Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

And yet, along with the few fragments that are all he has preserved from the many hours when he looked along shelf after shelf in the drab upper room, first taking down and then looking into and then mostly replacing the one after another of the books in their dull-coloured cloth-and-boards, from the many hours when he sat or stood in some or another railway carriage, staring at the opened pages in front of him or glancing, whenever he turned a page, at some or another young woman, hardly more than a girl, who sat or stood nearby but always looking back at the pages before she returned his glance, and from the many hours of an evening after he had washed or dried the tea dishes with his brother and had done his homework at the wooden kitchen table with linoleum glued to its top and had sat until his bedtime at the same table with his library book open in front of him — along with those few fragments, he has been aware during the past sixty years of a certain personage, so to call her, who first appeared to him while he was reading a certain book of fiction borrowed from the upper room: a personage worthy to be called, if he were to use the language of false poetry such as was used by D.K. Broster, his own guiding star or shining star.

I would be misleading the reader if I were to report that Torfrida is a character in a work of fiction with the title Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley. I am able to state as a fact that he who deals, of course, not in facts but in fictional truths once read the book of that name, which book, so he seems to recall, even contained a duotone reproduction of a portrait of a fair-haired female person, which portrait was intended, surely, to suggest to the reader what would have been the appearance of a female character, so to call her, mentioned often in the adjacent pages of text if that character had been an actual person. But I am able to state as well that the personage known to him during the past sixty years as Torfrida appears to him as a young woman, hardly more than a girl, with dark hair and lacking altogether the fictional history of the fictional character in the work of fiction by Charles Kingsley.

What does he, researcher among works of fiction never published or never even projected — what does he recall from his having read the work of fiction Hereward the Wake ? He recalls that Hereward the Wake is the leader of a band of English rebelling against the Normans soon after their conquest of England; that the stronghold of the rebels is in the fen districts; that Hereward marries Torfrida when both are young but that he later has another woman as his consort, after he and Torfrida have separated. He, the researcher, as I call him, believes he recalls also that Torfrida has her first sight of Hereward when she looks down at him from the window of an upper room. Of all that must have passed through his mind during the many hours while he read the hundreds of pages between the maroon-coloured covers of the bulky borrowed book, he recalls nothing more. And yet, at some time while he read, he became acquainted, as it were, with the image of a dark-haired female ghost-above-the-pages who was to haunt him during the remainder of his life, to use the terms most favoured by the writer mentioned in the previous section of this work of fiction.

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.