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More from Michael Cunningham
The author of The Hours takes us inside his new novel, Specimen Days
The author of The Hours takes us inside his new novel, Specimen Days
"I try to
model myself on artists most heroic to me," Michael
Cunningham says in an exclusive interview in The
Advocate's Summer Books issue, "people who
ignore their obvious gifts to try something new and
see what happens." The writer takes quite a few
risks with Specimen Days, a trio of
interrelated, genre-bending novellas set in New York City
involving Walt Whitman. The first, "In the
Machine," is a ghost story at the height of the
industrial revolution; the second, "The
Children's Crusade," is a contemporary
crime thriller about a kids' terrorist ring; and the
third,"Like Beauty," is an interspecies
romance between a lizard lady and a male robot who
traffics in homoerotic S/M fantasies circa year 2150.
With The Hours you took on Virginia Woolf. Why now Whitman?
I hadn't planned it. Actually, the first part was
always set in New York City around 1865. As I did
research, I realized that New York then was an
extremely difficult and dirty place for everyone but the
very rich. Most people had a 12-hour-a-day,
six-day-a-week factory job. There was a coal-laden sky
that hung above everybody's head. I thought how
interesting that out this blighted environment sprang Walt
Whitman, the greatest transcendental poet, and, I
think, the greatest American poet, period.
In the second novella, "The Children's
Crusade," a character refers to Whitman as
"a lover of boys." Not everyone believes
that he was gay. Where do you stand?
I don't think there's any question that he
was gay. There are many gay passages in Leaves of
Grass, many references to his love of men. And OK,
there are some references to his love of women as well.
Do you think he was bisexual or gay?
I think he was gay. There is nothing in his biography to
suggest a serious, sustained interest in women.
Romanticism runs throughout Whitman. Do you see
yourself as a romantic?
Oh, yeah, almost to a fault. If anything, I try to
undercut the romanticism in my work, at least until it
hovers at a certain level of plausibility.
Did you always have the idea to frame the book as
three novellas?
I did. I wanted to work with genre. What was really
interesting to me was what some of the various genres,
like ghost stories and thrillers and science fiction
stories, are telling us about human life and mystery.
It's time to reconsider redrawing the boundary lines
in literature and consider the notion that some of the
thinly veiled autobiographies in the serious
literature sections are not nearly as deep and interesting
and adventuresome as some of what's across the
aisle in the science fiction section.
Who is your favorite sci-fi writer?
Samuel Delaney, who is probably not the only gay male
African-American S/M science fiction writer but undoubtedly
the best!
The first novella is my favorite. I prefer your
more lyrical, realist fiction focusing on human
relationships. But I understand the desire to
attempt new things as a writer.
Yeah, then you are writing the same book over and over
again. You just have to hope to live enough to cover
the whole range of experiments to find out what you
really can do.
Bahr has written for The New York Times,
GQ, and New York.
Specimen Days(Amazon.com)
The Hours(book Amazon.com)
The Hours(tlavideo)
Leaves
of Grass
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