Hear us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists

Cooper was born in Hollywood in 1951. He attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1979. On graduating, he abandoned the visual arts in favour of writing, initially supporting himself as a shoe salesman. He next taught at the UCLA Writer’s Program and, later, at the Creating Writing Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He is currently the art critic for Los Angeles magazine.

Cooper’s short essays and memoirs have been anthologized in a number of volumes of The Best American Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin); Brian Bouldrey, ed., The Best American Gay Fiction 1996 (New York: Little, Brown, 1996); Thomas R. Cole, ed., The Oxford Book of Aging (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Robert Drake and Terry Wolverton, eds., His: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996); and James McConkey, ed., The Oxford Book of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). His work has also appeared in the Georgia Review, Grand Street, Harper’s magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Mid-American Review, Nerve, the New York Times Magazine, the North American Review, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and the Threepenny Review, among others.

Cooper’s first book, Maps to Anywhere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990; New York: Viking Penguin, 1991), with an introduction by Richard Howard, was published as a collection of memoirs; nevertheless, it won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for Fiction. Cooper’s first novel, A Year of Rhymes (New York: Viking Penguin, 1993), was followed by a further collection of memoirs, Truth Serum (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), the title piece of which won an O. Henry Award. His most recent book, Guess Again (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), is a collection of shorter fiction.

RC I want to start by asking about your apparent renegotiation of the boundary between fiction and autobiography. One of your books is labeled a novel; another, a memoir, won a fiction prize; some stories have appeared as fiction as well as essays or memoirs.

BC Yes. That’s going to require some explanation. Let’s start with my evolution. I studied visual arts at the master’s level, at what was and probably still is one of the most avant-garde art schools in the country, the California Institute of the Arts. It was around the time conceptual art had taken over. Distinctions between text and performance, performance and stand-up comedy, environmental art and sculpture, painting and assemblage had all become blurred—not always necessarily intentionally. There was an assumption that part of the endeavor of making art involved blurring boundaries, taking what you needed from different genres and recombining them in ways satisfying or meaningful to you.

So I came out of an educational environment where iron-clad distinctions between genres weren’t that important. I’d always used language in my own conceptual art, and I’d always been a reader—particularly of poetry. When I started thinking of writing as the most interesting avenue for me, a lot of my reading involved blurred boundaries too. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was a favorite. A transforming experience during graduate school was reading the first international anthology of prose poetry, edited by Michael Benedikt. Here were pieces in prose which had the compression I loved in poetry. They read like fables, stories, or mini-essays. Everybody did what they wanted with the form. There seemed a tremendous amount of freedom. Thereafter I began writing some of the shorter pieces that appear in Maps to Anywhere. Although I was in a sense troubled by the fact that they couldn’t easily be labeled, I resigned myself to the fact that that was a designation somebody else would have to make. I had to do what I wanted, keep my fingers crossed, and hope it was good, whatever it was.

I remember Amy Hempel once writing that I was one of the people who had intentionally tried to blur the boundaries between the short story, the essay, and poetry. I adore her and her work, and while I’m glad to be credited with just about anything worthwhile, that’s not something I did intentionally. I did it because I needed to write about a range of subject matter in a particular way. I wasn’t trying to push the envelope. And I never thought of it as experimentation, any more than anything any writer does is experimental.

I should also say here that my parents were second-generation Jews whose parents had come to America from Eastern Europe. They were very hush-hush about their background in certain ways. I didn’t learn until much later, for instance, that my name had been changed from something I still don’t know to Cooper. My parents either claimed they’d forgotten what it was, or actually had forgotten. That sense of the mystery of my past combined with an odd sense of anomie about being gay, about my view of my world as not fitting into what I perceived happening around me. These two things sensitized me, and made me interested in what’s true and what’s myth.

But I don’t think my impulse to write things has ever been guided by the desire willfully to disrupt people’s notions of what various genres can do. Anything I write takes the form it takes, and it’s always some sort of hybrid of fiction and nonfiction.

RC That hybrid can take many forms too. You don’t present yourself in the third person in your fiction, for example.

BC No. One thing I demand of the autobiographical writing I’ve done is that the self is at the center, but isn’t the focal point. It’s the eye that’s doing the perceiving. That’s why I’ve always felt a great kinship with poetry, which often has much to do with witnessing, recording, or interpreting phenomena. Annie Dillard’s work is really important to me. She once said that when she wrote about collecting seashells as a child, she wasn’t writing about herself as a child. She was writing about seashells, but the easiest way for her to access some sort of wonder, awe, or feeling about that was to recall that childhood situation. I agree. Some might say writing autobiographical work is by its nature self-centered or solipsistic. To some extent it is. But I’m also interested in the world around me, not just me as a persona, character, or presence.

One more thing regarding Maps to Anywhere particularly: I really did think of those pieces as species of nonfiction. It was only after I sent the work out to various literary reviews that they then began to publish them as short stories, fables, or prose poems. They made the categories. The University of Georgia Press and, subsequently, Penguin thought of the book as nonfiction too, but then it won the PEN/Hemingway Award for fiction. Carole Maso, one of the judges, had some pretty liberal ideas about what constitutes fiction. But I think they liked the book because it was difficult to categorize too. So part of the aura surrounding Maps to Anywhere in regard to its straddling different genres isn’t something I had anything to do with. The book had an independent life.

A Year of Rhymes I based on personal experience too. It had an autobiographical core. But I added into it relatives who never existed and incidents that never happened. It’s a much more conscious amalgamation than anything in Maps to Anywhere. And then Truth Serum was a series of memoirs, also based on real experience. Obviously, though, memory’s fallible. That interests me. I’ve got to say the distinction between fact and fiction is less interesting than the way memory compensates for what’s missing, or the way it changes or erodes things … makes them blossom into other forms.

RC Memory does seem your theme.

BC If I’ve been called on to speak about one theme more than any other, it’s been memory, and the relationship between it and my work. I’ve been anthologized in the Oxford Book of Memory, edited by James McConkey. At this point, I’m trying to move pretty far away from it. I’ve recently only been writing in the third person, which is fascinating and challenging, and writing stories about characters with lives and experiences pretty remote from my own. To date, all three books have toyed with the discrepancies between what’s remembered and what’s imagined. Now I’ve moved into something that is for the first time discernible as short fiction.

It’s funny to talk about this. I’m forced to stand outside the medium in which I always live. Jean Cocteau said that asking a writer to talk about his writing was like asking a plant to talk about horticulture. But it’s fascinating to try to articulate these things, which are so hard to define.

RC After a book is written, do you develop a certain indifference or dispassion to it, so that you don’t mind how it is taken?

BC Well, in some senses I mind—in the same way, maybe, that an architect minds what sort of furniture’s put in a house he or she has designed.

RC Or what kind of people …

BC That too—which one has no control over!

I feel that the process of writing—even though it involves a tremendous amount of passion—is finally a craft. During public readings for Truth Serum, quite a lot of people would say: “I so admired your honesty. You took so many risks with this.” There was something about that that made me bristle. It was as if there was something so unsavory about my private life that I was taking a great risk in making it public. My answer, though, was that although maybe I am drawn to material that’s a little touchy or is private to start off with, once you start forming that into sentences and thinking about how the sentence scans, about the connotations of every word, about how the sentences combine to make a paragraph, about how each paragraph makes the transition to the next, you lose any sense of it being raw or personal. It becomes the raw material you manipulate through your craft. There’s a bit of dispassion involved there in getting the job done.

Flannery O’Connor, whom I idolize, and Raymond Carver are the two people who have written with the most incredible lucidity about the process of writing. They really demystified it. O’Connor once said that she was like the little old lady who doesn’t know what she’s going to say until she says it. I love that. And I feel that myself—that the process of writing is commensurate with the process of finding out what I have to say. I thrash my way through all this inchoate material to find that out. But the more you refine the work and worry about it, and carry it around with you day and night, and daydream about it—especially if you spend one to five years writing a book—oddly the material becomes almost invisible. You write it to see what’s obsessing you, haunting you, moving you to write. You try again and again through the editing to clarify that. But you come up with something very hard to assess, something with a certain kind of invisibility.

RC I wondered whether you felt a degree of disengagement from readers of your work. Not critically—just in that the text, once it appears, forms certain impressions upon them that you’re not privy to.

BC I’d venture that a lot of writers—both of memoirs and fiction—feel that. People I don’t know have come up and asked: “How’s Brian?” They’ve read in Truth Serum about us being a sero-different couple. I’m moved by that. It’s sweet. But I also think: “Who are you; how do you know about that?” The obvious answer is that I’ve told anybody who opens my book about it. But I keep myself a bit distant or protected for a number of reasons. One’s that I have to work against any kind of self-consciousness. It would inhibit me in my writing. Also, I need to feel steeped in a kind of privacy in order to write, even if what I’m writing about betrays my privacy.

RC I take it that you don’t have much sense of a specific readership.

BC The question of who you write for comes up with a fair degree of frequency. Until recently I’ve always felt there’s something wrong with me for not having any idea. Rilke said he wrote to God. For me, and at the risk of sounding mushy … it’s not God, but some listener in the world; someone who will listen. Who that is; what their demographics are—I’ve no idea. What preoccupies me far more than trying to appeal to a certain, preimagined audience is trying to get the sentences right—as incisive, interesting, communicative, and seamless as I possibly can. I know that sounds hopelessly pragmatic. But I hope the rest takes care of itself. I hope that kind of care will speak to a variety of people; that some kind of truth—whether it’s the “actual truth” or an imagined one—comes through the language to appeal to a reader. That takes precedence over any conception I may have of who I’m writing for.

RC Perhaps it arises often now because of trends in publishing and marketing.

BC You’re right. And it’s been exacerbated by the popularity of the memoir in American writing. I love the memoir. But I’m not sure what the effects of its ascendance in literature are going to be. I’m a little worried. A lot of people write books about divorce so they can help a reader going through a divorce. There’s a kind of altruism. For the same reason, people go on the Ricki Lake show to air their problems in the guise of helping the people watching.

RC Novels can get caught up in this. A novelist gets called on to testify to the authenticity of his or her fictional work—which can mean, simply, to admit that it all happened.

BC I remember once seeing Susan Minot read from a novel called Monkeys. It was about a family headed by an alcoholic father. Later an audience member asked whether her father was an alcoholic. She said—not defensively: “I don’t want to answer that.” It was of no interest to her. Somebody pursued it further, though, by asking what percentage of the book was autobiographical. Then Susan snidely said: “Two percent autobiographical on page one; 14 percent on page two.” She made a mockery of the whole idea.

Oddly, when Truth Serum came out, some people responded to it not with questions about how or why I’d wanted to evoke these memories of sexual awakening. They’d ask me practical, talk-show-type questions, like: “What advice do you have for kids today who are coming out?” There are lots of things I could have said. But I wouldn’t have presumed to have the expertise that would permit me to give my opinions with the intention of helping people solve their personal problems. I also started telling people who’d ask about the degree of veracity in Truth Serum: “I wasn’t writing these memoirs to hold up in a court of law.” It wasn’t about getting the facts right; it was about getting to the truth. Toni Morrison wrote a beautiful lecture in which she made a powerful distinction between the facts and the truth, and about how the facts sometimes have nothing to do with the truth.

RC Do we inhabit a culture that is unhealthily confessional in some respects?

BC Well, I’m so much in the middle of it that it’s very hard to articulate. But American culture has talk shows where people commit all kinds of confessional excess in the name of “Let’s-enlighten-the-world.” It’s horrible. Then there’s that weird species the docudrama, where a real event is reenacted to show what really happened. Actors play the people to whom it happened, acting out what “happened.” There are all these strange paradoxes.

Still, there seems also to be a form of cultural insistence on drawing the line between fact and fiction, while at the same time blurring it. We’re obsessed with what’s real and what’s fictive. I become muddled thinking about it. I don’t feel obligated, though, to have an answer as to the differences between fact and fiction. I think of Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy Warhol’s drag celebrities. Years ago I saw her being interviewed by Dick Cavett. He was trying to pin her down about whether or not she thought herself a man or a woman. He said: “Holly, when you wake up in the morning, are you a man or a woman?” She said: “Who cares, as long as you’re beautiful?” That’s how I feel about my work.

RC The public reception of poetry, since you mentioned that, seems especially germane. Someone like Sylvia Plath is invariably only read with reference to her biography.

BC Then again, you wonder to what extent Plath cultivated the persona of the unsteady, slightly crazy mystic. Like Plath, an American poet named Sharon Olds made her mark by writing these scorching, powerful poems about incest and abuse. Not too long ago she revealed that they were written under a persona. A lot of people—myself included—were shocked. We’d assumed they were written out of personal experience. Although on occasion I’d used a persona or written through a mask in my poetry, usually the “I” in the poem was me. I was concentrating on the minutiae and subtleties of language, its shades of meaning. My interest in poetry is much more about essential aspects of language than about a way of playing with personae.

RC I noticed in several places in Maps to Anywhere, you juggled first-and second-person narration, which is unusual.

BC Yes, sometimes I did waver between the first and second person, or between second and third. My intention there probably goes back to my interest in the visual arts. There’s one piece about going to get my haircut at a barber’s. He gave me this calling card which had a wonderful little logo of a floating haircut. I used his telephone number in the piece. The idea seemed hilarious—making the piece an advertisement for this barber I’d had this experience with. That was very much related to the kind of art I was interested in in the sixties or seventies—by people like Robert Rauschenberg, or Tom Wesselmann. An artist might use an actual clock in a painting, so that the painting tells the time. There’s the shock of something nonfunctional like a painting suddenly having a function. Some pop artists were blurring the distinctions between a rendered object and a real one.

One problem with the second person used consistently is it can be a little bit tyrannical—“you’re doing this; you’re doing that.” There’s something potentially authoritative about it. I used to throw the second person in occasionally to implicate or achieve a sort of sudden intimacy with the reader, to give the text a kind of liveliness or charge it might not otherwise have.

RC I want to ask in this context about “English as a Second Language,” which concerns the usefulness of art in tuition. An English teacher uses Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” but gets an underwhelming response.

BC The reality of that story was a nightmare! I was hired to teach freshman English and composition at the Fashion Institute in Los Angeles. I’ve experienced the same thing at many schools during the long time I taught freshman composition. It’s the horrifying experience I’m sure many teachers have shared, where you bring in things you love, and people start falling asleep. They look at you as if you should be locked up in a padded room for being enthusiastic. Part of my frustration at that led me to write that story.

RC Can creative writing can be taught?

BC I think ultimately I have mixed feelings about that. I’ve made my living as a teacher of creative writing. Because I’m teaching people who are really serious about it, in many instances I’ve seen people’s writing change remarkably. Then the question is: Does someone achieving a kind of competence in creative writing make their work ultimately good? Can you influence someone to experience that essential spark that makes their work stand apart as unique or alive, in some way that distinguishes it from other work? I’m not sure you can. But you can help people toward that.

One thing that’s very important—almost a personal crusade of mine—is to talk in class about things which aren’t often addressed in creative writing classes: things like self-doubt; competitiveness in the literary world; the vicissitudes of publishing. If these people have decided they’d really like to commit their lives to this very difficult thing, art—which I don’t necessarily recommend—I think it’s a service not only to help them find a direction to move toward in their work but also to get them thinking about the difficulties, about the expenditure of energy it takes to be a writer or to commit to anything creative as your livelihood.

RC Are you preparing them for failure?

BC Yes, but failure’s an experience of all writers. Joan Didion, another one of my heroes, once said that the moment she wrote the first word of a book, she knew it was a compromise. It was no longer the castle on the hill she’d been imagining. The things one writes do fail.

RC And commercial failure?

BC Absolutely—especially now because dangled over everyone’s head are the very rare instances where people get enormous advances. What happens to the great majority of people is disappointing compared to that kind of financial and critical success, which is only for a few. It’s an old cliché, but writers have to be prepared for a lot of rejection. I’ve been so lucky—not only in getting books published, but parts of those books excerpted, and so on. I’d never have dreamed even a fraction of the things that have happened to me would have. Still, all it takes is one “no” to ruin my week. I take rejection very hard, though in some ways I’ve developed a thick skin. What I want to tell my students is that wherever they fall on the spectrum between being tough or vulnerable, this is something you’ll constantly have to negotiate: getting ridiculed in a review; getting praise sometimes that’s so hyperbolic, it’s nuts. You don’t feel somebody’s even seeing what you’ve done when they’re that positive. There are all kinds of weird, dissonant feelings one is subject to with both success and failure. Thinking about and negotiating those things is an ongoing struggle.

RC To some extent you’re helping people find their way through to their own expression, where the only experience you can draw on is your own. To formalize any strategy—to introduce this poet you liked; that short story—is surely in some way to shape other would-be writers according to your own development. What of serendipity?

BC Well, until recently I taught at Antioch in what’s called a low-residency program. It’s very good for writers as they’re only on the campus for ten very intensive days. They prepare for seminars by reading selections the teachers choose. The rest of the time they schedule their own reading material, which is approved by a mentor.

Otherwise, you’re right. One of the great joys as a writer isn’t when you feel you’ve done what you set out to do, necessarily, but when you realize that you’re making a path through the world by your reading. That’s the way to learn things you didn’t expect. It’s so vital, and you’re right—it’s very personal. One author will lead you to another, and so on.

The writers I use in my teaching are exemplars not only of good writing but of specific things. Let’s say it’s a class on memoir. So-and-so may have written something really personal without being self-indulgent or sentimental. That’s part of what I feel a memoir should do. Or here’s a writer who’s talked about the father being abusive, not only without crying “victim!” but also with enough detachment to see the father’s humanity, despite his cruelty. There are lots of things I want my students to see that writing can do. I hope what I bring into class leads them to other texts. It’s not definitive. It’s just a way to offer concrete examples of the kinds of things I’m trying to address. I also hope they’ll be springboards for people to pursue more of that person’s work, or other avenues of reading.

RC A Year of Rhymes contains great examples of writing which successfully negotiates the risks of sentimentality, or of trying to make language suggest too much. The resultant prose is very potent, rich, and resonant—and also very material. The metaphors are strongly material, as they are in Maps to Anywhere. How did you arrive at that materiality? Is it through revision, or is it something you struggle at line by line?

BC Both. I talk to my students a lot about the common mistake in writing a memoir, which is to want to exhibit your own emotions through the prose. Something that’s very tricky about writing in general—and autobiographical writing especially—is that you want to convey the experience you had, but so that the reader feels the emotion, not the writer. If the writer feels everything, there’s no room for the reader. Texts like that get very cloying, overwrought, and surprisingly distancing because of their emotionality. A funny translation has to take place. All the components of a scene—dialogue, environment, color, ambience, sound—everything has to work towards the reader becoming part of it. It’s not just you the writer infusing the prose with emotion. It’s writing a kind of prose that allows the reader to be engaged.

I don’t mind writing with a touch of sentiment, however. Strong feeling has to be there. I like being moved in that quaint, old-fashioned way of being stirred or made melancholy by something a writer’s doing. When the work gets sentimental, though, the writer’s expecting the prose to carry too much. To invoke Joan Didion again—she once said something that’s at the heart of how I experience my work. She talked about going to Berkeley to study literature. She doesn’t consider herself an intellectual now, but was trying to be one then. In order to graduate, she had to write ten thousand words on Dante. She said she remembers nothing about what she wrote. What she remembers is the exact rancidity of butter on the train from her house to Berkeley.

You get the sense that she’s the kind of person who clings to concrete detail. I’m so much that way. As soon as people start talking about theory or abstraction, I’m lost. I can’t understand the world in those terms. But once they’re made manifest in some sort of figurative or concrete speech, then I can. So, for example, you can say a woman’s mad. But madness is really only an abstraction. But if you say: “She plucked at her hair as if she heard a sound in it.” That completely conveys somebody’s madness in a tangible way. That’s the kind of spark I want my writing to have—where the net effect of the writing brings the world into sharp focus, but a focus that can embody abstractions without itself being abstract.

RC You suggested that you experience the world in this nonabstract way. Is it then a relatively effortless process to write in this way?

BC “Effortless” would probably be the last word I’d use! Someone once described writing sentences as like wrestling a bear. That was pretty good.

It’s really hard. Some days a whole page, like a piece of ripe fruit, will fall from the tree into my hand. But that’s so much the exception. I edit and revise a lot. The writer Evan S. Connell—who wrote Mrs. Bridge—said: “Words are all we have—and they’d better be the right ones.” I feel that. The greatest responsibility I have as a writer is to create the right words. Some days that’s easier than others; some passages are easier than others. But it’s a lot of work. Often I wish I could sit down and write a book in a year. It doesn’t happen that way. And, years later, I still have the impulse to change certain things that could have been better.

RC Do you work at specific times of the day?

BC My best time’s the morning. I go down to my workroom with the world having intervened as little as possible. I drink coffee, eat my breakfast, and then am at it. Generally, I have a period of between three and five hours of intense concentration and some productivity. Some days I can come back after lunch and edit a bit. But producing the stuff is generally limited to a few hours a day. I try to be as consistent as possible, but that’s hard too.

RC Do you work on a single project?

BC For the first time I’m now working on two books at the same time. I’ve always been superstitious about sticking to one thing until I get it done. There’s a wonderful gay painter named Larry Pitman. He described the same thing. Generally, even if he can’t do anything on a painting, he won’t let himself do anything else. He’ll keep beating his head against a wall till it’s done.

One of the books is a collection of short stories, mostly in the third person, and all concerning things pretty distant from my experiences. Obviously, in fiction, everything’s up for grabs. With a memoir like Truth Serum, no one can say: “I think you should make your mother a coal miner.” With fiction, though, there’s infinite flexibility.

The other book I’m imagining as a lot like Maps to Anywhere. It’ll be a collection of difficult-to-categorize pieces. I’m interested in them having a single focus—which is the visual arts, and specifically my experiences in having gone to this avant-garde art school, spending years watching people do performances where they’d brush their hair for six hours and then fall asleep. That seems innately funny and appalling to me at the same time.

I’m trying to bounce back and forth between the two things. It remains to be seen whether that’s a good way of working. But I’m enjoying turning to something else when I reach a real obstacle in one thing. I feel I always have something to work on. That’s new.

RC Have you embarked on projects which simply haven’t worked?

BC Sure. Not whole books. But I have uncollected material. There are lots of stories and essays that never quite came to fruition. Christopher Isherwood was one of the first writers to take an interest in my work. I sent him some poems first. Then I remember sending him what I thought was a really good story. It was about my father having been a lawyer for this case called the “Miracle Chicken.” A farmer and his wife had beheaded a chicken which kept living. They charged people to see it. The SPCA wanted to kill it; they wanted to keep it alive—as a sign from God. My father defended the couple.

I’d never written prose before. It was horribly overstated. Isherwood called me up. He’d been so enthusiastic before about the poems. But he said: “I got the story you sent. You know, it’s wrong; wrong; wrong.” [Laughs] I was devastated. But he was right. Years later, I wrote the piece again from scratch and it became part of Maps to Anywhere. So there’s a way in which some things get discarded forever, and other things get forgotten and ferment over time. Then suddenly it’s the right time to work with that material again.

RC Could you summarize your own reading history?

BC My earliest reading was in poetry. Probably my life was forever changed by a teacher I had in high school who brought in an anthology called Contemporary American Poetry, edited by the poet Donald Hall. That was the first time I read Ginsberg to any extent. Also Plath, Howard Nemerov, and Anthony Hecht. Hecht was a powerful influence. He’s written several kinds of poems. But he wrote a lot of strongly narrative poems—like stories with line breaks. The language was much denser than it would have been in prose. These were extremely dark, but funny at the same time. They involved all kinds of kitschy junk, like whoopee cushions. At heart, though, they were very unsettling. I loved the fact that he could balance those two tones, and that he told a story.

One of the first gay writers who turned my head was the poet Edward Field. His book Stand Up Friend with Me I found at a bookstore. The poems again were strongly narrative, accessible, and with a terrific gentle humor. They didn’t seem academic at all. They had a loose, prosaic quality I responded to. They were frank about his sexual identity and the milieu he lived in in New York. He was my gay Robert Lowell—somebody who’d taken the material of his life and transformed it into poetry.

One remarkable thing about Michael Benedikt’s anthology of prose poetry was that it opened my eyes to a whole genre I didn’t know about … and not only the people who were pretty much the first to experiment in prose poetry—Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. There were a lot of Americans too—even people like Anne Sexton. I’d no idea she’d written prose poetry. In fact, I think they’re very rarely collected. Michael Benedikt himself wrote some really funny stuff. Then there was a ripple effect. I began reading both poetry and prose; finally, just about anything.

Apart from their influence on this particular book, I don’t know if I’d put these two writers in my ultimate cosmos, but tremendously influential to A Year of Rhymes were Denton Welch and Bruno Schulz. A friend gave me Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure. I was completely dumbstruck. I loved the fact that so little happened, yet the whole thing seemed charged with an amazing nascent sexuality. Everything had a sexual undertone. I kept thinking: “On the next page, he’s going to have sex.” But it never happened. And the events were all so trivial. One favorite moment occurs when as a young man the major tries to see if he can fit himself in the bureau drawer. It was so peculiar, and yet so provocative—this ordinary whimsical thing a kid might think of doing … It was completely riveting, even though nothing was happening. I loved the subtlety of Welch’s work, and particularly the idea that a book can be charged with sexuality when the character, at twelve, was really too young, naive, or bashful to act on any sexual impulses.

Schulz was Polish. His work’s an odd hybrid of autobiography and fiction. He was a great influence on the structure of A Year of Rhymes. I remember a quote of his: “Memories are like the filaments around which our sense of the world is crystallized.” I thought of each section of A Year of Rhymes as one of those filaments. There was a central image everything seemed to congeal around—usually something that had a kind of hidden meaning I had to discover through writing it.

I’m crazy about Joan Didion’s essays in particular. Though not many people find her funny, I think she’s often hilarious, in a very bleak way. There’s lots of work by Annie Dillard I’ve been really stirred by. Her stuff is unabashedly poetic—delicious and musical, full of alliteration and onomatopoeia. There’s an American writer named Albert Goldbarth, a poet who also writes what he calls “poem-essays.” He’s not as well known as he should be but is constantly anthologized. He’s a writer’s writer.

One of my favorite gay writers is Allan Gurganus. I first came across his work with a really short story that was in Paris Review—“It Had Wings.” It was brief, compressed like a poem. It relied on imagery. It was like a fable in its departures from the real. It was very exciting. I’ve been a fan ever since, particularly of the stories. I’m nuts about “Nativity, Caucasian” and “Condolences to Every One of Us,” which I think are perfect.

RC A Year of Rhymes was compared to Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, which surprised me. It seemed wrong formally; I associate Other Voices, Other Rooms with the gay tradition of elaborate, ornate, bejeweled prose. Perhaps people are really searching for thematic comparisons?

BC Yes. This is an odd phenomenon a writer has no control over. I think it was the publicist who wrote the jacket copy who first made that comparison. Then it filtered into reviews. Suddenly one person’s assessment seemed like a unanimous critical comparison. A Year of Rhymes was also compared to J. D. Salinger. I think you’re right—it’s about theme. And at book readings, people always wanted to ask me about what it was like growing up gay, not about matters of form.

I guess the comparisons flatter. But it’s like looking at yourself in a fun-house mirror. You know it’s you, but the distortions make you feel incredulous. I don’t think either comparison’s right, whereas if somebody had said Denton Welch, I’d have felt they understood very accurately what I was aiming for.

This stuff happens and you take it in your stride—so long as they compare me to fabulous, famous writers! [Laughs] As far as ornate stuff goes, the writing in Maps to Anywhere was the most ornate mine has ever been. I was coming out of years of reading poetry, of being influenced by people like Anthony Hecht, who has incredible verbal agility. In my own way I was trying to imitate that. I love the richness of Nabokov’s prose too.

You have to be interested in language to write—the same way a painter has to be interested in paint. How could you not be completely enthralled by your medium and still spend your life working in it? I feel really strongly, however, that, as much as I love ornate language in my reading, and as much as I’ve tried to produce it myself, I still want a certain kind of transparency in my work. I want the language to be in service of something said, something in the real world. I don’t want it to be about itself. One contemporary literary movement that I’m completely baffled by is language poetry. It’s solely a kind of formal experimentation. I want news of the world in what I read. And I do want a charge of feeling or sentiment in the work.

It’s more likely that I’ll be enamored, even envious, of writers whose prose is simple, because it goes against what for me is a more or less natural inclination—to approach language from a more skewed, aesthetic direction. So I love Raymond Carver. One of my other favorite American writers is Tobias Wolff. His prose is miraculously hard and clear, yet it always carries this plaintive or mesmerizing quality. I’m in awe of the lucidity of his sentences. Yet they always seem to be about something mysterious and ineffable.

I’m a little unsure ultimately where I fall on the tightrope between the ornate and the simple. I probably vacillate toward different extremes at different times. Something that does draw me to some degree toward the ornate, though, is that there’s something slightly hyperbolic and complicated about the way I see the world. I think in part it has to do with being gay, and so never taking anything on face value when I was growing up. Everything seemed charged with innuendo. The world was supposed to be one thing, but there was a world beyond what was evident or obvious.

The other thing has to do with my being Jewish. That draws me towards the hyperbolic. There’s a certain pitch of woe, of complaint or ribald humor, that characterized my growing up—in the way my relatives would talk to each other. You never had a problem. You always had “The Woyst Problem You Just Wouldn’t Believe …” Everything was exaggerated to this amazing pitch. So there’s something authentic in the way that pitch captures my view of the world. There are a lot of Jewish-American writers where that kind of ornateness comes into play, like Cynthia Ozick or Stanley Elkin, who I think formally is one of the more adventurous American writers. Not only does he toy with language, but when things happen, they happen in this mad, slapstick way. I love that. It seems real to me—the way a child might draw a big orange blob with spokes on it, and that to him is the sun.

RC How important is your Jewish ancestry to the work?

BC In his introduction to Maps to Anywhere, Richard Howard wrote about something he found innate in my work: the flavor of second- or third-generation Jews. My parents were intent on assimilating. It was one of their big goals. But they were torn between two worlds. They spoke Yiddish, for example, but refused to teach it to me. In part, they wanted to be able to carry on discussions I’d know nothing about.

I remember very distinctly my mother advising me to tell people I was American when they asked who or what I was. She was very frightened—as she had reason to be—about how people might respond if I said I was Jewish. They were torn, like a lot of Jews of that generation. They were carrying on traditions with one hand, and shedding them with the other. I was barmitzvahed when I was thirteen. But I learned my speech phonetically. I had absolutely no idea what I was saying. That says it all. It was a ritual my parents—superstitiously, perhaps—felt it was necessary to carry through, but not enough so that I knew what the hell I was doing. To be frank, all I thought was: “I’m going to get a lot of presents”—like the American consumer I already was.

I’m not very religious, which I think obviously has to do with my upbringing. I have much more kinship with Jewishness as an ethnicity than a religion. What was most ingrained in me weren’t religious precepts but things like Jewish humor, a way of talking. One thing I find most profound about Jewishness is that everything gets inflected into a question. Everything’s doubtful. Even belief isn’t so much about finding definitive answers as about figuring out the right questions. Those questions I feel are part of my soul, whereas the religious things … Well, I never know when Hanukkah is, for instance.

RC Do you see any connection between the materiality of your prose and Los Angeles, your hometown—a place where, according to the cliché anyway, materialism and surface proliferate endlessly?

BC One of the consistent elements I decided to pursue in this book of short stories is setting—I wanted them all to take place in or around Los Angeles. I’m very interested in the city’s ambience. I do think the clichés about L.A. are true, but their opposites are also often true, too. I find L.A. a place of disturbing irrationality, of great mystery, of a kind of melancholy anonymity, in that people are very removed from each other. These things Joan Didion has certainly captured.

Something that makes L.A. ripe for the work I do is its superficiality. Pop art was the first aesthetic experience I ever had. It was profoundly transforming. Overnight I saw myself as an artist. One thing I’ve always loved about pop art at its best is that, though on the surface it’s “about” surface, it can also address some really unnerving, complicated things. When Andy Warhol made two hundred Marilyn Monroe silk-screens, that was obviously about the superficiality of an image repeated ad nauseam. On the other hand, it was also about the way people become masks of themselves, which is both a sad and an amazing thing for a work of art to be about. The early work of Roy Liechtenstein took really loaded images of American clichés—clichés about heroism—and made them seem absurd and empty. That was earthshaking.

I’ve always loved the way the superficial—if dealt with interestingly—can lead to something more complicated and intricate. It’s the way I’ve hoped to employ banal or superficial imagery myself. In a piece like “The House of the Future,” where I talk about this almost laughable house at Disneyland, there’s some sense in which all these plastic goodies speak to me about how impossible ideas of Utopia are—the way humans always strive for some glimpse of the future. It was the same with Anthony Hecht—he used articles about Marlon Brando from Life magazine to address some really stirring, often unhappy things. I love the resonance between what’s supposedly superficial and what’s deep or disturbing.

RC In “If and When,” there’s a suggestion of the deep appropriateness of, or your own deep sympathy with, a very consumer-based engagement with art. Was that conscious? Or was it to introduce an element of irony or tension?

BC I’m not sure irony’s there. Andy Warhol said that the artist who truly expresses our times is the one painting flowers in his attic. In a way I find the fact that people have crappy reproductions of Rodin’s The Thinker on their mantelpiece really touching and amazing. It speaks to me of the way people yearn for aesthetic experiences, and to understand things beyond their ken. We all do it. So I take kitsch very seriously. I’m fond of it in a way that isn’t exactly ironic.

RC “If and When” also features some very personal experiences of AIDS. Was that especially hard to write about?

BC Absolutely. That’s probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever written … not so much in setting things in language. There were extraliterary concerns that muddied the waters. One was that I was writing about someone I care for immeasurably. I felt a responsibility I’ve never felt before. It’s one thing to try to reflect your own view of the world. It’s another to do that for yourself and for someone you feel strongly about. That dual responsibility was difficult.

One of the really hard things—and I think I can say this without to the best of my knowledge being blinded by love—concerns the fact that, as most people who know Brian would tell you, he’s remarkably resourceful. He’s done everything he can to take care of himself. He’s made sure that his health problems have not subsumed our relationship. He’s also the most genuinely even-tempered person I know—quite different from the Jewish hysteric you’re talking to!

I wanted to show those things—but accurately. I didn’t want it to seem like some sort of crazy romanticization, or to make him seem somehow impervious to suffering, which of course he’s not. I had to write about how he was. I wanted to write him in a way that captured his desire to live, simply put, yet wouldn’t strike the reader as an attempt to make him more heroic than he is. Also, I wanted his approval. I knew at some point he had to read the piece, and if it wasn’t OK with him, it wasn’t going in. That had never happened before.

Also, we mentioned earlier how much of my writing concerns memory. This was really different. I was writing about it as it was happening. Not only that. Brian’s health—as for a lot of people who have AIDS—can change dramatically from day to day. So it was like capturing something that was always changing. I wanted to let my emotion into the piece, but didn’t want to be swamped by it, as happens quite frequently in my day-to-day life. I often feel overwhelmed by the gravity of his suffering. It may sound a little dramatic, but I’m bereft by the possibility of losing him. It’s horrible. To find the right distance from the material was really hard.

One of the most incisive things anyone’s ever said about my work was when Richard Howard read A Year of Rhymes. He said something that made me so grateful: “You know, this isn’t at all a coming out story. This is about what it means to be in a body.” I’d only been vaguely aware of that, but he was right on the money. The same is true with “If and When.” One thing AIDS has made us all excruciatingly aware and hyper-vigilant about is the body. It may just be a carapace, but everything begins and ends there—the possibility of the greatest losses and salvation. Being able to continue to touch Brian, to experience his flesh—in one sense, this was the most superficial notion of a meaningful connection or romantic bond. But in the end, it was also the most profound thing possible. Everything began and ended with a small gesture on the surface of each other’s body. It was there that the greatest depth of expression took place. And every time I felt despair about the possibility of losing Brian, the antidote was his physical existence. That, of course, made the possibility of losing him all the more frightening.

RC It’s like Brian’s happiness at your testing negative. It’s the tortuous circularity of AIDS logic.

BC That’s a good phrase for it. My experience of being in a sero-different couple—and here comes the hyperbole—is that the fluctuation from one emotion to another is like being flung from one end of the room to the other. That’s how violent it feels. These emotions chase their tails in a really ferocious way. What makes you happy simultaneously makes you sad because you risk losing it. Because you risk losing it, it’s all the more important to you. There’s so much of that. It’s exhausting!

RC Who else has impressed you in writing about AIDS?

BC The AIDS texts that come to mind are the stories and nonfiction I’d read before I decided to write about it myself. I made a conscious effort not to look at other writings about AIDS when writing about it myself. I’d visited so many workshops for people with AIDS or sero-different couples—places where people were trying to write about this disease. But again, what allows me to write is a sense of anonymity or aloneness. So there was a conflict between feeling I was part of a community of people giving voice to an experience that’s incredibly difficult and overwhelming, and trying to believe in the possibility that I had something unique to contribute.

I admire Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time. I remember him giving an overwhelming reading of the poems from Love Alone. For the most part, people like Paul Monette and David Feinberg had contributed not only to a literature of AIDS but to the literature of anger. Their work was rousing and amazing. They harnessed this tremendous rage and weren’t swamped by it. As angry and frustrated as both Brian and I have become, though, my writing’s never been the place where I vent anger. I think if I tried, the results would be unreadable. I hope instead to try to chart certain paradoxes, certain odd, circular ways of thinking which lead to troubling aspects of human nature—things that are joyful and miserable at the same time. Also I wanted to offer humor. Gallows humor.

Sometimes I feel humor is like bread or sustenance for us. It’s not just that we can laugh at the darkest possibilities. There’s something genuinely nourishing about it. I find myself constantly making jokes with Brian. He makes them too, and they kill me. They come right out of left field. In my work, I try to use humor that seems particularly resonant, that make points about life and death that only a joke can make.

RC Is AIDS a theme you’ve left behind?

BC No. Some characters in the stories have AIDS. One thing that’s been a little bit odd for me about this subject is that I grew up in a family with three older brothers, all of whom had died by the time AIDS hit. I have to say that AIDS seems like a really horrifying continuation of something that’s always preoccupied me: a heightened sense of mortality and the impermanence of the body. One great sadness in my relationship with Brian—and maybe no love can do this—is that I wanted love to take that out of my life. But it put it in the center in a way I’d never have imagined, especially after going through all that with my brothers.

RC Could you say something about the significance to you of the pre-AIDS sexual culture—what someone in “If and When” refers to as “Shangri-la”? Sex doesn’t feature so heavily in your work.

BC My own experience in the gay world was that I tried to find a place for myself in the Edenic 1970s. I took advantage of sexual opportunity. It was incredibly good for me. But I’d also lived with a woman for about three years romantically. My greatest thrills always seemed to be within the context of a relationship. I think I got the same sense of unpredictability, play, and adventure in an intimate relationship that other people might get from having different partners or exploring other avenues of sexual expression.

That’s not a judgment. As for writing about sex, I like writing and reading about sex where there’s some undercurrent of meaning other than just the experience of sex. A friend of mine said something brilliant—that writing about sex-that’s-just-sex is like writing about chewing instead of about tasting food. That was perfect. Sex can be written about mechanically. That doesn’t interest me. But the way sex can betray people’s desperation or foolishness, or the extent of their hunger … That’s interesting. As for my evolution as a gay man, I spent many years in a wonderful, slow process of coming out that involved a great deal of sexual exploration. But I’m more interested in exploring the complicated things that happen to people when they’ve had a lot of history together and a lot of things are at stake.

RC What do you feel about statements regarding the appropriateness of sexual writing in gay literature?

BC I don’t feel persuaded by either extreme—the one that insists on excising sex from a work for the sake of propriety or whatever; or the other—using sex as an in-your-face way to get people to confront their feelings about gay sexuality. Nothing I write comes out of that. I do think about the repercussions of what I’ve written. But I don’t write anything out of a theory. Generalizations don’t work for me. I find them oppressive.

In the same way, there are lots of prescriptions about how people should write about AIDS—that you must be angry, or educate, or show safe sex, or have transgressive sex, or else you’re erotophobic, or whatever. The supposition is that there are right and wrong ways to experience sex on the one hand, and grief on the other. I’m sorry, but I do it the best way I know how, which is sloppy and changes from minute to minute. I think one gropes through those experiences. It’s the floundering, the trying to figure out what it all means that interests me.

RC Is there anything you resist reading when you’re writing?

BC Right now I’m obsessed with reading short stories. That’s all I can read. It’s odd because I’m writing them too. Often I’ve felt when I was writing a novel, that I should read nonfiction; when I’m writing nonfiction, I’d read fiction, so I could feel there was a difference between my reading and writing lives. At the risk of sounding barbaric, though, in some ways it all seems the same to me … like different bodies of water. When you boil them down, you get salt.

RC Do you still write poetry?

BC No, though I still go to poetry readings and read a lot of poetry. One troublesome thing about writing poetry was that I got really stifled trying to figure out line breaks. Free verse is a lot more problematic than people give it credit for. Once I’d given up on the idea of trying to shape things into lines, my work became more expansive. I could stretch it. I was mobile in prose—flexible—in a way I wasn’t in poetry.

RC Have you ever wanted to write for stage or screen?

BC No. In L.A., everyone asks if you’re writing a screenplay. Plays and screenplays—as much as I admire them—don’t offer what I love in prose: description. Sometimes I have an idle fantasy that I could make visual art again. But I have my hands full writing fiction and nonfiction. I’ll probably be working with those forms for the rest of my life.

RC Congratulations on the publication of Guess Again. You’d spoken of enjoying writing in the third person; I was surprised to find that the first story, “Night Sky,” was not only one of three written in the first person but also that Sam, the narrator, casually reveals that he is HIV-positive. Did you hesitate before taking on this particular “I” voice?

BC No. I welcomed taking it on. It was a way to immerse myself in a character whose HIV status is different from my own. It was a way, I hoped, to achieve greater empathy with a person who would be going through this threat to his mortality.

RC In “Night Sky,” protease inhibitors, which have so starkly changed circumstances for so many, are explicitly mentioned. Could you comment on the experience of writing so frequently about AIDS in these stories as the circumstances of AIDS treatment programs were changing so rapidly?

BC Treatment programs are changing, but they change for every disease. What interests me is how people do or don’t cope with treatment, how people do or don’t learn to live with the degree of uncertainty that having a disease imposes.

RC I assume you’ve continued to work on the proposed collection of memoirs concerning your experiences at art school. How has it felt moving back to autobiographical material after the hiatus of the very diverse fictional circumstances of Guess Again?

BC It’s been a great pleasure writing about art—about the nobility and absurdity of the avant-garde, which interests me in the same way that notions of a utopian civilization interested me in the essay “The House of the Future” in my first book. I’m moved by how human beings have the capacity to imagine a perfect world, and at the same time to realize that those idealizations are fallible and will never be fully realized.