Granted, such pieces are the hardest part of a magazine to bring alive, to come up with ideas not by raiding the pages of The New York Times, but out of the thin, zeitgeisty air, marrying subject to writer. With celebrity “journalism,” powerful and strangulating, establishing itself for good in the 1990s, there was less room for editors to take chances.
Today, good writers, even great ones, end up doing celebrity profiles. (“Mailer on Madonna” sounds like a joke but it was actually an Esquire cover story in 1995.) They’re relatively easy, for the editor and writer, and they pay well. (The creative thinking now is in haggling to get “talent” on the cover).
In the past 10 or so years, a few great pieces come to mind: John Edgar Wideman on the L.A. riots; Michael Paterniti driving cross country with Einstein’s brain in the trunk; Jon Krakauer on Everest, which, led to an entire, redundant genre, and especially David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship, on the no-name 79th ranked tennis player, on David Lynch. In fact, if you walked into a mid-’90s editorial meeting of any magazine that aspired to publish literary journalism, the most popular ideas would be David Foster Wallace on X: Home Depot, The Weather Channel, Beck, whatever. And they all would’ve been good to the last footnote; Wallace’s take on the world is that pleasantly skewed.
And then, surprisingly, there is Denis Johnson, poet (and novelist) of the fringe. Johnson’s fiction, by now, is well-known, his name even a trendy one to drop. “Angels,” “Fiskadoro” and “Jesus’ Son,” the little autobiographical masterpiece of a sweet itinerant junkie, are all in Harold Bloom’s pompous but useful “The Western Cannon.”
He writes expertly about those well outside the mainstream in America, yet he’s not a one-note avant-gardist. His last novel, “The Name of the World,” for instance, is about a former senator turned college professor-post death of wife and daughter-that begins in innocuous enough tones but doesn’t stop-not for a chapter break, not even for a line break-until 129 pages later, a steady, seamless intensity.
With “Seek: Reports From the Edges of America and Beyond” (new from HarperCollins), a collection of Johnson’s journalism, which he’s been publishing on occasion since 1990, we can interact with his wide-eyed, dissonant sensibility on a nonfiction level.
About half of the pieces appeared in Esquire in the early and mid ’90s, and were commissioned by Will Blythe, the former literary editor there, to whom the book is dedicated. “Begetter and editor,” Johnson calls him.
In “Seek,” Johnson attends a hippie reunion in Washington state (“I’ve located Joey. He looks the same, only older, just as sad or perhaps more so, having lived 30 years longer now and found more to be sad about”) and searches for gold on his honeymoon in the middle of nowhere in Alaska where he meets Americans who describe themselves living “on the cutting edge of freedom,” some who don’t pay taxes.
In “Bikers for Jesus,” about a Christian revival in Texas that he wrote for Salon.com, he learns about these damaged, rehabilitated souls, without poking insidious fun, as would be easy-and tempting.
He even has the guts to talk about his attraction to the freedoms of the militia movement and his resulting ambivalence. (“If I’m neither side when the shooting starts, and I don’t like being in the middle, then where do I belong?”)
It’s not that he goes looking for the good in people, he’s not Pollyanna-ish at all. Nor is he brashly contrarian in a Christopher Hitchens vein. (On the contrary, Johnson will never show up on “Hardball”; he’s charming and self-deprecating and, in the words of the writer John Sack, “heroically handsome,” but reticent and private.) But he does note warmth when he sees it, no matter from who, and includes it in his report.
“His sympathies seem broad and undoctrinaire, subversively Christian in the ideal sense of the word,” says Blythe, now the literary editor at Men’s Journal, which will soon publish an original Johnson novella. “Maybe more than Christian-more primal, downright spooky and fearless.”
Indeed, Johnson seems imbued with religion, not tepid spirituality, but there are signs and sayings (a Liberian rebel leader croons a reggae-Creole version of Psalm 137), good and evil, Christ, God, how he saves and abandons, hypocrisy. “Jesus’ Son” is more than a line out of Lou Reed-“When I’m rushing on my run, and I feel like Jesus’ son.”
He’s equally as revealing in the Third World as he is in America’s outskirts. There are dispatches from Afghanistan, Somalia and the gulf war. And the collection is bookended by two pieces from Liberia, one from 1990 written for Esquire another from 2000 that appeared in Harper’s, which told of his time there in 1992, while on assignment for The New Yorker. They are both works of genius. In 1990, Johnson had a modest but rising reputation as a novelist (all but one of his books are set in the United States) without any journalism experience. Blythe took the chance.
“I saw a picture in the newspaper of Liberian rebels in full armor and wedding dresses charging across a field,” Blythe says. “For some reason, when I saw that picture, I thought: Denis. This is a job for Denis. I so loved his fiction-it’s a mixture of high visionary and real down-and-out. In particular, the guerilla with the AK-47 and the Vera Wang, or whatever it was, seemed right out of ‘Fiskadoro.’ When I called him up, he was immediately game. It took him a long time to get into Liberia, and he was immensely frustrated. The story itself, however, seemed for him one of those magical pieces. It came into Esquire perfect. We ran what I pulled off the fax.”
He’s not good at playing journalist but produces something different and great. In Somalia he writes of himself: “… and in his company there travels an American of extremely doubtful competence, a confused and desperately friendly, and, Artran hopes, well-bankrolled American who continually smiles and nods and repeats, ‘Salaam,’ to anyone who’ll listen: somewhat the idiot nephew.” In Liberia, interviewing President Charles Taylor: “Because I didn’t know what I was doing and turned the device toward the wind, the recording is almost unintelligible.” And later: “My assignment in Liberia was over. As far as I could see at the time and as far as I can see now, I accomplished nothing.”
What we learn about Liberia is, up close, how disturbing and pathological a legacy it is for America. It’s perfectly at home in this book. After his itinerary is bungled and his interview with Taylor in doubt, he writes: “My parents raised me to love all the earth’s peoples. Three days in this zone and I could only just manage to hold myself back from screaming Niggers! Niggers! Niggers! until one of these young men emptied a whole clip into me.”
This type of honesty-not political incorrectness for shock value, but simply what’s deep in the head and gut-is rarely seen in magazines. And what makes them so, well, the same. After reading these pieces, other magazine writing feels like a gyp, even deceptive. (Another mountain mishap? Another capsizing? Five thousand more words on Claire Danes or what’s his name?)
Other writers have collected magazine pieces, usually an easy way for a book credit. But Johnson’s is essential. He writes fiction, and as we see from this book, nonfiction, to figure out life. And, you get the feeling, to save his own.
