From BOMC.com
Interview with Michael Cunningham on The Hours By Caz Springer

Three days before Michael Cunningham won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Hours, he spoke on the phone from his home in New York City about Virginia Woolf, his writing process, and some of his heroes. A fast-paced, engrossing view of one day in three lives separated by time, The Hours is Cunningham's unique riff on Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and truly a gift to readers hungry for intriguing fiction.

Caz Springer:
I must say this is a beautifully written book. Your craft is so clean and compact that there is no space wasted in this book. And there's a gem of beauty and insight on each page.

Michael Cunningham:
Thank you for telling me.

CS:
This may sound completely off the wall, but one name that came to mind early on in my reading of The Hours, because of the parallel narratives, the time compression, and the mingling of fact with fiction, was Kathy Acker.

MC:
Kathy Acker was certainly someone whom I thought of. When you do something this unorthodox, and search around for some kind of model, guide, somebody who's gone ahead and in some way paved the way, and given you permission, I did think about Kathy Acker, who is a sort of hero of mine.

CS:
How did you decide to tell the story in the voices of three women? How did that develop?

MC:
I originally set out to write a very different book. It was going to be a contemporary retelling of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway with a gay man at the center of it, a fifty-two-year-old gay man living through a relatively ordinary day of his life in New York City in 1999. And moving through Chelsea society, which seemed to me to strongly resemble in many ways the London society of the twenties in which Clarissa Dalloway functioned. I spent almost a year working on that version of the book. I had about one hundred pages with many very nice neat parallels between Woolf's book and this contemporary version of mine. Then I suddenly came to the realization that it was really not enough to write a novel about. It was just a parlor trick, at heart. The world didn't need another version of a great book. We already had Woolf's novel, we didn't need my gloss on it. I thought I would just have to abandon it. As a novelist, I'd always wondered if sooner or later I was going to embark on something that simply would not pan out, something that I would have to write my way into to realize that the idea just wasn't going to survive. And I thought, 'Well, here it is. Here's the book that didn't work. Here's the idea that didn't turn out to be a novel after all. There's a year down the toilet.'

But I stayed with it for a while. I gave up on the idea of so closely paralleling Woolf's book. But I kept writing. I started making notes about Virginia Woolf and almost freewriting about why she meant so much to me. What was it about this book and Woolf that spoke to me so powerfully? And I started writing about Virginia Woolf, and I began to think about possibly making her a character in this modern-day version of Mrs. Dalloway. What if the book involved my attempt to rewrite Mrs. Dalloway, and Woolf's ghost intruding periodically? I tried various ways of working the specter of Virginia Woolf into my own attempt to retell the story of Mrs. Dalloway. That didn't quite work either. I tried it various ways. I went through months and months of aborted attempts. There was even a period when I thought of doing this contemporary version of Clarissa Dalloway on the right-hand pages, and an imagined day in the life of Virginia Woolf on the left-hand pages—also an idea that didn't survive. It really turned into the book it became when I came up with the notion of a third character, a reader—the figure of Laura Brown, the housewife in Los Angeles.

And then it clicked into place. Suddenly I realized that it would be three days in the lives of three different women separated over time. Then all I had to do was write the book! (laughs)

CS:
It works beautifully. You mentioned freewriting about Woolf. What did you discover through freewriting about why she is so important to you?

MC:
I found that in almost free associating, from Woolf I got to things about my mother, who is not the Laura Brown character, but was in some ways the source of the Laura Brown character. She was in some ways the kind of powerful, intelligent personality who made it possible to imagine someone like Laura Brown.

I thought back to high school, when I first read Mrs. Dalloway. I went to high school in southern California. I was a not especially precocious student at a not-all-that-good public school. One year in high school, I really hadn't read much, and didn't think I needed to read much. An older student, a senior, forced Mrs. Dalloway on me, and it just knocked me out. It really turned me around, though I didn't think of it at the time, at least not consciously. It was really when I began to imagine that someday I might try to write something, too. While I didn't understand what was going on in Mrs. Dalloway at the age of fifteen, I did understand the beauty and music of those sentences. I understood Woolf's assertion that the most ordinary hour in the most ordinary life contains all stuff of great literature. Yes, you can write about foreign wars and the search for God, and you can also write about a woman doing errands on a Tuesday afternoon. Almost in the same way that the recipe for the entire organism is encoded in every strand of DNA, the story of the world, the story of human life, is encoded in every human experience. That's what I picked up from Woolf, and Mrs. Dalloway in particular, that really formed my thinking, and certainly made me the kind of writer that I've become, which is a writer who is intent on trying to split the atom, for lack of a better phrase—to go deep enough into ordinary experience that it cracks open and reveals its profundity.

CS:
When did you start to take writing seriously?

MC:
I didn't really start writing until I got to college.

CS:
What college did you attend?

MC:
I went to Stanford. And I had a couple of great teachers: a man named John L'Heureux, and I took a literature course from a great teacher named Nancy Packer. That's really when I started. It had been churning around in the back of my mind, but I don't think I imagined that I could actually do it. I could imagine wanting to do it. But I didn't think that I was a writer. I'm not sure what I thought writers were, but I didn't think I was one.

CS:
How far along were you when you submitted 'White Angel' to the New Yorker?

MC:
'White Angel' was a chapter from my second novel, A Home at the End of the World, which was published in 1988. I had sent any number of stories to the New Yorker, and had always gotten them back almost instantaneously. It seemed sometimes that if I took the story to the post office and did a few errands on my way home, it would be waiting for me when I got back. (laughs) 'White Angel,' involving, as it did, a violent death, children on drugs, sex in a graveyard, seemed like a very long shot. And they took it. It made a huge difference in my career. Suddenly my agent was getting calls from all sorts of publishers. Among them was Roger Straus, who said not what all the other people had said, which was, 'If he's working on a novel, we'd love to see it,' but 'I love what he did in this piece so much that I'd like to publish his novel. I trust him to write something interesting, and I'll commit to it.' And I will feel married to Roger Straus forever on the basis of that kind of faith. (laughs) It's not something that happens much in publishing anymore.

CS:
In The Hours, you touch on the interrelationship between the dream state and the creative process. What about your process; were these women alive for you in your dreams?

MC:
Very much so. People often ask of a novel, 'Which of the characters is most autobiographical? Which one is you? The only answer I have to a question like that is 'Well, all of those.' If I didn't feel like I was a character, I wouldn't try to write that character. The question is always, for me, whether I can sufficiently imagine myself into the position of another person and actually begin to write as if I was that person. With some people it happens, with some people it doesn't happen. I did feel like I was able to imagine my way sufficiently into the essence of these three women, that I could sufficiently imagine what it was to be them. Woolf was, of course, the biggest risk. She is, after all, someone who really lived, she was a genius. I hesitated, of course. I wondered it was something I could do, or if I would just end looking like an idiot. And then I decided, 'Well, why would you want to do anything that wasn't a big risk?' In preparing to write about her I read or reread everything she had written—all her fiction and essays, her letters and diaries. A few biographies—the remarkable Hermione Lee biography that was published a couple of years ago, among others. Then I closed all the books and started writing, because I wanted to write under the influence of Woolf without trying to write as her. I wanted to write about a day in her life as if from memory, without checking back and forth with the biography. That day in her life—while it took place within the house in which she lived in 1923 with Leonard, who was in fact her husband, and Nelly, who was in fact the cook—nothing that I describe actually took place. Vanessa didn't come to tea that day. There was no episode involving a bird and a burial. I wanted to feel free to write a fictional character named Virginia Woolf. And I've done neither more than less than that. This isn't Virginia Woolf, of course. This is someone I've invented and called Virginia Woolf.

CS:
What was the time span from the false start (if I can call it that) with the concept of the gay male central character to The Hours as published?

MC:
The whole book took about three years to write, from its initial shaky inception to the finished entity.

CS:
This is a book which I feel I could recommend to anyone because of the excellent technique and the way the story line and themes are so well crafted and balanced. The characters' relationships are intriguing.

MC:
It was very important to me that it stand on its own, that the reading of it not be dependent on knowledge of Virginia Woolf or Mrs. Dalloway. I wanted it to have resonance and depth for those who, like me, know about Virginia Woolf, but I also wanted it to be a freestanding novel. For me, its nearest living relative is a piece of music—the way one composer will do riffs on the works of another composer.

CS:
In reflecting on the book I couldn't help but wonder how you developed the flow, the interweaving chapters.

MC:
It came together slowly out of bits and pieces. It required more blind faith on my part than anything else I've ever written. It seemed until very close to the end like it might in fact be nothing at all. Like it was just these three strands that had very little to do with one another, really, and ultimately added up to very little. Writing it was in certain ways a terrible experience. It wasn't until I got right to the end and things began to come together that it did seem like a book. It did seem like something with a shape and an arc that went somewhere. And as I wrote I constantly battled a conviction that it just wasn't adding up, that it just wasn't anything.

CS:
So you wrote through that ambivalence.

MC:
Yes, I just kept writing anyway. I think that writing more than anything is an act of faith. I just don't know whether it's going anywhere. I hope. I occasionally pray.

CS:
You teach writing, is that correct?

MC:
I teach in the M.F.A. program at Columbia.

CS:
There are those that say writing can't be taught. In what ways do you believe that it can be?

MC:
I believe that writers can be helped. I believe that you can look at what a young writer is doing and help him or her become more fully and completely himself or herself on paper. I think you can help people find their voices. I don't think you can or should build a writer out of nothing. I think you can take what somebody brings and help them get into the deepest, fullest possible contact with it. What I do in my class is try to the best of my ability to create an atmosphere in which it feels safe to fail. What I want my young writers to do is to push it, shove it around, try the risky things. Risk being pretentious, foolish, overly ornate, melodramatic, in the hopes that in taking those risks—and frequently failing—they eventually find their way to something that only they could have written.

CS:
You help them find authentic expression.

MC:
I do think sometimes I can help people do that. Teaching writing? Probably not. But trying to facilitate people's search for their voice and their subject and their vision? Yeah.

CS:
What are you reading these days?

MC:
I'm always reading several things. I'm reading The Best American Short Stories of the Century right now—the collection that John Updike edited, which is marvelous. And I've been reading the Pinsky translation of Dante; Lorrie Moore's collection Birds of America, which I love. I'm rereading the novellas of Henry James. A Joyce Carol Oates book. I love Joyce Carol Oates. I'm reading Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, and it's knocking me out.

CS:
I read an interview with Jim Grimsley recently where he said that he is finally at a place where he should be able to support himself with his writing, but the added expense of medication owing to his HIV-positive status means that he has to keep his other job for the health benefits. In a sense his time and concentration must be divided because of the expense of maintaining his health. Do you have any views on the effect of AIDS on the writing community, specifically the gay male writing community?

MC:
I think it's had a huge impact, an incalculable impact. I wrote my previous two books, A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, during the early years of the epidemic, when I knew a lot of people who were ill and who were heroes. I did a lot of work with ACT UP. I saw people come through in ways that didn't seem at all that dissimilar to fighting in a war with people and seeing what they're capable of doing for each other, seeing an act of heroism. Through ACT UP I met and became close to a lot of people who I might not have otherwise met. Many of them, heroes and warriors, men and women alike, were not big readers. They were readers, but not the kind of readers I think you and I are: voracious, interested in anything on paper.

And as these friends of mine, these compatriots of mine, would get sicker and sicker, I would want to take them books to read. They didn't want Plato or Chekhov. It was late to start on something like that. It wasn't what they were interested in. They did want books about their lives, which to a large extent did not exist. There wasn't much to take to a twenty-five-year-old man who was dying of AIDS that would feel to him like it was in any direct way about him. And one of my many motives in writing both those books was simply that I wanted to try to produce a book or two or more that I could take to somebody like that—that I could take to a twenty-five-year-old man who wanted to read a story in which he recognized himself. That in some degree dictated the way I wrote the books. I didn't want them to be simple, I didn't dumb them down, but I wanted them to be accessible. I wanted them to be straightforward stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.

CS:
In one of your 'Mrs. Dalloway' chapters, your Clarissa searches fruitlessly in a bookstore window for a present. That was a scene which I'm sure many readers could empathize with. Books are often the first gift we think of, particularly books we've loved.

MC:
It's true, I gave my Clarissa a little passage of straight autobiography. It's exactly that: that desire to give a gift for someone and looking in a bookstore window and finding that there's nothing there that's going to move him, that's going to work for him.

CS:
How wonderful then that you can create a gift, let's say, for the sake of simile, like Mrs. Brown's birthday cake.

MC:
(laughs) That's a very good simile. Those books are the things that I tried to bake.