Sloppy Mr. Cunningham Speaks
The surprising things Michael Cunningham said when he gave a reading at UT last week
By Clay Smith, Fri., Feb. 8, 2002
"I'm a very sloppy sort of novelist," Michael Cunningham said last week after he gave a reading at UT from The Hours (1998), his concise and sturdy novel. Someone asked him, "Could you talk a bit about how the structure of your novels came about?" a question that just begs a writer to lay down the law. As in, "structure is everything," or "you must have the structure mapped out before you can write even one word," the forgettable stuff you inevitably hear if your beat is books. "I just do it in the way that seems most doable," Cunningham said, "but it's tricky business." Unassuming and a little frenetic, Cunningham was saying surprising things most of the night. "One of the first things a novelist discards is his dignity," the Pulitzer Prize winner quipped. He mentioned that after The Hours was published, he attended a conference of the Virginia Woolf Society, "the very people I thought were going to stone me." But of course he was not, and at a costume party the society threw, a woman with blue crepe paper fluttering off her limbs sauntered up to him and said, "Can you guess who I am? I'm The Waves!" As for the movie: When film producer Scott Rudin (The Royal Tenenbaums, Wonder Boys) called up Cunningham to ask him if he'd be interested in a movie version of The Hours, he surprised himself when the noncommittal words "I don't know" popped out of his mouth, especially since he says he has "less character than most people" and "always needs money." Forty-five minutes later, a determined Rudin called back with the promise that David Hare could write the screenplay (it's "extraordinarily good," Cunningham says). The Hours is coming out this fall with Meryl Streep as Clarissa Vaughn and Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, among other quality names.
