Iowa
Review by George Yatchisin
Is it possible to feel sad considering the life of someone who authored nine novels (one a winner of the National Book Award), a novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage? That’s a damn good run for anyone, let alone someone gone at the relatively young age of 67. Still, it’s hard not to look at the life of Denis Johnson and lament.
Clearly his biographer Ted Geltner recognizes that—just check out the book’s title. Geltner, a professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, remains true to his reporter’s roots throughout, digging up vivid chestnuts of facts that illuminate Johnson’s troubled yet also uniquely charmed life. We find out who he did acid with in high school, which real life members of the Iowa City demi monde are the sources for which fictional characters in his work, get a where-are-they-now? coda for the family that inspired his classic story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.”
We even learn something not too surprising given Johnson primarily gave himself over to fiction as he got older—his poetry also began in “long, free-flowing paragraphs. Phrases would be repeated, over and over, reordered and refined until he was satisfied. The he would sift through the paragraphs, cut the excess, and break what remained into lines to form the poem.” Note that process could still get Johnson to a somewhat traditionally shaped sonnet with a sizzling poem like “Heat”; perhaps the notion he just “refined” work needs to be unpacked just a tad.
Johnson was a wunderkind, part of an outstanding literary crop that earned MFAs from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974—Stuart Dybek, Tracy Kidder, Allan Gurganus, TC Boyle, and Jane Smiley. Geltner effectively captures the excitement of the times, from the arrival of Raymond Carver as a teacher to what a workshop meeting was like when one of Denis’ poems was to be discussed. “But in the moment…his fellow classmates were dumbstruck,” Geltner writes. “Nobody was able to manage any suggestions for improvement, so they decided to adjourn, and as a group, go listen to some Bob Dylan records.”
The chapters all get epigraphs that help contextualize Johnson’s life and expand the parameters of the storytelling. None beats the one from Dylan Thomas—“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do”—in a chapter where Johnson’s life bottoms out so deep, he has to hock his typewriter. Given how clearly driven he was to create, it might have been easier to sell a gallon of blood. Fortunately Johnson does eventually get clean, coming around to religion as many who find the lifeline that is AA do. It might also be telling he got his mom to go around and make amends with those he hurt in those self-destructive, sodden years; he also dedicated his masterpiece poetry collection Incognito Lounge “to the people I have lied to.”
Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures suggests that Johnson’s addictive behavior found its new release in his on-again, off-again “career” as an international war correspondent. Despite his feeling “he was just another American sissy who wanted to be Indiana Jones,” he traveled to every dangerous hot spot for decades—Nicaragua, Philippines, Somalia, Iraq—to find ever-greater adrenalin rushes. And then there was Liberia, where Johnson had an audience with crazed leader Prince Johnson, who showed him the torture video of the late president, Samuel Doe, in which Johnson cut off Doe’s ears and made him eat them. The Esquire article for that trip was aptly titled “The Civil War in Hell.” Here’s where a poet writing this biography no doubt would bring up this echo of Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel” as an atrocious analogue.
All that said, I consciously stopped taking notes about every ugly scene that reflected on Johnson’s addictive character because I didn’t want to think of one of my literary heroes that way. Not that Geltner sensationalizes or piles on the unpleasantness. Still, even the old saw “love the art, not the artist” was tested in a passage when a blitzed out Johnson gets in a physical fight with a pregnant girlfriend when she informs him she’s going to have an abortion. It’s so raucous neighbors call the police. The magnetic side of him did not fail him in such incidents; Johnson talked his way out of arrest.
For there’s also a lucky life side to Johnson’s tale. He had the ability to crank out poems or stories the night before a grant was due and still win. His parents always had his back, despite how different he had to seem to them. And while he wrote fiction even when he was primarily a poet, that genre took over, especially once he realized that’s where the money in publishing was. Geltner’s passages about Johnson in the heady publishing world of Manhattan are particularly captivating. Let alone a few tentative forays with Hollywood. (Turns out if a producer says your script is poetic, it’s not a compliment. It means you’re fired.)
Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures isn’t meant to be literary analysis, but there’s no doubt Geltner is most obsessed with Jesus’ Son, making a compelling case for it not only as Johnson’s masterpiece but also as an x-ray of the early 1990s zeitgeist. Particularly revelatory is Geltner’s analogy between Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which, while about WW II and the 1940s, was a crucial text for 1960’s unrest, and Jesus’ Son, while having its genesis in the rough and rabble Iowa City of the late 1960s/early 1970s, “touched a nerve among a large slice of the youth culture, [and] it even scored a more direct hit on the writers of Generation X.” After all, even today writers get labeled “the new Denis Johnson” if, like him, they have “an eye for the subtle glories of infirmity.” For Johnson himself said, praising an early writing hero, Leonard Gardner, author of Fat City, “That in the world’s grays and sepias, in its shadows and lonely nights, a fine beauty is visible to the eye that stays open.”
If only Johnson’s still were.
