Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

It was no part of my research, as I call it, but often, while I was trying to hold in mind some or another personage about whom not a single word had as yet been written, I found myself speculating yet again on a matter mentioned earlier in this work of fiction. I have never been able to comprehend how the entity called in common speech time could be said to exist separately from the entity known likewise as space . To put this differently: I am unable to believe in time in the same way that some persons are unable to believe in a personal god. Nor does the word space denote for me mere extension. For me, what the word space denotes is hardly different from what is denoted by the word mind , and whenever I perform one or another of the exercises mentioned earlier, which is to say, whenever I read with due attention some or another passage of what I call true fiction or considered narration, then I become aware that the space between each sentence and its subject-matter may well reach endlessly in directions unknown to me.

Two men from our loose circle, so to call it, held for some years full-time positions as teachers of creative writing in universities. Perhaps I should have written just then that two of us admit to having held such positions, and that others of us may prefer not so to admit. And yet, I could hardly credit that any of us would fear from his fellows the quiet contempt that some groups in far parts of this building are said to hold for anyone who formerly earned money from teaching others to write. There are corridors, so I have heard, where residents are accorded respect in proportion to the tens of thousands of copies of their books sold or the numbers of their books adapted for film or even the number of literary prizes awarded them. Most of us hereabouts have always considered our occasional royalty payments as bonuses or small treats while we supported ourselves and our families by working at whatever jobs we were capable of.

Our two worked at their teaching in rather different ways, so we have heard from them. One was resolved to disabuse his students of any notion that the writing of fiction is a delicate procedure to be undertaken only in silence and isolation by a naturally sensitive person in a heightened state of alertness. This teacher, in one of his first classes each year, after having read to his students several passages in which one or another biographer of D.H. Lawrence reported his writing page after page of some or another work of fiction in the main room of the rented quarters where he and his companion lived for the time being, while the room was noisy with the conversation of the friends and admirers who seemed often to surround Lawrence, and while he himself often, and without looking up from his writing, took part in the conversation. The teacher would then stand at the whiteboard in front of his students and would begin writing with a felt-tipped pen, often pausing to amend or to erase words or phrases or whole sentences. Whenever he thus paused, he explained to the students what had caused him to pause and why he was amending or erasing. What he was writing, so he assured the students, comprised the latest hundred words and more of the work of fiction that he was then writing for publication, and he would dismiss them ten minutes early so that he could transcribe for his later use the words of his that he had written in their presence.

Our other teacher claims that he could never write so much as a sentence of fiction in the presence of another person, let alone a class of students. He writes fiction, so he says, for a few readers of good will, or perhaps for only one such reader whom he wishes never to meet but only to approach by means of his writing. Not only could he never have written fiction in front of his students, but he spoke to them about his own writing only if they had first questioned him about it. When he wanted to promote class discussions about the theory of fictional narration, as he called it, perhaps pompously, as we sometimes accuse him, although he answers that any means is justified if it earns respect for the craft of fiction — when he wanted to promote discussion, he would put before his students some of the large collection of statements that he had gathered from the writings of writers themselves or from a famous series of published interviews with writers. (It was this collection that provided me with the epigraph for this present work of fiction.)

The two teachers had used very different methods for assessing the pieces of fiction written by their students. The first man relied mostly on comments made first by the student-author and then by his or her fellows during a detailed classroom discussion of each piece. At the beginning of each discussion, the author would criticise his or her piece and would then award the piece one of the so-called grades required by the university. (The teacher believed that this practice developed in each student the ability to read his or her own fiction as a discerning reader might read it.) The piece was then read by the class and afterwards discussed. Each member of the class was required to award the piece a grade. Finally, the teacher commented on the piece and awarded it a grade. The final, or official, grade was the average of all grades awarded by the class-members, the third multiple of the author’s grade, and the sixth multiple of the teacher’s grade.

The other man had allowed classroom discussion of each piece but he had always removed the author’s name from the piece before it was photocopied for reading in class. Discerning readers in each class learned in time to identify many authors from their distinctive styles or from the recurring subjects of their pieces, but no member of a class was allowed to address any comment to the author of a piece — all comments had to be written in the margins of the text as though addressed to a presumed author unlikely to be met with. The teacher himself wrote comments in the margins of each piece and would always announce his opinion of each piece to the class, but only the author of the piece learned — in writing — the grade awarded to the piece, which grade was decided by the teacher alone before he had heard any comments from anyone. He sometimes supposed that the course might be more effective if the students were never permitted to meet with each other or even with him, so that they knew each other only as the writers or the readers of certain fictional texts. His teaching methods were in keeping with his belief that the best sort of fiction had for its author not the flesh-and-blood being who might acknowledge in a classroom discussion that he or she had written this or that piece but a presumed personage whose characteristics might be something of a mystery to the flesh-and-blood being and were best recognised by a discerning reader. It was to this personage, this deep and writerly version of the author named on the title-page, that the second of the two teachers had always directed the many comments that he wrote on his students’ fiction. He would never have denied that he sometimes had in mind, while he wrote the comments, an image of the author as he or she might have appeared in the classroom but he would have insisted that his words were not such as should be spoken to the person of that appearance but suitable only to be read in private by the personage responsible for his or her writing.

He had among his students each year many who were called officially mature-age. Many of these were of his own age or older and were often the writers of the most impressive fiction. He had heard or had read of teachers in universities who had affairs with students but he had been faithfully married for nearly twenty years and was made weary by the mere thought of the deceit and the subterfuge that he would have to practise during such an affair, and he easily put off the few female students whom he supposed were signalling their interest in him. Each year, when he met his new students for the first time, he would feel himself attracted by the mere appearance of one or two of the so-called mature-age women, but he took care afterwards to deal with them no differently than he dealt with the others, which policy was usually made easier for him after those who had attracted him by their looks had failed to impress him by their writing, as almost always happened.