The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson – review

If the circumstances of a not-untypical Denis Johnson character are defined by the story The Starlight on Idaho – “on” not “over” because it’s actually a rehab facility and Idaho is the name of a street – then a likely destiny is laid out by the narrator’s grandma: “You’ll end up buried in a strange town with your name spelled wrong on your grave.” This warning has, nevertheless, a certain allure of its own– a beat-down version of Keats’s “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Johnson’s death in May of this year, aged 67, made clear the discrepancy between the way his name was writ in America – large – where his wayward originality was part of a recognised tradition, and the fervid but limited support he enjoyed in the UK. His big novel was Tree of Smoke (Vietnam, CIA), but his best books were probably the shortest: The Name of the World (a weird campus novel), Train Dreams (an epic of the history of the American northwest in 116 mind-blowing pages), and the very druggy, highly influential story collection Jesus’ Son.

Some of the stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden pick up where Jesus’ Son left off in 1992. Fuckhead, the quaintly named narrator of those stories, had a fondness for his $60 Chevrolet on the grounds that it was “the kind of thing you could bang into a phone pole with and nothing would happen at all”. Strangler Bob in the new book opens with a similar bit of automotive nous: “You hop into a car, race off in no particular direction, and blam, hit a power pole. Then it’s off to jail.”

Jails are familiar stations of the cross for Johnson’s people. In this one, the titular strangler’s cellmates are the happy beneficiaries of a magazine brought in by a visitor, a page of which has been soaked with a potent psychedelic. Less happily, it has not been evenly soaked, so their experiences become scarily lop-sided – and not at all enhanced by a qualified confession from Strangler Bob about his wife: “We charcoaled a couple T-bone steaks and drank a bottle of imported Beaujolais red wine, and then I sort of killed her a little bit.”

In terms of set and setting, it’s as inappropriate a place to trip as the medical examination – for a locked knee – attended by the narrator of Triumph Over the Grave. Wrongly assuming the exam will take place in a private room, he finds himself in an auditorium where the orthopaedic surgeon is strutting his stuff before an audience of students. The acid focuses attention on the pain, but it also makes that pain seem “cosmically funny”.

Both halves of this phrase bear emphasis. Whatever Johnson had gone through, however he expressed it on the page, it would all have been wasted had it not ended up being funny, because then a major percentage of wisdom would have been missing. An incident from one of the most famous stories in Jesus’ Son is like a bombed-out remake of Steve Martin’s old arrow-through-the-head routine. You know the one: guy walks into hospital with a knife in his eye. Informed by the nurse that he’d better lie down, the casualty – played by Johnson himself in the film of the book – replies: “OK, I’m certainly ready for something like that.” In the acid-trip jail, meanwhile, the narrator comes to the conclusion that his companions – Bob excepted – “may have been not human beings, but wayward angels.” And with that we’re right back to where we started, with the publication of Johnson’s first novel, Angels, in 1983.

Since then, he’s been plenty venerated and honoured, but I suspect that winning the National Book award for Tree of Smoke made about the same difference to his writing life that not even being longlisted might have done: none. In the last piece in the new book, Doppelgänger, Poltergeist, about a poet who becomes obsessed with the idea that Elvis died at birth – it’s a long story – someone points out that the “vapid, tedious” work of Presley’s later years was due to the influence of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. “Inside every one of us lives a poisoner like Tom Parker.” Reluctant to admit to such self-betrayal, writers blame publishers for pressuring them to be more “commercial”. In fact, publishers seem extraordinarily willing to encourage the likes of Johnson to remain faithful to the highest (which might be synonymous with lowest) sense of their vocation.

Not that Johnson needed much encouragement. On the one hand, this was because the writing came from the depth of his being that is Dostoevskian. At a certain point, I suspect, writing was the only thing left for him. On the other, this somewhat ponderous diagnosis is entirely compatible with Johnson’s own take on the mystery of literary production: “It’s easy work,” confides the narrator of Triumph over the Grave. “You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all… Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie – although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.”

Now this comes from within a fiction, not from a Paris Review interview about his craft, but it sounds about right. He led a certain life and found ways of giving expression to that life, with varying degrees of imaginative embellishment. After a while, that too – the expressing, the inventing – became parts of the life which were, in turn, folded into the mix, so he wrote about being a writer, though this writer both was and was not the author of the book you’re now reading about.

But here’s the thing, a point about his work and voice-driven fiction generally that might best be made with reference to Bob Dylan. Suppose, when Dylan sang the line “I just reached a place” at the start Going, Going, Gone, we’d wired him up to some kind of advanced polygraph that detected not lies but truths. Every time he sung this line, the polygraph would confirm the simple fact that he had just reached a place, even though circumstantially this was impossible to verify. When Johnson writes, “I’ve been arrested about eight times, shot twice, not twice on one occasion, but once on two different occasions etc etc, and I think I got run over once but I don’t even remember it”, we believe him. Ditto when he notes that random cumulus formations “made the morning sky look like a large, comfortable bed”. From here, it’s a very small step or stumble into the cosmic or visionary – before he lapses back into deadpan pandemonium.

The secret of all this is the shifting wattage, the slipshod magnificence and crazy wonder of the Johnsonian sentence. Clause by clause, word by word, anything becomes plausible. Control is achieved through willing proximity to its loss. It seems he’s “just filling a notebook with jazz”, but then these directionless improvisations acquire the weight of stories. Sideways drift gives way to narrative. So let’s hand the wheel back to the narrator at the Starlight who has “nothing to show for 36 years on this earth. Except that God is closer to me than my next breath. And that’s all I’ll ever need or want. If you think I’m bullshitting, kiss my ass. My story is the amazing truth.”