CONVERSATION: Dennis Cooper on Closer, Confusion, and Fantasy
Oscar d'Artois meets up with Dennis Cooper at a café in Paris to discuss the reissue of his 1989 novel
A few weeks ago Dennis Cooper mentioned to me that Closer – the first of his pentalogy of novels the George Miles Cycle, published in 1989 – was being reissued in the United States by Grove Atlantic. I told him I had actually just been reading it, because I’d gotten a copy of the new UK edition on a recent trip. It feels odd to mention that you are reading someone’s book who is sitting in front of you to their face, but that’s showbiz. With Closer still fresh on my mind, it seemed obvious I should interview him about it for Zona Motel. The reissue was imminent, so the following day I wrote, hey are you around next week do you think we could do an interview? Although we’ve known each other for several years at this point, we’d never done anything quite so formal together. To my relief he said ‘sure’ and then ‘thanks!!’ as if I were doing him a favor.
We set up a time and agreed to meet somewhere quietish – a café on the Place de la République. I love the anonymity of these big, generically Parisian places. On the day of, I rushed over on a city bike, having just assembled my notes. It was one of those cool, sunny days in May that’s impossible to know how to dress for. While we are similar in a number of ways – we share a teenage obsession with French Symbolist poetry, for instance – unlike me, Dennis doesn’t live for the sun’s rays. Accordingly, he’d found some terrace shade and was in his classic jeans, loose t-shirt, big open white button-down, and an overcoat. I was in some slutty little tank and a light jacket, overeager for summer. He greeted me with a faux-gunshot hand signal and a smile.
It’s funny because I can still vividly recall my first time seeing a Dennis Cooper book, some fifteen years ago. I’d befriended a film professor I’d go to the movies with sometimes and once, we stopped by his house, and in the entrance I saw a copy of The Sluts on a chair and exclaimed What is that?! As a result, I was a bit nervous about doing this interview, so we just jumped right in.
Dennis Cooper: The cars are okay?
OD: Yeah, it should pick us up. Otherwise, I’ll make it up.
DC: I did that once. I interviewed Leonardo DiCaprio when Romeo + Juliet had just come out. I met with him, we talked for a long time, I was using a DAT [Digital Audio Tape], and when I got home, it had recorded like two minutes. But luckily I basically remembered the whole conversation. So I sat down and went, okay this was that… And I just made it all up. And he never said, ‘I didn’t say that’ – or else he didn’t mind what I made up for him.
OD: Nice.
DC: Zac [Farley] is gonna show up at some point, by the way. We’re gonna go look at some art after.
OD: Great. Okay, so I guess I’ll start asking questions. What does it feel like, having the book reissued?
DC: It’s great. I think I’m a better writer now, but I worked extremely hard on it, thought about it for years. It’s great to have your work refreshed. And it’s odd because I guess it means I’m getting older if they’re reissuing my early books. So that’s a little strange. It’s interesting that people still read it and get stuff out of it. But I feel basically really good about it – I’m still happy with what I did.
OD: Was Closer your first foray into writing prose? You had mainly been a poet before then?
DC: I had been a poet for a while, but I’d always written prose. That was always my primary thing, but I wasn’t good, so I was doing it but it wasn’t ready to be seen. I had published some short things. I had published this novella called Safe. But I’d had this idea for a big project since I was fifteen, which evolved into the cycle.
OD: More recently you published I Wished, which kind of looks back on the whole cycle.
DC: I didn’t intend it to do that, but people seem to think it does. It references the cycle, so I understand why they say that. But I Wished was more about the person, the real George, as opposed to the character.
OD: So if I Wished is more about George himself, is what you have in Closer and the other cycle books based more around the idea of a muse figure, or…?
DC: Using him as a template, yeah. I went through these different periods where I had to figure out how I was gonna do this big project. And so different things would fall into place. And then I’d discover something, like music or a writer that would help me. And one of them, a big one, was that I decided I would write about George and make him at the heart of it. Because he was extremely complicated, as was my relationship to him. He evolves, though. He’s only in the first novel, and then he fractures and turns into different characters, and then returns at the end. I just thought if I put him in the center of it, that would prevent me from doing anything sadistic or evil to him, that I would always be thinking of him, and always be thinking of his viewpoint, or be protective of him in some way, as much as the characters would be objectified and treated terribly. That if it was George, it would be a way to make sure I didn’t go too far.
OD: Right, like you don’t kill him, for instance.
DC: Well, he’s dead in the last novel, but he’s dead in that one because he actually died. The real one died. But he wouldn’t have been killed if he hadn’t, well, killed himself.
OD: Jesus. Ok. But whereas in other books, where you sometimes have a more objectified kind of boy figure – sometimes they’re hacked to pieces, etc. – in this one, the guy’s like, do you want me to kill you? And he’s like, No, actually, I don’t. And then he leaves.
DC: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that anyone actually gets killed in my books. It’s all fantasy. It’s all just made up, it’s basically just these guys collaborating inadvertently and getting combined into this character who may never have existed. In The Marbled Swarm, it’s all part of the game of the prose. Because the guy’s manipulating you with the prose, and so you don’t really know if any of it’s real. So basically, I think no one actually gets killed. But I’m not interested in realism, so all the novels are kind of fantasy.
OD: Right, that’s an interesting point I wanted to bring up. There’s a sort of turning point for me in the book, which is when you have the scene of Cliff watching the sex between Philippe and George, and Philippe summons a turd out of George’s ass. And I couldn’t finish it after that, I had to put the book down, and only later came back to it.
DC: Oh! Interesting. You really get to know the person based on their reaction to the book. And now I’ve learned so much about you.
OD: Yeah. Sure. But I guess for me, up until then, everything’s been relatively vanilla. People are talking about stuff, maybe having creepy ideas. But nothing that bad has happened to anybody. And then suddenly you get this. And for some reason, I had this quite strong, visceral reaction. After that it gets much more into the gory stuff. But that felt to me like a scene that was conceivable within the realm of reality, almost. Cusp reality. And because you sympathize with the character of George, it felt like too much. But then with everything after that, the chopping to bits and stuff, I accepted that it was just play. I’d moved outside of the dimension of what was conceivably real to me. And so I treated it as comedy or something. I feel like in The Marbled Swarm you have something similar, a dimension where one of the characters is described as being totally flat, two dimensional. And in this book, after that scene, I felt I entered more of a dimension where the characters were unreal, whereas before they’d seemed more human.
DC: Yeah. Well, it’s supposed to be disturbing when that stuff happens. That’s purposeful, what you’re saying. But I hope it doesn’t make you just close the book and move on…
OD: No, it’s more that, like, afterwards, rereading it the second time, I thought it was funny. I just laughed. But do you have this sense of moving between dimensions, in the book, or is it all completely in the realm of fantasy from the get-go?
DC: It’s all just fiction. Sometimes I want it to feel real enough and visceral enough that it’s disturbing in a different way. And sometimes I want it to be clearly framed as being something that’s happening in the heads of these people who are projecting their own sexual ambitions onto people with whom that can never happen. It’s playing with the levels, with the tones. I do a lot of modulation in my writing, where I use humor as a sedative, to get people in a state where, when something happens, you’re unprepared because you’re somewhere else, and it startles you.
OD: This has me wondering about how you came upon the structure of the book, of these seven or so characters orbiting around the character of George. It feels like a good way to get at the central mystery of the book, which seems to be – what is his problem, what ails him?
DC: Each of the books in the cycle have exactly the same structure. In each case, it serves a different function. It isn’t always about one character, but the structure was worked out because it was something flexible that would serve the purpose of what I was trying to do in each book. So in Closer, all the paragraphs are equal length. It’s hypnotic. It creates a rhythm, even if the novel has its own rhythm because of the way the story works. But then there’s this superficial thing on top of that, this extremely regular rhythm, like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And it works. It works while you’re reading. Because it takes you to the next part, and the next part. It does these divisions, and that was to create this kind of hypnotic quality. And it’s, again, a kind of sedation of what’s going on. I worked the structure out pretty carefully, knowing that all the books had to have the same structure. But in this case, what you’re saying is true. One of the purposes of the structure is to put this amorphous, confused being at the center of it, and then be able to fracture him out, and fracture out the interests that the book and the reader or characters have in him.
OD: Speaking of hypnosis, at one point you have two characters looking at a porn mag, and one of them’s like, hey look at this guy, he’s really beautiful, and then the next page is just his ass, and they’re simultaneously horrified and fascinated by it. They describe it as hypnotic. It’s like, you can get too close to the thing itself.
DC: Well, there’s individuality in a face, but an ass is an ass. It depersonalizes, on the one hand, but it’s also inviting, because it’s so simple. An ass is like a very simple face. I can’t always deal with who he is, but the ass is the other entrance to the body. I can do whatever I want with it.
OD: Right, because you go back and forth, don’t you? One of the things that really works about the book, is you have that depersonalized aspect, where you’ve got this sort of hacking to bits and body parts and stuff, and then you have this very emotional connection with a lot of the characters, and that’s what really what draws you in. A lot of people compared this book to Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero, which came out around the same time, but to me, that book seems less emotive, whereas here that stuff really feels central.
DC: I like Brett’s work, we’re friends, but he was just trying to do something completely different. He’s a social satirist, essentially. There is dark stuff in there, but it’s very occluded. Whereas for me, the emotional stuff is really important. It’s always there under the surface, always going to break through, and always where I want the reader to be gravitated towards.
OD: You have this character that I feel kind of recurs in other books, such as The Marbled Swarm. You have similar iterations of this pervy old French man. I’m wondering where he comes from?
DC: French literature. It probably comes from extrapolating a kind of character out of that. I was obsessed with French literature. So, Sade, Genet, Bataille. There’s a kind of pervy gay intellectual guy thing that’s very specifically French. I wanted to work with that, because that’s how I learned so many things, from that kind of voice. So, placing that stuff inside a French character who’s a little pretentious was both strategically useful, and I thought it was funny.
OD: Yeah, it is, because that character comes out of nowhere. When Philippe appears in the novel, George is at a dance, and his high school English teacher has gotten him stoned out of his mind, and everyone’s abandoned him and he’s annoyed. And suddenly, this guy with an ivory skull ring appears and says, May I give you a ride? And it’s Philippe, and it’s like, where did he come from? Why is he at this high school dance?
DC: Well, anything’s possible in this world…
[Laughter]
OD: You grew up in a time when there was a lot of serial killing happening around you. Was that a big part of your imaginary?
DC: That stuff has been in my head forever. I don’t know that it was inspired by the serial killers, but they grounded it. I was like, Oh, this happens in the world. There’s examples of it. And it was around me, in my vicinity. Charles Manson, all that stuff was happening when I was a kid, so it gave me a way to represent it. I knew about it from Sade, I read him and thought, oh, you can write about this stuff. But here were these examples of these men doing these things to these teenage boys who were my age. So it was helpful in the sense that it created a model I could use in my work, of a man who had these huge ambitions for these boys’ bodies. But I only knew about them through the news, or true crime magazines. I was young so it’s not like I went and hung out with them. But one of the murderers killed three boys really close to my house. I lived at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, and there was this place a short drive away called Chantry Flats. And we’d go up there and go hiking and smoke pot and stuff. And the guy killed these three boys there, he took them camping and killed them. So that was very real to me, because it was like, that’s where my friends and I go. So I could sort of think, well, that could have been us. I knew the kind of boys that would go camping up there. So that was very real. And I went up and I found where the killer had done it, I made a friend of mine go with me. He was like, what the fuck? And we found where it happened, because you could see the police tape and stuff. So, that one was very present, because it was literally right where I lived. It just gave me a way to think about it or rationalize it, and to be like, this isn’t my insanity, this actually happens. I’m just making them a lot more ambitious than they probably were.
OD: Back to Phillippe, there’s the sense he’s come to LA as an expat to sort of discover himself as a creepy old French perv.
DC: Well, he’s more than a perv. That’s not his entire existence. Please, some respect for Philippe!
OD: Right, sorry Philippe. Do you have a larger imaginary for your characters?
DC: They’re not real to me, I don’t think of characters that way, but yeah, I had a real construction of who the characters were, even if it’s not in the book. I didn’t want them to be two-dimensional. Unless they were, but then it’s on purpose. Philippe is complicated, because he’s more two dimensional than George or David. But because he’s French, and he speaks in this slightly poetic way, he has a kind of facade of being more than two dimensional that you feel distance from. You know he’s speaking a second language, so you feel like there’s probably more going on here.
OD: So this distance creates a sense of depth?
DC: It leaves the character mysterious. Because then there’s Tom, and Tom is just pure evil. He’s very two dimensional. As opposed to Philippe, who philosophizes about what his interests are, and then there’s Tom who just wants to fuck and slaughter some kid.
OD: Philippe has a line where he says something like, seeing the insides of a boy’s body, his guts, is like walking onto the theater set of a play that’s being performed in an unfamiliar language, that you have to explore in this totally new way that doesn’t make any sense.
DC: I do that all the time.
OD: Also, you live in Paris, in this place that must have some degree of unfamiliarity to you?
DC: Well, the people are all unfamiliar to me because I don’t speak French.
OD: Do you feel that this sense of immersion in unfamiliarity is important to you in terms of helping you describe reality?
DC: At this point? I like it. It’s not the first time it’s ever happened. I lived in Amsterdam too. I like not understanding things. My whole thing is, confusion is the truth, that’s kind of my “motto.” I feel comfortable there. I like being a little confused by everything. Maybe it puts less pressure on having to feel like you understand things, or maybe it humbles me in a way that’s really good. I don’t know.
OD: I remember living in Germany and not understanding what people were saying, and then I’d come home and it was horrible, listening to everyone having these stupid conversations.
DC: It’s weird when I go to the States and understand what everyone’s saying. But I like it, too. Overhearing someone in conversation, they’re still totally mysterious, you’re just getting bits and pieces of what they’re thinking at that moment. So in a way they’re just as mysterious. But it’s harder to project onto them. They seem more autonomous, rather than examples of general confusion, or something.
OD: You have a quote early on in the book where you have John say of his drawings, “What if his drawings really weren’t important at all except as places to put his confusion.” Do you feel that is the purpose of art?
DC: Not for most people.
OD: But for you?
DC: Yeah. It’s confusion, trying to articulate it, and then trying to find language, which is wholly inadequate, but trying to really chisel, because I work extremely hard on the prose, to get the prose to be clear enough, and communicative enough, while at the same time reflecting my confusion. And also to work out my own confusion. It helps me figure out what exactly I’m thinking, if I can nail down a specific interest. It’s both. But I don’t think most people do that. Otherwise, art would be a whole lot better. I’m so not interested in know-it-all stuff, in this approach to art that’s like, I’m going to ace this by being a master of this, and bring my insight and knowledge to this project, and therefore I and it are important. I don’t like power hierarchy stuff. With the work I do, I try to create something really balanced, so the reader is just as important as the book. It isn’t trying to tell you something or show you that it knows more than you. It’s not a textbook.
Zac Farley: Hi! Are you recording?
OD: Hi! Yeah, we’re recording.
ZF: Ok, I’m gonna go have a coffee over there.
DC: Oh, you can sit here, you’ve heard me blather before.
ZF: I’m fine, I’ll read the piece.
OD: Is there a character that you most relate to in the book?
DC: The one character that’s the most me in the book is Cliff. That’s my name. Clifford.
OD: Your name is Clifford?
DC: My real name is Clifford. Clifford Dennis Cooper. And he’s the worst, the weakest character. And that’s the character that’s the most like me. I couldn’t make him as interesting as the other characters. He serves a purpose, and he needs to be there, he’s fine, but he’s the least interesting character. But he has to be there, he’s part of the span, if he wasn’t the whole thing would collapse. All of my books have one point that is always the weakness, to make the structure work, which is very complicated. There’s always a part that ends up being the weakest that’s there to make the rest work, but it itself isn’t as successful. Luckily no one ever points those out.
OD: Interesting. I liked that part, I found it quite moving. When Cliff knows that Alex is in love with him, but basically can’t be bothered with him. And they’re like, jerking off, and Cliff looks over at Alex, and he’s about to cry. Because he’s like, why can’t we just be a thing. I thought that was one of the more moving moments.
DC: Thank you. I don’t remember it, but thank you.
OD: At a certain point, you had a younger brother character who wasn’t George, that someone wants to sleep with, and I wondered if he wasn’t closer to the real life ‘George,’ who was your friend’s younger brother.
DC: The physical layout of the character and his problems, those are very George. But obviously nothing like that ever happened to him. He wasn’t a cute boy anyone pursued. It wasn’t like that. He was a cute boy, but no one pursued him because he was too crazy. And in the real world, people actually care when someone’s fucked up. In this book, they can just objectify him because he’s pretty, but in the real world, it’s like, oh, this guy’s really fucked up.
OD: There are like ten gay boys in this book, at least. Do you feel that that was your experience of high school?
DC: No. I did go to an all boys school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys, so that created a certain world. But it was just to facilitate what I wanted to happen. The cycle has extremely few females in it, and there’s a reason for that. I think in this, the only female is a poster picture on the wall. I wanted it to create this myopic world where this was plausible to some degree, where this could happen because there was no interference from the real world. If there had been girls, I think it would have thrown everything off, because it wouldn’t have allowed them to live in this fantasy world. So them all being gay just facilitated it, because I wanted to write about what sexual desire would do to a person in that situation. So, it just made it easier to do that.
OD: Ok, last question. You have this status as a “cult author.” How are you feeling about that currently?
DC: I’m super grateful for what I have. I don’t like the term. I like that I’m known and read to the degree I am, but am not the center or seen as an authority figure. I’m just this guy who represents that you can write experimental stuff and be a nice guy and be supportive of other artists. I think that’s basically what people think of me at this point. I mean, I’m sure there’s still people who think what I do is sick.
OD: But that matters less, because you’re sort of in this protected bubble.
DC: And that whole hierarchy has completely collapsed anyway, the whole, like, you’ve got to get your book in the New York Times. When was the last interesting book that you read’s existence even acknowledged in the New York Times? That doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s all scattered and fractured. It’s websites and scenes and people and readers, and I feel really comfortable with that. So, the idea that you aren’t going to be invited to do a lecture at the 92nd street Y – it’s like, I don’t care. In that sense, I like where I am. I feel really grateful. Because a lot of the writers that I started out with ended up having a really hard time getting these books published. And I’ve always had enough of a readership that publishers will publish me. So I don’t know. I’m at peace with the cult writer thing, because, what am I gonna do about it? It just seems like a strange term, the idea that your readers are a cult.
OD: The word cult is weird. If you don’t think about it too much, it’s okay.
DC: It’s like you’re being marginalized, but I don’t care about the people doing the marginalizing. I don’t want to be like these people. Why do I care if they’re marginalizing me? So, I guess that’s how I feel about it.
OD: And it gives you this sort of special outsider status.
DC: Nobody that has power thinks what I do is important, and that’s great. Because if I was some prominent figure, I’d get canceled all the fucking time.
Cool conversation with a legend. Thank you both!
Great one, Oscar.