(Originally published in Image, the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, Feb. 1 1987)

It is a cold night in November on that part of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley where you can’t seem to buy a meal for less than $30. The street people seem to have all gone underground, seeking shelter where they can, while in restaurants and cafes people chat idly over late dinners and cappucionos, warm behind the glass windows.

About 30 people have shown up at Black Oak Books to hear Denis Johnson read in the back of that clean, well-lighted place. Johnson–who has just driven down from his new home in Gualala, south of Mendocino on the Pacific Coast–is best-known for his novels Angels, Fiskadoro and The Stars at Noon–though best-known may be misleading. The number of people at Black Oak on this night is indicative of the size of the audience that appreciates serious new American fiction, especially fiction as dark as Denis Johnson’s.

For at a time when our most-heralded young writers seem content to write about people with Ivy League backgrounds, whose greatest dilemmas arise from arranging their extra-marital affairs or resolving their early-midlife crises, Johnson writes of another world. His is one populated by losers and lowlifes, self-destructive men and women out of time and grace, people who, in his words, “don’t seem to be able to stay sober or keep out of jail.” In choosing to write about the down-trodden and the misbegotten, Johnson takes his place in a tradition in American fiction that includes Stephen Crane and Flannery O’Connor, a venerable tradition as nearly forsaken as the characters in Johnson’s books.

Not that his novels are neglected. As he says, “I write the kinds of books that critics seem to like to write about.” This is in part due to their dense texture, their wild ambition, and the poetic clarity of the prose. indeed, Johnson began as a poet and caused in that field a similar stir. Writing of an early Johnson collection, Raymond Carver said, “The best poems from The Incognito Lounge are examples of what the best poetry can do–bring us closer to ourselves and at the same time put us in touch with something larger.” Praise from his fiction has been similarly unrestrained. Philip Roth Called Angels (1983) “a small masterpiece.” Fiskadoro (1985) had critics falling over themselves, evoking influences as varied as Melville and The Road Warrior. And his new book, The Stars at Noon, has received raves (of a slightly more qualified nature) from The New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice. Angels has been optioned for a film, The Stars at Noon is under consideration, and Johnson just received the $25,000 Whiting Writers’ Award for excellence in fiction and poetry.

Some of those here at Black Oak tonight familiar with the content of his stories might be surprised at the clean-cut, well-mannered appearance of the young man at the podium. The biographical notes on his books say only that he was born in Munich in 1949 and that he worked in a prison in Arizona, and I half-expected some intense, brooking young Werther fo a man, glowering from above the page. Instead his reading is so soft as to seem almost tentative, his jokes are pale and self-effacing. When we talk later of his relative literary success, his manner is somewhat bemused, as if it should be obvious to anyone that success of any kind is illusory.

What has been real though, and found only between the lines of his sketchy biography, is Johnson’s firsthand acquaintance with suffering, wrought from a life filled with alcoholism, drug abuse, despair–and followed by a rebirth and artistic success. As he wrote in a poem, written “Ten Months After Turning Thirty”:

I can hear my own scared laughter coming back

from desolate rooms where the lightbulbs

lunge above the radios all night,

and I apologize now to those

rooms for having lived in them. Things

staggered sideways for a while…

Things seems straight enough now and Denis Johnson’s a pretty happy guy. But his friendly complacent manner belies the secret knowledge that powers his prose and poetry: “There is a hell and we can go there all the time. I’ve been there by total selfishness.”

***

What brought Johnson’s parents ot Germany was the foreign service. His father was an executive in the US Information Service, and like many kids with diplomatic parents, Johnson grew up on the move. Before he was eighteen he’d lived in Germany, Japan, Washington DC, Virginia, and the Phillipines.

Manilla was hot and smelled of garbage, Johnson recalls. It was fifteen years after the end of World War II and the country still had not recovered. It was here that Johnson pursued the powerful pastimes of drinking and juvenile delinquency–endeavors made easier by the country’s less than stringently enforced drinking age, “I had lots of little run-in with the authorities,” he says, “malicious mischief and that sort of thing. It was pretty boring. But I definitely had an attitude problem. When I got back to the States, I had an even worse attitude problem. That’s when I discovered the option of being an artist and a beatnik.”

It was back in DC, where Johnson’s family returned when he was sixteen, that he began to get serious about being a writer. Until then it had been largely a matter of image: You have to be something when you’re in high school. Like many aspiring writers with attitude problems in those days, Johnson fell under the spell of Bob Dylan. (“I liked all his songs but really I liked all that gobbledygook on the back of his records. I tried to write poetry like that.”) The apocryphal Bob Dylan-Dylan Thomas connection brought him to the Welsh poet, whom he discovered he liked even more.

The young Johnson began spending all his time in the poetry stacks at the library, pulling down volume after volume, reading everyone from Whitman to Pound with equal attention. It was his senior year in high school and Johnson was alone and curious. “The audience I write poetry for is somebody like that,” he says. “Some kid who’s reading poetry for the first time and doesn’t know who anybody is. Because that was really a wonderful time of discovery.”

Out of high school, he applied to the University of Iowa, not knowing that its well-regarded writing program wasn’t part of the undergraduate school. The gaffe is somehow typical of Johnson; there is a dreamy, not-quite-there quality to much that he relates. He’s vague on dates, places, the order of events in his life. For Johnson, life was always elsewhere.

There’s a story he tells about Raymond Carver, who was teaching at Iowa then, that says more about the teller and his abstracted ways. Still to be found in the library, Johnson used to continually pull down a collection of short fiction that included Carver’s story, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” (later the title story to Carver’s first collection). He read the story over and over–“It just killed me”–without ever bothering to check the author’s name. “I just knew it was some really common sounding name,” he says. “And there was something about it that made me think the guy would never write another story; it was coming out of such a fragile life.” The joke is not simply that Carver was teaching writing there then, but that Johnson knew him, played cards with him once a week, in fact. “We liked to have him around because he was always drunk,” says Johnson. “He’d drink this gin, and by the end of the evening he’sstart shoving all his money into the pot. He’s sobered up since.”

As has Johnson, who would be the first to admit that him calling anyone a drunk in those days would be the equivalent of that famous shouting match between the pot and the kettle. He drinks tea with his meal–sirloin and steak and more than you can eat–when we meet for an interview at the Gualala Hotel, a few miles from his home and a stone’s throw from the ocean. Continuing with his story, Johnson tells me he was married and divorced in those college years, a short union that yielded a son, Morgan who lives with his mother. It’s hard to imagine Johnson with an eighteen-year-old son; at 37 he appears easily ten years younger.

Johnson is vague, too, on that marriage and those years, though perhaps for reasons other than absent-mindedness. His poems from that time (which were already beginning to receive attention, with two small volumes of his work in print) are troubled fragments, testament to a restless sprit, a ragged life half-lived and perhaps better left half-recalled. It is best to know that his first major collection, The Incognito Lounge, is dedicated “to the people I have lied to.”

The poems from that time are filled with the garish signs of American heartbreak, fluorescently-lit offices and Greyhound buses (“with a dog apparently pursued to skinniness/painted on its side, an emblem/not entirely inappropriate, considering/those of us availing ourselves/of its service…”). And they are sung by sorrowful voices searching for articulateness. “Please,” he wrote in “The Song,”

Please stop listening

to this sound, which

is actually the terrible

keening of the ones

whose hearts have been broken

by lives spent in search

of its source,

by our lives of failure, 

spent looking everywhere

for someone to say these words.

But even as Johnson’s poetry was being praised, as he was passing from the University of Iowa’s undergraduate school into its esteemed writing program, he felt his old attitude problem rearing its head. “I realized that I had talent and felt good about it,” he says, “but I also realized that I was in for the long haul, and it was going to take a long time before I was any better than I was. I really petered out, I quit going to classes, I quit paying attention.” And like many writers who have watched their productivity decrease, he comforted himself with fantasies of a posthumous Emily Dickinson kind of fame.

“It seemed apparent then that I would never be well known as a writer. But I had a couple of limited editions printed on good paper, and they were in the special collections part of the library. I thought that maybe they would be unearthed someday by future civilizations. I thought of myself as anonymous–and, in a way, that was a wonderful time.”

The years after graduate school were hazy. He had been drinking heavily and doing a lot of drugs in college, and now it was mostly just drinking. “That really caused everything to go dead,” he says. “Everything I did turned out to be a dead end. I was really great at the 50-yard dash, but then everything kept turning out to be a marathon. So I’d just check out and do something else.”

Checking out involved a lot of moving over the next six years. His upbringing had prepared him for that sort of transience, but his drinking was also a factor. He taught for one year at Lake Forest College outside Chicago, then headed out west to Washington, where he bummed around port towns for years. “I was trying to find a good place,” he says. “I thought where I was had something to do with my happiness.” And throughout these moves he was involved in a tempestuous relationship with a woman he had known since graduate school, forever breaking up and getting back together. “Whenever I moved, I moved by myself,” he says now, “but sooner or later negotiations would start and we’d try again.”

Finally, after years of drinking, gambling (he made quite a killing in Port Townsend for a season, playing high-low split) and lumbering, he hit rock bottom in Seattle. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t play cards, he wasn’t writing; he found himself selling blood to make enough money to live. “So I went down to Phoenix, where my parents were. I used to show up there periodically, every year or two, just to read books and eat their food. And they insisted I go to a 28-day alcoholic treatment program. And it really changed me; I haven’t had a drink since, or any trouble. Nothing serious, anyway.”

It was after this rehabilitation that Johnson got a job, through the Arizona Arts Council, teaching creative writing at a state prison in Florence, AZ. Most of his students were bank robbers and murderers–who make up a very small percentage of the prison population. “Maybe in order to commit a murder or rob a bank, you have to have more imagination,” muses Johnson, “the same quality you need as a writer.” Not that much writing was actually done; for the most part the classes were two-hour bull sessions.

“It was really a course in how to rob banks,” Johnson admits, which was okay by him. “I was fascinated–I think there’s a little bit of bank robber in all of us and I just wanted to find out how it was done.” indeed, Johnson had sought the job at Florence because he knew he wanted to write a book about someone who robbed a bank, killed a guard and was sent to Death Row. Much of what he learned in his class hie incorporated into the bank robbery scene in Angels. And tow of his best students–students who really wrote–had spent years on Death Row: Charlie Doss and Robert Smith.

Charlie Doss was a college student who had killed someone at registration (a temptation which has surely gripped many students). “He was consumed with hatred,” recalls Johnson. “He had epileptic seizures and a terrible stuttering problem. He just wanted to get out and kill everyone he hadn’t killed before. And then something snapped inside him after he’d been on Death Row a year and a half; he realized that all this hatred was what had got him into trouble before, and he had this complete inward turning. He stopped stuttering and stopped having epileptic fits.” Once lucid, Doss began writing essays about his transformation, essays which he sold to the Christian Science Monitor. With the profits he bought color television sets for the prisoners on the psych ward.

Robert Smith, the other gifted writer in Johnson’s class, was known in his youth as “The Beauty Shop Killer.” At eighteen he had gone into a beauty school in Mesa and shot everyone there, women and children all, through the head as they lay in a circle on the floor. He spent over ten years on Death Row insane–and then also came out of it, reemerging to write stories about soldiers in Germany, lovers in Central Park. Johnson drew on the experiences of both men for his portrait in Angels of Richard Clay Wilson, the child murderer in Angels, as well as his portrait of Death Row, the last walk to the execution and the details of the chamber itself. As Johnson says, “People who’ve been sentenced to the gas chamber know all about it.”

The two years he spent teaching in prison were important to Johnson, not least because of the way he found his students living vicariously through him. All of his day to day experiences–breaking up with his girlfriend, the little jobs he’d had and lost, his battle with the bottle–all were of unlimited interest to these men, men for whom such things were, at best, to be looked forward to in some dim future and, at worst, were to remain only memories. But it was really the things undone in Johnson’s life that provoked the most interest.

“There were these things that I felt like doing sometimes,” he says, “like skydiving, and they’d say, ‘That’s a great idea.’ And I realized: I really could do it; they really couldn’t.” Fortified by this simple wisdom, Johnson spent a lot of time doing a lot of things. He went skydiving, he went into a sensory deprivation tank, he found a cult in the desert he’d heard about and he spent a few days in a monastery. And each time he would return and tell the prisoners what he’d seen.

“It was a great thing to be able to go into a prison and come back out again,” he says now. “It was inspiring that way; it was good to be reminded that we really are free. We’re prisoners of ourselves, we’re always telling ourselves why we can’t do something, when actually we’re free to do whatever we want. The worst we have to risk is the bad opinion of other people.”

***

Inspired by this new sense of freedom, this ability to do anything he wanted, Johnson forced himself to finish the novel he had actually begun long before. “I kept not writing the book,” he says, “because it didn’t appear to be the book I wanted to write. I had this idea of this beautiful gem of a book, and this wasn’t it.” But after doing his own time, he realized it was another case of his own self-imposed limitations. There was nothing standing in his way but himself. The gem book of his desiring was a true fiction; he couldn’t see the first line. He wrote a letter and mailed it to himself. It said, “There is only one book that you are working on. There is no other book.” The letter went on the wall before his typewriter, and the advice serves him to this day.

“You can only write the books you write,” he says, stating what might seem obvious to anyone who hasn’t tried to write a novel. Though he’s not as happy with his later novels as he is with Angels, he says, “I was lucky that I didn’t require myself to write something better. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a second book.”

Ironically, Angels was the gem he wanted to write. A dense, dark novel, at once inspiring and horribly claustrophobic, it contains passages of suck power that it’s hard, at times, to continue reading. From the opening description of a woman dragging her children through the Oakland Greyhound bus station (filled with “people she never hoped to meet–struggling with mutilated luggage and paper sacks that might have contained, the way they handled them, the reasons for their every regretted act and the justification for their wounds”) to the novel’s final moments, when her wayward boyfriend finds himself going “up the pipe” of the gas chamber, staring at a stencil inside the chamber that reads “Death Is the Mother of All Beauty,” Angels is a relentless journey of destruction and rebirth. Its characters are defeated people whose opportunities were drowned like unwanted kittens. The woman, Jamie, eventually lands in a mental institution , where she is told by an attendant, “You’re going downhill. You’re on that slickety-slide.” And her lover, Bill Houston–the failed bank robber, the man headed for death row–is found in a drunken stupor, ruminating on his own end.

“A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it was a move he could make that would change his life, to become another person, but he’d never be able to guess what it was. He found a cigaret and struck a match–for a moment there was nothing before him but the flame. When he shook it out and the world came back, it was the same place again where all his decisions had been made a long time ago.”

Knopf brought out Angels in 1983 to an immediately favorable critical reaction. John Le Carre’s remark was typical: “I have not been so impressed by a first novel in years.” Many critics picked up on the influence of Robert Stone (one of Johnson’s favorite contemporary writers, and one of the few whose books he finishes), though no one noticed its debt to Leonard Gardner’s story of similarly lost types, Fat City. “Stylistically, Gardner was a big influence,” acknowledges Johnson. “Also his attitude towards his characters. He just reports, he doesn’t sentimentalize.”

Johnson also numbers Flannery O’Connor among his antecedents. Like her work, Angels is peopled with false prophets, people with every conceivable spiritual interpretation of things. And like her work, Johnson’s is filled with lives that some might call grotesque. “I agree with Flannery O’Connor,” he says, “that it’s possible to be a good Christian and write about sick, twisted people, that ugliness really is there and the whole question is one of redemption: Whether it’s possible to redeem or justify it–or whether that’s even the author’s job. We don’t have the power to justify anything, to rescue it from its ugliness, to make it beautiful. I just want readers to know about people like the ones in Angels, and to feel for them.”

Like O’Connor, Johnson is a Catholic. Unlike her, he converted late in life, when he was teaching in prison and working on Angels. He had attended a Catholic retreat during his time of exploration. For some reason–his divorce, his past–he felt that he would not be allowed to convert, and once he found that he could, he knew he wanted nothing more. “I felt that this was the real church,” he says, “and I never realized that I felt that.” He also claims that he had little choice in the matter. “I was running into a lot of walls and it just kept getting worse. It was either that or suicide.”

johnson finished the writing of Angels at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a colony that gives writers and fine artists room and board for seven months while they pursue their craft. (“I spent most of my time goofing off,” says Johnson.) It was there that he met his current wife, Lucinda, a sculptor and painter. They remained on Cape Cod after their time at the center was over. There they briefly ran an art gallery, an experience Johnson avoided taking part in as much as possible, and mingled with the literary set. Robert Stone, who has called Johnson “a first-class American writer,” came to pay his respects, thoroughly charming the young couple by reading Wallace Stevens long poem “Sunday Morning” at the dinner table.

It was also there, with the benefit of another grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (he had received his first one after leaving Iowa) that Johnson wrote his second novel, Fiskadoro, which Knopf published in 1985. The critical response was, once again, wholeheartedly enthusiastic. The New York Times called it “the sort of book a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today.” Not only was Fiskadoro an imposing book, a vision clearly wrought, but it was totally unlike Angels in style and subject. To find such a disparate and equally worthy one-two punch in American fiction, you’d have to go back to Ken Kesey.

Fiskadoro is set in Florida, sometime after the nuclear apocalypse. The postwar America Johnson paints is a wasted, leftover place; everything is made from remnants. People hang car parts from their walls as decorations, revere the memory of Jimi Hendrix and Jake Barnes, speak an admixture of pidgin English, patois and spanglish. “It strains all belief,” writes Johnson in the beginning, “to think that these are the places that god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus, promised to come back and build their kingdoms.” It’s the story of a fisherboy, Fiskadoro, who moves through these haunted lands seeking wisdom–musical, spiritual, hedonistic. It is written in a style that is at once both hallucinatory and tangible.

Johnson had long wanted to write some kind of post-apocalyptic novel and had also wanted to draw on his memories of the Philippines; in Fiskadoro he did both. “One of the points of the book,” says Johnson, “is that after what we call the end of civilization, we would probably take up a position in the Third World. There would be no industrialized nations; the Third World would be it. That’s what those people in Fiskadoro are; they’re Third Worlders.”

Fiskadoro has been a more popular book than Angels–probably because it’s looser, more comic in tone, though never what you would call sunny–though Johnson claims it was not that fun to write. “I was goofing off the first half of the book,” he says, “and then I decided I really had to finish it. I thought, ‘How do you finish this?’ I was in a real state of anxiety while writing the second half; I decided it was just too absurd. And it ended up being the kind of book that I really don’t enjoy reading. It’s like Blue Velvet, it takes place in a land that doesn’t exist. I’d rather you told me the truth about something, the truth that underlies everything.”

In talking about matters spiritual, that underlying truth, Johnson seems most focused and articulate; it is here that the confidence so evident in his narratives comes from and here that he truly resides.

***

johnson moved to Gualala last spring with his wife and her eight-year-old son. They bought a piece of land on a ridge overlooking the ocean (and the fog line), complete with a stocked fish pond and a stable for Lucinda’s horses. Lucinda is a lithe and attractive young woman, easygoing and attentive. The day I met her she had her arm in a cast, having been thrown by an overly enthusiastic horse. Country life had left her just bored enough to invite a journalist to breakfast. As the three of us ate, we looked out over a wooden deck and the trees above the ocean. Her son’s skateboard sat outside.

For kicks these days, Denis Johnson drives his MG sports car at high speeds up the mountain roads, the only guilty pleasure he’ll admit to. Mostly he can be found knocking about between the half-finished house and the study he’s having built in an old equipment barn, where he’s at work on a new novel. He also recently wrote a screenplay for Angels that will be produced by Elliot Lewitt and Steven Shainberg, who backed the fantastically unsuccessful At Close Range, starring Christopher Walken and Sean Penn. Johnson, who is admittedly intrigued by the idea of writing movies, made another trek to Hollywood to discuss The Stars at Noon. Of the people he met in that quest he says, “They don’t mind buying you a breakfast or a lunch and telling you why they can’t make a movie of your book.”

Almost predictably, The Stars at Noon, which was published last fall, was well-received, though less so than its predecessors, The Stars at Noon is an allegorical novel, the story of two lost souls in hell. It is set in present-day Nicaragua, a place Johnson visited for only a week with the thought of writing a magazine article about it. He didn’t have a good feeling about what was going on there, but he also felt like he didn’t understand the situation well enough to judge it–not as a journalist anyway. “So I decided to write a novel instead.”

The book is book is told from the point of view of a cynical woman narrator, an American doubling as a journalist and a prostitute who is stuck in Nicaragua, like those souls caught in the first circle of hell. She hooks up with an English businessman who is on the run, having engaged in a bit of international intrigue. He is as articulate as she is foul-mouthed, as optimistically pro-revolution as she is contemptuous. He is also completely ineffectual; she sees him as “the most horribly tormented soul of all, the humanitarian among the damned.” They move together toward their unfortunate end, one that seems inevitable from the book’s beginning. There’s nowhere to go in hell.

The Stars at Noon is the least successful of Johnson’s novels. It lacks the immediacy of his earlier books; the characters are less fully realized, the landscape less real. And a good deal less happens here, too. “I was trying to explore a certain style,” he says, “a manner of speaking. I didn’t realize it at the time, I didn’t want to tell a whopping good yarn–and I probably should have.”

But taken on its allegorical level, The Stars at Noon contains some of the strongest images to arise out of Johnson’s spiritual thinking. The hell that the story takes place in is not a Central American country; it is a place made out of the cycle of our desires, the place where we torment ourselves with what we want.

By the end of The Stars at Noon, the narrator has returned to prostitution and is now inexplicably stuck in Costa Rica. The novel closes with the image of a john–who has picked up her and another whore to fulfill his two-woman fantasy–impotent before them. “Holy Jesus,” says the narrator, “what this guy must have done in his time on Earth… to be put here with his dreams, but not himself, made substance…”

So you finally get what you want and you’re not there to enjoy it: It has the trappings of a Buddhist parable. Indeed, Johnson studied Buddhism and meditated after his conversion to Catholicism. “I hit a point there long before I started on a spiritual quest,” he says, “where I realized that life as I knew it was not going to satisfy me. The basic things I’d been after–drink, chemicals, love, some kind of aggravation or encouragement–all those things that I’d been seeking, they weren’t going to give me what I’d been looking for. I was in despair, what Walker Percy called ‘the despair that doesn’t know it’s despair.’ Actually, it’s worse looking back on it than it was living through it, because now I know what it was.”

At one point the narrator in The Stars at Noon says, “Poets who live in Hell go to Heaven when they die.” Wishful thinking on Johnson’s part, perhaps, and though I can’t say where he’s going, I think he’s done his time in hell.