Easy Writer

On Ted Geltner’s ‘Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson’

A scene from the film Jesus' Son, based on the Denis Johnson short story collection of the same name.

One of the most irritating things we learn in Ted Geltner’s new biography of Denis Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures, is just how easy it all was for Denis. Not that Denis’ life was easy — anyone who’s picked up Jesus’ Son is at least dimly aware that DJ blasted away his 20s careening between dope and booze before he got his act together — but the writing, if we’re to believe Geltner’s reverent account, came to him with blissful, galling ease. It began at the University of Iowa, where a 19-year-old Denis (“It was always Denis, not Denis Johnson,” Joy Williams insists) showed up to his freshman year seminar with a poem that left his classmates dumbfounded. “Nobody was able to manage any suggestions for improvement,” Geltner reports. Dejected, the class slinked off to “go listen to some Bob Dylan records.” Poor, defeated hippies. For the next seven years, as Denis muddled through an MFA, he routinely shocked professors into slack-jawed awe and drove students into paroxysms of envy with his immense and inexplicable talent. By 1974, “Well, it’s another Denis Johnson poem” had become a weary refrain around campus.

“Immediately,” “promptly,” and “quickly” are the adverbs that pepper Geltner’s breezy summary of Denis’ college years: Denis’ poems were “immediately” put on track for publication, and once that happened, Denis — restless and in search of further worlds to conquer — turned his attentions to Iowa’s fiction workshops. The first short story he ever wrote, “The Taking of Our Own Lives,” was “promptly” accepted by the North American Review. The next landed at The Atlantic and provoked Houghton Mifflin to “quickly” make Denis a deal for his not-yet-written debut novel. It’s enough to make the reader, who’s probably a writer, squirm with jealousy as they consider the drafts, rejections, “in-progress” submissions, fragments, jottings, and half-baked ideas clotting up their desk and their desktop.

That the audience for a Denis Johnson biography is likely to consist of writers themselves is obvious. It’s not that Denis can be comfortably labeled a “writer’s writer” (although Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures comes enthusiastically blurbed by Jenny Offill and T. C. Boyle, who claims, erroneously, that it’s a “biography with all the fluidity and thrust of a novel”), but that he, even more so than his mentor Raymond Carver, can be held responsible for the applications of at least several thousand young writers to MFA programs across America. The truth is that Denis wrote marvelously, and, crucially, he produced the kind of effortless prose that seemed imitable, the sort of writing that made one think, “Maybe I could do that.”

His formula was deceptively simple: take the minimalism and subject matter of Carver (“The Savoy Hotel was a bad place”), add a dash of Whitmanian lyricism (“I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth”), and presto, you had yourself a heartsick little gem like “Work” or “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” Of course, try to do this at home and you’ll find that it’s teeth-grindingly difficult work. So one cracks open Gestures determined to find answers. What made Denis tick? What was his routine? Was he a Balzacian, sustained by endless gallons of coffee, or did Denis draw his inspiration from some deeper interior well — heroin, followed by religion? We want to know how, exactly, he wrote those novels, and those stories, and those sentences. Reading about his life, we want a little of his power for ourselves.

It’s pointless to try and answer these questions — we’re almost better off knowing nothing about him — but Geltner sets himself to the task patiently. Denis left no instructions for a potential biographer before he died, so it’s up to Geltner, a professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, to track down the usual grab-bag of friends, lovers, ex-wives, colleagues, former instructors at the U of I, writing retreat buddies, barflies, gadflies, and hangers-on, all of whom seem as mystified by Denis as we are ourselves. The result of all this pavement-pounding is a diligent, respectful account of Denis Johnson’s life, from birth to death, addiction to sobriety, and obscurity to (sadly truncated) literary fame. Relevant interviewees are quoted throughout, appropriate historical context is provided, but ultimately Gestures is long on detail, short on insight, and although a tone of quiet worship is struck throughout, one finishes the book with the strong sense that Denis would not have wanted it written.

If the writing came naturally to Denis, it was the business of living that he was ill-suited for. “I can’t remember very many situations,” he told the LA Times, “where I had even the tiniest idea what the heck was going on. Meanwhile, you humans, you Earthlings — you all seem right at home.” We roll our eyes reading this — a clever writer’s folksy self-mythologization — but one of Gestures’ great revelations is that Denis Johnson, in addition to being one of the more graceful prose stylists of the last half-century, was also a complete buffoon. Newly arrived at the University of Iowa, Denis quickly took up with Nancy Jo Lister, an Iowan who found Denis “an exotic, romantic figure.” By sophomore year, Nancy was pregnant with his child. Denis reacted to this news by getting drunk and chucking a bottle of whiskey out of the cafeteria window. The couple moved into a two-bedroom and prepared for the arrival of their first child. Nancy’s parents bought them a crib and Nancy decorated the nursery. For his part, Denis, the boy-poet, decreed that if the child “was a girl . . . she should be called Tangerine.” If it was a boy, he would be christened “Changer D’avis.” Geltner earnestly explains that translated from the French, this means “change your mind,” but the effect, when spoken, is more Appalachian than French — closer to Breece D’J Pancake than Guy de Maupassant. The child was a boy. Fortunately, his parents had recently seen the 1966 slapstick comedy Morgan! starring Vanessa Redgrave and David Warner. Having enjoyed the film, Denis and Nancy decided to name their firstborn after it. Morgan would be Denis’ only biological child.

More examples of his dumbassery ensue, each less charming than the last. As Geltner put it, Denis was “middle-class gone crazy,” which meant that he was a sloppy alcoholic and a druggie who spent the better part of the ’70s embarrassing himself. Geltner dutifully records each one of Denis’ moronic misadventures. These range from the risible, like when Denis, a new hire at Lake Forest College in Chicago, decided that instead of grading each student’s work by hand, “he would throw the entire pile of essays down the stairs” and assign grades based on where they fell, to the repulsive, like when he encouraged his seven-year-old son to make friends in a new neighborhood by passing out porno mags.

Much of the flavor of these sodden, peripatetic years is contained in Jesus’ Son. The hangovers, the driftlessness, the mornings waking up dead broke and hitchhiking to the next crummy town, countless days weathering “the common humiliations of a human life.” This period makes for grim reading, but one realizes, raising an eyebrow, that Denis had a dim idea that all of it — the pain, the homelessness, his addictions — was necessary research. He was hungry for any kind of experience, the seamier the better. Pills, guns, needles, burglary, drunk driving, unplanned pregnancies, general disreputability: Denis hoovered it all up. “You’re only hanging out with us so you can write about us later, aren’t you?” one of Denis’ pals at the Vine, a favored dive in Iowa City, asks him. Right he was: the Vine — “a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere”— would appear in Jesus’ Son, along with its regulars. It becomes laughable how often Geltner, having just described another sordid scene, magnanimously concludes that it “would lead to some memorable stories down the road,” or at the very least, promises us that “Denis observed and took notes.”

But by the late ’70s, Denis had realized that his powers of observation and “even his ability to write poetry . . . had abandoned him.” Finally scared straight, he retreated to his parent’s house in Arizona, where he sobered up with startling alacrity. In the span of two pages, Denis goes from a “bloated and pale” lush to a hearty and hale all-American. The reader’s head spins. At this point, Geltner might pause to reconcile Denis’ recusant youth with his newly sober and monkish 30s, and to explain the congruence between his life and his art. Instead, he plugs on, and Gestures becomes a dull catalog of novels published, fellowships won, and plaudits received.

It’s a pity, because there is fertile ground here. A shrewder writer might have seized the opportunity to become an English department’s resident Denis Johnson expert — all it would take is a chapter on his relationship to his class of lyrical realists and some plucky assessment of his oeuvre. But Geltner is strangely timid when it comes to evaluating Johnson’s work — the wrong tack for this biography, because after the derangements of his 20s, work was all Denis had left. Sober and clear-headed, powers of observation recovered, Denis started writing and never really stopped. First came Angels, written in two spurts separated by a decade and not quite so convincingly soldered together. Next, emboldened by a grant-winning streak, Denis pumped out Fiskadoro, a puzzling post-apocalyptic daydream, and the Robert Stone homage Stars at Noon. Both novels are only ever fitful displays of Denis’ talent. He seemed aware of this. “Actually [Fiskadoro is] kind of a weird book,” he wrote to a friend. “But who cares?” Denis certainly didn’t.

The ’80s pass by in a productive blur of plays, poems, stories, and essays, but Jesus’ Son, Denis’ 1992 collection of highway-side missives, is the star attraction here — indeed, it’s the book upon which Geltner’s argument for his greatness hangs. In his fabulistic retelling, Denis was looking for a way to pay for his divorce from Lucinda Johnson when he happened upon some short stories he had written 30 years prior stashed in a drawer. All he had to do was staple them together and mail the packet off to Jonathan Galassi at FSG, who promptly pronounced them masterful, had them published, and gave Denis the biggest success of his career. All that’s left for us to say, hopelessly, is “Well, it’s just another Denis Johnson story.”

Geltner, so far, so reticent, devotes a fulsome chapter to Jesus’ Son. According to him, the book “directly tapped into the vibe of an era” — the ’90s — and “fill[ed] a hole in a new generation searching for touchstones.” Vibes and touchstones, like much of Geltner’s writing, sound suspiciously vague. Jesus’ Son was certainly the book that established him as a serious, unusual writer, but by now the reader, becalmed in a sea of drab facts, longs for Geltner to express a bold opinion or make an interesting claim about Denis’ life and work. This is the first biography to be published since Denis passed away nine years ago; one feels that it should go some way to tidying up Denis’ place in the American literary canon. He was not a titan like DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy — although at times his work shared some of DeLillo’s Americana or the flinty spirituality of novels like The Crossing — nor was he (as his detractors would have it) a mediocre prose-poet, someone like Richard Brautigan. The cliché, in this case, is true: his influences were often obvious, but what he did with them, when it came time to sit down and do the work, was anything but. There’s Carver of course, along with Graham Greene, Leonard Gardner, and Conrad, yet at its best Denis’ prose seemed peerless.

Post-Jesus’ Son, Gestures begins to lose steam. Simply put, Denis’ life became sort of boring. He wrote, he taught, he accepted occasional assignments from Esquire or Salon, he bought 200 acres in Idaho and a pad in the Bay Area, where he married Cindy Lee, his third wife. But Geltner is a Denis fan, and as a fan, he has a fan’s quiddities, his bêtes noires and pet topics. We’re treated to a chapter on Denis’ dalliances with literary journalism (“It was Denis’s first published work of journalism. It was also his masterpiece of the form”), even though Denis, who once described journalists as a “pack of lemmings,” clearly saw his trips to Kabul or Liberia as paid opportunities to gather material for his fiction. He suggests that Denis should’ve received a National Book Award for Jesus’ Son — the “creation that the gods of literature had actually chosen to preserve for eternity” — rather than Tree of Smoke. (I disagree: Tree of Smoke, Denis’ 700-page Vietnam War epic, is his masterpiece and the gods of literature, wherever they are, were right to bestow one of their highest honors upon it.)

Elsewhere Gestures can be repetitious, unclear, listless, sterile, and excitable: “Much of the work of transforming his experiences from the trip with Messer into literature would take place at an ideal location for such work.” Or this passage: “It was now part of the wider ‘human experience,’ and Denis believed he had a calling to write stories from that human experience.” And when Geltner does reach for some verve, we’re confronted by sentences like “Denis dined with Somali fighters high on chhaht, the warrior’s drug of blood and ecstasy.” Besides the bizarre spelling of khat (qat or qhat are also acceptable), it would be more apt to characterize the leaf, a mild stimulant chewed as a social pastime in the Horn of Africa, as the loafer’s drug of zippy conversation and slight insomnia.

“Nobody could ever possibly imagine how clumsy, silly and stupid that great man was in his youth,” Baudelaire wrote of Balzac. “And yet he managed to acquire . . . not only grandiose ideas but also a vast amount of wit. But then he never stopped working.” So it goes with Denis: first we get the idiot, thrashing around the heartland; then we get Denis the weathered and weary mystic — as Jonathan Franzen grandly put it, “the God I want to believe in has a voice and sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s”; and finally we get Denis the writer. Yes, he was uncommonly talented and unreasonably lucky, but what Gestures ultimately reveals is what we already half-suspected about him: each effortless sentence required slavish devotion, incessant tinkering, and a steely focus. You’re left admiring Denis — his creative powers, his reserve, his mulishness and determination — but he remains a remote figure, a kind of wonderful savant adrift among the earthlings. Only once while reading Gestures did I feel noticeably close to him. Right before he died, before the liver cancer took over, he asked his wife, Cindy Johnson, “Is it ok if I stop writing now?” Everybody knows that feeling.

Max Callimanopulos is a writer who lives in New York City. He most recently wrote about the singer Αkon in the London Review of Books.