Introduction


Michael Cunningham

I READ MRS. DALLOWAY by chance, when I was fifteen years old.

“By chance” in that I was a lonely, not particularly studious kid who went to a lackluster high school in a suburb of Los Angeles, far, far away from the postwar London of Virginia Woolf’s novel.

Woolf was not on our school’s reading list, nor were any of the more “challenging” writers. I’d heard her name, but was not entirely sure whether she was an actual person or part of the title of the movie that won Elizabeth Taylor a Best Actress Oscar.

Once I’d determined that Woolf was in fact a writer, and a highly esteemed one, I took Mrs. Dalloway out of the school library, with the idea that some measure of erudition might bolster my sense of myself. My school, like so many, was ruled by a cohort of youths who might have been athletes in ancient Greece, spoke only to one another, and were rumored to hold parties to which almost no one was invited.

It was easy to feel not only ignored but incorporeal.

I figured that if I wasn’t going to be lithe and beautiful, never mind getting invited to those parties, I might as well give bookish a try. I imagined reinventing myself as a figure in an overcoat and scarf, solitary and contemplative instead of merely unpopular.

I confess to this as my motive for picking up Mrs. Dalloway, as opposed to intellectual curiosity or even an early devotion to reading. I further confess that I chose Mrs. Dalloway as my starter novel because, among the library’s modest selection of literary classics, it was shorter than Jane Eyre or Anna Karenina.

I was the second person who’d borrowed that particular copy. The first, some six years earlier, was one Marris Calder (I somehow remember the name), whom I still hope, someday, to meet.

I took the book home, thinking of my future as a romantic and melancholy figure, sitting contemplatively apart. It seemed that with the correct props, solitude could be counted as a virtue. I imagined myself walking home after school, book in hand, my scarf worried by winds that rarely blew in Los Angeles, among fallen leaves that seldom fell.

I’d begin with Mrs. Dalloway, and go on from there.

I can’t truly say I read the book. I can say that I tried to read it. I couldn’t follow it. It didn’t make sense to me.

I was accustomed to novels that had been chosen by our overtaxed if well-intended teachers for their simple sentences and blindingly clear morals. They were novels one entered through a wide-open door, and from which one exited an improved, more sensitive member of the world and its people.

The books I’d read—the “serious” books—variously enjoined us to be kind to the unfortunate, to do our best not to harm those we loved, to oppose nuclear war.

I could do that.

I’d read the assigned books, and written reports that testified to the ways I’d been enlightened by what I’d read. I was largely untouched, and untroubled, by any of it.

I started Mrs. Dalloway expecting to be similarly led in the general direction of my own betterment. I eagerly negotiated the book’s opening lines:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

All right. Mrs. Dalloway was the central character—her name was, after all, the title of the book. Lucy, and Rumpelmayer and his men, would be secondary characters, whose significance would soon be made clear …

Or not. I read on:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen.

Bourton? Where something awful was about to happen, when she was eighteen? And nothing awful happens, at least not immediately. We return, in the same paragraph, to Clarissa, years later, off to buy flowers.

The books to which I was accustomed were usually fairly clear, from their opening lines, about the nature of the story to follow.

What was I to do, then, with Mrs. Dalloway? What was the book trying to tell me?

It would be some time before I came to understand that great novels aren’t necessarily trying to tell their readers anything specific, and that if these novels mean to improve readers, they do so by imparting an expanded sense of the world; by conveying the most compelling possible proof of the humanity, the depths, the beingness, of people who are not us.

I couldn’t see this at age fifteen. What I could see—which was enough, at the time—was the grace and complexity, the sheer gorgeousness, of the language itself.

I’d never read sentences like these. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was possible to produce sentences like these, using only ink, paper, and the words in the dictionary.

There I was, in my suburban bedroom, with its Bob Dylan poster and M. C. Escher print, its sour-skeevy teenage-boy smell, reading:

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Farther down, on the same page:

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run.

It was like hearing a symphony for the first time, having grown up with harmonicas and oompah bands.

The book soon ceased to feel like an inanimate object, even though a humbler object, in the form of a book, is difficult to imagine. This copy of Mrs. Dalloway was protected by a once-clear plastic cover that had yellowed over time. Its jacket was formally floral, in the way of an elderly aunt’s wallpaper. Its binding was reinforced with a strip of grimy white masking tape.

And yet, it soon revealed itself as a wormhole. Virginia Woolf had funneled through time and space and was speaking to me as clearly as if she were there, in the room (which I’d have endeavored to clean up a little, had I known she was coming).

I was surprised to find, as I read on, that I didn’t really need to understand the novel’s plot, if indeed it had a plot at all. It was all about sound married to sense. It was the swing, tramp, and trudge; it was the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead.

What, after all, does a symphony mean? It means all of its notes, from the first to the last.

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

I was lost. I was gone. I never recovered.

* * *

OVER THIRTY YEARS LATER, I set out to write a novel about a novel. A novel about this particular novel. Reading a great book is a powerful and transforming experience for most of us, but for me, reading Mrs. Dalloway was also an essential aspect of my biography. It was a turning point. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it altered the course of my life.

It became part of my writerly material, if you will, on a par with marriage, the loss of a parent, and other personally singular events that often inspire novels, no matter how far the novels might stray from their emotions of origin. I probably remember reading Mrs. Dalloway as vividly as I remember falling in love for the first time, and for similar reasons: the sense of wonder at the sheer magnitude of the other, the sinkholes of self-doubt (How can I possibly be worthy?)—all of that, with the added consolation that a book, unlike a person, will not, one night in mid-July, simply get into someone else’s car in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and drive away.

I’ve never been entirely sure what to call The Hours in relation to Mrs. Dalloway. The best I’ve been able to come up with is the word “riff”—the way a jazz musician might play variations on an existing piece of great music: Art Tatum playing his own version of Dvorak’s Humoresque, or Duke Ellington performing a jazz interpretation of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

A riff, then, in the sense of a variation, an homage, a new interpretation that testifies to the potency and scope of the original. If most of us read the same murder mystery or romance, few of us read the same Portrait of a Lady, or the same House of Mirth. Or the same Mrs. Dalloway.

My riff, titled The Hours, started out as a simple retelling of the story of Clarissa Dalloway, if she were alive today. How, I wondered, would she differ, and how would she not, in a world that offered more choices to women? Would she have a job, would she feel free to live with another woman? Or would she essentially duplicate herself a hundred years later, as a wife in Connecticut, still giving parties, getting into her Lexus to buy the flowers herself? To what degree are we the embodiment of our time and circumstances, and to what degree are we, more fundamentally, the embodiment of ourselves?

It didn’t take me long to realize that that was a conceit, posing as a novel. The world needs so much. It probably doesn’t need, with any urgency, an updated version of Mrs. Dalloway.

Suffice to say that, over time, this idea evolved into the triptych of The Hours. Three single days in the lives of three different women—one a writer, one a reader, and one a character in a novel written by a writer and read by a reader.

In my experience, a book, as one writes it, should start out as one thing and turn into something else. It should, in the course of the writing, defeat whatever idea pulled the writer in; it should take on an unanticipated life; it should spring more surprises than anything the writer had in mind.

When Woolf started writing Mrs. Dalloway, she believed she was writing a book about the devastation visited upon London by World War I. It would involve a number of people, among them a society hostess named Clarissa Dalloway, who would, for no apparent reason, commit suicide. Its initial title was The Hours.


The Hours copyright © 1998 by Michael Cunningham

Introduction copyright © 2022 by Michael Cunningham

Mrs. Dalloway copyright © 1925 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf