Dennis Cooper

The facts of Cooper are these: He was born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1953, and grew up wealthy as the son of Clifford Cooper, who owned a company that built missiles for NASA. (One of Cooper's memories of adolescence was his parents' having their good friends Dick and Pat Nixon over to the house.) His family life was a deeply alienating experience. "I had severe problems with my parents. They divorced when I was quite young, and the divorce proceedings took forever, and my parents did not behave well during that period. The fact that parents barely exist in the books is probably because I escaped mine as completely as I could beginning in my teenaged years. I crashed at friends' houses a lot, and tried to distance myself from the hell going on in my family home, and, ever since, I've had a very distanced relationship to my family."

Considering that the 1960s were his formative years, I asked Cooper why his work reflects virtually no aspect of this time. "Hippiedom held little appeal for me, though the freedom it celebrated certainly appealed to me, and the fact that drugs were seen as tools of enlightenment certainly influenced me, and I took advantage of the plethora of drugs that were around. And rock culture was my culture, though I don't know if that's specific to the period -- maybe psychedelic music influenced my thinking about form, since my writing has a kind of psychedelic feel, maybe."

But it was punk that took hold of Cooper. "That was the most important, the first culture I felt aligned with without reservation. Disco, of course, I despised, and its grip on gay culture of the '70s and onward undoubtedly helped create the deep alienation I feel and have always felt from gay-centric culture."

He attended Pasadena City College and Pitzer College of Claremont Colleges, lived as an expatriate in London and followed a boyfriend to Amsterdam. Then he lived for a while in New York, before relocating permanently to Los Angeles. In the '70s he founded the influential Little Caesar magazine, later to become Little Caesar Press, and published more than two dozen chapbooks of his poetry, as well as the work of, among others, Bob Flanagan, Tim Dlugos and David Trinidad.

His early short fiction has been collected in "Wrong," but it is in "Closer," his first novel, that Cooper began to explore in earnest the true nature of his obsessions, in the form of a walking enigma named George Miles. George Miles was his teenage infatuation -- a kid three years younger, with extreme psychological problems, who became Cooper's closest friend, and the inspiration for his five-novel cycle. Briefly, they were lovers. Even when Cooper lost touch with Miles, and Miles had disappeared, his emotional hold over Cooper was profound. In "Closer," he is the victim of a violent mutilation, which he survives, only to vanish from the other books -- until the last.

In "Period," published this year and the last novel of the cycle, Miles' memory lingers. "Period" is an elegy to the nature of obsessive love, the need to feel. It is also a memoriam: Before embarking on the writing of "Period," Cooper discovered that the real George Miles had killed himself years before. In the history of great artistic inspiration there is another muse named George -- George Dyer, the model-lover of Francis Bacon, whose genius, like Miles', lay in being the object of passions both physical and aesthetic. It was George Dyer who haunted Bacon long after Dyer's own suicide; likewise it is George Miles who is the locus of Cooper's genius.

In "Period," there is a character named Walker Crane, author of a book called "Period," described by one of the characters as "a messed-up human being ... not cool and evil like you'd think." Later, he's described as "an evil man. He made George get completely dependent on him, and then he dumped him, and exploited him for that novel, the fucking psychopath." I asked Cooper about this. "I was poking fun at my reputation" -- the idea that Cooper himself is not nearly as evil or cool as his image might suggest. (In fact, "Dennis" is described in "Guide" as being "sort of a wuss.")

But perhaps, insofar as Miles is concerned, there is also an element of guilt involved: Cooper used Miles' passivity and psychological traumas as stimulation. At the same time, he had taken care of Miles, before he disappeared for good, leaving Cooper with this need to reinvent Miles in fiction. "I couldn't remember who the real George was. The real George got lost."

Then came "Frisk." It was the publication of this second novel in 1991 that led to the death threat. As death threats go, it was a fairly ludicrous one -- more a piece of guerrilla theater from a half-baked queer splinter group. Cooper was due to give a reading from "Frisk" at San Francisco's A Different Light Bookstore when he was handed a leaflet -- a group calling itself the "Hookers Undivided Liberation Army" proclaimed that "Dennis Cooper Must Die! Must Die! Must Die!" (The flier is on view in the "Beautiful" exhibit at NYU.) His crime? Murdering young men, and glorifying his activities in a novel called "Frisk."

I said I thought the death threat was more a stunt for attention -- a mock fatwa -- than a real threat, and Cooper concurred. "Of course it was. I realized it once I spoke to the guy responsible. When 'Frisk' came out, it was the heat of the moment -- ACT UP had kind of become Queer Nation, Jeffrey Dahmer had just gotten arrested, 'American Psycho' had just come out. There was a lot of hatred directed at me."

Next Page: Using his own name, as a character who commits savage murders in his head

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