Denis Johnson’s Desperate, Poetic Horrors |
Denis Johnson wrote about some of the most unlikable characters in American fiction, and yet he always managed to make readers care what happened to them. This talent may have had something to do with many unlikable qualities in Johnson himself that, through the force of his dedicated and uncompromising talent, carried him through three marriages, nearly two dozen books of poetry and fiction, several plays and screenplays, and numerous darkly recurring periods of addiction. It would be fair to say that, throughout his adult life, he was either suffering from addictive disorders or engaged in 12-step programs to keep them at bay.
Johnson’s major and minor characters were doped-out criminals, doped-out derelict parents, doped-out journalists, and a frenetic range of doped-out CIA agents, drug smugglers, motorcycle gangs, hit men, and American Special Forces ops. In his best-known and most successful book—the small but powerful series of character-linked short stories Jesus’s Son—they were simply doped-out dopers, often stealing the money they needed to buy drugs, living in communal packs in order to save money to buy drugs, and taking ugly late-night jobs—such as cleaning blood off a hospital floor in the most memorable of these stories, “Emergency”—in order to, you know. As one recovering narrator recalls in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories, Johnson’s excellent last book of fiction:
Just to sketch out the last four years—broke, lost, detox, homeless in Texas, shot in the ribs by a thirty-eight, mooching off the charity of Dad in Ukiah, detox again, run over (I think, I’m pretty sure, I can’t remember) then shot again, and detox right now one more time again.
As the same character finally concludes, his gravestone will almost certainly read: “I Should Be Dead.” Which might actually be reassuring, since death is the only form of detox that Johnson’s most troubled characters aren’t doomed to repeat.
As Ted Geltner recounts in his enjoyable, narratively brisk, and compassionate new biography, Denis Johnson wrote about difficult (and sometimes even awful) people from the inside out. Born in Munich in 1949, and gifted with supportive, intelligent parents (his father was a career diplomat who worked with the FBI, CIA, and the U.S. Information Agency), Johnson spent his early years in the Philippines, Japan, and Washington D.C., during which time he developed many of the attributes of a creative personality: He learned to prefer reading books to taking classes about them, and he often got into trouble. Early in adolescence he was suspended for “disruptive behavior,” and later, at 14, he developed a predilection for rum. As he grew older, he developed a lot more predilections.
Geltner does for Johnson what Johnson did in his best fictions, offering us a deep, honest vision of a complicated, and often quite selfish, man while still bringing out what was most moving, generous, and poetic about him. In many ways, Geltner’s previous biography—of the wild, self-taught punk-country genius who wrote some of Southern gothic’s raunchiest novels, Harry Crews—was the perfect preparation for this one. In other ways, Johnson’s privileged childhood, his clean-cut and deceptive good looks, and his successful path from one prestigious literary grant or award to another, makes him Crews’s opposite. And yet both wrote books that were unlike the books of anybody else in their generation; and both lived hard-fought lives that left as many marks on Johnson’s soul as they did on Crews’s face and body.
What saved Johnson (and so many writers) from a life of pointless crime and sadness was his love for books. Determining as a teenager to write poetry, he went to the University of Iowa creative writing program when he was 18. Within months of enrolling, he was the writer to whom all the other students chose to compare themselves. He made fast friends with Raymond Carver and Robert Stone (two other notoriously addictive personalities) and visiting writers such as Charles Bukowski, who lived full-time on the darkest roads of poverty and alcoholism that Johnson managed to visit only for brief periods in between recoveries. And he quickly developed a knack for winning writing awards and grants—everything from small university summer grants to the Guggenheim, the Frost Place poet-in-residence, and the Lannan Fellowship.
Like Zola, he treated the world around him as his own personal laboratory experiment, and from a young age always seemed to be scrounging through the lives of his friends and acquaintances for........