Shades of Virginia Woolf

Where do books come from? Michael Cunningham would be the first to say that innumerable influences make it impossible to track the genesis of a particular work.

But in the case of “The Hours,” Cunningham’s bestselling, critically acclaimed fourth novel, which is based on Virginia Woolf’s great modernist work “Mrs. Dalloway,” he can pinpoint its birth to one moment more than 30 years ago when he was a 15-year-old student at La Canada High School.

“It was out by the football field,” recalls the 46-year-old New York-based writer on a recent visit to Los Angeles to give public readings from his new book, one of five nominated for the National Book Critics Circle annual award for fiction.

“I was talking to this very cool, very smart senior girl who I very much wanted to impress, and to whom I said something like, ‘I think Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are the two great artists of the 20th century.’ And she said, calmly and not unkindly, ‘I wonder if you have ever heard of T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf?’ ” Cunningham immediately went to the school library and took out a copy of “Mrs. Dalloway.”

It was a revelation, he says, in his characteristically light, urgent but slightly amused tone. “I didn’t really know what was going on exactly--that came later. But the beauty of the language and the rhythm of the sentences, it did something to me. It was like hearing Mozart for the first time. You don’t have to know exactly what Mozart is doing. You just get it.”

From that early epiphany, the book stayed with him as he studied at Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop and as he wrote 1980’s “Golden States” (Crown), 1990’s “A Home at the End of the World” and 1995’s “Flesh and Blood” (both Farrar, Straus & Giroux). These many years later, he has applied intellect to gut reaction to tease apart what first made him respond to “Mrs. Dalloway” as a great work of art.

“I want the book to be not just a sort of hommage, not just a meditation on ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ but on creativity itself,” Cunningham says.

Creative Process From Three Points of View

Named for one of Woolf’s first titles for “Mrs. Dalloway” and containing numerous echoes of that book’s imagery, characterizations and themes, “The Hours” examines the creative process from three points of view: a contemporary Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan, a 52-year-old lesbian living in New York with her lover, Sally; a Los Angeles housewife, Laura Brown, reading “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1949; and Virginia Woolf writing “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1923.

By “creativity” Cunningham doesn’t simply mean writing, he says, but any form of imaginative work (like Laura making a cake), which is, in turn, symbolic of our common struggle to make something beautiful out of life’s chaos--a struggle that some can negotiate and causes others to buckle.

Thus, Cunningham’s Clarissa, like her Woolfian precursor, puts all her energies into giving a party, though not for a bunch of stodgy, upper-class British socialites, as in Woolf’s book, but for a writer friend dying of AIDS. Like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (but with a gender-bending twist), Cunningham’s survival-minded Clarissa gave up her passionate connection with her gay friend for a more stable relationship with her lesbian lover. In contrast, Cunningham’s Woolf is tormented by a sense of failure--even as she produces great work--that later prompts her to commit suicide, while Laura Brown, estranged from her husband and son, escapes to a hotel to read “Mrs. Dalloway” as guiltily as if she were having a tryst with a lover. Of all the characters, Laura comes closest to a sense of wholeness, as she sets out to find the missing something that most approximates the beauty and honesty of great literature.

“I think literature is about many things,” Cunningham says. “But it is absolutely, at its heart, about redemption, about not just survival, but transcendence. And I don’t mean self-help or some recipe for living, though one of the reasons literature exists is to help us with the darker aspects of life. Literature is about being human.” Like Woolf, he tries to evoke life with all its shadings, to emulate her “sense of the impossible beauty of the world that does not in any way negate all the horror.”

His Lover and His Family Keep Urging Him On

At the readings, his warm brown eyes sparkling behind oval wire-rimmed glasses, his slender 6-foot-2-inch frame bent eagerly over his book, Cunningham seems far from angst-laden. Indeed, questioned about the sadness in his books, he says it does not come from his own life. He lives happily with his lover of 11 years, Ken Corbett, a clinical psychologist, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. He also has a generous family who “always let me know I could do anything.”

“I worry sometimes that my family reads my books and thinks, ‘What did we do? Where could all this sorrow be coming from?’ But I think sorrow is part of being human, mitigated, of course, by huge hope and optimism.”

Without his family, he says, he doesn’t know if he could have persevered as a writer through the years when he wasn’t getting published (years of bar-tending in Laguna Beach, of traveling aimlessly, of getting involved with gay activism in New York), through the flop of his first novel, “Golden States,” until finally a short story--”The White Angel,” published in the New Yorker in 1988--led to “A Home at the End of the World,” which brought him widespread critical attention. But it was during the hardest times that his family made “a huge, huge difference,” he says, so steadfast were they in their belief that he was an artist.

The entire family shows up for both readings: his parents, Don and Dorothy (who still live in La Canada Flintridge), and his younger sister, Kristie Clarkin, and her husband, David--with Kristie’s dog, Maggie--who come all the way from Oxnard.

Part of the appeal of “The Hours,” as several critics have pointed out, is Cunningham’s ability to empathize with a wide range of characters, from a suburban housewife to a New York lesbian. This suggests, Cunningham says, that “gender may not be the blade that cuts all the way down to the bottom, that there are questions of character and soul that run much deeper than whether the being is male or female.”

Cunningham himself has had relationships with both men and women, including a brief affair in his early 30s with the writer Sandra Cisneros. “She was intelligent, funny and sexy, and it just seemed insane not to get involved with somebody so great!” He’s drawn to strong-minded people of either gender, he says, though as he gets older he seems “to have more urgent erotic and romantic business with men.”

Perhaps the real key to “The Hours” is what first drew Cunningham at 15 to “Mrs. Dalloway”--the language. Critics have pointed to the heartbreaking beauty of his writing, especially the Virginia Woolf passages that resonate with the rhythms of Woolf’s prose, though the nuanced interweaving of thought and action is clearly Cunningham’s.

To get the tone just right, Cunningham says, he read everything Woolf wrote, as well as several biographies about her. He also visited various Woolf sites, including Westminster in London, home of the fictional Mrs. Dalloway, and Hogarth House in Richmond, where Woolf lived for a while with her husband, Leonard, while writing “Mrs. Dalloway.”

He Visited the Site of Woolf’s Suicide

But the “biggest revelation,” he says, was seeing the spot on the River Ouse at Rodmell where Woolf drowned herself.

“It was shocking, I won’t ever forget it,” he says. He had expected a roaring torrent, a typical American river that “you’d jump into the way you’d jump in front of a fast-moving train.” Instead, there was “this brown swatch of water moving sluggishly across the flat green countryside.” At the water’s edge, he picked up a stone of the sort that Woolf must have put in her coat pockets to weigh her down. Suddenly, he understood the sense of “despair and fear” that Woolf must have felt that day in 1941 in “a way I hadn’t before.”

That connection across the years became central to the book, Cunningham says. It’s symbolized in his prologue by the image of Woolf’s body bumping against a bridge piling, absorbing the sounds of life above--as if to say, Woolf may be dead but her legacy lives on, not only through readers like Laura and writers like Cunningham, but in the transformation of life’s ordinary things.

“And that’s certainly one of my ambitions for this book,” Cunningham, says. “To take Woolf’s insistence that right now is the stuff of literature and to bring that into the present, into a world where tabletops are made of wood-grain Formica and the light that’s falling down on us is from fluorescent bulbs. If Woolf were alive today, she would be making literature out of this.”