A vision at once mystical, worldly
Denis Johnson had a ruthless honesty and transcendent power in his remarkable works.
Denis Johnson ought to have had a free pass. Denis Johnson ought to have been exempt. To write as he did, in this crucible of a world, it ought to be worth more than to die at 67 or perhaps to die at all. Think of the transcendent power of his sentences, the ruthless honesty, the unexpected turns.
“Down the hall came the wife,” he tells us late in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” which opens his remarkable 1992 collection of linked stories, “Jesus’ Son.” “She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process,
diamonds were being incinerated in there. 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.”
A slab of brilliance, incinerated diamonds: Could there be a better description of Johnson, who died Wednesday, on the page? So raw, so honest — metaphysical and at the same time rooted in experience. He wasn’t afraid to make mistakes; all but a handful of his books have problems, yet in the end these fade like smoke. In any case, we don’t come for perfection; we come to experience how he works with, or exposes, the ineffable. “God is a universe and a wall,” he argues in his 1991 novel, “Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.” “… But there is a pattern, a web of coincidence. God … is the chief conspirator.” And this: “There are no coincidences to a faithful person, a person of faith, a knight of faith .… [T]he mystery is the Mystery.”
“Resuscitation of a Hanged Man” is a strange book, which could, of course, be said of much of Johnson’s work. It tells the story of Leonard English, a 33-yearold (yes, we recognize the symbolism), who in the wake of a failed suicide attempt has come to Provincetown to reorient himself. That this doesn’t happen goes without saying; like Jesus, Johnson’s heroes, or antiheroes, often wrestle with “the sense of a cloud between [themselves] and God.” Still, to label him a religious writer is to miss the point. English, like so many of his characters, is looking for meaning, but he has no idea where to look. “Out of the million little things happening on this beach,” he reflects, “you can only be aware of seven things at once, seven things at any given time. … We never get the whole picture. … Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations.”
I don’t mean to keep quoting Johnson’s writing, but I don’t know what else to do; I’m bereft, and mostly what I can offer are the passages that see me through. Take “Jesus’ Son,” which, 25 years after publication, remains an American masterpiece. Here, we see the clearest expression of Johnson’s double vision, his gritty mysticism. Revolving around a recovering addict, it distills some piece of the author’s experience (“I never quite became a hippie,” he wrote, revealingly, in an essay about the Rainbow Gathering. “And I’ll never stop being a junkie”) into an act of expression so visionary, so stark in its clarity and its confusion, that it cannot help but become our own.
Here he is in “Beverly Home,” describing a patient on a rehab ward who suffers from “something like multiple sclerosis”: “No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.” In “Out on Bail”: “We lived in a tiny, dirty apartment. When I realized how long I’d been out and how close I’d come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead.” This is writing that devours its own illusions, that requires us to stare eternity, with its sharp incisors, in the face.
In part, this has to do with the broadness of Johnson’s vision, mystical and worldly at once. Much of his fiction takes on big-bore issues; in “The Name of the World” (2000), a college professor turns away from tragedy by becoming a war correspondent in the Middle East; 2007’s National Book Award-winning “Tree of Smoke,” meanwhile, zeroes in on Vietnam. “As a storyteller,” Johnson told me in an email exchange about his 2014 novel “The Laughing Monsters,” “I’m drawn to realistic, contemporary situations and to figures caught up in danger and chaos.” Indeed. Chaos, we might say, was his métier.
Over nearly half a century — his debut was the 1969 poetry chapbook “The Man Among the Seals” — he wrote plays and verse, stories, novels and essays; he reported, for venues such as Harper’s and Esquire, from Liberia and Kabul. He wrote presciently, and counter-intuitively, about American politics, especially of the libertarian strain.
Perhaps my favorite of his essays is “The Militia in Me,” published just months after the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, in which he stares into the mirror and finds not complicity or judgment but an unlikely common ground. “I believe the State should be resisted whenever it encroaches,” he acknowledges. “But the bombers of that building will demonstrate for us something we don’t want demonstrated: There’s no trick to starting a revolution. Simply open fire on the State; the State will oblige by firing back. What’s harder is to win a revolution, and the only victory worthy of the name will be a peaceable one.”
Ultimately, what this indicates is an uncommon openness: not empathy, exactly, but something more profound. As a writer, as a thinker, as an observer, Johnson was, not unlike Orwell, relentless in exposing petty pieties, turning our assumptions inside out.
And yet, free pass or exemption? The burning heart of Johnson’s achievement is that he understood exemptions are not just impossible but also unnecessary, that transcendence can always find us, even in the final moments of our lives. “He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it,” he writes at the end of his first novel, “Angels” (1983). “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. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.”
I don’t pray, so I’ll leave that for another human being. When all is said and done, though — and whatever else he may have gone through in his time of dying — I hope this is how his final breaths played out.