BY NIGHTFALL, Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, begins with a quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies concerning the terrifying, unfathomable power of beauty—its ability to rattle our foundations and take us unawares. True to form, Cunningham explores here a region that’s outside the sexual mainstream, whether gay or straight, in this case the story of a straight man who’s an art dealer in a stable but staid marriage, whose world is rocked by the arrival of his wife’s much younger brother, the gorgeous, charming, and deceitful “Mizzy” (for “Mistake,” as his birth was unplanned).
Cunningham’s first novel, A Home at the End of the World, was published in 1990 to wide acclaim. His next novel, Flesh and Blood, published in 1995, was an intense family drama worthy of The Sopranos (much of it taking place in New Jersey). The Hours, a re-imagined and updated take on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for literature and was made into a successful film version starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, and Nicole Kidman. His next novel was Specimen Days in 2005, which is actually a trio of novellas inspired by the life and poetry of Walt Whitman. A Home at the End of the World was made into a movie in 2004, with a screenplay written by Cunningham and starring Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Robin Penn Wright, and Sissy Spacek. He co-wrote, with Susan Minot, a screenplay for the 2007 film, adapted from Minot’s novel Evening, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep.
Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1952 and grew up in Pasadena, California. He received his B.A. in English literature from Stanford University and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He lives in New York City with his partner of 24 years, psychoanalyst and artist Ken Corbett. He also spends time in Provincetown, which is the setting for Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown (2002).
I spoke with Michael Cunningham in person during his recent book tour.
Michael Ehrhardt: You repeatedly refer to Thomas Mann in By Nightfall and call him “the patron saint of impossible loves.” Is your novel a sort of Death in Venice with a more benign ending?
Michael Cunningham: Very much so! I truly love Death in Venice, obviously; it’s really one of my favorite human creations. This book started out as a riff on Death in Venice, but I wanted it to peak at some place other than dead in a beach chair with makeup and a bad dye-job. I am, for better or for worse, really optimistic at heart. Although most of my novels are seen as dark and depressing and depict terrible events, I’m always a little baffled by that, because I feel they are enormously hopeful, and I seem always to end my novels on some kind of grace note. I really mistrust endings that arrive too neatly or tragically. My novels always end with something still ahead; they always end with somebody moving into some uncertain future that may be terrible or may be great or may be some combination of the two.
ME: You wrote in an essay that “There may be, in the end, no happiness quite so potent as the anticipation of a greater happiness still to come.” That’s very optimistic
indeed.
MC: Oh, yeah, I’m a sap! I’ve been nothing if not consistent. I don’t know how I got labeled as dark and gloomy—I’m anything but. I think we are living through what I can only call a “happiness epidemic,” in which people are reluctant to
experience any of the tragic, more diffi-
cult emotions. We want to be happy all the time.
ME: Since your protagonist is an art dealer, another one of your themes is about how we evaluate art in this age of cynicism. How do we decide which work is a transcendent experience and which is an overrated hoax?
MC: I think the art market is controlled in more or less the way that the DeBeers company controls diamonds. Unlike a book, which is all about multiples—the more copies you sell, the better—an objet d’art has to be rare and singular and precious. But if we deem too many artists to be significant, you can’t sell a piece for $75 million. I don’t think the art out there is meant as a hoax, but I do think the market is narrowed and manipulated for the sake of money.
ME: How did you acquire so much insight into the New York art scene—the venal philistinism at the high end, for example—are you a collector yourself?
MC: No, I don’t have the money for that. But, I’m a huge art maven: I go to the galleries all the time. Many of my friends are artists and a couple of them are dealers. So I knew something about the scene already. And the lovely and heroic Jack Shainman of the Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea let me hang around and watch him in action, and go to the openings, and he answered ten thousand questions. So I had a little bit of hands-on experience in a gallery not unlike the gallery Peter Harris ran.
ME: In By Nightfall, the character of Ethan—beautiful, androgynous Ethan, also called “Mizzy” or “The Mistake”—becomes the fly in the ointment, who upsets Peter’s domestic equilibrium when Peter finds him sexually alluring. Do you think this possibility is the deep, dark secret straight men would rather die than admit to?
MC: I think it depends on the man in question. I personally am not so convinced that many people are 100% straight or 100% gay. We certainly have our dominant passion. I’m not suggesting that everyone is really bisexual; I abandoned that one when I was about nineteen. I do believe that human sexuality is tremendously complicated and idiosyncratic. Peter is queer for just one boy. It’s beauty and it’s pheromones. It’s the stirring of some lost memory.
ME: Are you still vulnerable to human beauty in the way Peter Harris is?
MC: I’m quite vulnerable to human beauty; but not exactly as Peter is. I don’t have the thing about youth that Peter does. And Peter of course is in mourning for his own youth, and for his wife’s youth. I’m more likely to have a crush on some older man of a certain stature than on some callow youth—that’s how I’m wired.
ME: Even though he’s deceitful and narcissistic, I felt compassion for a guy who is nicknamed “The Mistake.”
MC: That’s good, because I don’t want him to be a completely unsympathetic character. He’s a human being, after all, even though he has his dark and devious ways.
ME: You include the specter of AIDS, represented by Peter’s deceased gay brother Matthew. Do you feel nostalgia for the
pre-AIDS era of sexual abandon and
experimentation?
MC: Sure, who wouldn’t? That said, it’s easy to over-romanticize the era of sexual abandon and all that we imagine that era was. But, did those times still favor youth and beauty over, say, a beautiful soul in a less perfect body? Yes, they did. In San Francisco in the 70’s and early 80’s, did you need to have a crew cut, a mustache, a polo shirt, a pair of tight Levis and a pair of hiking boots in order to get laid? You did.
ME: I love the turn-of-the-screw ending. Did that come to you spontaneously, or did you have that in mind from the get-go?
MC: No. That came spontaneously. It came out Tuesday night in the shower, or something like that. I never know where a novel is going, because I find if I do that the best it’s likely to do is arrive on time at its destination, which is no fun. As our beloved Flannery O’Connor says, how can there be any surprise for the reader, if there hasn’t been any for the writer? I abided by that. So, I kind of march in hoping the story goes somewhere, but determinedly unaware of where that will actually be.
ME: I think your depiction of a marriage—the little white lies, the need for one’s own space, the gradual cooling of passion—is spot-on. Did this come from direct experience?
MC: Yeah. That marriage is not Kenny’s and my marriage. We’ve been together 24 years. Eudora Welty said something to the effect that you can write about any situation you want without necessarily having gone there and seen it firsthand. You can write about a logging camp without having worked in a logging camp. But, said Miss
Eudora, you probably can’t write about an emotion you never felt. If you haven’t been in love, you probably shouldn’t write a love story. And if you’ve never been in a long relationship, you probably may want to think twice about the effects of one.
ME: How do you feel about queer assimilation into heterosexual life styles— the fight for marriage,
adoption?
MC: You know, I personally don’t give one shit about marriage. Kenny and I have been together for 24 years with no desire to get married. It goes without saying that I completely support the desire and right of any queer person to get married. I just don’t want to myself. I find that the two central issues of the era, the military and marriage, are two things I support in theory but I have no desire to participate in. I don’t want to be a soldier, and I don’t want to be a husband. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is not right. And my queer brothers and sisters have to keep fighting for that right. I’m just talking about the funny sort of gap between what I want for my gay brothers and sisters and for what I want for myself.
ME: Home At the End of the World, The Hours, and Specimen Days have been called “crossover” fiction. Do you find this term offensive?
MC: Oh, not at all. Certainly, Specimen Days was a kind of experimentation with genres, with fiction’s less presentable cousins. I love genre fiction, and wanted to work with it.
ME: What are your thoughts about the state of gay literature these days? Is the whole concept of gay lit passé?
MC: Maybe. I’m not coming up with that many [new]writers. The fact that I can’t name a new generation of gay writers… I just feel that we may have run out of interest. I’m enormously interested in books that are about gay people, but I like a bigger canvas and a larger context. The fact that I can’t name a new generation of gay writers doesn’t mean that they’re not out there.
But the young gay writers seem to be writing about a bigger world that includes gay people and other people. It’s a little harder to look at what they’ve written and say “This is a gay book.” As gays move more freely in the straight world, I want to see fiction that depicts that. And then, of course, where do we sit about straight guys who write gay books, like Michael Chabon? And how often do you need to read a coming-out novel? Is it a gay book if it’s about gay people, but the author is straight? What we’re moving toward is increasingly apparent: that the books by or about gay people need to be shelved with the rest of the books.
ME: You report that you went into a “deep spiral” after the success of The Hours. How deep?
MC: It was pretty deep. That’s because I’m pretty fucked up. Yeah, I had a hard time. “What do I do now?” “Where do I go from here?”
ME: The Hours and A Home at the End of the World have both been turned into movies. What did you think of the translations of both books to film?
MC: I thought The Hours was a beautiful movie. I’m happy enough with Home, although we had a really serious argument with our distributor about cutting it. So,
the version that we see is not the version that Michael Mayer, the director, had in mind.
ME: Was it over sexuality? I know the kissing scene between Colin Farrell and Dallas Roberts is still intact.
MC: It’s not that they cut the sexy stuff. They just cut out a lot of the narrative; they wanted it shorter and shorter. I’m proud of the movie, but one nevertheless imagines the other version, which would have been
better.
ME: I hear you were really spooked about having Nicole Kidman play Virginia Woolf in The Hours.
MC: Actually, almost everyone was spooked except me. I kind of thought, “Let’s give her a shot.” You have to remember that at the time, Nicole was not really considered a serious actor. She was in a Batman movie and she was married to Tom Cruise. I’m not remembering anybody I talked to about the movie before it was made who thought casting Nicole as Virginia Woolf was a good idea. But in the end she nailed it.
ME: Are you superstitious about discussing working on a new book? If not, what does it involve?
MC: I am, I’m sorry to say. Not superstitious— I’m aware of the fact that if I talk about something too much, I talk it out. It’s got to remain mysterious to me; and if I talk about it to somebody, it sounds like the beginning of our conversation: “It’s about this guy who’s really pissed at a whale.” You could quickly lose faith in it. Suffice to say that I’m about fifty pages into a new one.
