Michael Cunningham: The Hours

Excerpt from Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism

Chapter excerpted from my book Recent Gay Novels and the Return to Literary Modernism, available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.

I noted in my introduction that Alan Hollinghurst in The Line of Beauty has his many references to Henry James and is curious about matters of style that an interest in that modernist writer will bring out. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (H) has a far closer relationship to one particular modernist novel. His characters and scenes repeat, to a remarkable degree, those of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Other than a brief introduction that narrates Woolf’s suicide by drowning in 1941, there are three temporal settings in this novel. In 1999 or so, Clarissa Vaughn begins her day, as Clarissa Dalloway does in Woolf’s novel, buying flowers for a party she is giving in the evening. The party will honor her longtime close friend of over thirty years, a gay poet named Richard Brown whom she met while they were undergraduates at Columbia in the mid-Sixties. Richard has just won a prestigious poetry award, but he is also in the late stages of AIDS and the new medications available do not seem to be helping him. Both because of her given name and because of certain qualities of her character, he has always called Clarissa Mrs. Dalloway.

A second temporal setting is 1949 Los Angeles. We follow the life of Laura Brown, her husband, and her three-year-old son Richie, who we are not surprised will become the seriously ill poet of 1999. Laura, marrying a returning soldier because it seemed the shape that her life was supposed to take, finds the marriage not just suffocating and restricting but also, at times, very close to unbearable in the emptiness and loss of self it threatens her with, when she has always been at home in the world of books. She finds the thought of suicide attractive but discovers that taking time for herself, in order to read the novel Mrs. Dalloway, gives her the sense of distance that she needs. In the scenes we are offered, she returns to her family after an afternoon of flight and wonders if she might indeed be at home in this sort of family life, with the real pleasures and affections it offers. But we find out eventually that she did try to commit suicide, unsuccessfully, and also left her family for good, retreating to a life as a librarian in Canada, at home with the books that had always been her favorite pastime.

The third temporal setting is 1923, when Virginia Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway and is also fending off madness, which often comes in the form of severe headaches and hallucinations. She is supposed to be treating her disease by living a calm, healthy life in the suburb of Richmond. Yet she wants very much to be at the center of things in London again. The excitement of life in London, her madness, and her capacity to write well seem to belong together in her experience. Clarissa Dalloway is not notably intellectual, but she has a keen appreciation of the everyday beauty and vitality of small incidents and ordinary appearances, and she takes pride in her ability to bring people together at a party. Woolf supposes at first that she will let Clarissa die at the novel’s end, but then decides that this death will occur to the mad, shell-shocked former poet and soldier Septimus Smith.

Cunningham develops many subtle, detailed, and sometimes ingenious parallels between his novel and Woolf’s, with important transformations as well. Wolf’s Clarissa, when young, had an intense relationship, including a passionate kiss, with a young woman named Sally Seton. She was courted by Peter Walsh, very much in love with her, but chose to marry Richard Dalloway, a government official. His more conservative emotional life allows her to have a greater space of her own, and so greater freedom, in the marriage, and that has been a life priority for her. Cunningham’s Clarissa differs in that she has actually formed a long-term lesbian partnership with a woman also named Sally, as if Cunningham is writing an alternative history in which Clarissa Dalloway has gone on instead to make Sally Seton her life partner. Instead of the importunings of someone like Peter Walsh, this Clarissa’s sense of another road she might have taken involves her quite passionate friendship with the poet Richard (who shares Richard Dalloway’s name). Whatever bisexual elements are alive in this poet responded strongly to Clarissa when both were undergraduates and they had an affair, even as he was attracted to Louis, another classmate. She wonders if they could somehow have managed a life together, as Clarissa Dalloway wonders about herself and Peter Walsh. Richard for his part thinks of Sally as affording Clarissa a “safe” marriage-like relationship, rather as what Clarissa Dalloway has with Richard. Peter Walsh, returning from a spotty career that has led to a long period in India, seems to be recognizing, while also not quite admitting, how much he has loved Clarissa all along. Richard the poet for his part has recently written his only novel, a heavily autobiographical work that focuses very much on Clarissa, whose character dies at the novel’s end, as Woolf’s Clarissa was at first destined to do.

If Richard has some of the allure of Peter Walsh, his clearest parallel from Woolf’s novel is Septimus Smith. In Septimus’s case, his experience of the trenches of the Great War has given him a severe case of post-traumatic stress, especially as an officer and close friend of his named Evans was killed very close to him. He has mad hallucinations, as he sees figures approaching him who are dead, imagines that an airplane is signaling to him, and expects to burst into flame at any moment. Richard’s hallucinations, in turn, are due to some deterioration in his brain due to his late-stage AIDS. Both Septimus and Richard will kill themselves by jumping from windows near the end of their respective novels.

There is a rather curious parallel between Miss Kilman in Woolf’s novel and Mary Krull in Cunningham’s. Kilman is a religious fanatic who has somehow captivated the mind and loyalty of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth. She has a tortured air and wears her poverty and suffering as a mark of contempt for people like Clarissa, those who live comfortable lives and are not moved by her own religious passion and moral concerns. Clarissa despises Kilman with some of the strongest emotions she expresses in the novel. Elizabeth is taking Kilman shopping, as her clothes and shoes are falling apart. Kilman, it appears, is attracted to Elizabeth and feels great emptiness without her, but Elizabeth, while moved by Kilman’s religious and moral zeal, has no feelings of that sort for her. Cunningham transforms Miss Kilman into Mary Krull, a feminist queer theorist who has made that discipline into her fanatical religion. She is, from Clarissa’s point of view, “finally too despotic in her intellectual and moral intensity, her endless demonstration of cutting-edge, leather-jacketed righteousness.” (H 23) Clarissa’s daughter Julia is in thrall to Krull’s intellectual outlook and style, which emphasizes T-shirts and combat boots, a different version of the attire of Miss Kilman. She mocks Clarissa for her comforts and her quaint, non-radical notions of lesbian identity, as if her “normal” relations with Sally will protect her when the perverts, including the assimilated ones, are rounded up. Julia is taking Mary shopping and we see, in the continuing parallel, that Mary is in love with Julia but that Julia, in spite of her attachment to Mary as a symbol of radical feminist theory, does not reciprocate these feelings.

There are parallels even with minor characters. In Woolf’s novel, Hugh Whitbread has a vague connection with the royal court but is treated generally with scorn and condescension because of his overall traits of character. Clarissa thinks of picking up an appropriate book for his wife Evelyn. In Cunningham’s novel, Whitbread, with his initials reversed, has become Walter Hardy and Evelyn has become Walter’s gay partner Evan, still sick but responding to the new AIDS treatments. Clarissa is pondering what book she might buy for Evan. Walter, like Hugh, is very much looked down upon, in his case because in his mid-forties, he goes around with a baseball cap and running shoes as if he were still a young gay man working out every day at the gym. He is also, on the other hand, said to have been generous and supportive when Evan was in the worst stages of his illness. He writes popular novels about well-muscled young men and their predictable and romanticized emotional lives.

Other minor points in Woolf’s novel have their parallels. If Woolf offers an unexpected shift of perspective from Clarissa’s stream of consciousness, as she herself is observed walking through Westminster by Scrope Purvis, Clarissa Vaughn’s perspective as she wanders through Greenwich Village and Soho is suddenly interrupted by Willie Bass’s observations of her. Septimus and Richard will both think that birds or hallucinated figures are singing to them in ancient Greek. Richard’s former lover Louis will reappear suddenly, having returned from San Francisco as Peter Walsh has returned suddenly from India. Peter and Louis share the trait of bursting into tears unusually easily and both are involved in new relationships that seem unpromising, Peter with the wife of a British official in India and Louis with a young student of his whose passions seem unreliable. If Clarissa Dalloway is interrupted on her walk by a discussion about just which government official has just been sighted in a limousine, Clarissa Vaughn is interrupted by a discussion about which Hollywood actress has just emerged from the trailer of a movie being filmed in the Village.

The parallels drawn by Cunningham with Mrs. Dalloway, then, are ubiquitous. But that is a merely superficial return to the scene of literary modernism. Cunningham also writes to display his command of some of the literary resources of that era. He will not be looking to the more radical forms of literary modernism, as in Gertrude Stein or surrealism, and he will not even be as formally experimental as Woolf herself is in her stream-of-consciousness technique. What he wishes to take from his modernist forbears, it appears, is the practice of acute and subtle penetration into an individual’s complex psychological states, as well as the practice of forming well-crafted sentences that advance with a convincing rhythm and a quiet beauty. There is a sense as well that such an attention to the crafting of sentences is not merely a matter of style. Such questions of style, rather, are related to profound issues of self-formation, of shaping a kind of self that can maintain its rhythms and patterns of individuation, of appropriating experiences with a characteristic phenomenology and habits of ordering, even as very difficult stresses are faced. Hegel examined subjectivity as a structure that is always implicitly self-ordering in its ordering of what is other. Literary style can make that implicit self-ordering more evident, that way of accentuating and sustaining the patterns of selfhood that one keeps going as one gives shape to one’s experiences of a complicated external world.

Cunningham brings out this aspect more than Woolf does herself when he emphasizes scenes that do not have true parallels in Woolf’s novel: those involving the three-year-old Richie in Los Angeles in 1949 (he who will become the poet dying of AIDS in Manhattan) and his mother Laura. There is a clear relationship between a complex early attachment and his later aesthetic practice. Richie is “transparently smitten with her; he is comic and tragic in his hopeless love.” (H 44) For him she is “the animating spirit, the life of the house.” (H 47) But he is also anxious and easily filled with remorse. He is a great observer of her words and actions and somehow perceives in her, quite anxiously, a readiness to leave the family. He sees her comforting a neighbor woman who has been diagnosed with cancer and the kiss between the two women turns passionate. Then she goes off unexpectedly to a hotel to have a space to herself and to read Mrs. Dalloway, while leaving him for hours with a caregiver. “He is flushed, alarmed, almost overwhelmed by love and grief.” (H 189) He sounds frantic when he tells her that he loves her. (H 192) “He is devoted, entirely, to the observation and deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all.” (H 192) Laura recognizes that “he will watch her forever. He will always know when something is wrong.” (H 193) It is perhaps not surprising that Clarissa, meeting Laura after Richard’s death, thinks that “here is the woman from Richard’s poetry. Here is the lost mother, the thwarted suicide: here is the woman who walked away.” (H 221) She describes his particular contribution to poetry: “His defiantly prolix lamentations over worlds either vanishing or lost entirely.” (H 65) Like many of his modernist forbears, he “observed so minutely and exhaustively” and “tried to split the atom with words.” (H 65) She later describes his poems as “Richard’s elegies, his beautifully cadenced laments, his unsentimental offerings of love and fury,” that are in some sense about “the lost mother, the martyr and fiend.” (H 225)

 We are dealing, then, in the deep structure of Cunningham’s novel, with the intricate symbiosis between aesthetic achievement and, on the other side, a psychological space concerned with attachment, loss, separateness, grief, and strategies and compensations for loss. That aesthetic-psychological symbiosis returns one in some respects to the transitional space of childhood, when the entire way an individual would learn to pattern relations of self and other was at stake, and when more mobile, shifting, oscillating relations were in play. Richie’s anxiety about what seems a profound loss of what is essential to his very being is never quite left behind as he matures. His poetry will be a way of finding a self-securing and self-sustaining activity that can face up to such an unsurvivable loss and that can allow re-experiencing of it without disintegrating. The tone of elegy and lamentation that Clarissa finds in it will be proper because one will always have in view, behind any scene of everyday life, a lost attachment that can never be recovered, an absence that seems so profound as to threaten disintegration. Such a deeply framing psychological mood will affect one’s overall metaphysical account of the world, so that it too hides behind its everyday scenes a space of emptiness and of necessary relinquishing.

The description of Richard suggests that for a male writer the freedom of separateness and independence, of a well-achieved individuation, may carry with it an elegiac sense of painfulness and of a lost intimacy. Cunningham follows Woolf in supposing that women, affixed by social habits to an enforced intimacy, may find that it is, in contrast, freedom that is missing. Woolf’s Clarissa has married Richard because, unlike the case would be with Peter Walsh as a partner, she can maintain a good deal of emotive and marital freedom. Looking at her young son, Cunningham’s Laura thinks: “For a moment she wants only to leave – not to harm him, she’d never do that – but to be free, blameless, unaccountable.” (H 78) Clarissa Vaughn in Cunningham’s book is content to be with Sally, but at times she looks around the apartment and imagines that if she leaves, she’ll be happy, for “she’ll be herself.” (H 92) When they were young and Richard wanted to keep up their relationship, she turned away because she expected that he would demand too much from her. If Woolf mentioned a woman writer needing money and a room of her own, Laura will fight to escape a sense of entrapment, as well as what she calls a “nowhere feeling,” by taking a hotel room for several hours and reading Woolf’s novel.

In the background is the issue of what makes an overall life matter. Cunningham’s Clarissa, seeing Richard close to death, wonders what chance his poetry has of going on into the future. Most books, she concludes later, vanish from history soon after the writer’s death, but perhaps Richard’s poetry will be different. He himself confesses to her that he has been a failure, that his poetry has not captured the character of the world as he has seen it and his novel has not captured the essence of Clarissa and of his relationship with her. (One may think here of what James demanded of the art of fiction, for it is those demands that frame what Richard sees as his failure.) Clarissa worries that her own life has not produced anything extraordinary, and like her namesake in Woolf, she thinks at times of death and of how its ready possibility shapes one’s sense of life. Yet she has a keen openness to the freshness and beauty of the everyday life around her and she is skilled at offering occasions for her friends to be happy and sociable. She is an influential editor at a publishing house and she is in an admirable and satisfying long-term intimate relationship.  Woolf herself, with her own character Clarissa, has raised this very issue. Are Clarissa’s qualities, perhaps associated at times with women, enough to counterbalance a contrast, diminishing perhaps in its character, with the Woolf who demanded independence and the opportunity to write novels that would last?

Other than the focus on Mrs. Dalloway, we do not have a clear suggestion, as we do in several others of the novels studied here, of the literary and musical works that help form the cultural worlds of the characters and that support the idea of a return to literary modernism. On the other hand, it does seem relevant that the only reference to radical queer politics and queer theory, in the person of Mary Krull, is a negative one. (Is she supposed to remind us of Thomas Mann’s The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man?) A claim might be made that such an unfriendly portrayal occurs only because Cunningham needs a character to match the religious fanatic Miss Kilman of Woolf’s novel. Yet the portrayal seems to go beyond that need and to express something of Cunningham’s own disdain for academic theory of the last several decades. His poet Richard, we have seen, offers elegies and laments for what has been lost, rather than any iconoclastic figuring of a radically new future, and we may suspect that Cunningham has some of that sensibility, as suggested in his choice of a modernist text as palimpsest. Even drawing the close psychological parallels he does between Woolf’s novel and his own suggests that human mental states today are in many respects rather like those of a hundred years ago. It is more common among academics now to believe that subjectivity is such a social construction of present underlying forces that it is hard to defend a practice of comparing mental states at very different periods.

It is important that two aspects often present in literary modernism make that look backward appropriate. First, there is, as I have been noting, a frequent, if often implicit, suggestion of a transitional space of childhood, where one had to negotiate an entire structure of self and other, in a mobile and shifting realm of mental identifications and investments. One feels the attraction, present in one’s very style as a writer, of a return to that space, perhaps to renegotiate what has never quite been resolved. Second, when many literary modernists express a dissatisfaction with modernity, it is not from the perspective of a future social revolution. Rather they are disheartened by the ways that modernity has severely thinned out and impoverished the rich cultural legacy of the past that might make aesthetic experience and individual self-formation more compelling and more rewarding. They are happy to turn to that legacy for a range of resources that might enrich their aesthetic undertakings. So a somewhat elegiac look backward may seem both psychologically and historically appropriate.

Ultimately what Cunningham takes from modernism, and especially from Woolf, is the subtle, precise description of the experiences and perceptions of a complex individual consciousness moving through the world and vibrating finely with its happenings. He does not accept the supposed findings of literary theory over the last several decades or so, where such findings would devalue and decenter subjectivity until it is an insubstantial surface spoken through by underlying economic, social, discursive, and disciplinary systems. He does not suppose that the self-shaping concerns of the experiencing individual are a mere artifact of a bourgeois economy of commodities and exchange, or that individual subjectivity has been deconstructed by a linguistic machinery that is, in the end, impersonal, autonomous, and alien to human meanings and intentions. Like James, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf before him, he captures the finely tuned states that make up the everyday phenomenology of an individual human experiencer. In his case he is less experimental in doing this than are Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, and he makes the composition of well-ordered sentences as important as it was for James and Proust.

He grants Clarissa a capacity for subtle psychological observation. Here she is describing Louis’s return. “His old beauty, his heft and leonine poise, vanished with such surprising suddenness almost two decades ago, and this Louis – white-haired, sinewy, full of furtive chastened emotions – emerged in much the way a small, unimposing man might jump from the turret of a tank to announce that it was he, not the machine, who flattened your village. Louis, the old object of desire, has always, it turns out, been this: a drama teacher, a harmless person.” (H 124) She briefly feels that she would like to free herself from Sally. “Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight.” (H 92) She reflects on her surprising degree of disappointment at not being invited to a small event. “Being passed over by Oliver St. Ives (who probably did not consciously exclude her but simply did not think of her at all) resembles death the way a child’s shoebox diorama of a historic event resembles the event itself.” (H 94) Richard, she says, “cannot imagine a life more interesting or worthwhile than those being lived by his acquaintances and himself,” and if he insists on a version of you that is “funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound that you suspect yourself to be,” he manages to convince you, at least for a while, that he has seen into your essence and appreciates it more than anyone else. (H 60-61)

Clarissa, observing a dead bird for which the children have given a funeral, thinks: “Vanessa and Julian can go on about their business, their tea and travels, while she, Virginia, a bird-sized Virginia, lets herself metamorphose from an angular, difficult woman into an ornament on a hat; a foolish, uncaring thing.” (H 121) Regarding her own suffering: “Pain colonizes her, quickly replaces what was Virginia with more and more of itself, and its advance is so forceful, its jagged contours so distinct, that she can’t help imagining it as an entity with a life of its own,” so that at times it seems to be a white mass over the cobblestones, like a jellyfish. (H 70) She describes Richard in his illness: “He looks insane and exalted, both ancient and childish, astride the windowsill like some scarecrow equestrian, a park statue by Giacometti.” (H 196) Other characters are perceptive as well. Louis, even while feeling irritated with Clarissa, is disarmed by her. “You find that you move, almost against your will, from being irritated with her to consoling her, helping her back into her performance so that she can be comfortable again and you can resume feeling irritated.” (H 130)

Cunningham, I have claimed, in his emphasis on a subtle beauty of style and on precise psychological penetration, seems in the world of Proust and James rather than in that of recent literary theory or queer theory. On the other hand, he does work to bring out, in the explicit form of today, what were only suggestions of same-sex attraction in Mrs. Dalloway, and he introduces further instances of that sort of attraction when he can. If Woolf’s Clarissa had a brief, passionate kiss with another young woman named Sally, Cunningham’s Clarissa has had an eighteen-year lesbian relationship with her Sally. If Septimus Smith seems to recall his close friend and officer Evans in a clearly homoerotic manner, Richard, the poet going mad in Cunningham’s novel, has had an openly gay life in the Village. Hugh Whitbread’s marriage with Evelyn has become Walter Hardy’s marriage-like gay relationship with Evan. If Clarissa Dalloway feels left out when her husband Richard, and not she, is invited for lunch with a society lady, Clarissa Vaughn feels depressed when her partner Sally, and not she, is invited to a business lunch with a very popular actor in Hollywood action films, a man who has recently come out as gay. Louis, who borrows some of Peter Walsh’s characteristics, is now trying to have an affair with Hunter, a handsome drama student of his who he tries to persuade himself is a brilliant performer. Being gay becomes something open, taken for granted, and unremarkable in the novel, as it could not be seven decades earlier.

On the other hand, Walter Hardy seems to represent a new sort of gay man, so completely unquestioning about his place in the world that he “brings no shadow of adult irony or cynicism, nothing remotely profound, to his interest in fame and fashions, the latest restaurant.” (H 18) He has nothing of the wit or reflective complexity or multileveled play with stances that characterized those gay men for whom the practice of camp behaviors and attitudes was a defensive pleasure to be cultivated. Walter’s books show handsome, well-muscled young men who are romantic and show courage in the face of adversity; the psychologies in question are easy stereotypes. Perhaps there is a hint here that with all their liberties, gay men today will not have the pressures that generated the complex sophistication, with its levels of insinuation and nuance, of keen perception and multi-leveled irony, of gay literary modernism. Does Cunningham go back to Woolf’s novel as a model in order to introduce something of that world of nuance, subtlety, and penumbral emotive states to the new, more prosaic, and more obvious gay setting of today?

If you would like to read the rest of the book, you can purchase it on Amazon in paperback or kindle version. Read the introduction for free here.