Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists

Dennis Cooper was first published and celebrated—by Edmund White and Felice Picano, among others—as a poet, but is best known now for a series of highly innovative works of fiction featuring adolescents, music and youth culture, and explicit sex and violence, such as Closer, Frisk, Try, and Guide. Born in 1953, Cooper grew up in California. He studied for two years at Pasadena City College and one year at Pitzer College before dropping out.

Cooper’s first published poetry collection, Terror of Earrings (Los Angeles: Kinks Press, 1973), appeared when he was twenty. In 1976 Cooper set up Little Caesar magazine, founding Little Caesar Press two years later, through which he published a second poetry collection, Tiger Beat (Los Angeles: Little Caesar, 1978). Antoine Monnier, Cooper’s first published prose work, appeared the same year (Los Angeles: Anon Press, 1978). He became director of programming at the art venue Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, in 1979; in the same year, his third poetry collection, Idols (New York: SeaHorse, 1979), was published. Three further collections followed: The Tenderness of the Wolves (Trumansberg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1981); The Missing Men (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Am Here Books/Immediate Editions, 1981); and He Cried (San Francisco: Black Star, 1985).

In 1984 Cooper published the novella Safe (New York: Sea-Horse, 1984). He moved first to New York, then to Amsterdam, where he wrote the first of what was to become a much acclaimed sequence of novels, Closer (New York: Grove Press, 1989). This was followed by Frisk (New York: Grove Press, 1991), Try (New York: Grove Press, 1994), and Guide (New York: Grove Press, 1997). The fifth and last volume of this loose series is Period (New York: Grove Press, 2000).

Other work includes 1992’s publication of shorter pieces, Wrong (New York: Grove Press, 1992). The same year, Cooper edited Discontents: New Queer Writers (New York: Amethyst, 1992). In 1995 his The Dream Police: Selected Poems, 1969–1993 (New York: Grove Press, 1995) appeared. Cooper has also coauthored two cartoon storybooks: Jerk (San Francisco: Artspace Books, 1993), with Nayland Blake, and Horror Hospital: Unplugged (New York: Juno Books, 1996), with Keith Mayerson.

Cooper is currently working on two projects: a pornographic photo-novella in collaboration with the artist Vincent Fecteau, and a nonfiction book on youth culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where this interview took place on Wednesday, November 19, 1997.

RC In an interview you gave to Kasia Boddy, you talked readily of your sequence of novels reflecting a kind of ongoing exploration of the self.¹ You even accounted for them as reflections on your own emotional disposition. Not every writer wants to reflect on work in relation to autobiography. Do you do that easily?

DC I can. It’s important. My work’s so tied into those things. It’s crucial for me to do that, because the books are a cycle; there is this progress, and I need to study my own emotions formally in a certain way. I’ve learned how to do that. Also, I was at a really emotional point with Try, and I was very keyed into that for that interview.

RC I was thinking of how you discussed your work-in-progress at that time in terms of a search for “bliss.” Was Guide the product of that search?

DC No. The books are rewritten and edited so heavily. That’s the way I work. They have to keep up with me, so at that point, that was what I wanted to do. But it was a little utopian. It’s in there, though. It’s just been fractured a lot. Guide was changed because I tend to write about people around me. The guy who became Luke was actually someone I met. That changed the whole book.

When I talked to Kasia Boddy, he wasn’t an issue yet. So it was more about my initial idea, which was about memories of the LSD state of mind, and trying to simulate that, then study my subject matter through its scrambled, subjective scrim. I wanted to create a kind of stratosphere of searching, wandering, revved, nonjudgmental thoughts around the material, as a way of both opening it up and locating it squarely within the hermetic, somewhat psychotic context that my work requires. So Guide is very revealing and utterly secretive at the same time.

RC Guide constituted a big break from the previous novels. I don’t know if its reception in the States reflected that, or even if you felt conscious of it. In terms of narrative, there’s the sustained use of a single, first-person voice. But there’s also a more general coherence in Guide.

DC Some critics recognized it, but most people don’t really get my work. I’m categorized as a certain thing, and people react to it as though it’s the same book again and again. Every time I write a book I’m really trying to kill off my interest in what I’m writing about. This time, it almost did. They’re all mutations of the same book; they’re intentionally that way. But Guide is located in my mindscape, which differentiates it from the other novels.

RC One new aspect of Guide is that you loiter on abstract emotional states without translating them into a kind of sustained metaphorical language of the material body, as you did before. There’s something brave about refusing to do that.

RC Is it something you plan to continue? You’ve spoken of having a sense of the novels forming a coherent, five-book project.

DC Well, I had that from Try on. They were always intended to be a series, but when I wrote Try I knew there were two more. I’m doing the last one now. It’s called Period.

To me, the series can be seen as a single body being alternately tortured and repaired in a certain way, so that the form of the novels mirrors the content. Closer is that body. It contains everything that will appear in the succeeding four novels. It’s very solid, airtight, compacted. Everything in Closer—the violence, love, sex, art, drugs, whatever—has the same weight and is caught up in the overall rush and chill of the style. Frisk is that body damaged. It’s structured like a dismembered yet living body. It’s still extremely organized, but it’s more revealing of its internal workings—its desires, fantasies, fears, hopes, et cetera. Try is that body repaired, restored to life. It’s an attempt to live and function normally, given the damage it’s incurred. Guide is that body after a second dismemberment. It’s laid open, and what is revealed is an elaborate, rather delusional self-justification. There’s little of the body left; there’s mostly just the mind overcompensating for its physical sparseness. Period is the final rebuilding of the body. It’s essentially a skeleton, a barren structure, an attempt to create an illusion, a mystique, a sense of meaning around what is essentially a decimated work, a zombie, the walking dead.

I guess it’s a strange way to think about the novels, and it’s not necessary that readers think about them in those terms, but I do.

RC When you speak of each novel being involved with killing off your interest in what’s in it, is that something identifiable in retrospect?

DC Well, it’s always the same thing. With each book I have a specific approach in mind, which I hope will complete my need to express it. Each book has a different approach, so it’s about that. Closer was so impacted and tight. The paragraphs were all hypnotically the same length. I was trying really to freeze it. Then I tried to open it up. Guide and Frisk have a lot of relationship for me, because Frisk was really an attempt to take responsibility for the material, and that was the riskier book at that time. Try was written in the middle of an emotional mess. I was trying to find love. I thought if I could find the love in it, that might do it. It didn’t really work. Then Guide was really a serious attempt to take responsibility for the work. I tried to specify the work.

I do get sick of people misunderstanding the work. I tried really to locate my relationship to the work as honestly and complexly as I could. The last one, Guide, is just like giving it its due.

RC I’m interested in each book’s regard for aesthetic processes. Though you speak of Frisk in terms of taking responsibility for the material, at the same time, of all the books, it’s Frisk which most forthrightly frames the material within a neat aesthetic. It’s not exactly a “how-to-read-this” framework, but it is more heavily preoccupied with aesthetic framing—in the opening and closing scenes with the photographs, especially—than Try is, for instance. But, then, perhaps that isn’t so far from the word you used: “responsibility.”

DC There has to be a balance in it for me. What you’re saying is true, because the form of Frisk was about just setting up that whole duality of the order of the world versus the disorder of the brain, and somehow making them work together. In Guide that’s true too in a different way. Try was written out of a sense of my life as completely chaotic. The reason that book’s the most straightforward is just because I needed something formally straightforward, and that’s about as conventional as I could ever get.

RC Is it to do with closeness to the material? You’ve spoken about how you wrote Try while a friend was detoxing.

DC Yes. The books are all for somebody—a specific person. With Try, I was having a very intense relationship with a heroin addict. It wasn’t a sexual relationship, but it was very intense. It played on all my worst “caretaker” nightmare roles. So that was just me trying to understand that. Ziggy in it is partially me, but also another boy I used to know.

RC That leads to the placing of your fictional self, “Dennis,” in the novels. In Guide there’s a striking moment where this past, fictional self intrudes: the “Luke” character is discussing early works by “Dennis.” Does this placing of “real” figures in the fiction—albeit projected and imagined—cause problems, either within or beyond the texts?

DC Sure. They’re completely intermixed to me when I’m doing the first couple of years of work on them. The last year is usually all refinement. At that point it’s done. But, for instance, the person “Luke” is in my life: by the time the book was finished, my relationship with him was completely different than it was in the book, but I couldn’t incorporate that. So at a certain point I cut off and it becomes totally aesthetic. But for the first couple of years the two are intermixed, and that organizes the book.

RC I’m interested in the extent to which the conception of each book is clear at the outset. Are some things already “organized”? Is there an aim to be executed?

DC Yes, but it changes. There’s a start, then it changes. Writing’s very difficult for me. I’m not a born writer, despite what William Burroughs said. It’s very difficult. I have to write an enormous amount of material and experiment in different things just to get anywhere in the beginning. There’s usually an initial idea. When I was talking in that interview, that’s when I was beginning with Guide. I was thinking about LSD. That part of that book is true: I took an enormous amount of LSD when I was younger. I took it every day for a month. I was remembering what that felt like; to be that high all the time, and how amazing it was.

I wanted to write about that, and also about kiddie porn. I lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years, and there was a lot of it there. I was just astonished by it. I’ve always written about it to some degree, but I really wanted to write about it in a way that was acceptable. There are silly things, too: I had a crush on the bass player of Blur, so I wanted to write about that. I’d written an article for Spin that ended up being rewritten and worked into the novel. I’d been thinking about the kids that featured in that and their stories. Then I just work it all through. The formal approach takes a lot for me to get to.

RC Do you write quickly in the first instance? Is there a kind of outpouring of raw material?

DC Sometimes; sometimes not. I’ll try different things out. I was trying to get at the LSD thing. That was the initial thing. I was having a really hard time with it; reading every novel I could find, every book about LSD: Tom Wolfe, Tom McGuane, Ishmael Reed, Irvine Welsh: everyone who’d written about drugs. I couldn’t get it. Then someone said: “You should read Ivy Compton-Burnett.” I loved it. It drove me crazy. It was just the opposite. So I thought: “I can write about LSD like Ivy Compton-Burnett would.” That really started it. At the very beginning of the book, there’s a little bit—almost too much—of Ivy Compton-Burnett. I was so influenced by her work at that point: that really cold, hard style. I can only read four or five of her novels till I get sick of them. But they are brilliant. So something funny like that will kick it in for me.

RC Do you find it easy not to be affected by the style of the other things you are reading?

DC Yes. I’ve got such a specific style. I don’t even worry about it. It’s been really hard for me to find a style. I only did with Closer, really. I trust it, and it’s immutable. I’m not worried about that. Sometimes I’ll sit down and try to figure out how somebody wrote, like Ivy Compton-Burnett, but as soon as I do, it’s my own. I’ll do a little bit in her voice, then it immediately becomes my own. It’s too ingrained in me how to write.

DC Well, I really believe in style. I’m very interested in what formal things can do, so it’s not that hard for me. For better or worse, I have a very distinctive voice, and I can always write what I want to write the way I want to write it. I always study things. Popular music influences me a lot. I’m always trying to transfer ideas from music or bands I like. I try somehow to take their ideas and make them into prose. With writers, too: different books from different writers really help me write. And film.

DC I guess so. A lot of people write about music, but I’m not sure they let it influence the way they write. I don’t just pop the names in because I think kids will like the books. I really like that stuff. Usually when I write about a band, it’s because I’ve really been studying their style and trying to do something with it.

RC I was trying to think of other writers doing that. Hanif Kureishi said punk moved him to write.

DC Yes. I can feel that in his work. There must be others. Bret Easton Ellis’s work is influenced by pop music. I trust his interest in it. I know he’s obsessed with it. You can see that in the work. He’s not just namedropping.

RC One reason for mentioning Hanif Kureishi was because he suggested writing came from a desire to put himself on stage in some way which couldn’t be carried through in music.

DC I had bands for a while, but it didn’t work. I wrote before I listened to music, though.

DC Yes. I drew a lot of pictures, though, too. When I was in high school, I was more known as an artist. But I was writing as well, from when I was really young. I became really serious about writing when I was around fifteen. Then I just dedicated myself to it. It’s weird, because I’m not a natural writer. Or maybe it’s that I want to write complex things and it’s very hard to do. Maybe if I relax a little, I could write very easily. But I can’t do that. I write journalism, which I find relatively easy, but I don’t think I’m very good at it. I’m lucky to get the gigs because it’s not very good journalism.

RC You say writing’s very hard. Could the difficulty be part of its attraction?

DC It’s got to be. I love the amount of effort it takes to do what I want to do.

DC Yes. Occasionally I’ll write something easy, and it doesn’t interest me at all. I’ve published some things that were fairly easy. When people like them, it bothers the shit out of me. One reason I quit writing poetry is because it just wasn’t hard enough.

RC You’ve spoken of your attention to form and care for language. Do you have a sense of frustration at the way your books are often considered less in terms of form, and more with what is considered extreme subject matter?

DC Yes. It really bothers me. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t take it personally. I think it’s a cultural deal. People don’t really write books like the ones I grew up reading and the kinds of things I like. People don’t like films like that anymore, either. Godard’s films open and play for three days here. Nobody sees them. I have an audience, so some people are interested. But it does amaze me that people don’t want that kind of experience from writing anymore. I’m not saying my work doesn’t have problems, or that it’s the ultimate in anything. But it can be very frustrating.

RC When you mention the writing you used to enjoy reading, who are you thinking of?

DC I’m a big Francophile, so: Bataille, Blanchot, Genet, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautréamont; the nouveau roman. Nobody gives a shit about that stuff anymore.

RC Aren’t you essentially describing America’s cultural self-centeredness? You live in L.A., after all—a kind of focus for American-centered culture.

DC I remember in Amsterdam it was different. Céline was really famous there and influenced a lot of their major writers. You don’t see that here.

David Foster Wallace is brilliant, and there are occasionally people who are really great who get successful here, but otherwise it can be frustrating.

RC It isn’t every writer who is so subject to content-led critiques of his or her work, however. I want to press you on that.

DC I float two different ways in my work. But the content’s so glaring that some people can only see the glare, no matter how subtly I try to undercut that stuff; to subvert it.

I just realize there’s nothing really you can do. I thought Guide would change things, and it did to some degree. But people cannot deal with the subject matter. On the other hand, the form’s so complex. There’s so much stuff going on in the language and style that people who might look for a visceral kick don’t get it; there’s too much interference. My work isn’t Poppy Z. Brite. Then, being gay, there are so many gay people who just hate me, and think I’m horrible and awful.

DC The response to my work in England has been really great, comparatively. I’ve been really happy being published over there. And in some other European countries, too, the response has been much better. Here I still get these unbelievable reviews that are like: “This guy should be shot!” It blows my mind.

RC There’s a relatively new, bourgeois construct of “gay identity” found in, say, the Advocate, which seems very keen to protect itself from fictional worlds such as yours. Could the problem simply be this: many gay readers still need some sort of authentication of their lives in the literature they read, in order to feel comfortable with being gay? I can see you don’t offer that to them.

DC No. But, then, there are a lot of gay people who really like my work because they feel really alienated from all of that. Gay identity doesn’t interest me. I don’t buy it, personally. OK—it’s great: it’s a natural thing to have happened; there are so many happy people now in this neighborhood—West Hollywood—compared to what happened before. That’s what’s most important. But even since I’ve been writing, there’s been this major shift. When I was first published, if you were gay and smart, you read literature. It was part of the thing. Now that’s not true at all. Gay men don’t need to read literature anymore. There’s so much stuff available to look at, read, or see. There’s queer cinema, gay art, this or that. So literature has suffered because of that. It’s not like when I was a kid, where you read William Burroughs because there wasn’t much else to read.

It’s really interesting to do readings in A Different Light [gay bookstore chain]. On each book tour, it’s a different crowd. Literature doesn’t mean that much to the gay community now. But what do you do, because if I was somebody who just wanted to have a nice place, be in love, and have money, it would be great, wouldn’t it? It is great, but it has nothing to do with me. I’ve never been involved in gay culture, really.

RC But you’re right that in the past, the act of exploring—or even sublimating—your sexual identity in the literature you read was an important aspect of gay culture. Nowadays gay culture is largely about sex and sexual expression, and if its literature fails to reflect the appropriate sense of euphoria or arrival, it’s critiqued.

DC I suppose so. It’s amazing how quickly that’s changed. It wasn’t that long ago that, with authors like David Leavitt and Edmund White, people read them and cared about them. It’s not true anymore.

RC Implicitly, we’re considering notions of readership and audience at this point. Do you have a conception of your readership that impacts on your work? Does the question of who reads you concern you at all?

DC Yes, but it doesn’t affect the way I write. Not with this work, anyway. When I finish the fifth book, I’m leaving myself open to any possibilities, so we’ll see then. But it hasn’t here—though to some degree, even though it wasn’t the main impulse, with Try I was trying to show that in some way I wasn’t a monster. With Guide, I was trying to show that my thinking about the stuff in it was very complex—partly because I thought people were seeing me as someone who jacked off to snuff videos. But it hasn’t affected the way I write. I want my work to be very pure. It comes from a very pure space.

RC Perhaps the perpetual reduction of your work to its subject matter has hardened you. It must be shocking, though, to find, when you write about child porn and snuff videos, say, that the horror which seems absolutely conditional to the form of your work is ignored. I’m returning to this overliteral reading of your work which remains blind to that.

DC Yes. I don’t know how to explain it really. My brain’s configured differently to some people’s, I guess, because I don’t understand it when people don’t understand that it’s important to think about these things.

DC I knew the series would be a limited number, but I didn’t know how many until with Try, when I knew I was in the middle. I knew if I could write Guide the way I wanted to, I’d only have one more approach I wanted to take.

After Period I want to take a break from writing fiction for a while, and clear my head and all that. I do have some unfinished short fiction and experiments that I’ll probably polish up to tide me over. Basically, I need to decide whether I want to keep writing novels. I’ve always felt more like someone who was using “the novel” to meet my ends, rather than a novelist, and I’m not sure whether fiction will accommodate whatever I decide to do next. I’m kind of in a strange place. I’m really proud of my work, but, at the same time, I feel like I’ve failed myself, and I’m not sure why. I remember a few years ago a friend chiding me for still loving Rimbaud’s work. His idea was that one outgrew Rimbaud and his ridiculous ambitions. But I still feel connected to Rimbaud’s idea of writing transcending writing’s fundaments and accessing the sublime, whatever that means. I haven’t done that, of course, but I’ve tried very hard, and I’d still want to try. I just need to stop for a while and decide how I might go about that, and decide whether I have the ability to do that, or whether I’m just not well-equipped enough for the task. Anyway, in the meantime I’m going to write a nonfiction book—some sort of meditation on youth culture. I feel like that would be an interesting challenge, considering my inabilities as a journalist. So that’s my next project.

DC Period reinvolves George Miles, who was the main character in Closer, who figures in Guide, and who is kind of implicitly behind all the novels’ young male characters, not to mention the subject of a number of my short fiction pieces and poems. There was a real George Miles. He was my most important and influential friend from high school onwards. He was a few years younger than me, and very sweet and brilliant, but he had a severe chemical imbalance, so he was all over the place; really chaotic and unpredictable. Our relationship was intense and unforgettable, and if I have a muse, it’s him. Anyway, I lost contact with him when I moved to Amsterdam in the mid-eighties, and had been trying to track him down with no luck for ten years when, at just about the time Guide was published, I found out he’d killed himself in 1987 while I was living in Europe.

It’s strange, because I’d always intended for George to be the main character in the last novel, but Period has become for me a way to process his death, which was really, really devastating, but also abstract, having happened so long ago, and complicated by the fact that I’d believed he was alive all these years. In a way, I wrote the novels for him, and assumed that somehow, somewhere he was reading them, and knew how important he was to me.

I’d like to write a nonfiction book about him someday, but Period isn’t it. It’s a distillation of the ways the real George affected the work, and a kind of playing out of what his death does to all the fantasies and art and characters and ideas he inspired. It’s a hard book to describe, but essentially it’s a kind of tomb in the form of a magic trick that makes George Miles—and, by proxy, the work—disappear.

RC Do you think of yourself mining a very individual literary seam? Are there “fellow travellers”?

DC There are people in the visual arts—not even necessarily people I know, though I do know a lot of visual artists and I am influenced by conceptual art.

I feel a kinship with some writers. Among my gay peers, there’s Kevin Killian, Bob Glück, Bruce Benderson, Matthew Stadler, Gary Indiana, and a few others. A number of younger, emerging writers excite me. But the huge majority of so-called gay literature is incredibly provincial these days, or, when it’s “reaching out,” it’s so middlebrow—intellectually soft and barely artistic, except in the most bourgeois way. It’s become this modest, inbred little genre whose arbiters and publishers discourage radical writing and seem to look only for possible “crossover” books, still using the tired David Leavitt model—goody goody, nicey nice, feel-our-gayness fiction. I certainly feel alienated within that. I think I’m basically on my own. Supposedly, I’ve influenced a number of younger writers, but I don’t see that so much.

RC It must be odd hearing or reading people suggest that there is a group of writers influenced by you. Scott Heim’s name comes up often.

DC Yes. I don’t think that’s so true. I think maybe I influenced him the way William Burroughs influenced me. Burroughs’s work didn’t influence me at all. His example influenced me. Likewise, I have a mainstream publisher; I’m publishing very difficult work. That may give other writers strength.

People always mention Scott Heim. I’ve known Scott a long time. He sent me his work when he was really young and living in Kansas. I encouraged him, critiqued his work; read Mysterious Skin. I gave him a lot of support and he admired me, but that’s basically it. If there’s an influence there, I don’t think it’s interesting. People do that to him a lot. They say: “He’s Dennis Cooper, but …” Then it’s either: (1) “… better because he’s more accessible”; or, (2) “… worse, because he’s not as complicated.” It’s really unfair to him. I didn’t like it when people did it to me when I was younger either. I remember some review in the Advocate saying my work was just like me jacking off with a copy of Genet’s Funeral Rites in my lap!

I get letters all the time from younger writers, sending me stories, or wanting my opinion or help. I try to do as much as I can. But I think my work’s too specific to influence anyone. If there’s a younger writer who writes about a boy being abused by a man, immediately they “are” me, which is just ridiculous. As if we all don’t have these thoughts.

RC With Scott Heim, in terms of the way he structures a sentence, one could make a loose case for a comparison to you—in Mysterious Skin anyway, if not in In Awe.

DC I know what you mean. But maybe some of that’s coincidental. When I was working on Closer, all my friends suddenly said: “This guy Bret Easton Ellis has totally ripped you off. Don’t read this book; it’ll make you so upset.” So I didn’t. But as soon as I finished Closer, I read Less Than Zero. I was amazed by the parallels, it’s true. Then for years people were saying he ripped me off. But of course Bret didn’t read me until later. We just completely arrived at the same place. And I think in sentence structure there’s even something between his work and mine, but that’s totally because we both grew up in L.A. and both like bands. Even in Mysterious Skin, though, it’s Scott’s own work. I never would have written that book.

RC There’s this precise, symbol-laden lyricism in your writing style. Since what’s coming across is that you read widely and meticulously, are there writers working in very different styles that engage you, notwithstanding the difference in their aesthetic? What about writers within the bejeweled, elaborate tradition of gay literature that came out of Proust?

DC Well, like you said, I read a lot, I guess. Flaubert himself is amazing, sure, especially Sentimental Education. I do like the bejeweled, though I like it better in poetry than in fiction—the Symbolist poets, Ashbery, things like that. Sade of course was massively influential on me. André Gide’s The Counterfeiters was a watershed in my early twenties. I’m very fond of metafiction—William Gaddis, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and, more recently, David Foster Wallace, Kathy Acker, Curtis White, and other post-metafiction writers. Minimalism interested me for a while, though not hugely, unless J. D. Salinger counts. I love him, of course. And I was influenced in some deep way by writers in German like Thomas Mann, Max Frisch, and Thomas Bernhard, all of whom I was very into at one time.

It’s interesting to read something where I feel the prose has a relationship to mine, like Ivy Compton-Burnett. I immediately recognized it in the work. There are other writers like that, like Jean Rhys. But I never read Proust. I’ve been avoiding him like the plague. I’m afraid to read it.

When I was first writing prose, I was really amazed by Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, which is nothing like my work. It was so Flaubertian. But I really responded to what he was trying to do in that work, and I really wanted to meet him. I wasn’t the only one who was really empowered by that book. I was looking at what there was of gay novels at that point, and it really stood out. I wasn’t interested in Dancer from the Dance or Faggots. I couldn’t relate at all to that scene. But Edmund White was a real writer, who liked French writers. I remember he had a big fan base of younger writers then—at least among people I knew, around the time of that book and Forgetting Elena earlier.

RC There’s a small group of readers of his work that’s most interested in those early works, and Caracole too. I know at the time of Caracole, Edmund had a very clear idea of himself moving between two very different styles of writing: between Nabokov and Isherwood, or between the mannered and the spare. The “Isherwood” strain struck a chord with an audience, though: A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. Caracole didn’t.

DC Absolutely. Caracole was interesting in that sense, because it did seem like its failure was the end of a certain phase of Edmund’s work. I don’t think it’s his best book, but I admire his intentions in it very much—in getting away from gay material. I remember going to a reading of his when he read from that before it came out. People were just pissed off that it wasn’t gay. It was the end of something for him, because it was a disaster, I guess.

RC I think in future it will become clearer that he has reincorporated some of the formal ambition of Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes, and Caracole in the use of language in works taken to be of the “Isherwood” school. The Farewell Symphony in particular has many passages which hint at the elaborateness of the earlier works.

DC I like that in his works. I thought there were really beautiful sections in A Boy’s Own Story, though, too. Several chapters in that I think are really pristine. Maybe him collaring AIDS really changed his outlook on things in a lot of ways.

RC Do you mean he felt pulled towards a more realist prose style in response to AIDS?

DC I’d assumed it was a question of time. An enormous amount of effort and time must have gone into Nocturnes. Maybe he doesn’t feel he has the time. Now it’s different, because he’s doing so well. But maybe there was a certain urgency to make him speed up at one point.

RC In contrast to Edmund White, somebody like Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels shared a startling formal coherence, both within and between them. Thematically, too, they were similar. I wondered whether the sense of there being an integrity, a purity to one’s whole output appealed to you in the way you thought of the five-novel sequence.

DC Very much. Artists I really revere have that. My favorite artist is Robert Bresson. There’s no purer body of work than his. That’s my favorite kind of work. It becomes almost religious when it’s that pure. It gives the work a kind of charisma.

DC Yes, though Prisoner of Love was very different. Otherwise he’s a good example of that.

RC In your case, as you said, a certain purity and consistency of form in your published work has emerged rather effortlessly, it seems. Is there work hidden under the bed which you consider unsuccessful, for stylistic or other reasons?

DC The style fluctuates a lot in fact, so there are a lot of experiments I’ve done which have gone pretty far. I’ll usually end up publishing them, though. Wrong is a collection of things that didn’t work, or that I intended to make into something but didn’t get beyond that little thing. I try and try to be different, but I always end up fussing with it until it’s like that; until it’s like my writing again. My range is very small—on purpose.

RC The status of aesthetics and the figure of the writer as aesthete are both central to your work. I don’t mean they’re presented uncritically—quite the reverse. Often there’s a lacerating critique of aesthetic self-regard and the figure of the “uninvolved” aesthete. Is this a deliberate counterstatement or reproach on your part to the pristine quality of your prose?

DC I know what you mean. One thing I don’t like about a lot of work—even Genet, for instance—is the ego. I don’t like the work to have an ego. Also, I do think that everything one says or writes is a lie. That’s always there for me. Those two things are always playing with each other.

It’s not something I calculate. I’m always questioning everything because it always seems false. So I’m this total aesthete, but really distrustful of the florid. That’s why it takes so long to get things visible and omnipresent at the same time. That’s Bresson, too.

RC In the fiction, the aesthete is at times described as someone who sees people as types. I was thinking of that as a criticism—not of aesthetics per se, but of its potentially abusive deployment of the variety of humanity to its own indifferent ends.

DC Yes, that’s totally true. But that comes partially from the point of guilt.

RC In Try, you relate debates concerning art and aesthetics specifically to human relations. The figure of Roger is described in terms of how he behaves with others. The position of an artist as somebody involved in a process of distancing, formalizing, framing human experience: isn’t the suggested immunity of that being progressively questioned as the books go on? Take Frisk: I’d say the forthright pronunciation of fixing, formalizing, framing in that book, so much a part of its structure, has melted subsequently.

DC It did in Guide, yes. I’m working on a book now that’s restoring that. But I think there’s going to be an enormous tension between where I am now and where I was with Closer. In terms of the narrative, Guide sets up this opposition, with these two artist characters who are basically doing what the book does, but visually. You hit me in a funny place, because I’m actually dedicated to returning to that sort of thing for the last one. But since I see the books as a cycle, I want it to be implicit in the last book that there’s a failure to do what it intends to do.

RC I want to ask about the direct engagement with AIDS in Guide, which is also new. Did writing about AIDS lead to the kind of formal dissonance or difference that characterizes Guide?

DC Well, it’s meaningful within the work that there’s this piece of journalism within the novel, although I do elaborate amounts of things to justify its inclusion.

RC People always used to ask where AIDS was in your work. Now, for better or worse, there’s a Dennis Cooper novel featuring AIDS centrally, yet it appears in a slightly tangential place within the book. Does the piece’s status as journalism within the fiction constitute an important formal statement, then?

DC Yes. I wanted to negate the rest of the book in a funny way. It negates the aesthetics of the books. It’s funny how people responded to that. There are people who say: “Finally, in this one section, Dennis Cooper has written something good.” I just got some personal experience. I wrote this article; I knew these kids; I really liked them; they died. I was attracted to them. It was just strange.

RC There is a whole series of debates and assumptions concerning AIDS and literature which writers shouldn’t and probably can’t get involved in; questions of appropriateness and responsibility, for example.

DC That’s crap, all that. AIDS is in all of the books. Here I wanted to try to frame it in the work. I’ve always been interested in the purity of the body. There’s all these things going on in Guide—about fairy tales versus child pornography, and the question of whether they are the same thing.

RC Your works have always been heavily marked by a sense of mortality. But for those for whom writing about AIDS is an overriding duty for the writer, that’s not enough.

DC For me it’s hard to separate that part out. It’s all connected to the different things I was working with in the whole novel. In Guide those characters just parallel Chris. I’m just setting up contrasts. There’s a critique of gay culture and AIDS hospices and people who work in that, but that’s probably just me being a jerk about gay culture, which I like to do sometimes.

RC There are lots of moments in all your books where this rather precious, content-led reading of gay literature in terms of positive imaging seems deliberately sent up.

DC A little bit, just for jokes. In Try, everybody was on my ass about the gay father thing and adopting children and all that. I think it’s funny. I don’t usually try to push buttons. It’s usually not what I’m thinking about. But occasionally I’m aware that I can push a button, then complicate it with lots of references to other things going on in the books that anchor the joke.

RC In the interview with Kasia Boddy, you spoke of being preoccupied with the nature of adulthood. Would it be fair to trace that preoccupation by way of artistic developments in your work? Do you see it in there?

DC Sure. That’s true. I’m not eighteen anymore, and it makes a difference. I wanted to try to inhabit the adult characters more and make them less one-dimensional—I guess because I am one, even though I don’t relate to adulthood very much, or my idea of it. It doesn’t interest me. My interests are in the new, which is different to a lot of people.

I feel like I have to be more responsible in my life now because I am an adult. When I was younger I did a lot of things. Now, when younger people come to me and want support, I see a difference in the way I think about it. I feel much more like I understand what they want; more than I used to, though I’ve been older than some of the people I’ve been involved with for a long time. Now I have more of a sense of what they want, just because I’m older. I try to be what they need, rather than fulfilling my own interests. I think that’s in the work, too, to some degree. I feel it, and since the books come from wherever I am psychically, that ends up in the work too.

RC There’s a paradox in the idea of acquiring a greater understanding of youth as you get older and further from it.

DC Yes. I used to just feel that whatever age I was, it didn’t matter: I was just one of them, or their buddy. With Try, I clearly wasn’t the same age as the person who was strung out on heroin. It really taught me a lot about that. But before it would just be like: “Let’s explore this together and we’ll both learn.”

I never leaned on older people when I was younger. I didn’t trust older people at all. But I understand that people need people to lean on, and to be consistent in all these different things. That’s something new to me. I get a lot of weird offers. I surprise myself how responsible I’ve become in relation to those things.

RC I wanted to ask about the importance of power relations and role-play in your works. Your early fiction appeared at a time where, to an extent, “good”—or balanced—gay relationships are starting to flourish elsewhere. Relationships in your novels, however, seem heavily determined by power and status—though there’s a slight move away from that in the recent books. There seems to be a developing awareness of greater choices in the role-play—even, sometimes, a sense of the redundancy of the idea of roles.

DC That’s true. It’s because I’m inhabiting a larger range of characters, so to speak. The characters are just configurations of the prose. But in the earlier books, my sympathies were totally with the younger characters. It’s like the younger characters were real and the older characters were my fantasies. That’s changing. As much as there are characters in the books, they’re both equally fantasy and reality now. That’s a difference. Consequently, they’re more complex, because I’m giving them more room.

RC I was thinking especially about the absence of reciprocity in sexual power relations.

RC I suppose so. One could infer that the very idea of reciprocal sexual relations was either a lie or a wrong goal.

RC The word love floats around in your work now, which seems to require reciprocity.

DC I think that’s totally aesthetic. The books are omniscient. They divide their consciousness between different characters. It’s partially just that.

I have this mistrust of fiction: I have this specific and weird mind, and to put that reciprocal thing in there—I just don’t buy it. It’s too much of a lie for me to try to represent because I can’t imagine what a reciprocal thing would be. That may just be personal because I’m a weird, self-absorbed person.

RC There’s also an aesthetic consideration: if reciprocity is somehow to mean a settled power dynamic in a relationship, that might be uninteresting.

DC It is uninteresting to me, and I have a real resistance to it. I find there’s a laxness that sets into a work when that happens. Also, I do put specifications on myself. I’m not sure I could exceed them if I wanted to. To me, all that’s broken down in Guide because of the acid. On acid I did believe I could understand everything. Using the acid was a device to bring that in and negate it at the same time.

A lot of it’s just my own experience. I’m distrustful of reciprocal love, sexually. I’ve always been interested in the idea of separation more than the closeness. A lot of my experiences have been with prostitutes. I was very interested in that kind of sex. I read books, and my first boyfriend was a prostitute, and so were his friends. My whole relationship with sex was determined by all that.

He was my first boyfriend. I wasn’t paying him, but prostitution was his world and I was in it. You could see in Guide this whole thing: that real love isn’t sexual. I don’t believe that. I’d never say that. But in the work it’s true, and I say in Guide that I can’t write about my boyfriends because the experience of love was too confusing or self-incriminating.

In some ways for me all this might be too personal, but the greatest loves I’ve had were with people I haven’t had a real sexual relationship with: because of the course I was set on, and because I have such an interest in what sex is and isn’t, and with the aesthetics of the body and the internal organs—all these different things.

RC In Guide, you engage with these debates intellectually. Specifically, you introduce Platonic ideals within the book as a kind of counterpoint to sexual relations. In that respect, I felt Guide engaged with preoccupations that were current a hundred years ago, and not seen much recently: the kind of morality/aesthetics debate of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance.

RC Wilde spoke of his book in two incompatible ways: on the one hand, he claimed the irrelevance of moral approaches to art; on the other, he insisted on them, defending Dorian Gray against some reviewers by claiming it was too moral a work. Guide, ultimately, can be read both as aesthetically indulgent and incredibly moral. I introduce this because the word ethics itself features prominently in Guide.

DC That’s always been there. I just found a way to articulate it with Guide. Ethics has been the center of all the books from the beginning. I guess the subtlety of my approach or my burying of those issues was misunderstood. People think people who are moral or ethical don’t entertain the ideas of the things they find horrifying. That’s the difference: I want to understand their power, so I give things that power. Otherwise there’s no point to it.

RC I want to discuss the importance of geography to your writing. What’s the relationship between your prose and Los Angeles, where you live and write?

DC It’s certainly part of it. But part of it’s totally instinctual. I grew up here and understand the rhythms and spaces here. In order to have the purity I want for my work, I needed not to have to think about those things, by staying here. Certainly the writing’s determined by that. I think of people who grow up in L.A. as a little less well-educated; more spacy and less articulate. I really love that about it. I myself am very inarticulate, I think. I have a hard time describing things. It’s very bad when I try to speak. I think that’s an L.A. thing.

RC A sense of intellectually unmapped space could be a great context for a writer.

DC Absolutely. It’s such a mysterious place. It’s incredibly organized, but you have to decode it to get there. I grew up here and understand the organization of L.A.; how formally precise it is. Other people don’t see it that way. You think you’re part of some secret club when you grow up here. I think I use that in the work, too. The work’s broken. Things mirror each other from odd spaces. There are rhymes and echoes in the prose that are strange dislocations from each other. There’s a way in which that’s the physical map of L.A. There’s so much secrecy and mystery here. You can write about L.A. and not describe it. It’s no surprise it was the capital of serial murders. You can dump people anywhere here. It’s full of all these weird, fantastic negative spaces.

RC I was thinking of geographical diffuseness. One reading of L.A. sees it as a place where received social structures are at their loosest and least defining—compared, say, to New York. The idea of the novel as a document of social manners wouldn’t have much to feed on here.

DC Except Bret Easton Ellis’s work’s all about that. That’s what’s so brilliant about it; he actually did that.

There’s no social life here. That’s one thing I like. You see who you want to see when you want to see them, one on one. I don’t like the whole New York scene of seeing people in groups and crowds. Here you make specific plans to see people. You can go to clubs and bars and art openings if you want. The younger ones do have crowds and go to this or that place, though, like rave warehouse parties.

RC But for those of us used to living in a more socialized world day to day, this feels the closest Western culture comes to privatized experience: homes are private spaces; and everyone drives to and from them.

DC It’s funny, though. We’re in West Hollywood now—the closest L.A. comes to that socialized world. There’s a whole ghetto here. People never leave West Hollywood. You feel really foreign here, because it’s “The Hood.” This is an attempt to build that kind of culture here. I suppose it’s very successful.

DC I suppose I do, though where I live is also like that, but not specifically gay. Los Feliz has become the hippest area in L.A. since I moved there. It’s a hipster type area, not like Melrose. It’s a lot more underground. I like that a lot—not that I hang out at the cafés. But I’ve always had a hard time with wholly gay situations. I have a nervous breakdown just walking down the Castro. It makes me so nervous. All that sexual energy—it’s just freaky.

RC Is it something to do with the sense of being the observed, rather than the observer? One way of thinking about the distinct roles in your books is to distinguish between the artist-observers and the people they observe.

RC To enter the ghetto, to cruise and be cruised: you surrender the certainty of inhabiting one role.

DC In this ghetto at least, yes. My friends and I—here and in New York—all went out to hustler bars—not because we wanted to buy hustlers, necessarily, but because everything was so clear: the observers and the observed. It made me feel very relaxed; comfortable; invisible. It was the hip thing for years—and probably still is. The hipsters go to hustler bars.

RC For many gay men who like ghetto life, “liberation” is specifically concerned with this blurring of boundaries on many levels—ultimately, including sex itself. There’s this ambiguity or doubleness in the reciprocity: you might be fucker or fucked, as well as, in social situations, being both watcher and watched. For some that’s really liberating.

DC Yes. Can I ask a question about that? Have you found there’s this general sense of alienation within that culture among the writers you’ve talked to?

RC Of course—if only because the priorities of creative writers and those of the gay subcultural ghetto now seem sharply antithetical.

RC It’s not always expressed at every level. Your detachment from that culture feels rather more complete. Other writers might engage with subcultural life, then present that world alternating with another one; one characterized by writerly detachment. Some books are even structured around this idea of engagement and retreat.

DC He’s interesting in that sense. He seems an awfully strange, isolated person, yet he wrote so well about Fire Island and all that stuff. He was totally interested in it. I think Scott Heim moves in that world. Edmund White used to, very comfortably, when I first knew him, but then he was with hustlers all the time too.

RC I want to ask something more about place. I was thinking of your use of the Netherlands in Frisk. It reminded me of Poe’s imaginary landscape. There’s little of America in what Poe wrote, which has always rather concerned people. I wondered if the idea of a non-American or less American imaginary environment appealed to you.

DC Yes. I really was thinking of Poe with that Holland section. That windmill section is Poe, that’s absolutely true. Back in those days, I had to go there to get it out of me. I’m a strange person—an American who’s only influenced by European things.

DC It is. I have a lot of friends like that too. Part of what makes my work so peculiar is that it’s so exclusively influenced by European—especially French—writing and film.

RC At the same time, we’re describing a cultural affiliation more than anything else. It’s not the same as Edmund White’s move to Paris. Yours is a literary engagement only.

DC Yes. I felt extremely uncomfortable when I lived in Europe for those two-and-a-half years. I was living in Holland, a very strange country. I was never more miserable. Maybe it’s just because I can’t divide Europe up too much, but there’s some kind of relationship between Holland and England: a certain repression. The Dutch are so repressed, and such a mess.

DC That’s what’s so strange about that place. They are really weird people. That’s part of why I attacked them in Frisk in a way. I was so frustrated with them. Everything’s acceptable there, and they hate every minute of it. They’re tolerant, but so angry.

RC I agree that it’s a culture with both libertarian and conservative impulses in play and in strong tension. Some Dutch people told me a more family-centered, conservative culture you couldn’t imagine.

DC It’s true. It’s really difficult for their artists. They hate their own artists to become ambitious. Every time an artist of theirs would become a world artist, he was reviled. Yet if anything avant-garde came to Holland, they’d just go crazy for it—not so much with writers, but then the writers are always conservative there. Even the most interesting Dutch writers are pretty conservative—at least the ones I was able to read.

DC I don’t mean that in a bad way. In some ways it isn’t. I haven’t been to England very much. I read the N.M.E. and Melody Maker [British music weeklies] and get a lot of my sense of it from that, which isn’t fair.

RC You read about the nonconformist, youthful England, then—only part of the story.

DC But you have that great eccentricity. You have these English eccentrics; these mutants. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. That’s so interesting.

RC It’s like the debate about who invented punk: New York or London. The English don’t care, because we know all the interesting figures in punk were on our side, whether or not we invented it, because of their eccentricity. But perhaps I’m on dangerous territory here!

DC How English of you to say that! [Laughs] All the English punk was very style-oriented but then so was New York. There’s this whole idea of America being authentic and England being all style. It’s to some degree true. We all look to English bands because their style’s so brilliant. There couldn’t be a band like the Pet Shop Boys in America. But Neil Young or Nirvana could never have come out of England.

RC We have conformist icons, too—like Oasis. At the same time, we throw up talent that’s so different, perhaps without even recognizing it—Blur, for that matter. We don’t usually recognize the difference. What people take to their hearts is immediate conformity or ersatz rebellion.

DC That’s true. Is that true in literature, too? The Scots are throwing a wrench into that, right? I really like them.

RC As soon as they do, they get packaged. The acceptably rebellious ones are sold—and ruined.

DC See what’s happened to Irvine Welsh. He’s become this pop cultural figure. It’s very sad because he’s a brilliant writer. Initially I was fascinated. His work had more in common with people like Alexander Trocchi.

RC Think of the idea that Martin Amis was a voice for disaffection, though—or Will Self! That’s astonishing.

DC Will Self is published by my publisher. He hates me; I don’t like him either. It’s interesting to see the phenomenon of “Will Self” though. He seems like an elegant writer to some degree. He’s funny; the work’s comic social satire. But it’s presented as though it’s a daring, scary nightmare, which is ridiculous. So what if he gets caught shooting up on the prime minister’s plane. Heroin’s a very reactionary, boring drug. Anyone truly daring would never have milked it for publicity.

DC Then, inadvertently, something like the Sex Pistols comes along. Regardless of their intentions, they changed my life. There was something in those songs. You heard the world opening and splitting. Now you realize it was Malcolm McLaren’s calculation. At the time, here in little old L.A., we couldn’t believe what we were hearing. It was like hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

RC The cleverness of McLaren was not the organizational ability but that he concealed his processes somewhat. No one realized it was all a game.

DC Then he went on to Bow Wow Wow. That’s where he showed his cards—and, for a brief period, that was brilliant, the way it self-critiqued.

DC I have my faves like Guided by Voices, Pavement, Sebadoh. There’s stuff I’m getting an aesthetic hit off at the moment, but which I may or may not find interesting in six months, like Placebo, Cat Power, Radiohead, Stereolab. I like some electronic stuff, like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Luke Vibert, Orbital. Lately, I’ve been liking the Manic Street Preachers, which is strange for me, because they’re kind of trad rock. I like that they’re almost American sounding, but there’s still that feeling that it’s all style.

RC They’re Welsh, which begs a question. Going back to punk, the most esoteric and interesting bands were all from the regions. The most bizarre takes on punk were the Undertones from Northern Ireland, the Buzzcocks from Manchester, the Skids from Scotland.

DC Ian Curtis of Joy Division was obviously a big influence on me. And Nick Drake, another oddball. And Spiritualized.

DC Yes. One reason I did it, apart from having a crush on Alex James and being a fan of their work, was I knew they liked my work, so I figured they’d understand. When I was writing Guide, they’d put out The Great Escape. I thought it was over for them. I thought nobody would even know who they were.