Denis Johnson, Exorcist

The forecast for Monday has already been posted here. From my journal: 

Denis Johnson (look him up, novelist, brilliant) has hooked me up somehow with my Uncle Walt, a wonderful man whom I wish I had known better when I was a kid.

It's all inexplicable. Denis Johnson wrote about the Vietnam War in his novel Tree of Smoke which I started reading two days ago. I am utterly impressed by it, startled by it, overwhelmed by it.  Where has Denis Johnson been all my life? I feel him as a brother, a companion, an elder but also a friend. He knows things. He knows what very few know. He has uttered in a few sentences, here and there in his novel, hidden under foliage and banana leaves and flattened cigarette packs on the ceilings of bamboo huts, enunciations of the Absolute. There is nothing missing in this novel, insofar as it treats of human suffering and confusion. It is totally incredibly Buddhist, Christian, Communist, atheist, and human (I would say "humanistic" but that is a nasty word). It reaches into something we all know but are afraid to say.

I became his brother when I read, in a commentary published in an article about Denis in the Atlantic, I think, a few years ago, a denunciation of this novel which I find incandescently illuminating. It was something like "A totally boring horrible never-ending compendium of bad writing" or something equally insulting. Huh? Wha? Duh, man, whoever you are who wrote this, you are not a critic but you are definitely critical. In bad shape. Doomed to suffering until you wake up and appreciate Denis Johnson's writing.

I always knew that there are a multitude of "intellectuals" and "critics" and pseudo-intellectual pompous asses who do not understand good writing or good human beings. They are, in fact, Legion, that is, there are too many of them, demons, yet Jesus a couple centuries ago tossed them out of an obsessed man and he is still able to do that. Believe me. He shall toss them out of all those who do not understand the value of Denis Johnson's writing.

Of course, I have to admit that the only writing of his with which I am conversant is the first few chapters of Tree of Smoke. Yet it is the novel of his which won the National Book Award. That is no small achievement. I find, in an essay about him by Michiko Kakutani (where has she gone? Does she still exist? She was once the chiefest or closest to chiefest of the book reviewers of the New York Times) the following:  “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”  That is a quote from Joseph Conrad which Denis re-quoted to try to explain what he was trying to do. And yes, without a doubt, that is what he was doing in his book Tree of Smoke. I am overwhelmed by it.

Monday 1/22/2018

I am less overwhelmed but continue to be interested in pursuing the novel. Have done 100 pages of its 600. Complex, gossipy, diverse characters, no sharp plot line yet, the aimlessness of "real life" in a semi-military semi-"intelligence" "post" which is not a post, and on and on.

One wonders how Johnson could have written it without being a veteran, but I guess he was not. He had relatives in the military I think, or in the intelligence services. 

His own intelligence came from elsewhere. He did read the Bible. That is probably why I can read him.

My friend X called tonight and it was a long meandering conversation about this and that, except it was not a conversation but a monologue as it always is when he calls. I felt guilty for wishing he would just shut up but what I really wished was that he would listen to a little of what I had to say, which is not totally uninteresting I hope but he seems to think it is. Uninteresting.

If a "conversation" with someone is 90 per cent his talk and 10 per cent one's own, something is definitely wrong.

Denis had some good advice for writers, but I don't care to summon it up. After I read it I thought "This is the kind of stuff writers make up to tell would-be writers when actually they never really followed the advice themselves, but they get posts at writers' camps or writing schools and have to say something so they make up these tendentious 'rules' for writers which they never thought of until they had to 'teach' writing either because the royalties were not enough or because a writer's ego is so huge it has to have a vent in self-praise, as in 'teaching,' as well as in writing."  But I forgive Denis because he is a genuinely good human being and a fine writer. That is, it appears he actually has things to say. 

How does one encompass the whole world in one's writing?  Why should one do that, or want to do it? I am not saying that Denis consciously wanted to do that, as apparently Balzac did (or B. would say "No, I only wanted to encompass all of Paris"), but it appears that Denis was doing it in this Tree of Smoke novel. It is just too cosmopolitan for me. Scenes all over the world. But I realize some lives play out that way. Not mine and I am glad. I have been just a little less provincial than the philosopher Kant who never left his home town of Konigsberg but conquered the world of thought from there. 

No, Denis's advice for writing would not really work for me. It would be like swallowing green tea to inspire a poem. Not really.

There is the dilemma of containing so much of time and space in one's writing, whether it is essays or novels or stories. One chooses time and space, times and spaces, but one does not realize what one is choosing until it has been chosen.

I think of my Uncle Homer. He was not Homer the poet. I wonder if he ever read him, in translation? 

My first memory of him is in uniform, a World War II American dark green uniform with military cap, walking across a field on the farm of his father, my grandfather, my mother's father. He smiled. He was glad to be home. And he liked having been a soldier and the glory it gave him. It was a classic scene. Homer returning to his father, like Odysseus! How is it possible that I was vouchsafed that vision when I was no more than four years old? And that I remember it? He actually returned home by walking across a field on the farm he grew up on. It was classic. 

It is a vivid, strong, never-fading ancestral memory. I do not think my parents or aunts or uncles saw him on that field as I did. I believe I was the first to see him. When I mentioned the memory they seemed skeptical. But I saw my Uncle Homer coming home.