posted on 11 Jul 2022

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Having avoided reading Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours, for an awfully long time I was nonetheless surprised to find that it is approaching its twenty-fifth anniversary.

How to describe this extraordinary novel? An homage to Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, Mrs Dalloway? An imitation? A re-imagining? A re-voicing? It is all these things and more, and even that does scant justice to Cunningham’s audacious literary experiment.

Unlikely as it may sound, what Cunningham does is restage Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness modernist classic, transposing its action – and, somewhat obliquely, some of its characters – variously to early-90s New York City at the height of the AIDS crisis, 1920s London (featuring Virginia Woolf herself as she struggles to shape Mrs Dalloway and push the novel forward), and post-war Los Angeles in the late-1940s.

In each of these settings and periods crucial aspects of Mrs Dalloway are recast for a new polyphony of voices. There is Clarissa Vaughan, a prosperous Manhattanite, an editor and publisher, who lives in a large Greenwich Village townhouse with her partner Sally. Clarissa is in essence the modern incarnation of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, and as in Woolf’s novel on the morning on which The Hours opens is making her way through the downtown streets to buy flowers for a party – in Clarissa’s case, a party to celebrate the literary award won by Richard, her one-time gay lover, a poet and novelist of rarefied taste and expression who is dying of AIDS/HIV and for whom she has become a sort of ‘carer’ (a term she would almost certainly resist: she is simply doing what old lovers, old comrades do). 

There is Clarissa Vaughan’s daughter, Julia, rebellious, somewhat entitled and in thrall to Mary Krull, a radical queer theorist/writer whom Clarissa admires for her ruthless honesty and combativeness (and the relative poverty this uncompromising ideological commitment entails), but also despises for her self-aggrandising posturing (and – more secretly, more inwardly – for ‘stealing’ her daughter). There are Virginia and Leonard Woolf themselves and Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell and her three children; there is the Woolfs’ troublesome but indispensable servant, Nancy. And in the glittering urban sprawl of 1949 Los Angeles there is Laura Brown, relatively recently married, pregnant for the second time, but struggling with what may be post-natal depression and struggling to love her three-year old son and her inoffensive and hard-working but unengaging husband, Dan.

Each of these individuals – along with a handful of other walk-on characters – have parallels in Mrs Dalloway.

I think I expected to find The Hours tricksy and over-literary. This is why I ignored it for so long. But it isn’t. This homage, this re-staging – call it what you will – is so beautifully done, so powerfully imagined, so absorbing, so densely textured and so wonderfully written that while one may be conscious of its inner workings, one reads it for the story. For despite its relative brevity, it is gripping and somehow reminiscent of those long, absorbing panoramic urban novels in which the city itself is an additional character – Saul Bellow comes to mind, Donna Tartt, Henry Roth, perhaps Jay McInerney or Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. 

It has been a long time since I last read a novel that surprised me and thrilled me on almost every page – that had me reading on the edge of my seat as it were, waiting to see whether Michael Cunningham would fall from the high-wire he had chosen to walk. He doesn’t.

Although The Hours was filmed in 2002 I have never seen the film and I’m not sure whether I am tempted or not. I can’t imagine it doing justice to what is an essentially literary conception.

But what The Hours does seem to make mandatory is a rereading of Virginia Woolf’s original. When I finished The Hours I didn’t quite have the energy to do this, but I have pulled Mrs Dalloway from the shelves and put it in a prominent spot to remind me that I must revisit it soon.

 

Alun Severn

July 2022

 

Books by, about  or inspired by Virginia Woolf elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

The Death of the Moth & Other Essays by Virginia Woolf

 

A Boy At The Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy

 

Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers : The Hogarth Press 1917-1941 by J.H. Willis Jnr.

 

Mrs Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light

 

Orlando: A biography by Virginia Woolf

 

Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade