Denis Johnson

• Born: July 1, 1949
• Birthplace: Munich, Germany
• Died: May 24, 2017
• Place of death: Gualala, California

Other literary forms

Denis Johnson has published several volumes of poetry, the best-known being The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems (1982), and a number of novels, including Angels (1983), Fiskadoro (1985), Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991), Already Dead: A California Gothic (1997), Tree of Smoke (2007), Nobody Move (2009), and The Laughing Monsters (2014). He also wrote three plays, a screenplay, book reviews, news copy, and essays (“School’s Out,” 1999). His last story collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in early 2018.

Achievements

Denis Johnson received a National Poetry Series Award for The Incognito Lounge, and Other Poems, a Whiting Writers Award from the Whiting Foundation in 1986 for “exceptionally promising emerging talent,” a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, and a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction in 1993. His short-story collection Jesus’ Son was adapted as a film released in 1999. “Train Dreams,” a lengthy story about the life and death of a hermit widower in the West, was awarded the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review in 2002 and an O. Henry Prize as one of the best short stories of 2003. In 2007, Tree of Smoke received a National Book Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Train Dreams, published as a novel in 2011, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2012, but the award was not given that year. In September 2017, Johnson was posthumously awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Biography

Denis Johnson, the son of Alfred Johnson, a United States diplomat, and Vera Louise (Childress) Johnson, a homemaker, was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949. He grew up in countries such as the Philippines and Japan, wherever his father was posted. These frequent moves inculcated in Johnson a sense that relationships and life were unsustainable. In the United States, he went to school in Washington, DC, and while overseas he attended the American School. Later, Johnson matriculated at the University of Iowa, where he earned his undergraduate degree. Johnson went on to earn his graduate degree at the university’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied under minimalist writer Raymond Carver.

Johnson, intermittently a teacher and a journalist, was always a writer and often alluded to a troubled period when he was addicted to heroin and alcohol. In 1969, when he was only twenty, he published his first volume of poetry, The Man among the Seals, which received immediate acclaim. In 1983, he published the first of his novels. He had also been a foreign news correspondent, covering such hot spots as the war in Somalia. Johnson was well traveled and made homes in such disparate places as Washington, DC, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Arizona. In 2006–7, Johnson held the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Johnson died in 2017, of liver cancer, at his home in Gualala, California. His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Cindy Lee (Nash) Johnson; a brother, Randall Johnson; three children, Lana Burke, Morgan Johnson, and Daniel Burke; and two grandchildren.

Analysis

Denis Johnson writes about lost souls who have faint hopes of finding, if not God, at least some meaning in their lives. His themes and violent descriptions echo the works of Flannery O’Connor and Robert Stone, two of his major influences. Johnson portrays the marginal in American society: the addicts, alcoholics, homeless, beggars, and crooks, as well as those who simply cannot or will not adapt to mainstream culture, a culture that itself is crumbling and has helped create the characters it rejects. Johnson’s characters seem able to survive on hope and human resilience, no matter how outcast or alienated they may be. Ultimately, Johnson’s themes are metaphysical. The alienation of his characters implies the existence of someone or a something from which to be alienated.

Johnson’s finely detailed works are often episodic and surreal but told in a colloquial, almost intimate manner. He balances a wry detachment from his characters with a tenderness for even the most criminal of them. Johnson’s narrators are often addicts. Therefore, the narrator’s voice is alternately dreamy and brutally factual, shifting from a detachment, which speaks casually of bullets and blood, to an unexpected, intimate recognition of the characters’ common humanity. The sudden intrusion of compassion in otherwise cold narratives has the effect of producing both Christlike and pathological states within the same character.

By juxtaposing fact and fantasy, realism and surrealism, saintliness and destructive craziness, Johnson flirts with altering the short-story form itself, producing a variation that intrigues as well as appalls. As the reader watches losers spiral downward through the consciousness of a narrator, who is also “not all there,” he or she feels empathy for them and recognizes the implicit suggestion that, through a shared humanity, the difference between Johnson’s misfits and the rest of society is one of degree only and that in some respects everyone is “not all there.”

“Car Crash While Hitchhiking”

The narrator, high on drugs, hitches a ride in an Oldsmobile and senses an imminent crash the minute he hears the “sweet voices of family inside it.” After the wreck, the narrator, holding the family’s baby, wanders toward the other car that was involved in the accident. Seeing that the broadsided car has been smashed, he assumes all inside are dead and walks past it. Flagging down a passing truck, he tells the truck driver to go for help. Because the truck driver cannot turn around on the narrow bridge, the narrator leaves the truck, sees another car nearing the scene, and approaches it. Then he perceives that the man in the smashed car is not dead but soon will be. At the hospital, he hears the wife shriek when she learns of her husband’s death. The narrator remarks her scream made him “feel wonderful to be alive” and that he had “gone looking for that feeling everywhere,” exhibiting the addict’s relentless search for a rush.

Years later, in a hospital detoxification ward, the narrator experiences a flashback to the accident scene. The ambiguous last phrase, “you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you,” expresses either contempt for those who might count on him or the self-loathing and guilt beneath an addict’s thrill-seeking veneer.

“Emergency”

The narrator, working as a hospital clerk, befriends Georgie, an emergency room orderly, who steals pills (which the narrator takes) and is always high. Terrence Weber comes in with a knife stuck in his one good eye. Explaining that his wife stabbed him, Weber claims the knife has affected his brain because his body will no longer do what his mind directs it to do. The emergency room physician calls for the best eye surgeon, brain surgeon, and anesthetist, then orders Georgie to prepare Weber for surgery, even though he knows Georgie is “not right.”

As the specialists argue over how best to remove the knife, Georgie returns from preparing the patient with the knife in hand. Stunned, no one says anything. When the narrator asks how Weber is doing, Georgie replies, “Who?”

Later, Georgie and the narrator, still high, become lost. When Georgie hits a rabbit, he cries, “Rabbit stew,” picks up the rabbit, and skins it with Weber’s knife. When he finds tiny rabbit fetuses inside the corpse, he declares, “We killed the mother but saved the children,” then hands them to the narrator, who warms them in his shirt. As darkness approaches, the two stumble upon what the narrator hallucinates is a military graveyard with large angels hovering overhead. In a rare lucid moment, Georgie recognizes the place as a drive-in cinema. When the screen goes blank, they argue over whether or not to go home. Georgie resists driving until he remembers that the rabbits need milk. The narrator tells him to forget about the rabbits, which have been crushed inside his shirt. The rabbits’ deaths provoke Georgie’s wrath, but the narrator acknowledges he is unclear about how or when the deaths occurred. His only clear memory is of the morning’s mystical beauty.

Before Georgie and the narrator return to the hospital, they pick up a friend of the narrator, a serviceman named Hardee, who is absent without leave and headed for Canada. Georgie declares that he will take Hardee to Canada. When asked what he does for a living, Georgie replies, “I save lives.” Ironically, despite Georgie’s drug-crazed recklessness, he probably could get Hardee to Canada, just as he succeeded in removing Weber’s knife. The reader does not learn anything more about Hardee because of the drugged narrator’s fragmented narration, which, like their lives, is in a state of emergency.

When they return to work, the Lord’s Prayer is playing over the intercom. Weber, miraculously unscathed, comes to say goodbye to Georgie, who does not recognize him. The infusion of the sacred into this story implies that the protagonists’ successes may be providential.

“Beverly Home”

Living in Phoenix, the narrator decides to look for a job because members of his Narcotics Anonymous group think he should. He finds work at the Beverly Home, an old-age home that also houses the disabled, some of whom are so deformed they make “God look like a senseless maniac.” During his free time, the narrator rides the bus and strolls in the desert. One evening, he hears a woman singing in the shower. Entranced, he hides behind some greenery and peeps at her. The narrator reveals his cowardice and violence when he states that he would break in and rape the woman if he had a mask to wear. Peeping at the woman becomes an obsession for him, particularly after he discovers that the woman and her husband are Amish, an oddity in Phoenix. Hoping to see them make love (he never does), he watches their daily movements, including an extraordinary act of contrition: a foot washing by the repentant husband.

When not working or peeping, the narrator dates first a dwarf and then a woman whose childhood encephalitis has left her with spasms and who is thus “unwholesome and very erotic.” The narrator thirsts for, but is afraid of, making connections of either a spiritual or an earthly nature. Beverly Home’s hall seems a room for souls waiting to be reborn. He has sex with the dwarf while the television is on so he will not have to get to know her. The closest he gets to either God or a real relationship is peeping at the Amish couple. The parallels between the Beverly Home misfits and the narrator are obvious to the reader but not to the narrator, who gratefully concludes that he is improving, despite living among “weirdos.”

“Dirty Wedding”

“Dirty Wedding” deals with the narrator’s anguish over his girlfriend’s abortion. As he and Michelle approach the abortion clinic, picketers sprinkle holy water on them and pray, and the narrator wishes he knew their prayer. Hating himself, he tells lies to make Michelle leave him, but she stays until, as the narrator says, “She really knew me.”

Thrown out of the abortion clinic for making wisecracks, the narrator aimlessly rides the city’s public transportation. As in “Beverly Home,” when the narrator illustrates his alienation by peeping through the window at the married couple, the narrator of “Dirty Wedding” peers into the windows of buildings as the train he is riding rushes past.

After Michelle’s abortion, he cannot look strangers in the eye. Fixating on one man, who seemingly has an appointment, the narrator follows him. When the man confronts him, the narrator thinks the man is Jesus Christ. Later, the narrator says that he would have felt the same way about anyone he followed, thus revealing his need for direction.

Back on the train, the narrator muses on what motel maids stuff into trash cans; thoughts about throwaways lead him to thinking about Michelle’s fetus. He reveals his sense of loss as he wonders if the fetus could imagine a world outside the womb, if its darkness would get darker in death, and if it would know or care about being aborted.

Abruptly the narrator shifts the subject to Michelle. Michelle ran off with a man named John Smith, then died from a drug overdose. Afterward, Smith heard her ghost calling to him and also died. Illustrating his convenient sense of victimization, the narrator brands Michelle a traitor and a killer. Once she shot him five times, not to kill him but to “eat his heart,” to wound him the way a mother can devastate a child. He concludes that arguments about the morality of abortion are beside the point. “It,” the wrong, in this situation is not the abortion. “It” is “What the mother and father did together,” implying destructive personal relations and motives, as well as premarital sex. The narrator’s union with Michelle is dirty not because they aborted their child but because of the way they treated each other.

Bibliography

Carlson, Michael. “Denis Johnson Obituary.” The Guardian, 6 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/06/denis-johnson-obituary. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.

Cunningham, Michael. “Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year.” The New Yorker, 9 July 2012, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/letter-from-the-pulitzer-fiction-jury-what-really-happened-this-year. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.

Donnelly, Daria. “Flannery O’Connor in Reverse—Jesus’ Son.” Commonweal, August 13, 1993. This review alleges that Jesus’ Son owes much to Flannery O’Connor. Unlike similar allusions in the work of O’Connor, the spiritual allusions in Jesus’ Son rest on incertitude, rather than on faith. The passive spiritual hopefulness of Johnson’s fiction is reflected in the addicted narrator of Jesus’ Son. Through the nonlinear, drunken narrative, reality is rendered both comically and tragically. Donnelly thinks that much of the power of Jesus’ Son is in the complex rendering of the narrator, who exhibits both lust and indifference, as well a longing for love and God.

Farrin, J. Scott. “Eloquence and Plot in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son: The Merging of Premodern and Modernist Narrative.” In The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues, edited by Farhat Iftekharrudin, et al., under the auspices of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Analyzes the narrative style of the collection.

Gates, David. Newsweek, February 8, 1993, p.67. Reviews Jesus’ Son positively, calling it “masterfully bleak.” Gates particularly stresses the narrative form, praising Johnson’s depiction of the narrator’s drugged, hallucinatory mind as he tells his stories. The surreal tone is exhilarating, according to Gates, for it reflects the irrational lives of the addicts. In the same way, the stories’ enigmatic forms are appropriate to the subject matter.

Kristulent, Steve. Review of Already Dead, by Denis Johnson. Oyster Boy Review 9 (May-August, 1998). This review deals not only with this particular novel but also with Johnson as a social critic. Kristulent compares Johnson to such European novelists as Milan Kundera and Robert Musil, who believe that every personal choice is also a political one. He also considers Johnson’s work to be particularly American, comparing him to John Dos Passos in his emphasis on contemporary fringe groups.

McManus, James. Review of Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson. New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1992, p.5. McManus argues that Jesus’ Son is a masterpiece of moral deterioration. Its disjointed narrative illustrates both diseases and Christlike states of mind, as well as a condition in which salvation remains possible but improbable.

Miles, Jack. “An Artist of American Violence.” The Atlantic, June, 1993, 121-127. Miles praises Johnson’s skill in portraying the mind of the addict and criminal, but he thinks the characters’ poetic language is linguistically unrealistic. Miles calls the characters’ spiritual longings “pre-religious,” a yearning for God, a result of having lost faith in people. Argues that Johnson’s most innovative contribution is the narrator’s intermittent, direct addresses to the reader; these intimate asides bring the reader closer not only to the narrator but also to the more shattering moments in the narrative.

Parrish, Timothy. “Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro: Postcolonial America.” In From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Discusses the relationship of fiction and history in Johnson’s novel. Parrish argues that Johnson and many other postmodern novelists “compel” readers to accept their narratives as true in the same way that historians expect readers to assume the truth of their accounts.

Parrish, Timothy. “Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son: The Kingdom Come.” Critique 43, no. 1 (2001): 17–29. Discusses the theme of transformation in Johnson’s writing and speculates why the author writes the kind of stories he does.

Sandomir, Richard. “Denis Johnson, Who Wrote of the Failed and the Desperate, Dies at 67.” The New York Times, 26 May 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/books/denis-johnson-dead-author-of-jesus-son.html. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.

Smith, Robert McClure. “Addiction and Recovery in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.” Critique 42, no. 2 (2001): 180-191. Analyzes the spiritual concerns explored in Johnson’s short-story collection.

Wiggins, Marianne. “Talk into My Bullet Hole.” The Nation 256 (February 15, 1993): 121. Praises Jesus’ Son for depicting characters with serious flaws and scars, such as addictions and craziness. Wiggins argues that what makes the book memorable is that Johnson at times endows the characters with an essential, shared humanity. She claims that reading the stories is like reading a subconscious ticker tape.

Woodrell, Daniel. Review of Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson. Washington Post Book World, February 21, 1993, p. C1. Comments on the strengths and weaknesses of Jesus’ Son. Woodrell praises the fragmentary style that reflects the narrator’s mind-set and states that in the best stories the narrator’s disjointed consciousness is portrayed so that his anguish conveys a kind of majesty. However, the stories fail to reveal much more of the character of the narrator than the reader is shown in the beginning, and the characters in Jesus’ Son are not as large of heart as the characters in Angels.