The Antigonish Review
Issue # 122
Randall Curb
Rooms Across the Way
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Farar Straus & Giroux, 230 pp.
ISBN 0374172897, paperback edition, 1999.
In Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours,
Virginia Woolf is one of three women whose lives are briefly, poignantly
chronicled in alternating chapters. The others, wholly fictional, are
Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown. Each woman is immanently, transcendently
alive on a single, different day in the twentieth century. For Mrs. Woolf,
living in the London suburb of Richmond, it is a springtime day in 1923,
the day she writes the first tentative sentences of her new novel, Mrs.
Dalloway "a book about a woman giving a party". For
Clarissa Vaughan, it is a day in June, in Greenwich Village (where she
is about to give a party), in 1998. And for Mrs. Brown, who lives in Los
Angeles, it is a June day in 1949, her husband’s birthday (a small party
is planned) " a day when she begins to read Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
When their days are over, each woman will have had her party (Virginia’s
will be only tea), each will have thought about the fictional character
Clarissa Dalloway, each will be haunted by a kiss, and each will have
tried to find "and utterly, soulfully be" herself.
Clarissa Vaughan loves life and New York and a
woman, named Sally, with whom she has lived for eighteen years. When we
meet her " she is in her 50s " she is leaving her apartment
to go to a florist shop. On her rounds in the Village she sees an old
woman, singing under Washington Square Arch, singing iiii, very
like the old woman that Peter Walsh, Mrs. Dalloway’s former suitor, sees
singing at Regent’s Park tube station. She also meets an old friend, a
gay novelist with a sick lover named Evan. This friend is every bit as
smug and unlikable as Hugh Whitbread, the old friend Mrs. Dalloway encounters
on her errand, who has a sick wife named Evelyn. (And Clarissa will think
of buying Evan a book as a get-well present, and Mrs. Dalloway will think
of buying one for Evelyn.) Eventually, Clarissa will visit her cherished
friend and one-time lover, Richard, who is dying of AIDS and who hears
strange voices, hears singing in archaic Greek. Richard is the man she
once kissed by a pond, in a moment that seems to have determined the rest
of her life. For she didn’t marry Richard; she made her life with Sally,
becoming as much of a wife, in her way, as Mrs. Dalloway is. Clarissa
thinks of that kiss, that long-ago moment: "There is still that singular
perfection, and it’s perfect because it seemed, at the time, so clearly
to promise more." Of course, in Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway did
marry her Richard, and Sally Seton, whom she kissed at age eighteen, will
come to her party and talk of her husband, her five sons. If Sally’s kiss
had ever promised more, the time for that has passed inexorably, and the
girls they were are only ghosts.
Laura Brown is much younger than the two Clarissas
and is very different from them. In 1949 she lives with her husband Dan
and their three-year-old son. It is a quiet suburban life, which she is
not sure she loves. (She thinks of Virginia Woolf, who escaped her life
by walking into a river.) Early in the day Laura is visited by her neighbor
Kitty, who is ill, possibly dying. A kiss passes between the two women.
Laura has never kissed a woman before and thinks she "can kiss Kitty
in the kitchen and love her husband, too." But more than anything,
Laura loves to read, and for a few hours she runs away from her too-familiar
life, checks into a downtown hotel, and reads Mrs. Dalloway. Then
she dutifully returns home. But is her life "husband, son, Kitty,
baby on the way" enough? Is she, in such an existence, authentically
herself? Or is she just beginning to find her own true nature, as Virginia
Woolf found and formed the consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway? Is it here,
in Los Angeles, this June day in 1949, or is it elsewhere? Can a book,
a novel, help tell her who she is?
Cunningham gives Virginia Woolf her day as well.
She rises, washes, dresses (but does not look in the mirror), works on
her new novel. Her day is not a day from Virginia Woolf’s actual life
(not quite), but she does the things Woolf did do "help her husband
with manuscripts, entertain her sister Vanessa and her niece and nephews,
take a walk. In the afternoon she witnesses the funeral of a bird, a thrush,
found by the children. Thus, in every woman’s day in The Hours
there is a little death. Before Vanessa leaves, Virginia kisses her "chastely,
intensely" for without Vanessa she would not be who she is. Then,
like Laura Brown, Virginia wants an escape from domestic everydayness.
She therefore contemplates leaving Richmond, catching a train into London,
walking those city streets, immersing herself in a more fully lived life.
But her husband finds her first, and she too returns home. The beauty
and richness of being, which London represents to her, she will have to
create on paper, word by word, character by character. What she does not
have of life on this day she will give to Clarissa Dalloway.
Making the people in one’s life into "characters"
is a recurring theme in The Hours. There, Virginia Woolf makes
Vanessa and Vanessa’s children characters in her life. She
thinks of them as she would if they were in a novel. Seeing them as fictions,
she finds them most real. Clarissa Vaughan’s Richard, also a novelist,
is like Virginia in that way. As Clarissa realizes, "It is only after
knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an
essentially fictional character, one he has invented...because he, Richard,
needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures."
As for Laura Brown, fiction blurs identity. Cunningham writes of her,
"She is herself and not herself. She is a woman in London, an aristocrat,
pale and charming, a little false; she is Virginia Woolf; and she is this
other, the inchoate, tumbling thing known as herself...." Cunningham
knows that our lives are always in this flux, making and remaking characters
from our mercurial selves, making characters " true or false, a bit
of each " of others. Fiction knows that life is made of fictions,
that personality can sometimes be as fluid as time itself. What do we
do in the face of that? This is the question " essentially it is
the question of how to live, what to love, what to take from the world
for our own reflection " that both Cunningham and Woolf are always
circling. It is at the very heart of their novels.
Beauty, and the richness of life: this is what
the Clarissas, in both novels, really love. It seems so abundantly there
before them in the teeming sensations of their modern cities. Yet Cunningham
and Woolf both imply that there is something superficial about these women,
with their flowers and their parties. They are complacent, and, for the
novelist, complacency must be jolted. So both heroines are forced to confront
madness and death, to question their self-images, to imagine otherness.
Self-knowledge cannot be achieved in a vacuum; other lives must be considered,
consulted.
On the afternoon before her party, Mrs. Dalloway
looks out her bedroom window into the window of an old woman across the
way. (Richard, in The Hours, has such a window, such an old woman
across the way from his apartment; she rearranges the glass figures on
the sill from time to time.) There, in a glance, it is " the miracle
and the enigma : that old lady whom she does not know, in her own singular
room, living her singular life. Virginia Woolf, in sympathy and generosity,
gives Mrs. Dalloway an ineluctable revelation. She sees that the "supreme
mystery" was "simply this: here was one room; there another.
Did religion solve that, or love?"
For Michael Cunningham, taking his cue from Woolf,
there is a corollary mystery to be found in the repeated, reinforcing
patterns of lives and fiction. For all the isolation, all the unknowable
rooms in the world, there is inevitable connection. A light here casts
a shadow " or a reflection " there. Virginia Woolf’s life illuminates
Laura Brown’s. Clarissa Dalloway lives in Clarissa Vaughan, June 1923
in June 1998. The writing of Mrs. Dalloway crystallized the
consciousness of its author, strengthened and supported her. The reading
of it helps shape the thinking " the quiddity " of Laura, of
Michael Cunningham, of any sympathetic reader. Such connections go on
every minute, every day, every hour. Meaning and evanescence are always
colliding; catch the moments you can. Laura Brown thinks of fleeting time,
of life: "Here it is...there it goes. The page is about to turn."
Each page of The Hours is a little
miracle.
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