As an eight-year-old in comfortable, solid, suburban California, Michael Cunningham felt compelled to make art before he quite understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven, for example, in which paradise resembled the Griffith Park Observatory and the dead were all depicted in profile because their creator felt unequal to the challenge of full faces. There was also a cigar box covered in gold-sprayed macaroni and a clay representation of the animals on Noah’s Ark – anything, in fact, that would challenge the painting of a placid white chicken that hung in a gilt frame on his parents’ wall.
If Cunningham moved on fairly rapidly from the visual arts, either sparing or denying us the fruits of a more fully formed talent, it wasn’t because the impulse to create had withered. Rather, it was that the experience of making material art had functioned as a temporary outlet, being less painful, less embarrassing – both emotions he ascribes to his young, sensitive self – than attempting to capture the world in words.
Unsayable, an intriguing combination of memoir and writing guide, asks us to consider what causes those feelings of embarrassment and pain, and what powers them. Do they proceed, almost inevitably, from the gap between language and the vast, mysterious terrain it tries to describe? Cunningham’s writerly insecurity, from childhood to maturity, seems to live in that gap, and to feel it as an ever-present judgment on his endeavours, impossible to expunge. Success is no antidote and, he points out, might even contribute to a feeling of isolation from other writers, or a quickening fear of a return to obscurity.
Cunningham did become successful, and extremely so, when in 1998 he published The Hours, a triple-stranded, time-shifting riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; his celebrity increased four years later, when Stephen Daldry and David Hare released a film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Several novels and 25 years later, he was to return to a similar structure – compressed time and multiple interior monologues – in Day. “I don’t work on an epic scale”, he tells us in this book, “though my ambitions run to more epic proportions than I like to admit.” This, one might say, is the tension at the heart of modernism, perhaps Cunningham’s greatest stylistic influence: the attempt to render the grandeur of consciousness that also shows us its fragility, how easily it evaporates on examination.
Fragility and contingency recur throughout Unsayable. Cunningham might never have discovered Woolf unless he’d found himself secretly smoking at high school alongside a cool girl called Natalie, whom he desperately wanted to impress, despite his increasing suspicion that heterosexuality was not available to him. He’d overheard her mention Allen Ginsberg and asked what she was reading now. “It’s funny you should ask,” she replied. “I’m being just so completely transformed by Virginia Woolf.” Pretty soon, he was too.
There are plenty of observations that feel like familiar territory when it comes to writers on writing, most of them of the “fail again, fail better” variety. But where Cunningham is most engaging, and in a much more offbeat way, is in his repeated depictions of himself – mostly younger, but not always – as a man anxious to fit in, to lay claim to experiences that are far more recherché, more daring, than he really is. His flair for pace is no hindrance, and the chapter that begins, with no prior ground-laying, “During my senior year at Stanford, I started going to San Francisco on weekends to work as a rent boy” is a brilliant evocation of bravado, precarity and pathos.
So, too, are the episodes and people about whom he won’t write: his beloved sister, for instance, or – beyond a series of respectful vignettes – an elderly and gracious gay couple who befriended him when he briefly lived in Provincetown, who fed him delicious dinners and gasped delightedly in mock horror at his mildly exaggerated tales of sexual abandon. After their deaths, he wonders about the extent to which they had chosen their lives, or whether they had adapted to what, at the time, society would allow them to have. It’s a few pages, but so touching, so unsentimental, so enlarging a view of these two incidental men that you feel sure that Cunningham made the right choice, all those years ago, when he shelved the gold pasta cigar box.
• Unsayable: A Life in Writing by Michael Cunningham is published by 4th Estate. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
