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Michael Cunningham
Photograph by Barbara Zanon/Getty Images
Photograph by Barbara Zanon/Getty Images

Michael Cunningham: A life in writing

This article is more than 13 years old
'Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind'

By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham's new novel, might be read through the rhetorical questions of its protagonist, Peter. You could publish them in a pamphlet: the mental morse code of the anxious New Yorker. "What are the symptoms of stomach cancer? Does stomach cancer exist at all?" "Who was it said a country gets the government it deserves? Does America get the art it deserves?" "Do you think it'll be another building next time, or will it be a subway or a bridge?" "By the way, is the drinking becoming a problem, how exactly are we supposed to know?"

Cunningham lives in New York, in the neighbourhood where he set part of The Hours, his Pulitzer prize winning novel. The 58-year-old's writing space is a tiny, rent-controlled apartment six flights up, a perfect bolt-hole, says Cunningham, and five minutes from the loft he shares with his partner of 24 years, Ken Corbett. By Nightfall is set around here also, and tells the story of a middle-aged couple going through their first panic about mortality, which takes the form, as these things will, of fissures in their marriage. It's a risky choice of demographic for Cunningham: Peter Harris, an art dealer, and Rebecca his editor wife, inhabit a loft in downtown Manhattan, have brunch at swanky brunch places, drink wine from fish bowl glasses and do everything else to invite the charge, of who cares about these spoilt people and their existential crises.

Yes, says Cunningham, that thought struck him too.

"Here are characters who are unhappy with lives that 99.9% of the world's population would commit murder to get. What about that? And I suppose I have to hope that these people's humanness carried readers through. And that, as we know, the 1% of the population that is so fortunate, is not in any way safe from the ravages of sorrow and mortality. And maybe we can get a certain comfort from that – those of us who aren't quite as prosperous as Peter Harris and Rebecca."

What saves it from smugness is the quality of the writing, the painstaking accuracy that makes the novel feel at once chunky and edited to within an inch of its life. Peter, in his disappointment with most of the art he sells through the gallery, describes "the unending effort to find a balance between sentiment and irony, between beauty and rigor, and in so doing open a crack in the substance of the world through which mortal truth might shine."

It is Cunningham's project too, the pressure of which he feels, particularly after finishing a novel, when the terrible gap between what he hoped he'd produce and what he wound up with becomes apparent. Because, he says, one tends to value the things one isn't good at, he has a fantasy that one day he'll find he has written "some kind of vast epic novel that would include the Crimean war and interstellar space travel" rather than his usual slim volume of the interior lives of ordinary people.

"Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest. You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire – that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book. And it has its strengths, it has its virtues, but there's nothing about the Crimean war, there's nothing about interstellar travel. It says what it says and that's it. And it joins all the other books in the world."

If there is a criticism of Cunningham's novels it is, as Peter Harris observes, "the preciousness of everything, the exhausting preciousness". This is at odds with the writer's robust physicality. Cunningham is large and imposing, with a booming laugh and an almost cowboyish ruggedness. He grew up in California, "an embarrassingly ordinary childhood", he says, his father in advertising, his mother a homemaker. "And I, of course, could not wait to get the hell out of there and live in a bigger and more dangerous and more interesting world. I couldn't wait. I was counting the days." He initially wanted to be a painter, and after many fraught afternoons at a local gallery, produced, as he thought painters must, a series of religious tableaux. He smiles: "Bleeding Christs, ascensions into heaven." Somewhere along the line he realised he wasn't good enough, and while at Stanford switched ambitions to writing.

Cunningham's focus on the minutiae of thought, on the mental fluctuations that preoccupied Woolf in her storytelling, is, he argues, the single thing the novel has over its racier competition. It takes nerve to limit the action the way he does and the accretion of small detail pays off: there is a scene towards the end of the new novel in which two people, having a conversation in a Starbucks, get snagged on a misunderstanding so utterly mortifying you feel, as you read it, something weird happen to your scalp. (He is very good at embarrassment; Clarissa, in The Hours, is shocked to find that among her responses to her best friend's suicide, she is "slightly embarrassed by what has happened.")

He says: "Never more so than in 2011, I feel like a certain interiority is what the novel can offer that no other medium can. I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds. The novel remains the most effective means of telling a reader what it's like to be somebody else. You can burrow into these little bastards' minds and hearts. And I often find novels that don't do that to be a little unsatisfying. Why would I read a book that doesn't take me some place that otherwise I couldn't go? Watch The Wire. Watch The Sopranos."

His model is Madame Bovary – "Flaubert took this shitty, shallow little person, and looked at her so intently that he made her a great figure of literature." His greatest achievement in terms of character is perhaps Laura Brown, the frustrated housewife with suicidal impulses whom Cunningham created as the third lead in The Hours. Brown moves through her life in 1950s LA with that sense of disappointed expectation, the shallowness of all things and its flip side, the sudden flights of joy and inexplicable wonderment that underpins the novel. He based the character on his mother, who he thought would be delighted. She was not.

"She tried to put a cheerful face on it, but I think she felt indicted and betrayed; mothers, don't raise your children to be novelists."

The novel was initially conceived as a straightforward updating of Mrs Dalloway, and there's a question as to why a novelist would set himself up for comparison with Virginia Woolf. (Hermione Lee, in her review of By Nightfall in this newspaper, wrote waspishly of "the great writers whose souls Cunningham cunningly stole.") He says: "I got about 50 pages into it and thought we don't really need a new Mrs Dalloway, unexamined and unquestioned. We already have a great Mrs Dalloway." He kept working around the edges of the idea until he figured out what interested him about it: "the fact that Woolf had very little confidence and strongly suspected that she was just an hysterical, spinsterish figure whose tinselly little experiments would be swept away by time. And so I thought about contrasting this day in the life of my reimagined Clarissa with this day in the life of Virginia. So then it was a diptych, and it still felt a little thin, like a conceit. And I got into one of those black moods: oh, this was a mistake, it isn't working out, it's a tinselly little experiment that'll be swept away by time." And then his mother popped into his daydream in the form of Laura Brown.

"I realised that part of my attachment to Clarissa Dalloway, and to Virginia Woolf, stemmed from my sense that my mother was a little like an Amazon captured and trapped and sent to live a life that was too small for her. Although she was someone who wasn't really happy just keeping the house, she was obsessive about the house. She could spend all day looking for the perfect cocktail napkins. I began to think, if you take away the result, the end product, mom and Virginia Woolf had something in common; they were both women devoted to an ideal, to the image of impossible perfection, and Virginia Woolf was trying to write great books, and did. Mom was just trying to make a great cake."

While the film version of The Hours was being made – directed by Stephen Daldry, with a screenplay by David Hare – Cunningham's mother was dying. When it became apparent she wouldn't live to see the movie he rang Scott Rudin, the producer, and asked whether there was anything he could show her. Rudin biked over 20 minutes-worth of rushes.

"I sat on the sofa we'd had since I was a kid, with my mother, who would die in another week, watching Julianne Moore play her – as if she was being reincarnated while she was still alive. I think something about the movie made sense to my mother in a way the book didn't quite. It was a great moment."

Cunningham observes normal office hours. He is at his desk by 9am and sticks at it till late afternoon. He is happy in that time to get three good sentences written. "One of the great things about the novel – and one of the terrible things about writing a novel – is that it takes so long. It's so much about going sentence, by sentence, by sentence." I wonder if his partner gets nervous when Cunningham writes a novel in which two Manhattan loft-dwellers find themselves hideously bored with each other after a marriage of, oh, 24 years or so.

Firstly, says Cunningham, he tells students in his writing class not to bother if they're going to spend time fretting over what their grandmother/mother/boyfriend will think. "A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world."

On the other hand, he says, "Kenny hangs in, but I know he's affected by it. Another novel of mine, Flesh and Blood, involved a man who falls in love with a slightly older guy who is a little overweight, and Kenny did go on a diet." Cunningham laughs. "Unnecessarily – he's not in the least bit overweight." Corbett could, if he wanted to, get his own back with a little professional knife-work: he is a psychoanalyst. How does that work out at home?

"By the end of the day he is so tired of psychoanalysing his patients that, if anything, he under-psychoanalyses me. Sometimes I have to point out the subtexts to him. So no. I don't feel dissected by Dr Ken Corbett."

Corbett is, however, his first and most prized reader, with the courage to tell Cunningham when something isn't working. "I've learned to take it," he smiles. He is amused when people ask him if he thinks gay men, and by extension gay writers, are more sensitive than straight men. "All I can ever tell them is, give me an hour, I can get 10 gay men in here of such crushing insensitivity that that idea will go forever out of your head."

He has a life outside of writing. Cunningham has been arrested numerous times for civil disobedience; once he and a group of protestors invaded the Waldorf Astoria to heckle George Bush Snr who was appearing there. Another time, they chained themselves together outside a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey to protest against its failure to share research findings with other companies.

Most of his activism has involved Aids awareness. When a character in the new novel dies of Aids, it feels, shockingly, like a period piece. Yes, says Cunningham; "blasé attitudes" towards the illness are a real problem. He lived through the worst of the Aids crisis in New York and lost a lot of friends. "If you survive a war or epidemic, your sense of life and the world is changed. You've just seen a level of mortality which many people don't see. And you work with that. You simply take it as part of the material you've been given and try to negotiate it as a writer."

For a change of pace, now and then, he writes screenplays. He wrote Evening, an unsuccessful film with Meryl Streep and Claire Danes ("you can rent it some time, but you could rent other things first") and is currently writing a vehicle for Anne Hathaway, a "contemporary version of The Turn of the Screw." He learned a lot from watching David Hare, he says, and compares screenwriting to "a hybrid of writing narrative and doing a crossword puzzle".

And there is a new novel to begin. Does he get size envy, I wonder, when he looks at Jonathan Franzen's Freedom on the bookshelves?

"I don't. As a reader, I prefer a shorter novel. When someone hands me a 750-page tome, my first reaction is, oh fuck you. I don't want to read your giant book. There has been a fixation in American letters on giant books that are usually written by men and that are usually a demonstration of the writer's scope and precocity. Those aren't the books I aspire to read."

Or to write. His novels are shorter than they used to be – "physically smaller and more focused because I've learned more about how to write. I'm better able to penetrate my characters' consciousnesses than I was at 25."

His aim, as Richard in The Hours puts it, is to write something that is "alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning." To that end, Cunningham has a rule in the mornings, on his short walk from the loft to the writing space; he tries to avoid talking to anyone. "If I have too much congress with actual reality before I come to the studio I get here and look at what I've done and it's a story I'm making up. This isn't as profound and mysterious as a dry cleaners; as beautiful and strange as a drugstore."

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