There's a moment in Denis Johnson's collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden that stopped me cold. At the end of "Triumph Over the Grave," an elegiac story in which the narrator reminisces on the decline and death of two friends, he writes: "It doesn't matter. 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." I nearly set the book down and cried. Famously, Johnson completed Largesse right before his death at age 67; I think it may have even come out just after he died. Johnson must not have imagined when he wrote those words that the maybe would become a certainty so soon, or perhaps he did: the word "maybe" contains so many possibilities. But it's hard not to read these words, too, and feel the loss of other possibilities, of many years of incredible literature, and the life of, by all accounts, a humane teacher and good man.
"Triumph Over the Grave" is my favorite of the five long-ish stories in Largesse of the Sea Maiden. It has a nested structure that makes its true core elusive. Two deaths, two griefs, framed one within the other. One, a talented writer and teacher wasting away on a Texas ranch; the visits from his sister and brother-in-law, long dead, turn out to be emanations of the brain cancer he doesn't know he has. The other a friend whose wife, long since remarried, has succumbed to dementia, and whose now-husband drives her to see him on his deathbed. (Both of these stories, in fact, are framed with the shocking news of another, third death, which it seems, is too fresh a grief to be part of the story--only, perhaps, its instigation.) The diers in "Triumph Over the Grave" take a long time dying. When does it begin, one wonders? The writer, does his death begin when the first cell mis-multiplies, unknown and unseen within the body? Or is it when he retreats to the ranch, isolated from the world? Or is it when he sees these visions of his dead family that show he has one foot in the grave? Does the other man's ex keep him alive, having regressed in her mind to a point of life before the point of decay? Or is her forgetting, too, a kind of death, an obliteration of so many years? Whatever else, "Triumph" offers that final line, which is no less true and necessary because it is so often said: "The world keeps turning." The maybe happens to us all.
"Triumph" is followed by "Doppelganger, Poltergeist," which you might call the collection's "showstopper." In it, a brilliant poet becomes obsessed with a theory that Jesse, the twin brother of Elvis Presley who supposedly died at birth, in fact was sold to a midwife, who later schemed with Colonel Parker to murder Elvis and replace him with Jesse. The story is not so much about the theory but the poet's obsession with it; he's even arrested for digging up baby Jesse's grave. The story is narrated from the perspective of the poet's former teacher, a half-talented academic who becomes the poet's confessor. The theory, we come to find out, was actually--stay with me here--the poet's brother's who died, a brother who himself had a twin who died in childbirth like Presley. There's your doubles, your doppelgangers, your poltergeists. The narrator has his double in the professorial figure who haunts the poet's poems, a figure given the name of the dead twin.
It's all very complicated, as a good doppelganger story should be. A good doppelganger story never has just one doppelganger; it's always sensitive to the way that a double can divide again, like mitosis. It's sensitive to the way that things are never repeated only once. On top of everything else, it's a 9/11 story, and contains perhaps the best description of the towers falling I've ever seen in literature. The obvious connection--twins, twin towers--is lost on our narrator until the poet makes it. More richly, the little griefs are reduplicated as big griefs; worlds are shaken on every scale. Elvis arrives to a kindly farm couple to let them know he has seen their aunt Gladys in Paradise. This, to the poet, proves that Elvis had already died when he was supposed to be alive, but perhaps we can be haunted by our futures as well as our pasts.
Jesus's Son gave Johnson a reputation as a writer of the down-and-out. Two stories here make good on that legacy. The first is "Starlight on Idaho," an epistolary story that takes the form of a collection of letters from a man enduring rehab in a former motel in California. (The Starlight Motel--you know, on Idaho Street.) The voice here, rattled and ranting, desperate but determined, is one of the book's many victories. The other, "Strangler Bob," actually brings back one of the characters from Jesus' Son, Dundun, this time as a prisoner in a jail of violent and mercurial figures. This story--perhaps because it has a little too much going on--struck me as the weakest of the five.
But for the most part, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is a book not about the down-and-out, but the up-and-in, or at least the moderately successful. The middle-aged academic of "Doppelganger," who admits abashedly that he dreams of tenure at his small Midwestern college, the lightly famous writer of "Triumph"; these are people with comfortable lives. One wonders if they are versions of Johnson himself, having become himself a widely regarded writer and teacher, and having (to my understanding) left youthful vagaries behind. "Doppelganger" isn't really about the tortured genius of the poet; it's about the narrator's comfortable mediocrity, which itself is a kind of torture. The first and title story, too, is about an ad man living a life of relative comfort and ease. It's a funny story, arranged as a series of short flash pieces, without what I'd call a clear through line. But even the most comfortable and ordinary man is prone to fantastic dreams, some of which come true:
Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folk tales that I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.
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