Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

blunt objects & expanding territories

“‘Everybody who knew him tells me he was an excellent feller and also a most… excellent feller, you might say.’”

A writer’s address consists of two coordinates: style and subject area. Style is what you could discern if you were listening to a reading from the other side of a closed door: Is the writer talking fast or slow? Is her tone solemn and MFA-honed or jaunty and mischievous? Is the audience laughing?

Style is innate (so is the absence of style) and should be fiddled with only in cases of dire need. The words stylistic departure, like the words grade pending, signal trouble ahead.

But subject area — the fact that Philip Roth tends to write about vigorously neurotic Newark Jews and Barbara Pym tends to write about meek older churchgoers coming down with colds — that you can fiddle with; that you should fiddle with, once you know what you’re doing. So, Philip Roth abandons his voice in order to ventriloquize Richard Yates for six hundred pages in Letting Go: no thank you. But Philip Roth ventures out of Newark to visit a West Bank settlement in The Counterlife: let’s find our passports!

Maybe the best subject-area-departure I’ve ever read is Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. It is 116 small pages long, a clattering wagon-ride through the early-twentieth-century life of a down-and-out Pacific Northwesterner named Robert Grainier. Grainier works on railroad construction projects; he logs (“He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him”); he bounces like a man falling out of a tree between the various brutalities of itinerant life in the wilderness.

We are, in other words, miles from Johnson’s usual sticky-surfaced bars and Greyhound buses and highway underpasses. But look how clearly the prose proclaims itself his. Flipping almost at random, we find:

Grainier had seen people dead, but he’d never seen anybody die. He didn’t know what to say or do. He felt he should leave, and he felt he shouldn’t leave.

Here we have Johnson’s characteristic stunned-with-a-blunt-object profundity (the opposition between dead and die, should and shouldn’t); his sense of life as a performance for which you have humiliatingly failed to prepare.

When Grainier comes upon a stranger dying propped up against a tree (“He was bearded and streaked with dust, and bits of the woods clung to him everywhere,”) Johnson shows off his drawing-class gift for writing what he sees, rather than what he expects to see:

He had the impression of a mouth hole moving in a stack of leaves and rags and matted brown hair.

When a writer faithfully translates his style into unfamiliar settings he doesn’t abandon his territory; he expands it.

Late in the book Grainier falls in with a vagabond named Eddie.

Grainier thought Eddie and he must be the same age, but the loose life had put a number of extra years on Eddie. His whiskers were white, and his lips puckered around gums probably nearly toothless.

Together they find work on a rail crew, and Eddie enlists Grainier’s help in wooing a widow they both know, Claire Thompson. They’re going to borrow a Model T and help Claire move out of her house.

They’re pulled over to the side of the road, the car loaded up with all of Claire’s earthly possessions, when Eddie decides to proclaim his love. He begins, sensibly enough, by praising Claire’s dead husband.

“The late Mr. Thompson was a fine feller,” he told her. He spent a tense minute getting up steam, then went on: “The late Mr. Thompson was a fine feller. Yes.”

Claire said, “Yes?”

“Yes. Everybody who knew him tells me he was an excellent feller and also a most… excellent feller, you might say. So they say. As far as them who knew him.”

The proposal goes poorly — life goes poorly for just about everyone in Grainier’s orbit — but this passage contains my favorite sentence in the book. Everyone who knew him tells me he was an excellent feller and also a most… excellent feller, you might say. I love that Johnson takes the risk of dialect with feller (Johnson’s ear is as good as his eye). I love Eddie’s stammering panic (the meaningless repetition, the ellipsis, the David-Brent-ian helplessness of that you might say). I would bet a thousand dollars, having read this exchange, that Johnson knew how to tell a joke.

And Train Dreams — for all its deep sadness — is a kind of joke: what if you joined a railroad crew in the 1910’s and found a Denis Johnson novel there? What if life everywhere and always has been as dumb, as painful, and as accidentally beautiful as the life of a contemporary hitchhiking drug addict? What if, sitting drunk at a bar in the middle of the day, you put down your beer and held up a glass of Hood’s Sarsaparilla? And what if the very same light shone through?