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Literary Review
Between the lines
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM'S 1998 novel, The Hours, has been in the news recently owing to the runaway success of the film based on it. Pre-release publicity made much of Nicole Kidman's false nose (playing Virginia Woolf) and the performances of other starring choices. But for the reader in India who may have missed the book when it came out, one welcome consequence has been its wider distribution. Whatever the delights of its screen version, the novel is a memorable success on its own terms, its verbal pleasures, as in Woolf herself, more than compensating for visual ones.
The Hours was Virginia Woolf's "working title" for Mrs Dalloway, a novel defined in many ways by the inaugural image of a pause, a hush, before Big Ben strikes. "First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air." That wonderful last sentence creates the mood for a novel rich in moments and pauses, as in the crowded, irresistible, onward rush of mortal life. Cunningham's novel bases itself on Woolf's, building a series of three separate but linked narratives out of its imagined history. First there is Virginia Woolf herself, writing her novel in the intervals of despair, walking the streets of Richmond to escape her husband's anxious protectiveness, entertaining Vanessa and the children to tea, thinking mortal thoughts as she "deals" with the cook. Then there is Mrs. Dalloway in her 1990s New York incarnation, a publisher called Clarissa Vaughan, living out her precursor's youthful fling in a stable lesbian relationship with Sally Seton, buying flowers to give a party for a poet dying of AIDS. And finally, there is Mrs. Brown, not really the woman imagined by Woolf in her celebrated essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown", a 1940s housewife in a suburb of Los Angeles, bored with her husband and child, desperately reading Mrs Dalloway in her bedroom, in a hotel, in the kitchen.
These three women, in their individual worlds, make up the novel's divided universe. But it is a universe finally linked by the threads of Woolf's novel, as by Cunningham's willingness to surprise us with plot, even in a setting rigorously tied to what Mrs Dalloway can provide. They are all here: mad poets, sparrows who chatter in Greek, the flowers, the children, the clock striking, suicide. If The Hours takes us back to re-read Mrs Dalloway, this would be no bad thing, though the earlier novel, in my opinion, will continue to astound us with its brilliance and energy, making Cunningham's pastiche anaemic by contrast. And indeed there are moments of spectral distrust, false notes in idiom and register (such as the typically American use of the verbs "fix" and "act") in Cunningham's anxiously respectful portrayal of Woolf herself at home in Hogarth House. Moreover, the obeisance to the film medium, to the notion of the "star" (Meryl Streep is a glimpsed figure in Cunningham's book long before she is cast to play a character in it), while it may have its cultural justifications, is a touch distressing.
Yet these moments are scarce, and The Hours has its own, very contemporary delights for the reader.
The best parts of the novel are those set in New York and Los Angeles, sections engaging with the mid- and late-20th Century's varied moods of gloom and doom. Cunningham catches tones of desperation, instinctual revulsions in the midst of domestic intimacy or party chatter, in a quieter, more reflective mode than his model, Woolf herself. The AIDS epidemic hangs as heavily over end-of-century America as the memories of the Great War do in 1920s Britain. Cunningham uses his "originals", Mrs. Dalloway and her creator, with humane, subtle, imaginative intricacy. And his conclusion is a triumph: to be savoured by the first-time reader, not revealed here in a review. If there is a weakness in Mrs Dalloway, it is the ending: "What is it is that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was." By contrast, Cunningham takes away some of this excitement from Clarissa and redistributes it, awakening, as all good writers should do, a closing curiosity, an eagerness that propels us beyond the novel's fictive worlds. This is no small achievement.
I wonder if the film succeeds in retaining the tension and triumph of this final moment. But it is to say a great deal of Cunningham's novel that it makes the question a minor one. Ultimately this is a book to be read, an encounter with print and page and the joys of a literate memory, not a pretext for an Oscar-winning performance — though indeed it may inspire one.
The Hours, Michael Cunningham, 1998: Fourth Estate, 2002, £6. 99.
Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor of English at Jadavpur University.
SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI
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