Three Rules To Write By
Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.
Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can’t waste it.
Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.
Denis Johnson
Having died in 2017 of liver cancer, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden will be Denis Johnson's final release; a collection of five short stories, two of which were not previously published elsewhere. I loved this collection, but am having a hard time articulating why: Johnson's magic is certainly to be found in the words he uses – when poets also excel at prose, the results can be sublime – but his real expertise is in the pivots and transitions between the lines that suddenly illuminate a story like a spotlight from above. And to give a sense of what I mean by that, I'd need to excerpt an entire story – which, of course, I won't do – so you'll just need to pick this up and see for yourself.
I wonder if you're like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you.This line seems to capture the link between these stories – they could all be called expositions of the moments when the Mystery winks at you; not necessarily all uncanny experiences, but those times when you glimpse behind the curtain nonetheless. Watching a grown woman cry as she's dared to kiss an amputee's leg stump; an inmate climbs and swings simian-like across the outside bars of unlocked cells; a man confesses to digging up a generations-old infant's grave in the dead of night: these are strange tales told matter-of-factly. These stories are full of death – suicide, lethal injection, the sudden heart attack and the drawn out cancer battle – and filled with the ways we separate ourselves from one another: the series of locked gates you must pass through to reach a remote ranch house; the obscene offer handed under the bathroom stall's partition; the death row visitor's room and the peepshow booth, both with telephone handsets and a wall of safety glass preventing skin-on-skin contact. There are throughlines here that seem to reveal what Johnson himself was contemplating in his final months.
I note that I've lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn't mind forgetting a lot more of it.As for the particulars, this collection contains the title story, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, written from the POV of an “ad man”, it's a collection of odd stories from his life and career (just a lovely piece); The Starlight on Idaho is a series of letters written by a man in rehab who just might be going crazy from the Antabuse he's prescribed (this one was my favourite; it was unbelievable to me how a whole life was revealed through these ever-more-erratic ramblings); Strangler Bob is written by a man in a county lockup, surrounded by a variety of unusual characters (this was my least favourite, but as it might be a revisit to Johnson's most beloved character from Jesus' Son – which I have yet to read – it could be more meaningful to other readers); Triumph Over the Grave, wherein a writer recounts a story from the past and one from the present in which friends of his die (which is so self-aware as Johnson himself was dying that its final line left me stricken); and Doppelgänger, Poltergeist, from the POV of a poetry professor who mentors a more talented younger poet and becomes his confessor for mad deeds and beliefs.
The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction.Because so many of the narrators of these stories are writers themselves, it usually felt like Johnson himself was speaking to me. And because so many of these stories were about end-of-life experiences, and the unreliability of memory, and the writer's efforts to take lived experience and “put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light”, it felt personal and long-considered. This is masterful work and a fitting cap to a celebrated career.
