in Conversation with Michael March

Michael March:  {to the audience) Please imagine this as a dance floor. {to Michael Cunningham} You were born in 1952 in Cincinnati. What’s more disturbing Cinci or Nati?

Michael Cunningham: {laughing} They work quite well together, because Cinci is sort of slippery, and just when you think you might slide right off the end of the name, you bump up into Nati  which stops you.

MM:  So you are taking Cinci?

CM:  I think Cinci and Nati are beautiful together. They couldn’t be better syllables.

MM:  I choose Nati, because it reminds me of my idiot stepfather. So we split the cells.

CM:  Exactly.

MM:  What were the highlights of your youth?

CM:  You know, I had a youth that was entirely devoid of highlights. That is one of the reasons why I loved Woolf´s Mrs. Dalloway. I was just a kid living in a suburb in Los Angeles, one of those places that if you drove by, you might very well glance out the window of your car and think to yourself: Thank God I don’t live there. I understood it to be magical and strange and complicated and singular, even though it looked like almost any other place in America, and when I read Mrs. Dalloway and understood that somebody named Virginia Woolf had written this epic story of an ordinary day in a life of an ordinary person named Clarissa Dalloway, I thought: Oh, I want do that! I want to try, if it’s anywhere in me, to convey the strangeness and magic and off-kilter beauty of where I’m from, of the lives of the people that I know that are not full of highlights.

MM:  Hard work.

CM: You know, by the time I started to try to seriously write I had pretty much wasted my twenties—I urge any young people in the room to benefit from my example and do not piss away your twenties the way I did—The next thing you know your turning fifty-four and mourn the loss of a whole decade. By the time I was writing, the AIDS epidemic was raging through America, and I felt that I had to write a novel. As it turned out, the second novel in some way dealt with the need to try to write about the lives of the women and men who were living or not living through the epidemic.

MM: You appear as a romantic—sensitive, extremely observant—looking down from the spires almost as a ghost observing life.

CM: Yes, absolutely. I’ve always been acutely aware of the passage of time. I think of novels as doomed attempts to preserve time—to fix it and hold it and make it last—that’s part of why we love novels. Take Madame Bovary—her   world’s still intact—in time. In the act of writing, when we reach the end of a sentence, it’s already in the past. If there is no present—as we are always moving at brake-neck speed into the future—then we can only write about the past. All stories are ghost stories.

MM:  Last night we were talking about hope—apparently as ghosts—over côte de boeuf.  Hope is kitsch, nonexistent.  We are condemned to hope.  

CM:  I probably harbour a certain sort of kitschy hope for myself—I’m not afraid of kitsch and I’m not afraid of hope. I write very dark books, or so I’m told, but they always have happy endings. They always end with life going on, even though not all the characters have survived. There is always a future and another day—the inevitability—that something will happen, perhaps for the best.

MM:  Hope fades into love—another profound theme.

CM:  Love is what saves us. It is the most powerful force in the world, and the human capacity to love another person, to actually put that person’s good before your own, is what aligns us with the angels, is what renders us extraordinary, it’s why they write books about us. We are a species that will go into a burning building to see if strangers are safe. You can say all you want about our shortcomings, we tend to be fat and lazy and have terrible taste in shoes— though I’m rather pleased with mine—but there’s that mysterious human capacity to care so deeply about another. That’s what’s great about us—why the aliens can’t blow us up, why we have to live on.  

MM:  Coupling love and geography, does the European Union belong in the Kama Sutra?

CM:  {laughing} Everything belongs in the Kama Sutra! Even the European Union.

MM:  In Specimen Days there is the sentence: “It isn’t murder if you do it with love.”

CM:  That’s a line spoken by a deranged, little boy who has been raised on nothing but lies. Nothing justifies murder—not love, not anything. There is no cause that merits the loss of human life. I feel that absolutely, categorically.

MM:  With Newton, what went up—came down. For us, the zipper lends transcendence: what goes up—stays up.

CM: Yes, we are beings of miraculous powers.

MM:  For Saint Augustine, “we are here to begin again.”

CM:  I love beginning again. I love starting a new work because every time I start a new novel I understand none of the other novels quite worked out the way I had hoped they would, that they developed all kinds of snarls and loose ends and had all kinds of unfortunate lapses in them—but this new one which I’m just beginning will be perfect. This will be the great book. It’s somewhere around page—oh, seventy-five usually—that I begin to realize that this is going to be another flawed attempt. Talking to translators, I realize that the original is a sort of bad translation, because what you had floating in a cartoon balloon over your head was a vaster, smarter, funnier, brighter, darker novel than you could possibly write. You are walking through the world with this ghostly cathedral hovering over —you can almost taste it, can almost reach up and pull it down.

MM:  Does language translate into film?

CM: I don’t feel precious about my work—it’s not a holy text, not a thumbnail of a saint that needs to be preserved in a reliquary. if somebody comes along, someone you respect—who you feel is gifted, intelligent and wants to do something with your book—the only reasonable response is: Sure, please, change it. Please take it someplace else.


Published in The Guardian Books as 'I think of novels as doomed attempts to preserve time'
Municipal Library, Prague, December 2006