Dennis Cooper, born in 1953, has a reputation as a cult author but never made it into the mainstream. This may be due to the fact that early on he was labeled an ‚enfant terrible‘ who wanted to provoke with explicit depictions of sex and violence. He is currently in a high phase: his new, tenth novel I Wished was published at the end of last year. At the same time, Luftschacht Verlag published his 2004 novel Die Schlampe (Orig. The Sluts) for the first time. He is currently preparing his third film and maintains his blog almost every day. In the meantime he found the time for an interview.
I recently read de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom – partly because you cite de Sade as an influence on you as a writer. I thought I had seen everything that could possibly be committed to a page, but boy was I wrong. Being a scandalous book from a scandalous writer, the appeal is clear. It’s what brought me to American Psycho when I was sixteen – forbidden fruits taste best. And of course I found more than scandal reading that book just as you did, I suppose, when you read 120 Days of Sodom. So let’s start right here: When and why did you start reading de Sade and how did reading 120 Days of Sodom change your approach to literature?
— I found and read De Sade when I was 15. The 120 Days of Sodom was sitting on the bookshelf of the son of some friends of my parents whom we were visiting. I’d heard about Sade, so I pulled it out and started reading it. When I realised how extreme it was, I stole the book and hid it in my suitcase and read it secretly. It was a huge revelation because I’d been beset with intense fantasies about sex and violence since I was a kid, and I was very confused by them and what they might mean about me. Realising that such extreme subject matter was legitimate to write about and get published and even to be praised by brainy people like Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Blanchot, whose essays on the novel were included in the Grove Press edition I was reading, was pretty massive to me. I was already writing and had been since childhood, and I realised I could try to write about that hidden aspect of myself, and so I started doing that pretty much straight away. It’s hard to overstate what a breakthrough that was for me as an artist and as a human being in general.
The most de Sadean book of yours is, in my opinion, The Marbled Swarm. Not only in terms of setting (a remote chateau), but also in terms of language. Your sentences tend to be longer and more complex than in other works of yours. I must admit that I had a hard time reading The Marbled Swarm and I feel like I didn’t get it. Still, since I’ve just read 120 Days of Sodom and The Marbled Swarm came to mind while reading it, I’m interested to know if you’d agree that this is the novel most clearly influenced by de Sade or if I’m completely off track here? And I’d also be interested to know what you actually set out to do when you wrote The Marbled Swarm and if it has anything to do with you not publishing novels (other than the GIF novels) for a decade?
— I wasn’t thinking about Sade or trying to reference him consciously in The Marbled Swarm, but I totally understand why it seems like my most Sadeian novel, especially given the very dense and ornate prose I was working with. As for what I set out to do, I wanted to write a novel where the novel itself was the most important thing and what went on in it was secondary to what the novel’s structure and writing were doing. I wanted to write a novel where the writing was full of secrets and hidden passages to the point of being as three-dimensional as possible. Doing that had been a huge goal of mine since I first decided to be a serious writer when I was young, and I had tried to write a novel like that before but it took me many years to get the skills and chops to actually pull it off. It’s my favorite of my novels. I know it’s very difficult and demanding, but I suppose that’s what I like about it. I love fiction and films and art and music that’s very confusing to understand but very clearly and exactly rendered, and I feel like I managed to do that with The Marbled Swarm. The novel had nothing to do with my taking ten years to finish my next novel I Wished. That was mostly because I got very interested in making films with Zac Farley and in trying to write novels composed of animated gifs, and I concentrated on them. I suppose I also wanted to take a break from writing novels seeing as how I had been concentrating on writing novels basically nonstop, one after another, for such a long time. I always feel the need to reinvent my approach to the novel every time I start a new one, and between that search and being preoccupied with the films and gif novels, it just took me longer than usual to find a new way to write a novel that excited me enough.
Since structure is so important to you and as a reader I sometimes have the feeling that a novel’s structure itself is the key to unlock everything else in it, I wonder how elaborate the outlining process is – do you work out a plan you go by when actually writing it or is it a more organic process?
— It depends on the novel. For the George Miles Cycle books, I spent many years devising the cycle’s structure and the individual novels’ structures within the cycle’s overall structure. The Marbled Swarm was another novel that needed a lot of advance experimenting and pre-planning. But with I Wished, for instance, I deliberately went against my usual tendency to pre-plan novels’ structures in an elaborate way. I wanted it to be as emotionally generated as possible. That novel was written very intuitively with an ‘anything goes’ attitude, and then I went back to the material I’d written later and searched through it looking for connective tissue then structured it during the editing process. With The Sluts, on the other hand, I wrote that novel over the course of ten years, constantly trying different ways of building it. When I first started writing it it in the 90s, there wasn’t a developed internet yet, so the internet setting, which is of key importance to the novel, came along later. So that novel has a complicated structure like most of my novels do, but it came about through a process of continually building things and tearing them down and rebuilding them, etc.
One of the few awards you have received is the Prix Sade, which was awarded to you for The Sluts in 2007 (that must have been a sort of ‘full circle’ moment given what de Sade means to you). That novel has just been published in German for the first time and one reviewer described you as the ‘enfant terrible of gay fiction’. This leaves the question of what gay fiction actually is and why we would need this nomer. But much more interesting to me is the question of being looked though the lens of this transgressive gay writer led you to write God, Jr., a novel without gay characters yet is still very much a Dennis Cooper novel in the way that it explores the impossibility of truly knowing someone else as well as loss (at least that’s what I think is at the heart of many of your novels). The book connects to so many things of your other writing, just in a heteronormative setting. In God, jr., the father grieving the loss of his son is building a monument for him, just as you, one could argue, built a written monument for your friend George Miles, for example. As I see it, you actually write about pretty universal stuff – was God, Jr. an attempt to break out of the “gay writer” box and, looking back, how do you look at it today?
— I know that people have a pre-set idea of what a ‘Dennis Cooper’ novel is. I’ve been boxed into the ‘bad boy’, ‘enfant terrible’ category pretty much since I first started. But I, of course, don’t think myself as a writer who plays that part or who has some particular area in which I work. I’m not a genre writer, I’m an experimenter. So I feel disconnected from that expectation, and I just don’t think about it or consider what people are going to anticipate from me. I had been interested for a long time in discovering what kind of novel I would write if I excluded sex and queer characters and sexual desire as an impetus, and I’m a big fan of video games. I’ve learned a lot about spatiality and narrative possibilities from the way they’re built and from the driven but free-floating experience they offer players. So, with God Jr., I just decided to explore that area in a deliberate way, and doing so excited me enough that I felt no need to include the fiery material I usually work with. I had already been moving in that direction with the prior novel My Loose Thread where the concentration on sex/violence in an explicit way was already diminished. I’m still quite proud of God Jr. I think the last section of that novel is probably the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s interesting to me that, at the time, people who had a stake in my work like my agent and publisher and so on, and who had a long told me that the only reason my work wasn’t really successful and acclaimed by the arbiters of the literary world was because of my difficult subject matter, were excited that God Jr.would be my ‘breakthrough’ novel when, of course, it wasn’t. I was already too stigmatised by my work’s reputation by then, so all God Jr. did was confuse people who thought they understood me.
To return to The Sluts: When it was originally published, Facebook was still in its infancy and fake news as a term was not even on the horizon, which is to say that it has aged very well. The novel consists of online reviews and chats on gay message boards and dating sites. We don’t know who speaks and how many. There is no ‘truth’, just rumors and fantasy and they kind of spiral out of control. Since The Sluts predates social media and what I feel they have done to public discourse, I wonder a) to what extent (if at all) your outlook on the internet has changed since writing the novel and b) if anything about The Sluts feels outdated to you given that it takes place in a medium that has changed quite a bit on the surface?
— The premise and structure of The Sluts was based on a website that existed at the time where escorts advertised their services and clients posted their reviews and discourses about the escorts. There was a fair amount of fantasising and lying and fabricating going on there, not to the huge extent that takes place in The Sluts, but I was fascinated by the possibility that one could have created a massive ruse there a la The Sluts quite easily, and I just ripped the site off the internet and planted it on the inflexible paper of a novel and made that happen. I don’t know if you read my blog, but once a month I gather escort ads and client commentary/reviews from various existing escort sites and publish the most interesting ones with a bit of editing and disguising on my part, and although even now nothing as elaborate as what happens in The Sluts goes on on those sites, it gets close in some cases. So, in that sense, I guess The Sluts seems kind of prescient. I don’t think The Sluts has become dated — or not yet, although no doubt it will — mostly because the transfer of internet interactivity to the immobile printed page has a freezing in place effect, I think. I do think there might be a certain quaintness to The Sluts now given the current internet’s preponderance of wild conspiracy theorising and hacking attacks and click bait, etc., so maybe it has a vintage vibe in that sense, a kind of vinyl vs. mp3 effect or something.
I do check out your blog regularly and I’m amazed at how you manage to post something on almost every day while also writing novels and making films. Do you have something like a workday schedule?
— Other the doing the p.s. section every morning, no. I just spend most of my free time making the blog posts. When I’m busy with another project or life-related stuff, I make myself find an hour or two every day to construct a post. When I’m inbetween things, as I am right now, as I’m mostly waiting for the funding to fall into place for Zac Farley’s and my new film and fiddling with some fiction ideas, I just direct the bulk of my creative energies into blog post making. I have tons of curiosity plus energy always, so I can be pretty productive. At the moment, I have blog posts built and lined up for launch for about three weeks in the future, which is about as far ahead as I ever get.
Your new novel I Wished returns to the muse of the George Miles circle. The novel is, I would argue, as much about your friend George as it is about you as an artist. My favorite section is the chapter “The Crater‘. Here you write about the roden crater and James Turrell, who is molding it into an art installation. There is this funny line about Turrell, who you imagine thinking “I love and disrespect this old thing so much that I’ll devote my life to molding it into my greatest artwork”. That sentence reminds me of Joan Didion’s famous quote “writers are always selling somebody out”. Since you’re making it explicit in I Wished, did you ever have inhibitions about “molding” George Miles into art?
— When I was developing the Cycle, George was still alive. And I had many talks with him about what I was planning to do with those novels and how I intended to represent/misrepresent him. He was completely fine with what I was planning and was very encouraging. He was excited by the idea of being a malleable fictional vessel. As I’ve written about in I Wished, he felt very lost and unfocused as a person due to his disorder and the artificial effects that his medications imposed on him, and he was interested in the idea that could be crystalised into a cogent character. So I felt okay using him as a figurehead in the Cycle as I did. As you surely know, George killed himself before the first novel Closer was published, which I didn’t know until I was about to write the fifth and final novel Period. That very shocking news complicated the whole project for me very much, as I had thought he was somewhere reading the books. And that’s why Period is such a confused/confusing illusional kind of novel. I Wished was undertaken as a way to try to do George justice by representing him as he truly was as a person as best as I understood him. I think the novel is much more about me and what George does to my imagination than it is about him directly. I do feel very conflicted about turning George into art, and I think, or at least hope, that the novel makes that clear at every point.
I Wished is also a sort of plea that somebody who knew him might get in touch with you. He passed away a long time before the internet and you write you couldn’t track anybody down who knew him. Has the publication of I Wished lead to anything with regard to that?
— Soon after I Wished was published, a woman contacted me to say she read the novel and had used her resources as an employee of a newspaper to track down George’s brother. This was amazing to me because I had been trying off and on to locate his brother for many years. He’s a doctor, and she was able to find a phone number for his office, but not an email address. I’ve been debating ever since whether to call him, and I’m very hesitant to since I don’t know, first, if he knows about my books for George and what he would think about them, and, second, whether he would want talk about his brother since the end of George’s life and his suicide were very dramatic and traumatic for his family. The woman at the newspaper did find an email address for George’s niece and wrote to her explaining that I wanted to get in contact with her uncle and asking for his email address, but the niece never wrote back. So, I do have a way to contact George’s brother by phone, but I don’t know if I have the courage to approach him so directly. Other than that, no, no-one else who knew George has gotten in touch with me, at least not yet.
With I Wished, you once more stretch the common understanding of what a novel is as it rolls fairytale, memoir, essay and much more into one. It accomplishes the feat of being both structurally challenging while also being pretty easy to read and very relatable. The novel could also be read as both an end point and a new direction for you as a writer. Having turned to film in recent years, how much interest do you still have in the novel as an art form?
— I had a long standing plan to write 10 novels —the 5 Cycle novels and 5 post-cycle novels — and then stop writing them. I think I mostly liked the symmetry of 5/5, and I thought 10 novels is a lot from one writer. So I intended I Wished to be the last one, and when I became interested in making films and the gif fiction and put I Wished aside for about five years, I thought I would go back and finish it, and that would be that. But when I went back to it and finished it, and once I got back into that headspace, it was such a pleasure, and I felt the same excitement regarding the difficulty and challenges involved that I always had, so I decided I’m going to leave myself open to writing more novels if I feel like that’s the right form for what I want to do. So, yes, I seem to still be very interested in the novel. I’m just as excited about making films now, but I don’t see any reason why I can’t do both. We’ll see.
Recently, I think on the Apology podcast, you mentioned Joy Williams, who I also love. I’m perplexed as to how unknown she is! I think her new novel Harrow is absolutely incredible and she is probably my favorite short fiction writer ever. Final question: What’s your favorite Joy Williams book and why? And do you have an explanation for why she is this unknown entity?
— Joy Williams is probably my favorite American writer. At least among living writers. I think John Ashbery is my all-time favorite American writer. It’s actually tough to choose one of her books as my favorite. I too really loved Harrow, and I think it’s way up there among her very best. Maybe The Quick and the Dead is my favorite of hers. That might be because it’s the first book of hers that I read, but, yeah, I guess that’s my pick if I have to choose one.