How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  That for Sebold and her readers Heaven can’t, in fact, wait is symptomatic of a larger cultural dysfunction, one implicit in our ongoing handling of the September 11 disaster. The Lovely Bones appeared just as the first anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was looming; but by then, we’d already commemorated the terrible day. September 11, 2002—the first anniversary of the attacks, a day that ought to have marked (as is supposed to be the case with such anniversary rituals) some symbolic coming to terms with what had happened—was not a date for which the American people and its press could patiently wait. Instead, on March 11, 2002, we rushed to celebrate, with all due pomp and gravitas, something called a “six-month anniversary.” In its proleptic yearning for relief, and indeed in its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of victimhood, its pseudotherapeutic lingo of healing and its insistence that everything is really OK, that we needn’t really be sad, that nothing is, in the end, really scary, Sebold’s book is indeed timely—is indeed “the novel of the year”—although in ways that none of those now caught up in the glamour of its unprecedentedly high approval ratings might be prepared to imagine.

  —The New York Review of Books, January 16, 2003

  Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf

  At the beginning of the novel in question, it is a fine June day in a great city, and a fifty-two-year-old woman named Clarissa goes shopping for flowers. She is giving a party that evening, and as she walks to the flower shop, a host of thoughts tumble through her mind. Not all of them are about her party. (Her party!) She worries, for instance, that her beautiful teenaged daughter is in thrall to a humorless middle-aged woman who is, somehow, her, Clarissa’s, mortal enemy. (The woman’s fierce ideological views make Clarissa feel slightly shabby in comparison; and indeed Clarissa supposes that she is, when all is said and done, quite “ordinary.”) She is embarrassed to run into someone whom she hasn’t invited; she has reveries about a long-ago summer in a house in the country when she and some friends indulged in illicit love affairs. (As she thinks these thoughts she is glimpsed by a neighbor who sternly, but not unkindly, judges her looks: she has aged.) She thinks, often, about death. As she stands in the shop buying the flowers, there is commotion outside—a loud noise—and when Clarissa and the florist go to the window to see what it might be, they get a glimpse of a famous head emerging from a vehicle, someone everyone knows from the papers, from pictures.

  The famous head, glimpsed from afar by curious, even prurient crowds, has been placed there by the author of this novel for the purpose of contrast. This head reminds us of the great world out there, and the values by which it measures things: fame, importance, power, rank, distinction—and hence stands in stark contrast to Clarissa’s head, filled as it is with a quotidian, haphazard jumble of thoughts that are of no particular importance to anyone except Clarissa herself. Clarissa’s life is meant, indeed, to be one of those existences, neither brilliant nor tragic, that moved Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, to ponder what the proper subject and style of an authentic women’s literature might possibly be. The values of novels, she argued, reflect the values of life, which novels must mirror; and it was, furthermore, “obvious” that

  the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

  Part of the proper work of women’s writing, Woolf suggested, was to recuperate for literature “these infinitely obscure lives [that] remain to be recorded.” Let men preoccupy themselves with “the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past.” As Woolf grew as an artist, she experimented with ways to record and “bring…to life” another kind of experience altogether, one hitherto buried in the interstices of those great movements.

  One way to do so was, indeed, to focus on the concrete minutiae of women’s everyday existences—everything that men’s literature, by its very nature, overlooked, an omission that led to yet larger gaps and inaccuracies. “So much has been left out unattempted,” Woolf complained. “Almost without exception [women] are shown in their relation to men…not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex.” And so, she told the audiences of the lectures that would become A Room of One’s Own,

  you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudomarble.

  That which men’s literature dismissed as trivia must be taken up and forged into a new kind of literature that would suggest how great were the hidden worlds and movements in women’s lives; such a literature was long overdue. “There is the girl behind the counter,” she wrote toward the end of A Room of One’s Own. “I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion which old Professor Z and his like are now inditing.”

  Hence Clarissa, with her random thoughts of flowers and parties and sewing and old love affairs: she is (for all the differences in social status) that girl, just as the famous head is a reminder of the other world, the world of great movements, of Napoleons and Miltons. And indeed Clarissa is the heroine of the first great example of the literary project that Woolf advocates in A Room of One’s Own: Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, a few years before the essay in which she explicated that project.

  And yet the novel I began this essay by describing is not, in fact, Mrs. Dalloway. Or, I should say, is not only Mrs. Dalloway. It is, rather, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner which is at once an homage to and an impersonation of the earlier work of fiction. (Woolf had long planned to call her novel “The Hours,” but decided on Mrs. Dalloway in the end.) In it, three narratives about three women, each connected in some way to Mrs. Dalloway, are intertwined; in each of the three, numerous elements from Woolf’s novel—characters, names, relationships, tiny details of phrasing, individual sentences, whole scenes (not least, the world-famous head poking momentarily from the big vehicle)—are reincarnated with almost obsessional devotion. But perhaps the most remarkable achievement of The Hours is to preserve Woolf’s project—to avoid the banal ways in which male novelists often see women, either dramatizing them or trivializing them, and thereby making them more comfortable for consumption by men.

  “The design is so queer & so masterful,” Woolf wrote in her journal, in June 1923, of the book she was struggling to write; the same words, with additional overtones, could well be used of Cunningham’s reinterpretation of it. Cunningham takes his Woolfian donnée and splits it into three narratives, each a kind of riff on some aspect of Mrs. Dalloway. Each takes place, as does Mrs. Dalloway, in the course of a single day: each focuses on the inner life of one woman. The sections called “Mrs. Dalloway,” set in the 1990s, are about a lesbian book editor in New York City named Clarissa Vaughan (whom her best friend and onetime lover, a poet now dying of AIDS, enjoys calling “Mrs. Dalloway”; she’s giving a party to celebrate the prestigious literary award he’s won). The sections called “Mrs. Brown,” set in 1949, recount one fraught day in the life of an L.A. housewife, Laura Brown, who’s torn between reading Mrs. Dalloway for the first time and planning a birthday party for her husband. And the “Mrs. Woolf” sections envision Virginia Woolf herself on a day
in 1923 when she conceives how she might write Mrs. Dalloway. In each section, Cunningham ingeniously uses Woolf’s novel as a template: like Woolf’s Clarissa, each of his three heroines plans a party, has an unexpected visitor, escapes, in some sense, from the house, and tries to create something (a party, a cake, a book).

  The central story is the story of Clarissa Vaughan, the woman whose preparations for a grand party, like those of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, are the vehicle for a stream-of-consciousness narrative that suggests a contemporary, wryly self-aware Everywoman: “an ordinary person (at this age, why bother trying to deny it?).” While this Clarissa prepares for her party, the dying poet, whose name is Richard (the given name of Mr. Dalloway in Woolf’s story) worsens: just as the Great War and the Spanish flu gave poignancy and weight to Clarissa Dalloway’s musings about the essential goodness and beauty of everyday existence (“life; London; this moment in June”), AIDS gives substance to the similar thoughts of Cunningham’s Clarissa (“What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June….”).

  Both Clarissas, for all that they are haunted by thoughts of death, are strong. In Cunningham’s novel, as in Woolf’s, it is the men surrounding the women who keep falling apart. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa’s old flame, Peter Walsh, disintegrates in tears when he shows up for an unexpected visit. (He’s having an affair with a much younger married woman; sensible Clarissa knows she was right to refuse his offer of marriage, long ago.) In a different part of town, meanwhile, the mad poet Septimus Smith disintegrates and flings himself from a window. Cunningham’s novel reproduces these elements while updating them. His Clarissa lives in Greenwich Village with another woman, Sally (the name Woolf gave to the girl her Clarissa once kissed, long ago, in a country house); in his novel, it’s an old flame of Richard’s—his onetime lover, Louis—who shows up for an unexpected visit and, while Clarissa is preparing for the party, dissolves into tears. Like Woolf’s Peter Walsh, Cunningham’s Louis is foolish in love: he’s having an affair with a male theater student who “does the most remarkable performance pieces about growing up white and gay in South Africa.”

  And in Cunningham’s novel, too, it’s a mad poet, Richard (to whom the author gives some of Septimus’s lines: both characters believe they hear animals speaking ancient Greek), who spectacularly kills himself toward the end of the book—the kind of theatrical self-immolation that Western literature has typically reserved for women, whose staged disintegrations have long served as the climaxes of so many dramas and novels. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf hinted that behind the empire-building noise that men made, women were strong, too; that because of the patriarchal economy, their creations were more often than not children, households, families; but they did create, and could of course create art, too, if they had the means. It was just that no one had written of this strength, this creativity. In Mrs. Dalloway, she wrote of it—and of men’s weakness; and in The Hours, Cunningham does too.

  The other two strands of Cunningham’s tripartite narrative recapitulate this important if subtle motif of Woolf’s story in various ways. His “Mrs. Woolf” section is a fantasy of what might have gone through Woolf’s mind on the day that Mrs. Dalloway took shape. On that summer’s day, she wakes up in Richmond (the suburb to which she and her husband, Leonard, had retreated for the sake of her fragile mental health), thinks about her book, entertains her sister, Vanessa Bell, and “Nessa”’s children to tea (they come unexpectedly early), and tries, unsuccessfully, to run off to London, whose noise and bustle she misses. (A frantic Leonard catches up with her outside the train station and fetches her home.) It is no easy or safe thing for a contemporary novelist to ventriloquize a great author who was a novelist herself, but Cunningham approaches his task with great delicacy—and no little erudition: much of the “Mrs. Woolf” section of his book is based on careful reading of Woolf’s journals. The “escape” scene, for instance, is based on an episode that Woolf records in an October 15, 1923, diary entry:

  I felt it was intolerable to sit about, & must do the final thing, which was to go to London…. Saw men & women walking together; thought, you’re safe & happy I’m an outcast; took my ticket; and 3 minutes to spare, & then, turning the corner of the station stairs, saw Leonard, coming along, bending rather, like a person walking very quick, in his mackintosh. He was rather cold & angry (as, perhaps was natural).

  Cunningham delicately transforms this, in his novel, into a parable about Woolf’s artistry, and her bravery—her yearning to have a full life out of which to create her art, whatever the risks.

  But the real delight of the “Mrs. Woolf” portion of Cunningham’s The Hours is its delicate, detailed, and sometimes witty suggestions about how Woolf might have come up with some of the material that appears in Mrs. Dalloway. In The Hours, Vanessa Bell’s children find a dying bird in the garden, and the youngest, her daughter, Angelica Bell, makes an elaborate bier for it out of grass and roses. Peering at the tiny dead thing in its improbable nest, Virginia thinks to herself that “it could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death.” Readers of Mrs. Dalloway will remember that the wife of Septimus Smith is an Italian girl who makes hats; she is, indeed, making one just before her shell-shocked husband flings himself out the window. The hat-like bier gives Cunningham’s Virginia an even more important idea: that it is not Clarissa who must die (she loves life, the world, too much), but the mad poet. “Clarissa,” Virginia thinks, “is the bed in which the bride is laid.” Clarissa’s life, that is to say—and her love of life, the quotidian thoughts and feelings that suggest how good she finds life, and how strong she is—must be the surround, the context, in which the death of the poet, the young man, will stand out as anomalous, impossible to integrate, “other.” Another way of putting this is that Virginia will do to her male characters what so many male authors have done to their female characters.

  It is the third of Cunningham’s three women who has no clear referent in either Mrs. Dalloway or the life of its author. But this is not to say that Laura Brown, the housewife whose reading of Woolf’s novel, one summer’s day in 1949, transforms her life, has no basis in Woolf’s work. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf wryly comments on the ironic way in which (as was the case in ancient Athens, she thinks; one recalls that she worked on her Greek every day) woman is “imaginatively”—i.e., in the works of male writers—“of the greatest importance,” while being “completely insignificant” in real life. Hence what one must do to create a fully real woman is

  to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact—that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either—that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually.

  In Cunningham’s novel, Laura Brown is, in fact, just this combination of prose and poetry. Her life is an ostensibly ordinary one—her day consists of sending her husband, Dan, a former war hero, off to work, and then baking a birthday cake for him with her little son, Richie—but she is not, nor has she ever been, the homecoming queen type. Cunningham goes to considerable lengths to make sure we understand how starkly she stands out against her bland background, “the foreign-looking one with the dark, close-set eyes and the Roman nose,” with her Polish maiden name and her passion for books. Privately Laura thinks she could be “brilliant” herself. Tormented by inner demons, seething with inchoate creativity, striking-looking, she is clearly meant to bring to mind Woolf herself; her tragedy, the author suggests, is that her time, culture, and circumstances provide no outlets for her lurking creativity other than domestic ones. Baking cakes, for instance: as Laura sets about her day’s work, “she hopes to be as satisfied and as filled with anticipation as a writer putting down the first sentence.”

  It’s really Laura who’s the fulcrum of the novel, a hybrid of Clarissa, with her everyday bourgeois preoccupations, and Virginia, the da
rk, half-mad high priestess of art. And indeed, in the novel’s deeply moving conclusion, we get to see how Laura is the bridge that connects Woolf, in 1923, to Clarissa Vaughan, in the 1990s: little Richie, it turns out, grows up to be Clarissa’s friend Richard, the poet. It is Laura who, through her reading of Woolf (she flees to a hotel in order to finish the book in peace and quiet), understands that the life she’s living is somehow terribly wrong for her: she feels she’s going mad. And it is Laura who finds reserves of terrible strength to preserve her own sanity, her authentic self. By the end of The Hours she’s decided to abandon her family after the birth of her second child; we learn later that she moves to Toronto, where she becomes a librarian—another position that places her midway, as it were, between literature and life. Throughout The Hours, as throughout Mrs. Dalloway, it’s the women who are strong, who choose life, who survive.

  And so Cunningham’s novel is a very interesting form of “adaptation” indeed: much more than being merely a clever repository of allusions to its model (although these are many and dazzling, and make The Hours a kind of scholarly treasure hunt for Woolf lovers), it transposes into a different key, as it were, the constituent elements of Woolf’s novel, for the purposes of a serious literary investigation of large (and distinctively Woolfian) themes—the nature of creativity, the role of literature in life, the authentic feel of everyday living.

  Cunningham has, indeed, found just the right equivalents in today’s world for many of the elements you find in Mrs. Dalloway. Take that famous head, for example—the apparition, in Woolf’s book, that serves as symbol for the world that is made by men, for men’s literature and men’s values—the great world, with its preoccupation with importance and fame and status. In Woolf’s novel, people wonder who that briefly glimpsed head could belong to—“the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?” In Cunningham’s book, the scene is replicated, but this time the VIPs come from a slightly different milieu. “Meryl Streep?” they wonder. “Vanessa Redgrave?”