Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

...

The Hours
By Michael Cunningham
Picador
Price: $13

The Hours was Virginia Woolf’s working title for Mrs Dalloway. In his 1998 tribute to the Bloomsbury genius — now repositioned atop the heap after the Meryl Streep-Nicole Kidman starrer swept the Oscar nominations — Michael Cunningham splits his narrative threeways in a bid to illuminate the redeeming power of Mrs Dalloway across space and time.

That he succeeds is a surprise. For one, The Hours strikes so many parallels with Woolf’s classic, in its quiet, unobtrusive way it seeks to extract from its inspiration the most intangible of things — a meditation on life’s ordinary pleasures. One cannot help but wonder, will this busy intertextuality detract from the thrill of locating epiphany in the quotidian? For another, a creative tension is palpable throughout. The book opens with Woolf’s flight from her fear of a returning headache and swirling voices, from her unfinished suicide notes to husband Leonard and sister Vanessa. As she weighs her pocket with stones and wades into the river, and the novel turns to its protagonists, a chill — a foreboding of things to come — has been cast on the other protagonists. Will this attempt at romancing the 1925 classic lapse into a nail-biting mystery? And will Cunningham’s Virginia strike as much of a stereotype as Kidman’s false nose?

An emphatic no, no and no to those three questions!

Story continues below this ad

Three women inhabit The Hours. In 1923, Woolf, almost imprisoned in a London suburb by a caring husband, wakes up with the fragments of a sentence that shall flag off Mrs Dalloway: “Mrs Dalloway said something (what?), and got the flowers herself.” She tiptoes around her house and the remains of the night, around Leonard poring over Hogarth Press proofs and the little encounters that could ruin a good day.

Instead, as she yearns for London and its metropolitan buzz, she plots her novel. Her heroine has a party to throw, she must run some last-minute errands in Westminster, and at the end of the day “Clarissa Dalloway will die, of that she feels certain, though this early it’s impossible to say how or even precisely why. She will, Virginia believes, take her own life. Yes, she will do that.”

Mrs Dalloway never did end her own life that day, of course, and the reasons are made clear as much in Woolf’s fictionalised musings as in Clarissa Vaughan’s day. Give a woman a city to wend through, an errand to run, and a party to throw, and she shall endure, suggests Cunningham. So he begins: “There are still the flowers to buy. Clarissa feigns exasperation, leaves Sally cleaning the bathroom, and runs out, promising to be back in half an hour. It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century.”

The party is for Richard Brown, in the last stages of a terminal illness and tonight to receive a big literary prize. Clarissa swings by to look in on him. The voices, he tells her, he who has always called her Mrs D, are gone, but “they were singing just now, in a foreign language. I believe it may have been Greek.” So, Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Smith too has invaded NYC.

Story continues below this ad

It’s depressing, but the city beckons. She, with her ethnic footwear, with all those oddball characters also out on their daily rounds to greet, loves all of it. The TV set abandoned on the curb, the vendors selling discounted broccoli and mangoes, the rebels seeking causes to embrace. “It’s the city’s crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life.”

The city rescues, in its bustle and anonymity it provides extraordinary pleasures to ordinary lives, it provides respite from those endless Hours. Clarissa Vaughan feels it in her bones, Virginia finds her Clarissa Dalloway too succumbs to the city’s charms — they will survive.

Laura Brown, the third woman, must experience the city and the flower-buying at a remove. It’s 1949, and in her Los Angeles suburb, with a caring husband and a devoted toddler, could well be a Betty Friedan exhibit. She too has an errand and a party tonight. She must bake a cake for her war hero husband, it’s his birthday. Yet, something’s missing, and her only defence against ennui is a book, and she begins to read: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Laura too will be influenced by and, in turn, influence Virginia and the two Clarissas.

“Can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel?” asks Cunningham’s Woolf. Mrs Dalloway provided a resounding answer to that question. Now, The Hours has provided an affirmation of the power of stories to shepherd us along.