An Interview with Michael Cunningham

A Search for Transcendence in The Snow Queen

By Sarah Anne Johnson

i first met michael cunningham when I took a writing workshop at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. I’d come to Provincetown for the summer, and I was hard at work on a novel. Cunningham was working on The Hours at the time, a novel he referred to in class as “a little book about Virginia Woolf.” The main point I took away from Cunningham’s workshop was an attention to physical detail. For a writing exercise, he had us walk around town and follow a person, then come back to the class and write a description of that person. Of course, his own description blew us out of the water. But that lesson, that attention to the minutest of details, has stuck with me throughout my writing life. When a scene in my writing becomes very emotional or intense, when things get heady, I turn to what is physical and present. When I put two people in a room, the emotion arises out of what I can describe in that room. Of course, watching the trajectory of Cunningham’s literary life makes an impression as well: a sense of perseverance, finding your own literary terrain, and carrying on. His books began as straightforward narratives and they’ve passed into some other, new form that is uniquely his own. He is an artist who is constantly searching out new meanings and expressions through language. Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels The Snow Queen, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the nonfiction bookLand’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York, and teaches at Yale University. Last winter, I had the pleasure of talking to him about his new novel, The Snow Queen.

Sarah Anne Johnson: When did your writing life first bring you to Provincetown? major gallery in New York or Los Angeles might choose to market them.

Michael Cunningham: I came to Provincetown as a Fellow at the Fine Arts SAJ: Do you find that the community in Provincetown still influences your work? Work Center. I came because I, having just finished graduate school, had no money, and no prospects. I grew up in California. I’d never been to the East MC: I revere, and depend on, the members of the P-town community Coast. I’d never heard of Provincetown. I came because it was the best deal who are not “artists” in the traditional sense—that is, people who don’t I’d been offered. Okay, it was the only deal I’d been offered. paint or write poetry, etc. There is, among the people I know in P-town, a sense of creativity that isn’t necessarily restricted to making art; there SAJ: How has working in the artists’ colony here shaped your writing? are people who are incredibly creative about the ways in which they live their lives. We talk a great deal about creativity as it applies to art. We MC: The artists’ community in Provincetown has been crucial to me since I talk less than we should about creativity as it applies to the day-to-day came to the Work Center . . . my God . . . thirty years ago. business of life itself. Provincetown is, as we know, full of people of formidable intelligence and unfathomable gifts. It’s also full of brilliant artists who live off the SAJ: Your new novel, The Snow Queen, narrates the story of two brothers, Bar- proverbial art-grid—by which I mean, you’re more likely, in P-town, to rett and Tyler, both in search of something just beyond their reach, for a kind of meet people who are creating what they feel most driven to create, people transcendence—one through religion, the other through drugs and music. What who are thinking more about what they produce than they are about what drew you toward this quest?

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MC: I’ve always been particularly interested in peo- ple whose reach exceeds their grasp; people who want more than that which appears readily avail- able (I hope it’s clear that I’m not talking about real estate, cars, or clothes).

SAJ: At what point in the writing did the idea of The Snow Queen come to you?

MC: It’s always a little difficult to say where an idea comes from. It’s a kind of . . . coalescence. This experience, that impulse, this strange incli- nation, all seem, over time, to add up to an idea for a book. At least as mysterious is the question of which ideas stick, and which don’t. With The Snow Queen, I found myself continuing to think about the search for transcendence in all kinds of ways, and increasingly, specifically, about drugs and religion. I mean, “drugs and religion”—that’s the American motto in the early twentieth cen- tury, right?

SAJ: There is a fabled, or mythic, quality to the prose at certain points. Was this something you intended at the outset, or did it arise in the writing?

MC: Once it seems that you’re going to write a novel that involves the search for transcendence, by whatever means—be it heroin or going to Mass—a certain mythic quality, an aspect of the fable, just seems to attach itself.

SAJ: Tyler seeks a similar experience through cocaine: “And here it is. Here’s the sting of livingness. He’s back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he’s renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.” What drew you to the jux- taposition of the paths the two brothers take toward a higher experience?

MC: I’m afraid that if I tried to contrive an answer michael cunningham photo by richard phibbs it would feel like, well, a contrivance. Transcen- dence. Religion. Drugs. Each word leads to the MC: I can’t quite imagine a real artist who is not experiences her own transcendence and acceptance of next, right? I will say that I’ve found the depiction also, by definition, a frustrated artist. That includes her destiny. Was it difficult to imagine your way into of drugs, in literature and movies and narrative of the greatest of artists. No matter how great artists her experience? all kinds, to be a little narrow and one-dimensional. may be, they always had something even greater in Believe me when I tell you The Snow Queen is NOT mind when they started out. It’s part of the deal. MC: Beth was probably the most difficult char- intended to encourage more people to do more We—I mean, we as a species—can imagine more acter to fully imagine. It’s one thing to imagine drugs. At the same time, I’m aware of the fact that than we can produce, even if what we produce is writing songs, it’s another to imagine the processes different people use drugs for different reasons, a Bach cantata, or a Cézanne still life. of mortality. I can only honor and thank the peo- and the image of the drug user we inevitably get ple I know who have died, or are struggling with is: dead in an alley, needle protruding from arm. SAJ: What were the challenges in writing about a grave illnesses. I can’t possibly repay them for all Which happens. But what about Carlos Castaneda? songwriter? What did you do to prepare to write this they’ve taught me. What about Jean Cocteau? What about drugs as an character? attempt to reach a state of higher consciousness, SAJ: Rather than narrate large or sensational events, the even if they prove, in fact, to be bad for you? MC: I suspect that anyone who attempts to make chapters of the book pick up after these events, bringing something out of nothing—a songwriter, a painter, readers into the aftermath and catching us up in the SAJ: Tyler, a songwriter, is also a frustrated artist. He a novelist, etc.—is already halfway there. That said, emotional tide. seeks a song just out of reach: “He can feel the song, sus- I couldn’t have imagined my way into the song- pended over his head. He can almost hear it, not the tune writing process without the help of my brilliant MC: I’m drawn to aftermaths; it’s frankly a little itself but the buzz of its wings. He’s about to jump up and friend Billy Hough. One needs help sometimes. difficult to say why. Maybe the flash of the actual grab it, pull it down, hold it to his chest. Never mind about If one is lucky, one gets it. explosion is too blinding for me—I feel better feathers battering his face. Who cares about pecking and equipped to sort among the rubble, record the clawing? He’s nimble, he’s ready. He’s not afraid.” What SAJ: Another character, Beth, who is dying of cancer, damage, imagine the city during the moments drew you to writing about this particular frustration? is also a Snow Queen of sorts. Even in dying, Beth before it fell.

ProvincetownARTS.org 133 SAJ: The characters find the transcendence they’re looking for, but not where or how they expect to find it. Did you know where the characters would end up at the outset of writing the novel?

MC: I never know where a novel is headed when I start it. I’ve found that if I’m too firmly set on a destination, the characters and events tend to become employees of the story, rather than free citizens of the story. As Flannery O’Connor said, “How can there be surprises for the reader if there haven’t been any for the writer?”

SAJ: What is your process like for writing a novel? How many revisions do you do, and what goes on through each revision?

MC: I revise and revise and revise. The first draft, for me, is exploratory; the first draft is my attempt to find the story I actually want to tell. Or maybe (at the risk of sounding pretentious) the story that wants to be told. A decent novel can’t really be planned. A decent novel is, to some degree at least, arrived at. A decent novel is a strange hybrid of intention and unconsciousness. The first draft is, should be, a complete mess. Then I rewrite it. Then I re-rewrite it. This is all part of the attempt to discover the book itself, and then, with luck, to end up producing a book that’s at least a little bit smarter than I am.

SAJ: What are you working on now?

MC: I recently finished a book of fairy tales, and am about one hundred pages into another novel. I just sold a pilot to Showtime, and am working Marcey Oil cO. on a couple of screenplays. In short, I’m doing Premium Diesel • Propane • Heating Oil too much. Since 1937 SAJ: What would you say to writers working on their StAnding the teSt oF time first books or stories?

MC: All I can ever say to newer writers is, Don’t panic.

SARAH ANNE JOHNSON is the author of The Light- keeper’s Wife (Sourcebooks), The Very Telling, The Art of the Author Interview, and Conversations with American Women Writers, all published by the University Press of New England. Her interviews have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, Glimmer Train Stories, Provincetown Arts, and the Writer, where she was a contributing editor. She is the recipient of residencies in fiction from the Jentel Artist Residency Program and the Vermont Studio Center. She received an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Learn more at www. Three Generations Proudly Serving Provincetown • Truro • Wellfleet sarahannejohnson.com. “24 Hour Emergency Service”

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