Poured Over: Michael Cunningham on Day

By Jenna Seery / November 14, 2023 at 6:00 am

Set on one day in April in three different years, Day by Michael Cunningham is an intimate analysis of family love and connection. Cunningham joins us to talk about translating his writing from thoughts to words, writing a pandemic novel that isn’t really a pandemic novel, using literature as a connection to the world and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.          

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.      

Featured Books (Episode):
Day by Michael Cunningham
Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been so looking forward to this interview with Michael Cunningham, who I just admitted to a minute ago before we started taping that I have been reading for quite some time. And really, a really, really, really long time. And I’ve read all of it. All of the novels. But Day is the new one. It’s your first novel and it was 10 years. There was yelling in my office when I heard this book was coming.

Michael Cunningham

A mere 10 years.

A mere 10 years, but I mean, it’s, there’s been a lot happening. Would you set up Day though, because structurally, I love what you did. And it’s a huge piece of the book. But I also do want to stay away from spoilers because we’re airing as you pub.

Yeah, I think I can, I can deliver a brief sense of the book that will be spoiler free. I was into a different book, maybe a third of the way done with an entirely different novel, when the pandemic like Godzilla came, rose up out of the river and just destroyed everything, I couldn’t find a way to work the pandemic into the novel I was writing. And it seemed, on the other hand, impossible to write a contemporary novel that did not acknowledge the pandemic, it would be like setting a novel in London during World War Two and not mentioning the Blitz. But then, how do you write a novel that concerns the pandemic, but isn’t about the pandemic, you know, novels are about human beings. And this needed to be a novel about human beings undergoing in their own way, something that was happening to every person on the planet. So how do you do that? How do you do that, I finally settled on a structure, which is how the book ended up. It’s one day in April divided into three parts, morning, afternoon and evening. But each of the three parts of this day takes place in different year, right morning is in 1999, before the pandemic, afternoon is, at the height of the pandemic evening is, I don’t want to say post pandemic, or not post pandemic, right. It is that the year when, certainly in the lives of these characters, it’s past, you know, it remains hanging in the air, but it is their lives after this catastrophe has occurred. And we follow them. I sort of think of it as the pandemic for the sake of the novel, the pandemic is a brick with a hole running through it. And the narrative is a string that goes in in one side of the hole and comes out the other.

I love this cast. And I immediately knew I was back into a Michael Cunningham novel because of how we open and where we are and who these people are. And I know when I’m reading you, there’s sort of a gentle entry into whatever we’re working on. And I’m genuinely curious always about the characters. And I followed you into some pretty trippy places. I mean, Specimen Days, it’s like, okay, here we go. It’s you, I’m gonna follow you

have an Android and a robot lizard, from another planet who fall in love.

I was really happy to meet Isabel and her husband, Dan and her brother Robbie. And I love the way you write siblings. It’s so fascinating to me, when you have two people grew up in the same family and like they don’t actually have the same experience of the family. I love, that’s a very primal thing for me, but a big piece of this book. Marriage doesn’t necessarily make people’s hearts go pitter patter. I do feel like part of what you’re doing is blowing up this sort of traditional marriage plot and there’s a nod to The House of Mirth.

Yes, if you can bring Edith Wharton in, by all means do it. Right.

So I have to confess I do need to read The Mill on the Floss. I have not. George Eliot and I was a history major in college. I missed a lot of George Eliot and I’ve now purchased a couple of different editions of Middlemarch because I keep thinking if I buy the right edition, I didn’t even do it during lockdown. I was staring at this edition. I was like, this is the perfect time to do it and well, you know, stuff is happening.

It’s not going anywhere, Mill on the Floss, you always wonder if you’re being too obvious or too subtle. Mill on the Flossis about all kinds of things. But it is fundamentally about a brother and sister who are the loves each other’s lives.

So you’re pulling in House of Mirth, you’re pulling in Mill on the Floss. And apparently, I really will follow you anywhere, because now I’ve gone back and reread House of Mirth. And like I said, I really do need to read The Mill on the Floss. But watching you play with these influences and pull them in, I was reminded of the introduction that you did to Death in Venice, there’s a new translation. And you’re talking about how even your work when it’s not being translated into a foreign language, the act of writing is an act of translation, and that you are putting images and ideas and characters into language. And I love that. And I sort of want to start there, because it gives us a way to bring in all of the work. And Walt and Thomas Mann.

Oh, yeah, it’s especially on my mind now, because I’ve been working with the first few of the translators, I’ve had long emails back and forth with Dutch translators and the Spanish and just starting to talk to the Danish translators. The basic idea, having worked with translators, as much as I have by now is that the original, in my case, book in the English language, in which I wrote, which is already a slightly unsatisfying, translation of the greater book, you have had floating and a little cartoon going on over your head for all that time. And that greater book is, I think, really not a book anyone can write, because it not only uses language, as evocatively and piercingly as language can be used. It includes whale songs, and the sounds the constellations make, and their own scratch and sniff sections where you can get to feel what the character feeling without, you know what I mean? So yeah, yeah, so I am saying to a translator, essentially, just further that translation, just take what’s already something of a translation and rewrite it in Dutch or Spanish or Danish.

Yeah, one of the things that I was thinking about those I read, and I do I love the structure. I, the idea is fantastic. It gives these characters, and there are a couple of supporting characters I’m not really going to bring into this conversation. But I will laugh because the baby’s name is Odin, and I’m sorry, I’m still laughing. It was just a great, great idea. And people will understand what I’m talking about when they read Day. But the structure and this sort of three part, very sort of clearly delineated and yet, really kind of, I need a word that isn’t just Michael Cunningham-esque.

So many words are not Michael Cunningham-esque.

I did keep thinking of Mrs. Dalloway, not just because of the hours, which is it’s a book I absolutely love, but also because of what Woolf was trying to do when she wrote Dalloway, which was capture London in a particular moment after World War One where the country had suffered this incredible trauma, write all of the dead young men and the horrors of war and everything else. And she’s doing it in a way that as we all know, opens with Clarissa Dalloway going to buy flowers and the idea that there are no tiny lives, right? It’s the way we talk about these lives. And I felt that reverberating through Day. I mean, Daniel is having some career things happening. And Isabel has some career things happening and Robbie has some career things happening. And there are still children who need the adults to be adults on these things. And yet, you do cover the depth of the experience.

I try to yeah, F Scott Fitzgerald said of the writers of fiction, you must not love your characters too much and must not hate them at all. Right? Which has been a sort of operating principle for me, and I do my best not to sentimentalize anybody. But I love my students and every now and then I will get a story from a student which I can only say this strikes me as a story intended to show readers that these people aren’t worth writing a story about. Oh, you know what I mean?

Yes, I do. Oh, yes, I do. And I would like to very much not read that story. Thank you.

Well, you know, I don’t know if I would name names, particular writers, but there, Martin Amos for you know, there are and, and rest in peace, and God bless Martin Amos. But you know, if anyone as a reader is looking for a kind of cauterizing meanness in a novel, there are those novels to read. And that’s not what I do.

You do, however, come at family sideways. And that’s one of the pieces that I love. And it is it is a through line through every single book you’ve written. And this idea that family is, you know, whatever, we’re going to make it right. And again, like, there are complications. But can I also point out, you had a pretty ordinary childhood.

But you know, that can’t really go back and change that. We were prosperous, and suburban. And I know that, quote, unquote, unorthodox families keep turning up over and over again. And you know, of course, you don’t start a novel. And I’m going to write another novel about unorthodox families, but it’s the things just insist upon. And so I think, for me, that sort of started early. As for me as a gay man who has so far survived the AIDS epidemic, yes. Thanks for two pandemics in one lifetime. Here’s hoping it stays at two, I was in the thick of it. I was involved in Act Up. And it was really apparent that as people got sick, people contracted HIV and AIDS, any number of them called their parents and said, I’ve got two things to tell you. I’m gay. I had a number of parents said, we love you come home, we’ll do whatever we need to do. But a number of parents also hung up the phone. Right? And what happened was that we collectively, sort of formed alternative families, right? Because if you’re if your parents aren’t taking your calls, here’s your new family. We are a disco bunny, a trans woman and you know, and a leather daddy. I mean, that’s a little extreme. But you know what I mean? I wanted to see honor those alternative families, but I don’t mean idealize them. We fought about the same stuff. It was not just all love and support all the time. But it was a lot of love and support. And it was really apparent that some of us had been raised with the notion that only your family will come through for you. And guess what? Right? It turns out, this is not going to be much of a revelation for anybody. But it turns out that if your family isn’t there, you can make a new one. And they will indication of somebody who is that sick, come to the hospital, fight with the doctors, if necessary, plan the funeral everything. And that really, I think, set me on a course. I might or might not have followed otherwise.

But isn’t that what we’re supposed to do with books? Or isn’t that what we try to do with books is have that sense of connection and have that sense of possibility? And hope and change? And maybe it’s not perfectly ideal, right? But so much is happening in Day and yet we are so firmly in this. I feel like I know these characters. I feel like I know, Isabel and Daniel and Robbie, partially because of the world I live into. But there’s a universality to them that I really appreciate and this quiet awareness and watching them figure out what’s happening and the choices they’re making and the choices they’re not making and that empty space, right? Like I think we miss that sometimes when we’re reading and we don’t necessarily give ourselves a chance to notice the silence the decisions that don’t get made. It’s one of the reasons I really like reading your work because I can sit with the quiet and I can sit with the absence and it’s really key.

Yeah, yes, yes, yes. I always think of myself as writing for readers who are smarter than I am. I’m not trying to shed wisdom or moral lessons, I do think that one of the main reasons that fiction exists is that it is probably, we love the movies, love TV, and they have their own narrative powers that fiction doesn’t happen fiction may be the most effective way to convey to people who read it, what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. I’m always aware of the sort of obligation to do your best at doing exactly that. This is what it’s like to be someone who is not you. And I feel like it makes fiction if it’s working sort of inherently political.

Oh, yes.

So people who are empathic, who are encouraged in feeling connected to other people are, I think less likely to think it’s a good idea to bomb other countries for their keep children in cages, vote in certain ways.

There’s this idea that reading is sort of a passive thing that you do sitting on a chair somewhere, or sitting on a patch of grass, or sitting on the beach. And the amount of energy, at least for me, that goes into connecting with not only the characters and what’s happening, but also the author’s vision. And in some cases, I’m reasonably well versed in an author’s body of work. In other cases, it’s someone who’s entirely new to me. And of course, my brain gets going and for me, not just as a reader or a bookseller, I mean, the two are inseparable in my work, but it’s always making the connections like what have I read before? Where does this come in? I mean, you brought me back to Virginia Woolf. A very long time ago, I had been one of those kids who was just like, oh, right, yeah, of course, my mom talks about, my grandma, like, and I’d gotten a little snotty about it. And you come around with The Hours, which I, the first time I read it, I flew through it because I could not believe how connected I was to your world. And these characters that sent me back to Woolf’s work. And I love having those moments of the rabbit hole right By Nightfall, I’m going back to Death in Venice. And I’ve it’s happened too with Colm Toibin’s novels as well, like The Master. And I love that sense of community and continuation and connection that we get from reading and, you know, the more widely read like the bigger the world gets.

I mean, I, like we helplessly seem to include various literary references, some more obvious in certain books and others, my brain is just full of books. And what we read, and what I’ve actually experienced, are not entirely separate entities, right? This book is loosely based on Death in Venice, all right, there are things like unorthodox families and literary references are simply part of how you think and feel. And there you are.

I go back and forth on canon and how we approach canon and how canon does need to change. I mean, literature is a living, living, breathing thing, right? And it should challenge us, like we should be able to stretch when we read, but also, frankly, it should also represent us all a little better than perhaps it has. I mean, I had people who were teaching me Steinbeck and Faulkner, who clearly were not interested in teaching Steinbeck and Faulkner. And once I came to East of Eden, I was like, Oh, hello.

I’m thinking about who a reader is in this relationship. And you may be reading in a hammock or on the sofa, or you know, you’re probably not running a marathon. But it seems really important to me to be mindful of the notion that any work of fiction is a sort of dynamic, powerful, erotic ish, whatever relationship between a writer and a reader even if you are, however separated you are and time and space. If the writer has been dead for 500 years, there’s still a summoning, there is still a pact between writer and reader. And I’m always fascinated by the fact that no two readers read the same book. Right? You know, everyone has different associations, what does Anna Karenina look like, nevermind, the movies. And we all have a slightly different sense of her.

I had issues with Madame Bovary for a really long time. And there was a new translation. I think it’s Lydia Davis, actually, that made me reexamine Madame B. And I need that kind of swing in the language. When I think of coming up when I was younger reading Balzac and Flaubert. Like a lot of those translations have not changed, right? Like, it’s when I was in school, they were pretty reliably the same translations that had been out in the world,

Where, like, right now, we love Lydia Davis, for so many for so many reasons that include, okay, it’s my understanding that French into English is unusually difficult. Among, okay, European languages. And, well, Flaubert is unusually difficult, even among French writers whose phraseology, it’s just I have a friend who is bilingual. Her first language was French. And I was reading a few different versions of Madame Bovary because I deeply love it. Not at first, not when I was a kid. It has a painting and a handle to me that a cover. I came around to it. And, you know, there is this sort of well-known line to the effect that we bang on a drum to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity. Every translation, I mean, they had of course, they had it, but there was like, a different version, we bang on a pedal, when we would rather seemed they’re different. And I asked my friend, when we’re in French and English, she said, Actually, none of them is right. Okay. She said, there’s nothing in French that translates into move the stars to pity. It’s just not a concept.

Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I see exactly what you’re talking about.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this comes up with translators all the time.

I was thinking specifically also Chinese actually has, there are a lot of themes in Chinese where the English translation is challenging.

Challenging and not just on the level of the language. So that’s challenging enough in A Snow Queen, these two guys, two brothers are talking about what they might still do with their lives. One of them says, oh, we could just drive out into the Mad American night, which is from Kerouac, but you don’t need to know as an American reader, you don’t need to know that. That’s Kerouac, you get it? Is American fantasy about taking your savings out of the bank, buying a used car and just driving out to see what else might happen? And my finished translator asked what that meant. And auto think was, you know, I bet you can’t really drive out into the matte finish night, can you? And if you did, it would not read as a gesture of reckless optimism. You would be driving through brute force until you fell into the ocean. There was a whole idea that that particular case, it’s kind of American romance of the open road that translatable.

I was also laughing because I’ve spent a summer in Finland many years ago. It’s like, yeah, that just No, no.

No one’s driving out at night. Or if they do it’s for other reasons, then then optimism without a second chance.

Would you ever go back to the book that you’d started? Before Day? I mean, the one that you jettisoned because it wasn’t working, or something’s still there, though, because it sounds like it was a multigenerational saga.

It was and I’m, I’m not sure if is, on one hand alive and well, but on the other hand, it may just have been on the shelf too long.

Part of why I ask is, you know, are we in a place in the world where we are irrevocably changed? I mean, it are there pieces of art that just simply can’t come into the future with us because they don’t work. You’re obviously the only person who can decide on that front, but in that particular case with your book, but I do think I mean, we’ve seen it in so many different points. And you know, By Nightfall, there is sort of this post 911 thread, but without ever saying, hey, all of these things happened and now we’re walking around. You know that ended up and that to me when I’m reading is really important. Like I know the context. And I understand the context. And I understand the timeline. But I also don’t need it put in front of me in a five or 10 page, writing on the nose kind of explanation kind of moment. And I just can’t. I’m wondering where we go. You know, there are some writers who have said, I’m going to take this head on. And there are other writers who are like, No, thank you. I’m good. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.

I think we should have to wait and see where we go. This is just related. What about the anti semitism in Edith Wharton and F. Scott? To name a couple? What about the misogyny in almost everything 20 years ago?

Yeah. It’s, it’s wild. There’s there are things I’ve gone back to sort of reread. And sometimes it’s a good decision. And sometimes it is not such a good decision. And sometimes it’s really nice to be able to say, oh, that belongs to an 18 year old. That belongs to younger me. And that’s great. And I don’t need to go, I think I’m good.

I think of a book you mentioned Steinbeck, I think, like The Grapes of Wrath as a good book to read when you’re young.. But you know what I mean, yeah. And then after a certain age, it’s just not useful to you anymore. But if you’re 14, it can actually make you a better person.

I mean, I wrestled with Charles Dickens. And I know, there are plenty of writers who love Dickens and yay, congratulations. And from an intellectual standpoint, I understand what he’s doing and how he’s doing it and why he’s doing it. And I do appreciate it. But I only have so much time to read so many books. And I would rather say, hey, The Mill on the Floss sounds like an actual miss, I really should grab that. Whereas I don’t think I need to read Martin Chuzzlewit. I think I’m good.

Oh, my sister, I’m sure this will be infuriating to many. I am not a huge Dickens fan. I’m just not, you know, no author is going to be everybody’s cup of tea. Right? And well, all right, I can finally come out. And as you say, the clock is always ticking. And no matter how long we are fortunate enough to live. We won’t read all the books, all the necessary books, right? Because people keep writing them. And then there’s the last couple of centuries. And so when I read something, whether it’s a venerable classic, or something that just came out, I have in the back of my mind, the notion that this book is taking the place of other books. Yeah. And how do I feel about devoting that space in my life and attention span to that book? I don’t know how you are about this. I decided years, years ago, that I didn’t need to finish a book that wasn’t working.

I do not finish books. I absolutely do not. And it’s not just because I’m a bookseller, it’s really because if it’s not for me, it will be for someone else. I have done the forced marches; I will do the forced marches. And luckily, I read very quickly. Every opportunity I get, and when I see people sort of wringing their hands over do I finish it? Do I? Oh, no walk away. To someone else, there should be no compulsion to finish the thing that is not working.

Just a first date that didn’t go well.

Absolutely not. And I do. And again, you know, I wasn’t an English major, I filled in some of the gaps, not all of the gaps, and I’m okay with the gaps. And there’s some stuff that I’ve read deeply into, because I went down a rabbit hole and I thought, Oh, wow, you’re great. I would like more of this place. And then there are other things where I’m like, I knew I need to know this reference point. There are things where it’s just like, I need to understand, I needed someone to explain that Shakespeare is best when you see it performed, because it’s meant if there’s a physicality, to the text that I’d sort of missed. And now I’m kind of like, Oh, right. Okay. So, you know, also raised by wolves, whatever, but you come to things when you come to and that’s kind of the beauty of what we do.

There’s the books you love, and finish and what you don’t love and don’t finish. And then I think there’s a third body of books, books that are just too important not to have read even if you hate them. I would say Ulysses can be so irritating, James Joyce, just shut up. And yet it’s kind of matters too much not to.

There is a copy currently sitting on the floor, and it has been there for quite some time, they find their way to a spot on the floor, and they just, kinda stay there.

It seems temporary, but…

you have Samuel Beckett and Beckett is fun. Like, he’s weird, but he’s fun. And short. But fun.

Yeah, I feel like there are kind of two kinds of venerable classics. Yeah, there’s the ones that are more fun than you thought they were going to be. They’re less fun than you thought it was going to be?

Well, humor is really subjective. And one of the things I do like when I’m reading you is you’ve got this very sort of subtle wit. And it’s just not mean, which is nice, too. And I have my, you know, books that I read when someone’s tweaking another human being, but that kind of sly wit where you’re kind of sideline is really you even give it to the kids, they get to do a little bit of that.

Oh, yeah, no, they really have their moments, by all means.

And I don’t mean that as in, they sound like 40-year-olds, they sound like children, which I? Yeah, the child narrator is 40-year-old now, please, let’s not do that.

I know, I know. I know, our children are sort of generic. You’ve ever known a child? You know how untrue that is?

They notice everything. And again, this goes back to as Daniel and Robbie and Isabel are sort of figuring out their thing. The kids are noticing more than the three adults realized.

For sure. For sure, for sure. Violet depends on it.

I mean, there’s a little Henry James happening when we’ve got that going.

Hello, Henry James.

There’s a nod to the man himself again. But the way you pull all of these points of view together, it’s really hard to put Day down. And I did have a moment when I finished I was like, wait, how’s that over now? And I do I read very, very quickly, but I read. I’m reading the first time and then when I’m prepping for the show. It’s a very different kind of read. Unlike you, I write over all over everything, dog ear. Yeah, I’m notorious, really destroying galleys.

You’re a participant in the book.

Also, you don’t know until you see it, what the exact thing that’s going to become the spine of the show is until you know it and then it’s been a lot of time. I mean, I’m looking at, I don’t know, 325 pages for you. And maybe we’ve covered 10%, which is half the fun, right? It’s like that whole thing when you’re writing a novel, and you know exactly what’s happening, like we get the 10% as readers and you’ve got this entire ecosystem underneath.

One of the things that I like about Day there’s a lot of things you don’t like about a novel once you finished it, but I realize in retrospect, that given the enormity and gravity of the pandemic, there should be jokes.

Why not? Because the thing is, when you go through the big horrible thing, right, you have to have a way to let off the pressure. Right? You need the release valve?

Yeah, yeah, I mentioned it in part because, you know, I can write what you write, and you do the best you can. But I have often felt with other novels, that it’s not that comes from kind of parallels last or anything, but they’re less funny than I would like them to be nothing to do about that. But you know what I mean that…

I do see what you’re saying, because you do a very kind of subtle humor. But when the joke lands, oh, man.

I should just quickly add that I think this is true of a lot of people who write, you always want to write some book other than the book you’re writing, that there is not it’s not only the grand books that no one can write. There’s also this sense of parallel book that you can’t quite get to, and in my case, have nothing to do about it there. There would be there would have been a few more jokes, and there’s more jokes in this one.

And maybe there’ll be more in the next one, whatever that might.

Oh, it’s definitely gonna be people like tripping on banana peels.

I think that’s part of staying grounded, though. If we can’t laugh at the stuff that’s hard. How do we get through like, we shouldn’t be walking around in ashes and sackcloth all the time. I just I don’t think humans are programmed to do that.

Well, that’s not a good look for anybody. It’s always seemed to me that any story that is either all tragic or all comic does not feel like an accurate representation of life on Earth, right? Because the unspeakable losses, and there’s some really funny stuff, some books are more comics and books are more tragic. But I always respond to some mix of the two.

It’s the level of detail. And it’s those tiny, tiny details that Violet, one of the kids in this book, and that yellow dress, I mean, exactly what I’m talking about. And readers, you’ll discover it when you but little things like that, or, you know, moments that Robbie has, there’s Robbie, Robbie has a Instagram account for a character he made up. But I thought that was a lovely touch to that. I mean, here we are living online in a very weird moment in our lives. And, sure, go ahead. You could be writing a novel, you could have a fake Instagram account, whatever. But these tiny touches that all sort of add up to a rather epic story of us. And what is art going to start looking like? I mean, certainly, everyone’s traveling again. But what is art look like? What is? Yeah, become like what? And I don’t I don’t have tons of answers. I’m just fascinated. I’m really curious to see where we go.

No, the only indication of where we’re headed. Towards I can tell for obvious, it continually expanding notion of who gets to tell a story. Yeah,

Right.

36:51

That was you, if you if you think about what we were reading 20 or 30 years ago who was getting published and promoted it’s really different. Yeah, it’s there’s a lot of ground still to cover. But that’s the only thing I can see as where we’re headed. A certain story written by a certain person is one of the many and not the book and then some other people writing other books that no one wants to publish.

Michael, thank you so much. That seems like a really good place to wrap, and Day is out. Now obviously, we’ve got the Mrs. Dalloway that you’ve written the introduction for which is great. There’s a translation of Death in Venice that you’ve written an introduction for and of course, all of the amazing books including At Home at the End of the World and Specimen Days and By Nightfall and The Snow Queen, and Land’s End there was the travel book to Provincetown. There’s a lot. Thank you.

It was such a pleasure talking to you.

This was great. Thank you so much.