On this level, The Hours was a mostly satisfying experience. Even without any research, it is immediately clear that it is a novel about another novel and its author -- in this case Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf -- a work and an author, unfortunately, I have little experience with.
But there are three characters, each in a different time and place, and each experiencing something similar. There is Virginia Woolf herself, in the 1920s, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway itself, featuring a character named Clarissa Dalloway who, among other things, plans a party; there is Laura Brown, in the 1950s, reading Mrs. Dalloway and trying to make sense of its as she plans a party of her own for her husband; and there is Clarissa Vaughan, in the 1990s, the modern and unironic embodiment of Clarissa Dalloway, also planning a party for ex-lover and friend, a poet named Richard Brown (Laura’s son), who is receiving a literary award.
These characters and their stories are sufficiently intertwined and Cunningham’s prose is sufficiently resonant with their common feelings and inner lives to keep one actively turning the pages, anxious to see what and where things are going to go.
I only learned after finishing the work that The Hours was Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway, which places even greater emphasis on this, the central metaphor of the three characters and the entire novel.
He says, “I don’t know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.”
“You don’t have to go to the party. You don’t have to go to the ceremony. You don’t have to do anything at all.”
“But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another. I’m so sick.”
“You have good days still. You know you do.”
“Not really. It’s kind of you to say so, but I’ve felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn’t that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability.”
This is Richard Brown, the poet, who is dying of AIDS, speaking to Clarissa Vaughan, and he sums up his difficulty with the hours in a perfectly understandable way. Pain and sickness can create the situation where any one of us would dread the chronic, inexorable passing of each and every one of them.
But there are other forms of dread.
Kitty looks into her coffee cup with elaborately false, foolish absorption. She seems, briefly, like a simple, ordinary woman seated at a kitchen table. Her magic evaporates; it is possible to see how she’ll look at fifty -- she’ll be fat, mannish, leathery, wry and ironic about her marriage, one of those women of whom people say, ‘She used to be quite pretty, you know.’ The world is already, subtly, beginning to leave her behind. Laura stabs out her cigarette, thinks of lighting another, decides against it. She makes good coffee carelessly; she takes good care of her husband and child; she lives in this house where no one wants, no one owes, no one suffers. She is pregnant with another child. What does it matter is she is neither glamorous nor a paragon of domestic competence?
This is one paragraph of many from all three of the women’s stories -- this one about Laura Brown and her neighbor Kitty -- where they examine the painful ennui of all of their situations, the inexorable passing of each of their hours, and of knowing that none of them measure up to the expectations of their male-dominated environments. For Virginia Woolf, it is an unfulfilled desire to satisfy her literary critics, for Laura Brown it is the gentle but sanctioned demands of her husband and son, and for Clarissa Vaughan it is the famous life that Richard Brown has led since the end of their love affair thirty years ago. Sometimes this ennui borders simply on the melancholy and sometimes on the downright suicidal -- but it is always there, permeating the prose like a lingering miasma -- impossible to ignore, impossible to blow away.
And, significantly, like Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours does end with a suicide, this one of Richard Brown, who allows himself to slip and fall out of his apartment window in the hours before the party Clarissa has planned for him.
She reaches the window in time to see Richard still in flight, his robe billowing, and it seems even now as if it might be a minor accident, something reparable. She sees him touch the ground five floors below, sees him kneel on the concrete, sees his head strike, hears the sound he makes, and yet she believes, at least for another moment, leaning out over the sill, that he will stand up again, groggy perhaps, winded, but still himself, still whole, still able to speak.
It is not to be. Richard is dead.
She knows even before she descends these last stairs that he is dead. His head is lost among the folds of the robe but she can see the puddle of blood, dark, almost black, that has formed where his head must be. She can see the utter stillness of his body, one arm extended at a peculiar angle, palm up, and both bare legs white and naked as death itself. He is still wearing the gray felt slippers she bought for him.
And in the aura of this irrevocable act, this ultimate solution to the ceaseless progression of his hours, Clarissa, like all the women in the novel -- perhaps, Cunningham wants to say, like all women? -- is struck speechless both by Richard’s courage and by her own inability to similarly act.
It ends here, then, on a pallet of concrete, under the clotheslines, amid shards of glass. She runs her hand gently, down from his shoulder along the frail curve of his back. Guiltily, as if she is doing something forbidden, she leans over and rests her forehead against his spine while it is still, in some way, his; while he is still in some way Richard Worthington Brown. She can smell the stale flannel of the robe, the winey sharpness of his unbathed flesh. She should like to speak to him, but can’t. She simply rests her head, lightly, against his back. If she were able to speak she would say something -- she can’t tell what, exactly -- about how he had had the courage to create, and how, perhaps more important, he has had the courage to love singularly, over the decades, against all reason. She would talk to him about how she herself, Clarissa, loved him in return, loved him enormously, but left him on a street corner over thirty years ago (and, really, what else could she have done?). She would confess her desire for a relatively ordinary life (neither more nor less than what most people desire), and to how much she wanted him to come to her party and exhibit his devotion in front of her guests. She would ask his forgiveness for shying away, on what would prove to be the day of his death, from kissing him on the lips, and for telling herself she did so only for the sake of his health.
Ennui, indeed.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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