[Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours

Fri Aug 11 11:55:28 EDT 2023

Dear Matt,

Thanks so much for these fascinating thoughts—really eye-opening for me! (One question I have been thinking a little about it why that particular novel broke out in the way it did, when it did). I really appreciate the time you have taken to send these thoughts.

All the best,

Mark

From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> On Behalf Of Matthew Cheney via Vwoolf
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2023 11:19 AM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours

Thanks for these great reflections. The Hours as a novel brought me back to Woolf and helped solidify my interest in her work as something more than literary history. I was in my early 20s when the novel was released, and had done serious reading 

Thanks for these great reflections. The Hours as a novel brought me back to Woolf and helped solidify my interest in her work as something more than literary history. I was in my early 20s when the novel was released, and had done serious reading and study of Woolf in my college years, but had drifted away and developed in my own mind a sense of her as not especially relevant to the current era. (Relevancy being very important to me in my early 20s, still not quite having escaped the deep narcissism of adolescence.) The Hours was a book I read primarily because it was by Michael Cunningham, and Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway were nice added bonuses.

Cunningham's earlier novel A Home at the End of the World was very important to me, a book I read in my first year of college in New York City. I hadn't loved Flesh and Blood, his follow-up novel, which felt too commercial to me then (how I, at that age, defined "commercial", I hardly remember), but The Hours was short, involved Woolf, and was available at the local library, so I happily gave it a shot. And was blown away. Really, few books have affected me as quickly and deeply. (Another of the joys of youth!) I found the structure engaging, but even more so the sentences, which just seemed perfect to me. I was far enough away from my Woolf studies that I didn't nitpick, but rather threw myself into the imaginative, imagined world. It was one of those lucky moments of reading exactly the right book at exactly the right time. Its aesthetic and emotional structures enraptured me. I was just out of New York, AIDS was very much on my mind, life felt terribly uncertain, and the mix of Cunningham's mind and words with a fictive Woolf was the perfect recipe.

What I remember most from the reception of the book then is how shocked I was that Cunningham hit the mainstream and won the Pulitzer. Flesh and Blood may have gotten some attention (I remember it being in quite a few bookstores), but openly gay fiction was still pretty marginalized, and Cunningham was seen (or so I remember) as an exciting gay novelist more than as an exciting novelist. I had bought my cherished copy of A Home at the End of the World at A Different Light bookstore, not Barnes & Noble. Cunningham's publisher clearly saw him as someone well positioned to break out of the niche, but as obvious as it feels in retrospect, a novel like The Hours didn't quite seem like it had huge potential for bestsellerdom. I remember a thrill when it won the Pulitzer because it felt like a vindication of my own taste (ha!) but more importantly a recognition of a writer who came from a world I recognized, a writer I had followed because of his association with and attachment to that world. I hurried to the nearest bookstore after the announcement of the Pulitzer because I wanted to get a hardcover copy of my own, both as a memento of the moment and as a way to thank the bookstore for having a copy in stock.

The book's unexpected popularity opened up all sorts of opportunities for conversation, too — I remember a colleague of mine loving The Hours and asking me what else to read and I suggested A Home at the End of the World. She read that next and it really changed her perspective on people who were not, like her, heterosexual, white married women. (That had been her way into The Hours, and it began the process of thinking more broadly for her, as she explained it to me, at least.) So for me the importance of The Hours is less as a Woolfian novel than as part of the gay male literary world of the 1990s. It then rekindled my interest in Woolf, and allowed a greater sense of Woolf's work as having power for that present moment. I went back to Mrs. Dalloway renewed. For a while, I even taught a high school class using both books, but ultimately decided they were better on their own, for me at least.

I haven't watched the movie in ages, but I loved it when it came out, mostly I think because of that sense of recognition — something that had been part of my own small experience was now getting worldwide attention. I found the performances powerful (despite Nicole Kidman's nose!), the adaptation sensitive, the somewhat gauzy respectability of it all a plus more than a minus because it felt so strangely affirming to watch what we might think of as a prestige picture about this subject, these people — remember, this is before even Brokeback Mountain. It's only 10 years since Philadelphia. I remember coming out of the theatre after first watching the film and just feeling overwhelmed in all sorts of ways, partly from the story and from seeing a cherished book adapted not terribly, but also from a sense of ... I just watched that in the same movie theatre where I have seen big action movies. Also, we were only a couple years out from 9/11 and I'm sure the representation of NYC in the film got emotionally intertwined with that for me. (Interesting to think of the book as pre-9/11, the movie as post-. I don't know if it makes any difference, but I've not thought of them that way before, and it's relevant for anything set in the city.) For all their pathos, the novel and then the movie made me feel hopeful for a better future for both literature and life.

Cheers,

Matt Cheney

On Fri, Aug 11, 2023 at 9:23 AM Mark Hussey via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> > wrote:

Thanks Pat and Trudi. And much as I am enjoying the cozy mysteries posts, I’m still hoping for more responses to my question about The Hours…😉 On Thursday, August 10, 2023, 02: 02: 38 PM EDT, Pat Laurence <pat. laurence@ gmail. com> wrote:  

Thanks Pat and Trudi. And much as I am enjoying the cozy mysteries posts, I’m still hoping for more responses to my question about The Hours…😉

On Thursday, August 10, 2023, 02:02:38 PM EDT, Pat Laurence <pat.laurence at gmail.com <mailto:pat.laurence at gmail.com> > wrote: 

I meant to add that observations on Woolf conferences are, of course, dated in the review.

On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 1:59 PM Pat Laurence <pat.laurence at gmail.com <mailto:pat.laurence at gmail.com> > wrote:

Following up on the Lillian Crawford review, here's mine of the Cunningham novel, The Hours, that appeared in English Literature in Translation (2000) in which I assert--that despite certain breakthroughs--he does not "get the rhythm right."

Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998)

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is a novel about reading: a homage to Virginia Woolf. It is one of many books to come out in the past few years in which a writer or critic reflects not only on the process of reading itself but also rambles among the works of a particularly-loved author: Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human; Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life,  Not a Novel; Stephen Marlowe’s The Lighthouse at the End of the World (involving Edgar Allen Poe). Now in Michael Cunningham’s novel, we have a fictional exploration of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway that was called The Hours among other titles in an earlier stage of the project. The idea is a fascinating one and in Cunningham’s writing the experience of reading turns in upon itself. It is a postmodern critical and fictional turn described by the French literary critic, Gerard Genette:

The text is that Moebius strip in which the inner and outer sides, the signifying and the signified sides, the side of writing and the side of reading, ceaselessly turn and cross over, in which writing is constantly read, in which reading is constantly written and transcribed. The critic must also enter the interplay of this strange reversible circuit and thus become, as Proust says, and like every true reader, “one’s own reader.” 1

We are in a hall of mirrors as we read ourselves reading Cunningham reading Woolf. We “participate” as readers (and writers!) of this novel in new ways.

Why are so many writers and critics preoccupied with writing about the process of reading? Perhaps the images on the computer screen have already darkened our reading sky as we intellectually venture into the Internet rather than ride the well-worn magic carpet. Are we as a culture already nostalgic about the demise of THE BOOK? Browse through any popular periodical, and you will find that the number of articles and images of technology far outnumber discussions or, indeed, images of books. Perhaps then writers and critics turn to the authors they have read and loved to pay tribute or to find inspiration and material. Perhaps they are preserving authors from the threat of being unread as “story” takes new forms in hypertext, and on the Internet, CD-ROMs, television, and books on tape. 

Michael Cunningham has written of his own introduction to reading Virginia Woolf. He remembers he “was in high school, where a very rough, difficult, slightly crazed girl with teased hair and long fingernails, who used to hang around behind the gym and smoke cigarettes, proclaimed her to be a genius.” Admitting that he was not particularly “bookish,” Cunningham found Mrs. Dalloway in the local bookstore “and the book just nailed me; I’ve thought about it almost constantly ever since” (PW 11/2/98).

It’s refreshing to me as a Virginia Woolf scholar to read a male reader reading Woolf: a male reader, a novelist, a male-homosexual reader-writer reading Woolf. In my attendance at the annual Virginia Woolf Society Conference over the past nine years, I have always been struck by the small number of men who attend or deliver papers. Is Virginia Woolf a gendered novelist? Do only women read and like her?  I remember mentioning to a Dean in my college that I was writing a book about Virginia Woolf. He looked at me patiently and said, “yes, my wife reads Virginia Woolf.” Hmmm. But perhaps this is changing, and it is interesting that some of the male readers who may be drawn to Woolf and the sexually-liberated Bloomsberries are homosexual. Cunningham has also written, Home at the End of the World, a well-received novel which presents in alternating voices, the stories of two boys from Cleveland (one, gay) and their families, reflecting new formations of gender and desire. It is this exploration of gender and desire as well as Woolf that motivates Cunningham’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Through reading Woolf and reinventing (and sometimes parroting) some of her characters and stories, Michael Cunningham writes about new kinds of heterosexual friendship as well as heterosexual and homosexual romance. It is this that belongs to him.

But this is also a book about translation: “It is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century.” Cunningham translates the story of a 1920’s London society hostess, Mrs. Dalloway, into an American context in 1990. Mrs. Dalloway is now Woolf’s hottest novel given Eileen Atkin’s film version starring Vanessa Redgrave last year. In her Diary, Woolf announces “I want to criticize the social system, & to show it at work” (D 2, 243-44) as well as sketch the society ladies she knew, like Sybil Colefax and Lady Ottoline Morrell whose lives were shaped by giving parties. They were women who like Clarissa “could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)” (p.182). She worried instead about the flowers, the silver, her dress, and most importantly, the “art” of the guest list. For Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s exploration of the “party consciousness” just as her other books explore other states of mind.  Woolf “deconstructs” the socialite wife of Parlimentarian, Richard Dalloway. She “digs tunnels behind her characters” and shows us that Mrs. Dalloway is a woman with a youthful past as Clarissa, a beautiful vivacious young woman in love with both the intense Peter and the scintillating Sally. Clarissa, it should be noted, is one of the few married women in Woolf’s novels with a first name (i.e. Mrs. Ramsay). She is a woman who finds that “death” happens into the middle of her party. She overhears one of her guests, Dr. William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, tell the story of the sad, shell-shocked Septimus, returned soldier from World War I, who has jumped to his death from a window that afternoon. And so, both the party and death--“What a lark! What a plunge!” announces Mrs. Dalloway on the first page of the novel--structures the novel.

Cunningham also uses this structure of the party and the death in his novel. In fact, the structure, the themes, the characters, the author as character, phrasings, and attempts at Woolf’s writing rhythm could all be said to be derived—if we attend to slippery “origins.” But deconstructionists have taught us that such pursuits are futile. Let’s observe instead how successful Cunningham is in achieving his own effect intertwined as he is with Woolf.

In his novel, he skillfully intertwines three stories all of which happen on a single day, each told from a different woman’s point of view. First, in Cunningham’s novel, there is the story of Woolf herself trying desperately to work on her manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway in 1923 as she deals with the distractions of a visit from her sister Vanessa and her husband Leonard’s work on the Hogarth Press, a press they acquired in 1915 as part of Virginia’s therapy.  The second tale, takes Woolf’s legendary character, Mrs. Brown, from a 1923 article, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in which Woolf queries how she, as a modernist author, is to describe a dowdy woman whom she observes in the corner of a railway car. It is an important essay in which Woolf sets out modernist principles for the development of “character.”  Here she questions the Edwardian authors, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, who will describe the legendary Mrs. Brown according to “realist” modes—where she resides, how much income she earns--what is she like from the “outside.” Challenging this mode of character development, Woolf will advance the modernist platform, and her interest in interiority. She will be interested in what Mrs. Brown thinks and feels, or as described in another novel, “what is unsaid.” Since this is a review that is not only about Cunningham reading Woolf  but I, as a critic and scholar, reading Woolf and reading Cunningham reading Woolf, you may very well say, “leave your knowledge of Mrs. Brown  out of this review.” But how can I? 

The traces of Woolf’s Mrs. Brown and Woolf’s larger fictional questions are present in my mind as I read Cunningham. How do we describe and develop “character” in fiction. I read and observe Cunningham’s transformation of Mrs. Brown from a frumpily dressed 1920’s Englishwoman in the corner of a railway car to a 1990’s American housewife, mother of a young son, Laura Brown. The translation of British themes and times, England in 1921 with shell-shocked soldiers struggling with insanity just after the war, to the America of the 1990’s experiencing an Aids epidemic and the fallout from the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s. The story of Laura Brown, the depressed housewife, is the best of Cunningham’s three. Here he hits his OWN stride. The plot is simple. Mrs. Brown is an unfulfilled housewife with a  young  child who adores her (much like James with Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse), pregnant with another child, living in Los Angeles. On this particular morning in 1923, we find her planning a small party, a birthday party, and attempting to make a proper cake. Delightfully (for all literary mothers with such fantasies), she escapes her unsuccessful baking day to go off to a hotel to rent a room (no. 19 where Doris Lessing also places her suicidal housewife) for a few hours to read (can you guess?) Mrs. Dalloway. The wickedness of modern brainy moms: an illicit day in June spent in a hotel room reading Woolf. As Mrs. Dalloway says in Woolf’s novel, “It is very very dangerous to live even one day.” And one of the messages of this novel is that reading can sometimes save one from danger.

For in the third story in Cunningham’s novel that artfully intertwines with the second, is about Richard, the young son of Laura Brown. He has watched her every unhappy mood, thought and action with unnatural attention and love, and he grows up to become a writer born of his mother, the reader. He is now dying of Aids. One of his best friends is Clarissa Vaughan, a woman of about fifty, a lesbian who lives in Greenwich Village, with whom he has shared intimacy of a certain sort in youth. He is modelled on Peter in Woolf’s novel but there is a homosexual reversal in the plot. Judith Butler’s challenge to the “heterosexual matrix” of literature is actualized in Cunningham’s new glance at relationships. The happiness of the traditional marriage plot (Laura Brown and her husband) is reconsidered; homosexual relationships become more central.  Clarissa, a lesbian in Cunningham’s novel is planning a party for Richard who has just received a literary prize. But the party never happens for this Richard like Septimus in Woolf’s novel plunges out of a window to his death, unable to deal with his deteriorating physical condition. Is there an implied connection implied between Laura Brown’s depression, thoughts of suicide, and her son’s plunge to his death? In this novel, the party, a metaphor for the continuing celebration of life, does not prevail as it does in Woolf’s novel. The party never happens; death does. And herein lies the difference between Woolf and Cunningham’s vision. 

His novel is the underside of Woolf’s: he teases out the homosexual subtext that Woolf critics have observed. He plays upon the knowledge of Woolf’s brief physical relationship with Vita SackvilleWest which began in 1925 just when Mrs. Dalloway was published. Though Clarissa makes a heterosexual choice in Woolf’s novel, Cunningham’s Clarissa and Richard make another, questioning and creating new forms of romance and relationship, culturally and fictionally.

But another reader, not the scholarly reader, but the “common reader” might say to this reviewer: I’ve never really read Woolf. Or I tried to read To the Lighthouse in college but nothing ever seems to happen or didn’t Woolf commit suicide or wasn’t she a lesbian or I don’t know who Mrs. Brown is or I’ve only seen the movie. Such a reader might say, “I like Michael Cunningham’s novel because he helps me to read Woolf.” Woolf is now so burdened with the cult of personality haunting most authors today: her manic-depressive patterns, her notorious suicide, walking in a trance into the River Ouse with her walking stick. Death in the middle of the river of her words. Perhaps for these readers—for this essay is about different readers—Michael Cunningham has done a service. We read a version of Woolf through reading Michael Cunningham.

But for those of us who do read and love Woolf, Cunningham can be clever, yes; imaginative, yes; slick, yes: a writer of ambition. Given that he has created three ingenious plots and taken his characters and inspiration from Woolf, what might we now say about his writing style and presentation of mind on the page, Woolf’s great gifts to the twentieth-century novel.  Cunningham himself mentions in interviews that he greatly admires her style and has ambitions to achieve it in his own writing, and reviewers, in turn, praise his “poetic” style comparing it to Woolf’s. Let’s compare parallel scenes to illuminate the differences. Interestingly, as someone who knows Woolf’s novel well, one feels the ghostly presence of Woolf throughout, as if Cunningham has Mrs. Dalloway open before him as he pens his shadow novel. Let’s compare Cunningham’s passage about Clarissa on 8th Street & 5th Avenue in New York with Woolf’s Clarissa crossing Victoria Street in London:

She straightens her shoulders as she stands at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the light. There she is, thinks Willie Bass, who passes her some mornings just about here. The old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in jeans and a man’s cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India? Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the far bank when it is beginning to know for certain the it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out. She waits patiently for the light. (Cunningham, p.13)

Woolf’s Clarissa:

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright. 

     For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty,--one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben Strikes. There! (Woolf p. 4)

Woolf’s sentences here pass through time, minds, and emotion as she collapses the partitions of the mind, boundaries between narrator and characters, speech and thought, indeed, what is outward and what is inward. She weaves in and out of different kinds of consciousness: from third person narration to Scope Purvis’s mind, to the narrator’s brilliant metaphor that merges narrator and character, to Clarissa’s mind. Deftly, she describes Clarissa with “a touch of the bird about her, of the jay.” She is never physically described; indeed Clarissa like many of Woolf’s characters does not seem to have a body. On the other hand, note the leaden adjectives in Cunningham’s description: his Clarissa “treads” the ground in ethnic slippers, “a female mammoth,” with a slick “good-witch sort of charm.” Mired in literal, cliched adjectives, Cunningham barely touches the flight of Woolf’s mind, sentences and metaphors. And herein lies the difference. 

Woolf said of her own writing of a morning: “style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words” (Letters III, p.242). Those who know the pulses of Woolf’s scintillating, dancing sentences and expressions of mind and heart on the page know that Cunningham--despite his accomplishments in this novel--does not get the rhythm right.

1 Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Columbia 

      UP, 1982, p.70. 

Patricia Laurence,

Professor Emerita

English Department

City College of New York

English Literature in Translation (2000)

On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 1:29 PM Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> > wrote:

Online ones would be more fun…. !!! Vara Neverow (she/her/hers) Professor, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program Managing Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany Southern Connecticut State University New Haven, CT 06515 203-392-6717 

Online ones would be more fun….!!!

Vara Neverow

(she/her/hers)

Professor, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program

Managing Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 

Southern Connecticut State University 

New Haven, CT 06515

203-392-6717

neverowv1 at southernct.edu <mailto:neverowv1 at southernct.edu> 

I acknowledge that Southern Connecticut State University was built on traditional territory of the indigenous peoples and nations of the Paugusett and Quinnepiac peoples.

  _____  

From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu <mailto:vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> > on behalf of Mark Hussey via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> >
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2023 1:27:26 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>  <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> >
Subject: [Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours 

I am seeing refs to this article pop up in various places, and wondered what people think of the headline’s accuracy: did The Hours (I guess they really mean Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of VW in the film) really “change how 

I am seeing refs to this article pop up in various places, and wondered what people think of the headline’s accuracy: did The Hours (I guess they really mean Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of VW in the film) really “change how we see” VW?  Offline responses welcome!

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230808-the-hours-at-25-the-book-that-changed-how-we-see-virginia-woolf__;!!KGKeukY!3drSixvNqvanwLNJEB2dL0zEZgzWblZxE0esz6klfbLru66FOGg9SQJz4QnMCpAT3L2--hH_5Br-Jr-Sy22Elg$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230808-the-hours-at-25-the-book-that-changed-how-we-see-virginia-woolf__;!!KGKeukY!w5PVwvRZFQykXOrinAgSOKgcVuep8KtG_uyBIN2_DYpnUfd9xGQ1QtQAvolGGnzW_TN93bZ4PxNdejQl3hc9Zg$> 

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