‘Robert Grainier is a day labourer in the American West, felling the trees that feed the railways. It is the start of the twentieth century, and the world is changing at a rapid pace.
Life is fragile in the wilds of the frontier; disease and forest fires are rife. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainier journeys, struggling to make sense of the bewildering changes transforming the nation.
Rich and muscular, sweeping and incantatory, Train Dreams is an epic in miniature: an elegy to the ravaged beauty of a lost landscape, and a haunting indictment of the cost of our modern way of life.’
Immediately upon finishing the final sentence in Denis Johnson’s novel Train Dreams, I started reading the book all over again, unwilling to relinquish its mesmerising prose and certain that further richnesses were buried in its pages. I am particularly fond of the literary genre into which Train Dreams falls, quiet novels that tell the stories of apparently unremarkable Everyman heroes, holding our notions of individual significance and worldly value to the light in the process. Some of my favourite authors write in this vein, from John Williams and John McGahern to Robert Seethaler and Marilynne Robinson; in their commitment to upholding the integrity and dignity of individual lives, their gentle lyricism, and their rejection of arrogant omniscience or authorial judgement, these novelists advance a deeply moral form of writing, for which I have the utmost respect and admiration. In Train Dreams, Johnson takesas his protagonist Robert Grainier, a forester and railroad worker living in the Idaho panhandle in the early twentieth century, combining the aforementioned tradition of Everyman heroism with the kind of muscular and unflinching naturalism I associate with the likes of Cormac McCarthy and Hernan Diaz, a quasi-allegorical literature of the American landscape, and particularly its former frontiers, as a world of terrifying magnitude, ferocity, and opportunity. Train Dreams is arresting from the very outset, opening with a scene in which Grainier finds himself irresistibly sucked into murderous, racist violence undertaken on behalf of the Spokane International Railway. Readers witness Grainier involving himself in a kind of kangaroo court, lending his physical strength to the attempted murder of a Chinese labourer accused of stealing from a massive corporation that affords its labourers the same respect as ants, or grains of sand, and which explicitly, unapologetically values its profit-making facilities above human life. This opening episode lays bare the fragility and brutality of life on the frontier: Grainier aids this gang of vigilante executioners without thought, let alone question, but he is too suspicious of the motives of his fellow men to join a group of workers bathing in the river, preferring instead to sit alone and guard his possessions jealously. This kind of ‘every man for himself’ individualism, cut-throat and capitalistic in nature, contrasts with Grainier’s fundamental gentleness, framing the corruptive influence of the American Dream in starkly tragic terms. At the end of this opening section of the book, Grainier latches onto the idea of the Chinese man cursing him:
‘Now Grainier stood by the table in the single-room cabin and worried. The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully while they dragged him along, and any bad thing might come of it. Though astonished now at the frenzy of the afternoon, baffled by the violence, at how it had carried him away like a seed in a wind, young Grainier still wished they’d gone ahead and killed that Chinaman before he’d cursed them.’
There is an aching poignancy in Johnson’s emphasis on Grainier’s attempts to secure an identifiable source of blame for future misfortune; it is as though he must be able to attribute the tragedies that befall him to some retributive, causative force, shying away from the prospect of an anonymising cosmic indifference, the apathy of federal government and corporate organisations towards the fate of the individual writ large.
Johnson draws on the inherited allegorical weight of both the forest and the railroad in maintaining tension between Grainier’s individual contribution to the expansion of the railroad, that emblem of human progress, and the guttering anonymity of his protagonist’s way of life among the trees. Traditionally, since the early Puritan settlers began casting the forests of New England as malevolent spaces in which the morals and values of ‘civilised’ society are eroded and upended, the vastness of American forests has been framed in terms of the freedoms and opportunities so often associated with the United States, as well as the threat of engulfment posed to the individual in an indifferent natural scheme built to such an incomprehensible scale. Even as Grainier insists on the value of his own endeavours on behalf of the railroad companies, likening the project to the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, and even as he bears witness to the wonders and hallmarks of America’s strides through the twentieth century like a modern-day Everyman, the insignificance of his life as an individual, and of his experiences of loss and loneliness, seems inarguable. Capturing the indiscriminate slicing of the Fates’ shears through the threads of individual human lives, Train Dreams is punctuated with accounts of sudden deaths that must be reckoned with and absorbed by characters stunned by uncomprehending shock and grief. The exigencies of frontier life demand immediate practicality and a ceaseless commitment to and then, and next; there is little room for elegies, and little time to mourn. This recurring motif is encapsulated by the example of Arn Peeples, a quasi-heroic man full of stories and superstitions, who served as a ‘powder monkey’ in the excavation of tunnels, and whose death is so abrupt and mundane as to seem almost cartoonish:
‘It looked certain Arn Peeples would exit this world in a puff of smoke with a monstrous noise, but he went out quite differently, hit across the back of his head by a dead branch falling off a tall larch – the kind of snag called a “widow maker” with just this kind of misfortune in mind.’
Despite the anonymity and brutality of frontier living, the account of Grainier’s life provided by Johnson is irresistible in its insistence on his quiet dignity and gentleness. Grainier is the archetypal American individualist, a frontier man with no memory of his origins and little capacity to articulate any expectations or hopes. In his unlikely heroism, Grainier is comparable to William Stoner, the Everyman protagonist of John Williams’s Stoner; Grainier is a laconic man about whom little is said, a man defined by physical labour and guided by his own moral steerlights, whose resilience and quiet thoughtfulness endears him endlessly to readers. Similarly to Williams, Johnson is unflinching in heaping tragedies and misfortunes on his protagonist, and in observing the rapidity with which his life and legacy slips from memory. Both authors, however, place enormous stock in transient moments of peace, love, and joy as life’s true currency; this is exemplified by the sweet simplicity of Grainier’s proposal to his girlfriend, Gladys, which Johnson teases out in beautiful, evocative prose:
‘When the sun got too hot, they moved under a lone jack pine in the pasture of Jeremy grass, he with his back against the bark and she with her cheek on his shoulder. The white daisies dabbed the field so profusely that it seemed to foam. He wanted to ask for her hand now. He was afraid to ask. She must want him to ask, or surely she wouldn’t lie here with him, breathing against his arm, his face against her hair – her hair faintly fragrant of sweat and soap…”Would you care to be my wife, Gladys?” He astonished himself by saying. “Yes, Bob, I believe I would like it,” she said, and she seemed to hold her breath a minute; then he sighed, and both laughed.’
In this restorative faith in the importance of the momentary, Johnson evokes a similar passage from the memoir of John McGahern:
‘The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.’
At times, Train Dreams reads like an environmental fable, as Johnson enacts the old duality of man set against nature. However, despite the Everyman heroism of Grainier’s characterisation, Johnson’s account of the American landscape lacks the anthropocentric machismo of Ernest Hemingway or Jack London, as well as the sententious moralism of Richard Powers. Paralleling the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Hernan Diaz, and John Williams, Johnson’s exploration of the storied renewal of the American landscape, and the endlessly, cyclically Edenic possibilities thus offered to its people, is never stale in its symbolism, and is carried off with plain-speaking, unadorned lyricism that refutes judgement. In the context of the natural disaster that irrevocably alters Grainier’s life, the subsequent adaptation and regrowth of the surrounding landscape is appalling in its implications of annihilation as a form of rebirth, outstripping religious logic:
‘By spring a few dispossessed families had returned to start again in the Moyea Valley. Grainier hadn’t thought he’d try it himself, but in may he camped alongside the river, fishing for speckled trout and hunting for a rare and very flavourful mushroom the Canadians called morel, which sprang up on ground disturbed by fire. Progressing north for several days, Grainier found himself within a shout of his old home and climbed the draw by which he and Gladys habitually found their way to and from the water. He marvelled at how many shoots and flowers had already sprouted from the general death. He climbed to their cabin site and saw no hint, no sign at all of his former life, only a patch of dark ground surrounded by the black spikes of spruce. The cabin was cinders, burned so completely that its ashes had mixed in with a common layer all about and then been tamped down by the snows and washed and dissolved by the thaw. He found the wood stove lying on its side with its legs curled up under it like a beetle’s. He righted it and pried off the handle. The hinges broke away and the door came off. Inside sat a chunk of birch, barely charred. “Gladys!” He said out loud. Everything he’d loved lying ashes around him, but here this thing she’d touched and held. He poked through the caked mud around the grounds and found almost nothing he could recognise. He scuffed along through the ashes and kicked up one of the spikes he’d used in building the cabin’s walls, but couldn’t find any others. He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Grainier that here had come a fire stronger than God.’
Despite this awe-filled account of the inhuman, post-human resilience of the land, Johnson underpins his novel with tacit horror at the manmade depredations inflicted on the natural world in the name of progress and civilisation, seeming always to question whether the ends can even come close to justifying the means. Without slipping into the saccharine priestliness of Richard Powers, Johnson’s prose is steeped in unassuming sorrow at Grainier’s participation in such a destructive capitalist system, which erodes his own physical fitness just as heedlessly as it leeches the natural resources and richness of the landscape. Although there is profound gravity in Johnson’s treatment of the sorrows of Grainier’s life and the wider systems and processes of which they are a symptom, the novel is suffused with a gentle humour, both fond and poignant, which is born of the near absurdity and miraculousness of life in these circumstances. The gaucheness fostered by the loneliness of frontier life makes for difficulties of communication that cannot being anything but hilarious, while the account of Grainier attempting to teach a suspected wolf cub to howl merges deeply humane tenderness with comic awkwardness to supremely moving effect:
‘Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall…Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s programme with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.’
Train Dreams is a gem of a novel, haunted by a strange and lucid beauty that belies the roughness of the world in which it is set. In full flow, the potent lyricism of Johnson’s prose is mesmerising, and the gentle pull of the narrative, by turns sorrowful and sweet, is totally irresistible. Although I have heard that the rest of Johnson’s oeuvre is even more brutal than the tragedies and frontier violence of Train Dreams, it is deeply exciting to come across an unfamiliar author with a significant back catalogue to be enjoyed. I will be readily turning to Johnson in future, and would highly recommend Train Dreams to anyone as a near-perfect example of the power of quiet narratives, and Everyman heroes.