'the hours'

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Excerpt from "The Hours"
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Cunningham

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Prologue

She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy
for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun.
She has left a note for Leonard, and another for
Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river,
certain of what she'll do, but even now she is almost
distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and
a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a
faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky.
She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks
on. The voices murmur behind her; bombers drone in the
sky, though she looks for the planes and can't see
them. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his
name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a
potato-colored vest, cleaning the ditch that runs
through the osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks
down again into the brown water. As she passes him on
her way to the river she thinks of how successful he
is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier
bed. She herself has failed. She is not a writer at
all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric. Patches
of sky shine in puddles left over from last night's
rain. Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. She
has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering
indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision,
behind her, here, no, turn and they've gone somewhere
else. The voices are back and the headache is
approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will
crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. The
headache is approaching and it seems (is she or is she
not conjuring them herself?) that the bombers have
appeared again in the sky. She reaches the embankment,
climbs over and down again to the river. There's a
fisherman upriver, far away, he won't notice her, will
he? She begins searching for a stone. She works
quickly but methodically, as if she were following a
recipe that must be obeyed scrupulously if it's to
succeed at all. She selects one roughly the size and
shape of a pig's skull. Even as she lifts it and
forces it into one of the pockets of her coat (the fur
collar tickles her neck), she can't help noticing the
stone's cold chalkiness and its color, a milky brown
with spots of green. She stands close to the edge of
the river, which laps against the bank, filling the
small irregularities in the mud with clear water that
might be a different substance altogether from the
yellow-brown, dappled stuff, solid-looking as a road,
that extends so steadily from bank to bank. She steps
forward. She does not remove her shoes. The water is
cold, but not unbearably so. She pauses, standing in
cold water up to her knees. She thinks of Leonard. She
thinks of his hands and his beard, the deep lines
around his mouth.

She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and
Ethel: So many. They have all failed, haven't they?
She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She
imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her
pocket, going back to the house. She could probably
return in time to destroy the notes. She could live
on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing
knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it.
The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if
she restores herself to the care of Leonard and
Vanessa they won't let her go again, will they? She
decides to insist that they let her go. She wades
awkwardly (the bottom is mucky) out until she is up to
her waist. She glances upriver at the fisherman, who
is wearing a red jacket and who does not see her. The
yellow surface of the river (more yellow than brown
when seen this close) murkily reflects the sky. Here,
then, is the last moment of true perception, a man
fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on
opaque water. Almost involuntarily (it feels
involuntary, to her) she steps or stumbles forward,
and the stone pulls her in. For a moment, still, it
seems like nothing; it seems like another failure;
just chill water she can easily swim back out of; but
then the current wraps itself around her and takes her
with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a
strong man has risen from the bottom, grabbed her legs
and held them to his chest. It feels personal.

More than an hour later, her husband returns from the
garden. "Madame went out," the maid says, plumping a
shabby pillow that releases a miniature storm of down.
"She said she'd be back soon."

Leonard goes upstairs to the sitting room to listen to
the news. He finds a blue envelope, addressed to him,
on the table. Inside is a letter.

Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going
mad again: I feel we can't go
through another of these terrible times.
And I shant recover this time. I begin
to hear voices, and cant concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You
have
given me
the greatest possible happiness. You
have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I dont think two
people could have been happier till
this terrible disease came. I cant
fight it any longer, I know that I am
spoiling your life, that without me you
could work. And you will I know.
You see I cant even write this properly. I
cant read. What I want to say is that
I owe all the happiness of my life to you.
You have been entirely patient with me &
incredibly good. I want to say that--
everybody knows it. If anybody could
have saved me it would have been you.
Everything has gone from me but the
certainty of your goodness. I
cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think
two
people
could have been happier than we have been. V.

Leonard races from the room, runs downstairs. He says
to the maid, "I think something has happened to Mrs.
Woolf. I think she may have tried to kill herself.
Which way did she go? Did you see her leave the
house?"

The maid, panicked, begins to cry. Leonard rushes out
and goes to the river, past the church and the sheep,
past the osier bed. At the riverbank he finds no one
but a man in a red jacket, fishing.

She is borne quickly along by the current. She appears
to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched,
hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing
behind. She floats, heavily, through shafts of brown,
granular light. She does not travel far. Her feet (the
shoes are gone) strike the bottom occasionally, and
when they do they summon up a sluggish cloud of muck,
filled with the black silhouettes of leaf skeletons,
that stands all but stationary in the water after she
has passed along out of sight. Stripes of green-black
weed catch in her hair and the fur of her coat, and
for a while her eyes are blindfolded by a thick swatch
of weed, which finally loosens itself and floats,
twisting and untwisting and twisting again.

She comes to rest, eventually, against one of the
pilings of the bridge at Southease. The current
presses her, worries her, but she is firmly positioned
at the base of the squat, square column, with her back
to the river and her face against the stone. She curls
there with one arm folded against her chest and the
other afloat over the rise of her hip. Some distance
above her is the bright, rippled surface. The sky
reflects unsteadily there, white and heavy with
clouds, traversed by the black cutout shapes of rooks.
Cars and trucks rumble over the bridge. A small boy,
no older than three, crossing the bridge with his
mother, stops at the rail, crouches, and pushes the
stick he's been carrying between the slats of the
railing so it will fall into the water. His mother
urges him along but he insists on staying awhile,
watching the stick as the current takes it.

Here they are, on a day early in the Second World War:
the boy and his mother on the bridge, the stick
floating over the water's surface, and Virginia's body
at the river's bottom, as if she is dreaming of the
surface, the stick, the boy and his mother, the sky
and the rooks. An olive-drab truck rolls across the
bridge, loaded with soldiers in uniform, who wave to
the boy who has just thrown the stick. He waves back.
He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see
the soldiers better; so he will be more visible to
them. All this enters the bridge, resounds through its
wood and stone, and enters Virginia's body. Her face,
pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all: the
truck and the soldiers, the mother and the child.

*****************************************************
okay, here is the prologue (or as much of it as was up
on this website).

what to say?

'lyrical' prose at the service of a poetically
ghoulish imagination.

a bad poet's 'poetic' rendering of that 'poetic'
moment: ah, a writer's suicide. toss in a woman's, at
that. even moreso.

   cunningham writes:

"She thinks of Leonard. She thinks of his hands and
his beard, the deep lines around his mouth."
i don't recall leonard ever having a beard. lytton
strachey, yes. oh, that famous beard.

if our author can't even get the facts straight, why
would i believe the imaginings.
the only bit of real writing that rings totally true
is the suicide note.

which happens to have been written by the real
virginia woolf.

rest in peace.

kim

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Received on Tue Nov 12 17:21:11 2002