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Denis Johnson's work created a place for dazzling beauty of the rarest kind, but his words could be startlingly harsh, too. He often captured the ugliness of our world in which wars, monsters, and injustice are commonplace. I can't erase from my mind one of the most candid and shocking moments from Seek, his book of journalism and essays for the New Yorker and Esquire. In one episode, he writes of being a white American writer on assignment in dysfunctional, war-torn Liberia in 1992, the year of Jesus' Son's publication. Despite his folksy upbringing—"my parents raised me to love all the Earth's peoples"—he concedes that three days in the region had given him the impulse to scream a stream of N-words "until one of these young men emptied a clip into me." (He doesn't yell nor get shot to death, of course, but is instead a firsthand witness to the brutality of war and dictatorship.) It's an appalling thing to admit. But Johnson doesn't shy away from coming clean, giving words and shape to such hideousness because that's what he is there to do as a journalist and as a writer.
Johnson's writing could contain such clear human awfulness and truth at the same time, and that's what made it so convincing and powerful. The scene that sums up Johnson, for me, is from his leadoff story to Jesus' Son, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking."She towelled off quickly, briskly, never touching herself in any indulgent or particularly sensual way. But it was virginal and exciting, too. I had thoughts of breaking through the glass and raping her. But I would have been ashamed to have her see me. I thought I might be able to do something like that if I were wearing a mask.
Denis Johnson was both that astonishing sound and its devoted seeker in one, and all we had to do was go to our nearest bookshelf to find it—lucky us.And yet, instead of stopping just there, or nearly there, Johnson has the audacity to jump ahead a couple years to deliver yet another unforgettable scene, in another hospital. We get FH's memory of detox and wigging out—hallucinations conveyed with poetic beauty and strangeness—followed by a veering turn, a spit in the face: "And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you?"It's a complete rejection of what stories are supposed to do, to give us some moment of insight or succor. And yet, the irony is, for so many readers and writers like myself, Denis Johnson really did help. And now he's gone.Follow James Yeh on Twitter.Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shriek as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.