Song Exploder - Book Exploder: Michael Cunningham - The Hours

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

Michael Cunningham is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours. He’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Hours was published in 1998, and in addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it won the PEN/Faulkner Award. The book was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. In this episode, Michael speaks to Susan Orlean about a passage concerning the suicide of Virginia Woolf, which comes at the end of the prologue. For more, visit bookexploder.com/episodes/michael-cunningham.

One note before we start this episode. The conversation includes a discussion of suicide. If you're thinking about suicide, or if you know someone who is, or if you need someone to talk to right now, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273 Talk. Or you can text home to 741-741, which is the crisis text line. If you're outside the U.S., check out the list of international hotlines at Suicide.org. Okay, here's the show. You're listening to Book Exploder, where authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write. I'm Rishi Keis Sheerway. And I'm Susan Orlean.

For this episode, Susan spoke to author Michael Cunningham. He breaks down how he wrote a passage in his book The Hours from 1998. And Susan, you and Michael are actually friends, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah, well, I'm proud to say that we're friends because I think he is really extraordinary. and The Hours is probably in my top ten favorite books. I feel like it was one of those books that I read almost in one sitting. And The Hours tells the story of three different women in three different time periods.

Right. It tells the story of Virginia Woolf in 1923 as she begins to write Mrs. Dalloway. Then there's the story of Laura Brown in 1949. and she's reading Mrs. Dalloway. And then there's Clarissa Vaughn, who's kind of living a contemporary version of the story of Mrs. Dalloway. And The Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Penn Faulkner Award.

And then it was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Merrill Streep. And the passage that Michael breaks down in this episode is from the prologue. Yes, it's about Virginia. Virginia Woolf's suicide. And it's the only part of her story that takes place outside of the day when she begins writing Mrs. Dalloway.

So it's a kind of independent little story at the beginning of the book. And Michael talks about writing that prologue, and in particular a few sentences in the prologue that stand out. Yeah. Would you remind me where you wanted it to start? Starting on page 7 to the end of the prologue. Yeah, okay, to the end of the prologue. Yeah, that's no problem.

Here's Susan's conversation with Michael Cunningham about the passage that ends the prologue. It takes place in Sussex, England, on the day Virginia Woolf died by suicide, March 28, 1941. I grew up in Los Angeles. I was an especially bookish kid. And I went to a ridiculous public high school where they didn't really teach us anything. And I had a crush on a girl.

Oh, every school has girls like this. She was tough and mean and beautiful and smart. And she was the pirate queen of our high school. And she was reading Virginia Woolf. I thought if I were to read Virginia Woolf, maybe I could impress this girl. Maybe she'd go out with me. So I went to the library. The trailer on Cinder Block.

where they kept the books at my school. And they only had one book by Virginia Woolf, which was Mrs. Dalloway. And I was the only one who'd ever checked it out. You know, I'll say I read it, I tried to read it. I couldn't really decipher it. I was not only 15, but not an especially precocious 15. And I couldn't tell what was going on.

But, but I could see the beauty and great. grace and complexity and potency of those sentences. I had never seen writing like that before. I hadn't really imagined you could do that with just ink and paper and the words in the dictionary. And I remember thinking, oh, she was doing with language, something sort of like what Jimmy Hendricks does with a guitar. And having already been a fan of Jimmy Hendrix, I also became a fan of Virginia Wolf, which helped me become a reader. There's only a small body of us who insist on the parallels between the work of Virginia Wolf and the work of Jimmy Hendricks, but I'm proud to be, I'm proud to be one.

But it turned on a little seven-a-lot light bulb over my tiny head, and I began to take books seriously. I think a lot of us have a first book. It might have been a children's book. It could be anything. saying the book that first showed you what a book can mean to you. And for me, that was Mrs. Dalloway. So was writing the character of Virginia something you approach differently

from writing the other characters in the book? Was she just a really different construct because she was someone who had a real life? You know, I was naturally daunted by the idea of presumed, of presuming to write about Virginia Woolf. So I read and read and read and read and read Virginia Wolf. There are few lives as well documented as hers between not only just, you know, of course,

her novels and her essays, but the diaries and the letters. I mean, there's really not a day that went unrecorded. And I read and read and read and then shut all the books and started writing and didn't let myself open a book by or about Virginia Woolf again so that I was writing almost with a sense memory of her without actually consulting the books for her diction, her voice, which was her own. And I wanted to pay a certain homage to it, but not to try to reproduce it. I couldn't.

I want to talk about some of the real specific word choices and sentences and so forth in this passage. So I think one of the things that makes it so deeply affecting is that we have this contrast between beauty. She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. And tragedy. She does not travel far. Her feet, the shoes are gone, strike the bottom occasionally. And when they do, they summon up a sluggish cloud of muck filled with the black silhouettes of leaf skeletons.

The description of her body floating is, it's wonderful. And yet, of course, what's horrible is this is someone dying. Talk, if you can, a little bit about keeping. keeping that balance as you were writing? Here is where my fabulous crew of readers enters the picture. I don't write these books entirely on my own. I take them as far as I can take them, and then I show them to a few people who I trust. And our instance in the passage we're talking about as we follow Virginia's body down the river,

she was, in fact, wearing the fur coat that she bought from the money she made from an A novel called The Years, which was her only book that ever sold anything, so she was wearing that coat. And I had her in an earlier draft floating down the river in the coat, the fur coat, like a Norse angel. And my brilliant friend, the poet, Marie Howe, said, that simile is too much. That is disrespectful. This is a person who really lived and really. died and that is one of those little show-offy phrases that is more about your ability to come up with that simile than it is in service to this person and her life and her death.

And all I could think was, we're going to cut that one. I sometimes need to be slapped out of my, shall we say, tendency toward excessive lyricism. If I haven't learned by now not to get to elaborate, at least I have the good sense to listen to people when they tell me I've gotten to elaborate. We'll be right back with more after this. I want to ask you about the choice of a certain word because I thought about it so much,

which is the use of the word worries. She comes to rest eventually against one of the pilinges of the bridge at southeast. The current presses her, worries her. I love the word worry in this context. Do you have any memory of making that choice? You know, I do have a way of going to the obvious word, the current ruffles or... Pushes her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then just sort of move one step to the right or the left and use the word that lives next door to the obvious word, if that makes any sense. Absolutely. In fact, I and I know this horrifies a lot of people, but I am a proud user of a thesaurus. Oh, me too. I mean, for that very reason, which is sometimes I keep thinking, I don't want this word. I want that word that exists in the same conceptual space, but isn't that same word. Oh, I'm glad we're both confessing to this because, yeah.

When I was younger, I kind of felt like if you. You don't have the word in your mind. It's not your word. You know, you don't go to a secondary source. And I thought, n'uh. I really consult thesaurus. And often I find a sort of association that I might have come up with or I might not have. I love my thesaurus.

I do. And actually, that leads me to another question, which is you leave her at the bridge and then you basically turn the camera upward. Some distance above her is the bright, rippled surface. The sky reflects unsteadily there, white and heavy with clouds. And we see the boy and his mother. A small boy, no older than three, crossing the bridge with his mother, stops at the rail, crouches, and pushes the stick he's been carrying

between the slats or the railing, so it'll fall into the water. Which to me feels like you are preparing us for the rest of the book. Right. Was it already in your mind that you would bring us above the water? I don't know how much of any part of a book, even a single image or a phrase, is accidental, but a lot of it is unconscious. Well, in all candor, when I was in high school, I spent many, many hours stoned, staring, at an MC Escher poster called Three Worlds, which was this kind of beautiful rendering

of a fish in water, and there are leaves on top of the water, and there's a reflection of a tree on the water's surface sort of superimposed over the leaves. So, you know, some of this comes from some sort of supposedly distinguished, informed literary sources, and some of it comes from being, 15 years old smoking a joint looking at a poster on your wall in your suburban bedroom.

That makes sense to me. And did you actually go see this river? I did. It's the river Ouse, O-U-S-E, which is near a country house, Virginia and her husband owned. I went to see the house, and there was a lovely woman who takes your pound that charts to go into the house and I said sort of nervously, I hope this won't seem too ghoulish, but I would like to walk the way Virginia would have walked when she went to the river. Well, clearly it was the most usual of requests.

You get a map. And you pass a lot of Virginia Woolfants coming and going. And I'm walking along and thinking, where's the river? I must have gone the wrong way until finally, finally, you sort of talk. a little rise, and there's the river Ouse, which is essentially a river-shaped mud puddle. Hmm. When Wolf ended her life by drowning,

there had been a lot of rain, it was more of a river than it was the day I went to see it, but I realized that when I thought about her decision to drown herself, I'd been thinking of a big American river. I've been thinking about the Mississippi. Mississippi and then seeing the kind of sluggish brown reality of the ooze really changed and I think deepened my sense of how determined she was to not be alive anymore. I'm interested in the fact that you chose to do this as a prologue.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Starting the book with Virginia's suicide, how do you. did you make that choice? Was this always going to be where you began the book? No, no, as a matter of fact, until the pen ultimate draft, the book did end with her suicide. And then when I was looking at it again, I thought, you know what, let's just get her demise out of the way early on. It matters, and it also doesn't matter. It's not the most important thing about her. You know, Virginia Woolf fell into fits of despair for which the word depression is a little mild.

We don't really know what was going on with her, but she hallucinated. She heard voices. She went way, way, way down. And yet, I would be hard-pressed to name a writer who wrote so convincingly. and cogently about the pure joy of being alive. What a lark, what a plunge, this Tuesday in London in June.

And I have always felt like if Virginia Woolf, having been where she went in her dark periods, if Virginia Woolf can come back from the deepest circle of hell and write to us about the beauties of the world, that's an optimism you can trust. Let's just lead with her death and then close with life going on. And now here's the passage from The Hours by Michael Cunningham. She is born quickly along by the current.

She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. She floats heavily through shafts of brown granular light. She does not travel far. Her feet, the shoes are gone, strike the bottom occasionally. And when they do, they summon up a sluggish cloud of muck filled with the black silhouettes of leaf skeletons that stands all but stationary in the water

after she's passed along out of sight. Stripes of green black weed catch in her hair in the fur of her coat. And for a while her eyes are blindfolded by a thick swatch of her. weed, which finally loosens itself and floats, twisting and untwisting and twisting again. She comes to rest eventually against one of the pilinges of the bridge at southeast. The current presses her, worries her. But she is firmly positioned at the base of the squat, square column, with her back to the river and her face against the stone. She curls there with one arm unfolded against her chest and the other afloat over the rise of her hip.

Some distance above her is the bright, rippled surface. The sky reflects unsteadily there, white and heavy with clouds, traversed by the black cut-out shapes of rooks. Cars and trucks rumble over the bridge. A small boy, no older than three, crossing the bridge with his mother, stops at the rail, crouches, and pushes the stick he's been carrying between the slats or the railing, so it'll fall into the water. His mother urges him along, but he insists on staying a while,

watching the stick as the current takes it. Here they are, on a day early in the Second World War. The boy and his mother on the bridge, the stick floating over the river's surface and Virginia's body at the river's bottom, as if she is dreaming of the surface, the stick, the boy, and his mother, the sky and the rooks.

An olive-drab truck rolls across the bridge, loaded with soldiers in uniform who wave to the boy who was just throwing the stick. He waves back. He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see the soldiers better, so he will be more visible to them. All this enters the bridge

resounds through its wood and stone and enters Virginia's body. Her face pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all. The truck and the soldiers, the mother, and the child. The Hours is available in hardcover, paperback, and as an audiobook. You can visit us at bookexploder.com for more information. This episode of Book Exploder was produced by me,

along with Theo Balcom, Julia Botero, and Susan. Our production assistants are Nick Song and Mary Dolan. Raina Takahashi created the Book Exploder logo, Our episode artwork is by Paula Jackson, and I made the show's theme music. Book Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. A network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. Find out more at Radiotopia.fm. I'm Rishi-K. Shirway.

And I'm Susan Orlean. Thanks for listening.