A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  It was no part of my research, as I call it, but often, while I was trying to hold in mind some or another personage about whom not a single word had as yet been written, I found myself speculating yet again on a matter mentioned earlier in this work of fiction. I have never been able to comprehend how the entity called in common speech time could be said to exist separately from the entity known likewise as space. To put this differently: I am unable to believe in time in the same way that some persons are unable to believe in a personal god. Nor does the word space denote for me mere extension. For me, what the word space denotes is hardly different from what is denoted by the word mind, and whenever I perform one or another of the exercises mentioned earlier, which is to say, whenever I read with due attention some or another passage of what I call true fiction or considered narration, then I become aware that the space between each sentence and its subject-matter may well reach endlessly in directions unknown to me.

  Two men from our loose circle, so to call it, held for some years full-time positions as teachers of creative writing in universities. Perhaps I should have written just then that two of us admit to having held such positions, and that others of us may prefer not so to admit. And yet, I could hardly credit that any of us would fear from his fellows the quiet contempt that some groups in far parts of this building are said to hold for anyone who formerly earned money from teaching others to write. There are corridors, so I have heard, where residents are accorded respect in proportion to the tens of thousands of copies of their books sold or the numbers of their books adapted for film or even the number of literary prizes awarded them. Most of us hereabouts have always considered our occasional royalty payments as bonuses or small treats while we supported ourselves and our families by working at whatever jobs we were capable of.

  Our two worked at their teaching in rather different ways, so we have heard from them. One was resolved to disabuse his students of any notion that the writing of fiction is a delicate procedure to be undertaken only in silence and isolation by a naturally sensitive person in a heightened state of alertness. This teacher, in one of his first classes each year, after having read to his students several passages in which one or another biographer of D.H. Lawrence reported his writing page after page of some or another work of fiction in the main room of the rented quarters where he and his companion lived for the time being, while the room was noisy with the conversation of the friends and admirers who seemed often to surround Lawrence, and while he himself often, and without looking up from his writing, took part in the conversation. The teacher would then stand at the whiteboard in front of his students and would begin writing with a felt-tipped pen, often pausing to amend or to erase words or phrases or whole sentences. Whenever he thus paused, he explained to the students what had caused him to pause and why he was amending or erasing. What he was writing, so he assured the students, comprised the latest hundred words and more of the work of fiction that he was then writing for publication, and he would dismiss them ten minutes early so that he could transcribe for his later use the words of his that he had written in their presence.

  Our other teacher claims that he could never write so much as a sentence of fiction in the presence of another person, let alone a class of students. He writes fiction, so he says, for a few readers of good will, or perhaps for only one such reader whom he wishes never to meet but only to approach by means of his writing. Not only could he never have written fiction in front of his students, but he spoke to them about his own writing only if they had first questioned him about it. When he wanted to promote class discussions about the theory of fictional narration, as he called it, perhaps pompously, as we sometimes accuse him, although he answers that any means is justified if it earns respect for the craft of fiction – when he wanted to promote discussion, he would put before his students some of the large collection of statements that he had gathered from the writings of writers themselves or from a famous series of published interviews with writers. (It was this collection that provided me with the epigraph for this present work of fiction.)

  The two teachers had used very different methods for assessing the pieces of fiction written by their students. The first man relied mostly on comments made first by the student-author and then by his or her fellows during a detailed classroom discussion of each piece. At the beginning of each discussion, the author would criticise his or her piece and would then award the piece one of the so-called grades required by the university. (The teacher believed that this practice developed in each student the ability to read his or her own fiction as a discerning reader might read it.) The piece was then read by the class and afterwards discussed. Each member of the class was required to award the piece a grade. Finally, the teacher commented on the piece and awarded it a grade. The final, or official, grade was the average of all grades awarded by the class-members, the third multiple of the author’s grade, and the sixth multiple of the teacher’s grade.

  The other man had allowed classroom discussion of each piece but he had always removed the author’s name from the piece before it was photocopied for reading in class. Discerning readers in each class learned in time to identify many authors from their distinctive styles or from the recurring subjects of their pieces, but no member of a class was allowed to address any comment to the author of a piece – all comments had to be written in the margins of the text as though addressed to a presumed author unlikely to be met with. The teacher himself wrote comments in the margins of each piece and would always announce his opinion of each piece to the class, but only the author of the piece learned – in writing – the grade awarded to the piece, which grade was decided by the teacher alone before he had heard any comments from anyone. He sometimes supposed that the course might be more effective if the students were never permitted to meet with each other or even with him, so that they knew each other only as the writers or the readers of certain fictional texts. His teaching methods were in keeping with his belief that the best sort of fiction had for its author not the flesh-and-blood being who might acknowledge in a classroom discussion that he or she had written this or that piece but a presumed personage whose characteristics might be something of a mystery to the flesh-and-blood being and were best recognised by a discerning reader. It was to this personage, this deep and writerly version of the author named on the title-page, that the second of the two teachers had always directed the many comments that he wrote on his students’ fiction. He would never have denied that he sometimes had in mind, while he wrote the comments, an image of the author as he or she might have appeared in the classroom but he would have insisted that his words were not such as should be spoken to the person of that appearance but suitable only to be read in private by the personage responsible for his or her writing.

  He had among his students each year many who were called officially mature-age. Many of these were of his own age or older and were often the writers of the most impressive fiction. He had heard or had read of teachers in universities who had affairs with students but he had been faithfully married for nearly twenty years and was made weary by the mere thought of the deceit and the subterfuge that he would have to practise during such an affair, and he easily put off the few female students whom he supposed were signalling their interest in him. Each year, when he met his new students for the first time, he would feel himself attracted by the mere appearance of one or two of the so-called mature-age women, but he took care afterwards to deal with them no differently than he dealt with the others, which policy was usually made easier for him after those who had attracted him by their looks had failed to impress him by their writing, as almost always happened.

  During his fifth year of being a teacher, he met up with circumstances the very opposite of those described in the previous sentence. The woman of all his mature-age students who attracted him most by her appearance and her deportment was also the one of all his students, whether male or female, who most impressed him by her writing. He tried to deal with her as he
dealt with all his students, and according to what she told him afterwards he had mostly succeeded. Sometimes, after he had written some or another comment in the margins of some or another piece of her fiction, he felt sure that he must by now have told more than he had wanted to tell her, but even in this, so she also told him later, he had mostly succeeded also: she had found in his written words hardly more than she might have expected to find in the words of someone won over as a reader.

  On the evening after the last meeting of the class that included the woman mentioned, she and her classmates, most of them mature-age, invited him to join them for drinks. The weather was very warm, and they sat under trees in semi-darkness near the cafeteria. He and she were among the last few to leave. She had drunk little, so he had observed during the evening, but he had drunk much. All of the students present had finished their undergraduate courses and expected to meet again seldom, if at all. Men and women, their teacher included, embraced one another before going their separate ways. As she later told him, he had misread her behaviour during their last minutes together, and yet he had not, so it later seemed, misread the letter that she had sent him soon after he had written to her as a result of his misreading.

  They met occasionally in a hotel lounge near the building where she worked in an inner suburb, and they wrote, each of them, long letters as though trying to outdo one another in writing. Sometimes their letters included speculations about the future but they were more often concerned to interpret the past. After a certain time, she decided that they had written enough, although he felt as though much, much more demanded to be written. The few occasions when they were alone together seemed to bring her joy but they brought him nothing of the kind, which is all that he cares to report in writing about those occasions. On the last such occasion, he and she spent an afternoon in a large house of mud-brick in hilly, forested countryside north-east of the capital city. Before that day, each had talked sometimes of leaving his or her family: she her husband and daughter; he his wife and two sons. The house of mud-brick would be empty for a year while the owners were in Europe, and he and she might have spent their first year together on a forested hillside not far from the terminus of a suburban railway line. During the afternoon in the mud-brick house, each came to acknowledge that they would not meet again although they might well write to one another for many more years, which, in fact, they did.

  He still recalls many of the details that occurred to him while he read for the first time a piece of fiction of hers written while she was his student and awarded by him the highest possible grade. He learned from her comments during the classroom discussion that the fiction, as he had supposed, was drawn from the author’s experience, which was a guarded form of words often used in the writing class to warn readers against supposing the text in question to be mere autobiography. The chief character of the piece of fiction is a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who spent her early years in a bleak district in the north-east of England before leaving home to live and work in London. She arrives in London at a time during the late 1960s when the city is sometimes called Swinging London.

  The only piece of his own published fiction that might be understood as connected with her has for its fictional setting a house on a forested hillside where a group of writers of fiction is attending a series of writers’ workshops in which they read and comment on one another’s fiction. The writers taking part bind themselves by the strictest of rules. No one speaks to another during their days together in the house. During workshop sessions, all comments, even those made by the supervisor, are written in silence and later distributed as photocopies. No one looks into the face of another or signals to another or groans or sighs or laughs in the hearing of another. Anyone breaking any of these or other such rules is expelled at once from the house. In the early paragraphs of the piece of fiction, the first-person narrator seems several times to refer to the recent expulsion from the house of a female person for whom the rules were seemingly too much to bear.

  Even one or another discerning reader might have supposed by now that we live permanently up here in our out-of-the-way eyrie. While it would be possible for a certain sort of writer to make his home here, and a few are rumoured to have tried from time to time, everyone that I know in this corridor and those few from lower corridors whom I speak to sometimes in the grounds – each of them has another sort of home elsewhere; has a wife, perhaps, or children or grandchildren and cares and concerns very different from those that trouble him while he sits at his desk behind his upper window.

  Do we never write about those concerns, those children, or those wives? I suspect that most of us do so write, although we hardly ever discuss that writing or offer it for publication. We have not only desks in our rooms but filing cabinets: solid, steel, old-fashioned filing cabinets with locks and keys. If I surmise rightly, then many a filing cabinet will be unlocked one day in accordance with the Last Will of the man who sat for much of his life at the desk nearby – many a filing cabinet will be unlocked and many a page will be found there of a sort of writing rather different from that which covers most of the pages of this work of fiction. What did the writing-students say often of their pieces, according to the narrator of the previous section? ‘This fiction is drawn from the author’s experience.’

  But why are we so reticent? Has not many a well-known writer seemed to make a sort of fiction out of his hating his father or divorcing his wife or watching his child endure a fatal illness? I believe us to be not so much reticent as properly respectful of, or even in awe of, what most of us hereabouts call true fiction. Even though none of us would claim to understand the matter, we sense that true fiction, the sort of fiction that we go on trying to write during year after year in this building, could never include the mere jottings of a person seeming to recall some or another painful experience of not long before. We sense that true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrence but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime.

  Perhaps that is why we return continually to this towering monstrosity, as it surely appears to some who see it from a distance and never know what goes on in its many wings and behind its many windows. Perhaps that is why each of us looks up often while he steers his car across the mostly level countryside hereabouts, waiting to see the glowing of late sunlight in the windows of his true home. Perhaps each of us, whenever he returns yet again to his upper room and passes the row of locked filing cabinets on his way to his desk – perhaps each of us hears in mind at such a time not the cautious phrases of some or another posthumous biography but the manifold rhythms of one after another subordinate clause in quite another sort of book. Perhaps each of us is driven most urgently not by his wanting to be the subject of some or another biography and not even by his wanting to be the author of some or another memorable volume but by his wanting to grasp the paradox that has exercised him during much of his lifetime: by his wanting to understand how the so-called actual and the so-called possible – what he did and what he only dreamed of doing – come finally to be indistinguishable in the sort of text that we call true fiction.

  Every one of us in this remote series of rooms would have fallen in love with more than a few fictional female personages. Leaving aside the question what is meant by the expression to fall in love, I can surely add that each of us finds himself equally liable to fall in love with the sort of personage who appears to him while he reads some or another fictional text or the sort of personage who appears to him from out of the space between fictional texts and whom he then seeks to have as a personage in a text of his own making. One of us, so I happened to learn recently while we two alone were drinking late – one of us had, nearly thirty years ago, the experience of falling in love with an entity, so to call her, who was both an actual
female person, one of the sumless inhabitants of the spaces between fictional texts, and also a seeming likeness, if not the embodiment, of a personage who had first appeared to him nearly ten years before while he was reading a work of non-fiction first published nearly ten years before his birth, which personage was also a fictional personage in a work of fiction that he was writing at the time when he fell in love, so to speak, with the entity, so to call her.

  I offer no apology to any sort of reader for any difficulties that he or she may have had with the previous sentence. Some of us in this topmost storey have been, or are still, entangled in such matters as cannot be reported in simple sentences. We are, during all our waking hours, rememberers of what we have read or have written, lamenters of what we have failed to read or write, projectors of what we hope still to read or to write, and breathing men, able, despite our many other concerns, to pace these corridors or to stroll through the grounds around this building or to travel whither we choose in the mostly level countryside beyond the grounds and no less likely than any other sort of man to fall in love with someone seen from a distance or met up with.

  The man who is the chief character of this and several surrounding paragraphs read for the first time, early in his fifth decade, a book of non-fiction, so to call it, reporting, among many other matters, the death of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who had leaped into a well on a remote farming estate comprising mostly level grassy countryside in the south-west of the Kingdom of Hungary more than thirty years before his birth. As is often the way with us frequenters of this upper corridor, the man, some ten years after he had first read the book mentioned, had set out to write a work of fiction in order not only to explain to himself why the image of a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, was constantly in his mind but also to learn, if it were possible, what he seemed required to learn whenever the image seemed, as it often seemed, to importune him. He knew about the young woman, hardly more than a girl, who was mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph and was mentioned in only three paragraphs of the book of non-fiction mentioned there, only that she had leaped into the well after having run during the night from the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer; that she had been unusually good-looking, although when her corpse had been dragged from the well and had been laid on the frozen soil nearby, her face had been disfigured by scratches caused, perhaps, by the buckets of the cowherds who had discovered her when they were watering their cattle at dawn; and that she had leaped barefoot into the well, having left her boots behind in her haste to leave the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer.