Christopher Busa, the co-founder and editorial director of Provincetown Arts, died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston on June 20, 2020, of complications from a congenital heart defect he had not known about. He was 73, and the magazine’s thirty-fifth-anniversary issue was going to press (Howard Karren, “Chris Busa of Provincetown Arts Dies at 73,” Provincetown Independent, June 25, 2020; Charles Giuliano, “Editor Chris Busa at 73,” Berkshire Fine Arts, June 23, 2020).
He served on the Society’s Board from its founding in 2003, and when the Society met in Provincetown he was one of its hosts.
His life
He was born in New York City on December 20, 1946, the eldest child of the abstract expressionist painter Peter Busa and Jeanne Busa, and spent part of every year in Provincetown from infancy, absorbing, as his conference biography put it, the town’s mythology as a place where artists and writers meet to work and live (2016 conference biographies). He graduated from the University of Minnesota, studied for a year at the Sorbonne, and spent ten years at Rutgers teaching and writing a dissertation on D. H. Lawrence that he never finished; he edited a Crown anthology of Lawrence’s erotic writing. For years he paid his way as a tennis pro, in summers at the Provincetown Tennis Club, and in 1978 he bought a house in Provincetown (Karren; Giuliano).
In 1985 he and Raymond Elman founded Provincetown Arts, which became an annual magazine with its 1987 issue, with Norman Mailer on the cover; he also founded Provincetown Arts Press, later a nonprofit, which published monographs on older artists and first books of poetry (Karren; 2015 conference biographies). “He put his whole life into it,” said Elizabeth Winston, an editor at the magazine (Karren). His interviews and profiles of artists and writers appeared in Arts, Garden Design, the Paris Review, Partisan Review, and The Mailer Review. He also taught at Wilkes University, a job he got, he said, through Mike Lennon (Giuliano).
Mailer’s neighbor
Busa was Mailer’s friend and neighbor on Commercial Street. In its summer 1999 issue Provincetown Arts published his interview with Mailer, Mailer’s fullest account of what Provincetown meant to him as an artist, with long discussions of The Gospel According to the Son and Ancient Evenings (Works and Days). In June 2009, when the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and Provincetown Arts Press gave their first Norman Mailer Cape Cod award for exceptional writing, he presented it to Salvatore Scibona.
In the Society
Busa was named to the Society’s interim Board at its founding in 2003 (2003 conference), re-elected for a three-year term in 2005 (minutes), and was still at the Board’s table in Sarasota in 2017 (Executive Board minutes, 2017). When the Society first met in Provincetown in 2004, Lennon thanked him for his help with the arrangements; he had offered his own house for the members’ party, until Norman and Norris Mailer insisted on having it at theirs (minutes, 2004). At conferences he donated copies of Provincetown Arts to the Society (minutes, 2005), led a walking tour of the town from his house at the 2015 conference, and spoke on panels about the film of Tough Guys Don’t Dance (2015) and Mailer and Picasso (2016).
He wrote often for The Mailer Review: “This Is a Town Worth Digging In and Fighting For” (2008), “Norman’s Crystals” (2009), “The Norris I Knew” and a review of The Castle in the Forest, “Imagining Evil” (2011), “Mailer’s Tough Guys: Novelist Invites His Characters to Dance” (2013), and “Why an Echo Is the Shadow of a Sound: The Resonance of Metaphor in Mailer’s Writing” (2014) (Works and Days).
After his death the Review gathered memories of him from his friends in the Society in its fourteenth volume, “In Memory of Chris Busa” (2020), with pieces by Robert J. Begiebing, “Chris Busa: A Welcoming Friend”; Denise Doherty Pappas, “Chris Busa: A Man with a Mission”; and Raymond M. Vince, “Chris Busa and The Mailer Review.” That fall the Society’s Board took up a Chris Busa Writing Award (2020 conference program).
In Works and Days
- Christopher Busa — Founding editor of Provincetown Arts and a Mailer friend and neighbor; his 1999 interview is Mailer’s fullest statement on what Provincetown meant to him as an artist.