Emergency

02/01/2025

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Denis Johnson understands fuck-ups as both noun and transitive verb. Someone is a fuck-up, and someone fucks up. In ‘Emergency’, he extends this realisation to calling one of his characters Fuckhead. (The same character narrates all the stories in the collection Jesus’ Son.) The narrator’s friend Georgie says to him, “does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?” “No wonder they call me Fuckhead”, the narrator admits, as Georgie says it is a designation that will stay with him till the grave. The exchange comes after Georgie has run over a pregnant rabbit. He saves the baby rabbits but the narrator has squished them as he shifts around in the seat.  

     Georgie might not be much of an improvement over Fuckhead, but he has at least tried to save the baby rabbits’ lives just as he earlier managed to help a man who came into the hospital where both he and the narrator work.  It looked like the patient needed a serious operation: arriving at the hospital with a knife sticking out of the edge of his eye. The doctor and the nurse discuss the problem, with the doc saying it needs a better man than him to do the op. “I want a brain surgeon. And I want a really good gas man, get me a genius.” All it finally seems to need is Georgie with a bit of chutzpah. He is the orderly who cleans him up and in the process removes the blade, which he then goes on to use cutting the baby rabbits out of the dead mother.  

     This might suggest that Georgie is a resourceful chap, but we should remember he is the guy who runs the rabbit over in the first place, and while working in the hospital he isn’t exactly focused on the job. “He often stole pills from the cabinets” and is rarely straight, his mood moving from trembling and weeping to singing Neil Young songs. When Georgie and Fuckhead decide to go camping they don’t get very far: the narrator reckons they must have covered about three hundred miles; Georgie tells him they have hardly exited town: they have been driving around in circles. 

       Looking at the story with a po-face the mood resists, we could talk of the story’s symbolism: that this is a story of America refusing to take responsibility. Both Georgie and the narrator are doing menial jobs and the doctor isn’t so keen to operate. When they pick up a hitchhiker the narrator knows, the man is off to Canada to escape the draft. You sense this isn’t because Hardee won’t see it as a just war; more that it is just a war and who would want to fight in one of those? Best to tune in and drop out. As the narrator discusses a famous LSD guru getting interviewed Fuckhead says: “his eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop. It doesn’t occur to me, as I pity the extraterrestrial, that in my life I’ve taken as much as he has.” 

       Vietnam like in many stories of the time hovers over the tale, but if it gives the story a sombre undertone it isn’t what gives it its tone. When we hear that “the day was clear and peaceful…the sky is clear and the dead are coming back”, it proposes an underlying despair that the tone refuses to acknowledge. If we accept that this is a story about a nation that has lost its meaning, it might seem important to resist imposing too strong a one upon it ourselves. Johnson’s strength as a writer lies in facetiousness. This means that the stories are rarely oppressively serious as the characters are caught in situations that from one perspective can seem close to farce, even if from another even closer to tragedy. At the end of ‘Out on Bail’, the narrator says that a character took too much heroin and while those around him monitored his breathing for a while, then “after a while they forgot about him, and his breath failed without anybody noticing. He simply went under. He died. I am still alive.” This is the story’s conclusion and of course another tale narrated by Fuckhead. It takes a bit of distance to see that life is sacrosanct; amid the chaos, it can only be manageable. Friendships are ‘false coalitions’ (‘Two Men’) and relationships are emotional accommodations. Finding the language to describe these affairs can be difficult, since junk life hardly falls within convention. “Michelle left me permanently for a man called John Smith, or shall I say during one of the times we were parted she took up with a man and shortly after that had some bad luck and died? Anyway, she never came back to me.” (‘Dirty Wedding’) There are hard feelings but the priority is hardening those arteries. 

       Johnson would be wary of taking life more seriously than the characters who are often more interested in denial than reality — their purpose is to get through their lives on their terms, and the sort of contextualising weight of existence is insignificant next to getting through their day, one fix at a time. These are people who are killing themselves, but why accept such a notion when you can pretend all is well, and your body is part of that deluded wellness? “It’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only on the ability to fool them.” (‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’) 

       Yet reading through sixteen Johnson short stories in Jesus’ Son and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, the reader notices he takes people more seriously than life. This might seem a useless paradox but one that helps us understand the need for the facetious and the escape from the portentous, even if Johnson isn’t afraid of the poetic or the purple sentence. In a strict sense, Johnson might seem far removed from minimalists like Carver, Ford and others who usually refrained from putting the dramatic on the page, and proposed it could be found in a past event. Johnson’s stories are very eventful indeed. ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’ is a death scene; an ex-wife phones the narrator to say she is dying of cancer in 'The Largesse of the Sea Maiden'; ‘Dundun’ all but opens with someone just shot, and in ‘Strangler Bob’ the story immediately tells us that our narrator is getting locked up for forty-one days — and we discover he will be sharing a cell with the title character. 

      But what Johnson shares with Carver (who taught him creative writing at Iowa)  and co. is an interest in people as a fact. It isn’t just that “I think that every tale told in that book [Jesus’ Son], all the incidents happened either to me or to somebody I knew, or it was told to me by somebody I knew about somebody they knew.” (‘Lying Down in the Dirt: An Interview with Denis Johnson’) It is also that Johnson knows that when people are making a mess of their lives they aren’t editorialising it. They aren’t examples of the dangers of drugs; they are hobbled agents of their own destiny and Johnson manages to find a place between the immediacy of their failings and the judgements of those outside their milieu. To stay inside the urgency of his characters’ addiction wouldn’t be so interesting (the reader is unlikely to be under the lure of the drug). To remain removed from the characters would be to offer judgement or pity, useful for a political campaign or a charity advert but debilitating for character creation.  

       A writer’s purpose is surely more to create an individual, even if in the process they might hope to achieve an archetype. By moving more towards the idiosyncratic over the archetypal, Johnson is happy to arrive at the facetious over the portentous. It is what differentiates him from someone like Hemingway, who Joy Williams could say was a lesson to many: “there are a great many writers who learned a great deal from his work—the early work always—the cleanness of the line, the freshness, the solemnity of the sentence, the discoveries that restraint and omission allow.” (Bookforum) Yet Hemingway’s figures were often larger than life while Johnson’s are smaller than life. Could we imagine a Hemingway story collection offering a character called Fuckhead? No, we get Nick Adams. Yet perhaps what Johnson creates is an archetype in miniature through using the comic more than the sombre, through capturing like many a minimalist the messiness of life but adding to it a potent brew of ongoing alcohol and drug addiction. Many situations in his work are unbelievably funny: they strain credulity but remain oddly, humorously true. In ‘The Starlight on Idaho’, the narrator says, “in the last four years I have been shot, jailed, declared insane, etc….and even though I’m just thirty-two years old I’m the only person I’ve ever met who’s actually ever been in a coma.” In ‘The Largesse of the Sea Maiden’, when the narrator’s ex-wife phones to say she is dying, he assumes this is Ginny but, during the call, he wonders if it might be his second wife Jenny; her voice is so weak that it proves hard to distinguish Ginny from Jenny. He realises that since he acted terribly in both marriages, he “didn’t know which set of crimes I was regretting.” A tragic situation becomes a comedic one; yet it seems Johnson’s purpose isn’t to undermine the humane but to contextualise it, to see that just because someone doesn’t always act with the best of motives this doesn't mean they are worthless, though they certainly aren’t worthy.   

      At the end of ‘Emergency’, Hardee asks Georgie what he does for a living, “I save lives.” It is both nonsense and true; he works in a hospital, though he isn’t there to do more than clean up— but he was the one who removed the blade safely from around someone’s eye. The sort of remark a doctor might make in justifying why they deserve a better salary is made with irony by Georgie. It is a worthy remark by a character who might seem close to useless if we choose to judge him a certain way, someone who is so out of it he mops a clean floor he thinks is covered in blood, steals pills from the hospital cabinets, and fails to find the road back to town, running over the jackrabbit during the attempt. But as we have noted he also tries to save the lives of the baby rabbits, sort of saves the life of the man knifed, and does, it seems, work in a non-profit, Catholic hospital. He is one of the good guys, even if the doctor says on hearing Georgie singing a Neil Young song as he washes his hands, “that person is not right, not at all, not one bit.” 

       The narrator won’t be much better, and Georgie at least possesses a diminutive as a name rather than as an insult, and will be just a passing character in the life of our narrator who will have many more chaotic encounters through the other stories in the collection, just as other Johnson figures will screw up in other books and other tales. When in the last story in Jesus’ Son (‘Beverly Home’) the narrator says, “how could I do it, how could a person get that low?”, he has been spying on a woman as she showers and goes about her business. “And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding?” That’s nothing. I’d been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do a lot worse.” Johnson is a writer of the lower depths, finally closer to Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski, than to Hemingway or Carver, to someone who doesn’t seek to ennoble his characters but wants at least to acknowledge their existence. This isn’t to say anything about the evaluative merit of the five writers but it would be to insist on some distinctions in an American writing tradition of the unsentimental that can show the country’s literary range.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Emergency

Denis Johnson understands fuck-ups as both noun and transitive verb. Someone is a fuck-up, and someone fucks up. In ‘Emergency’, he extends this realisation to calling one of his characters Fuckhead. (The same character narrates all the stories in the collection Jesus’ Son.) The narrator’s friend Georgie says to him, “does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?” “No wonder they call me Fuckhead”, the narrator admits, as Georgie says it is a designation that will stay with him till the grave. The exchange comes after Georgie has run over a pregnant rabbit. He saves the baby rabbits but the narrator has squished them as he shifts around in the seat.  

     Georgie might not be much of an improvement over Fuckhead, but he has at least tried to save the baby rabbits’ lives just as he earlier managed to help a man who came into the hospital where both he and the narrator work.  It looked like the patient needed a serious operation: arriving at the hospital with a knife sticking out of the edge of his eye. The doctor and the nurse discuss the problem, with the doc saying it needs a better man than him to do the op. “I want a brain surgeon. And I want a really good gas man, get me a genius.” All it finally seems to need is Georgie with a bit of chutzpah. He is the orderly who cleans him up and in the process removes the blade, which he then goes on to use cutting the baby rabbits out of the dead mother.  

     This might suggest that Georgie is a resourceful chap, but we should remember he is the guy who runs the rabbit over in the first place, and while working in the hospital he isn’t exactly focused on the job. “He often stole pills from the cabinets” and is rarely straight, his mood moving from trembling and weeping to singing Neil Young songs. When Georgie and Fuckhead decide to go camping they don’t get very far: the narrator reckons they must have covered about three hundred miles; Georgie tells him they have hardly exited town: they have been driving around in circles. 

       Looking at the story with a po-face the mood resists, we could talk of the story’s symbolism: that this is a story of America refusing to take responsibility. Both Georgie and the narrator are doing menial jobs and the doctor isn’t so keen to operate. When they pick up a hitchhiker the narrator knows, the man is off to Canada to escape the draft. You sense this isn’t because Hardee won’t see it as a just war; more that it is just a war and who would want to fight in one of those? Best to tune in and drop out. As the narrator discusses a famous LSD guru getting interviewed Fuckhead says: “his eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop. It doesn’t occur to me, as I pity the extraterrestrial, that in my life I’ve taken as much as he has.” 

       Vietnam like in many stories of the time hovers over the tale, but if it gives the story a sombre undertone it isn’t what gives it its tone. When we hear that “the day was clear and peaceful…the sky is clear and the dead are coming back”, it proposes an underlying despair that the tone refuses to acknowledge. If we accept that this is a story about a nation that has lost its meaning, it might seem important to resist imposing too strong a one upon it ourselves. Johnson’s strength as a writer lies in facetiousness. This means that the stories are rarely oppressively serious as the characters are caught in situations that from one perspective can seem close to farce, even if from another even closer to tragedy. At the end of ‘Out on Bail’, the narrator says that a character took too much heroin and while those around him monitored his breathing for a while, then “after a while they forgot about him, and his breath failed without anybody noticing. He simply went under. He died. I am still alive.” This is the story’s conclusion and of course another tale narrated by Fuckhead. It takes a bit of distance to see that life is sacrosanct; amid the chaos, it can only be manageable. Friendships are ‘false coalitions’ (‘Two Men’) and relationships are emotional accommodations. Finding the language to describe these affairs can be difficult, since junk life hardly falls within convention. “Michelle left me permanently for a man called John Smith, or shall I say during one of the times we were parted she took up with a man and shortly after that had some bad luck and died? Anyway, she never came back to me.” (‘Dirty Wedding’) There are hard feelings but the priority is hardening those arteries. 

       Johnson would be wary of taking life more seriously than the characters who are often more interested in denial than reality — their purpose is to get through their lives on their terms, and the sort of contextualising weight of existence is insignificant next to getting through their day, one fix at a time. These are people who are killing themselves, but why accept such a notion when you can pretend all is well, and your body is part of that deluded wellness? “It’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only on the ability to fool them.” (‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’) 

       Yet reading through sixteen Johnson short stories in Jesus’ Son and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, the reader notices he takes people more seriously than life. This might seem a useless paradox but one that helps us understand the need for the facetious and the escape from the portentous, even if Johnson isn’t afraid of the poetic or the purple sentence. In a strict sense, Johnson might seem far removed from minimalists like Carver, Ford and others who usually refrained from putting the dramatic on the page, and proposed it could be found in a past event. Johnson’s stories are very eventful indeed. ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’ is a death scene; an ex-wife phones the narrator to say she is dying of cancer in 'The Largesse of the Sea Maiden'; ‘Dundun’ all but opens with someone just shot, and in ‘Strangler Bob’ the story immediately tells us that our narrator is getting locked up for forty-one days — and we discover he will be sharing a cell with the title character. 

      But what Johnson shares with Carver (who taught him creative writing at Iowa)  and co. is an interest in people as a fact. It isn’t just that “I think that every tale told in that book [Jesus’ Son], all the incidents happened either to me or to somebody I knew, or it was told to me by somebody I knew about somebody they knew.” (‘Lying Down in the Dirt: An Interview with Denis Johnson’) It is also that Johnson knows that when people are making a mess of their lives they aren’t editorialising it. They aren’t examples of the dangers of drugs; they are hobbled agents of their own destiny and Johnson manages to find a place between the immediacy of their failings and the judgements of those outside their milieu. To stay inside the urgency of his characters’ addiction wouldn’t be so interesting (the reader is unlikely to be under the lure of the drug). To remain removed from the characters would be to offer judgement or pity, useful for a political campaign or a charity advert but debilitating for character creation.  

       A writer’s purpose is surely more to create an individual, even if in the process they might hope to achieve an archetype. By moving more towards the idiosyncratic over the archetypal, Johnson is happy to arrive at the facetious over the portentous. It is what differentiates him from someone like Hemingway, who Joy Williams could say was a lesson to many: “there are a great many writers who learned a great deal from his work—the early work always—the cleanness of the line, the freshness, the solemnity of the sentence, the discoveries that restraint and omission allow.” (Bookforum) Yet Hemingway’s figures were often larger than life while Johnson’s are smaller than life. Could we imagine a Hemingway story collection offering a character called Fuckhead? No, we get Nick Adams. Yet perhaps what Johnson creates is an archetype in miniature through using the comic more than the sombre, through capturing like many a minimalist the messiness of life but adding to it a potent brew of ongoing alcohol and drug addiction. Many situations in his work are unbelievably funny: they strain credulity but remain oddly, humorously true. In ‘The Starlight on Idaho’, the narrator says, “in the last four years I have been shot, jailed, declared insane, etc….and even though I’m just thirty-two years old I’m the only person I’ve ever met who’s actually ever been in a coma.” In ‘The Largesse of the Sea Maiden’, when the narrator’s ex-wife phones to say she is dying, he assumes this is Ginny but, during the call, he wonders if it might be his second wife Jenny; her voice is so weak that it proves hard to distinguish Ginny from Jenny. He realises that since he acted terribly in both marriages, he “didn’t know which set of crimes I was regretting.” A tragic situation becomes a comedic one; yet it seems Johnson’s purpose isn’t to undermine the humane but to contextualise it, to see that just because someone doesn’t always act with the best of motives this doesn't mean they are worthless, though they certainly aren’t worthy.   

      At the end of ‘Emergency’, Hardee asks Georgie what he does for a living, “I save lives.” It is both nonsense and true; he works in a hospital, though he isn’t there to do more than clean up— but he was the one who removed the blade safely from around someone’s eye. The sort of remark a doctor might make in justifying why they deserve a better salary is made with irony by Georgie. It is a worthy remark by a character who might seem close to useless if we choose to judge him a certain way, someone who is so out of it he mops a clean floor he thinks is covered in blood, steals pills from the hospital cabinets, and fails to find the road back to town, running over the jackrabbit during the attempt. But as we have noted he also tries to save the lives of the baby rabbits, sort of saves the life of the man knifed, and does, it seems, work in a non-profit, Catholic hospital. He is one of the good guys, even if the doctor says on hearing Georgie singing a Neil Young song as he washes his hands, “that person is not right, not at all, not one bit.” 

       The narrator won’t be much better, and Georgie at least possesses a diminutive as a name rather than as an insult, and will be just a passing character in the life of our narrator who will have many more chaotic encounters through the other stories in the collection, just as other Johnson figures will screw up in other books and other tales. When in the last story in Jesus’ Son (‘Beverly Home’) the narrator says, “how could I do it, how could a person get that low?”, he has been spying on a woman as she showers and goes about her business. “And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding?” That’s nothing. I’d been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do a lot worse.” Johnson is a writer of the lower depths, finally closer to Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski, than to Hemingway or Carver, to someone who doesn’t seek to ennoble his characters but wants at least to acknowledge their existence. This isn’t to say anything about the evaluative merit of the five writers but it would be to insist on some distinctions in an American writing tradition of the unsentimental that can show the country’s literary range.


© Tony McKibbin