Schrodinger's Ca(ske)t: Denis Johnson's "Triumph Over the Grave"

Also: Hopes and Fears of Posthumous Releases

I was reading Denis Johnson’s Largesse of the Sea Maiden and the “Triumph Over the Grave” story snuck up on me. Honestly, I thought it started a little slow and disjointed. I wasn’t expecting much, but then soon was shaken by what I read.

Denis Johnson. Swiped from The Guardian.

Largesse is Denis Johnson’s posthumous collection, so let me get off on my posthumous collection rant. I’ll come back to DJ’s work.

I’ve been writing since 1987. I still have notebooks from then somewhere in the garage in a plastic sealed tub. I will not show you these. I can’t bear to destroy them, but if I could rig it that they would disintegrate immediately upon my death, I would. And fortunately, there was a lot of bad writing done on MacWrite 3.5” disks and other such formats that I either lost completely or for which I no longer have the technology. Most of this writing is the really bad writing I had to do to learn how to be a writer. Throwing away such journals is as spooky to me as stabbing a photograph of my mother. I could. I just wouldn’t. And there’s no real reason to, except to bury my secrets forever. And maybe, just maybe, someday a university may want to buy my archive and get all my Pink Floydesque rhyming poetry from when I was 18.

On my hard drive are pages and pages of legit good ideas, short stories, and beginnings to novels that maybe I’ll get back to. However, if you were to take these from me and publish them, I’d be mortified. They’re not done. They’re not edited. They’re the “before” pictures, not the “afters.”

Look, I saw what happened to Charles Bukowksi’s legacy after he died. There was a fat collection of his work every year for a long time that was good for a book or two but slowly, you could see them sorting through the remaining pages and publishing worse and worse poems of his until they finally ran out. I’m still hesitant to mention this guy in a public forum, because he has not only ardent fans but ardent haters and while I consider myself a fan, both groups would probably think me a poser. But I stand by the man’s poetry from 1960–1972 as the best run of American poetics—and this is owed to the close editing selections of the time. Black Sparrow Press only printed the best of his work then. I read the entirety of his work until he died, and then a significant minority of what came out after. I can’t imagine he would have liked some of these later titles being published.

Now, back to DJ

There are three previously published short stories in this collection. These are fair game. Usually, after publication, I consider the prose in its final form. I’m all for this—I’d much rather read a story this way than have to track down a 2007 copy of Playboy to read “Starlight on Idaho.” Unless you’re a big fan of Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica and want to see her naked and you want to read the short story as well, it’s just not worth it. And maybe you don’t want to go to the library and hang out in the reference room to read the titular story or “Strangler Bob” from old New Yorker issues. These collections are worth their purchase price saving you the time and effort to track everything down.

But three stories do not a collection make. As fans, we’d all be down for a 100 page or so DJ book. But the marketing department won’t have it. I’m sure they demanded the page count top 200 and be less than 300. Normally I’d assume a writer would have more unpublished work, but as we have not seen another collection in these last seven years, it’s either all that’s left or it’s all his estate is willing to release.

I’m trying not to spin out on a Salinger tangent. But it’s hard. We all heard the rumors that he was still writing furiously but wouldn’t let the novels be published until after he was dead. We were sure there would be shelves of novels to come. And then he died—is there a German word for taking pleasure in an author’s death when you anticipate the writer’s material this much? But it was not to be. His son said in 2019 that he had been working on a posthumous release since 2011 and he was working as fast as he can. Still, nothing about a book that would likely break the internet with thinkpieces. Was he really writing novels in his secret writing room, a space into which his wife was not allowed? Or was he just writing cringey letters to teenaged women? Or maybe the writing just sucks. I’ll believe anything, but please, someone tell me.

All this to say, I didn’t know if DJ had planned to make the other stories available to be published, if he told anyone they were finished, or what. I didn’t expect a lot. Especially at the beginning of “Triumph Over Death” which reads like thoughts about a story that he wanted to write at the beginning.

Death, Youth, and Old Age

When you’re young, you assume all your friends are still alive, and are horribly shocked to find out about car accidents, ODs, and cancer. Even your reckless friends seem immortal when they ride motorcycles in shorts and flip-flops, get stupidly high before going to their roofing job, and test if the recipes in the Anarchist’s Cookbook really work. People will be shocked into making RIP T-shirts and getting tattoos, and miss the irony of getting a tiny brass plaque by their favorite barstool.

But as you get older, there’s less surprise. I’m going to put the over/under at 46. That’s about the age when people express mild shock but also offer up a first guess right away: “was it drugs?” “did it have something to do with his weight?” “did he piss off the wrong guy?” And they’ll say things like “Well, he had a good run.” “He would rather have gone out that way that get too old and die in a hospital bed.”

And now, squarely in my mid-50s, a lot of my old crew exists in a state of duality: they’re both alive and dead, and I’ll have to figure out my old Facebook password to find out. I call this “Schrodinger’s Casket.” I know, some of you will say, “it’s not called ‘Schrodinger’s Box’ so you should call it ‘Schrodinger’s Former Coworkers He Lost Touch With But Still Has Very Fond Memories of and Intends to Hang Out With Again if He Ever Goes Back to That City’” and you’d be accurate but have no poetic sense at all.

For me, this goes back to 2016, when my friend Shut Up Rick went missing. Our mutual friend John H checked with California Department of Corrections and didn’t find him, so I called the Medical Examiner to make sure he hadn’t died. He had. Long story short, Rick’s ashes are in a box that was mailed to me shortly after reimbursing the county for cremation costs. I was heartbroken, but as option one was “he’s probably in jail” and option two was to check the morgue, I can’t say I was “surprised.”

Again, back to DJ [major spoilers]

So “Triumph Over the Grave” starts with the narrator every DJ reader would assume is DJ calling up an old friend randomly, only to find out he’s just died, and his partner is calling everyone to say that he has just died. DJ opened the box to find out, and sure enough, he did. I was hooked in.

Next, in the story, he says he has been taking care of his friend, Link, who is very near death, only conscious for four hours a day, and requires frequent visits to the hospital. While waiting for radiology to finish with his friend, he writes about the prior interaction. Then he writes more.

He goes on for a few pages about his bum knee that was ignored for many years, then treated by an uncaring physician only to demonstrate his own prowess, all while the narrator cycles through a massive LSD trip. Drugs, medical issues, and a dissociated narrator—all standard JD fare.

Then the tale turns again, to a writer named Darcy Miller who wrote screenplays under the name “D. Hale Miller.” This threw me. Isn’t that DJ’s middle name? Yes. Denis Hale Johnson. What’s going on?

Darcy was a novelist and screenwriter whose works are unavailable—movies not at the video store and books that are out of print—that is to say, he’s dead. Please do not let me go on another tangent about how all books are some kind of grandiose death note. But many writers talk about the words of our favorite writers “coming alive” and feel more in touch with these long-dead writers than we do with the person in line in front of us ordering a Baconator without the bun. I’m not dead until my books are out of print. (Use this quote when you post about my death on social media)

Darcy lives in a house on an abandoned ranch (dead). The university pays for this, although we don’t know why. But it’s the same university that houses DJ’s archives. His work in boxes on shelves on the school’s dime.

On their first meeting, a fly keeps landing on Darcy’s arm. This is also death. He’s already a corpse, but doesn’t know it yet. He still has knowledge to dispense to DJ’s students.

On their second meeting, buzzards circled Darcy’s house. Already dead. The narrator checks in on him to see if he’s okay, and he claims that his brother and sister—both long dead—are coming in his house and drinking his liquor.

Their third meeting finds Darcy on the floor, with “a mess of dried blood…around his head like a corona.” Dead. A blood halo. Darcy is taken to the hospital, where he lives for one month.

And then we learn Link is dead. When we thought we were reading a story written while waiting on him in a hospital. Was he already dead? And we find a present left behind to the woman he really loved.

My idea: this story was his gift to us, his readers, whom he loved. Like Link’s gift, it was left where his people would find it and deliver it to us.

He then tells us that the woman who told him his friend was dead is now dead, even though we think of her as alive, and if the story was written in one sitting, it is as if she is both alive and dead depending on where we are in the story. And, oh yeah, that one side character Mrs. Exroy, is also dead.

And he ends on this: “It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.” Okay, he’s really handing us the answers here, isn’t he? Like the back pages of an Encyclopedia Brown book.

Here’s my big complaint: HOW DO YOU NOT END THE BOOK WITH THIS LINE? For fuck’s sake, any writer would love to have something as cool as this as the last line of the last book of theirs. That’s a horrible sentence. Good enough to end on.