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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
With his excoriating, hallucinatory, viciously funny vision, he's the most important transgressive literary artist since William S. Burroughs -- but even Burroughs didn't get death threats.
May 4, 2000 | "Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer," William Burroughs wrote about the man who has, more than anybody else, come to inherit the subversive tradition most exemplified by the Great Outlaw of American letters. Burroughs gave his cautionary praise based on reading "Frisk," Cooper's most infamous and signature work; "God help him" was an eerily prescient choice of words. Burroughs may have been an outlaw, but in truth he may have had it easier than Cooper, who has not blinked through this most nauseating era of political correctness and radical gay self-righteousness. And Big Bad Bill never had a death threat made against him. Dennis Cooper has.
The death threat isn't that surprising. Cooper is a dangerous writer, both for the pedestrian reader unable to get beyond surface, and for those who like their homosexual literary aesthetics cozily free of anything resembling depth or complexity. Cooper is anything but cozy. Prolific but terse, simultaneously poetic and laconic, he is a profoundly original American visionary, the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs. America being America, transgressive literary artists are not a highly appreciated commodity. Not surprisingly, particularly for a writer who has been influenced by European literary traditions, Cooper is more respected in Europe and even the Middle East; his books have been translated into 12 languages, including Hebrew. In England, his books are bestsellers.
All this is not to say that he isn't appreciated here -- in spite of what one might think reading the occasional Ameri-phobic European literary critic, who often feels the need to tell us what he thinks we don't know about our own. The truth is that Dennis Cooper is an American master, and his great subject is American youth culture. George Bataille has certainly had his influence, and Cooper also summons to mind Genet, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but he is, in the end, himself. He stands alone.
His vision is excoriating, hallucinatory, viciously funny. As with the work of the painter Francis Bacon, to really appreciate the effects Cooper creates, you have to be willing to look beyond the immediate "horror hospital" (to borrow a title from Cooper), to what Bacon once referred to as "sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." There you will reach the pure, undistilled essence of Cooper's achievement, which is rigorously literate, multilayered, brimming with intellect. He is a lover of language, and he uses it with the precision of a sculptor using a drill. Sentence for sentence, there are very few writers as perversely pitch-perfect.
The overriding obsession of anyone in a Dennis Cooper novel might best be summed up in his first, "Closer": "He couldn't decide if he wanted to draw David, fuck him, beat him up, or fall in love with him." Add "or kill him," and this would be a synthesis of everything Cooper has been working toward, unceasingly, since. Far from being a narrow vision, this accommodates everything there is: art, sex, the violence of life and the finality of death.
Probably the most subversive and delicious thing about Cooper is his genius at working humor into the most outlandish scenarios. Ziggy, the zoned-out teenage hero of "Try," screams at his ass-hungry lech of a foster father, "If you loved me you wouldn't rim me while I'm crying." Watching a porn-movie sex scene between adolescent Chris and Don Haggarty, a resentful adult dwarf, the narrator of "Guide" has this observation: "The porn had this strange, silly, magical ... I don't know, charm. I guess it was mostly the fact that I was watching a dwarf, with all his fairy-tale baggage." And what could be a more succinct description of oral sex than this? "The sensation's indescribable, like however the opposite of being tortured to death might feel."
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I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Cooper when he was recently in New York to attend a two-day symposium on his work at New York University. He is someone who seems to inspire devotion. "Beautiful: The Writing of Dennis Cooper," an exhibit of his manuscripts, scrapbooks, first editions, photographs and letters in NYU's Fales Library, features countless letters written to him, including those from writers such as Edmund White, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, all professing their awe. (There are a few naked Polaroids from gushing boy fans as well.)
In person he is tall, slim, still boyish and strikingly handsome, looking 10 years younger than his 47 years. While everyone seems to have a preconceived notion of what Cooper must be like based on his books, he is actually rather lovely -- unassuming, polite, self-effacing and utterly candid.
