Seeker: Denis Johnson and the Literature of Last Things

Iresisteda, at first, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. This collection of five short stories, the final new book by Denis Johnson, was announced shortly after the author's death in May 2017, at sixty-seven, and although a galley arrived late that summer, I held it in abeyance for as long as I could. Something—the idea, perhaps, that these were the final new sentences Johnson would ever publish—made it feel like a last will and testament. "It doesn't matter," Johnson writes in "Triumph Over the Grave," one of the stories gathered here. "The world keeps turning. It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it." The line recalls "Late Fragment," the closing poem in Raymond Carver's A New Path to the Waterfall, six brief lines of self-interrogation inscribed during his last days of life. "And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth." Johnson, however, provokes a different resonance, a different sort of immediacy. If Carver is looking back, creating his own epitaph, Johnson is projecting forward, speaking to us in a present he no longer occupies. I'm not dead, he insists. But maybe. The conditionality, the sense of language, of narrative, as instrument of both redemption and the impossibility of redemption—these have been among Johnson's most abiding themes all along. "We lived in a tiny, dirty apartment," he writes in "Out on Bail," one of eleven linked stories that comprise his 1992 masterpiece Jesus' Son. "When I realized how long I'd been out and how close I'd come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead."

I'm interested in the literature of death—not the literature of the survivors, but that written by the dying—although this is not exactly what The Largesse of the Sea Maiden represents. Indeed, it's more accurate to frame it as an example of the book as last thing, inspired less by the impending demise of its creator (as is A New Path to the Waterfall or, say, Jenny Diski's In Gratitude) than by the more general condition of mortality the writer and the reader share. Literature complicates this dynamic in a couple of essential ways, beginning with its ability to break down, for a moment anyway, the distances between us, our inevitable and unyielding loneliness. Then, of course, there is the matter of time. I'm not dead yet, Johnson tells us correctly. But his codicil, that maybe he will be by the time we read him, is also correct. Here we see the true transference that literature offers, a conundrum in which our thoughts, our beliefs, our expression, can survive us, even if we, as frail and temporary beings, do not prevail.

I think of Augustine, writing in the fourth century that "[l]ife is a misery, death an uncertainty." The sentiment remains as relevant, as living, in this moment as it was in his. Where The Largesse of the Sea Maiden leaves us, then, is not with testament so much as with a sliver of the author's living soul. I'm referring to pragmatics, not theology: If we animate the books we read, bringing them to life through our engagement, our intercession, then is it an act of preservation to hold off on reading when there will be no more? This was my experience with another Carver title, Cathedral, which I purposely held off reading for a few years after he died in 1988. I once felt about Carver the way I have come to feel about Johnson: that he was the most transformative and moving writer of my adulthood, the one whose books I would have most wished to have written, in addition to all else. Why? Again, it's...