Writers Who Inspire Us Series: The Faith of Denis Johnson
“That world! These days it’s all been erased and they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?” — “Emergency” from Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
Originally, I intended to write about Stoner by John Williams, a novel about the quietude of quotidian life and the inner struggle we face as humans with that life, despite our best intentions to become more than we are. But when I went to my small, makeshift library to retrieve the book, another writer caught my attention: Denis Johnson. I pulled off the four books I’ve read so far — Train Dreams, The Incognito Lounge, Angel, Jesus’ Son.
Johnson was a prolific writer, churning out ten novels, one of which — Tree of Smoke — won the National Book Award, five collections of poetry, three plays, two screenplays, a nonfiction collection, and two short story collections over the course of his life, which was tragically cut short. On May 24, 2017, at the age of 67, he succumbed to liver cancer and died in his home at Gualala, California.
Despite all that he had written, I didn’t know who Denis Johnson was until I was 22. Back then, I was in my undergrad program, commuting forty minutes from Dundalk — a small just east of Baltimore City — to Towson University. And I generally filled that time by listening to The New Yorker Fiction podcast.
One of the shorter readings was performed by Tobias Wolff, who selected the story “Emergency” by Denis Johnson. After a brief back and forth with Deborah Treisman, Wolff began:
“I’d been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended. With nothing to do on the overnight shift but batch the insurance reports from the daytime shifts, I just started wandering around, over to the coronary-care unit, down to the cafeteria, et cetera, looking for Georgie, the orderly, a pretty good friend of mine. He often stole pills from the cabinets.”
Later that evening while on my break at Barnes & Nobles, I bought a copy of Jesus’ Son.
It moves through each story, following the narrator, who all other characters refer to as “Fuckhead,” in a series of vignettes distorted by drugs and alcohol. Johnson’s prose throughout the collection is contradictory: lucid and concrete, intense and soft, ecstatic and melancholic, humorous and serious. In that way, it encapsulates, however absurd it may be, the varietal aspects of life itself. Moments oscillate like a teetering top, trying to remain upright.
In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the narrator awakes to find the carnage following a wreck that he’d been directly involved in. Johnson opens the story in broad strokes:
“A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captions by a college student…
And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri…”
Immediately, Johnson shifts the perspective to first person. It’s a wonderful feat of engagement that gives a broken idea as to where the story eventually moves to, into the hospital following the aftermath, where the narrator stands in the hallway, denying that anything is wrong with him, when the wife of one of the victims of the car crash appears. “Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us.”
The idea that ignorance is bliss, that power comes from the unknown, is thick throughout the collection. So, too, is the acknowledgement of truth, which is, in Johnson’s view, the acknowledgement of the full spectrum of life, both good and bad: “What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”
This assertion of life, of the feeling of being alive, is a form of faith. Johnson’s character’s pursue the feeling of being alive until, in some cases, the very end.
In his novel Angels, one of the main characters, while strapped to a seat in the gas chamber, he embraces the feeling of being alive while struggling against death: “Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one? Another coming … boom! Beautiful! They just don’t come any better than that.
He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there.”
No matter the character, Denis Johnson's assertion of faith is to embrace being alive for all that it is and can be, and even can’t be.
As someone who published his first book at 19, a collection of poems called The Man Among the Seals, who earned his bachelors and masters from University of Iowa, who set out with large dreams only to fall into the whirlpool of addiction — alcohol and various drugs, including heroin — and be able to swim the exhaustive swim out of that whirlpool after being in and out of psychiatric wards, he knows that being able to open one’s eyes each morning is a gift far often overlooked. His characters, like himself, like all of us, wake up each morning to face life and try desperately to relive those moments of joy we’ve experienced before each new sunrise.
image from @well.worn.reads
Recommended Reading
As I mentioned, Johnson was a highly prolific writer once he committed to sobriety in his 30s. Over that timespan, he churned out a variety of writing. If you’re new to his work, I suggest starting with Jesus’ Son. Published in 1992 by FSG, the collection tells stories of grief and transcendence, of becoming lost and being found. The prose is raw, energetic, evocative. It’s Johnson at his finest, in my opinion.
Largesse of the Sea Maiden, published in 2018, is the last collection of stories that Johnson worked on before he passed away. In many ways, it’s a spiritual successor to Jesus’ Son, with its overlapping themes and similar characters — there is a reoccurring narrator that resembles Fuckhead a great deal — this collection is a great follow-up once finished with Jesus’ Son. The most striking difference, aside from the maturity of Johnson’s writing, is the stability of this narrator when placed side-by-side to the narrator of his first collection.
The Incognito Lounge, published in 1982, is Johnson’s third book of poetry. The poems are quiet, at times ethereal, sincere, full of wit and passion. All at once, the book is troubling and evocative. It aims to look inward by reflecting on the landscape of American cities. Here’s what Raymand Carver had to say of this collection:
Denis Johnson’s poems are driven by a ravening desire to make sense out of life lived. The subject matter is harrowingly convincing, is nothing less than a close examination of the darker side of human conduct. Why do we act this way? Johnson asks. How should we act? The best poems from The Incognito Lounge are examples of what the finest poetry can do — bring us closer to ourselves and at the same time put us in touch with something larger. I’m unashamedly reminded of Whitman’s remark about his own work — ‘Who touches this book touches a man.’”
Angels is Johnson’s first novel. Published in 1983, it’s the gritty story of a runaway wife, her two kids and an ex-con on a cross-country ride. It moves from bus stations to cheap motels along the fringes of American life. It’s a novel that places the disenfranchised front and center, and examines their life and philosophies along the way. The prose is refined and terse, yet explosive, energetic, lucid.
Train Dreams is, to me, Johnson’s masterpiece. Published in 2011, it’s a thin book, about a day’s read, that has the breadth of an epic novel. The writing is slower, poignant and sharp; he takes his time, but just enough. The novella follows Robert Grainier, a laborer in the American West at the turn of the century, after the loss of his family as he struggles to make sense of the world. It’s a beautiful, picturesque book of tragedy and serendipity. While I don’t suggest starting here, I do recommend making it here.
About Coty Poynter
Coty Poynter is the author of two poetry books. His most recent, Delirium: Collected Poems, was published by Bowen Press. His work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Equinox, Grub Street, and Underwood Press. He lives in Baltimore with his partner, their cat Pudge, and a hodgepodge of plants.
