FAR FROM GOD

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DENIS JOHNSON

AT A NEIGHBOR’S PARTY NOT LONG AGO I MET A RECENT graduate from a nearby 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 marijuana dealer in the interim. When I asked him about his reading habits, he reached into his satchel and produced a paperback copy of Denis Johnson’s showpiece, Jesus’ Son, about a nameless Midwestern wastrel in the stranglehold of heroin and booze. He then did what I’ve come to expect from that breed of outlaw literati who worships Johnson’s book—he recited its most famous line: “I knew every raindrop by its name.”

When I asked him to help me understand what that sentence is supposed to mean, he said, “It can mean anything you want it to mean, that’s why it so great. It’s poetry.” I then tried gently to point out, first, that he’d just defined poetry as intentional nonsense, and, second, that a sentence which can mean anything you want it to mean necessarily means nothing at all. I tried to suggest an alternative: “I knew every puddle by its name.” Couldn’t that essentially have the same meaning, rendering “raindrop” a little less potent than he supposed? No, he said, because Johnson didn’t write “puddle.” I was supposed to feel the meaning of “raindrop”; I wasn’t given leave to think about it. He then assailed me with a caravan of angry platitudes. How do you talk literature with someone whose self-esteem has somehow become part of the discussion?

Votaries of Jesus’ Son aren’t hard to see coming: mid-twenties, white, and male, they revere On the Road and determined second-raters such as Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, have narcotics in their recent past, want to be fiction writers but would rather not puzzle through Henry James or George Eliot. I was once reluctantly in a Denver café on Colfax Avenue when I spotted a hipster with a paperback copy of Jesus’ Son slipped into the rear pocket of his snug pants. It was the old iconic copy, the tiny black one with the yellow and purple title: the one perfectly sized for a rear pocket. I’m not sure what other book is nowadays walked around like a wallet, but I’ve since seen Jesus’ Son protruding from male rear pockets in Washington Square in New York and Harvard Square in Cambridge; on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, and on Congress Street in Portland, Maine.

It’s beautiful to see, rear pockets sprouting Jesus’ Son, but I’ve wondered: Do all those hip young men believe “I knew every raindrop by its name” can mean anything they want it to mean? Are these rear pockets evidence of what is sometimes referred to as the book’s “cult following”? Because in his novel More Die of Heartbreak, Saul Bellow has that line to the effect that cults are neither that hard to get nor that much to be proud of. If ever you hear that a writer has a cult following, pause to remind yourself what a cult actually is and how a cult usually ends. Jesus’ Son, the preeminent story collection of the American 1990s, is worthy of more than mere cultism.

Like all legendary books, Jesus’ Son has its own compelling story, one Denis Johnson told to an interviewer in 2002. Already the author of four lauded novels, Johnson was bankrupt, wading through the flotsam left by his second divorce, and ten grand in debt to the IRS. He made a deal with his editor: he’d exchange him a book of short fiction for the ten grand needed to make good with the government. Jesus’ Son was the result, the art that emerged from Johnson’s delving into the unholy wreckage of his past in order to emerge from the unholy wreckage of his present.

The collection is singular in its amalgam of rarities. It wields a visionary language that mingles the Byronic with the demotic: a language of the dispossessed, half spare in bewilderment, half ecstatic in hope. There’s the bantam power of its brevity—you can read the book in one sitting—and the pitiless, aphoristic excavation of an underground existence bombed by narcotics, of psyches that prefer the time of their life to the life of their time. It deftly avoids that tired trope which pollutes so many stories of addiction: the trek from cursed to cured, from lost to loved, from breakdown to breakthrough. It also maintains an effortless appropriation of elements from the three most important storywriters of the American twentieth century: Hemingway’s sanctifying of the natural world in The Nick Adams Stories; O’Connor’s spiritual grotesquerie and redemptive questing; and Carver’s noble ciphers manhandled by the falsity of the American Dream. (Johnson was one of Carver’s drinking compeers at Iowa in the early 1970s.)

The famous raindrop line appears in the opening story of the collection, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” On the face of it, the line is the confused reaching of a vagrant anesthetized by methadone. Look closer, and place it within Johnson’s aesthetic, and you’ll see that it is a desire of affinity for the natural world, or a desperate 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.) He’d been hitchhiking at night in a storm, and waits now at the edge of the road for someone to pick him up. The drugs have made “the linings of [his] veins feel scraped out,” and that’s when he thinks: “I knew every raindrop by its name.” There he stands, hardly blinking at the rain on his nose and lashes, and half wondering what in the world has happened to him.

A family stops to pick him up. He doesn’t want to know their names because 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, drunk midday in a barroom with a guy he does not and cannot know, he will have the chance to notice: “We hadn’t yet mentioned our names. We probably wouldn’t.” The denizens of Johnson’s ground world guard their namelessness to sustain their anonymity, because naming something is the first step in your responsibility of owning it. A fellow junkie once called the narrator “Fuckhead,” and this unfitting sobriquet is all he wishes us to know him by.

All through the collection the narrator engages in his own brand of pathetic fallacy as he seeks to feel worthy of an unworthy world, to fit himself somewhere on the continuum between nature and man: “Midwestern clouds” are “great grey brains”; “the buds were forcing themselves out of the tips of branches and the seeds were moaning in the gardens”; “the downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts”; “we whizzed along down through the skeleton remnants of Iowa.” Grey brains, moaning, gurgled, skeleton remnants: he beholds himself imprinted onto the nature-ravished world, just as Hemingway’s Nick Adams—in “Big Two-Hearted River” and “The Last Good Country” especially—aligns himself with the Michigan wilderness, his respite from the macadam and steel empty of the divine. For Nick, the woods take on a spiritual significance civilization cannot muster; for Johnson’s narrator, it’s almost a miracle such gauzy eyes can notice, never mind value, the terror-making beauty of nature. Near the end of his chronicle, as the gauze begins to drop away, nature’s color comes in starker detail: he marvels at “one small orange flower . . . under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in its own distances.”

Like Nick, too, the narrator will become a writer, will be helped by the restorative force of art. It would have been impossible for Johnson to shirk the almighty influence of Hemingway’s Nick Adams in his crafting of stories that follow a single character from chilled darkness to the welcome bruise of dawn. In the triumph of its narrative form, Jesus’ Son was an unintended precursor to that screwy genre which had such a deservedly short life in American publishing: the novel-in-stories. Jesus’ Son underscores a necessary point about Johnson: despite his mammoth, National-Book-Award-winning Tree of Smoke, his true aptitude, like Hemingway’s, is for compression, for the intense tremblings of brevity. His novellas The Stars at Noon, The Name of the World, and Train Dreams have a welterweight punch mostly absent from the much longer Already Dead and Tree of Smoke.

It’s now something of a cliché for a writer to claim Flannery O’Connor as a godmother, and she’s become, with Kafka, the go-to mind whenever a reviewer or blurbist needs to summon a genius for the usually fatuous comparison. Few are worthy of appearing in the same sentence as Ms. O’Connor, but with Jesus’ Son, Johnson made himself one of them. In O’Connor’s postlapsarian mythos you’ll find the blasphemous suspicion that God is an escaped mental patient out of control on his throne. For Johnson’s narrator, that suspicion is a daily part of how he believes, or tries to believe, in deliverance. He wanders “under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God.” When he drinks himself blind at a pub, he does so “far from God” because he can’t quite decide what’s more monstrous: a god who won’t rescue or a man who won’t repent.

With Christ, Johnson’s narrator has been promised heaven but condemned to an outsized anguish on earth. He cannot be Christ himself—he is neither that mad nor that special—but he can be Christ’s child because the ordeals of the father are typically replayed in the life of the son. (The title of the book comes from the creepy Lou Reed song “Heroin”: “When I’m rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus’ son.”) And he differs from so many of O’Connor’s sanctimonious con men—Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the preacher Bevel in “The River”—in that his flashes of the sacred are a genuine grasping after betterment and transcendence.

But he feels terror and awe before the sacred, walloped by the inexpressible mystery of it: “On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.” In “Dirty Wedding,” he follows a bewitching stranger off the train and into a Laundromat: “His chest was like Christ’s. That’s probably who he was.” As with the sacred itself, the narrator is at once a part of the world and apart from it, immanent when sober and Other when high. Johnson understands that the inverse of the sacred is not the secular but the profane, and that the sacred cannot be found in theology but only in experience. That understanding does not endorse the druggie’s counterculture cliché—kick open those doors of perception—but is rather the natural outcrop of Fuckhead’s yearning for the sacred despite his persistent state of profanity.

When the narrator’s junk-headed friend employs the term “sacrifice” in an unexpected way, he asks himself: “Sacrifice? Where had he gotten a word like sacrifice? Certainly I had never heard of it.” Forget about our use of “sacrifice” to mean the surrender of something, recall that the word comes from the Latin sacrificium, meaning “that which is made sacred,” and the narrator’s confusion about the term becomes more than just a druggie’s quirk of personality. The sacred—those “things set apart and forbidden,” in Émile Durkheim’s definition—has been the narrator’s aim all along, whether or not he’s been completely aware of it. The most consequential sacrifice in Western civilization, Christ’s willing death on the cross, is a bit lofty for Johnson’s character. He is only Jesus’ son, remember, not the messiah himself. (“Christ” comes from christos, the Greek for “anointed one.”) Where, then, can his own sacredness be found? What, at this broken time in his life, remains set apart from him and forbidden? Normality, sobriety—renewal.

The sacrificial object achieves its ultimate worth only upon being sacrificed, and that’s part of the importance of Jesus’ Son, the charismatic pitch of its storytelling. The narrator evokes these days of ruin through the fondest nostalgia, with a tenderness peculiar for a view showing so much pain: “Most days in Seattle are grey, but now I remember only the sunny ones”; “all the really good times happened when Wayne was around”; “it was a sad, exhilarating occasion.” Writing about Jesus’ Son, John Updike remarks that the stories are “remembered in an agreeable haze.” Fuckhead’s nostalgic, post-addiction longing has morphed the worst of times into the best of times. “Numinous dishevelment,” Updike calls it, in a pairing only Updike can achieve, but Johnson’s narrator writes from a locus of health, from a place in which he no longer feels the Romantic compulsion to quest, to make of his disastrous life a living artwork. The numinousness and dishevelment have passed, hence his longing. You miss youthful abandon only when you’ve been saddled with adult accountability.

Johnson learned from his teacher Carver that the American Dream is often a hurtful ruse. Carver’s characters are disappointed and disillusioned if not altogether destroyed, and they’re never entirely certain who or what is to blame for their stagnation or demise. In “The Bridle,” a character says that dreams “are what you wake up from.” In the final story of Jesus’ Son, as Johnson’s narrator adapts to sobriety by working at an old-age home in Arizona, a senile man tells him, “There’s a price to be paid for dreaming.” Fuckhead can feel “the cancelled life dreaming after” him: the canceled life of a Carverian character, which for him would be an improvement, a promotion from inferno to purgatorio. Carver’s men and women wish for an earthbound paradiso, but Fuckhead never commits that error of ambition: he’ll settle for an uncomplicated cleanliness.

In Carver’s stories “Fever,” “A Small, Good Thing,” and “Cathedral,” characters grant themselves a minim of grace through the simple act of human communion. Fuckhead himself has a Willy Loman complex: he wants to be well liked by people, and in the story “Dundun” he isn’t ashamed to admit it. Nor is he too choked by testosterone or pride to admit his vulnerability, his throbbing want of maternal love: “With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who’d love me.” About his dope-hooked girlfriend, Michelle, he regrets that nothing in his power could convince her to “love me as she had at first, before she really knew me.”

And that’s the key to what raises Jesus’ Son so far above Burroughs’s Junky or the pointless nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Those delinquent books constitute a literature of delirium, a moral vacuity that by definition cannot be redemptive; their pages parade characters whose inner lives have been so charred by self-concern and drugs that they can scarcely register a genuine emotion, never mind a meaningful idea. Johnson’s narrator intuitively comprehends that love and human goodness are the only redeemers worth having. His story might end with neither total redemption nor the completing embrace of love, but, as he admits early on: “I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.” Halfway into the collection, the character Georgie—played to perfection by Jack Black in the 1999 film version—echoes Samuel Beckett: “We can’t go on.” He omits the second half of Beckett’s famous line, “I’ll go on,” because he and Fuckhead aren’t yet prepared for progress. True progress, they must learn, comes after forgiveness.

Johnson’s narrator is part messiah because he’s been charged with salvaging himself from devils most of us will never be sunk enough to know. We go to Jesus’ Son precisely because in its most sublime moments it reveals to us a condition both lesser and greater than human. We go to it for its flawlessness of aesthetic form, its transformative spiritual vision, the lovely stab of its humanity, and the beauty, the deathless beauty, of sentences that sing of possible bliss.

—Poets & Writers, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013