Unbelievable is Michael Cunningham’s assessment – The Hour Writer on the challenges that shaped his creative life | Autobiography and memoir

AHe is a well-to-do, tough, eight-year-old boy from rural California, Michael Cunningham he was forced to create art before he understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven, for example, how paradise resembles the Griffith Park Observatory and all the dead were shown in history because their creator saw that it was not equal to the problem of all faces. There was also a cigar box covered in gold-plated macaroni and a clay figure of an animal on Noah’s ark – anything that could challenge the picture of a white hen that hung on his parents’ wall.

If Cunningham moved rapidly away from abstract painting, perhaps preserving or denying us the fruits of a highly developed talent, it was not because the creative impulse had withered. Instead, it was that the knowledge of making physical art worked as a short-term, less painful, less embarrassing method – all that he claimed to be young, intelligent – than trying to take over the world in words.

Unspeakable, a fascinating combination of memoir and documentary, asks us to consider the causes of shame and pain, and what motivates them. Do they continue, almost without fail, to get out of touch with language and the vast, mysterious place they are trying to describe? The insecurities of the writer Cunningham, from childhood to adulthood, seem to live in that space, and feel like a fixed judgment on his efforts, impossible to remove. Success is not a cure-all and, he explains, can lead to isolation from other writers, or a quick fear of retreating into secrecy.

Cunningham succeeded, and so, in 1998 he published Hoursthe three-dimensional, time-shifting sound of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; his popularity increased four years later, when Stephen Daldry and David Hare produced a film based on Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Several books and 25 years later, he had to return to the same place – a time of repression and several internal monologues – in the Day. “I don’t work at a high level”, he tells us in the book, “although my ambitions reach a higher level than I care to admit.” This, one might say, is the problem at the heart of modernity, perhaps Cunningham’s greatest stylistic influence: the attempt to give the greatness of knowledge that also shows us its weakness, how easily it is analyzed.

Fragility and suddenness are always Unspeakable. Cunningham probably wouldn’t have found Woolf unless he found himself secretly smoking in high school with a nice girl named Natalie, whom he wanted to impress, even though he suspected homosexuality was not his thing. He heard him mention Allen Ginsberg and asked him what he was reading now. “It’s funny you should ask,” he replied. “It’s completely transformed by Virginia Woolf.” Soon, he was too.

There are many observations that feel like a common part when it comes to writers when it comes to writing, most of them of the “fail again, fail well” variety. But where Cunningham is most involved, and in a more nuanced way, is in his repeated appearances – mostly small, but not always – as someone willing to step in, to tell experiences that are much stronger, braver, than they are. His speed is not a hindrance, and the chapter that begins, without any background, “In my senior year at Stanford, I began to go to San Francisco on the weekends to work as a rent boy” and very well evokes courage, self-control and method.

In the same way, it is the events with the people who cannot write: his beloved sister, for example, or – beyond the list of polite vignettes – the old and graceful gays who befriended him during his brief stay in Provincetown, who fed him delicious food and shook with delight the fear of mocking at his sexual fantasies. After their death, they wonder about their life choices, or if they were used to what, at the time, people would allow them to have. It’s a few pages, but it’s so touching, so unsparing, expanding the views of the two men so casually that you’re sure Cunningham made the right choice, all those years ago, when he kept the golden cigar box.