2005 Cover Article

Michael Cunningham: A Fireside chat
By Christopher Busa

Specimen Days

Two years ago, following the movie release of The Hours based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Paul Lisicky, in an interview in Provincetown Arts, asked Cunningham, "What’s next? How is your work changing?"

At the time, Cunningham was deep into his new novel, Specimen Days, published this June, and he predicted, "It’s going to be very, very different from The Hours. It’s going to be three linked novellas, each done in a different genre. There’s a gothic horror story, a romance, and a science fiction story. Of course, if you check with me a year from now, this book may have turned into something else entirely, as my books generally do."

Specimen Days progresses across great plateaus of time, marching not as a 300-page novel but as three novellas, obliquely linked as any one generation is to the people who came before or after. Each century runs about 100 pages. In the Machine takes place in a time before we were born; The Children’s Crusade occurs in our own time; and Like Beauty will take place after we have died. Set in the 23rd century, something magical happens in this third part. The tone of his prose elevates, and becomes so confident that a character, who suffers from a form of Tourette’s syndrome, is compelled to quote involuntarily from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in fits and bursts. This is foreshadowed by the young Lucas in the first part, who sputters Whitman’s poetry on the streets of Manhattan, overheard by Walt Whitman himself. The living Whitman is astonished to hear himself quoted by a child: "I hear the talkers talking their talk, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning and the end." Cunningham suggests that his book is less about the beginning and the end than about examining technology before our own technology is as advanced as that in the story.

I met with Cunningham in early May, dropping by his waterfront apartment in Provincetown’s East End. A small fire flickered in a fireplace in which the facing bricks were painted white. I sat in a frail rocking chair near the friendly embers. Michael stretched his lanky form along the length of the couch. He wore a worn T-shirt that may have been the same one he wore for our cover photograph, taken a few weeks earlier by Joel Meyerowitz in Cunningham’s spartan Greenwich Village writing studio.

In Provincetown, the setting casual and homey, it seemed strange to be discussing the futuristic vocabulary in the riveting third part of Specimen Days.
"Astrohair, as I conceive it," Michael said, "is artificial hair grown on the head of a bald person. It can be any color you want. It’s synthetic hair that grows out of your scalp."
"What’s a mercury suit?" I asked.
"A mercury suit is made of this shimmer silver fabric, like Mylar mixed with silk."
"What’s a liquid suit?"
"A liquid suit? I think that’s a nickname for a mercury suit. It had a liquid texture."
"So it’s another way of describing a mercury suit?"
"Yes."
"A character who wears such a suit uses a German phrase, Was wollen sie? Why?"
"It means What do you want? He was a German tourist. Manhattan had become a tourist attraction."

In the future that Cunningham imagines, Manhattan has become a theme park where people can hire others to help them experience perversely delicious fantasies. Muggers can be hired by the hour to do the "menacing" that gives satisfaction to the menaced. The transfer of money makes dysfunctional behavior instantly functional. This future form of prostitution shows how an economy of pleasure persists despite a growing awareness of its perversity. The future is a period of time when people engage in game playing that offers primary satisfactions, and they pay money for playing the game in a controlled way that measures and monitors the level of hurt they wish to receive. Rather than have sex, you can get beaten up, paying a set rate for the pleasure.
In the novel, Cunningham arranges levels of inquiry that succeed in breaking your heart,
brutally, step-by-step. Sometimes he says things so directly that he made me swoon: "Simon dreamed of a woman who wore a secret around her neck." From writing The Hours, Cunningham said he learned to make the connective tissue of events much like a necklace that could be described in precise detail. In the science fiction section of Specimen Days, evolved robots exist whose flesh is joined seamlessly with titanium bones. Cunningham confesses simply, "I have to say I took the liberty to imagine a technology that may not at all be plausible."

Certain people in the future that Cunningham depicts are called "Players." They live in their own residential complexes, clusters of tall towers on the margin of the city. These Players comprise the staff of the amusement park that New York City has become. Their function is to impersonate various citizens of New York for the benefit of tourists. Others spray Central Park with chlorophyll-scented breezes. These future people often use strange stimulants for control of their moods. Exedrol, an advanced version of Thalidomide, is taken by pregnant woman in the future, producing highly intelligent, but deformed babies. Of course, it’s taken immediately off the market.

When Cunningham talks about Specimen Days, he alludes to Walt Whitman, author of a memoir called Specimen Days. A specimen, according to Whitman, is a type of heroic character. "As I understand it," Cunningham said, "a specimen is an individual meant to stand for the whole. This preserved violet is a specimen." Specimens evolve like family names, the names of children becoming parts of the names of their elders. DNA moves on, telling the common human story, not the individual story. "Which is why Whitman chose it for the title of his journals," Cunningham said.

I asked Michael if the word specimen sounded, perhaps, too medical. He said he liked the term, but that the title would have to be changed in almost every foreign edition—in most other languages specimen means a bottle of urine, ready to be taken to the lab. Right now, Cunningham was e-mailing back and forth with his Spanish translator about an alternative title.

The first part of the novel reinforces the conception of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution given by Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times, in which the sadness of the clown increases as he adapts to the demands of his factory job. The second part of Specimen Days takes place post-9/11. Here, psychotic children seem to be in control of our culture. They can’t even quote Whitman correctly. The enemy is no longer the machine, but something born of our flesh.

Previous centuries take place within our experience, but in the section devoted to the future there are robotic people who speak as clearly as "biologicals," whom, we all know, are not perfect. People from a planet called Nadia, named after a Spanish astronomer, have immigrated to Earth, where they are becoming assimilated like any other immigrants—that is, extremely slowly. Like Russians of the previous century who cultivated vodka from potatoes, the Nadians have allowed themselves to become dependant on laser blades for their looks; routinely they take a little Dermalith with their morning coffee.

As we continued our conversation, Michael brought me a cup of coffee, which I sipped and then set on the wobbly table between me and the fireplace. Michael mentioned that the table was purchased by his partner, Ken Corbett, at a yard sale in Wellfleet. Two knots in the table were missing, and there were empty, teacup-sized holes where these knots used to be. The fire in the fireplace was at low ebb, but it had been burning for hours. The chimney was radiant, throwing a steady heat.

"Did you invent these terms?" I asked.
"Everything in there is invented."
Hoverpods are the universal mode of transportation, but in the Denver of the future, horses are making a comeback. Hoverpods are less useful in the mountains of Colorado. The underlying principle of this section is that the future will be full of technology that does not work very well. Cunningham said that the future he imagined as a child has, "to a real extent," come about.
"Compare technology now to the late ’50s when I was a kid. We didn’t expect it to be so shoddy and temperamental. We imagined machines that functioned perfectly and lasted over a lifetime. Experience has taught us otherwise."

Cunningham’s books reveal his keen concern for generational range. Home at the End of the World is a contemporary experiment in a new family structure invented within a single generation by three people. In Flesh and Blood Cunningham graduated to three generations; the Greek families in Flesh and Blood have children; their children have children. "There’s a triangle," Cunningham said. "There are three in that book, too." In Specimen Days he needs three centuries to express the range of his voice.

Like Leaves of Grass, Ulysses, James Joyce’s magnum opus, is structured on the recurrence of myth; it takes place on a single June day in Dublin, but, symbolically, covers all human experience. Cunningham is certainly aware of the high standards of classic literature. He said, "I don’t find that a single day in a single life is sufficiently, metaphorically indicative anymore. I find myself putting more and more people into my novels, spanning greater and greater periods of time, in an attempt to tell a story that feels commensurate with the size of the world we live in."
Cunningham’s books transcend the small domestic traumas they depict. He finds density of life in bland, unremarkable experience. The domestic detail floats like smoke to a higher, more universal plane, curling into a question mark away from our perception. The author delights in disappearing in the interstices of his own text. Now he is rather astonished that his future characters are Whitman’s posthumous readers.

Cunningham had what he calls a "surprise success" with The Hours. Besides winning the Pulitzer Prize, the novel was adapted as an Oscar-winning film, starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, with Kidman receiving Best Actress for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf.
A new nose was created for Kidman in the film, rather large, making the movie star look more like a serious writer.

The Switch
In making the switch from Virginia Woolf to Walt Whitman, Cunningham followed his instinct for seeking literary guidance from the spirit of a deceased great writer, a cultural spirit that Freud might describe in terms of some secular religion, echoing the way Dante, in the Inferno, was guided through the underworld by the shade of Virgil. The guide is the spiritual force of an original voice, going on and changing into the voices of others.

When Michael walked by on the beach last summer, I was sitting on the sand with my friend Tony Jackett, a popular Provincetown personality who was captain of a fishing boat that I fished on for two winters many years ago. Tony loves to reflect tranquilly on trauma and is a good storyteller, typical of the generations of garrulous Portuguese fishermen who immigrated to Provincetown in the 19th century, becoming the core of its legendary fishing fleet, now so diminished. Tony, who is something of a philosopher, was speaking of Plato and his concept of ideal forms when Michael walked by, looking diminutive in the distance. He was making his way across a vast sandbar, the surface baked dry as a vanilla wafer. Michael’s hair flashed so blond in the bright light that I thought of his description of Claire’s hair in Home at the End of the World, after she dyed it orange and it appeared to "bristle as if her brains were on fire."

Specimen Days displays Cunningham’s facility for making a character quickly vivid. His descriptions are made more memorable by their piercing offhandedness. The author seems to exhibit disdain for his own magic, much the way the poet Byron began an epic poem, invoking the muse in a most routine fashion, "Hail, Muse, etcetera!" and went on to sing his song in the rapid cadence of anapests, without future need for inspiration. Although Cunningham’s previous novels demonstrate mastery of the form, the new novel challenged his expertise.

In the first part of Specimen Days, set in the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution, Cunningham’s characters function like cogs in a grinding wheel, as easily smacking precise dents in steel plates as chewing up the fingers of any hand caught in the machine. I asked Cunningham, "Does Lucas make the dents six across and four down, or is it four across and six down?" Cunningham surprised me by saying, "Oh, you know, you would think I would remember. But I’m no authority on what I’ve written."

The cog in the wheel, this machinist, Lucas, is making housing, but we do not know, nor does he, what these housings will house. He is working very hard. His brother Simon died making housings at the same machine, when it swallowed him whole, taking what followed from his ingers. The comedy of the mechanical repetition, which did not seem to matter which way it was repeated, alludes to the post-factory hours of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, when he keeps twitching his hands in unison, unable to stop the compulsive habits of mechanical reproduction acquired from his robot job. This is the comedy of Cunningham’s Industrial Age; it reads like a witty warm-up act for the main event. That, I suppose, is the hope of any moment for something better. I loved Cunningham’s first two novellas, but the third, the main event, is an epitome of contemporary narrative art. His characters now seemed released from their own fictionality.

The Italian Lizard
The character of Catareen began as an effort by Cunningham to go beyond the reach of realistic fiction. Each part of his novel has its own integrity, time frame, and characters, but there are eerie echoes of past and future in every age. Catareen, born on Nadia (a planet yet to be discovered in our present time) is a four-and-a-half-foot lizard with beguiling features, bordering on the beautiful. Catherine in the 19th century was Lucas’s boyhood love, a prostitute he saved from dying in a fire by obliging her to come to the hospital during a crisis when he lost his fingers in the machine shop. Cat, in the post-9/11 time, is a weirdly related character from the next century; she is a film-noir detective, darkly intelligent, a female Bogart. And because she is also beautiful she would be a contemporary hit on the crime best-seller list in any particular century, whether as a speaker on a street corner that Whitman might have passed on one of his walks in Manhattan, or on a TV talk show or holographic video grid from future inventors.

Catareen appears in the third part, which was largely written at the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany. The property belongs to Beatrice von Rezzori. "An extraordinary woman," he said. "Her husband was Gregor von Rezzori, a writer well known in Europe, but less known in America. When Gregor died, nine years ago, Beatrice found herself alone in this gigantic house on a farm in the country, and started inviting writers to come out, simply stay there and do their work. There are usually three, maybe four at a time. I was there with Zadie Smith, the English writer who did White Teeth, and a Hungarian writer. I had the top two floors of an old signal tower. I was only there for four weeks, but I got an amazing amount of work done. I was just starting the final section, the science fiction section, and I knew I wanted a sort of robotic man, plus a woman from another planet. I wanted very much to create a character that was believable but not human. Not just a human in alien skin, but a palpably different being." Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Cunningham was seeking not a believable person, but a believable entity.

He was constructing this entity from the ground up, but he was mindful of difficulties: "It’s differently challenging when that person comes from a planet you’ve invented. Every morning a beautiful green-grey lizard would run back and forth on my windowsill. I was alone. Spouses are not invited. You have to go by yourself. The utter strangeness of that lizard was what I used in trying to create this character Catareen."

The lizard was alien to Cunningham because it had characteristics intrinsic to itself, not to the author. She was a small, "incidental" Italian lizard, Cunningham said, about five inches long. Because of the longish tail of the lizard, Cunningham assumes the creature was female. He regrets that he did not give the actual lizard a cameo role in his book. He enjoys seeding his novels with secret references only one or two people will recognize, however much any reader will be convinced of the veracity of the detail, so telling in its own parabolic way. He enjoys inserting episodes that come along in the process of working on a novel—little asides that allude to some shared, private experience known only to that person and the author, yet available to the reader as a shared intimacy, the privilege of overhearing a trusted revelation.

Cooking: Sacred Ceremony
Jumping back to Cunningham’s earlier novels, we can remember that there is a lot of emphasis on cooking; making a nice cake is a central event in his first two novels. Knowing Provincetown, I couldn’t help but think of Billy Forlenza, a fine chef who ran a lively little sidewalk café during the ’80s; I had seen Michael in his café on sunny late mornings, having breakfast, his face buried in the New York Times. Michael and Billy were great friends who simply enjoyed being in the atmosphere of the other’s company. I saw bits of Billy in Cunningham’s novel Flesh and Blood in the characterization of a young restaurant cook in New York. Billy was also a natural dancer whose body swayed to music the way a leaf would move with the slightest encouragement of a breeze. The Billy I knew was a guy who knew he was not a great novelist and had no need to be. He loved cooking, he had talent for cooking, and he enjoyed the company of the people he cooked for. Cunningham’s respect for passion and excellence in ordinary accomplishments, such as cooking or dancing or gardening, animates his writing. The limitations of character become the vehicle for expressing their sufficiency.

"Inspiration and special feelings come and go," Cunningham reflected, letting his winter toes unfold, enjoying the dwindling fire in his seaside getaway. "This is true of everything I’ve written. There are hours, even whole days, when I write in a kind of ecstatic transport, and there are other hours, other days, when it’s just a slog. I look and see one leaden, inert sentence after another. What really powers me, on a daily basis, is blind faith, a mulish persistence. That strikes me as fundamental for a novelist. This obsession that keeps you working and working may even trump talent."

Artists tend to be people with paranoid streaks developed to protect their motivation to continue doing their work. I know it was not easy for Cunningham to survive the ’80s. He arrived as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The year was 1980. His first novel was vaguely underway, an embryo of what it would become. He had won an NEA grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship before the novel was published. Like most artists and writers, he worked many years without much money. The recognitions he received were prestigious, encouraging, but they did not prepare him for winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, a novel with a compelling conception of what might be called "literary time," or a time in which an influential author, deceased, plays a formative role. "You publish something and it looks like you are newly hatched out of nowhere," he said, "when in fact you already feel old and worn and haggard. Yes, I struggled as does most everybody. I’ve been fortunate in that I didn’t receive widespread recognition until relatively late. That is not what I wanted when I was 25. Now that I’m 52, it seems like the best thing that could have happened to me. It is more difficult to get all that attention when you are very young."

The Perfect Story
A previous cover subject of Provincetown Arts, Sebastian Junger, made a clear decision following his early efforts to write fiction; he came to believe more in the oracle of a weather forecast than in the possibility of writing a perfect short story. So he wrote The Perfect Storm instead, a nonfiction best seller, grateful for the constraints of circumstance that gave him the entire story complete, like a gift of destiny. Cunningham, in contrast, was determined from the beginning to be a novelist. Of his five books, only the recently written Land’s End, an impressionistic history of Provincetown, is nonfiction. In Land’s End, his novelistic voice will sound familiar with its revelatory anecdotes about Cunningham’s many friends from the Provincetown community, who become like characters in a novel. The book’s cover is a painting of a beach cottage by John Dowd, who figures also in the book as part of Cunningham’s constellations of friends. Indeed, the author’s gift for friendship may be directly related to the novelist’s drive to span generations.
Following the success of The Hours, in the middle of the writing of Specimen Days, Cunningham received a call from Random House asking him to write a short book about any place he liked, for a series the publisher was doing of "walks" taken by notable writers of their particular inspirational haunts. Frank Conroy wrote about Nantucket, and Cunningham was thrilled to write about Provincetown. "I would have never thought to write it on my own. I write fiction. Part of the trick, especially when you are younger, is figuring out what exactly is it that you do."
I asked, "One of the problems with imagination is the very freedom allowed, permitted, sanctioned, the poet’s very license to lie. Every artist needs restrictions, limits, yellow lines. How do you, as a novelist, with the range of your possibilities, approach the opposite need of the art, which is to formally contain what you imagine? If your characters go to a certain place, we see how they got there; we know the kind of doughnut they ate at an airport. Basic questions of ordinary living are answered so fleetingly, on the run, that they become what lawyers call ‘excited utterances,’ things people say under emotional compulsion. What ways do you use to go beyond the situations you construct?"
"For every book," he answered, "I invent my own set of rules and restrictions and function within those. That may be the only difference between people who write fiction and those who write nonfiction. People who write nonfiction usually take on the constraints of the real world. We novelists make up our own set of restrictions and then operate within those. Life has to have consistency. It is naturalistic or not naturalistic. But it’s all over the map if it feels like a different universe from chapter to chapter or paragraph to paragraph. It’s not going to cohere."
Cunningham’s obvious artistic need to cohere, to glue together, made me think of why artists like to cook. It’s a way of gathering the tribe together. Michael’s retreat-by-the-sea is part of the compound formerly owned by Robert Motherwell. Motherwell’s own house, the "Sea Barn," next door, was used to house various summer guests who visited the artist across the three decades he produced three-quarters of his year’s work in the three months he spent in Provincetown.
Just as some things can be said in an abstract painting that cannot be said in a figurative one, so the fiction writer seeks to explore what more can be imagined outside conventional characterization. Motherwell made many remarks about the artist’s relation to the medium, considering it primary. Work could achieve the primary relation that one has with a loved one. One fell in love with one’s work. Motherwell said to me once that he wanted his painting to have all the texture and reality of a living person. I was fascinated by this concept: once you conjure some creature from your own medium, you establish a relationship. In Cunningham’s books, a sustained relationship is the essential arc of his various narratives.

Relationships
For 17 years, Cunningham has been in a bonded relationship with Ken Corbett, a psychologist with a practice in New York. In their Provincetown digs, Michael has his writing room on the first floor and Ken has a photography studio above, reached via an outside stairway. There is a ship-like feeling to the place, each sailor having a private cabin. The water bangs concussively on the bulkhead twice a day, as the tide comes and goes from the high-water mark. On stormy days, waves break on the beams of the bulkhead and spray in a light-inflected mist as high as half the house. Robert Motherwell’s series of drawings Beside the Sea was inspired by the gestural bursts of the smashing waves; he discovered that to embody the gesture of the wave he had to use very strong and heavy paper that could absorb the force of his loaded brush. Living close to the water, witnessing its evolving moods, one builds one’s house like a ship, with running decks on different levels, and gangplanks that guide you with parallel handrails. The wide deck shared by four friends is bordered with green shrubs that thrive in salt air. The ghost of the artist next door inhabits Cunningham’s space. Michael and Ken believe, as Motherwell said just before he died, "I know there is a world of the spirit that can be approached, that its being is undeniable once one has experienced it."

If we pair a novelist with a psychologist, do we create a discussion about who is doing the more essential work? Cunningham feels that both Ken and he are doing the same kind of work: "He is trying to penetrate the mystery of actual people; I’m trying to penetrate the mystery of people
I’ve invented. It’s not all that different." For Cunningham, literature and psychology are like a married couple, impossible to separate. "Frankly," he said, "they are much related."
In Specimen Days, Cunningham uses certain terms that refer to psychological types. He mentions, for example, Phyllis Greenacre’s "as if" personality, a quintessential description of the actor’s personality. No role to play, no identity. Many actors feel this way between roles.
Cunningham put it this way, "It’s someone for whom there is no there there. It’s someone who is trying to impersonate a person because he doesn’t have a sense of a core being. Much about the process of acting feels familiar to me as a writer. Everything I hear from actors, especially the effort to abandon themselves and enter the mind and body of a character, is very much like what I go through when I’m writing a book, inventing people for a novel."Recalling Flesh and Blood, I remember distinctly how Cunningham moved surely from one strictly controlled point of view to another. The same scene gets repeated from another’s perspective. Few things in literature are more pleasing. I first recognized it in Shakespeare. There would be a battle; you would be at the fighting. Then a character who was at the battle would rush back to tell the king what had happened. First, you experience the battlefield directly, then you hear it in an impassioned report, then you hear the debate and further details. Cunningham likewise shifts effortlessly from what Shakespeare’s Banquo calls "one coign of vantage" to another.

How does he manage this switch of selves? "To what extent I am able to is slightly mysterious to me," he said. "I am aware of keeping my characters both consistent and surprising. You want not only to account for people’s coherence, but for their contradictions. A big concern is to let my characters be full and real, human, true to them. Where it comes from? There are aspects of writing that are purely craft, and I understand how they work. Tuning in a character is magical and mysterious. I got to know Julianne Moore fairly well during the filming of Hours; she is one of our most gifted actors, but she has no idea how she does it. She does a bare minimum of rehearsal. She worries that if she looks at it too closely, it will disappear. I understand that."

Mixed Society
In all his novels, Cunningham’s descriptions of heterosexual sex are sharp and pungent, as good as his descriptions of homosexual sex, revealing in fact similar power struggles. His details are acute—a certain position of the body will reveal an interesting crease in the skin tucking around the buttock to the back of the leg. The detail becomes our access to the experience. Here in Provincetown we have a lot of writers happy to be known as gay novelists, but Cunningham, from the beginning, was a mainstream writer who included gay characters in his novels. The Hours, certainly, received more mainstream acclaim than either of his earlier novels.

But in Flesh and Blood, sex on the grass of a golf course between the young couple, Susan and Todd, is as compelling as the best sex scenes in D. H. Lawrence. Told from Susan’s point of view, the two-page encounter has a delicious innocence, completely fresh, and punctured by sharp shafts of fleeting illumination. Under constellations of stars that Cunningham recurrently names, we are with the couple during their private time. She imagines him to be ignorant of his own masculinity: "He seemed to find it unremarkable that his fingers could grip a soup bowl around its edges and that his feet filled shoes massive and potentially lethal as cinder blocks." She quells the panic rising in her stomach by shifting attention to his uniquely male organ: "To take her mind off her own fears she focused on his cock, its veined shaft and purple, strangely innocent head . . . She wondered if he understood her loyalty’s depth and breadth. She wondered if this diligence, this scrupulous and clinical interest of hers, was what people meant when they spoke about love."

Cunningham said that he feels his ideal reader is a little bit like himself. Who is Cunningham? His father worked in a large advertising agency. He was very close to his mother, to whom Specimen Days is dedicated. He had dark moments in his early years, mostly issues having to do with personal relationships. He has a sister, two years younger than him, who lives about 50 miles north of Los Angeles. She works as a lab technician for a pharmaceutical company; she’s married without children. "The DNA stops with us," he said. "The dark moments of depression are triggered if there’s too much going on; my sensory apparatus gets overloaded. Whether it’s too much good stuff or too much bad stuff, it is much darker than wanting to retreat and be alone, much darker than my mother’s death or winning the Pulitzer Prize."

Cunningham grew up in Ohio, moved to California, and went to Stanford University, majoring in English. He received financial aid as a scholarship student. He worked. He studied English. Years afterward, he did time as a bartender. I asked Michael if he was straight during his bartender years, and he said, "You know, I don’t know if I was ever straight. I think I was impersonating a straight guy, as so many gay people do. The choices people make can keep opening. I hope the banishment of choices is something that is diminishing with each new generation—being gay and refusing to acknowledge it."

Provincetown, historically, has proven to be an unusual experiment. Its gay population is fully accepted within a mixed community. This magazine has always been a strong supporter of gay rights, and Cunningham is the seventh cover subject who is gay or lesbian.
D. H. Lawrence could depict the sexual power of a female from the point of view of a man, and the sexual power of a man from the point of view of a female. People who read Lawrence do not know what to think about his sexual orientation. Such an author is artistically polymorphous, and understands how a particular person can feel sexual attraction for another particular person. Anyone can read Cunningham’s material and get a sense of other lives we could have lived. Michael and I discussed this aspect of his work.
He remarked, "Somebody said the only difference between people is whether they are sexual or not sexual."
I replied, "I think almost all people are sexual. Was Thoreau sexual?"
"Certainly not his writings. I don’t know what his sex life was like."
"I think he was gay," I said, "but asexual."
"I think of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, people who were incapable of having sex who would probably have had gay sex if they could, but it was just too difficult or ‘icky’ for them. I look forward with great anticipation to the day when it just doesn’t matter. We are seeing a change. But now we are seeing a great deal of backlash. There are laws that criminalize gay relationships. It’s a dark period."
"Maybe it’s the final resistance before genuine change?"
"That’s my sense. When you start to make real progress, something like this resistance is bound to happen. Any attempt to hold a body of people down is doomed to failure."
"Doomed by its very structure, I would say. It would be one thing if the gay rights movement had a malicious desire to harm someone, but when a person simply loves another person, why should anyone be offended?"
"This is the question," Cunningham responded, "that I would love to be able to ask all those people out there, ‘Why do you care, why does it matter to you?’ One of the things I love about Provincetown is that it feels not so much like a gay town but a town where it just doesn’t seem to make any difference."
"The guide I followed in developing Provincetown Arts is what I call the ‘John Waters Model of Integration into Straight Society.’ It is a mixed society of gay and straights who share some
various beliefs and purposes that unite them. In Provincetown, Waters always prefers to go to mixed bars rather than gay bars."
"I feel the same way. My friends are not all gay. I don’t read exclusively gay writers. I read whatever is interesting to me. The sexuality question is relatively minor."
Here our conversation moved to a crux. Cunningham had been quoted several years ago in Provincetown Arts as saying that Oscar Wilde was the source of a statement that guided his practice in writing about sex: "Everything in life is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." Whether Wilde said it or not does not detract from the wisdom the utterance offers Cunningham. Even if the attribution is apocryphal, it is a truth that encodes Cunningham’s description of human mating behavior. "I find that line especially useful in contemplating writing about sex," he said. "Eroticism, for me, is impossible to do on the page. I find it possible only if I can do so in terms of what it tells us about who’s in power. If I think of it as a sort of negotiation or battle, rather than in terms of erotic pleasure, then I can write about it. Otherwise, it’s too amorphous and too idiosyncratic. What’s sexy to me is not only going to be not sexy to you, it’s not going to be sexy to another gay guy. Our circuitry is so personal.
"I think writers need to be acquainted on a firsthand basis with a range of human feelings. Any writer can write about anything in the world without having experienced it, except emotions. You cannot write about love if you have not loved. You cannot write about despair. I’ve had depression, more and more as I get older. It’s not helpful. You need to get out of it in order to get to work. Mild depression or mere blues may be different."

Whitman’s Poems Make Good Wallpaper
In Specimen Days, it is clear that Cunningham has absorbed Whitman thoroughly. In the second part of the novel, The Children’s Crusade, children have grown up in a bedroom where the walls, ceiling, and floor are papered with hundreds of pages of Whitman’s poems. The poems were plastered like wallpaper, and the growth of the children is measured by the wisdom they absorb as they live with every word, day by day and line by line. Each generation has people who are obsessed with Whitman. Their names are altered slightly, but they retain core etymological associations, often biblical and historical sounding, as if we’ve known such types, precursors, or prophets before. Lucas becomes Luke. On the distaff side, which does not seem to care much for Whitman, Catherine becomes Cat becomes Catareen. Either way, the fascination with the ur-author persists.

This name-changing reminded me of an embryonic effort in Home at the End of the World, in which Bobby attempts to change his name, graduating from a childhood nickname to a more adult-sounding name, the new name bestowing new identity. That little detail in the early book stood out in retrospect as the source of the wild succession of slight name changes in the three epochs of Specimen Days.
"It’s sort of autobiographical," Cunningham explained. "My family, my biological family, called me Mike when I was growing up. I didn’t come to be known as Michael until college, in the ’60s, when nobody was named Mike. You were called Michael. I can never get my family to call me Michael. I gave up trying years ago. They call me Mike. My father is still alive. My mother died a few years ago. They simply refused to call me by the name every other person called me. It feels indicative of what is great and terrible about one’s biological family. You remain a five-year-old."
Each generation in Specimen Days has another generation of Whitman-obsessed people, who call his writings "the book." They may as well call it the Bible. The wisdom contained is assumed to be subspecies aeternitatis, or the view of things from an eternal angle, rather than a momentary perspective. They were looking through a large frame. Another character will say, "Shut the fuck up! I’m sick of your poetry." When I first read that line, I erupted in laughter. I wondered if Cunningham chuckled when he wrote that, and he said, "Yeah, sure I did."
Cunningham’s first reader, after himself, is Ken Corbett: "He’s not only my first reader, but with him I live in an atmosphere of intelligence and discrimination and appreciation of a really good joke. It’s difficult to imagine writing without him. He is an integral part of the process. Maybe I’m a little corny, but I agree with the Beatles that love is, in fact, all you need. It’s just hard to get it, hard to hold it."

Here two thoughts flashed through my mind. First, the last section of the book, Like Beauty, seems to refer to Aristotle’s definition of poetry as being "not truth, but something like truth." Truth is factual history; something like truth is poetry. "Why?" Aristotle asked. Because poetry is more philosophical than history; poetry makes eternal what dies every day. Cunningham explained that the concept of beauty in the novel meant something that was "better than useful." My second thought was a passage I had read in which a Cunningham character declared that he had believed that romance would bestow dignity, destiny, and direction upon a person; but instead romance soured, became rank, like a sick spouse sitting on the toilet. Cunningham manages to use these disappointments to make his characters realistic and accessible, like us.
Many of Cunningham’s friends have small children. Marie Howe, the poet, Cunningham’s close friend from his Fine Arts Work Center days and present neighbor in Greenwich Village, has an adopted daughter that Cunningham cherishes as if she were a niece. His friends Don and Lee in California have Sam and Ben, who visit in the summer. I was swimming in the area a few summers ago and I heard a child splashing out of the water like a talking fish, squealing with glee "Uncle Michael!" It made me grateful that there are children all over the place. Melanie Braverman and Molly Perdue, his neighbors in the Provincetown compound, with whom Ken and Michael share an expansive deck, have an adopted child named Sam, who watches while Michael, Ken, Molly, and Melanie do the gardening around the borders of the deck, a kind of common ground. Here the role of gardening recalls the first chapter in Flesh and Blood, when the little boy on the Greek farm creates his own garden on a barren hill. He works his father’s farm during the day and carries at the end of day a mouthful of dirt, mixed with manure, up a hill. Day by day, he creates a small patch of fertile ground that is his own, where he grows tomatoes before he immigrates to America and then fathers three generations.

Dancing
In Specimen Days, machines have their clumsy rhythm, however perfected by the future. In Home at the End of the World, Bobby is the dancer: "Bobby swayed his hips in rhythm and soon began to dance. Watching him in his cheerful, slightly baffled progress through the day, you could forget what a dancer he was. It was one of his surprises. The moment a note of music sounded he could move with such grace and buoyancy. He appeared to shed some interior weight. A ghost of the flesh, all gristle and bone that dissolved at a guitar’s strum or the first bleat of a horn. On the record, a woman backed by maracas and guitars sang full-throated in Spanish, with shamelessly simple passion. Bobby, who loved all music, good and bad, danced as the last sun disappeared."
By contrast, Jonathan, Bobby’s boyhood friend, with whom he shared a homosexual encounter, "was an elegant if contained dancer. He moved within a small column of air, the exact boundaries of which he never overstepped." Later, having left the Midwest to live in New York as adults in an interesting ménage with a female interested in having a baby, Jonathan has a tête-à-tête with Bobby, asking, "The things that we used to do together. The, well, sexual things. I mean we never talked about it, and after school we just stopped. I guess I’m wondering what you thought about it."

Here Cunningham subtly examines the teenaged boys who could go either way, then compares them after they have chosen their ways. Bobby remembered that, years ago, he’d made love with Jonathan because Jonathan had wanted to, and because Bobby loved Jonathan. Still, when he did it, "nothing quickened or struggled for release." In New York, Bobby said, "We were kids, Johnny. That was years ago."

Cunningham thinks of language as a medium that is just as much about music as meaning. On the page the rhythms of the sentences, and how each one dances with the sentence that proceeds and the sentence that follows it, matters about as much as what he actually says. He has an untested idea that he should be able to read his fiction to somebody who does not speak English and his spirit would come across even if they didn’t know what his language meant.

I Asked if He Could Say Something About Whitman’s Importance
Cunningham said that when he started Specimen Days he had no intention of including Walt Whitman. He had just published The Hours and did not want to be described as the guy who takes a famous dead writer and glamorizes her or him in rip-off books. "Yeah," he said, "I cashed in on Virginia Woolf and now I will take Whitman to the bank as well. As I was doing my research for the first part, about New York in the late 1800s, one of the things I was made aware of was that New York was a really difficult place then, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. A handful of people were doing well, but almost everybody was working 12-hour shifts in factories, beneath a coal-smoke sky 20 feet above everybody’s head. At that time, Manhattan was Lower Manhattan. There were few houses, if any, in what is now the 50s and above. Whitman was walking around, saying, "I sing the body electric!" and "Every atom that belongs to me belongs to you." How interesting that our difficult and dehumanizing time in American history should also produce our great, transcendentalist poet. I put him in, peripherally. He became a bigger figure and it became clear he was going to be part of the glue that held the novel together. First, because he was there. Then I began to want to work with Whitman because the novel, to some degree, is meant to chart the arc of ‘progress,’ beginning with the Industrial Revolution and ending with cloning and interstellar travel. Whitman, our great humanist, our great celebrator of life in every conceivable form, ought to be there as a complement or counterpoint."
Cunningham had read Whitman since college. Much earlier, by chance, he had read
Virginia Woolf, who became, he said, "entwined with my DNA." He does not feel that Whitman is entwined with his DNA: "I think most of us who care about books have a small body of writers who are bloodstreams; other writers we revere. Whitman is more the latter to me, a writer I love, but whom I came to read later."

I was curious if Michael recognized the same concept of manliness that I saw in Whitman. The iconic hero of American poetry sauntered freely along the main boulevards of the city, and loved the stagecoach ride down Broadway, where he sat in the roof seating, waving to friends. During the height of the Civil War, he chose to go to hospitals, bringing candy, oranges, stamps, and tobacco to the wounded, and talking with them, offering the solace of recognition with his attentive ears. That shows instinctive compassion. His robust voice, his rolling catalogues of information, make it marvelous that Whitman belatedly became a major poet. The future does not care that Whitman lived to be applauded. Cunningham said, "He had a hard time at the end. His poetry had not really taken off. One of his ambitions was never realized, which was to create a poetry that would be read by everybody, not just the educated elite, but by working people, which, I am sorry to say, has not happened to a significant degree. But now, here he is, still very alive in a very real way."

I would not have associated Cunningham with an interest in science fiction until I read Specimen Days. He read a lot of science fiction until he was 15 or 16, then realized the importance of reading other literature as well. Genre books, those subcategories in bookstores, away from the main selections, interest him. Ten years ago, he said, he wrote a series of horror stories that never came to anything, and he never tried to publish them. When he prepared to write
Specimen Days, he said, "I read tons of science fiction and thrillers."

Like most people who love Provincetown, Cunningham shares a love for eccentrics. He himself is not especially eccentric, but he is often surprised by the general population who are instinctively repelled by eccentricity. He has seen such types nervous in the presence of a particularly sexy drag queen that happened to have

Mercurochrome-colored hair.
In Cunningham country, the people of the future have no word for valuations that exceed usefulness. They have a term, keeram, which means something like beauty, but it is only an approximation of our earthly expression. Roughly, the term translates as "better than useful."
The author is a fine specimen of a novelist, but he knows his limits. He prizes surprise in poetry, but claims not to have a gift for writing poetry. "A narrative that aspires to a poetic cadence is the closest I’ll ever come," he said. "I love to dance. I’m not especially good at it, but all the songs in my books are from records that mattered to me. Music is my very favorite of all the art forms. If I had any talent as a musician, I would play music. I am convinced that if an extraterrestrial appeared right now and said,
I only have half an hour. What can you tell me about life on earth? we would play him a Bach cantata. We would not read him a chapter from a novel."

CHRISTOPHER BUSA is editor of Provincetown Arts.