Denis Johnson’s Generosity

Denis and I became friends in the late seventies, when we were both living in Phoenix, a city that neither of us loved. Taking refuge from the heat and the faux-cowboy, arms-bearing culture, we got together to talk about books and writing and the prisoners we sometimes worked with at the state penitentiary in Florence. Both of us in need of some spiritual footing, we now and then accompanied each other to church. Denis was coming out of a troubled chapter in his life—an imaginative version of which he was to create, indelibly, in “Jesus’ Son,” and, more obliquely, in other works—and supporting himself, he told me, by renting out his uncanny typing skills at a high premium to local agencies and businesses that needed rush jobs on contracts and applications. Common friends who had known him at Iowa told me that he had enjoyed a certain renown there for his speed on the keys, and that other young writers, approaching deadlines, often hired him to type up their stories for workshop, and even entire theses.