COLUMN: Art in its Own Terms #8: Hats off to Fuckhead

On the occasion of the first Denis Johnson bio

Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures—A Biography of Denis Johnson by Ted Geltner

Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in you pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on the page, work it into shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, than filming a parade of clouds and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that clouds can descend, carry you up, take you all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.

—Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Denis Johnson’s been gone nearly nine years but his words are nearby all the time. Netflix put out a terrible film of his novella Train Dreams a couple months ago. It’s like an episode of Drunk History sponsored by Abercrombie & Fitch. At least the forty minutes I sat through before walking out of the theater. Now there’s a full-length biography as well.

It’s a strange thing about biographies. Some will line up with your life. A couple pages into Ted Geltner’s book, there’s a description of a lethal stretch of Highway 69 on the Missouri-Iowa border outside of Bethany. I text K about it, knowing she grew up nearby. Her answer: “METHANY! “ It’s what her ne’er-do-well friends called that town. A down-at-the-mouth place from all accounts. Impoverished and drug-addled. No surprise it’s where the true-life, fatal crash Johnson survived happened, the one he used as a crucial early scene in his best-known book, Jesus’ Son.

When my first book came out in 2011, JR Nelson—then manager/now owner of Myopic Books in Chicago—told me I was the first writer with a book release at that store since Johnson. The filmmaker John McNaughton, who optioned my book, hoping to make it into a TV series, had done the same with Johnson’s debut, Angels. The fact neither has been made to this point shouldn’t necessarily count against either. At least I hope not.

I’m not implying that Johnson and I are bound in any cosmic way, nor that my work is especially related to his; only that he keeps crossing my path. The way many readers form connections to their favorite writers far beyond the printed page and fully into their lived day-to-day. He keeps showing up in mine.

I never wanted to be Johnson’s friend. Getting to know people whose work you admire is a real third-rail situation. Yesterday, pulling an afternoon shift at the bar, a young guy asked me if I’d been there when David Berman—another all-time favorite—was logging time on those same barstools. I told him I’d been in the room with the man a few times but we’d never exchanged a word. It’s probably for the best. I feel that even more strongly about Johnson after reading Geltner’s book.

The figure that emerges is someone who only ever showed love or care when it suited him or, even more often, when it served to benefit his writing. He’s a kind of mercenary, plunging into chaotic situations and emerging unscathed but with notebooks full of material. This is equally true of personal relationships and international conflicts. When Johnson isn’t an active combatant, he’s a kind of revolution tourist, a fly on one blood-soaked wall after another. Harm to bystanders or loved ones be damned.

The drinking and drugging he battled a good part of his life took its toll but also fed his art. So many of Johnson’s heroes are at the mercy of appetites they can’t contain. The ones who show up more than once, like Bill Houston or the unnamed Fuckhead, rarely prevail in their struggles. And yet, if Geltner is right, then Johnson himself won a lot more battles than he lost.

Literary acclaim came early. A legendary star at the fabled Iowa Writers Workshop, Johnson had a collection of poetry published at nineteen. He set about sabotaging that triumph immediately by getting hooked on heroin and knocking up his college girlfriend. Throughout his life, he couldn’t deny the instinct to blow up everything comfortable and positive, be it personal or professional. The more success there was, the harder he worked to torpedo it.

I’ve been to Iowa City a few times for book and art reasons. I have fond memories of George’s Buffet cheeseburgers and reading from my book at Prairie Lights with no representatives of the local literary establishment present. Johnson’s version of that town seemed like an insular if not incestuous place from Geltner’s descriptions. I never got to know it that way.

Johnson’s thirst for chaos took him to war zones around the globe on magazine assignments modeled after Hunter S. Thompson’s modus operandi. Much of this reportage made it into novels like The Stars at Noon and The Laughing Monsters. Like any true artist, the line between his work and his art often blurred into nothing.

I wonder what a reader of Geltner’s book who was unfamiliar with Johnson’s writing would make of it. There are cursory sketches of much of the major work, yet his descriptions rarely match my experiences of them. Perhaps every reader forms their own relationship with their favored books and will rarely accept someone else’s take. Then again, who but a Johnson fan is likely to pick up this biography?

Last week, I spent an entire day reorganizing the Biography wall at the used-book store where I work. I spent minutes at a time flipping through books whose subjects I’d never heard of and had little interest in learning more about. How many readers would read a biography of someone they don’t know or care about?

The most valuable parts of Geltner’s book for me are where he traces Johnson’s influences. I was happy to learn he talked up Leonard Gardner’s Fat City to anyone who’d listen, that he befriended Raymond Carver, and that he made an entire workshop he led take turns reading Whitman’s Song of Myself without any commentary or discussion. These and other touchstones feel inevitable in retrospect.

As to Johnson’s impact on others, it is difficult to overstate. He’s become a gateway writer the way Bukowski or Philip K. Dick or Vonnegut were and continue to be. A kind of shortcut to an all-encompassing literary universe. The imitators are legion and mostly not worth mentioning. The impulse to slice and dice one’s troubles into prose and poetry didn’t start with Johnson and won’t end with him. But because he mastered so many forms, from poem to short story to novel to play, he makes a great teacher. In the last few years, Johnson has helped me make better sense of both poetry and prose.

He’s one of the great sentence-to-sentence writers, whether through a few couplets or in a grand narrative like Tree of Smoke. Even in that epic chronicle of America’s Vietnam misadventure, the war during which he came of age and to which his career-diplomat father likely contributed, Johnson’s knack for turning a phrase is what kept me reading.

Filmmakers and theater troupes have been trying to dramatize Johnson’s words ever since his debut novel, Angels. Geltner writes about the few unsuccessful attempts to put that book on screen, not even mentioning my friend McNaughton’s. The indie-movie version of Jesus’ Son with Billy Crudup as Fuckhead is well worth watching, but my favorite Johnson adaptation is Claire Denis’ take on Stars at Noon. It was my favorite film of its year despite the level of difficulty in actually getting to see it in a theater. It’s a rule of thumb that bad books tend to make better movies than good ones but Stars is an exception. I actually saw the movie first, but reading it early this year made me fall for Johnson’s writing all over again.

His early death, from a recurring cancer after a late diagnosis of Hepatitis C, marks him as representative of his generation. I lost a good friend a year ago from a similar affliction. He had kicked addiction much more completely than Johnson had but succumbed just the same. The bill for the Boomers’ partying youth continues to be borne by their progeny. Johnson’s son from his college marriage followed his father’s example too well and took his excesses to far further extremes. In Morgan’s interviews with Geltner, his attitude toward his father is difficult to peg. Simultaneously in awe, resentful, disappointed but unable to escape the man’s shadow.

Whatever his human shortfalls, Geltner’s book convincingly makes the case for this writer as worthy of inclusion in whatever the canon of literature may now be. I’ve never concerned myself much with ranking or rating the status of those whose work I admire in any historical or hierarchical way. I have no handle on any bigger a picture than the one painted on a given page or screen. All I know is that when I read Denis Johnson, I feel the pulse of experience, whether the setting reflects his own biography or something he witnessed or only read about. The ability to render life in words is rare and the price to do so is high. Few did it better or paid for it more handsomely.