' FLAGRANT -SELF DESTRUCTIVE- GESTURES : BOOK REVIEW

 

Flagrant, Self- Destructive Gestures : A Biography of Denis Johnson. By Ted Geltner.

When Denis Johnson told his parents he wanted to be a writer, they supported the idea. His father, a diplomat who'd taken his family to live in Tokyo and Manila, was an acquaintance of the poet Stanley Plumly.

He asked Plumly what Denis should do. Plumly replied : '' He should get himself to the Writer's Workshop in Iowa City, indubitably.''

Johnson arrived at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate in the fall of 1967. By the time he left Iowa City, more than seven years later, he was both a legend and a cautionary tale.

Everyone understood, almost on contact, that he was the best writer of his era there. Before long he was selling remarkable poems and stories to important publications.

It didn't hut his reputation that, as one classmate remembers in '' Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures,'' Ted Galtner's new biography of Johnson , that '' he had long hair, and he looked like Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. He was this golden kind of guy.''

Johnson's literary bible, his vade mecum, was Leonard Gardner's novel '' Fat City,'' which he read repeatedly.

What attracted Johnson to '' Fat City,'' a novel about second-rate boxers, was its spareness and grit and the resonance of its despair. Garner captured lives at the margins.

Johnson studied '' Fat City '' while drifting into increasingly marginal places himself.

He was a born nonconformist and the kind of person, Geltner writes, whose life '' was touched by experiences that went way beyond those of ordinary people.''

At Iowa he became an alcoholic and a heroin addict. He sometimes dealt heroin, too -unsuccessfully. He wasn't threatening enough to compel enough to pay up.

Also, he was too wasted to try very hard.

The World Students Society thanks Dwight Garner.