A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  When he set out to write the work of fiction mentioned above, the man with the image constantly in his mind knew no more about the young woman mentioned above than what is reported about her in the previous sentence. He did not know, for example, what was the colour of her hair or what was her name. Of what might be called her history he knew only that she had left her boots in the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer. The man knew, however, a great deal about the image-person, so to call her. He knew that she was dark-haired; he knew her name; and he had learned, in somewhat the way that a person learns such matters in dreams, much about her history, as it might be called.

  I ought, perhaps, to have repeated in each of the previous two sentences not that the chief character of these paragraphs knew certain matters but that he seemed to know them or that he claimed to know them. I wrote what I wrote after having recalled certain discussions between the chief character and myself, his narrator for the time being. We in this isolated corridor hold many views considered eccentric in other parts of the building, but even we find extreme and untenable some of the claims of the chief character. He claims to believe, for example, that the image-person, as I called her above, did not come into being as a result of his having read a certain three paragraphs in a certain book of non-fiction but that she pre-existed that event and that his taking-in with his eyes the text of the three paragraphs was merely the event that enabled him and her to meet up with one another. He even claims to believe that an image-person may be sometimes capable of influencing textual events, by which he seems to mean that his dark-haired image-person might not only have caused a certain three paragraphs of text to be written but might somehow have influenced him, nearly fifty years later, to become a reader of those paragraphs.

  We, the colleagues, so to call us, of this speculator, so to call him, have for long agreed that the reading and the writing of texts, even of so-called non-fiction texts, are mysterious processes indeed. Some of us talk without awkwardness of an invisible world inhabited by the beings who appear to us while we read. We acknowledge that the invisible beings seem largely independent of us and even that they are able to affect our thinking and our behaviour, but the speculator, my chief character, would have us believe rather more than this.

  At some time during the two and more years while he was writing the work of fiction last mentioned in the paragraph preceding the previous paragraph, the chief character, as I call him, who was already the author of several published books of fiction, was invited by some or another body to be one of a number of writer-guests at the annual conference of the body, which had as its stated aim the study of the literature of the chief character’s native country. He, the chief character, was about to draft a polite apology for his not attending before he learned that the conference was to take place in the island-state that was the southern-most state of his native country. He had never cared to travel, but he had long been curious about certain parts of the island-state, especially the district known as the Midlands, which he believed to comprise mostly level grassy countryside, and so he accepted the invitation. He travelled by boat to the island-state and then by car to the conference. He recalled afterwards that he had read a few pages from one of his published works, at a session of the conference when several writers thus read, but he recalled little else. He had been made uneasy by the strangeness of his surroundings and had been drunk or hung-over during most of the conference.

  At one time while he was hung-over and was eating breakfast, or it may have been lunch, in the cafeteria where the other conference-attendees were also eating, he noticed a certain dark-haired young woman at a nearby table. He judged from the appearance of the young woman that one or both of her parents may have been Hungarian. Most of the persons in the cafeteria knew one another, if only by name, and he was able to learn from someone at his table the name of the young woman, which was not a Hungarian name, and that she was a member of the English Department at a university campus in a provincial city of his own state.

  The chief character of these paragraphs has never written any piece of fiction drawing on any experience of his from the few months after he had met the dark-haired young woman at the conference in the island-state. He offers as his reason that he wrote, during the last week of that period, a long letter that could itself be considered a work of fiction, so shapely is it and so full of meaning. The original of the letter was sent to the dark-haired young woman, but the writer of the letter has kept a copy and is not unwilling to have it read and appraised by others of our group. The letter comprises more than twenty-five thousand words and was written at several different places in the island-state, whither the writer of the letter went a second time only a few months after he had met there with the dark-haired young woman and on the day following a meeting with the young woman, at which meeting both had seemed to understand that they would not meet again.

  The author of the letter that might be called a work of fiction avoids using the word coincidence. He claims that a person who writes fiction of meaning or who reads such fiction with discernment is able to recognise that the details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction. He claims that the word coincidence was far from occurring to him only weeks after his first visit to the island-state, when he received a second invitation to visit there. The body inviting him had no connection with the association that had previously invited him. His second visit took the form of an organised tour during which he and two female writers conducted so-called writers’ workshops each afternoon and stayed each night in a motel or in bed-and-breakfast accommodation. He had dinner each evening with the other writers but then went to his room and continued writing his letter.

  On the evening before the last day of the tour, he had still not finished his letter. It was important to him that the last words of the letter should be written somewhere in the island-state and that the parcel enclosing the letter should bear a postmark of the island-state. On the last day of the tour, he and the other two writers were to travel by car from the south to the north-west of the state, there to set out homewards. He could not think of trying to finish his letter in the car, with the women watching him, but towards noon the others decided that they had time enough to visit a certain so-called historic building in the district known as the Midlands. They had been travelling for some time across mostly level grassy countryside with a range of forested mountains in the distance on either side. At what he chose to consider the very centre of the mostly level district, they turned aside into the spacious grounds of a building of two, or it may have been three, storeys. He told the others that he was unwell and would rest in the car, but as soon as they had left the car he took out his letter and wrote. While the others were, presumably, touring the building of two, or it may have been three storeys, he was able to finish the last few paragraphs of the letter. Several times, it seemed to him as though some or another person was looking out at him from one or another of the upper windows, but whenever he looked towards the windows he saw only one after another reflection in the glass of some or another part of the sky, which was filled with grey-white clouds.

  I have looked into the letter, although not recently. It seems partly an account of all that had taken place between the writer and the dark-haired young woman, who was twenty years his junior, during the few months before the letter was begun: his finding a pretext for introducing himself to her at the conference where he first saw her; his learning at their first meeting that she had taught, as she expressed it, one of his books to undergraduates; his asking for her postal address and soon afterwards writing to her what he called warm letters; her answering some of his letters, often with her own form of warmth; their meeting several times in the lounge-bar of one or another hotel in the capital city or in the provincial city where she lived; and finally, after his having decided (wrongly, as he claimed in a parenthetical passage) that he had written enough to her (for he had go
ne on writing no less frequently even after they had begun meeting in lounge-bars), their meeting on two occasions in a stone cottage used sometimes by her parents in a district that he had never previously visited, which was a district of mostly undulating grassy countryside and shallow, gravelly creeks flowing towards the inland from the Great Dividing Range. The text seems to suggest that neither meeting brought joy to him or to her and that the second meeting was the occasion when both seemed to understand that they would not meet again, although he might well write to her once more, which, as we know, he did.

  I used the adverb partly in the second sentence of the previous paragraph. The document summarised in that paragraph seems partly a detailed report of the matters mentioned in that paragraph and partly a letter – but a letter intended not so much for the person addressed at the head of the first page as for someone known, perhaps, only to the writer. I noticed at once, when I first looked into the letter, that the writer uses the third-person form of every verb. That is to say, he addresses no person directly but writes as most authors of fiction write, reporting fictional events, some of them seemingly actual, for the seeming-benefit of a personage who might be called his reader-in-mind or his implied reader. I was often persuaded, while I read, that this possible or ideal reader is someone long dead.

  The author of the letter, as I reported earlier, declines to use the word coincidence which, so he claims, is used by persons unwilling to allow that some events seem more likely to be part of a narrative than merely to have happened. The author, in his letter, makes much of the young literature tutor’s having the dark hair and even the sort of complexion common among Hungarian persons. He makes even more of her having a small scar on her cheek. He makes still more of her having bought for him, before his first visit to the stone cottage in the mostly undulating grassy countryside, a pair of boots known as gumboots, so that he noticed, as soon as he had arrived at the cottage, two pairs of black boots standing together at the back door. (He and she later wore the boots while they walked together through the damp paddocks around the cottage and then through the shallow creek to the forest nearby.) In the passages that I looked at, the author makes no direct claim but he sometimes writes as though he credits the young woman mentioned much earlier in these paragraphs – the young woman who died more than thirty years before his birth – with an achievement that is surely possible only for a certain sort of fictional personage and then only in the invisible space between the fictional and the actual; as though he supposes that the personage long dead had somehow reached him through the agency of the dark-haired tutor of literature; and as though he is far from complaining that his and her affair, so to call it, ended as it did but accepts this as an appropriate punishment for his having wanted more than the singular satisfaction previously available to him in the invisible space mentioned.

  Those books that I mentioned in a much earlier section of this work – those books on the so-called techniques of fiction – all include a section devoted to dialogue, and yet I cannot recall having heard that word uttered in any of the many discussions held hereabouts during my many years in this building. Even an undiscerning reader would have understood by now that our sort of writer avoids the use of dialogue or so-called direct speech in his fiction because it gives to a text the appearance of a filmscript or a playscript. Many a one of us would have both a personal reason and what might be called a theoretical reason for not wanting even to discuss film or live theatre, so to call it. Such a one would prefer not to recall the glaring images and the shouted exchanges and the intrusive music from the cinemas where he wasted whole afternoons or evenings during his childhood. He is equally reluctant to recall the theatres where he sat tensely beside some or another young woman whom he had asked out, to use the jarring expression of those years, while he struggled to identify what he supposed was the meaning of the play or the issues that it addressed – not for his own satisfaction but so that he could announce them later to the young woman as a demonstration of his intellectual or cultural acquirements. Such a one would prefer not to recall the young man who had supposed that a few hours spent staring at a flickering screen or a half-lit stage were in some way comparable with the experience of reading even twenty pages of true fiction.

  As for the so-called theoretical reason mentioned above, many a one of us, having opened by chance some or another work of fiction, turns away from the sight of quotation marks looking like swarms of flies or a series of dashes like rungs on a ladder to nowhere – he turns away because dialogue, so to call it, is of all the tricks and devices used by writers of fiction that which most readily persuades the undiscerning reader that the purpose of fiction is to provide the nearest possible equivalents of experiences obtainable in this, the visible world where books are written and read. Many a young writer must often be tempted to compose a passage of dialogue rather than struggle with a report of elusive or abstruse matters. Suppose such a writer to be trying to write a fictional account of the death of a grandparent of the chief character. (Those of us who once earned a living as teachers of creative writing, so to call it, tell me that many a younger student was able to write a piece of fiction of considerable meaning about this sort of occasion, which was often the presumed author’s first experience of the death of someone close.) The young writer surely has in mind images of rooms and of furniture or of scenery out of doors; images of persons speaking and gesturing, images of scents, perhaps from a garden or from a corridor in a hospital; images of sensations such as the feel of wind against his face or of breasts encased in fabric while his mother holds him against herself. The writer wants to compose from these seeming memories such sentences as will seem to bring to the reader what he or she would call an actual experience. The writer seeks words for those sentences, but words, as he would have learned already, are not so readily available as are seeming memories and the like. But then there occurs to the writer a means of filling his pages much more rapidly than he could have filled them with sentences laboriously composed. The writer is able to recall whole sequences of words that he first heard on the occasion of his grandparent’s death. What he recalls are, in fact, not words but images of words. Images of words, however, unlike images of scenery, say, or of the feel of breasts encased in fabric seem to most persons so like the words themselves as to be hardly distinguishable. And so, the young writer, while he seems to hear, clearly and unmistakably, many a sequence of words that was once uttered in his hearing or that he himself once uttered – the young writer is able to fill space after blank space on his pages with words such as the following.

  ‘Why are you crying, Mother?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll have to be strong, son,’ she replied. ‘Your pa has gone to heaven.’

  This paragraph has been written for the benefit of any person who may have picked up this work of fiction in a bookshop or in any other surroundings and who may have opened the work at this page and who may have read immediately afterwards the previous two lines and may then have assumed that other similar lines appear on many of the surrounding pages. No other such lines appear anywhere in this work of fiction or in any of the works of fiction written in this out-of-the-way corridor of this vast building. We who have found our way to this outpost, as it might be called – we not only consider dialogue, as it is called, the crudest of the many devices used by those writers of fiction whose chief aim is to have their readers believe they are not reading a work of fiction, but we ourselves have it as our chief aim that our readers should be continually mindful that what they are reading is nothing else but fiction.

  And yet...how often are we obliged to write those words after an expression of a forthright belief? Perhaps forty years ago, when I was still forming my judgements in many matters, I read of a writer whose novels, as they were called, consisted almost wholly of dialogue. I recall her name, which was Ivy Compton-Burnett, and that she was an eccentric female solitary. Did I learn also that she lived alone in a house of two, or perhaps three, storeys in
the English countryside? Or, am I too much influenced by what I have in mind while I write these pages? Certainly, I read one of her works of fiction, which consisted, sure enough, of dialogue and little else. Not surprisingly, I have forgotten almost everything that I experienced while I read the work. I have not forgotten, however, a mental image of a large house of stone, almost as imposing as the wing where I sit writing these words. The house is occupied by an uncertain number of personages, many of whom seem to be siblings or near-relations and unmarried. These personages seem to meet up with one another at unpredictable times and to discuss, among other matters, difficulties between themselves and their parents. At other times, they seem to wander through the house of stone, talking at length but often as though to themselves. One such personage is named Horace. He is the only personage whose name I recall. He may also be the only personage who seemed, while I read, to be more than a mere utterer of dialogue, so to call it. Horace is reported in the text as having spoken the only words that I recall from the whole book of fiction. He speaks the words, as I recall, on one of the occasions when a number of personages are reported as trying to explain to one another why they are obliged to live under such harsh conditions. One of them is reported as saying something such as ‘Oh, well, a man’s a man.’ Horace is then reported as saying something such as ‘That is not so. I am not.’