Safe

by Dennis Cooper

As much a series of prose poems as it is a novel, "Safe" is a unique triptych of visions of sexual and romantic desire among the Los Angeles "Blank Generation", centering on Mark, a beautiful, proud suburban young man whose passions for drugs and sex hide an impelling self-destructiveness and fear of human companionship. For the men who have come obsessed with him, Mark is more, a symbol of everything their pampered, tolerant lives cannot give them - perhaps Spirit itself.

Genres: Queer, LGBT

Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.

He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.

While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.

In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.

In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.

His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.

Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cooper's debut, now a rare collector's item (and re-published in its entirety in the short story collection Wrong), presents itself as a triptych of interconnected stories, starring the beautiful, young Mark Lewis. All of Cooper's classic themes are already there: Youth, death, sex, mediated depictions of sex, reality vs. imagination, drugs, the longing for human connection, and violence - though the latter to a much, much lesser degree than in his later works. Let's look at the three individual parts:

"Missing Men"
Where is the comparative study between Cooper's peer Bret Easton Ellis, Harmony Korine, and Cooper? "Safe" was first published in 1984, Less Than Zero in 1985, and the vibe is the same, especially in "Missing Men". Here, Mark is dating an enigmatic writer named Rob (in later novels by Cooper, there will be a whole array of characters called Dennis), answers a sex ad, and he accompanies his artist friend Carl to a an opening at a gallery, where Carl hooks up with the guy whose works are exhibited. I particularly liked the many references to art and art production - now I want a Dennis Cooper Künstlerroman. Do it, Dennis!

"My Mark"
Perfection. This story was first published as stand-alone, and it's a stellar meditation on desire and longing strongly rooted in Cooper's work as a lyrical poet. The narrator is a writer named Dennis (ha!), and he thinks back on his complex relationship with Mark, ruminating about his feelings and the psychological movements he has experienced. Full of melancholy and cooperesque imagery, especially in the sex scenes which ponder the attempt to explore consciousness by crossing physical boundaries, thus blurring the concept of interiority. Beautifully written, and George Miles also makes an appearence (though not by name).

"Bad Thoughts"
In the last part, Mark has died, and we live through the aftermath of people missing and remembering him - feat., of course, the convergence of sex and death.

This is an impressive debut, and it's crazy how Cooper went from this to radically transgressive works like Frisk. Fascinating.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

(edited to remove errors in May 2024 but otherwise unaltered).

This is Cooper's first novel, though it is more a collection of interlinked stories - one of which 'My Mark' had been published previously as a stand alone chap book and would also later be included in Edmund White's anthology 'The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction'. The entirety of this book was later included in Cooper's first collection of stories 'Wrong'. I have never seen, let alone read, this original edition - it is pretty much a collector's item, but I still think it deserves a stand alone review.

Rereading 'Safe' now as a separate work is incredibly revealing because so much of Cooper's later oeuvre is already laid out. Although it is not included, and neither are the stories in 'Wrong', in the George Miles cycle this is clearly, to me, the genesis of everything that was to come. How important George Miles was to Cooper's work, may be apparent now but certainly wasn't when I read these stories in the mid 1990's and even when I became aware (probably not until sometime well into the millennium) of his role as muse I am sure I didn't really appreciate or understand it. It is only with time that his relevance to Cooper's work began to seem apparent.

Having said that you don't need to know or care about George Miles or any of Cooper's other stories or books to be dazzled by this early work. It has a maturity, and uniquely distinct voice, that only a really great writer has and, for me Dennis Cooper is one of the most important writers to emerge in the English speaking world since WWII. It is rather sad to realise that his chances of ever being on school curriculum has probably declined to nothing since the 1980's when it would have probably been seen as unlikely but quite possible in the future. We have grown more self satisfied and censorious as a culture and I don't limit that remark to the book banners of Florida.

I have to say this in every review I post of Cooper's work - there is less description of sexual acts then in most chick-lit or its gay MM variety and the 'violence' in his books pales compared to that in most crime or true crime ones. What his works have is honesty there is nothing pretty or tidy in his plots or characters and he doesn't employ simplistic emotional or moral cliches. The extent to which Cooper gave voice to a whole new way of looking at, to be pretentious, everything is reflected in the very many negative things said about him and his writing. I imagine more people 'know' what a Dennis Cooper novel includes then the number of people who have actually read one.

Despite the way he is branded as someone who uses and abuses young men in his fiction there is probably no writer more honestly true in his understanding and sympathy for the hopeless drifters that he writes about. The hustlers, addicts and others are not simply fodder for consumption and he also writes beautifully about his own distance from the youths due to age - by the time this collection was published he was over thirty.

I can't praise Cooper enough, his writing is beautifully crisp and succinct. He makes what he does seem so simple but despite the proliferation of authors claiming to be transgressive he stands out - unique and alone.

The stand out piece in this book is the story 'My Mark', if he had died after publishing this Cooper would have always stood out as a great writer. It is one of the most beautiful and compelling first pieces of fiction I have read; but that doesn't mean the other parts of the book are without merit.

If you think you know Cooper's work and don't like it I can only insist you need to take another look. He will be one of the writers that survive and flourish, if not in the next ten or twenty years then in the next hundred. If he doesn't than the world which I will not live to see is also one that I am happy to miss seeing.

[Steph Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the key books in my life. It immediately made me want to get out my pen and start writing and gave me the feeling I could say (absolutely) anything I wanted.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is some of his best work. Tame compared to his later pieces, and really meaningful too. I read the backstory for 'My Mark' on his website. It was kind of sad.. I enjoyed the book overall, his prose is excellent... A shame his later works did not follow in the same vein and went the gruesome route. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there's only so much of it you can take.

[ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I loved him. I should have said so less often.”

Since I had already read Cooper’s collection “Wrong” I have obviously read Safe already, but since I spent an unmentionable amount of money getting myself a copy of it, I decided it deserved a re-read, making it the first part of Cooper’s repertoire I have taken the time to do so for. This has very much reassured my belief that all of Cooper’s works are definitely worth a second read, and I will certainly make sure to get into that soon.

Thanks to my tragically bad memory I had the ability to read this as if it was the first time, despite the fact that it’s only been nine months since I first read it, and I’m glad for it, because it allowed me to approach this work as if for the first time, but with a deeper appreciation.

This was Cooper’s first long-form work to be published, and I think it already serves to show off exactly the kind of writer he is. Playing with narrative form itself and ever changing narrators, the entire thing underlined by a pervasive feeling of loneliness. I always find myself relating to his characters, even those I’d rather not.

I would say this could be described as one of Cooper’s less challenging works, both morally and conceptually, but it is nonetheless a beautifully atmospheric, tragic sort of story, banal at first glance but emotionally compelling at a deeper look.

As always I am enamoured with his works, and I truly hope we have yet to see the last of him.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“He clipped a photo booth self-portrait onto the upper right corner. It hid what he felt was his worst feature, shiftiness.”
—
“In theory this look should make him about as alluring as one of the mannequins in these display windows, and it’s as hard for Mark to imagine the poseur he’s become lying loose-limbed in another’s arms as it would be to stand perfectly still in a storefront. But, based on gossip and instinct, he thinks this more aloof, less shy appearance makes him a more attractive person to topple.”
—
“What feeling’s lost in expanding his vision is more than made up for, he hopes, by an ability to see his life as art.”
—
“he means the work’s mood to be too removed, as overwhelmed by his technical prowess as skiers by the presence of their surroundings. The novel’s about its embarrassment.”
—
“Jeff Hunter’s face is what Rob likes to call ‘architecturally sound,’ but that doesn’t mean he believes in God. It simply sounds better than ‘cute.’’’
—
“Mark is unnerved by how deep Rob’s respect sounds to be for that Ken doll with orifices.”
—
“He speaks in a whisper. It carries. His throat has a lump, not from cancer—‘Mark,’ the word that has been on the tip of his tongue all day. It’s eroded, enveloped in lots of saliva.”
—
“Gradually Rob lifts his eyes from his clenched, folded hands. He tries with difficulty to explain himself. He claims it’s research for his novel. He says his sentences are like bars on a cage that holds dangerous animals.”
—
“This is a shit-load of pain, but he’d like to embrace it like a dummy does its ventriloquist, as he senses the hand pushes farther than guts would allow, into his headache, working his mouthful of breathlessness, one finger up the ghost limb of his hard-on, molding that purple embarrassment onto his moderate figure. He wonders what Shane could pick from the inside of his body. He things of migrant farm workers, their arms submerged in orange trees across this whole country. He remembers his childhood—one longe-gone magician’s paw plucking a scarf from thin, colorful air when his fingernails twiddled over a bottomless top hat.”
—
“He sobs until the snoring, blanketed form passes into the back of his mind, like the storm cloud it resembles. He slams his fists on the table. He has to get this shit out of his system. The only way he knows how is to bury under the surface of language. He lifts his pen, taps the paper. Ink is beginning to leak out again. Shortly, with the first signs of natural light around him, come the first words of a novel so deftly written it escorts Mark, like the lush at an otherwise orderly party, out of Rob’s mind.”
—
“He’s back to square one: his naked body. He turns, bends over, and peers through his knees at the butt upside down in his mirror. It’s his chief asset. If he can only find clothes that direct all attention to it, even slacks with giant arrows all over them. […] One of humanity’s great mysteries is how much of an icon the rear end has been, for gays in particular. Spreading its cheeks very wide with his forefingers, Mark thinks his own even slightly resembles the Shroud of Turin.”
—
“These days Doug can’t voice his own feelings, though he’s sure they would sound wild as an ocean if he could put his ear up to the boy’s skull where he whispered them.”
—
“Sometimes Doug wishes that whole period of his life could fit into an old-fashioned shadow box like those he’d turned to the light at his grandparents’. […] It was a simple illusion accomplished with levels of painted paper. […] If Doug were good with his hands he would build a box with those ingredients and a red X to mark Mark’s tiny grave. He’d press his toy to the windowpane, sob a few times, slip it back in the dresser drawer, and meet his friends’ eyes again.”
—
“It’s been five months since Doug thought about Mark every day. He’s fading, gradually, like a song Doug used to love on the radio, once kids stopped calling up to request it.”
—
“When Doug was Todd’s age, ten years ago, some friends and he used to drug themselves out in his parents’ house, feeling one another up under the sprinkling of fluorescent stars Doug had painted on one ceiling. They thought they understood love because he’d been able to re-create one tiny fraction of its atmosphere in his bedroom, but their menage had as much to do with real love as poster paint with heaven. Doug put on spacy music. They drew straws. The loser let everyone else shove a finger up his ass. Doug rigged it. When his turn came he studied Larry’s asscrack as if it were an open atlas.”
—
“He knows he’s being obsessive, but that’s his pattern, one thread connecting the dots in his scattered life, a solar system of smirks and tight assholes he glued to his lips to with no idea who he was looking up.”
—
“Doug has a passion for pornography. It’s both a world he can think very clearly about and the purely aesthetic experience he feels most comfortable with. […] Gay tastes were less refined then, but Doug maintains the affection for those prototypes one does for one’s first lovers.”
—
“The life pornography pictures is ordered: inhabitants may treat each other like pieces of furniture, but when the last page turns over they’re usually back in their jeans again, none worse for the wear. Doug wants to live in this one-dimensional world, have hot sex twenty-four hours a day, leave one bed, fall immediately into another. If someone he fucked died he’d never hear about it, and if he did the world wouldn’t compute or feel real to him. He’d be involved in his latest orgasm, face drawn so tight nothing else could get under. But dreams won’t buy him a hustler, much less his ideal lover, so he gets up and takes a long shower.”
—
“Doug used to picture them a half-inch deep in some shag rug gone quicksand while rock n’ roll records blasted above them, saluting what they were doing”
—
“Semesters later, when Lon had gone off to college, never to promise to call again, Doug read an article in a now long-defunct underground newspaper about a Hollywood stripper club where women danced on a long, pier-like runway. The girls would squat and spread their vaginas inches from customers' eyes. Each man would scan his assigned one, handing its towering owner a ten-dollar bill. The article centered on a man who, when a stripper knelt over him, pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket to gaze up inside her wild organ. The woman spread it especially wide and was paid particularly well. ‘This guy just had to have pussy,’ the journalist wrote, putting the word in italics to mean he'd wanted the Truth. That need makes sense to Doug. He's imagining the punk onstage right now, nestled back on his haunches directly overhead. Doug would train his pen light on that enlargement and learn its deep secret.”
—
“Skip complies, peeking over his shoulder at his own ass with renewed confi-dence. It has a permanent flex like a marble statue's. His Tenaxed haircut makes audible cracking sounds as his head hits the pillow. ‘Shit.’ ‘You okay?’ Doug whis-pers. 'Yeah,’ Skip says. Doug pulls the cool buns apart, looking down at a fresh, unmarked asshole ‘God’ probably thought would be safe in such a remote place. It suggests good genes and years of light usage. Its taste reflects what Doug can't put his finger on because Skip thinks that might ‘stretch me out,’ as he whined earlier.”
—
“The pinkish skin of Skip's buttocks erases everything but its essence for more than an hour, each metaphor, image, and symbol of death haunting Doug's head.
What's left is a few pointed thoughts. ‘I can't lick deeply enough’ is the main one. Doug pulls Skip's buns even farther apart, sprucing the crease up. The anus mouths the words ‘Thank you,’ with help from Doug's probing thumbs. Its pucker raises the hackles on his neck and grows so loose he could slide in his cock without raising Skip's eyebrow. He prefers a simple tête-à-tush. He sees the art in it. He sculpts until his eyes glaze over.”
—
“He milks kissing for what it's worth, laps the neck, cleans an armpit, and slurps his way down to what he remembers of Skip's feet, which isn't much. ‘Skip’ lies perfectly still, breathing inaudibly. He is conveniently rolled on his front when Doug's ready to zoom in. Soon as his tongue is in its ‘musty holster,’ as Mark used to call it, Doug comes, hurling his head around. ‘Skip’ stands, throws on clothing, and leaves. Doug opens his eyes. He thinks how stupid he'd look if the real Skip could see the mess he's made of his life. No chance of that. Skip's just another pair of used asscheeks Doug will kick like a beach ball into the sea of former ideas. Skip's washing out on a series of cursory thought waves. ‘Bye Skip,’ Doug says to himself.”
—
“‘Mark,’ Doug whispers. His name keeps coming up.
Doug shakes his head roughly side to side like hippies do old acoustic guitars in which they've lost their picks. It seems to clear out. In fifteen minutes the room sparkles more or less.”
—
“porn will have to do. He grabs the magazine off its perch. It's Swap Meat, which he originally bought because one of the stars seemed a burlier, tattooed Mark Lewis. In the months after Mark's death, Swap Meat grew tattered in Doug's attempt to move into it. He squints while turning the pages, as if attempting to view a great work of art from the proper perspective. It doesn't hold up. Even an image he'd thought religious this morning is just a snap of some junkie on hands and knees, beckoning over one shoulder, eyes drugged to pitch-black, asshole fucked so many times it resembles an empty eye socket. Here's his drab tassel of penis and balls dangling down one bruised leg.”
—
“He closes his eyes, concentrating as hard as he can. He can't quite tune the real Mark in. He gets a familiar face, but, though evocative, it could be Mark's, Todd's, Skip's, the porn star's, or others who've caught Doug's eye in Mark's wake. Features have piled up, superimposed until the visage Doug sees has the beauty but blankness of a GQ model's. Mark's is somewhere beneath it, a skull whose gleaming originality can't be touched no matter how wildly Doug imagines he's french-kissing. Mark is a pile of bones deep and unlit in the earth. Doug's lost in thought. His cock's hard; his brow is furrowed, but he might as well try to breathe life back into someone who's been dead for so long he'd be totally brain damaged.”
—
“Doug and Skip have rolled off the bed onto the rug.
Skip lies facedown with one leg of the overstuffed chair in each hand as if braced for a violent wind. He's said
‘Shit’ so many times the last half of it's worn off. His ass and Doug's balls meet up with a light slapping sound. Their breathing only embellishes it. They're in different worlds, but with each slap realize they're not alone, no matter how far away their dream boys may ride bikes or lie dead. Doug knows whom he wishes were here. He wonders who Skip is fantasizing about.
He whispers, ‘Skip,’ to see what happens. ‘Skip,’ the boy's voice echoes back. Later he laughs when Doug tells him about it. He can't remember what he was thinking. ‘About being in pain, probably’”

[Nia Holton-Raphael · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When I was younger and met a boy who I wanted to sleep with, I was too embarrassed to say so. I'd lie there wishing that he was in trouble or dying, so that my feelings about him were justified, then I could say it to him on his death bed--it being 'I'll always love you'--and he would die thinking of me. Now I'm too embarrassed to think of the people I care about dead, and those who I love may as well be starring in their lives around me, and I one of tons of admirers breezing by."

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gay novel that displays Cooper's usual sexualization of death. He's great at it!

[Rod · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Dennis Cooper

[Corvyn Appleby]

"First novel of a poet"; some interesting formal complexity that puts this clearly beyond mere exercise, but the prose is labored and desperate to impress. Of course, Cooper wreaths this in self-aware irony, which means that you can argue the stylistic clumsiness is intentional, but I'd be hard-pressed to argue that it's /good/. You could say the same thing about the hipster pop-culturisms littered through this: does the indiscriminate, indulgent vapidness dripping off of them provide a running subtextual commentary on the insubstantial flashy lives that the protagonists hover about like sluggish flies over the roadkill of Americana? Maybe! Is it annoying? Definitely!

[Skylar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Included in Wrong, Safe begins well enough in the Cooper mode, yet the following two stories and their departure from Mark as a character toward Mark as an object of desire, and later loss, feel contrived and muddied by the jumbled perspectives and abrupt deductions of the interchanging protagonists. The regular enjoyment of the author's style is never curtailed by these flaws, only the constant acknowledgment of his need to develop it further.

[Fran Glisan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Safe by Dennis Cooper is his first novel, it is unmistakably written in his style, but it being his first novel is apparent. It is structured almost like his later novel Closer, but it is not as strong of a novel as Closer. It is very interesting to read this novel after his later ones and see how much his style has evolved.

[Yureka Eric Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

yeah, right

[KK · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was kind of boring tbh…. Like it’s obvious which of his books were written earlier in his career because I don’t think they’re great!