“I want to talk about Virginia Woolf, and a little about me,” said author Michael Cunningham on Tuesday, visiting campus to give the annual Annie Sonnenblick lecture. The rest of the evening Cunningham spent weaving together those two seemingly disparate subjects, until their interrelatedness became apparent.
Cunningham is the author of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Hours,” a work that merges Woolf’s own biography with her defining work “Mrs. Dalloway” and a modern-day tale. In his lecture, Cunningham explained that he had been drawn towards the author because of her brilliant use of language to express what he called, “the epic story of our ordinary lives.”
Pointing out that one of the hurdles Woolf faced in her career was overcoming the standard of sweeping Dickens-esque storytelling, Cunningham admired Woolf’s tale “of people who run errands, take naps and throw boring parties.” In this, Cunningham said, he found “the sense of what it feels like to be alive—the shock and the thrill…I love her [Woolf] for that and I try to honor her.”
“The Sonnenblick lecture brings to campus someone with wide appeal for the campus community,” said Anne Greene, Adjunct Professor of English, and architect of the annual talk. “If you ask students what book was most important to them in high school, they say ‘The Hours’.”
The renowned author spoke animatedly about everything from his non-literary adolescence to his experiences in finicky Hollywood (“The Hours” was made into an Oscar-winning film in 2002). He reminisced about first picking up “Mrs. Dalloway” only because a high school crush once told him he should work on being “less stupid.”
Despite his elementary impetus towards first reading Woolf’s novel, Cunningham said of his early reaction, “I had not imagined you could make language swoop and dive and sparkle like that. She was doing with language what Jimi Hendrix was doing with a guitar.”
While Cunningham admitted his youthful aspirations were towards rock stardom, he has since garnered the highest praise from the literary community. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for “The Hours”, he has won the Whiting Writers Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Cunningham’s first novel, “A Home at the End of the World”, is currently in production to be released as a film later this year.
During the lecture, Cunningham also shared stories from his involvement in the film production of “The Hours,” even recounting the first occurrence of Nicole Kidman’s infamous prosthetic nose. Initially, he said, he was hesitant to make the novel into a film, and doubted that the transition could be well done. In the end, however, after contracting a great screenwriter and an excellent director, Cunningham agreed to its making and seemed pleased with the results—and the process.
“It was interesting to hear a writer speak not only about the process of writing a novel but also about adapting such fiction to a screenplay and the experience of seeing the characters ‘reincarnated’ on screen,” said Alana Sisson ’04.
Cunningham described a particularly poignant moment of watching an in-progress version of the film with his dying mother, who passed on before the film was completed. Before them on the screen, actress Julianne Moore was portraying the character of Laura Brown, whom Cunningham admitted was based on his mother.
“One of the things I wanted to tell my mother with that book was that her life mattered to me,” Cunningham said, reiterating his point that Woolf magnified the everyday things as symbols of an entire meaningful life.
Of the moment with his mother he insisted, “This is why we rescue [books] from burning houses, why we try to write them, why we love them, why they matter.”
It was evident throughout the evening that Virginia Woolf, and “Mrs. Dalloway” in particular, weren’t only academic subjects Cunningham chose to write a novel about, but that they were also sparks of literary devotion in line with his personal experience, which he was then compelled to write about.
Towering over the podium in the University’s Memorial Chapel, Cunningham had the full attention of the audience, which contained students from the University as well as from Trinity College, professors, and guests of Cunningham. He thanked everyone in the almost-full chapel for trudging through the “challenging weather” to hear him speak.
“He was captivating and funny,” Sisson said. “He seemed like just a really great storyteller.”
“It was just nice to hear someone who really loves books talk about them so passionately,” said Amy Todd ’04. “It made me want to read fiction all the time now.”
After Cunningham finished his lecture, he requested questions and comments from the audience. In response to Visiting Writer Alex Chee’s question about how the author chose to structure “The Hours”—three simultaneous narratives whose stories occur in different eras—Cunningham spoke of an odd image that occurred to him during the writing. He saw three women: Virginia Woolf standing sternly next to a bright Mrs. Dalloway, and beside them, his mother. He seemed at a loss to explicitly say why his own life became part of the story of the lives of “Mrs. Dalloway” and of Woolf. Yet pertinent was the overarching idea that mere moments contain the entirety of untold lives, fictional or personal.
“We are so much,” he said. “You’re not gonna get it all. You can’t. You do the best that you can. My Virginia Woolf lives in the book.”
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