Denis Johnson
Novelist whose struggles with alcohol and drugs informed his tales of the dark side of American life
DENIS JOHNSON, who has died aged 67, was an American novelist whose early troubles informed his depiction of the tattooed underbelly of American life – and its sudden homicides; whether writing at length or, even better, in vignettes, he turned every common sight, however raw, into something distinctive, with the lives of his characters unfolding against landscapes which underscore atmosphere and plot.
In what many regard as the peak of his achievement, the linked stories of Jesus’ Son (1992), first published in The New Yorker and turned into a 1999 film starring Denis Hopper, the landscapes reflect the wasted, chaotic lives of the drug addicts who are its main characters: “Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn’t even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased.” The book became seen as an American classic and remains a great influence on such writers as Dave Eggers and George Saunders.
Denis Hale Johnson was born on July 1 1949 in Munich, where his father worked for the United States Information Agency and was linked with the CIA, which also took the family to Tokyo, Washington and Manila. It was a difficult upbringing, so much so that, by the age of 14, Johnson was availing himself of the rum freely available in the Philippines’ capital. This precipitated a downward course which – despite studying at Iowa and publishing a volume of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969) at 19 – led him to a psychiatric ward in 1970.
For much of the 1970s he was to be dogged by struggles with alcohol and drugs. In the midst of this, however, he found succour at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and by 1978 he was sober. “I was addicted to everything,” he said. “Now I just drink a lot of coffee.” His further poems – collected in Inner Weather (1976), The Incognito Lounge (1982) and The Veil (1985) – were described as “driven by a ravening desire to make sense of the life lived”.
For all that, Johnson had an acute sense of humour, and a zest for life with an element of spirituality – as shown in “Poem”: “Loving you is every bit as fine / as coming over a hill into the sun /at ninety miles an hour darling when /it’s dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking / themselves from the designs of God beneath / the disintegrating orchestra of my black / Chevrolet.”
His debut novel, Angels (1983), opens with an encounter on a Greyhound bus. Two of its passengers – Jamie, a fleeing wife and mother, and Bill, a drifter – become entangled. Along the way “Pittsburgh was colder and wearier than Oakland, but it wasn’t any filthier. What it seemed to lack that Oakland had was a sky. By day it looked like old newspapers had been pasted over the sun, and after dark the universe ended six feet above the tallest lamp.” As their lives descend through factory work to murder, brilliant phrases illuminate every page – a baby’s eyelids are “like two bruises laid over her vision”. When Bill shoots a man dead he is described as firing “like spraying paint – trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through.”
Based mainly in Idaho, despite the turbulence of three marriages and the rigours of home schooling his children, Johnson wrote steadily, alternating his novels with teaching and journalism. A collection of his reports from Africa were published as Seek in 2001. He could, however, let his prose slacken. As John Updike commented of The Name of the World (2000), “Denis Johnson’s radioactive wine holds up best in small bottles, before the decay of rhetoric sets in.” His last novel was a west African spy caper called The Laughing Monsters.
Johnson once said that his wife was allowed to deem his manuscripts, in descending order, “Genius”, “Shakespeare” or “Elvis”. He hoped that God would find him “pretty funny. But that’s probably all the speaking I should do for God – he doesn’t go around talking about me.”
He is survived by his third wife, Cindy, and their three children.
Denis Johnson, born July 1 1949, died May 24 2017