loves her professor who has discarded her; she’s taken pills, making herself very sick. The protagonist must save her, and presumably he does. But he is sick with fury in doing so, and we learn why by the time the story concludes. The wife, patient in her own grief, is willing to endure her husband’s behavior; she is the adult here, the unconditional giver of love, though one assumes at times she is just as sick of it all as anyone else, and takes a night’s respite on the couch. Still, they endure. They endure, this couple, as do many couples in the book, and sometimes we are given to believe that is enough. Other times a relationship does not endure, and Busch is not afraid to let us know that the pain we so easily inflict, that is not so easily removed, will lead us to our ultimate destination: that of being alone.

Busch was writing many of these stories during a time when it was fashionable for short stories to be what was referred to as minimalist. He was, after all, a contemporary of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Richard Bausch, and others, who were also writing in the vein of a short story form that was pared down, plain-spoken, often first-person, and told of single-event moments in what we call ordinary life. It is natural that Busch would write stories reflecting his time in history, and he did, all the while looking back over his shoulder, as any writer does, at those he believed helped shape his own particular use of the American language. In his case, these influences were, in particular, Melville and Hemingway. But he would just as naturally have been influenced by those writing next to him. And of course being a minimalist in the story form meant just that: the form was kept to a minimum. In the case of Busch, the stories mostly dwell on the domestic.