Battered Heart

"The love of reality unpossessed transfigures us." 
— William Bronk

In the fall of the feral year 1968, Denis Johnson, having been admitted at 19 to a graduate-level poetry workshop on the strength of his writing samples, was proving himself a wunderkind. Everyone in his class at the Iowa Writers' Workshop had to submit work for reading and critique, but his submissions alone were more than juvenilia. His first poem of the semester so stunned his classmates that, unable to offer any constructive criticism, they simply adjourned—and went off, as a group, to listen to Bob Dylan records. Next to his fully achieved verses, their own centaurine contributions—"half good, and half not up to par," one participant recalled—seemed amateurish. One day, the class instructor, a passionate young poet named Marvin Bell, read one of Johnson's lyrics aloud. When he finished, a general silence fell. The young aspirants looked down at their hands. "Well," one student said at last. "It's another Denis Johnson poem."

This sort of awed reaction is the stuff of which a young writer's—and not only a young writer's—dreams are made. The nothing-but-net submission! Let us try to hear what they heard in that gray utilitarian classroom nearly 60 years ago:

i feel i am old 
now, though surely i 
am young enough? i feel that i have had 
winters, too many heaped cold 
and dry as reptiles into my slack skin. 
i am not the kind to win 
and win.

This passage comes from "Quickly Aging Here," one of the poems that Johnson debuted in Bell's workshop. The world-weariness is no pose: the accents are those of a teenager who had gotten his college girlfriend pregnant and, at their parents' mutual behest, hurriedly married her; the accents of a prodigy strained and distended beyond his years. Johnson as a freshman had engaged in anti–Vietnam War activism—during one demonstration, students splashed their own blood on the steps of the university's Memorial Union—and had spent a week in jail for it. Then, having gained experience that would inform his writing ever afterward, he seems to have sworn off overt political protest and redoubled his literary efforts. If there is a false note in "Quickly Aging Here," it is not poetic but biographic: by the standards of his vocation, he was the kind to win and win. The poem not only was included, in the fall of 1969, in an anthology of the best "unrecognized" American poets—Johnson, at 20, was the youngest of them all—but also supplied the anthology with its title. By then, "Quickly Aging Here" had already appeared as the lead poem in Johnson's debut collection, The Man Among the Seals (1969), published just after his twentieth birthday. Years later, after Johnson had turned to fiction, The New Yorker would accept the shard-like stories of his now-iconic 1992 collection Jesus' Son (which he'd expected the hidebound magazine to reject), and bend its strict editorial standards—against the overuse of "fuck," say—to accommodate them. When in 1972 The Atlantic published the short story containing the germ of Johnson's first novel, Angels (1983), its author was just 22. Late bloomers and eternal rejection-letter recipients, eat your hearts out.

Ted Geltner's Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures (University of Iowa Press, 2025), the first full-length biography of Johnson, thus fills a void. One can write striking, sympathetic fiction about a loser junkie named Fuckhead—as Johnson does in Jesus' Son—but for the improbable charmed life of Denis Johnson, FH's alter ego, only biography will do. Whatever pitfalls he plunged into, whatever losses he sustained—as Geltner's title suggests, among his subject's many gifts was one for injury and calamity and, it must be said, downright idiocy: dropping out of classes; drinking to excess (he was too wasted to attend the birth of his son); getting hooked on heroin; brandishing a handgun during a shouting match with his first wife, Nancy; blowing up his second marriage with a string of affairs—there remains the phenomenal early success, the blazing firework of his debut ("a print run of 260 copies with hand-set Romanée type on fifty-six pages of rag paper from the Curtis Paper Mill, the oldest mill in America"), even if the book later became, Geltner tells us, "a symbol of past success and lost promise that hung around his neck like a weight." Johnson's father broadcast the news of The Man Among the Seals to his colleagues in the State Department. The poems, all in lowercase (in one of which the lyric "i" professes himself "as confused as ever"), are precocious in their narrative economy, their assured juggling of themes, while being gloomily, doomily youthful—as Georg Trakl's verse is youthful—in their expressionistic violence ("i // have seen trees, have / heard them at night being / dragged into the sky"). The book earned a single review: it was a rave.

When Johnson returned to the Writers' Workshop as an MFA student in 1972, his classmates considered him "a golden god" but also "a bit of a phantom," a recalcitrant hippie who roamed the halls barefoot and showed his face rarely. Anointed by Paul Engle himself, the father of the program (who had set him up with a translator job and arranged his first public reading), Johnson was the sort of guy who could write a bunch of poems the night before a $3,000 fellowship deadline and win the whole thing—about $23,000 in today's money. In other words, a bona fide star.

***

Johnson was born in a US military hospital in Munich in 1949. The son of a committed cold warrior, he was propelled into this world, one might say, by the postwar confidence that fueled America's baby boom. As his father rose through the ranks of the US Information Agency, the State Department's arts and media propaganda arm, Johnson spent much of his childhood abroad. This included a five-year stint in Japan—where the family enjoyed a "life of diplomatic privilege and domestic comfort," Geltner writes—and several years in Manila, a location that Johnson would revisit in his National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke (2007). In Manila, age 14, he started drinking; in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1966, he and a few high school chums dropped acid (still legal at the time). Rounding out these portents of things to come was Johnson's growing determination to be a poet. A poor student in most subjects, he came alive when discussing T. S. Eliot and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg with fellow beatniks. He got a job in a bookstore; he frequented the library. Books were for him a way of "feel[ing] at home on the earth," he recalled. When his English teacher told him "that if he tried to make a career out of poetry, he'd starve," Johnson ignored him. His parents, perhaps unusually for the time, supported their son in his literary ambitions. It was Stanley Plumly, an acquaintance of his father's, who said that if Johnson wanted to be a poet, "He should get himself to the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City, indubitably."

Yet Johnson was never really a creature of the academy. Early on he lived a double life, mingling outside the classroom with, and soliciting stories from, the oddballs who washed up in bohemian Iowa City—a miniature San Francisco immured in farmland. (Led Zeppelin played there in '69.) Occasionally Johnson's demimonde companions—some of whom were unapologetic criminals—sussed out his ulterior motive for hanging around: he was filling a notebook with their antics and anecdotes. Nor was it a secret to Nancy: "He was always trying to harvest words or emotions or outlooks that he could then file away in his head." Later, he fell in with a hardcore druggie crowd, people he described as having "that helpless, destined feeling." In between shooting up, downing beers, and playing pinball, he managed to extract from them the sort of stories "that would fill the Old Testament," he later wrote, "if God had written it after the invention of gunpowder." As it was, the stories got a second life in Jesus' Son. Later still, rather than a posh university perch, he sought, and obtained, a job teaching creative writing to inmates of a maximum-security prison in Arizona—more research, this time for Angels. War-ravaged Liberia still lay in his future: in one of his many reinventions, he spent several years from the 1980s to 1990s as a war correspondent for magazines like Esquire. Monrovia, Liberia's capital, was "a gutted landscape of unrelieved starvation” where “the skeletal citizens wander, dying of cholera and hunger." I recall the anecdote of a man whose wife arranged a trip to the Serengeti for his fiftieth birthday, to which he retorted that he would rather stay home and read the account of such a trip by Peter Matthiessen. Just so, I am for the most part content to learn what a heroin binge or the horrors of war are like from Denis Johnson:

I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.

There are many ways to mess up your life, and in the end Johnson tried most of them. So do his characters. In "The Two," a poem from Inner Weather (1976), his sophomore collection—and his only book of that decade—the subject is a marital smash-up: "The two work their hatred / till it is like a star reduced / to the dimensions of a jewel." (The marriage to Nancy lasted only two and a half years.) The title poem, the only one in the book that Johnson wrote after leaving Iowa, is almost too explicit in describing the poet's dismal inscape: "This is the middle of the night. / There are no stars." Two years later, he was in rehab.

Johnson got clean in Phoenix, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and converted to Catholicism. He believed that a higher power was at work in him. "He had, during his struggle to get sober, a 'strong experience of the presence of God,' an epiphany that he could not explain but that propelled him to commit further to the spiritual aspects of AA," writes Geltner. At one low point Johnson pawned his typewriter. Now the life of loud desperation that he had been leading (though, in the best 20th-century style, he had managed also to be an ambitious careerist) quieted down, became less dire. He had cheated death and still had the support of his parents. He shacked up with a girl he met in AA, to whom he bragged that he had an IQ of 162. In the years of his growing acclaim, practically every public appearance came with an affair. He was, in short, a selfish brute and lucky bastard. And a titanically gifted one. The manuscript of The Incognito Lounge, which became his third collection, was one of two entries chosen by Mark Strand out of nearly 2,000 for the National Poetry Series Award in 1981. "Things have just fallen into my lap lately," Johnson told a friend that year. On top of the award, he had just won a fellowship. But he never stopped knowing himself beneath the accolades, as the late poem "Crow" clarifies:

Since that time I have 
by my own count three lives led, 
one in magic, one in power, one in peace, 
and still 
the little wound goes like a well 
down into the rotten dark

***

It is here, past the halfway point of this essay, that I must clear up a misapprehension. Because of his addictions, his penchant for low life, the scrapes he got into, Johnson is often cast as a literary compeer of Charles Bukowski, a wounded eulogist of losers and hard-luckers, a bard of the barstools and backstreets. But what is best and strongest in him is not the spareness or seaminess of "dirty realism"—as the movement associated with Raymond Carver, whom Johnson met at Iowa, and which came to dominate American literary fiction in the 1980s was called—but a visionary realism, personal as William Blake's, in which the things of this world tremble on the edge of nonbeing, or threaten to buckle under the onslaught of another reality pressing in from behind them. Here, the poet says, "even these impenetrable things / waver, and aren't quite real, / and we take no comfort from them." Brittle and sharp as obsidian, Johnson's mature voice (on full display in The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, his 1995 volume of new and collected verse) seems to pierce the membrane between this world and the next. At other moments, the poet's perception stretches a sort of amniotic sac over them both—two yolks in one egg jiggling wetly within the cracked shell.

Blake famously declared that he looked not with but through the eye; Johnson often seems to do both at once. All-night supermarkets in Los Angeles, fluorescent-lit, call forth a natal simile: "We enter such / brilliance as we entered / the world, without // shopping list, perfectly." His poetry is a double exposure, as in the sonnet "White, White Collars," where office work is the pasteboard mask that uncanny fires burn through, revealing an unsuspected vista of deep time:

My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps 
to see the goodness of the world laid bare 
and rising with the government on its lips, 
the alphabet congealing in the air 
around our heads. But in my belly's flames 
someone is dancing, calling me by many names 
that are secret and filled with light and rise 
and break, and I see my previous lives.

The fierce expressionistic strain which Johnson's poetry never lost modulates time and again into tenderness and fellow feeling. Even his expressions of spiritual doubt partake of it: "no one can walk on the water, / nobody can take these little ones softly / enough against his chest," he writes in his fourth collection, The Veil (1987). (The title's biblical allusion, and the veil as a divider and image of simultaneous concealment and exposure, are obvious enough.) At times the fragility of the poet's voice and his readiness of response are extraordinary. In Saudi Arabia, wearing his foreign correspondent's hat when the First Gulf War kicked off, he cried, thinking of the lives that would be lost. He saw the massed soldiers, he wrote for Esquire, "as having finally found something more enormous than their own deaths." Did he pray for them? For several weeks after getting sober in Phoenix he joined a monastery, "abstaining from sex" (Geltner wants us to know) and taking part in the daily recitation of the Divine Office. We find the poetic fruit of this experience in "The Prayers of the Insane," also from The Veil: "The Discalced Carmelites of Sedona, Arizona, warn / that we must not hope to return alive from prayer."

What Johnson knows and conveys in poem after poem is that we will not return alive from any of it—our loves and hates, the sown failures and blooming flowers of our spent breath. Whatever we murder and create (to quote Eliot) will pave the way to our grave all the same, will slick the downward slide of our taking-off. We are alive for the first and last time. Johnson had enough brushes with death and bore witness to violence of a sufficiently harrowing nature that he seems never to have forgotten this basic fact. He brings tremendous metaphysical pressure to bear on it. "What I write about is really the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking: Why is it like this if there's supposed to be a God?" he said in 2002. This is a world we will not return alive from, and this knowledge is the beginning of poetry.

***

With Inner Weather capital letters enter Johnson's poetry, and he begins to bend traditional forms and diction to his will. "Since I find you will no longer love," one poem begins—a line that, were it not one syllable short of pentameter, William Shakespeare might have put in a sonnet. Several poems in Johnson's oeuvre are in fact sonnets or disguised sonnets. In "The Past" (the title is a clue), he apes the antiquated language of a poet of long ago, and comes off sounding like a latter-day John Donne, blending the Metaphysical poet's erotic and religious phases:

Betimes I held her pissed-off in mine arms 
and ached, the while she paid me for her sins, 
with a sweet joy like the Netherlands and its farms 
flooded with haloes and angels in the gloaming.

Like Donne's, Johnson's vision of the sacred is at least as violent as it is rapturous. "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," Donne cries out in "Holy Sonnet XIV,"

                                                     for you 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Johnson goes beyond Donne in this sense, at least: he comes to his verses battered already. His is a poetry that itself breaks, blows, burns, or which depicts the ambivalent aftermath of the divine doing this to him. It is a poetry in which "grace and incredible harm" are inseparable, in which "we must hold / our lives up in our arms like the victims / of solitary, terrible accidents." Indeed, a ruinous solitude afflicts the speakers of Johnson's poems. If they are not flying to Mexico to get divorced, or haplessly talking prehistory with their new wife's "urchin child," they are alone with loss, with their alien selves ("I feel like a scaly alien among you / waiting to be rescued to my home"), with the slow bittersweet mastication of memories. Alone, finally, with death: "it comes to them / singly, this shadow, it falls down to each / as he opens the door of his car."

"The flight of the alone to the Alone" is Plotinus's image of the soul's ascent to God. Surely, then, the opposite of this rapturous flight, though equal in loneliness, is Johnson's "the clenching back / of a man into himself"—a closed-off condition wherein everything external fails to catch or hold our attention, though the very heavens have our number:

All night the moon rings like a telephone 
in an empty booth above our separateness. 
Now is the hour one answers. I am home. 
Hello, my heart, my God, my President, 
my darling

From whom exactly has the poet been separated? The laundry list he rattles off, conflating deity with darling, leaves the matter unclear; unless, that is, the speaker feels as thoroughly Martian as Johnson did. He once told the Los Angeles Times that in contrast to his own sense of alienation, "you humans, you Earthlings—you all seem right at home." His "obstinate rigor of attention" (to use Paul Valéry's phrase) is that of a man who fell to Earth. The poet watches the dusk "tenderly / minister[ing] to the fallen parking lots" while the rest of us fuss, fight, and fuck each other over. His poems are rooted in equal parts wonderment and bewilderment. He is troubled by what he sees and still more disturbed by what he understands. For Johnson, "a deep / comprehension and terror" form another inevitable pair (like "grace and incredible harm"). "In the end," he claimed in the early 1970s, "my work becomes an expression of my total inability to figure anything out. And that's perfectly all right with me. It's enough now to see something and say, there it is." The wonder lies in what he sees, and that he makes us see it too.

***

There is a certain hesitation in writing about an author who, in a story from his final collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018), has the protagonist say that literary criticism "isn't real—it's not a real thing. So excelling at it hasn't healed me." In a sense he is right: the critic is never taking his life in his hands, as Johnson did in Liberia, never pushing all his chips into the middle of the table, never risking everything on an incandescent turn of phrase or a felicitous metaphor. But in another sense, the critic is doing just what Johnson says any writer does: "Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light"—and what happens to the critic are books. Literature supplies the signal events of the critic's life.

For years now, Denis Johnson's books have been happening to me, his poetry and prose pelting me like rain on a windshield, falling through my life like meteors, luminous, dazzling, through years of growth and dissolution, years of love and marriage and bitter divorce, through funerals—I finished Angels on a trip to Florida for my grandmother's send-off—and through fragrant evenings in Havana and other foreign cities. They have enhanced, they have become the moments of my life as they passed. And this, Johnson says in a poem, "is what it means to be human, / to witness the heart of a moment like a photograph, / the present standing up through itself relentlessly like a fountain."

Johnson died in 2017 of cancer caused by hepatitis C, which he had contracted decades earlier by shooting up with dirty needles at a time when the virus was still unknown. A land mine buried in his future. He laid down once and for all in the bed he had made. In an appreciation for the Los Angeles Times—one of countless such posthumous encomia—David L. Ulin wrote that Johnson "ought to have been exempt" from dying, such is the "transcendent power of his sentences."

Johnson's work now stands in his absence, stands up through Geltner's biography of the flawed man (in which we struggle at times to locate the artist), stands up through itself as part of the present it depicts—moments cracked open like cabbage palms to reveal their hidden hearts. Another reality fountaining relentlessly in this one, to which he bore witness.