A
Conversation with
By
Andrea Clark
Jesus'
Son, Denis Johnson's transcendent collection of stories featuring
a tripped-out narrator with a kind of kicked-in-the-head quality,
transformed the writer from poet-slash-novelist-in-recovery to literary
icon. His work has since appeared in the Paris Review, the New
Yorker, and McSweeney's. In 2001, a collection of his international
journalism (Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond)
and his most recent novel (The Name of the World) came out
in print. Last year, he revealed Shoppers, a book of two plays
written for Campo Santo, a San Francisco theater company. Johnson
wrote the script for Soul of a Whore, his fourth collaboration
with the company, in modern verse.
Andrea
Clark: Campo Santo is known for developing original work specifically
for its space, its company, and its audience. What does that mean
for you as its playwright-in-residence?
Denis Johnson: In the second play we worked on (Shoppers Carried
by Escalators into the Flames), I really thought about the people
I worked with here. I imagined them. We'd done Hellhound (on my
Trail), and I'd seen their set for a Sam Shepard play (the West
Coast premiere of Simpatico). I told James (Faerron, set designer),
when you build our set, just go get that last one from the dump and
put it up again. In that case, I had that space in mind. For this
play now, I had their style of acting in mind. I started showing my
plays to Campo Santo because I needed the encouragement. If you write
fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that
in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you
get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise,
you're not lonely anymore. You've got a group of people memorizing
every word you write. It may only be a handful of people, but these
people know this thing maybe even better than I do, and that's what
really helps.
Even
though you've moved on to plays, you're back to writing in verse.
Is the novel a form you've just left behind?
I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just
build a boat and take off. I can't understand why anybody would criticize
anything that ends up being a novel because you've arrived to the
other shore, you've made it alive. Maybe you started off for Africa
and ended up in Spain, but so what? I'm working on a novel now, but
I never entirely gave up on verse. My ears tune into it. When I realized
that in my plays I was going to write this sort of large stuff, big
stuff with tragic overtones, verse seemed to fit. All the modern verse
plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. This is
mostly about the play. It's more important that the play is first.
A
recent review in the New Yorker about writing under the influence
describes the whole genre of drug literature as remarkable only in
its mediocrity—with one exception: Jesus' Son.
I was straight when I wrote that; I didn't write it under the
influence. I don't know how you can. I mean, your hands get real big.
How could
you type? Did they say I was under the influence? I think it's silly
for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd
like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was
under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know
it.
Jesus'
Son seems to have been the book that really brought your work
to the mainstream.
What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote
that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories apropos
of nothing about when I was drinking and using and people would say,
"You should write these things down." I was probably 35 when I wrote
the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young
voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind
of double vision. So I worked on them once in a while, then I started
using stories I heard other people tell, and then I started making
some up. Pretty soon it was fiction. Then I just forgot about it.
I thought, I'm not going to parade my defects, my history of being
a spiritual cripple, out in front of a lot of other people. But once
in a while I'd write a little more—I would just hear the voices. I
didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got
malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven
stories. So I wrote three or four more. Even now people mention Jesus'
Son as if it were the only book I'd ever written. Details
magazine called me up a while ago and said, "Did you know it's the
tenth anniversary of the publication of Jesus' Son?" I told
them, "I've written about 10 books since then. Why don't you write
about one of them?"
Was
there a particular turning point when you really committed yourself
to writing?
I got a fellowship to the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown,
Mass. It's a workshop where they take 10 artists and 10 writers for
seven months. It's fantastic. They pay for room, heat, electricity,
and an allowance of 300 bucks a month. I'd published one novel already
that wasn't very good. So I went there to work on my next novel, and
I thought I was going to really do this. But then I just hung around;
I chased women. I did nothing, and after seven months I had nothing.
Oh my god, this was my big opportunity and where did it go? I was
so upset.
What
happened next?
I had started working on the novel. I'd met a woman and I got
married, but the money ran out right away. She came home and said,
"There's no money." And I said, "I know. I'm sorry." She told me I
had to get a job. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just
came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me. You
can't get to the point where you say, "When I'm financially stable,
then I'll quit work." You have to quit work first. She wanted to know
what was going to happen—the rent was about to run out. I told her,
"I'm going to live on the street. I'm going to write on the street."
She was mad; she left. I had my typewriter. It only took me three
months to finish the novel, and it was published. She came back a
lot later.
Do
you find your style has changed over the years?
In recent years I think it's toned down a lot. Not in the plays—that's
where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not
trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not
concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth
of anything with facts.
Does
fiction lead you to truth more than facts?
Oh yeah, because you're under pressure when you produce facts.
You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds
of formal constraints; there are expectations. Their influence is
subtle, but it's there; it's perpetual. Imagine the reader, imagine
the readership. That's the pressure I always felt. When I'm writing
for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American
Scholar. Because you're always allowing something to go to work
on material that is factual, you're going to end up with a lie, it
seems to me. Now if you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth,
your duty to work on it, you'll end up with some truth—not fact, but
something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want.
When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're
having, which is totally isolated, is like the characters' experience.
To a certain extent, we want to be assured we're alive.
So
should I check my facts with you before we go to press?
Nah, lie at will.
Denis
Johnson's Soul of a Whore opens February 20 at Intersection
for the Arts.
