A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  He would find it difficult to include Torfrida as even a ghostly character in any sort of fictional writing. She came to him without any seeming history, although her mere presence is powerful enough to suggest to him numerous possibilities in both her past and her future. Rather than struggling to write about her, he is mostly content to accept her existence as incontrovertible proof that the reading and the writing of fiction are much more than a mere transaction during which one person causes another person to see in mind a sort of shadowy film; that the whole enterprise of fiction exists mostly to enable her and numerous others of her kind to flit from place to place in mind after mind as though many a fictional text is a mere bridge or stairway raised for their convenience of travel.

  No one in this wing owns to being a poet. Several may have written one or more poems, but whether or not any such occasional poet has sought publication, no published poem can be traced back to these dusty corridors and mostly silent rooms. Poets we may not claim to be, but some of us will sometimes discuss at length the differences or the likenesses between sentences and verses or between paragraphs and stanzas; what purpose, if any, is served by the use of metaphors; whether or not a sentence can be said to have a rhythm even though it lacks for metre; and many other such matters. We discuss these things freely even though none of us calls himself a poet, and we find it curious that these topics are of interest to us but are never raised in a certain corridor in the wing adjoining ours. Some of us lunch or dine or carouse sometimes in that corridor, although few of us feel at home there. Among ourselves, we call the occupants of that corridor the renegade poets. They were young men when to be young and to be declaiming poems in public places was to feel oneself at the bubbling centre of a spring that would soon become a torrent and would cleanse the world, as one or another of them might have written at the time. But soon, a change occurred in the upper atmosphere where the winds of fashion arise, and those winds began to blow in a different direction, to put the matter poetically again, and many who had looked forward to changing the world found this particular change hard to bear, this passing of the craze for poetry, and so they took to writing novels, as they called their newest works, many of which might have passed for scripts of documentary films, with themselves and their disorderly lives for subject-matter. Those of us who consort sometimes with the renegades long ago gave up asking them to explain their changing from fashionable poets to equally fashionable novelists. The renegades seem to have learned long ago the advantages of evasiveness or, perhaps, of using expressions such as beautifully written or moving or powerful in order to hide their ignorance of the craft of fiction. Most of us believe them to have written their pretend-filmscripts from the same motive that drove them three and more decades ago, to declaim their poetic protests: from a wish to be entitled to swagger, especially in the presence of female persons. And some of us, when drunk, have even put to the renegades, as though in jest, what most of us long ago decided, namely that their turning from poetry to prose was of hardly any moment, given that what they had called poetry was no more than badly punctuated prose arranged in lines of arbitrary length.

  We happen to have among us one who freely admits to being a failed poet, although he reminds us often that he had taken up and had later abandoned poetry before the decades when the renegades were most prolific. As a very young man, so he once told us, he had believed in metaphor as some persons believe in religious creeds or political manifestos. He had even hoped to get from the contemplation of metaphor what some so-called mystics are said to get from their contemplation of the divine or the ultimate. Unlike the renegades, our failed poet is by no means evasive when asked why he turned from poetry to prose, but when he sets out to explain his apostacy or conversion he uses an odd-seeming comparison. He likens poetry to whisky or gin and prose to beer, which is his only drink. He says the amount of alcohol in a given volume of beer constitutes a sort of perfect proportion or golden mean whereas whisky and other spirits are akin to poisons, with a potency out of all proportion to their volume. Poets, he says, are distillers while we writers of prose are brewers, and he strives while he writes to turn out sentence after sentence the meaning of which will keep his reader in a heightened state of awareness for hour after hour whereas the poet that he had once wanted to be might have had his reader fall forward, before long, to the table, seeing double after a surfeit of metaphors.

  Our turncoat, as we sometimes call him in jest, counts among the unwritten pieces that he may yet write as supplements to his few brief published works a fictional account of certain events from his twenty-second year, one of them being his meeting up with a certain dark-haired young woman who, if ever he had tried to compare and to quantify the differing looks and features of all the dark-haired girls and young women he had taken note of, would have been one of the first among them. At the time of their meeting, he was a teacher in a primary school in an inner suburb of the city where he had been born. He worked conscientiously as a teacher but he was planning to resign at the end of the year, when his contract would have expired. He intended to work afterwards at menial jobs that would cause him none of the nervous stress, as he called it, that his teaching caused and would allow him to spend much of his free time writing poetry. He had no girlfriend at the time. He had had a girlfriend for a few months several years before, but he had bored her with his talk of books and poetry and he resented her wanting to go to dances or to cinemas. He felt much in need of a girlfriend but he could never have approached any of the young female teachers at his school, who talked in the staffroom mostly about television programs. He looked forward to acquiring a girlfriend from among the young female poets who would attend one of the literary gatherings that took place, so he had heard, at the time of publication of each number of the quarterly magazine to which he sent most of his poems. All of his poems had been politely returned to him by the editor of the magazine, but in the margin of one of the poems the editor had written a favourable comment. He, the young poet, expected soon to have one or more of his poems published and to meet at the literary gathering soon afterwards a female equivalent of himself and to begin with her the discussion and the exchanges of letters that would lead to their becoming boyfriend and girlfriend.

  On a certain day towards the end of what our turncoat, so to call him, intended to be his last year as a teacher, the principal of his school brought to the door of his classroom the dark-haired young woman mentioned previously, introduced him to her, and told him that the young woman was an expert in the teaching of drama and would spend a half-hour in his classroom during each of the next four weeks teaching dramatic skills to his pupils.

  Long afterwards, the teacher and poet came to understand the circumstances behind the unexpected appearance at his classroom door of the most noteworthy of all the dark-haired female persons he had met up with or had observed from a distance or whose images he had kept in mind. She had arrived from England not long before. She was entitled to put after her name a series of letters that intimidated the teacher-poet when he saw them during her first session in his classroom but which failed to intimidate the director of primary education after the young woman had gained an interview with him soon after her arrival from London, where she had completed the courses that had entitled her to put the series of letters after her name. She probably expected the director of primary education to appoint her at once to the staff of one or another training college for teachers as an expert in drama, but he allowed her only to visit one or another primary classroom each week for four weeks, to have charge of the children there for a half-hour each week, and then, during the fourth week, to demonstrate to the local district inspector of schools her skills as a teacher of drama. The school selected for her trial was the school where the young unpublished poet taught a fifth grade. He supposed, long afterwards, that the principal of the school would have approached several or, perhaps, all of his fellow teachers but that these would have refused to allow into their classrooms the pushy young
Englishwoman with the fancy letters after her name, as they would have called her. He, the young teacher of a fifth grade, would not have thought of refusing the young woman, even if she had not seemed to him at once the most fetching of all the dark-haired female persons that he had admired or had kept in mind. He was not opposed to having visiting teachers lighten his own teaching duties. As well, he was at that time still far from developing the antipathy that he later developed towards live theatre, so to call it. He even supposed sometimes that he might compose, after he had established his reputation as a poet, such a poem as could be performed on stage as a poetic monologue, which was a phrase that he liked to hear in his mind.

  He remembers nothing of what she taught, or tried to teach, to his pupils. He learned, some years afterwards and by chance, that she had later been on the staff of a teachers’ training college, although he could not know whether this was a direct result of her dealings with his class. He remembers nothing of her final session in his class, when the district inspector of schools would have been present to assess her. (He suspects that he might have spent the time in the staffroom rather than watch her ordeal.) He remembers that she thanked him often and profusely for his help. When she left his class on each of her first three visits, she asked if he would rehearse with his pupils during the coming week some or another routine. This he did faithfully, as he would have done for any visiting teacher, and she always seemed overly grateful afterwards. They addressed each other always as Mr and Miss, which was not unusual for that time and that situation, and the nearest that either of them came to familiarity was her calling him a brick when they said goodbye after her last visit.

  Not once did he think of her as a possible girlfriend. He supposed that she must have been a year or two older than he in order to have acquired so many letters after her name. That alone would have excused him from thinking of her romantically, as another sort of writer might have written. But even if he had wanted to meet with her during a weekend or an evening, he could only have foreseen the two of them sitting in a coffee-lounge or a cinema and himself feeling out of place or even wretched. He spent most of his free time at his desk in the rented room where he lived or in the Reading Room of the State Library. On several weekday evenings he drank beer, mostly alone, in a shabby hotel in the city, in a back bar frequented by people he considered bohemians. His solitary reading and writing and drinking seemed to him not so much a hardship as a sort of apprenticeship leading at last to his becoming a published poet and somewhat the equal of female persons with dark hair and memorable faces and many letters after their names.

  Given what is reported in the previous paragraph, I need hardly report in this paragraph that he felt no more that a mild annoyance a few hours after her last visit when he found among the books and papers on his classroom table an envelope with her name typed on the front. She had sometimes spread pages of notes on his table, and he assumed that the envelope had spilled out of her large bag during her last visit and had been later overlooked. His annoyance came from his having to try to return the envelope to her when all he knew was her name, but when he handled the envelope he found it to be unsealed, and when he had opened the envelope he found inside a single typed page with the letterhead of a famous jeweller whose shop was in a fashionable quarter of the city. At the upper left of the typed page was the name of the young woman, although the series of letters was missing, and below the name was her address, which was in a suburb near his own. Much of the page was occupied by a list of items of jewellery owned by the young woman together with the estimated value of each item for the purpose of its being insured. Below the list was the signature of the valuer of the items. After he had read the page with the letterhead of the famous jeweller, he was relieved that he would be able to return the misplaced letter to its owner simply by inserting it into a larger envelope and then posting both to the address of the young woman, together with a few words explaining the matter. He recalls these events clearly, even more than fifty years later, and if ever he were to include these events, or a version of them, in a piece of fiction, he would have the narrator of the fiction assure the reader that the chief character of the fiction entertained at the time no possibility that the young woman with dark hair and the many letters after her name had not genuinely misplaced the letter from the famous jeweller, although he supposed briefly that a young man very different from himself might have dared to suppose otherwise.

  On most evenings, a few of us spend an hour or more in the common room that serves this corridor. The room itself is a dreary space, hardly better furnished than the so-called commercial room that was provided in some of the two-storey hotels in country towns long ago, when numerous commercial travellers or sales representatives drove in their station wagons on the roads of the state where are set, so to speak, many sections of this work of fiction and needed, of an evening, a table or a desk-top where they could do what they called their paper-work while they drank their beer. The only books on the few shelves are so-called reference books: dictionaries, atlases, and those books that pronounce on correct usage of words, correct spelling of difficult proper nouns, and the like. The remainder of the shelves contain hundreds of back numbers of a soft-covered monthly publication, The Australian Journal. The earliest numbers date from the early 1930s while the most recent are from the late 1950s, when the Journal, so to call it, ceased publication after its former readers had taken to watching television during all of their leisure time. The man who deposited this publication on our shelves is almost the only one of us who looks into the back numbers. He has told us often that the collection had been amassed by his parents. They had bought and read the Journal from the first year of their marriage. As soon as he had learned to read, he had looked into whatever number was lying about the house and had tried to make sense of the text. As he grew older, he fell into the habit of reading every one of the dozen and more pieces of short fiction or short stories, as they were called, in every issue. He is aware, so he has often told us, that most of us dismiss those pieces or stories as popular fiction of no deep meaning or lasting worth, but he claims to have learned from the pieces or stories what he calls the power of straightforward narrative.

  This same man told some of us one evening in the common room that he still recalled, sixty and more years afterwards, certain series of narrated events from some of the earliest numbers he had read of The Australian Journal, by which he meant not only the scenes that had appeared in his mind while he first read but some of the words of the narrative. Even when he examined what remained to him of books that might be called works of literature, the last traces, as he called them, nearly always comprised a narrative, however brief. He gave as an example an autobiography that he had read nearly thirty years before and had not looked into since. The author had flourished, as the old expression used to have it, in the mid-twentieth century as a paleontologist at several universities in the USA. The man had had a humble and a troubled upbringing. There was much difficulty between him and his mother, which resulted in his leaving home when he was a young man, hardly more than a boy, and having to live as a hobo for some years during the early 1930s. During one of those years, he had been camped alone at evening on a hillside near a railway line. He had lit a campfire and was cooking a simple meal. He understood that a freight train would pass close to the campsite later in the evening, and he intended to jump aboard the train when it was slowed by the hill. When his meal was almost ready, a dog came up to him. The dog appeared to be starving, and the man gave it a portion of his meal. After he and the dog had eaten, the dog rested beside the man as though he and it were now master and faithful servant, and the man speculated that he might have been the first person ever to have fed the dog or to have treated it less than harshly. As the time approached for the arrival of the freight train, the man stood beside the railway line with his pack on his back, and the dog stood close behind him. The man understood that he could not take the dog with him. Not only could he not succeed
in getting both himself and the dog aboard the freight train, but he could not live the life of a hobo with a dog to provide for. When he heard the train approaching, the man stood ready to jump aboard. The hill where he stood was well-known among hoboes as a place for jumping aboard, and the man expected some of the hoboes already on the train to have opened some of the doors of the freight vans for someone such as himself. The train slowed; the man saw an open door; the man ran beside the train; the man clambered aboard. As soon as he was securely aboard, the man looked for the dog. He saw it keeping pace with the train and looking up at him. The dog was able to keep pace with the train for as long as it climbed the low hill, but when the train passed the hill, the dog began to fall behind. The man lay in the doorway of the freight van and watched the dog falling further behind. The man later wrote in his autobiography that he had recalled often during the remainder of his life his sight of the dog while it tried to keep pace with the train. He had recalled in particular his sight of the nearer eye of the dog while it tried to keep pace. The eye had seemed to be turned sideways and upwards, or so he had thought, as though the dog had struggled, before it lost sight for ever of the only person who had fed it or had treated it less than harshly, to fix in mind an image of that person.