Michael Cunningham has been climbing the walls, though it's not a manifestation of nervousness: he's just writing. In the tiny sixth floor walkup in Greenwich Village, which he used to call home but now calls his studio, there is text all over one wall of the kitchen. "It's Flannery O'Connor, at the moment," he says, greeting his PW visitor barefoot and in black jeans and black T-shirt. The text, in Cunningham's flowing hand, is scrawled in white chalk over what he calls "black chalkboard paint." On the wall opposite, a quatrain of verse, fashioned out of one continuous length of picture wire, hangs from screws.
The teeming textuality of Cunningham's very workspace seems a fitting interior for a discussion of his new novel, The Hours (Forecasts, Aug. 31), which skillfully interweaves three novellas inspired by a classic text of modernism, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
Cunningham, a lean six-footer, swivels in his desk chair on the balls of his feet, gracious, but with the pent energy of a writer accustomed to working in his space, not talking. Still the topic of Virginia Woolf brings a certain quietude.
"My introduction to Woolf's work," he remembers, "was in high school, where a very rough, difficult, slightly crazed girl with teased hair and long fingernails, who used to hang around behind the gym and smoke cigarettes, proclaimed her to be a genius." Cunningham, "not an especially bookish kid," in his view, picked up Mrs. Dalloway at the local bookstore, "and the book just nailed me; I've thought about it almost constantly ever since."
Some 25 years later, Cunningham understands Woolf in the context of the century's literature. "Woolf and Joyce," he notes, "were of course the great her s of modernism. They were interested in using the most idiosyncratic, p tic language possible to get to the heart of human experience, which, by Woolf's lights, was contained in every atom of human experience. One of the great accomplishments of Mrs. Dalloway was Woolf's insistence that everything you need to know about human life can be contained in two people having coffee together."
In The Hours, named after one of Woolf's early working titles for Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham tells three stories, each deceptively small in scale, concerning a single day: Woolf on a morning outside of London in 1923 as she tries to overcome family distractions (her sister Vanessa's unscheduled visit, husband Leonard's prickly self-absorption) in order to work on what would become Mrs. Dalloway; the melancholy tale, set in 1949, of one Laura Brown, an unfulfilled housewife in suburban L.A., who escapes her little boy and the day's cooking chores (it is her husband's birthday) for a session in a hotel bed, which she spends reading Mrs. Dalloway; and a June day in the life of Clarissa Vaughan, a 50-something lesbian who lives in Greenwich Village and who is called "Mrs. Dalloway" by her dearest friend Richard, a writer, dying of AIDS, for whom she is planning a party. The subtle interactions of these narratives, and each one's mirroring of scenes right out of Mrs. Dalloway, adds a dimensionality to The Hours that makes it much more than the sum of its parts. And readers mesmerized by Cunningham's attention to quotidian detail will gasp when, out of the blue, the stories cohere in a moving, final tableau that evokes a familiar Cunningham theme: family.
"I'm probably not, by any means, the best or most reliable authority on what I'm writing about from book to book," says Cunningham, sipping black coffee and smoking. "But when I look back at what I've written, the whole question of family just jumps out, as I think it would to anybody who's read my books. I do seem to have some kind of fixation on the whole notion of family, which is something of a surprise to me.
"But as I was writing this book," he continues, "I thought, well, finally I'm not writing about families anymore. Finally I've put that behind me. And guess what? As it turns out, here, once again, is the specter of the queer, extended, post-nuclear family."
Ohio to Iowa via Europe
Cunningham's path to becoming a writer was neither more nor less conventional than most, replete with the standard stopovers and uncharted byways. Born to a family that enjoyed increasing prospects in the prosperous fifties, Cunningham lived in Ohio, in Europe (where his father's advertising career brought them) and then moved to California at the age of 10. His mother kept the home, and Cunningham and his younger sister, like an entire generation of American kids, were raised on rock 'n' roll and rebellion. Cunningham went on to Stanford University, saw himself as a painter for a while, and, hearing about the Iowa Writer's Workshop, sent some stories.
"I went to Iowa in 1978, with real trepidations about whether I wanted to be a writer, whether I could be a writer. I didn't have a great deal of determination at that point. But to some degree a decision about my seriousness got made when I got in. I found myself among 60-plus people, some of them extremely talented, who were just about willing to commit murder over a paragraph. It's a very competitive place but I loved it. And something about it made me snap to."
Cunningham's teacher there was the novelist Hilma Wolitzer -- "wonderful and hugely encouraging," he says. He recalls those early days with a certain relish because, for a brief moment, it all seemed so easy. "I had a streak of luck at Iowa: a story in Atlantic Monthly and another in the Paris Review, which led me to the entirely false conclusion that if writing wasn't exactly easy, well, it was going to be easy for me. I would just write things and publish them. Boy, was I mistaken!"
Hearing Cunningham relate his stories, it's apparent that one of his gifts is an immediate and total immersion in the emotions he is describing. If it weren't early morning, one has the feeling he would be reaching for a stiff drink as he revisits how things somehow ran off track. He is fairly shouting now.
"And I sent stories that were every bit as strong to the same people who had published the others, and I started getting them back so quick I doubted they were even being read. I thought, c'mon, can this be?"
Fortunately, Cunningham's agent, Gail Hochman, saw him through the rough patches. Hochman has represented Cunningham since his MFA days. "She came out to Iowa to show the students what an agent looked like. `Like this!' she said," and Cunningham spreads his arms in a kind of diva turn, then hops up to catch the whistling kettle.
"I showed Gail a couple of things, and she agreed to represent me. Thank God! And she heroically returned all my calls and dropped me an occasional encouraging letter for years when nothing was happening."
The "when nothing was happening" was a period of 10 years that followed the publication of Cunningham's first (and now commonly forgotten) novel, Golden States, published by Barbara Grossman at Crown in 1980. He now admits he was never very fond of the novel. "I was approaching 30," he explains. "I was working in a bar, and I thought, I'm fast on my way to being a 50-year-old who once had a story in the Paris Review. So I managed to finish this novel. Barbara published it beautifully, and it got very nice reviews and sold seven or eight copies."
Wanderlust followed: "I was working either as a waiter, a bartender, moving around a lot, falling in love a lot and going wherever it took me, to Nebraska for a while with a woman, to Greece for a while with a guy." But all the while, Cunningham was working on what became his breakthrough book, A Home at the End of the World. And it all began at the New Yorker.
In 1988, in order to prove to a new lover (Ken Corbett, with whom Cunningham has been ever since) that the writer's life was misery, he sent a chapter from his work-in-progress to the New Yorker. "Watch," Cunningham told his new beau, "how fast this comes back. You think it's good? Watch."
And it did come back, but with a long memorandum from editor Dan Menaker. "Love the story, love the story, love the story, but..." is how Cunningham summarizes the letter. "And there was a handwritten note attached: `Call me, or I'll call you.' And he did."
The New Yorker, published the story, after some revisions, under the title "The White Angel." And it created a sensation. Cunningham still seems a little amazed that of all the things he had sent to the New Yorker ("I began to believe that Menaker's sole job there was to reject Michael Cunningham submissions"), they published one "about a nine-year old and acid and sex and violence in cemeteries.
"When the story appeared, Gail started getting calls from editors all over the place: `Can we see the novel?' But my very favorite was a call from Roger Straus, who didn't say, `We'd like to see his novel' but rather, `If he can write something I like this much I have faith that he can write a whole book. And we'd like to publish it.' "
Lucky for Cunningham, because he didn't have a novel yet. It took him another two years to finish A Home at the End of the World, which charted, in alternating voices, the passage into manhood of two boys from Cleveland (one of whom is gay), the fate of their families and their ultimate discovery of new arrangements in which to love. The book's exhausting intensity and p tic prose garnered glowing reviews, and established the author at FSG. "There is a sort of unspoken understanding at Farrar, Straus," says Cunningham, "that they are your publishers; that d sn't necessarily mean they are going to publish everything you write, but if you write another book and they like it, they'll publish that one, too."
A New Family Romance
Flesh and Blood followed in 1995, and it was here that Cunningham's concerns for honoring a new kind of family perhaps burned the hottest.
The 485-page Flesh and Blood "was a much bigger book than any I'd done before. It spanned 100 years, and I had really wild ambitions for it. The book was written while a lot of people I loved and admired were dying. My desire to write the best book I possibly could was all tangled up with my desire to write a book that would contribute in some way to the battle for a cure for AIDS.
"I think my interest in the post-nuclear family, which might include, say, a biological mother, a same-sex lover and the drag queen who lives downstairs, probably comes from being a gay man living through the AIDS epidemic. Everybody writes about what they know, obviously. I've lived through an epidemic that involves seeing all kinds of things, maybe one of the most significant of which is seeing nonbiological families come through in the way that biological families might not."
Flesh and Blood met with mixed reviews, some welcoming the brash revision of family dynamics, others contending that Cunningham the artist had become a gay populist. But Cunningham knew what he was doing by stretching the family saga formula.
"I very much wanted the book to be accessible to a wider range of people, by which I don't mean `gay" people or `straight' people but people who didn't read an awful lot. There are not a lot of books you can take to a sick 28-year-old man who d sn't have a lot more books to read. I mean, you can bring him Dostoyevsky, but will it be read? I wanted Flesh and Blood to have some of the easier virtues of a pulpier kind of book. There were things I would do differently now, but I was pleased with the real range of responses it got.
"I have a friend who said something to me that struck a chord," he continues. "She said that we seem to be at a point where it's fine for gay people to write about other gay people, but don't go messing around in the family album, don't go writing about straight people and housewives and the like. Because then you've crossed some kind of line."
Cunningham's friend may be right; which is not to say that he's heeded her words. In The Hours, he writes about straights and gays and lesbians and teenagers and housewives and a great figure of Western literature -- and, deftly, brings them all together in a tale about love accommodating difference. So, clearly, the family album is still under revision, just as the words on Cunningham's kitchen wall will no doubt be erased, replaced by a new text with a new relevance for a new day.
