AMichael Cunningham, an eight-year-old living in comfortable, concrete, suburban California, was forced to make art before he understood what it was, or could do: for example, a painting of souls ascending to heaven, in which heaven looked like the Griffith Park Observatory and all the dead were depicted in profile because his creator did not feel equal to the challenge of full faces. There was also a cigar box covered with gold-sprayed macaroni on Noah’s Ark and a clay depiction of animals – anything, in fact, that could challenge the painting of a serene white chicken that hung in a gilt frame on his parents’ wall.
If Cunningham moved on too quickly from the visual arts, either, depriving us of the fruits of a more fully formed genius, it was not because the impulse to create had dried up. Rather, it was that the experience of making physical art served as a temporary outlet that was less painful, less embarrassing, than trying to capture the world in words—both feelings he credits to his younger, sensitive self.
Unsayable, an interesting combination of memoir and writing guide, asks us to consider what causes feelings of shame and pain, and what powers them. Do they, almost inevitably, proceed from the gap between language and the vast, mysterious terrain it attempts to describe? Cunningham’s writerly insecurities, from childhood to maturity, live in that gap, and it’s impossible not to feel it as an ever-present judgment on his efforts. Success is not an antidote and, he points out, it can also increase feelings of isolation from other writers or the fear of returning to anonymity.
Cunningham succeeded, and extremely successful, when in 1998 he published The Hours, a triple-stranded, time-shifting riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; His fame 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. He tells us in this book, “I do not work on an epic scale, although my ambitions run on a more epic scale than I would like to admit.” This, one might say, is the tension at the core of modernism, perhaps Cunningham’s greatest stylistic influence: an attempt to present the grandeur of consciousness that also shows us its fragility, how easily it evaporates upon examination.
Fragility and contingency recur throughout Unsayable. Cunningham would never have discovered Wolf until he found himself secretly smitten in high school with a nice girl named Natalie, whom he wanted to impress despite his growing suspicions that heterosexuality was not available to him. He had heard her mention Allen Ginsberg and asked what she was reading now. “It’s funny you should ask,” he replied. “I am being completely transformed by Virginia Woolf.” Pretty soon, he was too.
When it comes to authors’ writing there are a lot of comments that feel like familiar territory, most of them of the “fail again, fail better” variety. But where Cunningham is most fascinating, and in a very unique way, is in his repeated portrayal of himself – mostly young, but not always – as a man who is eager to fit in, to claim experiences that are far bolder, more adventurous, than he actually has. His flair for speed is no hindrance, and the chapter that begins without any preface, “During my senior year at Stanford, I began going to San Francisco on weekends to work as a rent boy” is a brilliant example of bravery, uncertainty, and compassion.
Likewise, there are episodes and people about whom he would not write: for example, his beloved sister, or – beyond a series of respectful vignettes – an elderly and kindly gay couple he had befriended when he lived briefly in Provincetown, who fed him delicious dinners and gasped happily in mock horror at his mildly exaggerated stories of sexual abandon. After his death, he wonders to what extent he had chosen his life, or whether he had adapted to what society at the time allowed him to do. It’s a few pages, but it’s such a touching, such a heartfelt, such a detailed look at these two unlikely men that you’re sure Cunningham made the right choice, all those years ago, when he closed the gold pasta cigar box.
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