A Million Windows

by Gerald Murnane

  I had expected some of those in the room to be annoyed by my questions, but I was hardly prepared for what took place. One of them set up at once a certain catchcry and moved towards the door. The others, every one of them, took up the catchcry and picked up their sandwiches and pies and pasties and apples and bananas and moved to follow the first man. Describe a dream – lose a reader! was their cry, and I was all the more annoyed because I recalled having passed on to them those very words long before, when I was telling them some of the advice that I had read many years before in books published in the USA for the guidance of teachers and students of creative writing, so to call it.

  They brought their lunches back to the table after I had promised to say no more about my dream or about my interest in the possible connections between what we dream while asleep and what we see in mind while we write fiction. I supposed that my having mentioned my mother or, I should say, a dream-image of my mother, had caused them to believe I had gone over to the enemy: that I had become some sort of follower of the twentieth-century theorists who had seemed to their followers to have explained the workings of the mind, as though a leaning blade of grass might have found itself capable of explaining the source and the destination of the wind that overpowers it. No one was less likely than I to accept any theory of the mind, and I wish that my colleagues had heard me out and had offered comments after I had been able to tell them that Wilma, so to call her, had later, in reply to my asking her, as I often ask strangers in order to start a conversation, where she came from, had told me that she had grown up in Gormenghast, which is the title of a work of fiction that I read more than forty years ago and have quite forgotten except for the detail that the setting, so to call it, of the work is a building many times more vast than this.

  Reader, whether you discern or struggle to discern, you should hardly be aggrieved to learn that the writer of this and the following paragraphs is not an occupant, even for the time being, of any visible building of two or, perhaps, three storeys but rather a man past middle-age and older by several years than was the writer who was mentioned much earlier in this work as having been run down and killed while walking home drunkenly of an evening in a certain provincial city of this state. I am like the other writer in that I moved, late in life, away from the capital city of this state. He moved to a large provincial city in the near-west. I moved to a small township in the far west. In the city whither he had moved, many a building is of two or, perhaps, three storeys, which suggests that he may well have seen, while he walked drunkenly homewards on many an evening, one or more windows looking like drops of golden oil, after which he might have concluded that if he were to be run down a few moments later and were to lie dying on the roadside, he could take satisfaction from his perceiving that his life had been all of a piece.

  In the small township whither I moved late in life, no house is of more than one storey. We have grain-silos at the edge of the township and a water-tower near the main street, but whenever I walk home drunkenly I see around me nothing resembling a drop of golden oil. I am aware, however, that the township is surrounded on all sides by mostly level grassy countryside. Every street in the township ends at a view of sheep paddocks or croplands. The butterflies reported earlier as passing through Casterbridge might not even perceive any change in their surroundings if they were to flit over our few streets, where the silence is so profound that the sound of a single motor vehicle can be heard from far away, even by a drunken person. And even if, while I stride homewards with the faintly comical precision of a drunkard, some vehicle should unaccountably appear in my path and should run me down, then I would lie dying with the same equanimity that may have possessed the other writer. Around him, in the towering buildings erected by those grown wealthy from mining, the golden windows would have reminded him of his autobiography, long since published and acclaimed. Around me would appear not actual sights but images of a desk and a bookshelf and a window that I could not doubt had appeared sometimes to a distant observer as a drop of golden oil.

  Whenever we learn that one of us is drawing up plans or making notes for a wholly new piece of fiction, we assume, unless the plan-drawer and note-maker has told us otherwise, that his deciding on a new work has come about not as a result of his feeling as though he is in possession of an abundant or overflowing quantity of knowledge but from quite the opposite – from his feeling that he knows too little about a certain subject and ought to know much more. The phrase a certain subject in the previous sentence might suggest that what provokes the author is the sort of thing that might provoke a philosopher or a psychologist or a so-called social scientist to embark on a so-called research project, but our sort of author has little in common with those sorts of investigators. He, our author, is likely to be aware of no more than a few clustered images or even of one image. Sometimes, the image may be complex and may seem to yield some of its meaning almost at first sight, as, for example, an image of a castle with each room occupied by a character from some or another film; sometimes, the image may be simple and may seem to be of scant meaning as, for example, an image of a window-pane coloured gold by the afternoon sunlight. Whatever sort of image the author has in mind, he feels a certain feeling seeming to emanate from the image. The feeling is persistent, intense, and sometimes troubling, and yet, at the same time, promising. When the author first becomes aware of this feeling, he might seem to receive the same sort of wordless message that sometimes reaches him from some or another image-person or image-object in some or another dream. He seems to receive wordlessly the message: Write about me in order to discover my secret and to learn what a throng of images, as yet invisible, lie around me. (Is even the least discerning reader surprised to learn how different are our methods from those of the numerous group that we call, contemptuously, the paraphrasers of yesterday’s newspaper headlines: those who write, often with what is praised as moral indignation or incisive social commentary, about matters that none of us in this building has ever understood, let alone wanted to comment on?)

  And so, in time, the writer begins to write, but not before he has given thought to the question what form of narration he had best employ. The author whose deciding to write a wholly new piece of fiction is, for the time being, my own subject-matter has chosen, let us suppose, the very method of narration that I would have chosen in his circumstances, which is the same method of narration that I have used throughout the work of fiction of thirty-four sections of which this it the thirty-first section. The author has chosen to report in the third person and in the past tense the thoughts and deeds of a chief character while reserving the right to comment in the first person if the need arises. As confusing as it may seem to an undiscerning reader, I have to remind every sort of reader that an author who chooses thus to report is not merely choosing a certain form of narration but is casting himself in the role of a certain sort of personage.

  The author who was mentioned early in the previous paragraph and will be called henceforth the narrator begins his task by reporting that a certain man who will be called henceforth the chief character has been troubled, at different periods of his life, by images of certain details of a certain forest that he visited several times as a child. The chief character, who is himself an author of fiction, wrote, twenty years before, a piece of fiction in which the same forest was mentioned often. After he had written the fiction, which was later published, he supposed that he would never again be troubled by images of certain details of the forest, one margin of which was sometimes visible from the district of mostly level grassy countryside where he had lived for several years as a child. (Almost all of the forest was destroyed more than fifty years ago, and the land that had once been covered by forest was turned into dairy farms and roads and townships, but that was not the reason for the man’s supposing what he supposed. The man was more likely to be troubled by images of things if they were no longer visible.) In recent years, however, the man was troubled by images of certain forest plants that he
had handled as a child and of a certain bird that he had seen as a child when it flew across a clearing in the forest. These were some of the same images that had caused him, twenty years before, to write passages of fiction for which the setting, so to call it, is the forest, but the images troubled him, on the later occasion, differently, as though the meaning that they yielded earlier was by no means all of the meaning that they were capable of yielding.

  One evening during his early childhood, he had played at the edge of the forest with his cousins, the sons and daughters of an older sister of his mother. This woman and her husband and children lived in a clearing in the forest. He and his cousins had chased one another and had hidden from one another at the edges of the clearing, but he had run further into the forest than had they and had hidden there and had not been found but had given himself up when the game had ended. He was not afraid of the forest. He thought of forests, and especially of clearings in forests, as places of refuge and of safety. While he had run from his cousins, he had clutched or had tugged at several sorts of forest plant. The spike-like foliage of one sort of plant had pricked his palms whenever he clutched at it, and the sharp-edged leaves of another plant had cut into the skin of his fingers and had drawn blood whenever he had let the leaves run through his hands. His memory of these simple-seeming events and of the sight reported in the following paragraph were all that urged him to write, but their urging was insistent.

  On a certain afternoon in summer, perhaps even earlier than the evening mentioned above, he had been with his father in a clearing in a dense part of the forest. His father was felling trees to be stored and dried for firewood. A brightly coloured bird flew across the clearing, and at one point in its flight the sunlight seemed to flash from the bird’s plumage. Long afterwards, and long after the forest had been mostly destroyed, he still recalled the seeming flash of sunlight on the feathers of the bird which was a sacred kingfisher, so his father had said. The predominant colours of the bird were royal blue and a colour that might have been cream or white but had seemed, when the sunlight flashed on it, silver-grey.

  I have mentioned already in these paragraphs the feeling that seems to emanate from certain image-objects. I ought to mention also the counter-feeling, so to call it, with which the intending author must respond if his work of fiction is to be written. Despite his having, in the beginning, a few mental images and intimations, the author, by going on with his writing, declares his confidence in these sparse signs and in the many-faceted whole that surely has them at its visible junctures. To use the example of the author mentioned in these paragraphs, I might declare that his setting out to write as he does is a demonstration of his trust in the forest or, rather, the image-forest.

  Trust in imagery can serve a writer well, but quite another sort of trust is often needed to sustain a writer of fiction, especially the sort who make up our little band. Admittedly, one or two of us claim hardly to think of their readers but to draw inspiration from the task itself: to keep often in mind the splendid intricacy of the finished text and even to feel, as they complete page after page, that their writing expands their sense of who they are and of how much meaning can be found in a few meagre-seeming experiences. We are more likely, though, when we discuss the matter, to confess that each of us develops while he writes an image of a personage deserving to be called the implied reader. We are sometimes surprised to be reminded by one another that this personage is seldom of the sort whose name appears often in the dedication of a book; is seldom a parent or a wife or a child. The personage, so to call her – and we, being males, make her out almost always to be female – is someone scarcely known to us. For a few of us, she is by definition always unknowable except for the one fact that she will one day read our words with discernment. Some see her image clearly and can report such details as the colour of her hair; others sense her only as a presence unlikely ever to reveal herself to their inner eye, so to call it. All of us agree on two matters. First, we have no wish to meet up with her; our being able to write as we do depends on our never so meeting. Even were we to hear it rumoured that this house accommodates not only a hundred kinds of writer but numbers of kinds of what might be called writerly persons including, in some remote corridor of the farthest wing from here, a few females admirably qualified to serve as ghostly but discerning readers of texts still in the writing – even then, none of us would go any way towards seeking out those few and would surely be even more careful afterwards to avoid the groups of female persons sometimes seen strolling in the grounds around this wing.

  The second matter on which we all agree is that our implied readers are utterly to be trusted.

  The following paragraphs will report much of what will surely go into the making of the piece of fiction the beginnings of which were reported in the section before the previous section.

  The chief character had never learned the correct sequence of the places where his mother had lived before her marriage. He knew that she had been born in a small town on the plains that occupy much of the south-west of his and her native state and that her father had died before her birth. He knew that she and his father had been living in rented rooms in a western suburb of the capital city when he, their eldest child, had been born. At some time during the eighteen years between, she had lived at several addresses in the largest provincial city in the south-west of the state; she had even lived at some time in the largest forest in the south-west, a forest that was later destroyed almost wholly. She was the youngest of nine siblings, most of them females, and by the time when she was aged in her teens, most of the siblings had left home.

  At some time early in his mother’s childhood, her widowed mother had remarried. Her new husband was a man who had been previously unmarried. The chief character had often, as a child, been taken to visit this man and his wife and had called him, for convenience, Grandfather although his, the child’s mother, had explained that the man was not his true grandfather. He, the child, had neither liked nor disliked the man, although the child’s mother had told the child that the man had often been drunk in earlier times and had sometimes locked her and the younger of her siblings out of their house and had threatened them with violence.

  All except two of the persons mentioned in the previous three paragraphs were long dead when the chief character was visited by a man from a far northern state who told him that they two were half-brothers. The man from the north had with him papers proving that he and the chief character had had the same mother. They had been born in different hospitals in the same capital city, the man from the north about a year before the chief character. The man from the north had been placed in the care of a so-called babies’ home a week after his birth. He had later been adopted and had been given the surname of his adopting parents. He had been told as a young man that he had been adopted but had not been able until many years later to learn the name of his mother. After having learned her name, he went to much trouble to discover her address, which was in the south-western provincial city mentioned earlier. He then wrote to her, asking politely whether she could help in his search for his true mother. She, his true mother, had a solicitor write a letter beneath his letterhead telling the man from the north that she was unable to help him in his search and warning him that if he tried again to make contact with her she would take legal action against him. After he had received this letter, the man from the north had had what he described to his half-brother as a nervous breakdown.

  The chief character had felt sorry for the man from the north and had answered patiently the many questions that he asked about their mother. One of the few questions that the chief character could not answer was the question why their mother had repudiated her eldest son.

  The man from the north was, of course, curious as to who had been his father. He showed the chief character a copy of his, the older man’s birth certificate. The father was named by his surname only. The surname told the chief character nothing.

  After his half-brother h
ad gone back to the north, the chief character visited the other of the two surviving persons mentioned above. This was a woman aged in her nineties and the last survivor of his mother’s siblings. She had left her family home before the time when the half-brother, so to call him, would have been conceived and she had not learned of his existence until some years later, but she was willing to tell what she knew. She claimed that the father of the child had not been the person named as the father on the birth certificate.

  According to the surviving sister, her youngest sister had been living, at the time when she conceived, with her mother and her stepfather on a small farm, a so-called soldier-settler’s block, far inside the forest mentioned often in previous paragraphs. The youngest sister was the only one of the nine siblings who had not already left home. Several of the younger girls had left home in order to avoid their stepfather, who had sometimes exposed himself to them and had seemed often likely to make sexual advances to them. The surviving sister had no doubt that the father of her youngest sister’s first child was her stepfather. The surname identifying the child’s father on the birth certificate was the surname of a young man, hardly more than a boy, who had sometimes done labouring work for the stepfather, and the survivor believed that her youngest sister had been induced to name him as the father in order to conceal the true identity of the father. The person who had induced her, according to the surviving sister, was her mother.

  The surviving sister spoke harshly of the mother, who had been, of course, her own mother. The survivor claimed that the mother had known why the younger sisters had left home but had pretended not to know. The survivor even claimed to remember the circumstances that led to her younger sister’s conceiving her first child. She, the survivor, had visited her mother regularly after having left home and had learned during one of her visits that the mother intended to be away from home for several days while she visited her own mother, who lived in a small town on the plains that occupy much of the south-west of the state where these events are reported to have taken place. The chief character had concluded from this last piece of information that his mother as a young woman had not been able to trust her own mother or, that if she had trusted her mother, the trust had been misplaced.