In Recovery

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden stories by Denis Johnson.  Random House.  207 pp. $17.00. ***1/2

One thing I wonder about people in recovery—especially writers in recovery—is why they have an endless fascination with their period of addiction.  It’s the same way people at AA get together and tell stories of their worst fuck-ups.  “You think you fucked up.  Hell no.  Get ready to hear the story of a real fuck-up.”  I suppose these stories can be cautionary tales for other people, but they seem to go on and on, and AA member delight in them.  Some have admitted as much to me.

Denis Johnson is a case in point.  He’s a wonderful lucid writer, I admit, quite funny, but when I finally read Jesus’ Son, after people had been praising it for years, I must admit to a certain disappointment.  Did I want to read about these low-lifes for a whole book of stories?  The unrepentant Charles Bukowski—nobody ever accused him of being in recovery—had a certain charm because he wholeheartedly embraced his fucked-up life, and Lucia Berlin, though her most graphic stories were terrifying indeed, always had a feeling of redemption to her work.  But Johnson wrote about being fucked up as if fascinated by the fact, as if he couldn’t quite believe he had done all that.  There but for the Grace of God go I, and there even with the Grace of God I did go for a while.  Can you believe it?  Wasn’t I fucked up?

A friend of mine who has been in recovery for years told me that addicts have two problems, the actual physical addiction, also the fact that they are in the grip of an obsession.  At some point the physical addiction is gone; that can only last so long.  But if they don’t work on the obsession, it can come back at any time.

The question is, how to you cure an obsession?

I don’t think you cure it by continuing to think about it.

Two of the stories in this volume struck me that way, “The Starlight on Idaho” and “Strangler Bob.”  “Starlight” is a collection of letters written by a guy in recovery, most of them unmailed, and as funny as some of them are (my favorite opening was, “Dear Pope John Paul, Do you have two first names, or is Paul your last name, like you’re Mr. Paul”), a lot of it was a tiresome drunk—though he wasn’t actually drunk, but a man can be a dry drunk—ranting away, as in, “Dear Friends and Neighbors in the Universe, I think I need to tell you I am totally out of Kools” or “I’m getting depressed.  Depressed.  I think this Anatbuse is going wrong on me.”  I don’t doubt this is an accurate portrayal of this human being.  I’m just not that interested in him.  I’m also not especially interested in the characters in “Strangler Bob,” guys sitting around a jail shooting the breeze, including the title character who says, “It was nice, you know, it being just the two of us, me and the missus.  We charcoaled a couple T-bone steaks and drank a bottle of imported Beaujolais red wine, and then I sort of killed her a little bit.”

I guess it’s funny that he said it that way.  What he did sure as hell isn’t funny.

My honest feeling is: I know how to be fucked-up.  Why don’t you show us how to get well?  Stories can do that too.  That’s what I get from Lucia Berlin.

There is an elegiac air about several of the stories, of things coming to an end.  Johnson died of liver cancer at age 67—I believe this volume was published posthumously—and he may have written these stories as things were coming to an end for him.  “Triumph Over the Grave” takes up the always-fascinating subject of a writer who had a huge success when he was young—published a novel to great acclaim, saw it made into a movie—then lived out the rest of his life without any particular success, taking gigs in creative writing programs, living off his old earnings.  As a writer myself—though not one who ever had a particular success—I found that story fascinating (though also terrifying.  The man became more and more of a recluse, and had a dreadful end).  And “Doppelganger, Poltergeist” concerns a poet of great talent—who did have a long fallow period at the end—whose real obsession was not poetry, but Elvis Presley, and the whole question of what happened to him after he went to the army.  That guy is nuts, but he’s also fascinating, and anyone with an interest in Elvis should not miss that story.

And I should say—I saved the best for last—that the title story is absolutely stunning, the best Denis Johnson story I’ve ever read and one of the best stories period.  Again, it concerns a man whose best days are past, in this case an ad executive who has a perfectly good job in the present but who is being presented an award for an ad that he wrote many years before.  The group he worked with has all moved on to bigger and better things, but he has stagnated.

Somehow or other his slow decline is simply background to a bunch of random events in his life—this story has the randomness of everyday life, but is at the same time extremely artful—that are absolutely fascinating.  His wife has just given a dinner party, for instance, when a man at the party reveals not only that he has an artificial leg, but that he lost his leg in warfare.  People were talking about silences, and he said “the most silent thing he’d ever heard was the land mine taking off his right leg outside Kabul, Afghanistan.”  What follows that moment at the party seems weird beyond belief, yet nevertheless weirdly true.  The whole story is like that.

That one story is worth the price of the whole book.  A couple of others aren’t too bad either.