The Last Literary Outlaw

Alex Klineberg catches up with Dennis Cooper – one of the great alternative voices in American fiction

Dennis Cooper has lived in Paris for a number of years. He continues to write prolifically, both as a novelist and blogger. William Burroughs once said of Cooper: “He is – God help him – a natural-born writer.”

First of all, how did you find the plague year of 2020? Did you have a good lockdown?

Well, I haven’t gotten sick, and no one I know has gotten more than just mildly sick, so there’s luckiness there. Overall, it sucked, of course. France had a really serious quarantine from March to May where you couldn’t leave your home even to buy food without government permission. The lockdown isn’t as harsh right now, but I think we’re heading back into home imprisonment again soon. Being a writer, it hasn’t really harmed my art-making so much. But I collaborate with a French theatre director/ choreographer, Gisèle Vienne, on her works, and it’s been murder for her since all touring is cancelled, and the premiere of her new piece has endlessly delayed. The worst thing is not being able to travel. That’s really the squirreliest part for me. Paris is great, but...

You’ve lived in Paris for many years. What drew you from the US to the Old World? Initially it was for love. I was in love with a Russian guy. We tried for a long time to get him any kind of US visa, even a tourist one, so he could come to the States, but he was always rejected because, as I don’t need to tell you, the US is not exactly welcoming to non-Americans, and particularly Russians for some reason. So, to meet up, I needed to go to Moscow or we had to both travel to some neutral place like France, which has no problem with Russians. Eventually it was so difficult that it was either break up or move somewhere friendly, and we ended up in Paris.

“That people who otherwise seem cool and thoughtful have become aggressively afraid of being challenged is a depressing development”

Plus, I’ve been a Francophile since I was a little kid, and living in Paris was a lifelong fantasy. And my books were well known here, so I was able to come here as more than a nobody, which helped.

Do you consider the five books that make up the George Miles Cycle to be your greatest literary achievement?

I wrote the George Miles Cycle novels over about 10 years and planned it out for years before that, so I’m pretty proud of it. I don’t know that I think it’s my greatest achievement, but whether artists are the best judge of their own work is one of those eternal unanswerable questions. I’m personally prouder of some of my later works. I think I’ve become a better writer over time. If I had to choose, I think my best works would be my novels The Marbled Swarm and My Loose Thread, my animated GIF novels Zac’s Freight Elevator and Zac’s Drug Binge, and Permanent Green Light, one of the films I’ve made with Zac Farley, although I don’t know if that counts as literary.

You write a lot about sexual obsession. Would you say it’s been the key theme of your work?

I would say that if my work has a key theme it would be trying to articulate very hidden and complicated emotions and thoughts. I’ve always seen sexual obsession and/or the axis of sex and violence as situations where one’s feelings and ideas become the most inarticulate and secret and charged and defiant against language. The challenge of trying to find a way to do the impossible – using words to expose what happens in a person’s head when they’re in the grip of those activities or obsessions – has always excited and scared and compelled me for some reason, really since I was very young. And I seem to keep going back to that material and trying to find new and more successful ways to solve that mystery somehow.

You were one of the first major authors to take up blogging. Your blog seems to have taken on a life of its own. How do you distinguish blogging from novel writing?

I don’t think there’s much connection. The blog keys into another great interest of mine, which is curating and editing and drawing attention to things that I think are inspiring and too unknown. I used to edit this kind of punk literary/art zine in the late 1970s and early 1980s called Little Caesar, and I had a publishing imprint for a while in the early 2000s called Little House on the Bowery, and I think the blog is part of that journey or whatever.

“I’ve always seen sexual obsession and/or the axis of sex and violence as situations where one’s feelings and ideas become the most inarticulate and secret and charged and defiant against language”

Plus, in the case of my blog, there’s this community of readers and commenters who are often young writers or artists or filmmakers that I interact with on the blog daily via the comments, and that’s nice because I can encourage them in their work and find new comrades and friends as well. It’s a strange thing because doing the blog the way I do involves a shitload of work, but I keep doing it anyway so I guess it must be valuable to me.

Do you think the culture is becoming more puritanical? Or is social media becoming more noisy?

That’s hard to answer. I have this resistance to generalisations, so when you say ‘culture’ I go blank. The people I know and respect and deal with are, if anything, less puritanical than the people I used to know. But then there’s the whole ‘cancel culture’ fad of the moment, and maybe that’s what you mean. That people who otherwise seem cool and thoughtful have become aggressively afraid of being challenged is a depressing development. And how social media encourages people to have something kneejerk to say about everything obviously encourages that. My work seems to have escaped being cancelled so far, but I guess I’m well known enough that just my name is a trigger warning. It’s definitely an insane time. I suspect a lot of people will look back on what they believed and said publicly during this period and feel shocked by their own conservatism.

www.denniscooperblog.com