Diarmuid Hester Interview

When I first read Diarmuid Hester’s critical writing on Dennis Cooper I was convinced he’d moved the needle of literary criticism beyond anything I’d previously thought possible. He had this uncanny ability to sort of embody Cooper’s texts while he explained their elusive and playful internal contents. I can remember, too, the day when Hester announced that he’d signed a contract to write a critical biography of Cooper. He included in the announcement a picture of Dennis, apparently after a sunny day, standing next to a large stuffed animal named Sparky. It was perfect, and I couldn’t wait to read the book itself. Anybody who’s read Dennis Cooper knows that the experience is occasionally exhilarating, or awe-inspiring, or disconcerting in a way that only seems to push you deeper into the work itself. Having a critical companion, then, with whom you can wander within and out of these worlds and trust that your understandings are lining up, and it’s like you’ve both showed up with circles around your eyes to ramble at a coffee shop about this wild new author you’ve discovered, is a gift I cannot overstate. Diarmuid Hester connects with Dennis Cooper’s writing better than any critic or cultural writer I can think of, and for those who’ve read the singular works of Cooper this is about the highest praise I can offer. I was grateful to ask some questions about his new book, and I’m honored to share it now.

—Grant Maierhofer

I think just for starters it makes sense to talk about how you came to the writing of Dennis Cooper. I believe I first read Closer, then read the George Miles cycle, and continued to read everything I could get my hands on. Cooper’s interesting though because he’s also very active in the present day, online, so while I was taking it all in and responding to it, I would also peruse old iterations of his blog and engage that way, as well as through lit blogs. What’s your origin story when it comes to Cooper’s writing? What were your initial readings of Cooper’s work like?

Yeah, I had a similar experience. I first came across Frisk in 2005, then read backwards and forwards through the GM cycle, with quite a bit of lurking on Dennis’s blog in-between. I was living in Brighton, doing a Master’s degree in queer studies with the queer Marxist scholar Alan Sinfield, which was a very particular context in which to be introduced to Dennis’s work. He was presented as a gay author in relation to a canon of gay literature and gay subcultural traditions. You’ve read the book, so you know how important all of that queer cultural history is to me, but I was also really into theory at the time. I loved Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s saying that it’s not what something means that’s important, it’s what it does: let’s not sit around endlessly deliberating what the arsehole means in Try! Instead, what does it do when you plug Dennis’s writing into, say, Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning? How does it open up the possibilities for new readings of both? That was the idea anyway. In fact, my first big piece on Dennis was about mourning George Miles. It came out in a book of essays that Kevin Killian reviewed on Amazon and he said something like: loved the scope, too much Derrida! I met him years later and we became friends, and he said ‘I’m so sorry about that mean review…’ But you know what, I totally agreed with him. I miss Kevin—I would’ve loved to have read his Amazon review of WRONG.

I believe the first piece of criticism of yours I read was on Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm. I remember it because it delivered on a sort of underlying promise that seemed to preoccupy critics since the rediscovery of Moby-Dick. Professors I’ve had have talked about it, and critics have attempted it, but only in your essay were things mapped out so well as to be undeniable. The formula is basically a solving of a text, where someone reads it and uses a certain lens and finds that Renata Adele’s Speedboat says a lot about first or second wave feminism, say, and if you read the review and you’re interested in that, Speedboat will always represent that sort of text for you. With your reading of The Marbled Swarm, though, the critique is so clearly in line with what Cooper was attempting that it only serves to enliven Cooper’s book regardless of one’s interests. I frequently revisited your piece because it seemed so satisfying for the critic and the writer to have such overlap as to be almost one and the same thing. Now you’ve extrapolated this into a book on the whole of Cooper’s output, and I’m curious about this overlap now. Was this a personal project as well as a critical/biographical one? I’m put in mind of Beckett on Joyce or Edmund White on Proust, is there a sense of a shared wavelength for you with Cooper’s writing? Would you say that writing this book was a continuation of the sort of energy begun with that piece?

I wrote that essay early in my PhD work. I remember emailing Dennis around the time and I told him I was trying to ‘channel’ The Marbled Swarm—a kind of seance, I suppose. I was reading a lot of Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon, and I was obsessed by the form of Dennis’s novel, how it was composed of all these tunnels and secret passageways. Again, I wasn’t so interested in what these meant in a traditional sense, but how they operated and where they might lead to. Imaginatively speaking, if you followed them down, you could go back to the early 1900s and look at queer subcultural producers, and if you went down again you could go back even further to find Cooper’s anarchist precursors in the 1800s… I was channeling the form of the novel and using it as a way to do a radical cultural history, and a history of radical subcultures, that wasn’t governed by causality per se.

I’m really happy you liked it because it isn’t a conventional piece of scholarship. When I showed it to my PhD advisor Daniel Kane (who I love), I think he was kind of bewildered by it. Looking at it now, it’s a pretty insular piece; there’s something of the shared language of twins about it. Daniel very kindly pointed out that people have certain expectations where it comes to cultural history—and if I wanted to be a cultural historian, I needed to think about those expectations. So I shifted tack a little to take that excellent advice into account. I’d also combed through Dennis’s archive at New York University by that point. The tangible, causal links I found there were really fascinating: all the ephemera relating to Cooper’s time in LA, for instance, and his role in the little-known punk poetry scene at Beyond Baroque, which also included poets like Amy Gerstler, Bob Flanagan, Ed Smith… In order to do the history of that scene, to get people to understand it and remember it, I had to alter my approach a bit. WRONG is the product of that attenuated position. But there are a few surprise secret passageways in there still.

I think building off of these responses, there are two things I’m wondering now that the efforts of your critique/cultural history have arrived at this book, what your thoughts are about our present relationship to this sort of writing. It transcends a mere book review, and as you say there’s a rich tradition of critique and analysis and cultural history you’re working in, and I guess I’m wondering which aspects of this you felt guided the process here and thus if you felt certain figures looming larger as you worked. I love the idea of a seance, of allowing for holes and experimentation in the process of working through a writer’s works. I think Dennis talked somewhere about Guide as a sigil of a book, containing codes and desires and things he wasn’t sure how else to deal with. You can feel that reading your work, and I’m curious about what stood out as you worked your way through it.

Well, the book’s relationship to critique and cultural history is conditioned by the form of the biography. As I was sketching the book out, I was very aware of the conventions of biographical writing; in terms of what guided the process of writing the book, there were definitely some of those I wanted to incorporate and some I really resisted. Narratively, the chronological form was useful. It meant I could include the anecdotes and incidents I discovered in the archive and in interviews with DC and his collaborators—things that a DC fan like me would enjoy reading about. The book doesn’t stick religiously to chronology, but it’s always there in the background. On the other hand, I hate the tendency in a lot of biographies to reduce the work to the life. Take the recent example of Chris Kraus’s biography of Kathy Acker—where all of Acker’s published writing, her literary experimentation, the radical aesthetic she develops, is only important insofar as it illustrates something about the things that were going on in her life. Granted Acker folds her person into the work, but it seems crazy to me to pursue a singularly biographical reading of, say, Blood and Guts in High School. It domesticates the wildness of that experiment. I like Kraus’s work a lot but that seems like a misstep to me, like she gave in too easily to the demands of biographical writing.

With WRONG I wanted to retain something of the independence of DC’s works from his life. When a reader comes to a book like The Marbled Swarm, they’re not reading it for what it says about DC (or, not always); it’s the work that excites them or challenges them or sets them off thinking about this or that. That experience is central to the book, but it’s also a biography so it’s trying to do different things at the same time. If you’re interested, Catherine Brun’s ‘biographical essay’ of Pierre Guyotat was one of the models I looked to, one of the few precursors I found that did something similar to what I had in mind. It’s a magnificent treatment of the controversial French avant-gardist, which is equally attentive to the form of works like Eden, Eden, Eden, the culture in which they were received, and the incredible life of the artist.

Next I wanted to ask about the archive. It still feels fairly recent that a version of Dennis’s blog was shut down, and all this work he’d been assembling for years was suddenly gone, only to be pulled slowly back together where possible. Dennis seems very interested in the potential of archives for writers, with his blog, and Little Caesar, and then his papers, and the work he’s done with scrapbooks. Was there a sense when you were writing of wanting to preserve this aspect of Cooper’s writing? What was the process of going through his papers and materials like for you, or even of working Dennis directly? I remember talking to Kevin Killian around when he’d sold his papers and said it was a weird balance of relief and sadness, having given over all this stuff he’d cared for. Is there anything to the archive that seemed vital to processing these many various areas of his work?

Different forms of archive have different possibilities and constraints. In the case of DC’s ‘official’ archive, it’s housed by the Fales Library at New York University, where incredible conservation work is being done. His archive is part of the Downtown Collection, which includes the papers of many artists, writers, and performers that were part of the NY scene from the 50s to the 90s: Richard Hell’s papers are there, as are David Wojnarowicz’s, Lynne Tillman, Martin Wong, Semiotext(e)… Marvin Taylor, the archivist who started it, looked around New York in the early 90s, when AIDS had ravaged the place and gentrification had ramped up, and he thought: I need to save this. I’m certain that WRONG would not exist but for Taylor’s pioneering work and the efforts of his colleagues.

At the same time, a weird dichotomy is at play, which you feel as soon as you visit the archive at NYU’s Bobst Library, which is in Manhattan on Washington Square Park. There’s an immediate problem of access: who gets to see this stuff. To view DC’s archive you have to fill out forms, then you’re allowed through the gates and upstairs where you sit in a quiet reading room. You fill out more forms and a kindly assistant brings you a folder with, say, one letter from Bruce Boone in it. You read it, hand it back, and request another. The Fales is free and anyone can come in once they’ve made an appointment, but if you’re intimidated by academic libraries or you hate those kinds of spaces or you don’t live in New York, would you visit? The archive as an institution is inevitably exclusive. I’ve talked about this with my friend Lisa Darms, who started the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales with the papers of Kathleen Hanna and Tammy Rae Carland: how likely is it a teenage riot grrrl fan from back then would visit the Fales now?

In terms of the Downtown Collection especially, the archive also feels at odds with the culture it’s conserving. There’s all this anti-establishment, radical material by Downtown artists, which is carefully kept at NYU—one of the most venal and rapacious institutions in Manhattan, which has almost single-handedly driven gentrification in the Downtown area for years. So on the one hand NYU is conserving Downtown culture and on the other, through driving up the cost of living and buying up accommodation, it’s making the conservation of that culture necessary; NYU trades off the cultural kudos the Fales gives it, making access to the material at the Fales exclusive.

So is the Fales conserving or gentrifying Downtown’s radical culture? Probably both. Relatedly: is my book, which draws as much from NYU’s archives as from my privileged status as an academic, itself part of the gentrification of Dennis Cooper? Does a critical biography sanitise Dennis Cooper and make him respectable? That’s what the cover of the book is about by the way—or one of its visual puns at least: DC made presentable in a suit and tie alludes to the respectability the work may confer upon him; the awkward look on his face and the title ‘wrong’ suggest that there’s an unresolved tension there.

These responses were exactly the kind of thing that was on my mind while reading the book. I thought it was so much more satisfying than many doorstop biographies of artists because there is this tendency to see them as a product of their place and thus hundreds of pages might be spent on a childhood that doesn’t deviate much from most of our own lives before art became a concern. I thought of Call Me Burroughs, which is certainly a definitive account of Burroughs’ life, but at the beginning I found the stuff about his childhood and family life and St Louis tedious for the most part. It would be one thing if there was a sense that it was being connected to Burroughs’ extreme financial privilege later on, but when you’re reading it it just feels divorced from the later work and you wonder how necessary it is. Even if you were focusing on aspects of DC’s life, it never felt divorced from the work and I think that’s a huge achievement for you as a biographer. I’m curious about ways in which narrative proved useful for you. Dennis’s trajectory as an artist is interesting, starting with a vibrant zine career and devotion to poetry, obsession with de Sade and then things sort of breaking open with the cycle. Are you able to see the ways in which these various projects have built into one another? I’d imagine, for instance, looking at his work in this way might illuminate the ways in which his current focus on visual narrative forms—with the films and the GIF novels—responds to his early writings. And then there’s a new novel, I Wished due out soon, after a stretch of visual experiments after The Marbled Swarm. Do you see the connective tissue here in interesting ways?

So many biographers are obsessed by family background—how it determines their subject and the work they go on to produce. Sometimes that obsession is warranted, but a lot of the time it strikes me as pure laziness. It’s just another capitulation to the form of the biography, giving readers what the author thinks they want: a linear story that privileges the family over other kinds of love and kinship that may be even more important. When you’re writing about queer people, trans people, people who often have to look outside the family for support and a sense of who they are, you have to be critical of that. This is especially the case where it comes to a subject like DC, who invests so much in his friendships. I got an email a few weeks back from a Dennis Cooper fan, this really sweet guy, who said he was looking forward to reading the book for what it would tell him about DC’s relationship with his father—because that’s what he expected a biography to do, I guess. I had to tell him that although there’s a reasonable amount of background info in there, WRONG in fact privileges non-familial bonds. Non-traditional forms of kinship like friendship are central to how I view DC’s life and work.

That’s the through-line, in answer to your question: friendship—along with DC’s burgeoning anarchism, and the connections between those two things. That’s the recurring concern, as I see it, in DC’s life and his art. WRONG tracks the development of DC’s anarchist ideas alongside his emergence as an artist. I start by looking at his early poetry’s debt to Sade’s ego-centrism, how that’s fertile ground for his later interest in punk anarchism, which then matures into a sophisticated anarchist world-view. At the same time, I’m giving space to his community-building beyond the text and friendships with other writers and artists in LA (Amy Gerstler, Bob Flanagan, David Trinidad), DC (Bernard Welt, Tim Dlugos, Donald Britton), San Francisco (Robert Glück, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian), New York (Lynne Tillman, David Wojnarowicz, Joe Brainard); the friendship networks on his blog, his collaborations with Gisèle Vienne, his friendship with his co-director Zac Farley… I think focusing on these generative friendships more than, say, his relationship with his father, is a much better way of understanding DC.

I liked the questions you raised there at the end as well. I can’t remember the exact quote but Peter Sotos made a statement at one point about critics trying to insist that his work was historically significant or something, and he’s emphasized the books themselves as being the thing. I think even before I knew this book was a thing I felt that your analyses of Cooper’s work passed muster as being more than a mere insistence on the importance of the work, as being what you said an exploration of what the work does, to you as a reader, as a human being, and as even being a sort of seance, a communion with an artist who justified this and more for being more than just another writer but a force. Did you feel yourself resisting tendencies in championing the work of “transgressive” or even just “experimental” writers by explaining them or rendering them safe? It’s funny because even here I’m reminded of DC’s early book Safe, and how illicit it felt when I picked it up from an academic library. How can we resist sanitizing extremity while also singing its praises and relishing its possibilities, as I think you’ve done here masterfully from cover to cover?

When it comes to our introduction to writers and their works, how we feel about them, whether or not we continue reading them, so much depends on context. As I mentioned, I first read Frisk as part of a Master’s degree course; if nothing else, the university curriculum confers legitimacy on certain topics and works, so that was tacit acknowledgement that DC was worth spending time on—regardless of how much my classmates were appalled by him. But finding DC’s blog at the same time was also important: viewed in this context not only was his transgressive writing legit, it was also part of a tradition of experimental writing, avant-garde art, experimental aesthetics in general. I’d love to say that I came upon DC’s books not having heard anything about him, and was suddenly convinced of his genius, but that’s not the case and it’s rarely how things work. Context is key—and DC is himself aware of that.

Take his tenure at Beyond Baroque: when he becomes the poetry reading series organiser in 1979, the poetry scene in LA stinks. It’s stuck in this awful Beat-hangover phase and he wants to rejuvenate it, give it a shot of adrenaline, bring in punk, introduce more New York School poetry. So, with punk rock and Rimbaud being co-implicated by this point (e.g., Patti Smith singing ‘Go Rimbaud!’), DC throws a birthday party for Rimbaud where he gets an actor to go around pretending to be Rimbaud, pissing on people and spitting on them: Johnny Rotten-Rimbaud. Later, DC throws a birthday party for Frank O’Hara, where O’Hara’s favourite music is played (Debussy, Satie) while O’Hara’s favourite meal is served (breakfast, with orange juice, cornflakes, and donuts). You could see this as frivolous, indulgent, but it’s about creating a context—just like the contents page of his Little Caesar magazine created a context, with established New York School poets alongside reviews of punk gigs and interviews with porn directors. Throughout his career, DC has created contexts in which to understand certain artists and writers or re-contextualise them.

All that to say that I see WRONG as part of a context in which DC’s writing can be understood. I hope it’s a significant contribution to that context but it’s in no way the entirety of it.

I did want to ask about the cover, the image and the spareness of it, and even the title, sharing as it does the title of the (I think) out of print story collection of Cooper’s. I’m fairly sure some of those showed up in Ugly Man, but I’m not positive. I think this was only on my mind while reading and jotting these questions as I’ve got an old copy of Wrong on the shelf nearby, and I know the title is sort of justified throughout, but I wondered about the choice to call it that as I think there are these repetitions in Cooper that crop up—perhaps it’s Robbe-Grillet’s and Pinget’s influence too—where phrases and moments and obsessions—with Disney, with butts, with skinny drugged out slackers—start to light up while ready or scrolling the blog. What made Wrong the right choice for this book, for a biography of Cooper?

I’m so pleased you liked the cover! It was exactly what I had conceived from very early on and Iowa were great about giving me what I wanted. The title has a few connotations, some more obvious than others. First off, it’s meant to gesture to a certain idea of DC being transgressive or let’s say morally ‘wrong’: if that’s the case, then what else would you call his biography? I also liked the idea of getting out in front of the book’s critics: if it’s already ‘wrong’, there’s not much more to say is there? It also alludes, as you point out, to DC’s first collection of stories, Wrong, which was published by Grove Press in 1992. Taking the title of one of his books for my own relates to the idea we talked about earlier, this channeling of DC’s approach in the form of its most obvious sign. In the relationship of Wrong to WRONG there’s an iterative structure, a repetition of a repetition; en abyme—which, you’re right, is reminiscent of the Nouveau Roman.

But I have to admit, I wasn’t totally set on WRONG as the title until I found the photo. It’s by Sheree Rose, who photographed lots of LA poets in the 80s but is best known for her performance art with Bob Flanagan, who was also her partner. I think it was used to promote Frisk back in the day, but I’d never seen it before I opened up a folder in the archive. The interplay of title and image — how it relates to the matter of DC’s ‘gentrification’; how seeing DC in a suit slyly undercuts his readers’ expectations; how it relates to the John Baldessari art piece that opens the book — seemed perfect to me. The title and cover were set in my mind from that point. John Waters loved it, so that’s good enough for me.