In “Earth Angel,” a review of Denis Johnson’s posthumously-published short story collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Rachel Kushner shared an anecdote about attending a reading by Johnson in the early 1990s where he read his poem “Traveling” three times.
“The first time, his rhythm was off, so he wanted to try again. The second time, it seemed he wasn’t able to recapture the effect of the poem, and so he read it once more. Not for us, the audience, but to try to remember what work he’d originally thought the poem might do, back when he had written it. There is a line in it about the light coming in through a barbershop’s window: ‘the shifting illumination in the place made it seem we were traveling.’ The third time he read the poem, he slowed at this line. He’d reconnected.”
For some, that paragraph might inspire a desire to seek out and reconnect with Johnson’s work. Now Ted Geltner’s comprehensive biography of the poet, novelist, playwright, and National Book Award-winner, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures, offers a book length opportunity to do so. Geltner’s detailed reporting makes the book both compelling and essential to future work on Johnson. Two key interventions are illustrating just how autobiographical the stories comprising Jesus’ Son are and describing Johnson’s writing process, including the use of some techniques associated with new and gonzo journalism, across genres.
Geltner’s account of Johnson’s life really takes off during his first semester, as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa. Johnson was arrested at an on-campus Vietnam war protest and convicted of “disturbing the peace.” Rather than pay the fifty-four dollar fine, Johnson asked to be sent to jail. He spent six days in the Johnson County jail that changed the course of his life. He met John Dundon, who would appear as “Dundun” in both of Johnson’s short story collections, Jesus’ Son and Largesse, and brought him further into Iowa City’s underworld.
Iowa City is infamously intoxicating (Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering offers an excellent survey). At the end of 1968, Johnson was nineteen, married to fellow Iowa student Nancy Lister, a father, falling deeper and deeper into addiction, producing mind-blowing poems in his undergraduate workshop, and preparing to publish some of them. One of his frequent haunts was a notorious bar called The Vine, where he spent many days and nights taking notes and imbibing people, spirits, and stories for some future moment of clarity.
Johnson stayed at Iowa for graduate school. He was a favorite of the writing workshop’s administrators and maintained a mythic status among the writers on campus, all while Johnson was “often seen around town dragging a big plastic bag of his clothes behind him, searching for somewhere to spend the night.” One semester, he told the poet Donald Justice he was withdrawing from his seminar because “It seems I’ve become addicted to heroin.” Geltner’s many interviews, including with Johnson’s son Morgan, serve as reminders of the generational hold and trauma that substances can inflict. Even to the end of his life, Geltner writes, “the fight to remain clean was an hourly battle for Denis that never let up.”
By the late 1970s, Johnson was living in the Pacific Northwest and had pawned his typewriter. Around then, his parents brought him to their relocated home in Arizona where he entered a treatment center and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. While in treatment, he had a “ ‘strong experience of the presence of God’ an epiphany that he could not explain but that propelled him to commit further to the spiritual aspects of AA.” It was during this period that he wrote, revised, and completed the poems that would form his third poetry collection, The Incognito Lounge, and his first novel, Angels.
Geltner pays special attention to Johnson’s journalistic work, and as the biographer of the writer Harry Crews and sportswriter and Sports Illustrated editor Jim Murray, he’s well positioned to make the case for how pivotal Johnson’s 1980s and 90s domestic and international gonzo journalism is to his career. Johnson’s superpower, while in pursuit of researching and reporting a story, Geltner writes, was “a non-threatening, guileless persona that he could use to disarm people in even the most tense of situations. A well-timed laugh or smile could get anybody to lower their machine gun.” During the Gulf War, Johnson’s colleague at Esquire, veteran war reporter, John Sack, informed the editors back in New York that “Denis could become the modern-day Ernest Hemingway of war reporters…if he didn’t cry all the time.” Some of Johnson’s nonfiction has been collected in Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, but one can’t help but wonder if more reporters might be sitting with their emotions, let alone crying all the time, if Johnson’s reporting was better known or more widely anthologized.
It was an earlier reporting trip though, back to the Philippines where he’d lived while his father worked for the United States Information Service, that changed literary history. Johnson contracted malaria and didn’t seek treatment until he was back in the US and near death. While he was convalescing, Geltner writes, Johnson resolved to put the Iowa City stories that would comprise Jesus’ Son out into the world. The stories arrived, first one after another in some of the country’s most prestigious literary magazines. Eventually they were compiled and released in a collection which maintains its hold on the literary world three decades later.
The biography devotes its final fifty-some pages to Johnson’s work after Jesus’ Son including the National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke, Pulitzer Prize-nominated Train Dreams, Largesse, his playwriting, and his teaching career. It’s a lot to summarize in a short amount of space, but Geltner’s reporting is filled with details that make you wish there was more.
Still, it’s best not to get greedy. Geltner, both through the book (and his previous reporting for The New Yorker), seems to have narrowed the literary distance between Fuckhead, the protagonist of Jesus’ Son and Johnson. A thread for future work might be to consider Johnson’s relationship with the wave of autobiographical fiction and autofiction in the 2000s. After writing a story for Playboy about Johnson’s process on Jesus’ Son, Alexander Chee, the author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and a former student of Johnson’s, now encourages his students to write “the stories they tell but never write down.” Writing what you know is still sage advice in writing workshops. After all, it worked for Denis Johnson.
Nonfiction
Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures
A Biography of Denis Johnson
By Ted Geltner
University of Iowa Press
Published November 11, 2025
