THE LITERARY Life The Art of Reading Denis Johnson

THE ENDURING APPEAL OF JESUS’ SON

N 2005 I lived on the corner of Beacon Street and Massachusetts Avenue, right at the frenetic hub of Boston, two floors above the Crossroads Irish Pub. While reading A Tragic Honesty (Picador, 2003), IBlake Bailey’s biography of Richard Yates, I discovered that Crossroads was the smoky womb into which Yates retreated, every day for eleven years, to blitzkrieg his liver WILLIAM GIRALDI is the and lungs. Below me lived an Indian American intellectual author of the novels Busy with hipster-literary-narcotic tendencies and more friends Monsters (Norton, 2011) and than George Clooney, and he knew all about Yates and Hold the Dark, forthcoming Crossroads. That’s why he’d chosen to live there: to be from Norton in 2014, and the near the sodden spirit of a writer who’d doomed himself fiction editor for the journal to affliction. AGNI at Boston University. He’d often ask me to his weekend saturnalias, to which he would invite bohemian literary types and multihued ladies of the night, and at which I never felt quite bac- chic enough. Once he introduced me to a recent graduate of Emerson’s MFA program, a fiction writer in his mid- twenties whose grievance was planted on his face like a flag. He couldn’t land a job in writing, couldn’t convince anyone to publish his work, and so had become a not-so- reluctant hawker of weed. He asked what books I taught at Boston University and when I came to Denis Johnson’s masterwork, Jesus’ Son (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), about a nameless Midwestern wastrel in the stranglehold of heroin and booze, he reached into his weed-packed satchel and produced a paperback copy as if to say, “Ta-da!” He then did what I’ve come to expect from his lagging species of outlaw literati—he recited the most famous line of the book: “I knew every raindrop by its name.” When I asked him what, exactly, that sentence was sup- posed to mean, he looked at me as if I were the ignora- mus and then said, “It can mean anything you want it to mean, that’s why it’s so great, man, it’s poetry.” I tried gently to point out, first, that he’d just defined poetry as intentional nonsense, and, second, that a sentence that can mean anything you want necessarily means nothing at all. I suggested an alternative to him: “I knew every puddle by its name.” Couldn’t that mean essentially the same thing, rendering “raindrop” a little less potent than he believed? No, he said, offended and red, because Johnson

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didn’t write “puddle.” I was supposed IKE all legendary books, to feel the meaning of “raindrop”; I Jesus’ Son has its own NSchoolew of GraduateEngland and Professional Col leStudiesge wasn’t given leave to think about it. He story, one Johnson told then assailed me with a caravan of cli- to New York magazine chés, platitudes, and tautologies. How Lin 2002. Already the author of four do you argue literature with a person lauded novels, Johnson was bankrupt, whose paltry self-esteem has somehow wading through the flotsam left by become part of the discussion? his second divorce, and ten grand in Votaries of Jesus’ Son are never hard debt to those scalawags at the IRS. He Where to see coming: Mid-twenties, white, made a deal with his editor: He’d ex- and male, they revere On the Road and change a book of short fiction for the Innovation third-raters such as Charles Bukowski ten grand needed to make good his ob- Meets and William S. Burroughs, have narcot- ligation to the government. Jesus’ Son Tradition ics mayhem in their recent past, want to was the result, the art that emerged be fiction writers but have never read from Johnson’s delving into the un- Henry James and would rather inject holy wreckage of his past in order to turpentine into themselves than puzzle emerge from the unholy wreckage of through George Eliot or James Bald- his present. MFA in win. I was once reluctantly in a Denver The collection is singular in its Creative Writing café on Colfax Avenue when I spotted a alloy of rarities. It wields a visionary Fiction & Poetry hipster with a paperback copy of Jesus’ language that mingles the Byronic Son slipped into the back pocket of his with the demotic—a language of the too-tight pants. It was the old, iconic dispossessed, half spare in bewilder- paperback copy, the tiny black one ment, half ecstatic in hope. There’s Low-residency. with the yellow-and-purple title—the the bantam power of its brevity—you one perfectly sized for a back pocket. can read the book in one sitting—and Optional concentrations in I’m not sure what other book is nowa- the pitiless, poetic excavation of an New Media, Performance, days walked around like a wallet, but underground existence bombed by and Translation. I’ve since seen Jesus’ Son protruding narcotics, of psyches that prefer the Scholarships available. from male back pockets in Washington time of their lives to the lives of their Square in New York City and Harvard time. It boasts a deft circumvention Low student-to-faculty ratio. Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts; of that tired trope polluting so many on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, American stories of addiction: the Two brief residencies per and on Congress Street in Portland, trek from cursed to cured, from lost year on the beautiful campus Maine. to loved, from breakdown to break- of New England College in It’s beautiful to see, back pockets through. It also maintains an effort- Henniker, NH. sprouting Jesus’ Son, but I’ve wondered: less appropriation of elements from Do all those hip young men believe “I the three most important story writers knew every raindrop by its name” can of the American twentieth century: Faculty mean anything they want it to mean? Ernest Hemingway’s sanctifying of Matt Bell Carol Frost Are these back pockets evidence of the natural world in The Nick Adams Kate Bernheimer Brian Henry what is lazily referred to as the book’s Stories; Flannery O’Connor’s spiritual Katie Farris Ilya Kaminsky “cult following”? Consider that in the grotesquerie and redemptive quest- Alissa Nutting Malena Morling novel More Die of Heartbreak (William ing; and Raymond Carver’s noble ci- Morrow, 1987), Saul Bellow has that phers manhandled by the falsity of the Program Director wonderful line to the effect that cults American Dream ( Johnson was one of are neither that hard to get nor that Carver’s drinking compeers at Iowa in Tara Rebele much to be proud of. If ever you hear the early 1970s). that a writer has a cult following, pause The famous raindrop line appears 98 Bridge Street Henniker, NH 03242 to remind yourself what a cult actually in the opening story of the collection, is and how cults usually end. Jesus’ Son, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” On 603.428.2906 | [email protected] the preeminent story collection of the the face of it, the line is nonsense, the necmfa.org American 1990s, is worthy of much blather of a vagrant anesthetized by more than mere cultism. methadone. Look closer and place it

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within Johnson’s aesthetic vision, and you’ll see the line is really a want of Wordsworthian affinity for the natu- ral world, or a groping after a kind of Buddhist cohesion with the cosmos (at one point in a later story, the narrator wonders about “the miraculous world” of Taoism). In “Car Crash,” he’d been hitchhiking at night in a storm, and as he sits in the backseat of a family’s wagon, his head rests against the rain- strewn window. That’s precisely what you see from that position: not pud- dles, but streaks of rain aslant on the glass, the world tar-dark beyond it. He doesn’t want to know the names of the family in the car who just res- cued him from a godforsaken ditch on the highway. The names of actual people are an alien intimacy; naming raindrops is about all he can muster at this razed moment in his life. Later, Denis Johnson, the author of eighteen books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. drunk midday in a barroom with a guy he doesn’t know, he will have intuitively aligns himself with the Denis Johnson: Despite his mammoth, the chance to notice: “We hadn’t yet Michigan wilderness, his respite from National Book Award–winning Tree of mentioned our names. We probably the realm of macadam and steel so de- Smoke (FSG, 2007), his true genius, wouldn’t.” The denizens of Johnson’s void of the divine. For Nick, the woods like Hemingway’s, is for compression. hellscape guard their namelessness to take on a spiritual significance civiliza- His novellas The Stars at Noon (Knopf, sustain their anonymity, because nam- tion cannot muster; for Johnson’s nar- 1986), The Name of the World (Harper ing something is always the first step rator, it’s almost a miracle such gauzy Collins, 2000), and Train Dreams (FSG, toward the responsibility of owning it. eyes can notice, never mind value, the 2011) have a concentrated vigor, a wel- A fellow junkie once called the nar- terror-making beauty of nature. Near terweight agility absent from the much rator “Fuckhead,” and this unfitting the end of his chronicle, as the gauze heavier Already Dead (HarperCollins, sobriquet is all he wishes us to know begins to drop away, nature’s color 1997) and Tree of Smoke. him by. comes in starker detail: He marvels at All through the collection the nar- “one small orange flower…under a sky T’S become something of a cliché rator engages in his own brand of pa- whose blueness seemed to get lost in its for a writer to claim Flannery thetic fallacy as he seeks to feel worthy own distances.” O’Connor as a godmother, and of the world, to fit himself somewhere Like Nick, too, the narrator will she’s become, with Kafka, the on the continuum between nature and become a writer, will be helped by the Igo-to scribe whenever a reviewer or a man: “Midwestern clouds” are “great restorative force of art. It would have blurbist needs to summon a genius for grey brains”; “the buds were forcing been impossible for Johnson to shirk the usually fatuous comparison. Few themselves out of the tips of branches the almighty influence of Hemingway’s are worthy of appearing in the same and the seeds were moaning in the Nick Adams in his crafting of stories sentence as O’Connor, but with Jesus’ gardens”; “the downpour raked the that follow a single antiheroic char- Son Denis Johnson made himself one asphalt and gurgled in the ruts”; “we acter from darkness to the welcome of them. In O’Connor’s postlapsarian whizzed along down through the skel- bruise of dawn. In the triumph of its mythos you’ll find the blasphemous eton remnants of Iowa.” Grey brains, narrative formation, Jesus’ Son was an suspicion that God is an escaped men- moaning, gurgled, skeleton rem- unintended precursor to a screwy genre tal patient unworthy of his reign. For nants: He beholds himself imprinted that had such a deservedly abbreviated Johnson’s narrator, that suspicion is a onto the nature-ravished world, just life in American publishing: the novel- daily part of the way he believes, or as Hemingway’s Nick Adams—in in-stories. Jesus’ Son cannot be tagged tries to believe, in deliverance. He am- “Big Two-Hearted River” and “The a novel by any sane definition, and it bles “under a sky as blue and brainless

cindy lee johnson Last Good Country” especially— underscores a necessary point about as the love of God.” When he drinks

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Announcing himself blotto at a pub, he does so an unexpected way, he asks himself, the Thirteenth Annual “far from God” because he can’t quite “Sacrifice? Where had he gotten a decide what’s more monstrous: a god word like sacrifice? Certainly I had A. POULIN, JR. who won’t rescue or a man who won’t never heard of it.” Forget about our repent. use of sacrifice to mean the surren- POETRY PRIZE Like Christ, Johnson’s narrator has der of something, recall that the been promised heaven but also con- word comes from the Latin sacrifi- demned to an outsized anguish on cium, meaning “that which is made earth. He cannot be Christ himself— sacred,” and the narrator’s confu- he is neither that hubristic nor that sion about the term becomes more special—but he can be Christ’s child, than just a druggie’s quirk of per- because the ordeals of the father are sonality. The sacred—those “things typically replayed in the life of the set apart and forbidden,” per Émile son. (The title of the book comes from Durkheim’s definition—has been the Final Judge: the Lou Reed song “Heroin”: “When narrator’s aim all along, whether or DAVID ST. JOHN I’m rushing on my run / And I feel just not he’s been completely aware of it. like Jesus’ son.”) And he differs from The most consequential sacrifice in so many of O’Connor’s sanctimonious Western civilization, Christ’s willing The Prize con men—Shiftlet in “The Life You death on the cross, is a bit lofty for •Book publication by Save May Be Your Own,” Mr. Head in Johnson’s character. He is only Jesus’ BOA Editions, Ltd. in “The Artificial Nigger,” the preacher son, not the messiah himself (Christ Spring 2015 season Bevel in “The River”—in that his derives from the Greek cristos, which •$1,500 Honorarium flashes of the sacred are earnest, a means anointed ). Where then can his bona fide grasping after both better- own sacredness be found? How can Eligibility ment and the sublime. he be his own anointer? What, at this But he feels terror and awe before broken time in his life, remains set •Entrants must be legal the sacred, forever walloped by the apart from him and forbidden? Nor- citizens or residents of inexpressible mystery of it: “On the mality, sobriety—an opportunity to the United States farther side of the field, just beyond begin again. •Entrants must be at the curtains of snow, the sky was torn The sacrificial object achieves its least 18 years of age away and the angels were descending ultimate worth only upon being sac- out of a brilliant blue summer, their rificed, and therein lies the charming huge faces streaked with light and tenor of Jesus’ Son, the charismatic Submissions full of pity.” In “Dirty Wedding,” he pitch of its telling. The narrator evokes •Send one copy of your follows a bewitching stranger off the these days of ruin through the fondest manuscript between train and into a Laundromat: “His nostalgia, with a tenderness peculiar August 1—November chest was like Christ’s. That’s prob- for a vista revealing so much pain: 30, 2013, to: ably who he was.” As with the sacred “Most days in Seattle are grey, but now itself, the narrator is at once a part I remember only the sunny ones”; “all BOA Editions, Ltd. of the world and apart from it, im- the really good times happened when P.O. Box 30971 manent when sober and transcendent Wayne was around”; “it was a sad, exhil- Rochester, NY 14604 when high. Johnson understands that arating occasion.” Writing about Jesus’ the inverse of the sacred is not the Son, John Updike asserted that the sto- •Submissions must secular but the profane, and that the ries are “remembered in an agreeable include our entry form sacred cannot be found in theology haze”—Fuckhead’s nostalgic, postad- and a $25 entry fee but only in experience. That under- diction longing has morphed the worst standing does not endorse the drug- of times into the best of times. “Nu- For complete eligibility gie’s counter-culture cliché—kick minous dishevelment,” Updike calls it, requirements, submission open those doors of perception—but but the narrator writes from a locus guidelines, and the is rather the natural outcome of Fuck- of health, from a place in which he no contest entry form, visit head’s yearning for the sacred despite longer feels the Romantic compulsion his persistent state of profanity. to quest, to make of his disastrous life a www.boaeditions.org When the narrator’s junk-headed living artwork. The numinousness and friend employs the term sacrifice in dishevelment have passed, hence his

NOV DEC 2013 26 the literary life THE ART OF READING longing. You miss youthful abandon cannot be redemptive; their pages pa- Earn your only when you’ve been saddled with rade characters whose inner lives have adult accountability. been so charred by solipsism and drugs MA or MFA in that they can scarcely register a genu- OHNSON learned from his ine emotion, never mind a meaning- the summers. teacher Carver that the Ameri- ful idea. Johnson’s narrator, however, At Sewanee you can do can Dream can be a pernicious intuitively comprehends that love and it in four. Jruse. Carver’s characters are human goodness are the only redeem- disappointed and disillusioned if not ers worth having. His story might end We’re the innovative program in literature and creative writing for altogether destroyed, and they’re never with neither total redemption nor the students whose lives won’t stop entirely certain who or what is to blame completing embrace of love, but, as he for a year or two of conventional for their stagnation or demise. In “The admits early on: “I’ve gone looking graduate school. Give us six weeks Bridle,” a character says that dreams for that feeling everywhere.” Half- each of the next four summers, write a thesis, and we’ll award you “are what you wake up from.” In the way into the collection, the character an MA or MFA of exceptional final story of Jesus’ Son, as Johnson’s Georgie—played to perfection by Jack quality — and introduce you to a narrator adapts to sobriety by work- Black in the 1999 film version—echoes community that has been drawing writers and readers together for ing at an old-age home in Arizona, a Samuel Beckett: “We can’t go on.” He over a hundred years. senile man tells him, “There’s a price omits the second half of Beckett’s fa- to be paid for dreaming.” Fuckhead can mous line, “I’ll go on,” because he and Come join us in the summer of feel “the canceled life dreaming after” Fuckhead aren’t yet prepared for prog- 2014 and find out why. him—the canceled life of a Carverian ress. True progress, they must learn, character, which for him would be an comes after forgiveness. improvement, a promotion from in- ferno to purgatorio. Carver’s men and OU’VE probably heard the women wish for an earthbound para- familiar pabulum that lit- diso, but Fuckhead never commits that erature unveils something error of ambition: He’ll settle for an called “the human condi- uncomplicated cleanliness. tion”Y in its exploration of something In Carver’s stories “Fever,” “A Small, else called “universality.” Try not to Good Thing,” and “Cathedral,” char- believe that. Even if we could iden- acters grant themselves a minim of tify this mysterious thing called the grace through the simple act of human human condition it’s not the thing communion. Fuckhead himself has a we’d be searching for in literature. Willy Loman complex: He wants to be Great books are not echo chambers well liked by people, and in the story for your own selfhood. There’s very “Dundun” he isn’t ashamed to admit little in Jesus’ Son with which the ev- it. Nor is he too choked by testosterone eryday reader can “identify.” (Teach- or pride to admit his extreme vulner- ers: Don’t ever let a student get away ability, his throbbing want of maternal with proclaiming an inability to love: “And with each step my heart identify with a book. Literature isn’t broke for the person I would never find, meant to confirm identity but rather the person who’d love me.” About his to challenge and upset it.) dope-hooked girlfriend, Michelle, he Johnson’s narrator is part messiah regrets that nothing in his power could because he’s been charged with sal- convince her to “love me the way she vaging himself from devils most of us had at first, before she really knew me.” will never be sunk enough to know. We @SewaneeLetters And that’s the key to what elevates go to Jesus’ Son precisely because in its letters.sewanee.edu Jesus’ Son so far above William S. most sublime moments it reveals to us a 931.598.1636 Burroughs’s Junky (Ace Books, 1953) condition both lesser and greater than The University of the South or the nihilistic bilge of Bret Easton human. We go to it for the flawlessness 735 University Ave. Ellis’s Less Than Zero (Simon & Schus- of its aesthetic form, its transforma- Sewanee, TN 37383 ter, 1985). Those delinquent books tive spiritual seeing, and the beauty, John Grammer, Director constitute a literature of delirium, the deathless beauty, of sentences that April Alvarez, Coordinator a moral vacuity that by definition sing of possible bliss.

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