A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  One of those two who formerly taught writing in universities once made what he calls a detailed study of the subject-matter of all the pieces of fiction that had earned from him, during the previous two years, the grade of High Distinction. He had already observed, before he began his study, that almost every piece of fiction that impressed him, regardless of the manner of its narration, included what he chose to call a chief character and a lesser character and that the interest of the fiction arose out of the dealings between these two. When he began his study, the teacher had not yet decided how to classify the many sorts of chief character and lesser character that he was likely to find. He supposed that he might classify the characters first according to their gender and then according to their relatedness with one another, as, for example, wife and husband, mother and son, friend and friend, and the like. He was only a little way into his study when he decided that all such relationships were divisible into two groups only: relationships determined by blood and those otherwise determined. He then set about separating the pieces of fiction under study according to this division. The results surprised him somewhat. He had expected that a majority of the pieces would have included characters from the second of the two groups, but the opposite was the result. In nearly two thirds of the pieces of fiction that had impressed him during the two years past, the most prominent characters were blood-relations. It then occurred to him that he could further divide these pairs of characters into two groups. In one group were those pairs whose relationship might be called vertical, as, for example, parents and children, while the other group comprised those related horizontally, as, for example, siblings or cousins. Again, one group outnumbered the other, this time even more so: in about four fifths of the pieces, the relationship between the chief characters was the so-called vertical.

  I heard about this study long ago, and I recalled it recently when I was conducting what might be called a simple study of my own. Some of us, of course, can never be induced, even during long drinking-sessions, to reveal any detail of their latest fictional projects, their works-in-hand. Others talk freely about their writerly tasks, even if only, as some of them claim, so that their talking will rid them of what was fit only for gossip and will leave them with the deep, stubborn matter needed for giving shape to sentences and paragraphs. The reported subject-matter of two such projects deserves to be included in this, my own latest work. Of course, I have seen not a single page of either project, but I am so used to assembling texts-in-the-mind from scant impressions that the following paragraphs may seem as though I lately read the originals or even wrote them.

  The first-person narrator of the first of the two projects claims, in its first pages, to recall the details of certain Sunday afternoons, perhaps fifty years earlier, in a large house of stone with a spacious formal garden in a provincial city on the south-west coast of the state in which he was born. The discerning reader will have been pleased to note the verb claims in the previous sentence and will have understood rightly that the piece of fiction is far from being one of those so-called re-creations of the past that are written in the present tense, presumably so that the reader will be required to do no more than to watch a sort of filmic mental imagery while his or her eyes scan the text. No, the narrator not only claims to recall certain details but also reflects on them, which tells me that the author of the text is in favour of considered narration as I defined it in the third paragraph of the sixth section of this present work of fiction. The first-person narrator of the text in question reflects on some of the impressions made on him during the Sunday afternoons mentioned when he was a visitor in the large house of stone and when it was visited also by four other persons.

  The head of the house of stone was the widowed mother of the father of the narrator. The other persons living in the house were one of the three sons and three of the four daughters of the widow, and were, of course, an uncle and three aunts of the narrator. None of these four persons had ever married. The son had courted several young women but had not persisted for long in his courtships. One of the daughters had been courted, but her suitor had not persisted for long. During the years when the piece of fiction was set, so to speak, all four single persons might have been described as approaching middle age and might have been considered likely to remain single. The narrator, being what I call a strong and a consciously knowledgeable narrator, is able to inform his reader, at an early point in the narration, that the four single persons would, in fact, remain single throughout their lives, even though the action of the fiction takes place, so to speak, long before the lives of the four have ended.

  The four other visitors mentioned in a recent paragraph were three brothers and a sister, all of whom might have been described as middle-aged. Their mother had been a sister of the father of the four single residents of the house of stone, meaning that the eight were all first cousins. None of the four visitors had ever married. The narrator did not know whether or not any of the three men-visitors had ever conducted a courtship or the single woman-visitor had been courted, but he supposed that all four were likely to remain always single and, as the narrator did not hesitate to inform the reader, his supposition had later been proved correct. The four visitors, like the four residents, lived together in a large house although with no parent for company, both of their parents having died long before. Another difference between the two groups of four was that the house where the visitors lived was of brick rather than of stone and was far larger than the stone house, being of two storeys with dormer windows in the upper storey. The large house of brick was at a distance from the house of stone and was at a distance also from the coast. The dormer windows of the house of brick overlooked mostly level grassy countryside on the southern margins of the extensive plains in the south-west of the state where all nine of the fictional personages, together with the narrator, had been born.

  On the few Sunday afternoons that the narrator claimed to recall, he was a young man, hardly more than a boy, sitting quietly in the background in the dining-room of the house of stone while his widowed grandmother and his three unmarried aunts cleared the table after the midday meal and served tea. (The persons in the dining-room abstained almost wholly from alcohol, although not from any religious conviction.) The talk would have been lively enough during the meal, but while they drank tea the eight cousins reached the peak of their achievements as wits and conversationalists, or so it seemed at the time to the narrator. He, in the person of the narrator of the fiction, reported a few of the anecdotes and exchanges that he claimed to recall. (He reported them of course, always indirectly and in summary; he was writing fiction and not a script for the cinema or the theatre.) He acknowledged that his reports could not bring to the mind of even a discerning reader the mood, so to call it, that overhung the dining-table on those long-ago Sundays in the house of stone. But he reminded his readers that such was not his task; that he was narrating a piece of true fiction and was required to do no more and no less than to report the contents of his mind, among which were his recollections of how he had seemed to feel on those Sundays. And about those recollections he wrote eloquently enough for me.

  Their being unmarried allowed the eight cousins more time and more energy to stand apart from their social setting, so to call it, and to see more clearly and to comment more sharply on the follies of their neighbours and their acquaintances. They even dared, they who might never have fallen in love, to mock – although not too unkindly – the troubles, as they saw them, of those who courted or were courted. Above all, they who were comparatively prosperous, having only themselves to provide for, scorned what they called materialism, which meant for them mostly the advertising of goods for which they had no need. Only one item of human behaviour was never mentioned and seldom even hinted at during the exchanges that stayed in the mind of the narrator for perhaps fifty years. Every person in the room seemed at pains to avoid any sort of acknowledgement of what might be called sexuality.

  The young man, h
ardly more than a boy, who sat in the background mostly admired the persons who kept up their banter around the dining table. He even came close, at times, he for whom sexuality and falling in love seemed cruel punishments rather than any sort of pleasure – he even came close to wanting to become one of them: to saving all the effort that he expended on searching for images of sexually provoking females or actual dark-haired females suitable for falling in love with and to converting that effort into the sort of energy that would give rise continually to jokes and witticisms and to his feeling that he had escaped from the turmoil that beset most persons and was free to look down, as it were, from an upper window and across a mostly level grassy landscape, at the wretches who lusted after one another or fell in love with one another.

  Only a few years after the young man, hardly more than a boy, had felt as was reported above, he felt far otherwise. He had gone back to falling in love and to relieving his sexual urges, so to call them, and he considered the persons who had slapped their thighs and had shrieked and laughed around the dining table to be mental cripples. His, the narrator’s, having set out to write the piece of fiction summarised in these paragraphs, came from a suspicion, if not a change of heart, that had occurred to him in recent years. If he was not quite ready to believe it, then he suspected, at the time when he was older by several years than the oldest of the unmarrieds had been when he had first sat among them, that those who had thumped the table and had guffawed were not at all to be pitied or condemned; that they might have sensed, early in life, that so much was at risk if ever they should fall in love, let alone make sexual contact with another – so much was at risk that they had better remain heart-whole, to use that allusive term. He suspected that they had decided, early in life, that no one was to be trusted.

  I referred in an earlier paragraph of this section to a second piece of fiction that I was able recently to appraise from among the largely unknown pieces going forward in this upper corner of this vast and confusing edifice. The narrator of that second piece – again a first-person narrator – refers frequently to a book of non-fiction first published when he was a young man, rather more than a boy. The book reports that a certain anthropologist in the state of California read in a newspaper in the early years of the twentieth century that a so-called wild man had been captured recently in a township in a remote forested district in the north of the state. The anthropologist travelled to the township and learned, with the help of a translator, that the wild man, so to call him, was the last survivor of a group of Native Americans who had persisted furtively in their way of life all throughout the nineteenth century while their territory was being encroached on by farmers and by roads and railways. The group had survived, although barely, in the forested margins of the settled districts until they numbered only a male and two females. The male was he who was reported in the newspaper as being a captive wild man, although he had not been captured but had approached the township mentioned after the two females, his last remaining companions, had died and he had become the only survivor of his people.

  The anthropologist arranged for the last survivor, so to call him, to be accommodated at his, the anthropologist’s, university in a suite of rooms adapted to his needs. Until the survivor died from an infectious disease some ten years later, he lived contentedly, or so it seemed. He learned the language of his rescuers; he dressed as they dressed; and the book in which these matters are reported includes even a reproduction of a photograph of the survivor seated and smiling in a private box during a theatrical performance.

  The first-person narrator who was last mentioned early in the paragraph preceding the previous paragraph reported that an earlier version of himself, so to call him, had been so affected by his having read about the last survivor, so to call him, that he, the earlier version, had planned to write a work of fiction the chief character of which would be a young man, rather more than a boy, who was obliged to live in surroundings utterly uncongenial to him, almost as though he was himself the last survivor of some or another sort of extinct people. The work of fiction that I referred to earlier as the second work of fiction is largely an account of the chief character’s trying to write the work of fiction mentioned in the previous sentence.

  The last survivor, so to call him, took pleasure from demonstrating to the anthropologist and his colleagues the details of his, the survivor’s, previous way of life, so to call it: how his people had built their dwelling-places and had obtained their food and had made their clothes and utensils and weapons; what might be called their religious beliefs; and, of course, their language. The survivor, however, would never reveal his name, which had been a secret between himself and a few others. He was known to the anthropologist and his colleagues by the word that was the equivalent of man in the language of the perished people. One other matter the man, as I should now call him, would never discuss. Although he explained in outline the customs or conventions of his people in matters such as courtship and their forms of betrothal and marriage, he would never reply to any question about his own personal history. Of the two female persons who had been his last companions until they had died, one was much older than he while the other was of about his own age. Whenever the anthropologist would try to learn what relationship, if any, existed between the man and the women and would even question whether he and one or another of them had been sexual partners, the man would fall resolutely silent and would blush. The anthropologist surmised that the older woman might have been the mother of the man while the younger might have been what might be called some sort of cousin: a member of a clan or sub-group that he was forbidden from approaching, even if he and she might have been the last of their people on earth.

  It was wonderful how she felt, by the time she had seen herself through this narrow pass, that she had really achieved something – that she was emerging a little in fine, with the prospect less contracted. She had done for him, that is, what her instinct enjoined; had laid a basis not merely momentary on which he could meet her. When, by the turn of his head, he did finally meet her, this was the last thing that glimmered out of his look; but it came into sight, none the less, as a perception of his distress and almost as a question of his eyes; so that, for still another minute, before he committed himself, there occurred between them a kind of unprecedented moral exchange over which her superior lucidity presided...

  We may seem, to some of the other factions and groupings in this huge building, as though we are sure of ourselves: as though we long ago worked out our position in matters fictional and have never since wavered. We are, however, as liable as any other group with a policy to feel sometimes as though we restrict ourselves unduly, or, at least, as though we need encouragement of some sort. Especially when one of us has pointed out to the others a paragraph in a newspaper reporting that a valuable literary prize has been awarded to a person known to us as incapable of composing a shapely sentence, or when one of us has read a so-called review of one of his books blaming him for seeming to avoid crucial moral and social issues – especially at such a time will many a one of us try to cheer himself by doing as I did a few minutes ago when I reached for the nearest of my collection of books with Henry James for their author, let the pages fall apart wherever they might, and then read aloud one or another of the many passages there that might have suited my purposes.

  None of us has ever claimed to feel much affinity for the man of flesh and blood who went by the name of Henry James and who died nearly a century ago. I doubt whether any of us knows more than a few details of the life or the character of that man. All of us, though, feel a comradeship with the personage seemingly responsible for the texts of the works of fiction with Henry James for their author. We see that personage as the exemplar of what we call the strong narrator: a personage who has never sought to hide behind his or her subject-matter as the author of a filmscript or playscript hides but who seems to stride defiantly to and fro between his or her subject-matter and the reader, asserting his or her right
to be the sole interpreter of that subject-matter, so that we seem to see or to hear, while we read, not the pretend-deeds or the pretend-words of persons pretending to be actual persons but the measured sentences of true fiction: sentences reporting what no one but the narrator has seen or heard in the invisible setting where all fiction takes place.

  I have already betrayed, as an accepted habit, and even to extravagance commented on, my preference for dealing with my subject-matter, for ‘seeing my story’, through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter, some person who contributes to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it.

  The above is a mere fragment from the most astonishing account of fictional narration that I have read or expect ever to read. The account, as I call it, is the Preface that Henry James wrote for The Golden Bowl when that work was published in 1909 as part of the so-called New York edition of his works. One of our group has learned by heart not only the passage above but several other long extracts from the Preface. He tells us that he recites one or more of the passages aloud whenever he needs to remind himself that the task of fictional narration is no mere drudgery prescribed in advance by the seeming solidity of its subject but an undertaking to be compared with the drafting of a musical composition for full orchestra. If the same man, however, at some or another gathering of ours, seems likely to begin one of his recitations, a certain one of us will always leave the room in order not to hear words that frighten him, so he says, rather than inspire him. He once read a large part of the Preface, so he tells us, and next day, at his desk, was scarcely able to write, so hindered was he by the continual suspicion that he might not have the right amount of sensibility or detachment, or that he might be too involved, or not enough interested or intelligent or not able to contribute the right amount of criticism or interpretation. This fearful fellow, however, is an exception among us. We others will often call on our memoriser to recite for us, and often, after we have heard him to the end, and especially if we are drinking, will take to the floor ourselves, with one after another reading aloud his favourite passage from his favourite work of Henry James and struggling to make himself heard above such cries from his audience as ‘Go, you champion narrator!’ and ‘You tell’em, Harry!’