Writer Michael Cunningham about The Hours
Reading Mrs Dalloway has turned me into a reader. Even as a literary uneducated and rather lazy teenager, I could see the density, symmetry and muscularity of Woolf's sentences. I thought, wow, she was doing with language like what Jimi Hendrix did with a guitar. By which I meant she was walking a line between chaos and order. She played long riffs, and just when it seemed like a sentence was slipping into chaos, she brought everything back to the melody.
Decades after that first reading, which had mesmerized and mesmerized, I tried to write a novel about Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway. I approached the idea with the appropriate nervousness. For starters, being so close to a genius probably makes you look even smaller than you actually are. Second, I am a man, and Woolf was not only a great writer, but also a feminist icon.
My novel The Hours originated as a contemporary retelling of Mrs Dalloway. That soon turned out to be hubris, without any real interest. We already have Mrs Dalloway, a wonderful Mrs Dalloway. Who in the world would want another?
Reading Mrs Dalloway has turned me into a reader. Even as a literary uneducated and rather lazy teenager, I could see the density, symmetry and muscularity of Woolf's sentences. I thought, wow, she was doing with language like what Jimi Hendrix did with a guitar. By which I meant she was walking a line between chaos and order. She played long riffs, and just when it seemed like a sentence was slipping into chaos, she brought everything back to the melody.
Decades after that first reading, which had mesmerized and mesmerized, I tried to write a novel about Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway. I approached the idea with the appropriate nervousness. For starters, being so close to a genius probably makes you look even smaller than you actually are. Second, I am a man, and Woolf was not only a great writer, but also a feminist icon.
My novel The Hours originated as a contemporary retelling of Mrs Dalloway. That soon turned out to be hubris, without any real interest. We already have Mrs Dalloway, a wonderful Mrs Dalloway. Who in the world would want another?
From: Virginia Woolf, my mother and me by Michael Cunningham in The Guardian, 04/06/11, and from Dances With Woolf, an interview with Cunningham in the digital magazine POZ, 01/02/00.
‘We throw our parties, we leave our families, we laboriously write our books that we hope will change the world. We live our lives, do what we have to do and then we go to sleep; as simple and plain as that. There is only this consolation: an hour here or there in which our lives, against all probability and expectation, seem to burst open and give us all that we have ever wanted, although everyone knows that these hours are inevitably followed by others much heavier and more difficult. Nevertheless, we love that, the city, the morning, and we especially hope for one more hour.’
- from The Hours by Michael Cunningham