“Do you think that the bad things that we do follow us through life?”
That’s the question Robert Grainier asks Arn Peeples one night while lying back in a tent in “Train Dreams,” Clint Bentley’s new film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s masterful 2011 novella. They are loggers at rest, sleeping in the old-growth forest they’ve been hired to cut down. Light from a kerosene lamp flickers across their weathered faces. Neither has an answer.
It’s also the question that looms over the story, though it never appears in the book. The character who asks it, Grainier, is a logger born in the 19th century. He has probably never heard the name Sigmund Freud, and the abbreviation PTSD would be entirely inscrutable to him. When he asks about being followed by bad things, he’s describing something closer to the feeling of being physically followed. What he’s talking about is a ghost.
“Train Dreams” is set in the old American West, but Grainier is neither a gunslinger nor a prospector. He is a quiet man who works hard labor until, eventually, machines arrive that make him unnecessary. He was born to parents he never knew and, 80-some years later, dies alone in a cabin with no one around to find him. In between, he is marked by a set of tragedies that shape his life.
The novella opens on an afternoon in 1917, with Grainier working for the Spokane International Railway to build track through the woods. That day, a Chinese worker is accused of stealing from the company store. If there is any evidence of the man’s guilt or innocence, it is not presented. Grainier finds himself swept up in the lynch mob and almost immediately regrets being carried away by its mindless violence. The film presents a slightly different sequence of events, but the result for Grainier is much the same.
Grainier leaves work that afternoon haunted. He begins to have night visions. He sees the man lurking in the shadows around him, in the woods, in the creek, in his dreams. He says nothing of his mental dissolution — not even to his wife, the one person he feels close to. After another logging job, Grainier returns home to find a wildfire engulfing the valley where his wife and child have been awaiting his return. Once the flames have subsided, he finds only ash where their cabin once stood and a cast-iron stove, a small chunk of birch still unburnt inside. “Everything he’d loved lying ashes around him,” Johnson writes. The story turns on the ambiguity of this tragedy’s meaning. Did Grainier bring this fire upon himself? Did his wife and child die for his moral failings? Is he cursed? Is he being punished by God?
“Train Dreams” is an unusual novella, with more in common with a book of the Old Testament than with much contemporary literature. Some might be tempted to call it a western, but anyone who has read it knows that it doesn’t sit easily in that genre. Nor does it fit neatly with Johnson’s other books. The prose shifts between precise moments and broad sweeps of time, capturing not only Grainier’s life, but also America’s violent shift from the strange, old West to the 20th century and its burgeoning technologies. There is a touch of Hemingway in the spare sentences, but they brim, just below the surface, with the almost electric heart that animated Whitman’s poetry. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Johnson’s significance, at least among writers, is hard to overstate. He is best known for his 1992 short-story collection, “Jesus’ Son,” an autofictional account of addiction. George Saunders, while teaching in the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University in 1998, wrote to him about the book: “I can’t think of a writer more admired by our students. Or by me.” Yet, focusing merely on his almost cultlike influence misses, as Rachel Kushner wrote, that he was also “a writer whose ambitions were in their own way as broad and burgeoning as Dostoyevsky’s.” From the beginning, his work attracted the admiration of masters. Raymond Carver called his first poems “harrowingly convincing.” Philip Roth said his first novel was “a small masterpiece.” By the time he passed in 2017, the list of living writers from whom he earned praise — Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Louise Erdrich, Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen — was almost as outsized as the dead ones with whom he was compared: Twain, Faulkner, Blake, God.
Yet, the details of Johnson’s life have been unusually hard to track down. He rarely spoke to reporters; was never profiled at length by a major magazine; never gave an interview to The Paris Review, which would be obligatory for a writer of his stature. He didn’t even show up to the ceremony to receive the 2007 National Book Award for “Tree of Smoke.” The writer Chris Offutt told me that he preferred it that way. “He had the idea of creating a legend about himself, and he would say that sometimes: ‘Keep the legend alive.’”
That has now changed, with “Train Dreams” arriving on Netflix last month at the same moment as “Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures,” by Ted Geltner, a biography that has a rightful claim as the first real accounting of Johnson’s life.
The biography shines an uncomfortably bright spotlight on an author who often chose to remain half in the shadow. Geltner’s reporting demystifies the troubled period of Johnson’s life that shaped “Jesus’ Son” and leaves the reader with, among other things, a set of damning facts. They present a portrait of a man who, like Grainier, had good reason to be haunted by what he had done. That understanding may even change how we read Johnson’s last, enigmatic novella.
Johnson lived for 67 years. If you were to divide his life in two, the second half begins in 1989, the year he purchased a cabin in Idaho. His most ambitious work would be written and published from this relative isolation, which would eventually become the setting for “Train Dreams.”
But he could never quite shake what had come in the first half. There were two failed marriages and one son, born when Johnson was only 19. Johnson was the son of a State Department officer and a homemaker, and he had lived in Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Virginia, Iowa, Arizona, Washington, Massachusetts, California, Illinois. He told his first wife that he would never get a “real job.” He tried panhandling, failed at drug dealing, gambled and lost. He once bought a boat for commercial fishing but never managed to get it in the water. He dropped acid for the first time in high school, became addicted to heroin before he finished his undergraduate degree and was an alcoholic for a long time after that. He spent at least seven days in county jail, three weeks at a psychiatric hospital, at least two stints in rehab and, by the time he bought the cabin in Idaho, a decade in recovery. He dedicated his third volume of poetry “to the people I have lied to.”
The feat of Geltner’s biography is, for the first time in print, untangling the complicated details of the first half of that life. Geltner’s work exemplifies the old-school tools of journalism: newspaper archives, cold calls, police reports, knocking on doors. One can imagine certain facts dug up from long lost connections surprising even Johnson, were he alive to read them.
The book focuses deeply on how Johnson’s life shaped “Jesus’ Son.” The collection, narrated by an addict who cannot keep his stories straight, permanently altered the landscape of short fiction in America. Johnson was drawing from specific moments of memory set in places that would be familiar to any addict — dive bars, abandoned houses, emergency rooms — but the fractured perspective of the narrator allowed him to go far beyond the confines of those scenes. He swerves into direct address, suddenly speaking to the reader, “You, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Elsewhere he becomes reflective, looking back across decades at a scene that, just the sentence before, we had been in the middle of. Johnson had found a way to take the minimalist realism of Carver and break the limitations of that then-dominant style with a poetic, prophetic voice.
As that book aged into canonical status, continuing to find readers long after it was published, Johnson often found ways to dismiss it. He liked to say that he published it only because he needed to pay off a tax debt. Johnson’s apparent embarrassment about the book’s success, though, might be easier to understand when held against the facts of his biography. He took the worst things he had done in the first half of his life, moments of genuine depravity, and made art from it; it isn’t hard to see how he may have felt guilty and ashamed while facing those things, again and again, as evidence of success.
Geltner tracks down a different origin story for that book’s material than what has been told before. Sometime during his first year at the University of Iowa, Johnson was arrested during an antiwar protest and made friends while in jail with John Dundon, a junkie who had been caught robbing a senior citizen for drug money. Johnson soon ingratiated himself into his circle of Iowa City petty criminals, taking notes of their lives with the apparent intention to write about them.
Geltner recounts some grim scenes involving Dundon and Jack Hottel, two men whose names were only slightly altered in the book, including a shooting at a farmhouse used to stash drugs. He also finds an elderly couple who had a terrible car wreck in Missouri, in 1972, while a hitchhiker rode in their back seat. Johnson had approached their car at a gas station, looking for a ride back to Iowa. The short story that Johnson wrote of that night, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” opens the collection and became one of his best-known works. The couple had no idea their own experiences had been transformed into a canonical work of fiction until Geltner knocked on their door.
But what becomes painfully clear in this account is that Johnson’s worst behaviors weren’t only self-destructive. Both his first wife and a long-term girlfriend recount times in the 1970s when he hit them, sometimes so violently that they ended up in the hospital or talking to the police. In these cases, Johnson lied or apologized his way out and persuaded the women to continue their relationships.
If the fact that Johnson committed domestic violence is one of the biography’s revelations, it is also one that has been sitting in plain sight for much of his career. In the short story “Work,” the narrator confesses to us:
Once, as we stood arguing at a streetcorner, I punched her in the stomach. She doubled over and broke down crying. A car full of young college men stopped beside us.
“She’s feeling sick,” I told them.
“Bullshit,” one of them said. “You elbowed her right in the gut.”
“He did, he did, he did,” she said, weeping.
[…]
They put her in the car and drove away.
But she came back.
Worse, somehow, are the details of his son Morgan’s life. On the night Morgan was born, Johnson drank a case of beer with a friend, put his pregnant wife, Nancy, in the back seat of the car and showed up at the hospital drunk. The nurse sent him to the waiting room while Nancy gave birth. Thus began a pattern of estrangement. Johnson and Nancy divorced when Morgan was 2. Geltner’s conversations with Morgan are substantial, digging deep into the ways his relationship with his father shaped his life. What he recalls of his earliest childhood is strikingly grim: “There was a lot of fighting and drinking, and then makeup sex, then screaming again,” he told Geltner of his memories of living for a summer with Johnson and his girlfriend, the poet Susan Yuzna, in Port Townsend, Wash. At some point, after learning of the conditions that Morgan was living in, Nancy’s new husband showed up unannounced, said a few words to Denis, put Morgan in the car and drove away. For some years, Morgan grew to know his father through what he read in his books.
The tragedy of Morgan’s account to Geltner is that, though he was estranged from his father, he apparently grew to idolize him. The broad strokes of Morgan’s life — addiction, incarceration, street life — more than a little resemble the characters Johnson wrote about but narrowly avoided becoming. At one point, Morgan tells Geltner a story about plotting a robbery with some potential accomplices in a manner lifted directly from Johnson’s first novel, “Angels.” And as his life spiraled, he returned to his father in unpredictable intervals, sometimes needing money or help, sometimes looking for a reconciliation that neither could ever quite find.
Geltner’s book grows thin in the second half of Johnson’s life. His marriage with Cindy Lee Johnson, with whom he would remain until the end of his life, lacks the detail that animates his previous relationships, and his later works are given short, perfunctory treatments that lend little insight. Perhaps I’m just being generous, but I found this absence of information useful at times, maybe not unlike how Johnson’s books always left something out, allowing the mind to wander and search for meaning. Without knowing more of the second half of Johnson’s life, I found myself trying to imagine his regrets, what ways he tried to make amends for them.
We do know, though, that in the beginning of the second half of Johnson’s life, a Hollywood studio cut him a check for the film rights to “Angels.” Johnson thought the check might be large enough to buy a house anywhere he liked, but he had debts. “I sat down and I wrote three checks to people I owed money to. I had nothing left,” he would later tell Offutt, his friend. “North Idaho was the only place.”
He was 40 years old and divorced for a second time. Whatever had come before, now there was just a cabin on 40 acres deep in remote Boundary County, Idaho. The Moyie River ran in the distance, the Canadian border a few miles away. As a commitment to his sobriety, perhaps, he put up a sign on the property that said Doce Pasos North: “Twelve Steps North.”
Johnson began writing “Train Dreams” in Idaho in 1996, scribbling down ideas and observations of the area on scraps of paper. His earliest inspirations were distinctly historical in nature, far removed from the experiences of his own life. He copied down facts from old newspaper archives about men warming frozen dynamite on wood-burning stoves, cattle being driven across frozen rivers, the violent discrimination against Chinese immigrants. He found an anecdote about a man who claimed to have been shot by his own dog. He accumulated hundreds of little notes and fragments of phrases into a folder before finally finishing a draft in 2001.
It was not an immediate success. He initially submitted it to Men’s Journal, where the editor Will Blythe, who commissioned much of Johnson’s journalism, worked. After Blythe circulated the manuscript, it was rejected. The Paris Review published it in the summer of 2002, but its circulation was small. For almost a decade, “Train Dreams” was available only to savvy readers who knew to pick up a copy of the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories, where it had been anthologized.
It stayed that way until 2011. Johnson was long past his deadline on a contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a collection of three novellas. Jonathan Galassi, then president of the publisher, said he simply gave up waiting. “I said, ‘You know we’re never going to get another novella out of Denis, so let’s just publish this as a book,’” he told me. In this way, it was Johnson’s notorious disregard for deadlines that led to his nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.
The poignancy of Johnson’s novella, and in Bentley’s rendering of it in the film, is in how Grainier does not simply succumb to grief in the second half of his life. The story goes on, despite his own inability to process his loss, with Grainier rebuilding his cabin, finding new work and quietly living in moments of strange and affecting beauty.
One night, outside of Grainier’s rebuilt cabin, he finds a hurt child, around the age his daughter would have been had she somehow survived the wildfire. Is this his daughter? If so, she has been changed, transformed somehow into a half-human, half-wolfish being. She is in apparent distress and he desperately wants to help her. He lays her in his bed and, eventually, falls asleep sitting at her side. In the morning, she is gone as mysteriously as she arrived. We are not quite sure if this night is real or just a dream.
The child’s brief return leaves us with more questions than answers. Rereading the book after finishing Johnson’s biography, I found myself with a new question: Could this be Morgan? There was something about the resemblance — a lost child returning hurt, almost unrecognizable, in need of help — that caught my attention in a different way this time.
The power of Johnson’s work derives in part from an indirect process of accumulation. Many writers go through life gathering raw material: names, turns of phrase, their own mistakes, small pleasures, facts of history. Johnson’s method of organizing these bits of inspiration was to scribble them down into small notes and file them away into folders corresponding to different projects. A file could accumulate for years or even decades before he would begin a proper draft that made use of them. For a more structurally disciplined or deadline-oriented novelist, spending years collecting scraps of disconnected images or ideas before committing any time to a draft or developing even the notion of a plot would be disastrous. In Johnson’s files, though, it is possible to glimpse how the process worked.
Today, they’re kept among the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. What’s striking about his scraps is their immediacy: On a wrinkled-up piece of paper torn from a pocket notepad, it feels possible to witness the moment that an idea, unprompted, came into his head.
About 30 years ago, he flipped over a page of stationary from a hotel in Idaho and scribbled a quick note on the back, apparently one seed of the novella:
“Logger hit by tree – OK but grows dizzy & strange over course of days & one morning was dead.”
On a page torn from a spiral notebook: “1800’s name for shrink – ‘alienist.’” On a sheet folded up and torn in half: “stove – a chunk of a̶̶̶l̶̶̶d̶̶̶e̶̶̶r̶̶̶ birch inside it only half-burned.” On another: “Civil war tents – bloodstains & patched bullet holes.” A burst of poetry: “The mustard-colored fog of lodgepole pollen thru the valley when the wind came up after 3 days calm.” Some notes only a word or two — “powder monkey,” “pulchritude” — or a name, “Cabeza De Vaca.” A question: “Where did the Chinese go on the train after they were driven out of Bonner’s?” Under the date “1918 Spanish Flu 20 mil killed worldwide,” two words in capital letters “TRAIN DREAMS” circled with a flourish of pen.
Is it too obvious to note how Johnson’s poetic process — collecting unplanned information and ideas untethered by reason only to synthesize them back into a narrative order — resembles the mind creating a dream? It is a mechanism, psychoanalysts like to note, that simultaneously obscures and reveals.
With a book like “Train Dreams,” composed from this hypnagogic accumulation of scraps, it is tempting to try to arrange the details back into more intimate truths. There is the life of a man cleaved in half, perhaps on account of his own moral failings. There is a child lost to him, gone somewhere far away, possibly forever. There is the return of a child much later, hurt and made unrecognizable by the world. There is the man’s desperate yearning to help the child and, in the morning, the realization that he cannot.
When I talked with Clint Bentley, the film’s director, he said that part of what made Grainier compelling to him was the “pre-Freudian” mind-set of his time. Without a framework to process his grief and regrets, Grainier’s visions would have seemed all the more real to him: ghosts, spirits, messages from God. Understanding, as we do today, that the dreams and ghosts that haunt Grainier are animated by the latent content of his life, we can get a glimpse of the things he cannot say. Understanding more of him requires our own interpretations.
It’s hard not to see some parallel in Johnson’s dream work, the method he used to create “Train Dreams” from the suggestions of his unconscious mind. His scribbled visions, in some way, contained his desires and regrets. At the same time, perhaps they protected him from the things that were simply too painful to say directly. The notes for the book contain nothing about his son.
Source photographs for illustration: Marion Ettlinger/Corbis/Getty Images; Pierre Longnus/The Image Bank/Getty Images; Library of Congress; Bettmann/Getty Images.
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