Diarmuid Hester - Wrong

WRONG

THE NEW AMERICAN CANON

The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Samuel Cohen, series editor

WRONG

A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper

by Diarmuid Hester

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS

IOWA CITY

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

Copyright 2020 by the University of Iowa Press

www.uipress.uiowa.edu

Printed in the United States of America

Design by April Leidig

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach.

Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hester, Diarmuid, 1982 author.

Title: Wrong: a critical biography of Dennis Cooper / Diarmuid Hester.

Other titles: Critical biography of Dennis Cooper

Description: Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, [2020] | Series: The new American canon | Includes bibliographical references and index

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045112 (print) | LCCN 2019045113 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609386917 (paperback) | ISBN 9781609386924 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooper, Dennis, 1953 | Gay authorsUnited StatesBiography. | Poets, American21st centuryBiography. | Motion picture producers and directorsUnited StatesBiography. | Cooper, Dennis, 1953Criticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC PS3553.O582 Z67 2020 (print) | LCC PS3553.O582 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045112

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045113

Cover photo: Dennis Cooper Sheree Rose

For George Mind

Contents

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK IS the product of more than a decade of close engagement with the work of Dennis Cooper. Incorporating extensive archival research and new interviews, it offers detailed readings of Coopers poetry, prose, films, performances, and HTML works from the 1970s to the present. Some receive their first extended treatment here; others prompt new assessments that demonstrate their continued importance. But if this work is comprehensive, its not exhaustive. A critical biography holds in tension two modes of writing: biography, which generally observes chronology, and critique, which pursues an argument. Negotiating between them has been an exciting challenge that, with any luck, has made for a book that will interest different kinds of readers, but the form and limitations of space have also precluded an in-depth examination of every instance of this prolific artists work. Daniel Kane once told me that, at its best, scholarly work is a conversation; this book is thus envisaged as a contribution (a significant one, I hope) to an ongoing conversation about Dennis Coopers work, the cultural contexts he has created, and the ones through which he has moved. Its far from the final word.

A project in gestation for this long accumulates debts to many. Thanks are owed especially to Dennis Cooper, for supporting the project at every turn with his friendship and generosity, and Daniel Kane, who supervised the doctoral research this book is based on. Thanks to my colleagues and friends who helped to shape this work: Kasia Boddy and Peter Box-all, who first suggested I write a critical biography; Thomas Houlton and Laura Ellen Joyce for their support in the initial stages; Sarah Franklin and Heather Stallard of lgbtQ+@cam for helping me to feel at home at the University of Cambridge; and Claude Grewal-Sultze and Julie Hrischeva for tiny books and enormous kindness. I am very grateful to the following people for their support, intellectual and otherwise: Kris Beaghton, Gavin Butt, Lisa Darms, Jacob Engelberg, Laure Fernandez, Kristin Grogan, David Grundy, Helen Hester, David Hobbs, Nick Hudson, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Robert Macfarlane, Geoffrey Maguire, Leo Mellor, Michael ORourke, Jules ODwyer, Mike Rowland, John David Rhodes, Jordan Savage, Sophie Seita, Natasha Tanna, Lynne Tillman, David Trotter, Bernard Welt, and David Winters. To my mother and father, Doireann, Cathal, Harry, and Risn; to my friends Sam Nesbit, David Bramwell, Josh Schneiderman, and Jim Macairt; and to my partner George Mind: to you I owe the greatest debt of gratitude for your unfailing love and support. Go raibh mle maith agaibh.

For their expert assistance in archival matters, I am very grateful to Marvin Taylor, Charlotte Priddle, and the staff of the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. Thanks also to Sam Cohen, for his unwavering enthusiasm for the project, and the team of the University of Iowa Press, especially Ranjit Arab, who took the book on, and Meredith Stabel, who took it over, and about whom Id like to write reams of praise, but as we both know Im over my word limit.

Many thanks to those who gave me permission to quote from their work and correspondence: Mike Amnasan, Paul Curran, Jonathan Galassi, Amy Gerstler, Mark Gluth, Ron Koertge, Jonathan Mayhew, Eileen Myles, Thomas Moore, Sheree Rose, Marvin Taylor, Brian Tucker, Matias Viegener, Bernard Welt, and George Wines.

This book was researched and written with the financial support of an Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral scholarship and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, with additional funding from the University of Cambridge Faculty of English and the Isaac Newton Trust.

Selections from An American Poem are used by permission from I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems by Eileen Myles. Copyright 2015 by Eileen Myles. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

was published as Queer Cryptograms, Anarchist Cyphers: Decoding Dennis Coopers The Marbled Swarm: A Novel, Studies in the Literary Imagination 45, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 95112.

WRONG

Wrong

The Adolescence of an Iconoclast

IN THE MIDDLE of the photograph, a man stands with his hands in his pockets on the pavement in front of a suburban bungalow. He wears a pale, short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers. Judging by the style of the house behind him and the identical one behind it, it looks like somewhere in Californiatheres also a palm tree growing out of the guys head. The tree is actually behind him, but the way the photographers caught it, it looks like its sprouted from his head. His face is mostly in shade and hes pretty far away and out of focus, so its difficult to make out his expression, but from his demeanor, it looks like he might be in on the joke. Or perhaps the way hes holding himself indicates something else. A kind of pride, maybe? In which case it could be his house hes standing in front of; maybe hes just bought it and stashed the For Sale sign behind the station wagon parked in the driveway. Some of its tailgate reverses into the frame from the right, as part of a succulent bush encroaches on the scene from the left. That would mean that whoever took this amateurishly composed photo, standing too far back and divided from their subject by a vast swathe of road in the foreground, could be married to the man whos standing in front of their new family home. The caption underneath the photo, one word in large black capital letters, reads, WRONG.

Dennis Cooper first saw John Baldessaris 1968 artwork Wrong on a high school field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) when he was around sixteen years old. He doesnt seem to have cared about visual art before then, or taken much notice of it, but he remembers that